Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors Influencing Expectations of e-Health Services within a Direct-Effects Model of User Satisfaction

Researchers find customer satisfaction with service-oriented Web sites (e-services) can be modeled effectively based on the match between customers' initial expectations and subsequent perceptions of performance. However, little is known about the factors leading to expectations or the ability of such factors to provide early predictions of satisfaction. We use social cognitive theory as a basis to propose that self-efficacy, past experiences (participation, knowledge, and Internet experience), and affective factors (prior satisfaction and enjoyment) will influence expectations of an e-health service. We test these factors in conjunction with the direct-effects model of satisfaction among patients registered for an e-health service. We find that these antecedents explain 57% of the variance (R2) in expectations. Further, early predictions made from antecedents during initial use of the e-health service explain 39% of the variance in satisfaction. Our findings suggest that the antecedents are important contributors to patients' expectations and can provide early guidance to development of successful e-health services.
Active Control of Sound

Recent technological advances in the development of fast digital signal processors have made the active control of sound a practical proposition. This book brings together results from research in the two disciplinesof acoustics and signal processing and presents the fundamentals of noise control in a unified manner. Practical applications are presented wherever possible although the emphasis is on the algorithmic principles which form the foundation of practical systems. The volume is written in textbook style and aimed at both undergraduate and postgraduate students of acoustics and signal processing, professional acoustical and electrical engineers, and researchers in the field of active control.
Evaluation of a statistical prediction model used in the design of neural network based ECG classifiers: a multiple linear regression approach

The application of neural networks in the implementation of ECG classifiers has become widespread. Unfortunately due to the lack of scientific evidence many of the choices made in the design of these classifiers are based on trial and error. This paper details an investigation into a statistical approach aimed at reducing the computational requirements when training an ECG classifier. The multiple linear regression method was used to develop a predictor that would indicate at which point training of a neural network should stop. When tested it was found that this genre of predictor exhibited reasonable accuracy and out performed other predictors based on neural network and genetic programming techniques.
Research in library and information science in New Zealand

There are two main centres of library and information science (LIS) research in New Zealand, the Department of Library and Information Studies, at Victoria University of Wellington, and the National Library of New Zealand. They each have a different purpose, but each in its way contributes to a growing body of New Zealand LIS research which is available to inform managers and policy makers locally, and which is finding a wider audience in the international literature. Provides a brief overview of LIS research in New Zealand and discusses early difficulties in developing a research base in New Zealand, recent and current projects in both institutions, and some of the unique features of New Zealand research.
A new noise suppression method for high-definition CCD cameras

A novel noise suppression method for a high-definition CCD (charge coupled device) camera, the RDS (reflection-delayed noise suppression) method, is described. By using the reflection in a delay line, it has become possible to obtain both significant noise suppression and a wide frequency bandwidth. The method is superior to conventional methods in that its frequency bandwidth is very wide and its high-speed operations are very stable. The performance of a HDTV (high-definition TV) three-CCD color camera using this method is reported. >
Mining Query Logs: Turning Search Usage Data into Knowledge

Web search engines have stored in their logs information about users since they started to operate. This information often serves many purposes. The primary focus of this survey is on introducing to the discipline of query mining by showing its foundations and by analyzing the basic algorithms and techniques that are used to extract useful knowledge from this (potentially) infinite source of information. We show how search applications may benefit from this kind of analysis by analyzing popular applications of query log mining and their influence on user experience. We conclude the paper by, briefly, presenting some of the most challenging current open problems in this field.
Security boundary visualization for systems operation

This paper presents a security assessment approach for operational planning studies that provides the operator with accurate boundary visualization in terms of easily monitored precontingency information. The approach is modeled after traditional security assessment procedures which result in use of a nomogram for characterizing the security boundaries; these procedures are common among many North American utilities today. Therefore, the approach builds on what is already familiar in the industry, but it takes advantage of computer automation and neural networks for generating and understanding large databases. The appeal of the approach is threefold: it provides increased accuracy in boundary representation, it reduces the labor traditionally required in generating security boundaries, and the resulting boundaries, encoded in fast, flexible C subroutines, can be integrated into energy management system software to provide the operator with compact, understandable boundary illustration in real time. These improvements are of particular interest in securely operating transmission systems close to their limits so as to fully utilize existing facilities.
The words and sounds of telephone conversations

This paper presents data concerning the vocabulary and the relative frequency of occurrence of the speech sounds of telephone conversation. Tables are given showing the most frequently used words, the syllabic structure of the words, the relative occurrences of the sounds, and, for each vowel, the percentage distribution of the consonants which precede and follow it. Comparisons are made with the vocabulary and relative occurrence of speech sounds in written English.
Use of food product information in consumption decision among female workers in Nigerian state universities

The use of food product information is a globally acknowledged food safety measure. This study surveyed the use of food product information as a determinant of consumption of packaged foods among 561 female academic and non-academic staff of eight state universities in Nigeria using the multi-stage random sampling technique. Data was analyzed with descriptive statistic and binary logistic regression. The findings showed that the use of food product information is a determinant of consumption of packaged foods among the respondents; however, the majority based their consumption decisions on the availability of a National Agency for Food and Drug Administration (NAFDAC) registration number. The study concludes that female workers in Nigerian state universities are not taking full advantage of all the food product information available on packaged foods and therefore recommends that NAFDAC intensifies awareness campaigns on the importance of using all food product information available on packaged foods. Also, information professionals should collaborate with public health experts to organize seminars and conferences to further enlighten the public and members of the academic community on the usefulness of this food safety measure.
Evaluating the perceived voice quality on VoIP network using interpolated FIR filter algorithm

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a popular communication service nowadays. VoIP reduces the cost of call transmission by passing voice and video packets through the available bandwidth for data packets through Internet protocol. The quality of the VoIP signal is degraded due to the various network impairments. The proposed scheme, interpolated finite impulse response, is implemented as post-processor after decoding the signal in VoIP system. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated for various network conditions. The results of the proposed scheme are measured with the objective measurement methods for signal quality evaluation. The performance of the proposed system is compared with the existing techniques for quality improvement in VoIP system. The results show much improvement in speech quality with the proposed scheme in comparison to other similar schemes.
Ear Biometrics: A Survey on Ear Image Databases and Techniques for Ear Detection and Recognition

Identifying the people by using their ear is the emerging trend in the modern era. Biometrics deals with the procedure to identify people, by using their measurable, unique and permanent features such as fingerprint, iris, face, vein, DNA, hand writing, hand geometry and many more. Biometrics serves as integrated part of modern security systems. This paper discuss about the ear biometrics. Human ear is the unique and clearly visible trait that is permanent for his/her lifetime. The increasing age of human being affects very less on the ear. This paper provides a detailed survey of 16 most popular image databases available for ear biometrics, which will be helpful for the researchers on which they can perform the experiments. This paper includes a comparative study of techniques used for ear detection and ear recognition techniques. Current research work in ear biometrics is limited to database of images captured under certain conditions.
Processing multiword idiomatic strings: Many words in one?

Idioms are strings of words whose figurative meaning does not necessarily derive from that of the constituent parts. They belong to the vast and heterogeneous realm of multiword expressions, i.e. literal and non-literal word clusters whose representations are stored in semantic memory. This article provides an updated review of the psycholinguistic and electrophysiological literature on the processes underlying idiom comprehension with specific reference to the cues that lead to idiom recognition, to the syntactic and semantic behavior of idioms, to the relationships between literal compositionality and idiomatic meaning retrieval. Behavioral models of idiom comprehension are presented and discussed also with respect to the electrophysiological correlates of idiom and figurative language comprehension.
Automated Reasoning: Introduction and Applications

This book explains what automated reasoning is and what it can do and then demonstrates how to use it to solve complex problems with applications in logic circuit design, circuit validation, real-time system design and expert systems. A diskette containing the automated reasoning program "Otter" is included. It is available for the first time to PCs and workstations. The book has input files, commentary, examples in "Otter" notation and a user's manual that enables readers to experiment with the material presented as well as with ideas of their own. Other features include: various challenge problems that allow readers to test, compare and evaluate new ideas and techniques; techniques for answering open questions and finding shorter proofs; methods for finding such proofs; examples and puzzles to aid in the understanding of parallel versions of an automated reasoning program; and problems.
WORD PROCESSING AND SECOND LANGUAGE WRITING: A LONGITUDINAL CASE STUDY

The purpose of this study was to determine whether word processing might change a second language (L2) leamer's writing processes and improve the quality of his essays over a relatively long period of time. We worked from the assumption that research comparing word-processing to pen and paper composing tends to show positive results when studies include lengthy terms of data collection and when appropriate instruction and training are provided. We compared the processes and products of L2 composing displayed by a 29-year-old, male Mandarin leamer of English with intermediate proficiency in English while he wrote, over 8 months, 14 compositions grouped into 7 comparable pairs of topics, altemating between uses of a lap-top computer and of pen and paper. Al1 keystrokes were recorded electronically in the computer environrnent; visual records of al1 text changes were made for the pen-and-paper writing. Think-aloud protocols were recorded in al1 sessions. Analyses indicate advantages for the word-processing medium over the pen-and-paper medium in terms ofi a greater frequency of revisions made at the discourse level and at the syntactical level; higher scores for content on analytic ratings of the completed compositions; and more extensive evaluation ofwritten texts in think-aloud verbal reports.
2D to 3D video conversion with key-frame depth propagation and trilateral filtering

Depth maps play an important role in 3DTV applications for rendering stereo views. Most existing automatic algorithms cannot generate an acceptable quality of depth maps from a mono-channel video sequence. Proposed is a key-frame depth propagation algorithm, combining trilateral filtering to produce high-quality depth sequences. Experiment results show that the algorithm outperforms a well-known prior work in terms of depth PSNR by up to 3.5 dB.
Consultants and Directors’ Levels of Authority and Effectiveness of Agribusiness Ventures

A survey of 76 consultants and 19 directors was conducted in Zanjan Province, Iran to explore and compare consultants and directors’ levels of authority in agribusiness ventures (ABVs), the impact on ABV effectiveness, as well as factors influencing authority level. The study found that the most important predictor for consultants’ levels of authority is level of publishing details in an operation manual describing important characteristics of an extension program. Overall, this article concludes that positive correlations between consultants and directors’ levels of authority and effectiveness of ABVs may not exist on all aims.
Handbook of Human Genetic Linkage

In his book "Analysis of Human Genetic Linkage" Jurg Ott laid out the principles by which geneticists perform studies of genetic linkage in humans. Here, in the "Handbook of Human Genetic Linkage", Joseph Terwilliger and Jurg Ott provide a companion piece to the previous work, showing how its principles may be applied in practice. "Handbook of Human Genetic Linkage" contains detailed instructions on how to carry out linkage analysis, guiding the reader through each process on a step-by-step basis. The chapters are grouped into three main sections: two-point linkage analysis, multi-point linkage analysis, and such advanced topics as mutation rates, gene frequencies, linkage disequilibrium, complex diseases and computer simulation. Each chapter ends with exercises that can be performed on an IBM PC-compatible computer. The solutions are supplied at the end of each section.
Flexible Nanodielectric Materials with High Permittivity for Power Energy Storage

Study of flexible nanodielectric materials (FNDMs) with high permittivity is one of the most active academic research areas in advanced functional materials. FNDMs with excellent dielectric properties are demonstrated to show great promise as energy‐storage dielectric layers in high‐performance capacitors. These materials, in common, consist of nanoscale particles dispersed into a flexible polymer matrix so that both the physical/chemical characteristics of the nanoparticles and the interaction between the nanoparticles and the polymers have crucial effects on the microstructures and final properties. This review first outlines the crucial issues in the nanodielectric field and then focuses on recent remarkable research developments in the fabrication of FNDMs with special constitutents, molecular structures, and microstructures. Possible reasons for several persistent issues are analyzed and the general strategies to realize FNDMs with excellent integral properties are summarized. The review further highlights some exciting examples of these FNDMs for power‐energy‐storage applications.
Flow control and micro-architectural mechanisms for extending the performance of interconnection networks

In recent years, interconnection network fabrics, historically used in high-end multiprocessor systems, have been deployed in a wide spectrum of communication systems—I/O interconnects, high-speed network switches, terabit Internet routers and on-chip interconnects. This thesis proposes flow control and micro architectural mechanisms for extending interconnection network performance, and improving the performance of the overall system. The thesis introduces flit-reservation flow control where control flits traverse the network in advance of data flits, reserving buffers and channel bandwidth on their behalf. Reserving resources ahead of time yields two performance improvements. First, it enables routing and arbitration to be carried out beforehand, reducing network latency. Second, this advance scheduling makes very efficient use of buffers, pushing throughput beyond that of existing flow control methods. Our simulations show flit-reservation flow control reducing latency by up to 33%, and matching or surpassing the throughput performance of virtual-channel flow control with just half the number of buffers. Next, this thesis proposes a delay model developed for pipelined routers. Motivated by the model, the effect of speculation on the critical path of routers is investigated. While previous models claim that the complexity of virtual-channel flow control leads to high router latency which overwhelms its throughput advantages over wormhole flow control, the proposed model concludes otherwise. Simulations based on the pipelines prescribed by the proposed model demonstrate that a speculative virtual-channel router can have the same router latency as a wormhole router, while extending its throughput by up to 50%.
A real-time French text-to-speech system generating high-quality synthetic speech

The main features of the CNET diphone-based text-to-speech system for French language are described. The linguistic analysis works in three steps. First, a morphosyntactic analysis module assigns a grammatical value to each word in the text and transcribes it phonetically. A second module parses the text into hierarchical syntactico-prosodic groups. Finally, prosodic patterns are automatically assigned to each word by queries to a database of prosodic events. The phonetic and prosodic information serves as commands to the synthesis component. The synthesis component is based on diphone concatenation. A time-domain formulation of the pitch-synchronous overlap-add scheme (TD-PSOLA) is used to modify the speech prosody and to concatenate diphone waveforms. It is combined with a low bit-rate speech decoder to reduce the memory requirement for storing the diphone inventory. The system runs in real time on a PC equipped with a TMS320C25 DSP board and provides notably improved sound quality and naturalness in comparison to commercially available systems. <<ETX>>
Referential Hierarchy Effects in Yakkha Three-Argument Constructions

Yakkha (Kiranti language family, Nepal) has several constructions where speech act participants (SAP) and third persons are not treated alike. Such effects are found in the treatment of agents and patients of two-participant constructions, but also in the treatment of theme and goal arguments of three-participant constructions. This paper explores the referentiality effects on case marking and verbal agreement of theme and goal arguments. Crucially, most effects are scenario-based, i.e. they are conditioned not only by the properties of one argument, but by the relation between theme and goal. Besides the distinction between SAP and third person, the animacy of arguments can play a role, so that the argument realization in one construction is often conditioned by an interplay of several factors. Apart from alternations in case and agreement, Yakkha exhibits a serialization pattern that is related to an atypically high animacy of theme arguments. After analyzing these alternations and their conditions, the paper discusses how the findings match predictions that have been made about argument realization in three-participant constructions.
Faculty Publications as a Source of Information for Identifying and Satisfying Users' Needs: A Case Study at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

ABSTRACT This paper reports on a project of identifying users' needs through a study of the entomology faculty for a thirteen-year period, 1990–2002. It seeks to ascertain whether the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville's collection in entomology provides an adequate collection for research and teaching. Specifically, it is designed to identify (1) publications in which faculty are publishing that may not be in the collection; (2) types of materials that faculty cite in their publications to aid in collection decisions; (3) the age of materials that are cited; (4) which secondary sources include the material cited to aid in instruction sessions; and (5) which journals bought from the entomology serials fund were not cited in this thirteen-year study. In this study we managed to model the information needs of researchers in the Department of Entomology and to quantitatively verify the comprehensiveness of the collection in meeting their research needs. The results indicate that we are on the right track with respect to journal subscriptions. We know that our faculty are using and citing the older literature in their research and that there is considerable overlap in the three databases (CAB Abstracts, Biological Abstracts and AGRICOLA) with respect to the indexing of the journals that faculty publish in and cite.
A calibration experiment using the millimeter-wave imaging radiometer at the UK Meteorological Office calibration facility

The NASA Millimeter-wave Imaging Radiometer (MIR) was recently calibrated at the United Kingdom Meteorological Office radiometer calibration facility. Calibration data acquired at multiple reference temperatures were used to calculate correction factors that compensate for antenna beam efficiencies. These factors were then applied to another data set. Results demonstrate improved instrument calibration.
The Current Perspectives, Theories and Practices of Mobile Learning

Mobile learning (m-learning) is a highly popular multidisciplinary study field around the world. It has attracted a great deal of attention from researchers in different disciplines who have realized the potential to apply mobile technologies to enchance learning. Thus, mobile learning has been defined differently by different people. This study is a review of m-learning literature for understanding and discussion of current perspectives and theories in mobile learning. Additionally, some m-learning practices that are implemented in different sectors such as corporate, university and military have been mentioned.