BACKGROUND The Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) collects nationally representative data about the American's public use of health-related information. This survey is available in English and Spanish, but not in American Sign Language (ASL). Thus, the exclusion of ASL users from these national health information survey studies has led to a significant gap in knowledge of Interne...

Students can use an educational system’s help in unexpected ways. For example, they may bypass abstract hints in search of a concrete solution. This behavior has traditionally been labeled as a form of gaming or help abuse. We propose that some examples of this behavior are not abusive and that bottom-out hints can act as worked examples. We create a model for distinguishing good student use of...

The Hint Factory is an implementation of our novel method to automatically generate hints using past student data for a logic tutor. One disadvantage of the Hint Factory is the time needed to gather enough data on new problems in order to provide hints. In this paper we describe the use of expert sample solutions to “seed” the hint generation process. We show that just a few expert solutions gi...

In this paper, we address the problem of buffer management in a DBMS when the workload consists of transactions of different priority levels. We present Priority-Hints. a new buffer management algorithm that uses hints provided by the DBMS access methods. The performance of Priority-Hints is compared to that of priority buffer management schemes introduced earlier for a variety of workloads. Ou...

Trust is a critical aspect of social interaction. One might predict that individuals trust religious out-groups less than religious in-groups, and that costly signals performed by members of religious in-groups increase trust while costly signals performed by members of religious out-groups decrease trust. We examined how Christian participants perceived the trustworthiness of Muslim and Christ...

The paper analyzes the relation between religious beliefs, religious participation and social cooperation. In particular, we focus on religions that instill beliefs about the connection between rewards and punishments and social behaviour. We show how religious organizations arise endogenously, analyze their e¤ect on social interactions in society and identify a "spiritual" as well as a "materi...

In this paper we present a tool where both past and current student data is used live to generate hints for students who are completing programming exercises during a national programming online tutorial and competition. These hints can be links to notes that are relevant to the problem detected and can include pre-emptive hints to prevent future mistakes. Data from the year 2008 was mined, usi...

The goal of gene finding is to locate genes, which are important segments of DNA encoding proteins. Programs solving this task are based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) capturing statistical features extracted from known genes, but often also incorporate hints about the correct gene structure extracted from experimental data. Existing gene finding programs can use such external information only ...