A computer model of the decay of a radioactive series, written in Visual Basic in Excel[TM], is presented. The model is based on the random selection of cells in an array. The results compare well with the theoretical equations. The model is a useful tool in teaching this aspect of radioactivity. (Contains 4 figures.)

We describe two short group projects for finite mathematics students that incorporate matrices and linear programming into fictional consulting requests presented as a letter to the students. The students are required to use mathematics to decrypt secret messages in one project involving matrix multiplication and inversion. The second project…

This study investigated vocabulary coverage and the number of encounters of low-frequency vocabulary in television programs. Eighty-eight television programs consisting of 264,384 running words were categorized according to genre. Television shows were classified as either British or American and then put into the following genres: news, drama,…

In its report "To Err is Human", The Institute of Medicine recommended the implementation of internal and external voluntary and mandatory automatic reporting systems to increase detection of adverse events. Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) allows the detection of patterns and trends that would be hidden or less detectable if analyzed by…

This study explores how girls currently enrolled and recently graduated from Miss Porter's School, Farmington, Connecticut, define success and the role gender plays in their definition(s). Data were collected from semi-structured student interviews, written responses by the students to a prompt designed to elicit personal conceptions of success,…

The variety and complexity of potentially-related data resources available for querying--webpages, databases, data warehouses--has been growing ever more rapidly. There is a growing need to pose integrative queries "across" multiple such sources, exploiting foreign keys and other means of interlinking data to merge information from diverse…

Location-based services (LBS for short) providers require users' current locations to answer their location-based queries, e.g., range and nearest-neighbor queries. Revealing personal location information to potentially untrusted service providers could create privacy risks for users. To this end, our objective is to design a privacy-preserving…

Although software testing has been well-studied in computer science, it has received little attention in natural language processing. Nonetheless, a fully developed methodology for glass box evaluation and testing of language processing applications already exists in the field methods of descriptive linguistics. This work lays out a number of…

The author has undergone a major shift in the way of teaching his undergraduate computer programming courses. In the classroom, the teacher's computer is connected to a splitter and a video projector that display the computer's screen to the entire class. Using this technology, the programming language itself is used live in class to help the…

The gender digital divide has been widely discussed and researched over the years. Previous studies have focused on a number of factors such as computer attitude, computer anxiety, computer self-efficacy, and computer experience. This study empirically tested the sensitivity of a learning style instrument, the "Gregorc Style Delineator"…

Social networking and communications tools have become widely used in entertainment and social applications and there is growing interest in their use in formal education applications. Distance education and especially those types that are based on self-paced programming models may be the biggest beneficiaries of the use of these new tools to…

Digital game-players devote a large amount of their time to discovering rules hidden in the code and discoverable through empirical study, experiments, and developing or rediscovering the mathematical formulae governing the code. They do this through their own independent play as they test areas, gear and abilities, through data mining using…

With universities having difficulty attracting students to study information technology (IT), the scores needed for entry into IT degrees have dropped markedly. IT schools are thus having to cope by adjusting their introductory courses to ensure that students will still learn what is expected but without negatively impacting on pass rates. This…

Agile methodologies have become increasingly popular among software developers as evidenced by industrial participation at related conferences. The popularity of agile practices over traditional techniques partly stems from the fact that these practices provide for more customer involvement and better accommodate rapidly changing requirements,…

In order to evaluate student learning achievement, several aspects should be considered, such as exercises, examinations, and observations. Traditionally, such an evaluation calculates a final score using a weighted average method after awarding numerical scores, and then determines a grade according to a set of established crisp criteria.…