Understanding and Reacting to the Digital Distraction Phenomenon in College Classrooms

Student use of digital devices for non-class purposes has become ubiquitous in college classrooms across the globe—a phenomenon commonly referred to as digital distraction. The purpose of the chapter is to provide readers with an overview of the prevalence of student digital distraction in college classrooms, an understanding of the factors that contribute to student digital distraction, and a summary of the outcomes experienced by students who succumb to digital distraction during class. The reviewed research indicates that mobile phones and laptop computers are the devices used most for off-task purposes during class. Environmental and person-centered factors appear especially consequential for the motivational interference potential of mobile devices in college classrooms. Unfortunately, student digital distraction has deleterious effects on student learning and the quality of student-instructor rapport in college classrooms. The chapter concludes with descriptions of five strategies college instructors can use to curb student digital distraction in their classrooms.

Globally Scheduling Volunteer Computing

Volunteer computing uses millions of consumer computing devices (desktop and laptop computers, tablets, phones, appliances, and cars) to do high-throughput scientific computing. It can provide Exa-scale capacity, and it is a scalable and sustainable alternative to data-center computing. Currently, about 30 science projects use volunteer computing in areas ranging from biomedicine to cosmology. Each project has application programs with particular hardware and software requirements (memory, GPUs, VM support, and so on). Each volunteered device has specific hardware and software capabilities, and each device owner has preferences for which science areas they want to support. This leads to a scheduling problem: how to dynamically assign devices to projects in a way that satisfies various constraints and that balances various goals. We describe the scheduling policy used in Science United, a global manager for volunteer computing.

KEC: unique sequence search by K-mer exclusion

Summary Searching for amino acid or nucleic acid sequences unique to one organism may be challenging depending on size of the available datasets. K-mer elimination by cross-reference (KEC) allows users to quickly and easily find unique sequences by providing target and non-target sequences. Due to its speed, it can be used for datasets of genomic size and can be run on desktop or laptop computers with modest specifications. Availability and implementation KEC is freely available for non-commercial purposes. Source code and executable binary files compiled for Linux, Mac and Windows can be downloaded from https://github.com/berybox/KEC. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Accessing Learning Management Systems With Smartphones

Smartphones have many qualities that have made them potentially useful for learning (e.g., connectivity, interactivity, and personalization) but few studies have considered their role in understanding learning behavior and student engagement. This study investigated differences in the way students approach online learning, comparing those who use smartphones to access their online classroom with students who use more traditional tools, such as desktop and laptop computers. Specifically, the study was designed to investigate the use of smartphones and their effect on learning behavior and student engagement at a regionally accredited university in the United States. The chapter analyzes the quantitative data arising from the study and discusses why the results identified statistically significant differences in the ways students approached their own learning. Moreover, it also explores the engagement patterns which revealed that the type of tasks online students performed with a smartphone varied significantly from the tasks that students performed when using a desktop or tablet.

Interactional integration of talk and note-taking

This paper contributes to the current line of research that examines how participants interactionally engage in simultaneous multiple courses of actions. It looks into how institutional interactants jointly integrate two concurrent engagements: talk and note-taking. It builds upon video recordings of naturally occurring monitoring visits in Denmark, where social supervision representatives interview foster parents and facility leaders and simultaneously take notes on their laptop computers. Data suggest that talk and note-taking concur very commonly, that is, representatives take notes extensively while the other party talks. The paper investigates three factors that advance our knowledge about interactional reasons why this dual engagement can take place so commonly. First, when initiating concurring writing or talk, both parties orient towards simultaneous engagement in the two activities as appropriate. Second, whilst writing, representatives verbally display recipiency to talk, which prompt speakers to continue. Third, representatives frequently suspend the act of writing in order to briefly face the speakers, which they similarly treat as an encouragement to continue.

Numerical simulation of flattened heat pipe with double heat sources for CPU and GPU cooling application in laptop computers

An investigation of the effect of the thermal performance of the flattened heat pipe on its double heat sources acting as central processing unit and graphics processing unit in laptop computers is presented in this work. A finite element method is used for predicting the flattening effect of the heat pipe. The cylindrical heat pipe with a diameter of 6 mm and the total length of 200 mm is flattened into three final thicknesses of 2, 3, and 4 mm. The heat pipe is placed under a horizontal configuration and heated with heater 1 and heater 2, 40 W in combination. The numerical model shows good agreement compared with the experimental data with the standard deviation of 1.85%. The results also show that flattening the cylindrical heat pipe to 66.7 and 41.7% of its original diameter could reduce its normalized thermal resistance by 5.2%. The optimized final thickness or the best design final thickness for the heat pipe is found to be 2.5 mm.