Digital Commons Network^™

When The Walls Crash Down: Offer Services Where The Students Are, Julie Arendt, Mary K. Taylor

Articles

No abstract provided.

On The Autocorrelation Of Complex Envelope Of White Noise, R. Viswanathan

Articles

About four decades ago, in an article in this transactions, Thomas Kailath pointed out that the autocorrelation of the complex envelope of white noise is not strictly an impulse function, even though when treated as an impulse in practical problems, it does lead to correct results. However, it is commonly assumed that by simply letting the bandwidth of a flat-bandlimited noise process to go to infinity, one obtains the result that the autocorrelation of the complex envelope of white noise equals an impulse function. In this correspondence, we show that 1) the limit operation has to be done carefully and …

Mapping The Literature Of Medical-Surgical Nursing, Mary K. Taylor

Articles

Background: Medical-surgical or adult health nursing is a complex specialty that requires a wide-ranging literature to inform its research and practice. Several excellent qualitative aids exist for collection development for this field, but quantitative studies are few. While one bibliometric study of journals exists, no recent work had been done in this area.

Method: The Mapping the Literature of Nursing Project protocol was used. Four source journals were selected, and a citation analysis of articles from 1996 to 1998 was conducted.

Results: A list of the most frequently cited journals was created, using Bradford’s Law of Scattering. The list demonstrates …

Instruction Via Chat: Does Co-Browse Help?, Stephanie J. Graves, Christina M. Desai

Articles

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to determine whether instruction would be welcomed by instant messaging (IM)/chat users, whether instruction is possible in this medium, whether it can be effectively provided, and if the use of co-browsing enhances learning.

Design/methodology/approach – Two studies were conducted in which IM/chat reference transcripts were analyzed and patron surveys collected. This research paper compares results from these studies, the first based on use of text-only IM software, the second using commercial chat software with a co-browse feature.

Findings – Findings indicate that patrons welcome instruction, whether they ask for it or not, …

Distributed Approaches For Exploiting Multiuser Diversity In Wireless Networks, Xiangping Qin, Randall A. Berry

Articles

In wireless fading channels, multiuser diversity can be exploited by scheduling users to transmit when their channel conditions are favorable. This leads to a sum throughput that increases with the number of users and, in certain cases, achieves capacity. However, such scheduling requires global knowledge of every user’s channel gain, which may be difficult to obtain in some situations. This paper addresses contention-based protocols for exploiting multiuser diversity with only local channel knowledge. A variation of the ALOHA protocol is given in which users attempt to exploit multiuser diversity gains, but suffer contention losses due to the distributed channel knowledge. …

Instruction Via Instant Messaging Reference: What’S Happening?, Christina M. Desai, Stephanie J. Graves

Articles

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to analyze one Instant Messaging (IM) reference service to determine to what extent instruction is or can be offered in this medium and whether patrons want or expect it.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors surveyed IM patrons over a seven week period to determine whether they felt they could and did learn from chat transactions. Transcript content was analyzed to find out whether and how instruction is being offered.

Findings – Results show that patrons overwhelmingly welcome instruction and that it is provided in a large majority of cases, using a variety of …

Usability Testing And Instruction Librarians: A Perfect Pair., Stephanie J. Graves, Margie D. Ruppel

Articles

This study examines how librarians are experiencing usability testing and how their observations are influencing library instruction. A survey of instruction librarians illustrates how usability testing and library instruction are connected. Survey results prove instruction librarians are involved in usability testing. Furthermore, their participation in usability studies has led instruction librarians to alter their instructional methods. An overwhelming majority changed one or more instructional tools as a result of usability testing, and many reported creating new instructional resources. The authors add their own insights as both instruction librarians and participants in usability testing.

Throughput Performance Of An Adaptive Arq Scheme In Rayleigh Fading Channels, A. Mehta, R. Viswanathan, D. Kagaris

Articles

Using a simulation study we analyze the throughput performance of Yao’s adaptive ARQ scheme in time-varying channels. The simulation takes into account the Rayleigh amplitude and the fast or the slow fading characteristics of a wireless channel, under a representative M-FSK modulation and Reed-Solomon coding scheme. We show that, for a specific set of design parameters, Yao’s adaptive procedure works well for all channel fading rates, except for moderately slow rates. By observing variations of packet error rates at a specified SNR we provide an explanation for these varied behaviors under different channel fading rates.