A 32-item scale that can be used to measure physics students' understanding of introductory level wave optics.

Single hidden layer feed forward neural networks are widely used for various practical problems. However, the training process for determining synaptic weights of such neural networks can be computationally very expensive. In this paper we propose a new learning algorithm for learning the synaptic weights of the single hidden layer feedforward neural networks in order to reduce the learning time. We propose combining the upgraded bat algorithm with the extreme learning machine. The proposed approach reduces the number of evaluations needed to train a neural network and efficiently finds optimal input weights and the hidden biases. The proposed algorithm was tested on standard benchmark classification problems and functions and compared with other approaches from literature. The results have shown that our approach produces a satisfactory performance in almost all cases and that it can obtains solutions much faster than the traditional learning algorithms.

Data mining and clustering are important elements of various applications in different fields. One of the areas were clustering is rather frequently used is web intelligence, which nowadays represents an important research area. Data collected from the web are usually very complex, dynamic, without structure and rather large. Traditional clustering techniques are not efficient enough and need to be improved. In this paper, we propose combination of recent swarm intelligence algorithm, bare bones fireworks algorithm, and k-means for clustering web intelligence data. The proposed method was compared with other approaches from literature. Based on the experimental results, it can be concluded that the proposed method has very promising characteristics in terms of the quality of clustering, as well as the execution time.