Searching for "computer science"

Conference on Digital Libraries

CM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
June 2-6, 2019 – Urbana-Champaign, IL
Curated Knowledge. Connected People. Extraordinary Results.
UPDATED DEADLINE: January 25, 2019
JCDL welcomes interesting submissions ranging across theories, systems,
services, and applications. We invite those managing, operating, developing,
curating, evaluating, or utilizing digital libraries broadly defined, covering
academic or public institutions, including archives, museums, and social
networks. We seek involvement of those in iSchools, as well as working in
computer or information or social sciences and technologies. Multiple tracks
and sessions will ensure tailoring to researchers, practitioners, and diverse
communities including data science/analytics, data curation/stewardship,
information retrieval, human-computer interaction, hypertext (and Web/network
science), multimedia, publishing, preservation, digital humanities, machine
learning/AI, heritage/culture, health/medicine, policy, law, and privacy/
intellectual property.
Additional Topics of Interest:
In addition to the topics indicated above, the following are some of the many
topics that will be considered relevant, as long as connections are made to
digital libraries:
* Collaborative and participatory information environments
* Crowdsourcing and human computation
* Cyberinfrastructure architectures, applications, and deployments
* Distributed information systems
* Document genres
* Extracting semantics, entities, and patterns from large collections
* Information and knowledge systems
* Information visualization
* Infrastructure and service design
* Knowledge discovery
* Linked data and its applications
* Performance evaluation
* Personal digital information management
* Scientific data management
* Social media, architecture, and applications
* Social networks, virtual organizations and networked information
* User behavior and modeling
* User communities and user research
We invite submissions in many forms: short papers, long papers, panels,
posters, tutorials, and workshops. We also host a Doctoral Consortium.
Submission Deadlines:
Jan. 25, 2019 – Tutorial, workshop, full paper and short paper, and consortium
submissions
Jan. 29, 2019 – Panel, poster and demonstration submissions
Submissions are to be made in electronic format via the conference’s EasyChair
submission page. Please see the conference website for more details:
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can XR help students learn

Giving Classroom Experiences (Like VR) More … Dimension

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/11/02/virtual-reality-other-3-d-tools-enhance-classroom-experiences

at a session on the umbrella concept of “mixed reality” (abbreviated XR) here Thursday, attendees had some questions for the panel’s VR/AR/XR evangelists: Can these tools help students learn? Can institutions with limited budgets pull off ambitious projects? Can skeptical faculty members be convinced to experiment with unfamiliar technology?

All four — one each from Florida International UniversityHamilton CollegeSyracuse University and Yale University — have just finished the first year of a joint research project commissioned by Educause and sponsored by Hewlett-Packard to investigate the potential for immersive technology to supplement and even transform classroom experiences.

Campus of the Future” report, written by Jeffrey Pomerantz

Yale has landed on a “hub model” for project development — instructors propose projects and partner with students with technological capabilities to tap into a centralized pool of equipment and funding. (My note: this is what I suggest in my Chapter 2 of Arnheim, Eliot & Rose (2012) Lib Guides)

Several panelists said they had already been getting started on mixed reality initiatives prior to the infusion of support from Educause and HP, which helped them settle on a direction

While 3-D printing might seem to lend itself more naturally to the hard sciences, Yale’s humanities departments have cottoned to the technology as a portal to answering tough philosophical questions.

institutions would be better served forgoing an early investment in hardware and instead gravitating toward free online products like UnityOrganon and You by Sharecare, all of which allow users to create 3-D experiences from their desktop computers.

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Campus of the Future” report, written by Jeffrey Pomerantz

https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2018/8/ers1805.pdf?la=en

XR technologies encompassing 3D simulations, modeling, and production.

This project sought to identify

  • current innovative uses of these 3D technologies,
  • how these uses are currently impacting teaching and learning, and
  • what this information can tell us about possible future uses for these technologies in higher education.

p. 5 Extended reality (XR) technologies, which encompass virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), are already having a dramatic impact on pedagogy in higher education. XR is a general term that covers a wide range of technologies along a continuum, with the real world at one end and fully immersive simulations at the other.

p. 6The Campus of the Future project was an exploratory evaluation of 3D technologies for instruction and research in higher education: VR, AR, 3D scanning, and 3D printing. The project sought to identify interesting and novel uses of 3D technology

p. 7 HP would provide the hardware, and EDUCAUSE would provide the methodological expertise to conduct an evaluation research project investigating the potential uses of 3D technologies in higher education learning and research.

The institutions that participated in the Campus of the Future project were selected because they were already on the cutting edge of integrating 3D technology into pedagogy. These institutions were therefore not representative, nor were they intended to be representative, of the state of higher education in the United States. These institutions were selected precisely because they already had a set of use cases for 3D technology available for study

p. 9  At some institutions, the group participating in the project was an academic unit (e.g., the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University; the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University). At these institutions, the 3D technology provided by HP was deployed for use more or less exclusively by students and faculty affiliated with the particular academic unit.

p. 10 definitions
there is not universal agreement on the definitions of these
terms or on the scope of these technologies. Also, all of these technologies
currently exist in an active marketplace and, as in many rapidly changing markets, there is a tendency for companies to invent neologisms around 3D technology.

A 3D scanner is not a single device but rather a combination of hardware and
software. There are generally two pieces of hardware: a laser scanner and a digital
camera. The laser scanner bounces laser beams off the surface of an object to
determine its shape and contours.

p. 11 definitions

Virtual reality means that the wearer is completely immersed in a computer
simulation. Several types of VR headsets are currently available, but all involve
a lightweight helmet with a display in front of the eyes (see figure 2). In some
cases, this display may simply be a smartphone (e.g., Google Cardboard); in other
cases, two displays—one for each eye—are integrated into the headset (e.g., HTC
Vive). Most commercially available VR rigs also include handheld controllers
that enable the user to interact with the simulation by moving the controllers
in space and clicking on finger triggers or buttons.

p. 12 definitions

Augmented reality provides an “overlay” of some type over the real world through
the use of a headset or even a smartphone.

In an active technology marketplace, there is a tendency for new terms to be
invented rapidly and for existing terms to be used loosely. This is currently
happening in the VR and AR market space. The HP VR rig and the HTC Vive
unit are marketed as being immersive, meaning that the user is fully immersed in
a simulation—virtual reality. Many currently available AR headsets, however, are
marketed not as AR but rather as MR (mixed reality). These MR headsets have a
display in front of the eyes as well as a pair of front-mounted cameras; they are
therefore capable of supporting both VR and AR functionality.

p. 13 Implementation

Technical difficulties.
Technical issues can generally be divided into two broad categories: hardware
problems and software problems. There is, of course, a common third category:
human error.

p. 15 the technology learning curve

The well-known diffusion of innovations theoretical framework articulates five
adopter categories: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and
laggards. Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003).

It is also likely that staff in the campus IT unit or center for teaching and learning already know who (at least some of) these individuals are, since such faculty members are likely to already have had contact with these campus units.
Students may of course also be innovators and early adopters, and in fact
several participating institutions found that some of the most creative uses of 3D technology arose from student projects

p. 30  Zeynep Tufekci, in her book Twitter and Tear Gas

definition: There is no necessary distinction between AR and VR; indeed, much research
on the subject is based on a conception of a “virtuality continuum” from entirely
real to entirely virtual, where AR lies somewhere between those ends of the
spectrum.  Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino, “A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays,” IEICE Transactions on Information Systems, vol. E77-D, no. 12 (1994); Steve Mann, “Through the Glass, Lightly,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 31, no. 3 (2012): 10–14.

For the future of 3D technology in higher education to be realized, that
technology must become as much a part of higher education as any technology:
the learning management system (LMS), the projector, the classroom. New
technologies and practices generally enter institutions of higher education as
initiatives. Several active learning classroom initiatives are currently under
way,36 for example, as well as a multi-institution open educational resources
(OER) degree initiative.37

p. 32 Storytelling

Some scholars have argued that all human communication
is based on storytelling;41 certainly advertisers have long recognized that
storytelling makes for effective persuasion,42 and a growing body of research
shows that narrative is effective for teaching even topics that are not generally
thought of as having a natural story, for example, in the sciences.43

p. 33 accessibility

The experience of Gallaudet University highlights one of the most important
areas for development in 3D technology: accessibility for users with disabilities.

p. 34 instructional design

For that to be the case, 3D technologies must be incorporated into the
instructional design process for building and redesigning courses. And for that
to be the case, it is necessary for faculty and instructional designers to be familiar
with the capabilities of 3D technologies. And for that to be the case, it may
not be necessary but would certainly be helpful for instructional designers to
collaborate closely with the staff in campus IT units who support and maintain
this hardware.

Every institution of higher
education has a slightly different organizational structure, of course, but these
two campus units are often siloed. This siloing may lead to considerable friction
in conducting the most basic organizational tasks, such as setting up meetings
and apportioning responsibilities for shared tasks. Nevertheless, IT units and
centers for teaching and learning are almost compelled to collaborate in order
to support faculty who want to integrate 3D technology into their teaching. It
is necessary to bring the instructional design expertise of a center for teaching
and learning to bear on integrating 3D technology into an instructor’s teaching (My note: and where does this place SCSU?) Therefore,
one of the most critical areas in which IT units and centers for teaching and
learning can collaborate is in assisting instructors to develop this integration
and to develop learning objects that use 3D technology. p. 35 For 3D technology to really gain traction in higher education, it will need to be easier for instructors to deploy without such a large support team.

p. 35 Sites such as Thingiverse, Sketchfab, and Google Poly are libraries of freely
available, user-created 3D models.

ClassVR is a tool that enables the simultaneous delivery of a simulation to
multiple headsets, though the simulation itself may still be single-user.

p. 37 data management:

An institutional repository is a collection of an institution’s intellectual output, often consisting of preprint journal articles and conference papers and the data sets behind them.49 An
institutional repository is often maintained by either the library or a partnership
between the library and the campus IT unit. An institutional repository therefore has the advantage of the long-term curatorial approach of librarianship combined with the systematic backup management of the IT unit. (My note: leaves me wonder where does this put SCSU)

Sharing data sets is critical for collaboration and increasingly the default for
scholarship. Data is as much a product of scholarship as publications, and there
is a growing sentiment among scholars that it should therefore be made public.50

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more on VR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality+definition

suggestions for academic writing

these are suggestions from Google Groups with doctoral cohorts 6, 7, 8, 9 from the Ed leadership program

How to find a book from InterLibrary Loan: find book ILL

Citing someone else’s citation?:

http://library.northampton.ac.uk/liberation/ref/adv_harvard_else.php

http://guides.is.uwa.edu.au/c.php?g=380288&p=3109460
use them sparingly:
http://www.apastyle.org/learn/faqs/cite-another-source.aspx
Please take a look at “Paraphrasing sources: in
http://www.roanestate.edu/owl/usingsources_mla.html
it gives you a good idea why will distance you from a possibility of plagiarizing.
n example of resolution by this peer-reviewed journal article
https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i5.2566
Ungerer, L. M. (2016). Digital Curation as a Core Competency in Current Learning and Literacy: A Higher Education Perspective. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning17(5). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i5.2566
Dunaway (2011) suggests that learning landscapes in a digital age are networked, social, and technological. Since people commonly create and share information by collecting, filtering, and customizing digital content, educators should provide students opportunities to master these skills (Mills, 2013). In enhancing critical thinking, we have to investigate pedagogical models that consider students’ digital realities (Mihailidis & Cohen, 2013). November (as cited in Sharma & Deschaine, 2016), however warns that although the Web fulfils a pivotal role in societal media, students often are not guided on how to critically deal with the information that they access on the Web. Sharma and Deschaine (2016) further point out the potential for personalizing teaching and incorporating authentic material when educators themselves digitally curate resources by means of Web 2.0 tools.
p. 24. Communities of practice. Lave and Wenger’s (as cited in Weller, 2011) concept of situated learning and Wenger’s (as cited in Weller, 2011) idea of communities of practice highlight the importance of apprenticeship and the social role in learning.
criteria to publish a paper

Originality: Does the paper contain new and significant information adequate to justify publication?

Relationship to Literature: Does the paper demonstrate an adequate understanding of the relevant literature in the field and cite an appropriate range of literature sources? Is any significant work ignored?

Methodology: Is the paper’s argument built on an appropriate base of theory, concepts, or other ideas? Has the research or equivalent intellectual work on which the paper is based been well designed? Are the methods employed appropriate?

Results: Are results presented clearly and analyzed appropriately? Do the conclusions adequately tie together the other elements of the paper?

Implications for research, practice and/or society: Does the paper identify clearly any implications for research, practice and/or society? Does the paper bridge the gap between theory and practice? How can the research be used in practice (economic and commercial impact), in teaching, to influence public policy, in research (contributing to the body of knowledge)? What is the impact upon society (influencing public attitudes, affecting quality of life)? Are these implications consistent with the findings and conclusions of the paper?

Quality of Communication: Does the paper clearly express its case, measured against the technical language of the field and the expected knowledge of the journal’s readership? Has attention been paid to the clarity of expression and readability, such as sentence structure, jargon use, acronyms, etc.

mixed method research

http://login.libproxy.stcloudstate.edu/login?qurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3deric%26AN%3dEJ971947%26site%3dehost-live%26scope%3dsite

Stanton, K. V., & Liew, C. L. (2011). Open Access Theses in Institutional Repositories: An Exploratory Study of the Perceptions of Doctoral Students. Information Research: An International Electronic Journal16(4),

We examine doctoral students’ awareness of and attitudes to open access forms of publication. Levels of awareness of open access and the concept of institutional repositories, publishing behaviour and perceptions of benefits and risks of open access publishing were explored. Method: Qualitative and quantitative data were collected through interviews with eight doctoral students enrolled in a range of disciplines in a New Zealand university and a self-completion Web survey of 251 students. Analysis: Interview data were analysed thematically, then evaluated against a theoretical framework. The interview data were then used to inform the design of the survey tool. Survey responses were analysed as a single set, then by disciple using SurveyMonkey’s online toolkit and Excel. Results: While awareness of open access and repository archiving is still low, the majority of interview and survey respondents were found to be supportive of the concept of open access. The perceived benefits of enhanced exposure and potential for sharing outweigh the perceived risks. The majority of respondents were supportive of an existing mandatory thesis submission policy. Conclusions: Low levels of awareness of the university repository remains an issue, and could be addressed by further investigating the effectiveness of different communication channels for promotion.

PLEASE NOTE:

the researchers use the qualitative approach: by interviewing participants and analyzing their responses thematically, they build the survey.
Then then administer the survey (the quantitative approach)

How do you intend to use a mixed method? Please share

paraphrasing quotes

https://youtu.be/MiL4H09v0gU

statement of the problem

Problem statement – Wikipedia

 
Metaphors: A Problem Statement is like… 
metaphor — a novel or poetic linguistic expression where one or more words for a concept are used outside normal conventional meaning to express a similar concept. Aristotle l 
The DNA of the research l A snapshot of the research l The foundation of the research l The Heart of the research l A “taste” of the research l A blueprint for the study
 
 
 
Here is a good exercise for your writing of the problem statement:
Chapter 3
several documents, which can be helpful in two different ways:
– check your structure and methodology
– borrow verbiage
http://education.nova.edu/Resources/uploads/app/35/files/arc_doc/writing_chpt3_quantitative_research_methods.pdf 
http://education.nova.edu/Resources/uploads/app/35/files/arc_doc/writing_chpt3_qualitative_research_methods.pdf
http://www.trinitydc.edu/sps/files/2010/09/APA-6-BGS-Quantitative-Research-Paper-August-2014.pdf

digital object identifier, or DOI

digital object identifier (DOI) is a unique alphanumeric string assigned by a registration agency (the International DOI Foundation) to identify content and provide a persistent link to its location on the Internet. The publisher assigns a DOI when your article is published and made available electronically.

Why do we need it?

2010 Changes to APA for Electronic Materials Digital object identifier (DOI). DOI available. If a DOI is available you no longer include a URL. Example: Author, A. A. (date). Title of article. Title of Journal, volume(number), page numbers. doi: xx.xxxxxxx

http://www.stcloudstate.edu/writeplace/_files/documents/working-with-sources/apa-electronic-material-citations.pdf

Mendeley (vs Zotero and/or RefWorks)

https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/11355/226845?utm_campaign=Mendeley%20Webinars%202&utm_campaignPK=271205324&utm_term=OP28019&utm_content=271205712&utm_source=99&BID=799935188&utm_medium=email&SIS_ID=46360

Online Writing Tools: FourOnlineToolsforwriting

social media and altmetrics

Accodring to Sugimoto et al (2016), the Use of social media platforms for by researchers is high — ranging from 75 to 80% in large -scale surveys (Rowlands et al., 2011; Tenopir et al., 2013; Van Eperen & Marincola, 2011) .
There is one more reason, and, as much as you want to dwell on the fact that you are practitioners and research is not the most important part of your job, to a great degree, you may be judged also by the scientific output of your office and/or institution.
In that sense, both social media and altimetrics might suddenly become extremely important to understand and apply.
Shortly altmetrics (alternative metrics) measure the impact your scientific output has on the community. Your teachers and you present, publish and create work, which might not be presented and published, but may be widely reflected through, e.g. social media, and thus, having impact on the community.
How such impact is measured, if measured at all, can greatly influence the money flow to your institution
For more information:
For EVEN MORE information, read the entire article:
Sugimoto, C. R., Work, S., Larivière, V., & Haustein, S. (2016). Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: a review of the literature. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.08112
related information:
In the comments section on this blog entry,
I left notes to
Thelwall, M., & Wilson, P. (2016). Mendeley readership altmetrics for medical articles: An analysis of 45 fields. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67(8), 1962–1972. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23501
Todd Tetzlaff is using Mendeley and he might be the only one to benefit … 🙂
Here is some food for thought from the article above:
Doctoral students and junior researchers are the largest reader group in Mendeley ( Haustein & Larivière, 2014; Jeng et al., 2015; Zahedi, Costas, & Wouters, 2014a) .
Studies have also provided evidence of high rate s of blogging among certain subpopulations: for example, approximately one -third of German university staff (Pscheida et al., 2013) and one fifth of UK doctoral students use blogs (Carpenter et al., 2012) .
Social data sharing platforms provide an infrastructure to share various types of scholarly objects —including datasets, software code, figures, presentation slides and videos —and for users to interact with these objects (e.g., comment on, favorite, like , and reuse ). Platforms such as Figshare and SlideShare disseminate scholars’ various types of research outputs such as datasets, figures, infographics, documents, videos, posters , or presentation slides (Enis, 2013) and displays views, likes, and shares by other users (Mas -Bleda et al., 2014) .
Frequently mentioned social platforms in scholarly communication research include research -specific tools such as Mendeley, Zotero, CiteULike, BibSonomy, and Connotea (now defunct) as well as general tools such as Delicious and Digg (Hammond, Hannay, Lund, & Scott, 2005; Hull, Pettifer, & Kell, 2008; Priem & Hemminger, 2010; Reher & Haustein, 2010) .
qualitative research
“The focus group interviews were analysed based on the principles of interpretative phenomenology”
 
1. What are  interpretative phenomenology?
Here is an excellent article in ResarchGate:
 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263767248_A_practical_guide_to_using_Interpretative_Phenomenological_Analysis_in_qualitative_research_psychology
 
and a discussion from the psychologists regarding the weaknesses when using IPA (Interpretative phenomenological analysis)

https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-24/edition-10/methods-interpretative-phenomenological-analysis

2. What is Constant Comparative Method?

http://www.qualres.org/HomeCons-3824.html

Nvivo shareware

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/01/11/nvivo-shareware/

Qualitative and Quantitative research in lame terms
podcast:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-scientific-method-works/id278981407?i=1000331586170&mt=2
if you are not podcast fans, I understand. The link above is a pain in the behind to make work, if you are not familiar with using podcast.
Here is an easier way to find it:
1. open your cell phone and go find the podcast icon, which is pre-installed, but you might have not ever used it [yet].
2. In the app, use the search option and type “stuff you should know”
3. the podcast will pop up. scroll and find “How the scientific method works,” and/or search for it if you can.
Once you can play it on the phone, you have to find time to listen to it.
I listen to podcast when i have to do unpleasant chores such as: 1. walking to work 2. washing the dishes 3. flying long hours (very rarely). 4. Driving in the car.
There are bunch of other situations, when you may be strapped and instead of filling disgruntled and stressed, you can deliver the mental [junk] food for your brain.
Earbuds help me: 1. forget the unpleasant task, 2. Utilize time 3. Learn cool stuff
Here are podcasts, I am subscribed for, besides “stuff you should know”:
TED Radio Hour
TED Talks Education
NPR Fresh Air
BBC History
and bunch others, which, if i don’t go a listen for an year, i go and erase and if i peruse through the top chart and something picks my interest, I try.
If I did not manage to convince to podcast, totally fine; do not feel obligated.
However, this podcast, you can listen to on your computer, if you don’t want to download on your phone.
It is one hour show by two geeks, who are trying to make funny (and they do) a dry matter such as quantitative vs qualitative, which you want to internalize:
1. Sometimes at minute 12, they talk about inductive versus deductive to introduce you to qualitative versus quantitative. It is good to listen to their musings, since your dissertation is going through inductive and deductive process, and understanding it, can help you control better your dissertation writing. 
2. Scientific method. Hypothesis etc (around min 17).
While this is not a Ph.D., but Ed.D. and we do not delve into the philosophy of science and dissertation etc. the more you know about this process, the better control you have over your dissertation. 
3. Methods and how you prove (Chapter 3) is discussed around min 35
4. dependent and independent variables and how do you do your research in general (min ~45)
Shortly, listen and please do share your thoughts below. You do not have to be kind to this source offering. Actually, be as critical as possible, so you can help me decide, if I should offer it to the next cohort and thank you in advance for your feedback. 

 

 

remember better through VR

Research: People Remember Information Better Through VR

By Rhea Kelly 06/14/18

https://thejournal.com/articles/2018/06/14/study-people-remember-information-better-through-vr.aspx

A study from the University of Maryland found that people recall information better when it is presented to them in a virtual environment, as opposed to a desktop computer.

The project was supported by the National Science Foundation, the state of Maryland’s MPower initiative and the NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellenceprogram. The study results, published in the journal Virtual Reality, are available on the UMD site.

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more on VR in education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+rality+education

income-share agreements (ISAs)

income-share agreements (ISAs)

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/news/a-new-way-to-get-people-into-coding-1765499/

A new way to get people into coding

Want to learn to code without paying up front? Programs such as Lambda School, App Academy and even Purdue University are experimenting with income-share agreements (ISAs), in which students agree to pay a portion of their income after graduation, reports The Atlantic. It’s a promising idea, particularly when businesses needs to fill over half a million computer-science jobs. But the schemes are still in their infancy, and it remains to be seen whether ISAs prove to be a viable business model or successful for graduates.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/an-alternative-to-student-loan-debt/563093/

Code Now. Pay Tuition Later.

switching OS

Are you considering switching an operating system (OS)?
Do you have an old computer (hardware), but you don’t want to through it out yet (environment)?
These and other questions discussed as comments to the following article:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2018/apr/26/what-can-i-do-with-my-windows-vista-pc-cant-afford-to-upgrade-it-firefox

I can’t afford to upgrade my Vista PC. What can I do?

Firefox is about to stop supporting Windows Vista and websites are not working. Is there a cheap or preferably free solution?

selected comments under the article (practical, funny, for pundits and novices):

Ujjwal Dey Fedora is nice but it’s for more experienced users. Setting it up for everyday use is no rocket science, but still requires a bit of work with bash or whatever shell Fedora provides these days. For easy migration Mint is the best IMO.

Fraser McCabe Maybe Linux Mint or Manjaro.
If you want to test them first, you can create a bootable USB thumb drive first
Ubuntu is ideal for older machines. I run Kali and Lubuntu on an old P4 for basic pen tests and VM. I use Tor and Private VPN. No probs. Slow compared to modern systems. Yet functional. I have a lot of old Machines that I collect for Free to network and simulate environments to penetrate with virtual emulators. Works perfectly fine.
The article doesn’t mention the excellent Microsoft Office alternative – Libre Office.
It’s completely free, comes ready-installed with Ubuntu Linux, and in most cases can read and write to Microsoft Office format documents.
(there’s also a version of Libre Office that runs on Windows – again, an excellent free alternative)
Easiest way is to install a pirate version of Win 7 for free, then you buy a Win 7 activation key on Ebay for like $5. Where there’s a will, there’s a way 👌👌
Buy a second hand laptop from somewhere like CeX for about £60 with Windows 7 or 10 installed, assuming you can afford that.
Stop using Firefox. Switch to Chrome or Internet Explorer.
I’ve been “off the line” for years now. My advice: read a bloody book!
Blame Brexit

AI and China education

China’s children are its secret weapon in the global AI arms race

China wants to be the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. To get there, it’s reinventing the way children are taught

despite China’s many technological advances, in this new cyberspace race, the West had the lead.

Xi knew he had to act. Within twelve months he revealed his plan to make China a science and technology superpower. By 2030 the country would lead the world in AI, with a sector worth $150 billion. How? By teaching a generation of young Chinese to be the best computer scientists in the world.

Today, the US tech sector has its pick of the finest minds from across the world, importing top talent from other countries – including from China. Over half of Bay Area workers are highly-skilled immigrants. But with the growth of economies worldwide and a Presidential administration hell-bent on restricting visas, it’s unclear that approach can last.

In the UK the situation is even worse. Here, the government predicts there’ll be a shortfall of three million employees for high-skilled jobs by 2022 – even before you factor in the immigration crunch of Brexit. By contrast, China is plotting a homegrown strategy of local and national talent development programs. It may prove a masterstroke.

In 2013 the city’s teenagers gained global renown when they topped the charts in the PISA tests administered every three years by the OECD to see which country’s kids are the smartest in the world. Aged 15, Shanghai students were on average three full years ahead of their counterparts in the UK or US in maths and one-and-a-half years ahead in science.

Teachers, too, were expected to be learners. Unlike in the UK, where, when I began to teach a decade ago, you might be working on full-stops with eleven-year-olds then taking eighteen-year-olds through the finer points of poetry, teachers in Shanghai specialised not only in a subject area, but also an age-group.

Shanghai’s success owed a lot to Confucian tradition, but it fitted precisely the best contemporary understanding of how expertise is developed. In his book Why Don’t Kids Like School? cognitive Dan Willingham explains that complex mental skills like creativity and critical thinking depend on our first having mastered the simple stuff. Memorisation and repetition of the basics serve to lay down the neural architecture that creates automaticity of thought, ultimately freeing up space in our working memory to think big.

Seung-bin Lee, a seventeen-year-old high school graduate, told me of studying fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for the three years leading up to the Suneung, the fearsome SAT exam taken by all Korean school leavers on a single Thursday each November, for which all flights are grounded so as not to break students’ concentration during the 45 minutes of the English listening paper.
Korea’s childhoods were being lost to a relentless regime of studying, crushed in a top-down system that saw them as cyphers rather than kids.

A decade ago, we consoled ourselves that although kids in China and Korea worked harder and did better on tests than ours, it didn’t matter. They were compliant, unthinking drones, lacking the creativity, critical thinking or entrepreneurialism needed to succeed in the world. No longer. Though there are still issues with Chinese education – urban centres like Shanghai and Hong Kong are positive outliers – the country knows something that we once did: education is the one investment on which a return is guaranteed. China is on course to becoming the first education superpower.

Troublingly, where education in the UK and US has been defined by creativity and independent thinking – Shanghai teachers told me of visits to our schools to learn about these qualities – our direction of travel is now away from those strengths and towards exams and standardisation, with school-readiness tests in the pipeline and UK schools minister Nick Gibb suggesting kids can beat exam stress by sitting more of them. Centres of excellence remain, but increasingly, it feels, we’re putting our children at risk of losing out to the robots, while China is building on its strong foundations to ask how its young people can be high-tech pioneers. They’re thinking big – we’re thinking of test scores.

soon “digital information processing” would be included as a core subject on China’s national graduation exam – the Gaokao – and pictured classrooms in which students would learn in cross-disciplinary fashion, designing mobile phones for example, in order to develop design, engineering and computing skills. Focusing on teaching kids to code was short-sighted, he explained. “We still regard it as a language between human and computer.” (My note: they are practically implementing the Finland’s attempt to rebuild curricula)

“If your plan is for one year,” went an old Chinese saying, “plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for 100 years, educate children.” Two and half thousand years later chancellor Gwan Zhong might update his proverb, swapping rice for bitcoin and trees for artificial intelligence, but I’m sure he’d stand by his final point.

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more on AR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence

more on China education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/01/06/chinas-transformation-of-higher-education/

quantum computing

Alibaba puts quantum computing in the public cloud, follows Intel and IBM’s lead

Alibaba has just announced an 11 qubit quantum computer as part of its cloud offerings, making it the second-fastest public quantum computing platform in the world.

The 5 basics of quantum computers

Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba, in partnership with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has added quantum computing to its cloud service. Alibaba Cloud now hosts a superconducting cloud computer offering 11 quantum bit (qubit) speed, making it the second fastest in the world behind Intel and IBM’s 20-qubit cloud computer.

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https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=quantum

open access symposium 2018 digital libraries

The ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 2018 (JCDL 2018L:
https://2018.jcdl.org/) will be held in conjunction with UNT Open Access
Symposium 2018 (https://openaccess.unt.edu/symposium/2018) on June 3 – 6, 2018
in Fort Worth, Texas, the rustic and artistic threshold into the American
West. JCDL welcomes interesting submissions ranging across theories, systems,
services, and applications. We invite those managing, operating, developing,
curating, evaluating, or utilizing digital libraries broadly defined, covering
academic or public institutions, including archives, museums, and social
networks. We seek involvement of those in iSchools, as well as working in
computer or information or social sciences and technologies. Multiple tracks
and sessions will ensure tailoring to researchers, practitioners, and diverse
communities including data science/analytics, data curation/stewardship,
information retrieval, human-computer interaction, hypertext (and Web/network
science), multimedia, publishing, preservation, digital humanities, machine
learning/AI, heritage/culture, health/medicine, policy, law, and privacy/
intellectual property.

General Instructions on submissions of full papers, short papers, posters and
demonstrations, doctoral consortium, tutorials, workshops, and panels can be
found at https://2018.jcdl.org/general_instructions. Below are the submission
deadlines:

• Jan. 15, 2018 – Tutorial and workshop proposal submissions
• Jan. 15, 2018 – Full paper and short paper submissions
• Jan. 29, 2018 – Panel, poster and demonstration submissions
• Feb. 1, 2018 – Notification of acceptance for tutorials and workshops
• Mar. 8, 2018 – Notification of acceptance for full papers, short papers,
panels, posters, and demonstrations
• Mar. 25, 2018 – Doctoral Consortium abstract submissions
• Apr. 5, 2018 – Notification of acceptance for Doctoral Consortium
• Apr. 15, 2018 – Final camera-ready deadline for full papers, short papers,
panels, posters, and demonstrations

Please email jcdl2018@googlegroups.com if you have any questions.

Reproducibility Librarian

Reproducibility Librarian? Yes, That Should Be Your Next Job

https://www.jove.com/blog/2017/10/27/reproducibility-librarian-yes-that-should-be-your-next-job/
Vicky Steeves (@VickySteeves) is the first Research Data Management and Reproducibility Librarian
Reproducibility is made so much more challenging because of computers, and the dominance of closed-source operating systems and analysis software researchers use. Ben Marwick wrote a great piece called ‘How computers broke science – and what we can do to fix it’ which details a bit of the problem. Basically, computational environments affect the outcome of analyses (Gronenschild et. al (2012) showed the same data and analyses gave different results between two versions of macOS), and are exceptionally hard to reproduce, especially when the license terms don’t allow it. Additionally, programs encode data incorrectly and studies make erroneous conclusions, e.g. Microsoft Excel encodes genes as dates, which affects 1/5 of published data in leading genome journals.
technology to capture computational environments, workflow, provenance, data, and code are hugely impactful for reproducibility.  It’s been the focus of my work, in supporting an open source tool called ReproZip, which packages all computational dependencies, data, and applications in a single distributable package that other can reproduce across different systems. There are other tools that fix parts of this problem: Kepler and VisTrails for workflow/provenance, Packrat for saving specific R packages at the time a script is run so updates to dependencies won’t break, Pex for generating executable Python environments, and o2r for executable papers (including data, text, and code in one).
plugin for Jupyter notebooks), and added a user interface to make it friendlier to folks not comfortable on the command line.

I would also recommend going to conferences:

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more on big data in an academic library in this IMS blog
academic library collection data visualization

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/10/26/software-carpentry-workshop/

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=data+library

more on library positions in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=big+data+library
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/06/14/technology-requirements-samples/

on university library future:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2014/12/10/unviersity-library-future/

librarian versus information specialist

 

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