Metadiscourse is a widely used term in current discourse analysis and language education, referring to an interesting, and relatively new approach to conceptualizing interaction between text producers and their texts and between text producers and users. Despite the growing importance of the term, however, it is often understood in different ways and used to refer to different aspects of langua...

One important and promising application of item response theory (IRT) is computerized adaptive testing (CAT). The implementation of a nominal response model-based CAT (NRCAT) was studied. Item pool characteristics for the NRCAT as well as the comparative performance of the NRCAT and a CAT based on the three-parameter logistic (3PL) model were examined. Ability estimates were generated at test l...

The Heihe River is the second largest river in arid areas of China, and the irrigation water of oasis agriculture in its middle reaches accounts for almost 80% of the water resources in the whole watershed. Corn is the most important crop in the middle reaches of the Heihe River, and its water consumption is about 50% of the total agriculture water consumption of the middle reaches. Therefore, ...

Soft constraints hypothesis (SCH) is a rational analysis approach that holds that the mixture of perceptual-motor and cognitive resources allocated for interactive behavior is adjusted based on temporal cost-benefit tradeoffs. Alternative approaches maintain that cognitive resources are in some sense protected or conserved in that greater amounts of perceptual-motor effort will be expended to c...

Many people love traveling for entertainment nowadays. In a journey, visitors often produce digital multimedia resources by capturing images, audios and videos. With digital devices like cameras, travel notes are not limited to texts, multimedia resources are also used for decorating records in a journey. In this paper, an interactive traveling assistant application is proposed to save time for...

Resources required: The interactive system was developed and tested on a regular PC with MS Windows OS and 1GB of RAM.

Research on information systems has demonstrated the strategic potential of information technology (IT) through the logic of IT enablement: synergistic relationship between IT assets with organizational resources ensuing IT-enabled resources capable of influencing competitive firm performance. However, this enablement view has largely focused on IT assets and organizational resources within the...