The ASSISTment system was used by over 600 students in 2004-05 school year as part of their math class. While in [7] we reported student learning within the ASSISTment system, in this paper we focus on the assessment aspect. Our approach is to use data that the system collected through a year to tracking student learning and thus estimate their performance on a high-stake state test (MCAS) at t...

In tournaments in various sports that feature one-on-one competition, the trophy is sometimes prominently displayed near the athletes during the final. Based on recent research on subtle reward cues, we propose that such trophies have the potential to induce choking under pressure in the match favourites, who are known to be most at risk. To test this idea, we analysed real-life tennis performa...

This paper 1 presents the thesis that insecurity of software is due to interaction of technological and legal shortcomings, fostered by economic rationality. Ineffective liability laws further the distribution of unreliable and insecure software. Copyright protection for software hinders the quality improvement. Patent protection encourages the use of proprietary instead of standard technology....

A hard­fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper­evident logs and proof­of­stake consensus for proof­of­work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to establish and staff a secure financial data network capable of handling the world's transactions with subsecond response time. The new system pays dividends t...

We describe a recognition, validation and segmentation system as an intelligent preprocessor for automatic pronunciation evaluation. The system is developed for large-scale high stake foreign language tests, where it is necessary to reduce human workload and ensure fair evaluation.