No abstract

No abstract

In recent years, handheld devices have been playing an important role in children's learning. How to utilize mobile devices such as handheld devices to support collaborative learning has been an important research topic of Computer‐Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). Educators in Japan are seeking an educational system structure that supports “integrated courses,” which have been introduced due to the revision of National Curriculum Standards. We focused on a museum as one of the appropriate locations where “integrated courses” are held and constructed a system named Musex for supporting children's learning with two personal digital assistants (PDAs). Musex provides children with opportunities to answer questions related to exhibitions collaboratively. We performed an experiment on Musex in a science museum and discuss the results in this paper. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 35(14): 54–63, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10696

Mobile devices have acceleratedly penetrated into our daily lives. Though they were originally designed as a communication tool or for personal use, and due to the rapid availability of wireless network technologies, people have begun to use mobile devices for supporting collaborative work and learning. There is, however, a serious problem in mobile devices related to their user interfaces. In this paper, we try to alleviate the problem and propose intuitive techniques for information transfer, which is one of the typical usages of mutually-connected computers. Our system, Toss-It, enables a user to send information from the user's PDA to other electronic devices with a "toss" or "swing" action, like a user would toss a ball or deal cards to others. The implementation of Toss-It consists of three principle parts-gesture recognition, location recognition, and file transfer. We especially describe the details of gesture recognition and location recognition. We then evaluate the practicability and usability of Toss-It through the experiments. We also discuss user scenarios describing how Toss-It can support users' collaborative activities.

No abstract

The expression of a LEU gene from Candida maltosa (designated as C-LEU2) isolated previously (Kawamura et al. 1983) was shown to be regulated, when transferred into Saccharomyces cerevisiae, by leucine and threonine in the medium, as in the case of LEU2 gene of S. cerevisiae. The coding region together with the regulatory region was subcloned and the nucleotide sequence was determined. When the sequence of the coding region was compared with that of LEU2, the homology was 72% for base pairs and 76% for deduced amino acids. Comparison of the regulatory region of C-LEU2 with those of LEU1 and LEU2 suggested a few short consensus sequences which are involved in regulation of gene expression by leucine and threonine in the medium.

Most visible light communication (VLC) technologies use a light emitting diode (LED) as a data transmitter and a photodiode as a receiver. In this paper, we alternatively focus on the use of an image sensor or camera as a receiver due to its wide availability. However, the successful use of an image sensor mainly depends on the efficiency of the encoder-decoder and the modulation scheme. Thus, this paper proposes a novel modulation scheme based on a square wave signal called a square wave quadrature amplitude modulation (SW-QAM) method. This method can accommodate different camera settings and overcome the problem of LED flicker that is generally sensed by human eyes when the LED frequency is low. At the transmitter side, multiple LEDs can be used to increase the transmission bit rate, while, at the receiver side, a Wiener filter is used as a complementary technique to SW-QAM for solving the light interference phenomenon due to the closeness of one LED to another. Our experimental results show that the proposed SW-QAM scheme can decode symbols very well either the for close or far communication distances, dark or bright lighting conditions, and single or multiple LED points. INDEX TERMS Visible light communication (VLC), image sensor communication (ISC), exposure time, square wave quadrature amplitude modulation (SW-QAM).

No abstract