Journal of
Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics
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 ISSN: 1690-4524 (Online)    DOI: 10.54808/JSCI



TABLE OF CONTENTS





Culture Propels the Intersection of Ethos, Pathos, and Logos with Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Marta Szabo White
Pages: 1-6
ABSTRACT:
The model from the conference website: Academic Globalization and Inter-Cultural Communication: AGIC 2016 http://www.iiis2016.org/wmsci/website/about.asp?vc=22, is depicted in Appendix 1, and serves as the inspiration for this paper.
In this model, cybernetic loops, modified through: negative and positive feedback loops, and their relationships with “Academic Globalization” and “Inter-Cultural Communication” are supported by Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, 2016 [1].
http://www.iiis2016.org/wmsci/website/about.asp?vc=22


INTUITEL and the Hypercube Model - Developing Adaptive Learning Environments
Kevin Fuchs, Peter A. Henning, Mutfried Hartmann
Pages: 7-11
ABSTRACT:
In this paper we introduce an approach for the creation of adaptive learning environments that give human-like recommendations to a learner in the form of a virtual tutor. We use ontologies defining pedagogical, didactic and learner-specific data describing a learner’s progress, learning history, capabilities and the learner’s current state within the learning environment. Learning recommendations are based on a reasoning process on these ontologies and can be provided in real-time. The ontologies may describe learning content from any domain of knowledge.

Furthermore, we describe an approach to store learning histories as spatio-temporal trajectories and to correlate them with influencing didactic factors. We show how such analysis of spatiotemporal data can be used for learning analytics to improve future adaptive learning environments.


Baseline Study: Online Oil, Gas and Safety Technology Education for Ohio Residents of a Community Based Corrections Facility
George Ash, Alexis Benner
Pages: 12-13
ABSTRACT:
Using technology education to provide community based correctional facility residents with oil, gas and safety education to reduce recidivism by producing employment ready residents was started in an Ohio facility. Four areas of study were established as a baseline for future study.


Causal Bayes Model of Mathematical Competence in Kindergarten
Božidar Tepeš, Gordana Lešin, Ana Hrkac, Krunoslav Tepeš
Pages: 14-17
ABSTRACT:
In this paper authors define mathematical competences in the kindergarten. The basic objective was to measure the mathematical competences or mathematical knowledge, skills and abilities in mathematical education. Mathematical competences were grouped in the following areas: Arithmetic and Geometry. Statistical set consisted of 59 children, 65 to 85 months of age, from the Kindergarten Milan Sachs from Zagreb. The authors describe 13 variables for measuring mathematical competences. Five measuring variables were described for the geometry, and eight measuring variables for the arithmetic. Measuring variables are tasks which children solved with the evaluated results. By measuring mathematical competences the authors make causal Bayes model using free software Tetrad 5.2.1-3. Software makes many causal Bayes models and authors as experts chose the model of the mathematical competences in the kindergarten. Causal Bayes model describes five levels for mathematical competences. At the end of the modeling authors use Bayes estimator. In the results, authors describe by causal Bayes model of mathematical competences, causal effect mathematical competences or how intervention on some competences cause other competences. Authors measure mathematical competences with their expectation as random variables. When expectation of competences was greater, competences improved. Mathematical competences can be improved with intervention on causal competences. Levels of mathematical competences and the result of intervention on mathematical competences can help mathematical teachers.


Change Requires Change! Information Technology, Student Preparedness and Industry Collaboration: Supporting the Bridging Process between Education and Training with Innovative Solutions
Jill Anne O’Sullivan
Pages: 18-21
ABSTRACT:
This paper, Change Requires Change: will relate that bridging the gap between education: of what we teach and training: of what industry looks for in prepared skills for students, needs to be relevant to today’s situations.

We need to re-evaluate traditional industry academic partnerships which have been relatively successful including; internships, work-study programs, curriculum advisory boards, guest lectures and capstone courses, to identify gaps and opportunities for what is needed to support our future.

Do we want to continue with the status-quo or enhance education? Should we be cognizant of emerging trends? What could be the implications on changing academic-industry partnerships? How can we improve? This paper proposes several new approaches to academics and industry practitioner’s towards greater successful collaborations towards student preparation.


Virtual Learning Environment for Entrepreneurship: A Conceptual Model
Douglas Sparkes, Karin Schmidlin, Mark Hsu
Pages: 22-24
ABSTRACT:
The University of Waterloo has a history as an innovative and entrepreneurial university. With increasing demand for entrepreneurship education and venture development support there has been increasing interest in how to provide this support virtually. To address this need, an entrepreneurship platform consisting of four primary components; entrepreneurial team engagement, mentor engagement, provision of ‘just-in-time’ learning resources, and social network creation is under development. Engagement and social network creation are built around a series of gamified events that provide structure and feedback for the participants, as well as focal points for mentoring and network development. The ‘embedding’ of these early-stage ventures into a supportive social network aligns with a belief that one does not simply launch new ventures, but rather launch networks. These event gates are supported by a system of ‘just-in-time’ learning modules allow the participants to develop their own learning program, and may be drawn upon as needed.

In this paper we discuss the conceptual model as well as progress on development of its key features. We also discuss some of the early results and lessons learned integrating it into several initiatives underway in Canada and Kenya.


Student Teachers’ Modeling of Acceleration Using a Video-Based Laboratory in Physics Education: A Multimodal Case Study
Louis Trudel, Abdeljalil Métioui, Gilbert Arbez
Pages: 25-30
ABSTRACT:
This exploratory study intends to model kinematics learning of a pair of student teachers when exposed to prescribed teaching strategies in a video-based laboratory. Two student teachers were chosen from the Francophone B.Ed. program of the Faculty of Education of a Canadian university. The study method consisted of having the participants interact with a video-based laboratory to complete two activities for learning properties of acceleration in rectilinear motion. Time limits were placed on the learning activities during which the researcher collected detailed multimodal information from the student teachers’ answers to questions, the graphs they produced from experimental data, and the videos taken during the learning sessions. As a result, we describe the learning approach each one followed, the evidence of conceptual change and the difficulties they face in tackling various aspects of the accelerated motion. We then specify advantages and limits of our research and propose recommendations for further study.


Effectiveness of a Constructivistic Multimedia-Learning Package on Shaping and Guiding Students’ Attitudes Toward Physics
Divya C. Senan, Matthew E. Edwards, Salam Khan, Asha J. Vilasini
Pages: 31-37
ABSTRACT:
Physics is considered by some to be the most perplexing area in the sciences and perceived as a hard subject for students from secondary school to the university to adult-graduate education. Educational research has provided evidence that attitudes towards physics change with exposure to it. When students have negative attitudes towards physics, they often do not “like” physics courses or the teachers of those courses. Based on this premise, numerous studies have been conducted to determine the factors that affect students’ attitudes towards physics. A goal that is important to most if not all teachers of physics courses is to inspire students to have a positive attitude towards the subject. This goal encompasses an appreciation of how physicists think and how they incorporate the values that it provides, as well as, how it is applied to other areas or related fields, and its application in everyday life. In this regard, the aim of this investigation has been to explore how to impact more effectively positive students’ attitudes in physics courses. To that end, we report the effectiveness of a constructivistic multimedia-learning package (MLP) in shaping and guiding students’ attitudes towards physics.


A Preliminary Study of Pelletized Ecuadorian Cocoa Pod Husk for its Use as a Source of Renewable Energy
Luis Velázquez-Araque, José Cárdenas
Pages: 38-42
ABSTRACT:
In Ecuador, there is a constant need to pursuit energy independence, have created a new industry focused on energy generation by harnessing renewable sources. Biomass is established as the third leading source for producing electricity as the main source for the generation of thermal energy. However, the problems related to the low density of the different types of biomass and the difficulty in carrying and storing have caused the need to generate solids with higher density and stronger hardness known as pellets and briquettes. This paper develops an analysis of the possibilities of pelletizing the Ecuadorian cocoa pod husk and its use as biofuel. Several pellets configurations were proposed based on the diameter and length ratio. An experimental setup was established to crush and screen the cocoa pod husk in order to obtain less than 1.5 mm particle size. Then the pellets were made using a small scale pellet machine and finally burned in a combustion chamber for the evaluation of the energy potential by means of the high heat value and ash content. Finally, the selection of the most energy efficient pellet configuration is made taking into consideration international pellet quality standards as well. This largescale project would represent a cost savings in the Ecuadorian industrial sector leading further to lowering smog emissions into the environment from burning fossil fuels and also it would prevent the cocoa pod husk as a focus for the spread of Phytophthora species which is a main cause of economic losses in the cocoa industry.



Combination of Bayesian and Latent Semantic Analysis with Domain Specific Knowledge
Shen Lu, Richard S. Segall
Pages: 43-50
ABSTRACT:
With the development of information technology, electronic publications become popular. However, it is a challenge to retrieve information from electronic publications because the large amount of words, the synonymy problem and the polysemi problem. In this paper, we introduced a new algorithm called Bayesian Latent Semantic Analysis (BLSA). We chose to model text not based on terms but associations between words. Also, the significance of interesting features were improved by expand the number of similar terms with glossaries. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was chosen to discover significant features. Bayesian post probability was used to discover segmentation boundaries. Also, Dirchlet distribution was chosen to present the vector of topic distribution and calculate the maximum probability of the topics. Experimental results showed us that both Pk [8] and WindowsDiff [27] decreased 10% by using BLSA in comparison to the Lexical Cohesion with the original data.

[8]  Deerwester, S., Dumais, S.T., Furnas, G.W., Landauer, T.K. and Harshman, R. (1990), ‘Indexing by latent semantic analysis’, Journal of the  American Society for Information Science, vol. 41, n.6, pp. 391-407.
[27]  Pevzner, L. and Hearst, M.A. (2002). A critique and improvement of an evaluation metric for text     segmentation, Computational Linguistics, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 19-36.


Impact of Optimization and Parallelism on Factorization Speed of SIQS
Dominik Breitenbacher, Ivan Homoliak, Jiri Jaros, Petr Hanacek
Pages: 51-58
ABSTRACT:
This paper examines optimization possibilities of Self-Initialization Quadratic Sieve (SIQS), which is enhanced version of Quadratic Sieve factorization method. SIQS is considered the second fastest factorization method at all and the fastest one for numbers shorter than 100 decimal digits, respectively. Although, SIQS is the fastest method up to 100 decimal digits, it cannot be effectively utilized to work in polynomial time. Therefore, it is desirable to look for options how to speed up the method as much as possible. Two feasible ways of achieving it are code optimization and parallelism. Both of them are utilized in this paper. The goal of this paper is to show how it is possible to take advantage of parallelism in SIQS as well as reach a large speed-up thanks to detailed source code analysis with optimization. Our implementation process consists of two phases. In the first phase, the complete serial algorithm is implemented in the simplest way which does not consider any requirements for execution speed. The solution from the first phase serves as the reference implementation for further experiments. An improvement of factorization speed is performed in the second phase of the SIQS implementation, where we use the method of iterative modifications in order to examine contribution of each proposed step. The final optimized version of the SIQS implementation has achieved over 200x speed-up.


Searching the Web for Earth Science Data: Semiotics to Cybernetics and Back
Bruce R. Barkstrom
Pages: 59-63
ABSTRACT:
This paper discusses a search paradigm for numerical data in Earth science that relies on the intrinsic structure of an archive's collection. Such non-textual data lies outside the normal textual basis for the Semantic Web. The paradigm tries to bypass some of the difficulties associated with keyword searches, such as semantic heterogeneity. The suggested collection structure uses a hierarchical taxonomy based on multidimensional axes of continuous variables. This structure fits the underlying 'geometry' of Earth science data better than sets of keywords in an ontology. The alternative paradigm views the search as a two-agent cooperative game that uses a dialog between the search engine and the data user. In this view, the search engine knows about the objects in the archive. It cannot read the user's mind to identify what the user needs. We assume the user has a clear idea of the search target. However he or she may not have a clear idea of the archive's contents. The paper suggests how the user interface may provide information to deal with the user's difficulties in understanding items in the dialog.


Hybrid Optical Devices: The Case of the Unification of the Electrochromic Device and the Organic Solar Cell
Andre F. S. Guedes, Vilmar P. Guedes, Simone Tartari, Mônica L. Souza, Idaulo J. Cunha
Pages: 64-67
ABSTRACT:
The development of Hybrid Optical Devices, using some flexible optically transparent substrate material and organic semiconductor materials, has been widely utilized by the organic electronic industry, when manufacturing new technological products. The Hybrid Optical Device is constituted by the union of the electrochromic device and the organic solar cell. The flexible organic photovoltaic solar cells, in this hybrid optical device, have been the Poly base (3-hexyl thiophene), P3HT, Phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester, PCBM and Polyaniline, PANI, all being deposited in Indium Tin Oxide, ITO. In addition, the thin film, obtained by the deposition of PANI, and prepared in perchloric acid solution, has been identified through PANI-X1. In the flexible electrochromic device, the Poly base (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), PEDOT, has been prepared in Propylene Carbonate, PC, being deposited in Indium Tin Oxide, ITO. Also, both devices have been united by an electrolyte solution prepared with Vanadium Pentoxide, V2O5, Lithium Perchlorate, LiClO4, and Polymethylmethacrylate, PMMA. This device has been characterized through Electrical Measurements, such as UV-Vis Spectroscopy and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). Thus, the result obtained through electrical measurements has demonstrated that the flexible organic photovoltaic solar cell presented the characteristic curve of standard solar cell after spin-coating and electrodeposition. Accordingly, the results obtained with optical and electrical characterization have revealed that the electrochromic device demonstrated some change in optical absorption, when subjected to some voltage difference. Moreover, the inclusion of the V2O5/PANI-X1 layer reduced the effects of degradation that this hybrid organic device caused, that is, solar irradiation. Studies on Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) have found out that the surface of V2O5/PANI-X1 layers can be strongly conditioned by the surface morphology of the dielectric.


An Organizational-Technical Concept to Deal with Open Source Software License Terms
Sergius Dyck, Daniel Haferkorn, Jennifer Sander
Pages: 68-73
ABSTRACT:
Open source software (OSS) released under various license terms is widely used as third party libraries in today’s software projects. To ensure open source compliance within an organization, a strategic approach to OSS management is needed. As basis for such an approach, we introduce an organizational-technical concept for dealing with the various OSS licenses by using procedural instructions and build automation software. The concept includes the careful consideration of OSS license conditions. The results obtained from this consideration and additional necessary commitments are documented in a so-called license playbook. We introduce procedure instructions enabling a consistent approach for software development using OSS libraries. The procedure instructions are described in a way such that they can be implemented for example for Java projects using the popular build automation tool Apache Maven and the software repository tool Nexus. We give guidance on how to realize such an implementation on basis of automation tools in practice.


Implementing a Hybrid Graduate Program: Lessons Learned One Year Later
Ronda Sturgill, Jacob Wilson, J. C. Andersen
Pages: 74-76
ABSTRACT:
Development of any graduate program is an extensive and timely process. Once the development phase is complete the program continues into the implementation phase. The implementation phase of a hybrid delivered program can present with many challenges. The purpose of this paper is to describe the implementation and challenges of delivering a hybrid graduate program. This is a follow-up paper to “Developing a Hybrid Graduate Program,” [4]. This follow-up will provide information from both a faculty and graduate student perspective. Challenges of implementation, lessons learned, and future program delivery recommendations will also be presented.

[4] R. Sturgill, J. Wilson, & J.C. Andersen, “Developing a Hybrid Graduate Program,” Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics, Vol. 12, No. 7, 2014, pp. 22-24.


Creating the Economy of Virtuality: Systemic Aspects and Educational Considerations
Julio Rezende
Pages: 77-83
ABSTRACT:
This article discuss how an economy of virtuality had been created in Orlando, United States, with the great collaboration of entrepreneurs, creativists and the action of academic institutions like University of Central Florida (UCF). In UCF the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy – FIEA is an exemplary initiative of education that aims at creating new professionals for the economy of virtuality. Examining the case of Orlando city, would be seen the economic outcomes of the operation of different activities of virtuality: creation of jobs, revenues, tax and improving the quality of life of this community. The research debates the understanding of Economy of Virtuality and as also a educational field. The virtuality can been seen as a technology (a combination of developed hardware and software) and as a psychological experience (values, time/ availability, health, motivation, emotions and education). The article presents the story of virtuality and also a typical pathway in the creation of products in Economy of Virtuality taking the example of Spider-Man and the event Awesome.Con held in Washington D.C. in the period of 3 to 5 June 2016. At Central Florida Research Park (CFRP), there are 146 businesses in 59 buildings (March/2016) generating aproximally10 thousand jobs operating.


Educational Software for the Teaching and Learning of Quadrilaterals Generated from a Programming Language and the Dabeja Method (Invited Paper)
Daniel Bejarano Segura, Piedad Chica Sosa
Pages: 84-89
ABSTRACT:
The teaching of math is a process that starts from an early age especially the teaching of geometry through which different representations, constructions, axioms, and theorems among others helps develop the formal thoughts of individuals. This requires not only graphical but demonstrative processes that mentally schemes chords to generate levels of rational thought. Quadrilaterals are part of the components of geometry in the two-dimensional and three-dimensional fields. They possess properties, definitions, classifications, and studies through postulations of parallelism and perpendicularity. Using dynamic strategies and formal processes of knowledge as the Dabeja method to strengthen the teaching of geometry of quadrilaterals through the construction of dynamic courseware, is one of the questions that reveals problems in thought formation.

This is an investigation of a parametric quantitative approach with an experimental design of research aimed at the techno de facto and their relationship with the individual development of a formal thinking. An educational software was developed using the Java programming language to construct quadrilaterals, demonstrate their properties and relationships through the Dabeja method.