This research reports the findings from a survey that examined the differences in communication between students who used Instant Messenger (IM) services and those who did not in the same asynchronous distance education Web-based course. It was found that students who used IM services found it easier to communicate, felt a stronger sense of community, and had more venues for informal and social communication about not only class material, but also information about the school and their common degree program. In traditional classroom buildings, the common spaces such as hallways provide the venue for this informal communication; IM services can enhance the distance education environment by providing the â virtual hallwaysâ for students and instructors to meet.

This Microsoft Powerpoint presentation (of 20 slides) was presented at the Learning Resources Association of the California Community Colleges (LRACCC) North-South Meetings on February 15 at San Francisco City College and on March 11 at Coastline Community College. Cheryl Stewart is Virtual Librarian, Cosatline Community College and she discusses how distance learning is changing library services in the community colleges. A distinction is made between virtual, digital, and electronic librarians and library services in these modes. References are embedded and urls to useful electronic resources and tools are included.

This 84-page report defines the Cyberinfrastructure program proposed by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Here is the text of the news release from the University of Michigan School of Information: " Atkins committee issues NSF report on development of cyberinfrastructure (Feb 2003) A National Science Foundation (NSF) committee chaired by University of Michigan professor Daniel Atkins has recommended the organization spend an additional $1 billion per year developing the nation's "cyberinfrastructure" to support scientific research. The Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure argues that investment in a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure can change profoundly what scientists and engineers do, how they do it, and who participates. Its recommendations are detailed in a newly released report titled Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure. In the same way society now depends on highways, water systems, and power grids, the panel contends, scientific research in the coming years will depend on the quality of the cyberinfrastructure -- the integrated information, computing, and communications systems that tie us together. "It's not just the raw technology, but also the organization and the people," says Atkins, who is professor in the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at U-M. It's also the standards for interoperability that will allow different disciplines to use the same infrastructure, "just the way we agreed long ago on a standard gauge for railroad tracks." "The path forward that this report envisions ... truly has the potential to revolutionize all fields of research and education," says Peter Freeman, assistant director of the NSF for Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE), the NSF arm that commissioned the report. The report was issued on the same day the NSF submitted its $5.48 billion budget request for fiscal year 2004. "NSF has been a catalyst for creating the conditions for a nascent cyberinfrastructure-based revolution," says Atkins, a revolution being driven from the ground up. "We've clearly documented extensive grass-roots activity in the scientific and engineering research community to create and use cyberinfrastructure to empower the next wave of discovery." The committee cites NSF support for such projects as the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulations (NEES), the TeraGrid effort, and the Digital Libraries Initiative as seminal in the development of a cyberinfrastructure. At the same time, the report makes clear that the cyberinfrastructure needed cannot be built with today's off-the-shelf technology, and it argues for increased NSF support for fundamental research in computer science and engineering. The report emphasizes the importance of acting quickly and the risks of failing to do so. Those risks include lack of coordination, which could leave key data in irreconcilable formats; long-term failures to archive and curate data collected at great expense; and artificial barriers between disciplines built from incompatible tools and structures. The NSF has a "once-in-a-generation opportunity," according to the committee, to lead the scientific and engineering community in the coordinated development and expansive use of cyberinfrastructure."

We are finding ourselves in a rapidly growing and complex digital environment which has in turn increased our dependency on information. But there is increasing evidence that our information skills are not keeping pace in any systematic fashion. We all need help to sharpen the techniques and skills to manage information. Present paper is an attempt to present the current status of information literacy and the emerging roles of libraries and schools of LIS education in augmenting the information literacy campaign.

Towards a Unified Treatment of Modality (abstract) Sumayya Racy, Ph.D. The primary claim of this thesis is that despite the numerous forms modality may take, both within and across languages, there are relatively few features, structures and operations which give rise to these numerous forms. For example, in English the modal notion of obligation may be expressed by a verb (He must go), but an adverb (He obligatorily goes), by an adjective (He is obliged), by a noun (He has an obligation), and even by a preposition (It's on him to go) or by no clear modal marker (He is to go). In other languages, we find still more ways in which modality may be expressed, such as through affixes (Garo), through evidentials (Tuyuca), through modal particles (Norwegian), and through mood (Latin). It is shown in this thesis that by adopting Cinque's (1999) hierarchy of functional projections, Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993), the semantics of Kratzer (1991) and Hacquard (2006) and a limited feature set, we may account for many of these expressions of modality within a single unified framework. In particular, it is argued that modal roots are acategorial (accounting for the many parts of speech we find in modal expressions) and it is proposed that head movement and fusion may take place among modal functional heads (accounting for the fact that modality may be expressed through other categories like evidentiality). Along the way, several interesting facets of modality are pointed out, including the fact that modal nouns may only be used with unusual abilities, and the fact that in English intonation and ASL repeated movement we may find phonological correlates of epistimicity.

Working within the morphosyntactic framework of Distributed Morphology (DM, Halle and Marantz 1993, 1994) within the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), this dissertation proposes a new economy constraint on the grammar, MINIMIZE EXPONENCE, which selects the derivation that realizes all its interpretable features with the fewest morphemes. The purpose of this proposal is to capture the conflicting needs of the grammar to be both maximally contrastive and maximally efficient.I show that the constraint MINIMIZE EXPONENCE has a number of effects on analyses of morphosyntactic phenomena. I propose that, in order to satisfy MINIMIZE EXPONENCE, the roots in a derivation fuse with the functional heads projected above them, resulting in a simplex head that contains both a root and interpretable features. Following the tenets of DM, this head is now a target for the process of Vocabulary insertion. Since the target node contains both content and functional information, so too can Vocabulary Items (VIs) be specified for both types of information. This allows VIs such as eat and ate to compete with each other. This competition of forms linked to the same root allows for a new model of root allomorphy within the framework of DM. In this model of root allomorphy, following proposals by Pfau (2000), VIs that realize roots participate in competition in the same was as do VIs that realize abstract morphemes. Since root VIs are participating in competition and are specified for both content and formal features, the need for licensing through secondary exponence as proposed by Harley and Noyer (2000) is removed from the framework. Further, since eat and ate in this model are different VIs with different specifications that compete with each other for insertion, this model of root allomorphy also eliminates the need for readjustment rules as proposed by Halle and Marantz (1993, 1994) and elaborated on by Marantz (1997). This new model of root allomorphy allows for an account of the blocking of regular inflection in English nominal compounds (e.g. *rats-catcher), which was problematic for theorists working with DM, given the tenets of the framework.I also show that the fusion of roots and functional elements driven by MINIMIZE EXPONENCE allows for a new account of subcategorization. The model of subcategorization presented here falls out of the following facts: 1) arguments are introduced by functional heads; 2) those heads fuse with the root they are projected above, resulting in the node containing both the root and the features of the functional heads; 3) since the root now contains both the root and the formal features, the corresponding VI can be specified for both; 4) VIs that realize roots can also be specified for compatibility or incompatibility of the features of the functional heads that license argument structure. The result here is an underspecification model of subcategorization that predicts a number of behaviors of verbs with respect to their argument structure that it is difficult for a full specification model to account for. Those include polysemy (I ran the ball to Mary) and structural coercion (I thought the book to Mary).

Distributed simulations have been widely applied as the method to study complex systems which are analytically intractable and numerically prohibitive to evaluate. However it is not a trivia task to develop distributed simulations. Besides distributed simulations may introduce difficulties for analysis due to decentralized, heterogeneous data sources. It is important to integrate these data sources seamlessly for analysis. In applications for system design, it is required to explore the alternatives of hardware components, algorithms, and simulation models. How to enable these operations conveniently is critical for the distributed system as well. All these challenges raise the need of a workbench that facilitates rapid composition, evaluation, modification and validation of components in a distributed system.This dissertation proposes a platform for these challenges, which we refer to the SPEED-CS platform. The architecture of the platform consists of multiple layers that include network layer, component management layer, components layer, and modeling layer. It is a multi-agent system (MAS), containing static agents and mobile agents. The mobile agent is referred as the Data Exchange Agent, which is able to visit sub-simulations and has the intelligence to find the useful data for output analysis. Experiments show that the MAS requires much less network bandwidth than the "centralized" system does, in which simulations report data to output analyst.The application of the SPEED-CS platform is extended to handle systems with dynamic data sources. We demonstrate that the platform can be used for parallel reality applications where simulation parameters can be updated according to real-time sensor information. Data exchange agents are involved to manage the collection, dissemination, and analysis of data from dynamic data sources including simulations and/or physical systems.The SPEED-CS platform is also implemented to integrate simulations and optimizations. The system is able to provide services to facilitate distributed computing, event services, naming services, and component management. One of the important features is that the component sets can be updated and enlarged with different models adding in. This feature enables the platform to work as a testbed to explore alternatives of system designs.Finally we conclude this dissertation with several future research topics.

The increased complexity, heterogeneity and the dynamism of networked systems and applications make current configuration and management tools to be ineffective. A new paradigm to dynamically configure and manage large-scale complex and heterogeneous networked systems is critically needed. In this dissertation, we present a self configuration paradigm based on the principles of autonomic computing that can handle efficiently complexity, dynamism and uncertainty in configuring networked systems and their applications. Our approach is based on making any resource/application to operate as an Autonomic Component (that means, it can be self-configured, self-healed, self-optimized and self-protected) by using two software modules: Component Management Interface (CMI) to specify the configuration and operational policies associated with each component and Component Runtime Manager (CRM) that manages the component configurations and operations using the policies defined in CMI. We use several configuration metrics (adaptability, complexity, latency, scalability, overhead, and effectiveness) to evaluate the effectiveness of our self-configuration approach when compared to other configuration techniques. We have used our approach to dynamically configure four systems: Automatic IT system management, Dynamic security configuration of networked systems, Self-management of data backup and disaster recovery system and Automatic security patches download and installation on a large scale test bed. Our experimental results showed that by applying our self-configuration approach, the initial configuration time, the initial configuration complexity and the dynamic configuration complexity can be reduced significantly. For example, the configuration time for security patches download and installation on nine machines is reduced to 4399 seconds from 27193 seconds. Furthermore our system provides most adaptability (e.g., 100% for Snort rule set configuration) comparing to hard coded approach (e.g., 22% for Snort rule set configuration) and can improve the performance of managed system greatly. For example, in data backup and recovery system, our approach can reduce the total cost by 54.1% when network bandwidth decreases. In addition, our framework is scalable and imposes very small overhead (less than 1%) on the managed system.

Video-conferencing (VC) is a well established educational tool. Using a grounded theory approach, this study explored the experience of medical students studying remotely by VC. A convenience sample of 11 students participated in semi-structured interviews. Constant comparative analysis identified three emerging themes which were refined and verified by a focus group. The key themes were: the effect of VC on the students’ classroom experience, the development of a strong social cohesion between the students, and the impact on student learning. The participants adapted well to VC lectures but expressed reluctance to ask or answer questions in class. Participants felt they became more self-directed and better collaborative learners. Moore’s theory of transactional distance provides a possible explanation for these observations. High transactional distance was evident with less instructor-student interaction, more student-student interaction, and greater student autonomy. Understanding the transactional dynamics in the VC classroom will inform future research and faculty development. / 2011 May

Cloud computing enables data centres to provide resource sharing across multiple tenants. This sharing, however, usually comes at a cost in the form of reduced isolation between tenants, which can lead to inconsistent and unpredictable performance. This variability in performance becomes an impediment for clients whose services rely on consistent, responsive performance in cloud environments. The problem is exacerbated for applications that rely on cloud storage systems as performance in these systems is a ffected by disk access times, which often dominate overall request service times for these types of data services. In this thesis we introduce MicroFuge, a new distributed caching and scheduling middleware that provides performance isolation for cloud storage systems. To provide performance isolation, MicroFuge's cache eviction policy is tenant and deadline-aware, which enables the provision of isolation to tenants and ensures that data for queries with more urgent deadlines, which are most likely to be a ffected by competing requests, are less likely to be evicted than data for other queries. MicroFuge also provides simplifi ed, intelligent scheduling in addition to request admission control whose performance model of the underlying storage system will reject requests with deadlines that are unlikely to be satisfi ed. The middleware approach of MicroFuge makes it unique among other systems which provide performance isolation in cloud storage systems. Rather than providing performance isolation for some particular cloud storage system, MicroFuge can be deployed on top of any already deployed storage system without modifying it. Keeping in mind the wide spectrum of cloud storage systems available today, such an approach make MicroFuge very adoptable. In this thesis, we show that MicroFuge can provide signifi cantly better performance isolation between tenants with di fferent latency requirements than Memcached, and with admission control enabled, can ensure that more than certain percentage of requests meet their deadlines.