To achieve overall business goals, GQM+Strategies® is an approach that aligns the business goals at each level of an organization to strategies and assesses the achievement of goals. Strategies derived from business goals are based on rationales (context factors and assumptions). Because extracting all rationales is an important process in the GQM+Strategies approach, we propose Context-Assumpt...

The web has changed the way we do things in a variety of ways. It is not uncommon to associate the term disruptive technologies to the radical changes happening on the web. This paper takes an encompassing view of developments surrounding the web with a particular emphasis on emerging trends and evolving application scenarios. We provide a broad overview of technologies, in revealing directions...

Conservation tillage (CT) systems have a number of potential benefits including lower crop production costs and the ability to reduce soil erosion that have made them common in several regions of the world. Although CT systems have been researched and successfully implemented on some farms in California's San Joaquin Valley (SJV), overall adoption is low and the reasons for the region's compara...

Learners sometimes have incoherent and fragmented intuitive prior knowledge that is (partly) "incompatible" with the to-be-learned contents. Such knowledge in pieces can cause conceptual disorientation and cognitive overload while learning. We hypothesized that a pre-training intervention providing a generalized schema as a structuring framework for such knowledge in pieces would support (re)or...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study is to investigate the pursuit of achievement goals in medical students and to assess the relationship between achievement goals, learning strategy, and motivation. METHODS Two hundred seventy freshman and sophomore premedical students and sophomore medical school students participated in this study, which used the Achievement Goals Scale and the Self-Regulate...

When people learn that I study lethal injection, they are usually curious to know more (or at least they are polite enough to ask questions). Interestingly, the question that arises most often— from lawyers, law students, and laypeople—is why states behave as they do. In the wake of botched executions and ample evidence of lethal injection‘s dangers, why do states fail to address their executio...