Using multimedia concept maps to enhance the learner experience in business law

Students’ learning experience can be affected by difficulties in understanding the interrelationships between concepts and also between topics. Concept maps have been used in many disciplines (Kremer & Gains, 1996) to structure information and express relationships between them. Their holistic approach with multiple pathways through the learning resource can make relationships and linkages between topics and subtopics obvious, and contribute to a meaningful and positive learning experience. This paper outlines the development and formative evaluation of two hypermedia concept maps which led to the development of a series of eleven concept maps to enhance the learning experience of students in a first year undergraduate business law unit.

As part of the Stage 1 formative evaluation, two concept maps were developed together with supporting multimedia resources and trialled on the learners. Feedback was also obtained from technical staff. This phase was designed to assess and control the quality of the learning resource as well as the impact it had on the learning experience. The paper closes by discussing how information gained in Stage 1 was used in Stage 2 as a basis to modify the initially trialled maps and to develop the other supporting maps.

Using community-based monitoring with GIS to create habitat maps for a marine protected area in Australia

In recent years there has been an increase in community-based monitoring programmes developed and implemented worldwide. This paper describes how the data collected from such a programme could be integrated into a Geographic Information System (GIS) to create temperate subtidal marine habitat maps. A differential Global Positioning System was utilized to accurately record the location of the trained community-based SCUBA diver data. These georeferenced data sets were then used to classify benthic habitats using an aerial photograph and digitizing techniques. This study demonstrated that trained community-based volunteers can collect data that can be utilized within a GIS to create reliable and cost-effective maps of shallow temperate subtidal rocky reef systems.

Do animals have cognitive maps?

Drawing on studies of humans, rodents, birds and arthropods, I show that 'cognitive maps' have been used to describe a wide variety of spatial concepts. There are, however, two main definitions. One, sensu Tolman, O'Keefe and Nadel, is that a cognitive map is a powerful memory of landmarks which allows novel short-cutting to occur. The other, sensu Gallistel, is that a cognitive map is any representation of space held by an animal. Other definitions with quite different meanings are also summarised. I argue that no animal has been conclusively shown to have a cognitive map, sensu Tolman, O'Keefe and Nadel, because simpler explanations of the crucial novel short-cutting results are invariably possible. Owing to the repeated inability of experimenters to eliminate these simpler explanations over at least 15 years, and the confusion caused by the numerous contradictory definitions of a cognitive map. I argue that the cognitive map is no longer a useful hypothesis for elucidating the spatial behaviour of animals and that use of the term should be avoided.

Palaeobiogeography and palaeogeographical implications of Permian marine bivalve faunas in Northeast Asia (Kolyma–Omolon and erkhoyansk–Okhotsk regions, northeastern Russia)

The paper considers the biogeography and palaeogeographic implications of the Permian marine bivalve faunas of Northeast Asia, with a focus on the dynamic relationships between biotic similarities and palaeogeographic distance through an interval of ca. 50 million years. A stage-by-stage time series analysis of the biotic similarities between two previously recognized biochores in Northeast Asia, the Kolyma–Omolon and Verkhoyan–Okhotsk provinces, has been carried out using both the Jaccard and Dice similarity indices based on the spatio-temporal distributions of 355 Permian marine bivalve species in Northeast Asia. The outcome of this analysis, combined with other empirical data and previously published tectonic, sedimentological and palaeontological information, suggests that (1) the bivalve faunas from these two provinces were distinctive from one another as two separate biochores throughout all but the earliest (Asselian) Permian stages and (2) the biotic similarities between the Verkhoyan–Okhotsk and Kolyma–Omolon provinces remained consistently low since Sakmarian, all falling well below the minimum threshold of the Jaccard index of 0.42 required for distinguishing marine biotic provinces. We interpret these below-threshold Jaccard biotic similarities as an indication of significant palaeogeographic separation between the Verkhoyan-Okhotsk and Kolyma–Omolon provinces, which is in turn considered to indicate rifting and seafloor spreading of the Omolon microcontinent and associated terranes and island arcs away from the North Asian craton, at least from the Sakmarian to the beginning of the Late Permian.
Palaeo-distance separation appears to be the primary and most significant biogeographic determinant in accounting for the differences in the spatial distribution of most Permian bivalve species in Northeast Asia. Several other variables also appear to have played a significant role, including regional climate conditions, ocean currents and merged island chains as geographic barriers. In particular, the relatively high biotic similarity between the Verkhoyan–Okhotsk and Kolyma–Omolon provinces during the Late Wuchiapingian and Changhsingian may have been related to the shallowing of the deep-water basins (Oimyakon, Ayan-Yuryakh, Balygychan and Sugoi basins) that had previously separated the two provinces and the flooding (submergence) of the Okhotsk–Taigonos volcanic arc system, thus allowing the invasion of lower latitude warm-water Palaeotethyan and even Gondwanan species into Northeast Asia.

Analyzing international travelers' profile with self-organizing maps

It is generally agreed that knowledge is the most valuable asset to an organization. Knowledge enables a business to effectively compete with its competitors. In the tourism context, an in-depth knowledge of the profile of international travelers to a destination has become a crucial factor for decision makers to formulate their business strategies and better serve their customers. In this research, a self-organizing map (SOM) network was used for segmenting international travelers to Hong Kong, a major travel destination in Asia. An association rules discovery algorithm is then utilized to automatically characterize the profile of each segment. The resulting maps serve as a visual analysis tool for tourism managers to better understand the characteristics, motivations, and behaviors of international travelers.

Russia's Soviet nostalgia trip

It is strange to see so many symbols of the Soviet past alive and well in Russia. It is too simplistic to say this reflects nostalgia for Soviet times. Much of it is personal nostalgia. The intertwining of private and public memory is complex.

Minimum spanning trees for valley and ridge characterization in digital elevation maps

Texture synthesis employs neighbourhood matching to generate appropriate new content. Terrain synthesis has the added constraint that new content must be geographically plausible. The profile recognition and polygon breaking algorithm (PPA) [Chang et al. 1998] provides a robust mechanism for characterizing terrain as systems of valley and ridge lines in digital elevation maps. We exploit this to create a terrain characterization metric that is robust, efficient to compute and is sensitive to terrain properties.

Terrain regions are characterized as a minimum spanning tree derived from a graph created from the sample points of the elevation map which are encoded as weights in the edges of the graph. This formulation allows us to provide a single consistent feature definition that is sensitive to the pattern of ridges and valleys in the terrain Alternative formulations of these weights provide richer characteristicmeasures and we provide examples of alternate definitions based on curvature and contour measures.

We show that the measure is robust, with a significant portion derived directly from information local to the terrain sample. Global terrain characteristics introduce the issue of over- and underconnected valley/ridge lines when working with sub-regions. This is addressed by providing two graph construction strategies, which respectively provide an upper bound on connectivity as a single spanning tree, and a lower bound as a forest of trees.

Efficient minimum spanning tree algorithms are adapted to the context of terrain data and are shown to provide substantially better performance than previous PPA implementations. In particular, these are able to characterize valley and ridge behaviour at every point even in large elevation maps, providing a measure sensitive to terrain features at all scales.

The resulting graph based formulation provides an efficient and elegant algorithm for characterizing terrain features. The measure can be calculated efficiently, is robust under changes of neighbourhood position, size and resolution and the hybrid measure is sensitive to terrain features both locally and globally.

A unified formalism for landmark based representation of maps and navigation plans

We present a unified formalism for representing maps and using them for constructing plans of navigation for an autonomous agent. The foundation of this work lies in addressing key questions that an agent is confronted with when navigating. That is, besides the main task of how to reach the intended destination from the current position, the agent faces other questions like: where am I? what landmarks can I see? where is my destination relative to me and the landmarks I am seeing? Fundamental to this representation is the use of visual landmarks, which are used as pivotal points in the landscape being described. Further, in the representation of spatial information and navigation there are three different viewpoints: first, the localized representation from the viewpoint of a sighted, mobile agent; second, the static representation seen by the map-maker; and third, the view of an external agent giving directions on the basis of his own experience/knowledge. The major contribution of this map model and the associated navigation method lies in the framework which unifies these three different points of view. This unification enables the agent to make no distinction in terms of following implicit instructions contained in a map and the directions given by external agents.