The Role of Invention in Digital Dating Site Profile Composition

This study investigates writers enacting rhetorical invention within a non-academic digital environment. The data described and analyzed came from dating site participants who completed surveys about their composing processes and who provided profiles they had previously written for a dating site. In particular, the investigation considers the inventional choices writers make to represent themselves through discourse in this particular environment. Qualitative textual analysis led to the identification of these digital writers’ invention strategies along four dimensions: assessing self, assessing task, planning/composing text, and assessing interaction. The findings complicate our understanding of the relationship between rhetorical invention, audience, and impression management and suggest that rather than engaging in invention within the discovery versus creation binary, digital writers actually employ a spectrum of approaches to invention. Overall, this study suggests that audience is deeply connected to invention throughout the profile composing process: the participants expressed concerns about ethos, pathos, and the process of impression management within their writing, and these concerns all connected to audience in various ways.     

Why technology matters to writing: A cyberwriter’s tale

Technology does indeed matter to writing—and in significant ways. But how it matters can vary, depending on the particular technology, the habits and attitudes of the individual writer, and the context of learning and use. Here I employ a personal narrative (“a cyberwriter’s tale”) to track my development as a writer over time—from handwriting to typewriting to cyberwriting—and to show how each new writing technology influenced my practices and products. I argue finally for a cyborgian, posthumanist view of writing technologies. Such a view does not isolate the technological tool as an abstracted machine apart from human use, but insists on defining technology as use—as the human and machine working in concert (joined at the interface) and writing in a particular social, political, and rhetorical context.     

The fair use doctrine: History, application, and implications for (new media) writing teachers

Writing teachers have always had to contend with plagiarism. However, the technology of the Internet and the thorny issues of copyright law complicate how we teach legal and ethical use of others’ materials in the networked classroom. Our pedagogy and curriculum choices and our students’ writing practices are shaped by a legal infrastructure that includes the fair use doctrine. Our understanding and knowledge of the fair use doctrine should become second nature to us. Critical awareness of fair use, the four-factor test, and how to conduct appropriate analyses when using others’ materials must become part of the everyday digital writing/new media classroom curriculum. To this end, the author summarizes the salient points of law and practice of fair use and demonstrates, in small ways, how the fair use doctrine can inform the teaching of writing in digital contexts. As teachers, researchers, and experts of writing, the discourse of fair use must be considered in addition to the discourse of plagiarism.     

Negotiating What's at Stake in Informal Writing in the Writing Center

How do students learn expectations for “informal” online composition? This article details the results of a qualitative study that examines how students and writing consultants negotiate and define writing conventions for “low-stakes,” digital composition: that is, writing assignments that are composed for Blackboard discussion forums and receive only completion grades. Study results are based on both a survey of student experiences with digital composition and a writing center consultation case study at a large, southeastern, RU/VH university. Student anxiety about digital composition and classroom instruction have contributed to writing centers’ status as space for students to work out their fears and questions about new media. This study reports on how digital composition in writing classes has impacted the ways in which writing centers must address issues of audience, consider new methods for invention, and contend with a renewed focus on grammatical correctness. The article presents suggested pedagogy for emerging digital composition and poses questions to those in computers and composition about how we might best approach classroom instruction as digital composition genres evolve.     

Reclaiming Experience: The Aesthetic and Multimodal Composition

Recent scholarship points to the rhetorical role of the aesthetic in multimodal composition and new media contexts. In this article, I examine the aesthetic as a rhetorical concept in writing studies and imagine the ways in which this concept can be useful to teachers of multimodal composition. My treatment of the concept begins with a return to the ancient Greek aisthetikos (relating to perception by the senses) in order to discuss the aesthetic as a meaningful mode of experience. I then review European conceptions of the aesthetic and finally draw from John Dewey and Bruno Latour to help shape this concept into a pragmatic and useful approach that can complement multimodal teaching and learning. The empirical approach I construct adds to an understanding of aesthetic experience with media in order to render more transparent the ways in which an audience creates knowledge—or takes and makes meaning—via the senses. Significantly, this approach to meaning making supports learning in digital environments where students are increasingly asked to both produce and consume media convergent texts that combine multiple modalities including sound, image, and user interaction.     

Anxiety management training as a strategy for enhancing computer user performance

This study assessed the effects of self-managed relaxation and cognitive coping skills training on the anxiety and performance of 80 apprehensive computer trainees. The influence of a computer's user friendliness upon these measures was also examined. The college student subjects were taught to use spreadsheet software and were then assigned an independent computer task to complete. Experimental sessions included a control condition as well as manipulations in which subjects were trained to use relaxation coping skills, cognitive coping skills, or a combination of the two skills. Half of the subjects worked with “friendly” and half with “less-friendly” software. Training in 3elaxation or cognitive coping skills reduced error rates and task times, but not computer anxiety. Combined relaxation and cognitive coping skills training had similar effects, as did the use of friendly software. The findings indicate that teaching anxiety management skills may be most appropriate when software is relatively difficult to use.     

Extraction of geometric characteristics for manufacturability assessment

One of the advantages of feature-based design is that it provides data which are defined as parameters of features in readily available forms for tasks from design through manufacturing. It can thus facilitate the integration of CAD and CAM. However, not all design features are features required in down stream applications and not all parameters or data can be predefined in the features. One of the significant examples is property that is formed by feature interactions. For example, the interaction of a positive feature and a negative feature induces a wall thickness change that might cause defects in a part. Therefore, the identification of the wall thickness change by detecting the feature interaction is required in the moldability assessment.The work presented in this paper deals with the extraction of geometric characteristics in feature-based design for manufacturability assessment. We focus on the manufacturability assessment of discrete parts with emphasis on a net shape process—injection molding. The definition, derivation and representation of the spatial relationships between features are described. The geometric characteristics formed by feature interactions are generalized as significant items, such as “depth”, “thickness”, “height” etc. based on the generalization of feature shapes. Reasoning on feature interactions and extraction of geometric characteristics is treated as a refinement procedure. High-level spatial relationships—“is_in”, “adjacent_to” and “coplanar” as well as their geometric details are first derived. The significant items formed from feature interactions are then computed based on the detailed spatial relationships. This work was implemented in a computer-aided concurrent product and process development environment to support molding product design assessment.     

What Are the Top Ten Most Influential Parallel and Distributed Processing Concepts of the Past Millenium?

This is a report on a panel titled “What are the top ten most influential parallel and distributed processing concepts of the last millennium?” that was held at the IEEE Computer Society sponsored “14th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2000).” The panelists were chosen to represent a variety of perspectives and technical areas. After the panelists had presented their choices for the top ten, an open discussion was held among the audience and panelists. At the end of the discussion, a ballot was distributed for the audience to vote on the top ten concepts (in arbitrary order). The voting identified the following ten most influential parallel and distributed processing concepts of the last millennium: (1) Amdahl's law and scalability, (2) Arpanet and Internet, (3) pipelining, (4) divide and conquer approach, (5) multiprogramming, (6) synchronization (including semaphores), (7) load balancing, (8) message passing and packet switching, (9) cluster computing, and (10) multithreaded (lightweight) program execution.     

Teaching programming: A spiral approach to syntax and semantics

Coupling the recently proposed syntactic/semantic model of programmer behavior [1] with classic educational psychological theories yields new insights to teaching programming to novices. These new insights should make programming education more natural to students. alleviate “computer shock” (the analog of “math anxiety” [2]) and promote the development of widespread “computer literacy”.The spiral approach is the parallel acquisition of syntactic and semantic knowledge in a sequence which provokes student interest by using meaningful examples, builds on previous knowledge, is in harmony with the student's cognitive skills, provides reinforcement of recently acquired material and develops confidence through successful accomplishment of increasingly difficult tasks. The relationship of structured programming and flowcharts to the spiral approach is discussed.     

What is a “Good” Encoding of Guarded Choice?

The π-calculus with synchronous output and mixed-guarded choices is strictly more expressive than the π-calculus with asynchronous output and no choice. This result was recently proved by C. Palamidessi and, as a corollary, she showed that there is no fully compositional encoding from the former into the latter that preserves divergence-freedom and symmetries. This paper argues that there are nevertheless “good” encodings between these calculi. In detail, we present a series of encodings for languages with (1) input-guarded choice, (2) both input- and output-guarded choice, and (3) mixed-guarded choice, and investigate them with respect to compositionality and divergence-freedom. The first and second encoding satisfy all of the above criteria, but various “good” candidates for the third encoding—inspired by an existing distributed implementation—invalidate one or the other criterion. While essentially confirming Palamidessi's result, our study suggests that the combination of strong compositionality and divergence-freedom is too strong for more practical purposes.     

Dynamic Submodel Integration Using an Offer-Accept Discrete Event Simulation

Newer approaches for modelling travel behaviour require a new approach to integrated spatial economic modelling. Travel behaviour modelling is increasingly disaggregate, econometric, dynamic, and behavioural. A fully dynamic approach to urban system modelling is described, where interactions are characterized as two agents interacting through discrete events labelled as “offer” or “accept”. This leads to a natural partition of an integrated urban model into submodels based on the category of what is being exchanged, the type of agent, and the time and place of interaction.Where prices (or price-like signals such as congested travel times) exist to stimulate supply and/or to suppress demand, the dynamic change in prices can be represented either behaviourally, as individual agents adjust their expectations in response to their personal history and the history of the modelled region, or with an “auctioneer” from micro-economic theory, who adjusts average prices. When no auctioneers are used, the modelling system can use completely continuous representations of both time and space.Two examples are shown. The first is a demonstration of a continuous-time continuous-space transaction simulation with simple agents representing businesses and households. The second shows how an existing model—the Oregon TLUMIP project for statewide land-use and transport modelling—can be adapted into the paradigm.     

“Tryin to make a dolla outa fifteen cent”: Teaching composition with the Internet at an HBCU

Drawing upon nearly a decade of experience, I describe the challenges and advantages of teaching composition with the Internet at Howard University; I also explore the implications for other historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). First, I discuss the digital divide that has made it so difficult for many HBCU faculty members and students to access the Internet for composition courses. Next, I describe how students and I succeeded in harnessing the Internet not only to practice high-level writing skills but to “do cultural work”: to establish online “safe houses” for African American English, to collaborate with White North Americans and Black South Africans, and to publish Afrocentric material on the Web. In closing, I identify the pedagogical strategies that turned the Internet into a productive tool for the students in my writing courses.     

Show, not tell: The value of new media scholarship

In this article, I consider the changing nature of publications in relation to technology and tenure, presenting a taxonomy of scholarly publications: online scholarship, scholarship about new media, and new media scholarship. I offer a focused definition of new media texts as ones that juxtapose semiotic modes in new and aesthetically pleasing ways and, in doing so, break away from print traditions so that written text is not the primary rhetorical means. By applying this definition to scholarly online publications, readers can be better prepared to recognize and interpret the meaning-making potential of aesthetic modes used in new media scholarly texts. I conclude by offering an analysis of a scholarly new media text, “Digital Multiliteracies.”     

Towards an algebraic theory of information integration

Information integration systems provide uniform interfaces to varieties of heterogeneous information sources. For query answering in such systems, the current generation of query answering algorithms in local-as-view (source-centric) information integration systems all produce what has been thought of as “the best obtainable” answer, given the circumstances that the source-centric approach introduces incomplete information into the virtual global relations. However, this “best obtainable” answer does not include all information that can be extracted from the sources because it does not allow partial information. Neither does the “best obtainable” answer allow for composition of queries, meaning that querying a result of a previous query will not be equivalentto the composition of the two queries. In this paper, we provide a foundation for information integration, based on the algebraic theory of incomplete information. Our framework allows us to define the semantics of partial facts and introduce the notion of the exact answer—that is the answer that includes partial facts. We show that querying under the exact answer semantics is compositional. We also present two methods for actually computing the exact answer. The first method is tableau-based, and it is a generalization of the “inverse-rules” approach. The second, much more efficient method, is a generalization of the rewriting approach, and it is based on partial containment mappings introduced in the paper.     

Why not one big database? Principles for data ownership

This research concerns incentive principles which drive information sharing and affect database value. Many real world centralization and standardization efforts have failed, typically because departments lacked incentives or needed greater local autonomy. While intangible factors such as “ownership” have been described as the key to providing incentives, these soft issues have largely eluded formal characterization. Using an incomplete contracts approach from economics, we model the costs and benefits of restructuring organizational control, including critical intangible factors, by explicitly considering the role of data “ownership”. There are two principal contributions from the approach taken here. First, it defines mathematically precise terms for analysing the incentive costs and benefits of changing control. Second, this theoretical framework leads to the development of a concrete model and seven normative principles for improved database management. These principles may be instrumental to designers in a variety of applications such as the decision to decentralize or to outsource information technology and they can be useful in determining the value of standards and translators. Applications of the proposed theory are also illustrated through case histories.     

The role of design-principles in designing courses that promote collaborative learning in higher-education

Design-patterns and design-principles represent two approaches, which elicit design knowledge from successful learning environments and formulate it as design guidelines. The two approaches are fairly similar in their strategies, but differ in their research origins. This study stems from the design-principles approach, and explores how learning is affected by curriculum-materials designed according to two main design-principles: (a) engage learners in peer instruction, and (b) reuse student artifacts as resource for further learning. These principles were employed in three higher-education courses and examined with 385 students. Data analysis was conducted in two trajectories: In the “bird’s eye view” trajectory we used a “feature” unit of analysis to illustrate how learning was supported by features designed according to the two design-principles in each of the courses. In the “design-based research” trajectory we focused on one feature, a web-based Jigsaw activity, in a philosophy of education course, and demonstrated how it was refined via three design iterations. Students were required to specialize in one of three philosophical perspectives, share knowledge with peers who specialized in other perspectives, and reuse the shared knowledge in new contexts. Outcomes indicated that the design in the first iteration did not sufficiently support student ability to apply the shared knowledge. Two additional design-principles were employed in the next iterations: (c) provide knowledge representation and organization tools, and (d) employ multiple social-activity structures. The importance of combining several design-principles for designing curricular materials is discussed in terms of Alexander’s design-pattern language and his notion of referencing between design-patterns.     

Calculators are needlessly bad

In the two decades hand-held calculators have been readily available, there has been ample time to develop a usable design and to educate the consumer public into choosing quality devices. This article reviews a representative calculator that is “state of the art” and shows it has an execrable design. The design is shown to be confusing and essentially non-mathematical. Substantial evidence is presented that illustrates the inadequate documentation, bad implementation, feature interaction, and feature incoherence. These problems are shown to be typical of calculators generally. Despite the domain (arithmetic) being well defined, the design problems are profound, widespread, confusing—and needless. Worrying questions are begged: about design quality control, about consumer behaviour, and about the role of education—both at school level (training children to acquiesce to bad design) and at university level (training professionals to design unusable products). The article concludes with recommendations.“The problem of efficient and uniform notations is perhaps the most serious one facing the mathematical public.” Florian Cajori (1993)“[. . .] contrivances adapted to peculiar purposes [. . .] and what is worse than all, a profusion of notations (when we regard the whole science) which threaten, if not duly corrected, to multiply our difficulties instead of promoting our progress.” Charles Babbage, quoted in Cajori (1993).     

Applying New JIT—Toyota's global production strategy: Epoch-making innovation of the work environment

In order to strengthen management technology strategy, the author has recently developed a new management technology principle, New JIT, based on TMS, TDS, TPS and TQM-S. In developing “Global Marketing” that can win the global competition for quality and cost, the key for domestic and foreign companies is to successfully achieve “Global Production” that enables simultaneous production start-up (the same quality and production at optimal locations) throughout the world. This paper analyzes and proves the significance of strategically applying New JIT—a global production strategy activity called AWD6P/J—for epoch-making innovation of the work environment, as verified at Toyota. While many vehicle assembly shops depend on a young, male workforce, innovation in optimizing an aging workforce is a necessary prerequisite of TPS—a production strategy of New JIT. Elements necessary for enhancing work value and motivation, and work energy, including working conditions and work environment (amenities and ergonomics), were investigated through objective survey and analyzed from labor science perspectives.     

Cooperation without deliberation: A minimal behavior-based approach to multi-robot teams

While terminology and some concepts of behavior-based robotics have become widespread, the central ideas are often lost as researchers try to scale behavior to higher levels of complexity. “Hybrid systems” with model-based strategies that plan in terms of behaviors rather than simple actions have become common for higher-level behavior. We claim that a strict behavior-based approach can scale to higher levels of complexity than many robotics researchers assume, and that the resulting systems are in many cases more efficient and robust than those that rely on “classical AI” deliberative approaches. Our focus is on systems of cooperative autonomous robots in dynamic environments. We will discuss both claims that deliberation and explicit communication are necessary to cooperation and systems that cooperate only through environmental interaction. In this context we introduce three design principles for complex cooperative behavior—minimalism, statelessness and tolerance—and present a RoboCup soccer system that matches the sophistication of many deliberative soccer systems while exceeding their robustness, through the use of strict behavior-based techniques with no explicit communication.     

On the absence of strict boundaries—Vagueness, haziness, and fuzziness in philosophy, science, and medicine

This contribution deals with developments in the history of philosophy, logic, and mathematics during the time before and up to the beginning of fuzzy logic. Even though the term “fuzzy” was introduced by Lotfi A. Zadeh in 1964/1965, it should be noted that older concepts of “vagueness” and “haziness” had previously been discussed in philosophy, logic, mathematics, applied sciences, and medicine. This paper delineates some specific paths through the history of the use of these “loose concepts”. Vagueness was avidly discussed in the fields of logic and philosophy during the first decades of the 20th century—particularly in Vienna, at Cambridge and in Warsaw and Lvov. An interesting sequel to these developments can be seen in the work of the Polish physician and medical philosopher Ludwik Fleck.Haziness and fuzziness were concepts of interest in mathematics and engineering during the second half of the 1900s. The logico-philosophical history presented here covers the work of Bertrand Russell, Max Black, and others. The mathematical–technical history deals with the theories founded by Karl Menger and Lotfi Zadeh. Menger's concepts of probabilistic metrics, hazy sets (ensembles flous) and micro-geometry as well as Zadeh's theory of fuzzy sets paved the way for the establishment of soft computing methods using vague concepts that connote the nonexistence of sharp boundaries.