High-level Attributes Research Articles

Verbatim repetition and musical engagement.

The topics of musical similarity and variation have received considerable attention both from a psychological perspective (Deliege, 2007) and from a musicological perspective (Sisman, 1993; Zbikowski, 2002). Less well studied has been its correlate, exact repetition. A recent book (Margulis, 2013a) attempts to remedy that oversight, synthesizing work from a number of fields to outline a theory about the enduring appeal of musical repetition. Recent empirical work has suggested that repetition can shift listeners' attention to higher-level attributes of the musical stimulus (Margulis, 2012) and elicit more enjoyment from listeners and higher ratings of intentional artistry (Margulis, 2013b).An interesting borderline case between the poles of repetition and variation is performer nuance. Even when the notation is identical among different iterations of a principal theme, performers often change expressive inflections, altering dynamics and microtiming on each rendition. For example, the famous theme in Chopin's Polonaise in A major, Op. 40/1 recurs several times across the course of the piece. Pianists make many nuanced changes from rendition to rendition. For example, a pianist can withhold volume during the penultimate rendition to make the unleashing of maximal volume during the final rendition even more impressive.A skeptic might inquire whether these differences are intentional; perhaps performers simply lack the cognitive or motor control to execute sequences with a high degree of expressive fidelity. Gabrielsson (1987) examined pianists' expressive timing as they performed the first movement of Mozart's Piano Sonata in A, K. 331. Figure 1 captures the percentage deviation from notated durational values in performances by two pianists of the theme on its first statement (solid line) and then on its subsequent repeat (dotted line). The dotted line cleaves closely to the solid line for both pianists; their second performance of the theme was quite expressively faithful to their first. Shaffer (1984) also provides evidence that performers are capable of reproducing expressive elements. That study measured expressive timing characteristics during two performances of a Chopin Etude recorded two years apart by the same pianist. The second performance replicated the first in remarkable detail.Performers are able to replicate expressive inflections from one performance to another, so it seems likely that the deviations they make are expressively intentional. The question of what motivates these expressive choices is a fascinating topic of ongoing research (cf. Juslin & Timmers, 2010). An associated issue is the effect of these replications and deviations on listeners. Are they able explicitly or implicitly to register changes in performer nuance across renditions? How much deviation is required before a listener registers it? Do they prefer performances where repetitions are mostly exact, or performances where subtle variations have been introduced? What are the consequences of exact versus varied repetition for other aspects of musical listening and attention?Repetition, unsurprisingly, tends to enhance memory for melodies. Deutsch (1979) tested people's memory for a short atonal melody after it had been presented in one of several ways: a single time, repeated such that the second statement was an exact repetition of the first, or repeated such that the second statement involved an octave transposition. Performance on the memory task was best when the participants had heard the melody repeated exactly, but even a transposed repetition improved performance better than did a single presentation. Gardiner, Kaminska, Dixon, and Java (1996) showed that repetition increased both remember and know responses for music in an unfamiliar style, and remember but not know responses for music in a familiar style.Studies have shown that memory for the verbatim aspects of speech-the exact words and sounds used to convey the thoughts- decays rapidly and is replaced by memory for the gist, the basic content of the utterance (Gernsbacher, 1985; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995). …

Impact of Organizational Trust on Employee Morale

This study attempts to investigate the extent to which the organizational trust of these employees is significantly related to employee morale in comparison between Sri Lanka Telecom and Ceylon Electricity Board in Trincomalee Town and Gravets, Sri Lanka. Findings explore a positive significant relationship between organizational trust and employee morale. Comparatively, correlation coefficient of the relationship is higher for the employees in Sri Lanka Telecom than for the employees in Ceylon Electricity Board. Further, results indicate that all employees in both organizations have high level attributes of organizational trust and employee morale. Comparatively, Sri Lanka Telecom has higher level attribute in organizational trust and Ceylon Electricity Board has higher level attribute in employee morale. Extended analysis confirms that there is a difference between mean values of organizational trust and employee morale in Sri Lanka Telecom and Ceylon Electricity Board in Trincomalee Town and Gravets, Sri Lanka.

Ciphertext-policy hierarchical attribute-based encryption with short ciphertexts

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) systems allow encrypting to uncertain receivers by means of an access policy specifying the attributes that the intended receivers should possess. ABE promises to deliver fine-grained access control of encrypted data. However, when data are encrypted using an ABE scheme, key management is difficult if there is a large number of users from various backgrounds. In this paper, we elaborate on ABE and propose a new versatile cryptosystem referred to as ciphertext-policy hierarchical ABE (CP-HABE). In a CP-HABE scheme, the attributes are organized in a matrix and the users having higher-level attributes can delegate their access rights to the users at a lower level. These features enable a CP-HABE system to host a large number of users from different organizations by delegating keys, e.g., enabling efficient data sharing among hierarchically organized large groups. We construct a CP-HABE scheme with short ciphertexts. The scheme is proven secure in the standard model under non-interactive assumptions.

A Systematic Method for Specifying Effective Value Models

It has been argued that a value-driven approach can potentially eliminate troubling issues that arise during the design process, such as cost and schedule overrun, by taking a holistic perspective on how individual design decisions impact high-level attributes of concern. However, value-driven approaches can be difficult to implement in practice, at least partly because supporting tools and methods have not yet been sufficiently developed. Additionally, due to the multitude of researchers investigating the concept of value, it can be difficult to unambiguously characterize what defines an effective value model.In this paper, we attempt to address these issues by first reviewing the literature to produce a clear and concise enumeration of the characteristics of effective value models. Next, a three-stage systematic method is presented as a tool to aid in the specification of value models. To demonstrate the use of the method, a case study is presented that investigates the conceptual design of a multiple- input multiple output hybrid energy system.

Showing a tree to sell the forest: The impact of attribute- and alternative-based information presentation on consumers’ choices

Consumers can be provided with information in either an attribute- or an alternative-based way. We consider the literature on information presentation through the theoretical lenses of the Construal Level Theory. We propose and find that providing product-related information in an attribute- rather than an alternative-based way shifts choices. The attribute-based pattern leads to high construal levels and choices driven by desirability-related, high-level attributes (e.g., design). But when the same information is acquired following the alternative-based pattern, it leads to low construal levels and choices driven by feasibility-related, low-level attributes (e.g., price). As a consequence, choice shares for products whose strength lies in convenience and other feasibility-related features are boosted by the presentation of alternative-based information. Conversely, choice shares for products whose strength lies in design and other desirability-related features are increased by the presentation of attribute-based information. We further find that consumers acquiring information in an alternative-based way envision consumption much closer in the future than those acquiring information in an attribute-based way. Finally, we find that attribute-based information leads to more clicking.

High-level attributes modeling for indoor scenes classification

Scene classification is a challenging problem in computer vision. Though conventional methods show good performance in recognizing outdoor scenes, these methods does not work well in indoor scenes recognition. In recent years, high level image representations consisted of semantic attribute information has been introduced to solve this problem. However, a key technical challenge for these representations is the “curse of dimensionality”, caused by the large numbers of objects and high dimensionality of the response vector for each object. In this paper, we propose a hypergraph learning algorithm based feature selection method for indoor scene classification. It performs feature selection by hypergraph regularization, which not only considers the interaction among features but also the interaction between the feature selection heuristics and the corresponding classifier. For the convenience of the prediction of the new images, a liner regression model is integrated in the framework, making the new images classification directly and in real time. The experimental results show that our approach has satisfactory performance compared with previously proposed methods.

Assessing the impact of the tableware and other contextual variables on multisensory flavour perception

Currently little is known about how the non-edible items associated with eating and drinking (tableware items such as the plates, bowls, cutlery, glasses, bottles, condiment containers, etc.), or even environmental factors (such as the lighting and/or background music), affect people’s perception of foodstuffs. Here, we review the latest evidence demonstrating the importance of these contextual variables on the consumer’s behavioural and hedonic response to, and sensory perception of, a variety of food and drink items. These effects are explained by a combination of psychological factors (high level attributes, such as perceived quality, that may be mediating the effects under consideration), perceptual factors (such as the Ebbinghaus-Titchener size-contrast illusion and colour contrast in the case of the colour of the plateware affecting taste/flavour perception), and physiological-chemical factors (such as differences in the release of volatile organic compounds from differently-shaped wine glasses). Together, these factors help to explain the growing body of evidence demonstrating that both the tableware and the environment can have a profound effect on our perception of food and drink.

Customer Satisfaction in Terms of Physical Evidence and Employee Interaction

The study attempt to explore the level of customer satisfaction in terms of physical evidence and employee interaction in comparison between earlier established banks (before the year 2008) and newly established banks (after 2008) in the northern region of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Results indicate that all banks have high level attributes of customers for satisfaction with the bank service provided in terms of physical evidence and employee interaction. Further analysis confirms that there is a difference in service as being provided and the layout of physical evidence between earlier established banks (EEB) and newly established banks (NEB) in creating customer satisfaction.

The Relationship of Brand Equity to Purchase Intention

This study empirically examines the relationship between Brand Equity (BE) as the independent variable and Purchase Intention (PI) as the dependent variable in relation to branded baby soaps selectively. While both the variables individually have high level attributes of the customers, the Pearson’s correlation analysis explores a positively significant linear relationship between BE and PI. This implies that the PI of a customer for purchasing branded baby soap can be predicted with the customer’s nature of BE. The correlation coefficient between the BE and PI indicates that the BE of a customer is useful to explain the variation in PI of a customer. Further analysis of regression model with intercept indicates that it needs additional suitable variables to predict unexplained variation of 68% of the PI. However, the model without intercept indicates that BE alone can predict the PI by explaining its more than 99% variation.

Cortical Networks Representing Object Categories and High-level Attributes of Familiar Real-world Action Sounds

In contrast to visual object processing, relatively little is known about how the human brain processes everyday real-world sounds, transforming highly complex acoustic signals into representations of meaningful events or auditory objects. We recently reported a fourfold cortical dissociation for representing action (nonvocalization) sounds correctly categorized as having been produced by human, animal, mechanical, or environmental sources. However, it was unclear how consistent those network representations were across individuals, given potential differences between each participant's degree of familiarity with the studied sounds. Moreover, it was unclear what, if any, auditory perceptual attributes might further distinguish the four conceptual sound-source categories, potentially revealing what might drive the cortical network organization for representing acoustic knowledge. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to test participants before and after extensive listening experience with action sounds, and tested for cortices that might be sensitive to each of three different high-level perceptual attributes relating to how a listener associates or interacts with the sound source. These included the sound's perceived concreteness, effectuality (ability to be affected by the listener), and spatial scale. Despite some variation of networks for environmental sounds, our results verified the stability of a fourfold dissociation of category-specific networks for real-world action sounds both before and after familiarity training. Additionally, we identified cortical regions parametrically modulated by each of the three high-level perceptual sound attributes. We propose that these attributes contribute to the network-level encoding of category-specific acoustic knowledge representations.

What can we expect of clinical teachers? Establishing consensus on applicable skills, attitudes and practices

Despite myriad advances in medical education, we have not yet established a universally accepted set of attributes we can reasonably expect from our teachers. A modified Delphi technique established the skills, attitudes and practices thought to be core for clinical teachers within our region. We identified relevant statements from the literature. Individuals with significant involvement in undergraduate teaching acted as Delphi panelists. Four statement categories emerged: Preparing to Teach, Delivery of Teaching, Teacher Conduct and Supporting Activities. Two iterations of the Delphi round then took place. In the first round, panelists were asked to accept, reject or develop the statements identified from the literature. In the second round, they were asked to accept or reject modified statements. Throughout the exercise panelists were expected to differentiate between what could be expected from both those involved in clinical undergraduate education and those with a specialist educational remit. Agreement of > or = 80% was used to assign statements to basic or advanced categories. A total of 38 regional panelists participated in the Delphi process. After the 2 iterations, 27 statements were accepted at basic level, mostly in Teacher Conduct (11), and least in Supporting Activities (2). Overall, only 4 statements scored > 80% at advanced level. Many statements (25 of 56), were not clearly defined as either basic or advanced and failed to gain acceptance > 80% for either category. A useful set of attributes has been developed that can be applied to a majority of clinical teachers. There was less agreement than expected around higher level attributes. Further debate is invited.

Mass extinctions and macroevolution

Mass extinctions are important to macroevolution not only because they involve a sharp increase in extinction intensity over “background” levels, but also because they bring a change in extinction selectivity, and these quantitative and qualitative shifts set the stage for evolutionary recoveries. The set of extinction intensities for all stratigraphic stages appears to fall into a single right-skewed distribution, but this apparent continuity may derive from failure to factor out the well-known secular trend in background extinction: high early Paleozoic rates fill in the gap between later background extinction and the major mass extinctions. In any case, the failure of many organism-, species-, and clade-level traits to predict survivorship during mass extinctions is a more important challenge to the extrapolationist premise that all macroevolutionary processes are simply smooth extensions of microevolution. Although a variety of factors have been found to correlate with taxon survivorship for particular extinction events, the most pervasive effect involves geographic range at the clade level, an emergent property independent of the range sizes of constituent species. Such differential extinction would impose “nonconstructive selectivity,” in which survivorship is unrelated to many organismic traits but is not strictly random. It also implies that correlations among taxon attributes may obscure causation, and even the focal level of selection, in the survival of a trait or clade, for example when widespread taxa within a major group tend to have particular body sizes, trophic habits, or metabolic rates. Survivorship patterns will also be sensitive to the inexact correlations of taxonomic, morphological, and functional diversity, to phylogenetically nonrandom extinction, and to the topology of evolutionary trees. Evolutionary recoveries may be as important as the extinction events themselves in shaping the long-term trajectories of individual clades and permitting once-marginal groups to diversify, but we know little about sorting processes during recovery intervals. However, both empirical extrapolationism (where outcomes can be predicted from observation of pre- or post-extinction patterns) and theoretical extrapolationism (where mechanisms reside exclusively at the level of organisms within populations) evidently fail during mass extinctions and their evolutionary aftermath. This does not mean that conventional natural selection was inoperative during mass extinctions, but that many features that promoted survivorship during background times were superseded as predictive factors by higher-level attributes. Many intriguing issues remain, including the generality of survivorship rules across extinction events; the potential for gradational changes in selectivity patterns with extinction intensity or the volatility of target clades; the heritability of clade-level traits; the macroevolutionary consequences of the inexact correlations between taxonomic, morphological, and functional diversity; the factors governing the dynamics and outcome of recoveries; and the spatial fabric of extinctions and recoveries. The detection of general survivorship rules—including the disappearance of many patterns evident during background times—demonstrates that studies of mass extinctions and recovery can contribute substantially to evolutionary theory.

Global, geometric, and feature-based techniques for vector field visualization

Vector field visualization techniques are subdivided into three categories: global, geometric, and feature-based techniques. We describe each category, and we present some related work and an example in each category from our own recent research. Spot noise is a texture synthesis technique for global visualization of vector fields on 2D surfaces. Deformable surfaces is a generic technique for extraction and visualization of geometric objects (surfaces or volumes) in 3D data fields. Selective and iconic visualization is an approach that extracts important regions or structures from large data sets, calculates high-level attributes, and visualizes the features using parameterized iconic objects. It is argued that for vector fields a range of visualization techniques are needed to fulfill the needs of the application.

Parallel search for conjunctions with stimuli in apparent motion.

A series of experiments was conducted to determine whether apparent motion tends to follow the similarity rule (i.e. is attribute-specific) and to investigate the underlying mechanism. Stimulus duration thresholds were measured during a two-alternative forced-choice task in which observers detected either the location or the motion direction of target groups defined by the conjunction of size and orientation. Target element positions were randomly chosen within a nominally defined rectangular subregion of the display (target region). The target region was presented either statically (followed by a 250 ms duration mask) or dynamically, displaced by a small distance (18 min of arc) from frame to frame. In the motion display, the position of both target and background elements was changed randomly from frame to frame within the respective areas to abolish spatial correspondence over time. Stimulus duration thresholds were lower in the motion than in the static task, indicating that target detection in the dynamic condition does not rely on the explicit identification of target elements in each static frame. Increasing the distractor-to-target ratio was found to reduce detectability in the static, but not in the motion task. This indicates that the perceptual segregation of the target is effortless and parallel with motion but not with static displays. The pattern of results holds regardless of the task or search paradigm employed. The detectability in the motion condition can be improved by increasing the number of frames and/or by reducing the width of the target area. Furthermore, parallel search in the dynamic condition can be conducted with both short-range and long-range motion stimuli. Finally, apparent motion of conjunctions is insufficient on its own to support location decision and is disrupted by random visual noise. Overall, these findings show that (i) the mechanism underlying apparent motion is attribute-specific; (ii) the motion system mediates temporal integration of feature conjunctions before they are identified by the static system; and (iii) target detectability in these stimuli relies upon a nonattentive, cooperative, directionally selective motion mechanism that responds to high-level attributes (conjunction of size and orientation).

Machine learning approach to machinability analysis

Optimisation and automation of determination of cutting conditions in operation planning depend significantly on availability of reliable machinability data and knowledge. In order to improve and automate the tool selection and determination of cutting parameters in operation planning we have to re-formulate and generalise the existing machinability knowledge. In the paper the existent machinability data base was analysed by the use of machine learning methodology. A multi-stage experiment has been carried out, comprising (1) preparatory phase in which manual construction of higher level attributes and grouping of similar learning examples to obtain more consistent decision trees was performed, and (2) learning relations between workpiece materials to be machined, cutting tool features and cutting conditions. Within the learning process several decision trees have been synthesised predicting tool features, cutting geometry and cutting parameters from a set of attribute values. The investigation has revealed the extended insight into the machinability domain, as well as the possible knowledge synthesis regarding workpiece material to be machined and cutting tool as a bottom-line in operation planning for NC-programming and automated process planning.

The character of things

People, as well as things, appear to have character—high-level attributes that help us understand and relate to them. A character is a coherent set of characteristics and attributes that apply to appearance and behaviour alike, cutting across different functions, situations and value systems—esthetical, technical, ethical—providing support for anticipation, interpretation and interaction. Consistency in character may become more important than ever in the increasingly complex artifacts of our computer-supported future.

Topological reasoning about dextrous grasps

The need, in robot manipulation, for higher levels of dexterity and versatility than those provided by grippers and by special-purpose end-effectors has prompted much research effort during the last decade on the design and control of multifingered hands. Most work on multifingered robot hands has dealt with low-level, numeric control, commonly based on screw theory and tools drawn from line geometry, differential geometry, kinematics, and dynamics. Current numeric, contact-based schemes, however, are limited to tip prehension (intentional grasping by the fingertips). The intriguing ease with which humans perform grasping and manipulation activities has concurrently triggered new investigations to provide robots with humanlike, prehensile capability for complex tasks in unstructured environments. These investigations have resulted in numerous AI-oriented, task-directed, distributed, symbolic schemes that have been conducted essentially independently. Efforts to link symbolic and numeric schemes have been undertaken, but the results have been rather modest. This paper deals with an intelligent, integrated symbolic-numeric scheme for dextrous manipulation, using a topological approach. In this paper, we introduce a reasoning scheme called topological reasoning that is used in conjunction with a grasp-based, topological model for uniform representations of multifingered robot hands at different levels of detail (e.g., whole hand, finger, joint), and discuss its application to dextrous manipulation (grasp selection and regrasping). We show that using topological reasoning, both hand posture and hand functionality can be derived from symbolic, high-level task requirements and object attributes, and can be transformed into numeric, low-level, joint space variables. Furthermore, the reasoning scheme is applicable not only to tip prehension, but also to palm prehension and any combination of the two.

Characterization of electricity demand in a power system for service sufficiency evaluation

A methodology for the assessment of power system effectiveness is outlined; it is based on the evaluation of a hierarchy of attributes that describe the demand for the supply of electricity independently from each other. This paper addresses the characterization of demand for electricity. Besides the quantitative primitive descriptions of demand (which refer to when or how often electricity is needed), such as time profile and duration curve, qualitative primitives, which describe the demand for reliability or service quality, are also introduced. From those measures, higher level attributes can be derived under specific assumptions about the management policy of the utility company. The comparison between demand and supply attributes provides the basis for the evaluation of one of the components of system effectiveness: service sufficiency. The spatial distribution of the loads is taken into account: attributes corresponding to end user nodes are propagated through the distribution system and replaced by equivalent attributes at the distribution substations, where they can be compared with supply characterizations.