December 25th 2016 :

Multimedia instructional design principles

Beginning with cognitive load theory as their motivating scientific premise, researchers such as Richard E. Mayer, John Sweller, and Roxana Moreno established within the scientific literature a set of multimedia instructional design principles that promote effective learning. Many of these principles have been "field tested" in everyday learning settings and found to be effective there as well.

 The majority of this body of research has been performed using university students given relatively short lessons on technical concepts with which they held low prior knowledge. However, David Roberts has tested the method with students in nine social science disciplines including sociology, politics and business studies. His longitudinal research programme over 3 years established a clear improvement in levels of student engagement and in the development of active learning principles among students exposed to a combination of images and text, over students exposed only to text.

A number of other studies have shown these principles to be effective with learners of other ages and with non-technical learning content. Research using learners who have greater prior knowledge in the lesson material sometimes finds results that contradict these design principles. This has led some researchers to put forward the "expertise effect" as an instructional design principle unto itself.

The underlying theoretical premise, cognitive load theory, describes the amount of mental effort that is related to performing a task as falling into one of three categories: germane, intrinsic, and extraneous. Germane cognitive load is the mental effort required to process the task's information, make sense of it, and access and/or store it in long-term memory (for example, seeing a math problem, identifying the values and operations involved, and understanding that your task is to solve the math problem).

Intrinsic cognitive load is the mental effort required to perform the task itself (for example, actually solving the math problem). Extraneous cognitive load is the mental effort imposed by the way that the task is delivered, which may or may not be efficient (for example, finding the math problem you are supposed to solve on a page that also contains advertisements for books about math)

The multimedia instructional design principles identified by Mayer, Sweller, Moreno, and their colleagues are largely focused on minimizing extraneous cognitive load, and managing intrinsic and germane loads at levels that are appropriate for the learner. Examples of these principles in practice include

• Reducing extraneous load by eliminating visual and auditory effects and elements that are not central to the lesson, such as seductive details (the coherence principle)
• Reducing germane load by delivering verbal information through audio presentation (narration) while delivering relevant visual information through static images or animations (the modality principle).
• Controlling intrinsic load by breaking the lesson into smaller segments and giving learners control over the pace at which they move forward through the lesson material (the segmenting principle)

Cognitive load theory (and by extension many of the multimedia instructional design principles) is based in part on a model of working memory by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch who proposed that working memory has two largely independent, limited capacity sub-components that tend to work in parallel – one visual and one verbal/acoustic.[26] This gave rise to dual-coding theory, first proposed by Allan Paivio and later applied to multimedia learning by Richard Mayer. According to Mayer, separate channels of working memory process auditory and visual information during any lesson. Consequently, a learner can use more cognitive processing capacities to study materials that combine auditory verbal information with visual graphical information than to process materials that combine printed (visual) text with visual graphical information. In other words, the multi-modal materials reduce the cognitive load imposed on working memory.

In a series of studies Mayer and his colleagues tested Paivio's dual-coding theory, with multimedia lesson materials. They repeatedly found that students given multimedia with animation and narration consistently did better on transfer questions than those who learn from animation and text-based materials. That is, they were significantly better when it came to applying what they had learned after receiving multimedia rather than mono-media (visual only) instruction. These results were then later confirmed by other groups of researchers.

The initial studies of multimedia learning were limited to logical scientific processes that centered on cause-and-effect systems like automobile braking systems, how a bicycle pump works, or cloud formation. However, subsequent investigations found that the modality effect extended to other areas of learning.

November 23rd , 2016 :

What is Analytics

Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming and operations research to quantify performance.

Organizations may apply analytics to business data to describe, predict, and improve business performance. Specifically, areas within analytics include predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics, enterprise decision management, retail analytics, store assortment and stock-keeping unit optimization, marketing optimization and marketing mix modeling, web analytics, sales force sizing and optimization, price and promotion modeling, predictive science, credit risk analysis, and fraud analytics. Since analytics can require extensive computation (see big data), the algorithms and software used for analytics harness the most current methods in computer science, statistics, and mathematics

Analytics vs. analysis

Analytics is multidisciplinary. There is extensive use of mathematics and statistics, the use of descriptive techniques and predictive models to gain valuable knowledge from data—data analysis. The insights from data are used to recommend action or to guide decision making rooted in business context. Thus, analytics is not so much concerned with individual analyses or analysis steps, but with the entire methodology. There is a pronounced tendency to use the term analytics in business settings e.g. text analytics vs. the more generic text mining to emphasize this broader perspective. There is an increasing use of the term advanced analytics, typically used to describe the technical aspects of analytics, especially in the emerging fields such as the use of machine learning techniques like neural networks to do predictive modeling.

October 19th 2016 :

Digital marketing

Digital marketing (also known as data-driven marketing) is an umbrella term for the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium.

Digital marketing techniques such as search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, influencer marketing, content automation, campaign marketing, data-driven marketing and e-commerce marketing, social media marketing, social media optimization, e-mail direct marketing, display advertising, e–books, and optical disks and games are becoming more common in our advancing technology. In fact, digital marketing now extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, such as mobile phones (SMS and MMS), call back, and on-hold mobile ring tones

July 27th 2016 :

Data analysis

Data analysis, also known as analysis of data or data analytics, is a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modelingdata with the goal of discovering useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision-making. Data analysis has multiple facets and approaches, encompassing diverse techniques under a variety of names, in different business, science, and social science domains.

Data mining is a particular data analysis technique that focuses on modeling and knowledge discovery for predictive rather than purely descriptive purposes, while business intelligence covers data analysis that relies heavily on aggregation, focusing on business information

January 9th 2016 :

Communication protocols

n telecommunications, a communication protocol is a system of rules that allow two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. These are the rules or standard that defines the syntax, semantics and synchronization of communication and possible error recovery methods. Protocols may be implemented by hardware, software, or a combination of both

Communicating systems use well-defined formats (protocol) for exchanging various messages. Each message has an exact meaning intended to elicit a response from a range of possible responses pre-determined for that situation. The specified behavior is typically independent of how it is to be implemented. Communications protocols have to be agreed upon by the parties involved

October 24th 2015 :

Network address translation (NAT) is a method of remapping one IP address space into another by modifying network address information in Internet Protocol (IP) datagram packet headers while they are in transit across a traffic routing device. The technique was originally used for ease of rerouting traffic in IP networks without readdressing every host. In more advanced NAT implementations featuring IP masquerading, it has become a popular and essential tool in conserving global address space allocations in face of IPv4 address exhaustion by sharing one Internet-routable IP address of a NAT gateway for an entire private network.

IP masquerading is a technique that hides an entire IP address space, usually consisting of private IP addresses, behind a single IP address in another, usually public address space. The address that has to be hidden is changed into a single (public) IP address as "new" source address of the outgoing IP packet so it appears as originating not from the hidden host but from the routing device itself. Because of the popularity of this technique to conserve IPv4 address space, the term NAT has become virtually synonymous with IP masquerading

April 25th 2015 :

IPv4 address exhaustion is the depletion of the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses. Because there are fewer than 4.3 billion addresses available, depletion has been anticipated since the late 1980s, when the Internet started to experience dramatic growth. This depletion is one of the reasons for the development and deployment of its successor protocol, IPv6.

The IP address space is managed globally by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and by five regional Internet registries (RIR) responsible in their designated territories for assignment to end users and local Internet registries, such as Internet service providers. The main market forces which accelerated IPv4 address depletion included:

• Rapidly growing number of Internet users
• Always-on devices — ADSL modems, cable modems
• Mobile devices — laptop computers, PDAs, mobile phones.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) created the Routing and Addressing Group (ROAD) in November 1991 to respond to the scalability problem caused by the classful network allocation system in place at the time.[1][2] The anticipated shortage has been the driving factor in creating and adopting several new technologies, including network address translation (NAT), Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) in 1993, and IPv6 in 1998.[2] IPv6, the successor technology to IPv4 which was designed to address this problem, supports approximately 3.4×1038 network addresses

January 9th 2014 :

iOS

iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that presently powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. It is the second most popular mobile operating system globally after Android. iPad tablets are also the second most popular, by sales, against Android since 2013.

In 2005, when Steve Jobs began planning the iPhone, he had a choice to either "shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod". Jobs favored the former approach but pitted the Macintosh and iPod teams, led by Scott Forstall and Tony Fadell, respectively, against each other in an internal competition, with Forstall winning by creating the iPhone OS. The decision enabled the success of the iPhone as a platform for third-party developers: using a well-known desktop operating system as its basis allowed the many third-party Mac developers to write software for the iPhone with minimal retraining. Forstall was also responsible for creating a software development kit for programmers to build iPhone apps, as well as an App Store within iTunes

June 5th 2014 :

Google Translate

Google Translate is a free multilingual machine translation service developed by Google, to translate text, speech, images, sites, or real-time video from one language into another. It offers a web interface, mobile apps for Android and iOS, and an API that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications. Google Translate supports over 100 languages at various levels[3]and as of May 2013, serves over 200 million people daily