Many states and school districts are rethinking how they do educational assessment. A few are going further: attempting to build "balanced," "comprehensive," or "next-generation" assessment systems. At the same time, practitioners and researchers have long mulled the purposes and parts such systems should have. But…

Introduction: In the big data age, we have to deal with a tremendous amount of information, which can be collected from various types of sources. For information search systems such as Web search engines or online digital libraries, the collection of documents becomes larger and larger. For some queries, an information search system needs to…

Link failures in wide area networks are common and cause significant data losses. Mesh-based protection schemes offer high capacity efficiency but they are slow, require complex signaling, and instable. Diversity coding is a proactive coding-based recovery technique which offers near-hitless (sub-ms) restoration with a competitive spare capacity…

Annotations play an increasingly crucial role in scientific exploration and discovery, as the amount of data and the level of collaboration among scientists increases. There are many systems today focusing on annotation management, querying, and propagation. Although all such systems are implemented to take user input (i.e., the annotations…

The everyday operations of a school district depend on a network of people, including students, teachers, staff, and administrators. However, the ancillary services staff are really responsible for making the school day run smoothly. They are often the first employees that students see in the morning, either on the school bus or in the cafeteria,…

Companies purchase computer systems to make their processes more efficient through automation. Some academic medical centers (AMC) have purchased computer systems for their institutional review boards (IRB) to increase efficiency and compliance with regulations. IRB computer systems are expensive to purchase, deploy, and maintain. An AMC should…

Paying for employee turnover costs, data storage, and multiple layers of benefits can be difficult for fiscally constrained institutions, especially as budget cuts and finance-limiting legislation abound in school districts across the country. Many traditional paper-based systems have been replaced with automated, software-based services, helping…

The author recently created a presentation using HTML5 based on a tutorial put together by Marcin Wichary. The example presentation is part proof-of-concept, part instructional piece, and it is part of a larger site on HTML5 and how one can use it to create rich Web-based applications. The more he delved into HTML5, the more he found that it was…

North Carolina State University has incorporated many aspects of volunteer program administration and reporting into an on-line solution that integrates impact reporting into daily program management. The Extension Master Gardener Intranet automates many of the administrative tasks associated with volunteer management, increasing efficiency, and…

This paper proposes a teaching approach to reinforce accounting students' understanding of the concept of database normalization. Unlike a conceptual approach shown in most of the AIS textbooks, this approach involves with calculations and reconciliations with which accounting students are familiar because the methods are frequently used in…

The collaborative system with finite number of states is defined. A very large database is structured. Operations on large databases are identified. Repetitive procedures for collaborative systems operations are derived. The efficiency of such procedures is analyzed. (Contains 6 tables, 5 footnotes and 3 figures.)

Security incidents resulting from human error or subversive actions have caused major financial losses, reduced business productivity or efficiency, and threatened national security. Some research suggests that information system security frameworks lack emphasis on human involvement as a significant cause for security problems in a rapidly…

There are three valuable types of computer software needed by the professional researcher--word processing, spreadsheet, and database management. In general, these packages are required for the effective operation of offices; however, researchers may have special needs which can only be met with more specialized software. Recently, word processing…

Six papers on educational management systems and indicators development are presented in this document. Research was conducted under the Improving the Efficiency of Educational Systems (IEES) Project, which provided assistance in several countries, some of which include Indonesia, Botswana, Haiti, Guinea, and Nepal. The papers include:…

A school board member guides a tour of what is available for organizing school executives' schedules. Describes time-planner notebooks, computer software, and various academic and commercial online databases. Sidebars list the programs and products mentioned, discuss online services, and describe using a time-management planner in campaigning for…