Charity fundraising organizers increasingly attempt to predict the donations to their causes to maximize the effectiveness of their expenditures and achieve their “social good” objectives. Much of the scholarly work in cause-related fundraising uses organization-specific demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioral information about its donors to forecast donation amounts. Instead of d...

Given the increasing influence of religious fundamentalism on politics (e.g. the Christian right in the United States or the Muslim fundamentalism associated with Al Qaeda), the question of how we can conceive of law and order, or society itself, without employing repressive ideals becomes more urgent. We need a way of conceptualizing the origin and process of idealization (which is necessary f...

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have been successful at improving students' performance across a variety of domains. To help achieve this widespread success, researchers have identified important behavioral and performance measures that can be used to guide instruction and feedback. Most systems, however, do not present these measures to the teachers who employ the systems in classrooms. Th...

The current defense acquisition environment includes much uncertainty regarding future budgets, political developments, and global geopolitical events. With affordability of systems now mandated by the US Department of Defense, it is imperative to ensure that future acquisitions will be feasible from their inception given resource considerations, and can remain feasible given various future per...

This paper discusses current plans and issues for exploration that involve the use of cryogenic transfer. The benefits of cryogenic transfer to exploration missions are examined. The current state of the art of transfer technology is reviewed. Mission concepts of operation for exploration are presented, and used to qualitatively discuss the performance benefits of transfer. The paper looks at t...

Speakers often produce definite referring expressions that are overspecified: they tend to include more attributes than necessary to distinguish the target referent. The current paper investigates how the occurrence of overspecification is affected by viewing time. We conducted an experiment in which speakers were asked to refer to target objects in visual domains. Half of the speakers had unli...

Statistical probability theory posits that we learn about regularly-occurring events in the perceptual environment by determining the likelihood of each event’s occurrence (Aslin, Saffran, & Newport, 1998). The current study investigates infants’ ability to extract properties of repetitive visual events and represent predictable combinations of visual elements. Using a noveltypreference paradig...

A critical success factor for the reuse of learning objects is the ease by which they may be repurposed in order to enable reusability in a different teaching context from which they were originally designed. The current generation of tools for creating, storing, describing and locating learning objects are best suited for users with technical expertise. Such tools are an obstacle to teachers w...

Research indicates that people with body image dissatisfaction (BID) are not benefited from exercising in group contexts. The current study tested whether exercise video games (exergames) can provide unique opportunities for exercise interventions through the use of avatars. An experiment was conducted using a 2 (BID: High vs. Low) 2 (Exercise context: Solitary vs. Group) between-subjects desig...

The Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE) is elected for a two-year period. The current Chair, Paul Larson, is unavailable to be a candidate. A Nominating Committee for electing a new chair for the period 2011-2012 consisting of Calton Pu, David Lomet and Erich Neuhold has been formed. The Nominating Committee invites nominations for the position of C...