Competition, despite its potential drawbacks, is an easily adopted and frequently used motivator in classrooms. Individual abilities, in the years of schooling, are inevitably different, and performance in competition is heavily ability dependent, resulting that more-able students always win while less-able students always lose. Students easily perceive how well they perform through the result ...

We prove a lower bound ρ ≥ 9.001 for the competitive ratio of the so-called online matching problem on a line. As a consequence, the online matching problem is revealed to be strictly more difficult than the “cow problem”.

This paper modified the mechanism of weight adjusting of the Self-Organizing Mapping network (SOM) for solving the problems of topology preserving and clarifying boundary of clustering graph for the clustering analysis. The modified SOM is named the Multiple Clustering Centers SOM (MCC-SOM). The MCC-SOM changed the competitive learning mechanism of “winner takes all” to allow the more one clust...

A significant challenge that faces any teacher of introductory programming is the diversity of the class. At one extreme there will be students who have never programmed before, while at the other there will be students who have many years experience of programming. Handling this diversity is difficult. The temptation for the instructor is often to focus on the novice group and to assume that t...

In this paper we present results of an empirical study based on the opinions of 220 senior IT managers in the USA on critical success factors in the strategic use of IT. Our results show that competitive business strategies together with the competence of senior IT executives play the most important role in creating the strategic value of IT in organizations. The other critical factors were hum...

Most people approach the issue of competitiveness by attempting to define what it is or what it should be. However, it is also interesting to approach the matter from a different angle by examining what factors are not essential in establishing a country’s competitiveness on world markets. While certain factors are certainly helpful for promoting competitiveness, they nonetheless should not be ...

To better understand the complex relationship between academic researchers and funding agencies, the author interviewed 15 academic researchers regarding their views, suggestions, and difficulties in coordinating the proposal process. Data suggest that academic research funding is highly rhetorical, and that successful researchers have well-developed managerial, organizational, and communicatio...

The paper presents a problem resolved from social Modeling associated with the adequate selection of clothes and their distribution in a Dresser using a range of 87 clothes with different features associated with a fashion collection to represent the symbolic capital of it. A case of study is presented regarding to the selection of 47 different possible combinations using data obtained from the...