The purpose of this study was to detect differentially functioning items in the University of Tehran English Proficiency Test (UTEPT) which is a high stake test of English developed and administered by the Language Testing Centre of the University of Tehran. This paper is based on the answers of 400 test takers to the test. All participants earned a master degree either in humanities or science...

This study analyses teachers’ viewpoints on the potential undesirable influences of high stake exams. Seven stimulants related to exams education were given 191 teachers in a pairwise comparisons format. The participating this asked choose one influence by comparing them and determine more prominent problem stemming from Data analyzed via many-facet Rasch model. As result, it was found that con...

The new era we face is defining and achieving useful results for all stakeholders: including both internal and external partners. And we must prove the value we add in terms of empirical data about what we deliver, what it accomplished, and what value it added for all stake-holders (not just the value it added to our team, our department, or our organization, but to the entire system of interna...

We study cryptocurrency protocols that do not make use of Proof of Work. Such protocols commonly rely on Proof of Stake, i.e. on mechanisms that extend voting power to the stakeholders of the system. We offer analysis of existing protocols that have a substantial amount of popularity. We then present our novel pure Proof of Stake protocols, and argue that the they help in mitigating problems th...

NeuCoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency derived from Sunny King’s Peercoin, which itself was derived from Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin. As with Peercoin, proof-of-stake replaces proof-of-work as NeuCoin’s security model, effectively replacing the operating costs of Bitcoin miners (electricity, computers) with the capital costs of holding the currency. Proof-of-stake also avoids pro...

*Correspondence: Tae-Il Kim (Editor-in-Chief) Department of Periodontology, Seoul National University School of Dentistry, 101 Daehak-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul 110-749, Korea E-mail: [email protected] Tel: +82-2-2072-2642 Fax: +82-2-744-1349 We are living in the era of genetic engineering and looking forward to its eventual clinical application to life-threatening human diseases. In this context, we...

In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the Bitcoin cryptocurrency[Nak09], an online currency system which allowed peer-to-peer transfer of digital tokens. To ensure a consistent view of token ownership, Nakamoto used a public ledger which can be replicated and validated by all network participants. To avoid a single point of failure, this ledger is authenticated using a dynamic membership multipa...

The perfusion education program at The Ohio State University uses a step exam to rank students and identify incompetent students in regard to the program learning objectives. The step exam determines student progress from the didactic to the clinical phase. Each student must pass the competency step exam to gain entry to the clinical rotations. The development, use, and results of the step exam...