The discussion on concepts of quality of teaching and learning in higher education was given boosts, first in the 1980s by the introduction of what can broadly be called ‘new public management’, with its predilection for management models developed in the business world, then in the 1990s by the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, and most recently in the 2000s by the Bologna and L...

Open, online social question and answer sites (SQAs) have captured the public attention in recent years. As SQAs become increasingly popular knowledge sharing platforms, issues about how open online community systems will evolve are becoming vital to our understanding of these systems. In this paper, we outline how an SQA site functions as a social learning community. The success of an SQA site...

Existing top-k high utility itemset (HUI) mining algorithms generate candidate itemsets in the mining process; their time & space performance might be severely affected when the dataset is large or contains many long transactions; and when applied to data streams, the performance of corresponding mining algorithm is especially crucial. To address this issue, propose a sliding window based top-k...

INTRODUCTION The 2.0 Ga iron-bearing Gunflint Formation was deposited during a transitionary period in Earth history when a stable oxic atmosphere was being established. The Animikie Group, which comprises both the Rove and Gunflint Formations, extends NE-SW for approximately 175 km from Thunder Bay, Ontario to northern Minnesota [1]. The thickness of the Gunflint ranges from 100 to 180 m, with...

Jong Gyun Choi, Poong Hyun Seong Department of Nuclear Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Gusong, Yusong, Daejon 305-701, South Korea Abstract This work describes a combinatorial model for estimating the reliability of the embedded digital system by means of multi-state function. This model includes a coverage model for fault-handling techniques implemented in digi...

E-learning enables learners to decide what to learn, when, how and how fast. In the blended e-learning paradigm, knowledge is delivered using a combination of online and traditional distant education practices. The purpose of this paper is to propose a set of criteria for the evaluation of the educational process in blended e-learning communities. The systematic surveying and evaluation of the ...

This study describes the development and testing of a paired `customer satisfaction' survey used to determine the development of general skills by graduates from professionally accredited construction degree programmes. Graduates from professional courses are often described by employers as lacking in useful and instant fee-earning skills. This survey reveals the extent of differences in expect...

Components of an Ultrasound Quality Assurance Program 257 Quality Assurance and Preventive Maintenance 257 Tissue-Mimicking Phantoms 257 Tissue Properties Represented in Phantoms 257 Typical Quality Assurance Phantom Design 257 Cautions About Phantom Desiccation 258 Basic Quality Control Tests 259 Visual Inspection 259 Transducer Choice 259 System Sensitivity 260 Photography and Gray-Scale Hard...

The experimentally determined three-dimensional (3D) structures of proteins and nucleic acids represent the knowledge base from which so much understanding of biological processes has been derived over the last three decades of the twentieth century. Individual structures have provided explanations of specific biochemical functions and mechanisms, while comparisons of structures have given insi...

There are many aspects of obtaining good EPR data, for which there is need for a standard, or calibrant, to aid in determining uncertainty and reproducibility of the results. There should be a calibrant/standard for almost every variable known to affect the EPR signal, whether CW (linear or nonlinear) or time-domain. In the past, EPR standards have primarily focused on three issues: g-value, sp...