Abstract
Learning programming is a complex task that poses significant challenges. Students face different kinds of difficulties at complex levels that traditional teaching/learning methods are nor able to cope with. For this reason, several authors have researched the pedagogical effectiveness of program visualization and animation, and developed some tools. Animation can help students on the analysis and understanding of given programs, and can also guide on the development of new ones. It is very important to give students the opportunity to practice solving programming exercises by themselves. Receiving feedback is essential for knowledge acquisition. New tools arose (especially in the area of programming contests) to allow for the submission of solutions (programs developed by the students) to the problem statements presented by the teacher and to assess them, returning immediately information about the submitted answer. These tools can be incorporated into teaching activities, allowing students to test their work getting immediate feedback. Automatic evaluation systems significantly improve students performance. In this article are shown these two approaches, animation and automatic assessment, and proposed a new pedagogical practice resulting from the combination of both.

Abstract
The automatic classification of urban sounds is important for environmental monitoring. In this work we employ SAX-based Multiresolution Motif Discovery to generate features for Urban Sound Classification. Our approach consists in the discovery of relevant frequent motifs in the audio signals and use the frequency of discovered motifs as characterizing attributes. We explore and evaluate different configurations of motif discovery for defining attributes. In the automatic classification step we use a decision tree based algorithm, random forests and SVM. Results obtained are compared with the ones using Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) as features. MFCCs are commonly used in environmental sound analysis, as well as in other sound classification tasks. Experiments were performed on the Urban Sound dataset, which is publicly available. Our results indicate that we can separate difficult pairs of classes (where MFCC fails) using the motif approach for feature construction. © 2015 SERSC.

Abstract

Abstract
Learning programming is a complex task that poses significant challenges. Students face different kinds of difficulties at complex levels that traditional teaching/learning methods are nor able to cope with. For this reason, several authors have researched the pedagogical effectiveness of program visualization and animation, and developed some tools. Animation can help students on the analysis and understanding of given programs, and can also guide on the development of new ones. It is very important to give students the opportunity to practice solving programming exercises by themselves. Receiving feedback is essential for knowledge acquisition. New tools arose ( especially in the area of programming contests) to allow for the submission of solutions ( programs developed by the students) to the problem statements presented by the teacher and to assess them, returning immediately information about the submitted answer. These tools can be incorporated into teaching activities, allowing students to test their work getting immediate feedback. Automatic evaluation systems significantly improve students performance. In this article are shown these two approaches, animation and automatic assessment, and proposed a new pedagogical practice resulting from the combination of both.

Abstract
In a bankruptcy situation individuals are not equally affected since each one has its own specific characteristics. These aspects cannot be ignored and may justify an allocation bias in favor of or against some individuals. This paper develops a theory of differentiation in claims problems that considers not only the vector of claims, but also some justified differentiating criteria based on other characteristics (wealth, net-income, GDP, etc.). Accordingly, we propose some progressive transfers from richer to poorer claimants with the purpose of distributing the damage as evenly as possible. Finally, we characterize our solution by means of the Lorenz criterion. Endogenous convex combinations between solutions are also considered.

Abstract
Agents involved in a conflicting claims problem may be concerned with the proportion of their claims that is satisfied, or with the total amount they get. In order to relate both perspectives, we associate to each conflicting claims problem a bargaining-in-proportions set. Then, we obtain a correspondence between classical bargaining solutions and usual claims rules. In particular, we show that the constrained equal losses, the truncated constrained equal losses and the contested garment (Babylonian Talmud) rules can be obtained throughout the Nash bargaining solution. © 2015 by the authors.