Plain Version Research Articles

Visualisations with semantic icons: Assessing engagement with distracting elements

As visualisations reach a broad range of audiences, designing visualisations that attract and engage becomes more critical. Prior work suggests that semantic icons entice and immerse the reader; however, little is known about their impact with informational tasks and when the viewer’s attention is divided because of a distracting element. To address this gap, we first explored a variety of semantic icons with various visualisation attributes. The findings of this exploration shaped the design of our primary comparative online user studies, where participants saw a target visualisation with a distracting visualisation on a web page and were asked to extract insights. Their engagement was measured through three dependent variables: (1) visual attention, (2) effort to write insights, and (3) self-reported engagement. In Study 1, we discovered that visualisations with semantic icons were consistently perceived to be more engaging than the plain version. However, we found no differences in visual attention and effort between the two versions. Thus, we ran Study 2 using visualisations with more salient semantic icons to achieve maximum contrast. The results were consistent with our first Study. Furthermore, we found that semantic icons elevated engagement with visualisations depicting less interesting and engaging topics from the participant’s perspective. We extended prior work by demonstrating the semantic value after performing an informational task (extracting insights) and reflecting on the visualisation, besides its value to the first impression. Our findings may be helpful to visualisation designers and storytellers keen on designing engaging visualisations with limited resources. We also contribute reflections on engagement measurements with visualisations and provide future directions.

Exploring the Efficacy of Plain English to Measure Legal Aspirants’ Comprehension of Judicial Judgments

This study attempts to measure the linguistic adequacy of law students with reference to comprehension of judicial judgments and consumption of time. Data is collected in the form of test from the law students. Two tests are constructed comprising of five statements concerned with civil judicial judgments. Test 1 was carrying the original chunks of civil judicial judgments and test 2 was carrying the same test in plain version. Starting and ending of Timings were also essential to mention on the test. Tests were given to the 250 law students of five prestigious universities of Pakistan. The findings of the study revealed that the law students take less time while reading the plain legal language and raised the comprehensibility of judicial judgments.

Gelation characteristics of sodium alginate in presence of flavor molecules

Gelation properties of alginate in the presence of flavor molecules were investigated using small amplitude oscillatory shear tests at temperatures from 10 to 40°C. The apparent gelation time (AGT) was 72 min for plain alginate at 10°C. The AGT was 85 min in the presence of 2-acetyl pyridine and 56 min in the presence of eugenol. Flavor molecules affected dynamic elastic modulus (Gʹ) to a different extent depending upon the gelation temperature. At 10°C, Gʹ was higher for samples with eugenol and 2-acetyl pyridine in comparison to the plain version. At 40°C, Gʹ was generally lower for all flavored samples in comparison to the plain version. This study revealed surfactant properties of flavor molecules, with eugenol having the largest activity by reducing the surface tension of water from 73 to 49 mN/m. The compression force was most affected by the gelation temperature; increasing significantly at 40°C for all flavored gels. Practical applications Most of the available literature focuses on the effect of hydrocolloids on flavor release and perception. However, from industrial point of view, it is equally important to know the influence of flavor molecules on the behavior of hydrocolloids. Studies focusing on this issue are scarcely reported in the literature. This work demonstrates that flavor molecules influence significantly the gelation kinetics and other properties of alginate dispersions. The findings of this work are expected to help process engineers better understand and regulate the alginate gelation process in the presence of flavor molecules.

Die Clavier-Büchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach = The Notebooks for Anna Magdalena Bach 1722 & 1725 by Johann Sebastian Bach

Reviewed by: Die Clavier-Büchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach = The Notebooks for Anna Magdalena Bach 1722 & 1725 by Johann Sebastian Bach David Ledbetter Johann Sebastian Bach et al. Die Clavier-Büchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach = The Notebooks for Anna Magdalena Bach 1722 & 1725. Kritische Ausgabe = Critical Edition. Edited by Christoph Wolff. Leipzig: Edition Peters, 2019. [Contents, p. iii; preface in Ger., Eng., p. iv–viii; facsims., p. ix–xiii; score, p. 2–157; Critical Commentary in Ger., Eng., p. 159–170. ISMN 979-0-014-12600-1; pub. no. Edition Peters 11500. $90] The title Die Clavier-Büchlein may look odd but that is the novelty of this edition. Büchlein can be singular or plural and there are two 'little clavier books' (Staatsbbliothek zu Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Musikabteilung mit Mendelssohn-Archiv (D-B), Mus.ms.Bach P 224 dated 1722, and P 225 dated 1725). Until Georg von Dadelsen's edition of both books for the Neue Bach-Ausgabe (NBA: Johann Sebastian Bach, Neue Ausgabe Sämtlicher Werk, Serie V, Klavier- und Lautenwerke, Band 4 [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1957]) there had been no complete edition of the 1722 book and this seems to be the first one since then, although both manuscripts have been published in facsimile, and both may be viewed at Bach digital (https://www.bach-digital.de/content/index.xed) (accessed 20 April 2020). Bach and Anna Magdalena were married on 3 December 1721 and the 1722 book shows that she was soon drawn into Bach's project for a comprehensive system of musical training that had begun in 1720 with the Clavier-Büchlein for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. The 1722 book appears to be a continuation of that, addressing the keyboard suite, which Bach had not hitherto explored in an educational context. The main contents are the first five French Suites, BWV 812–816. Unlike the English Suites, the French Suites have a marked demonstrational character as a compendium of ways for treating the standard dances of the keyboard suite in the current mixed and galant styles. The educational character goes further in P 224 in what looks like a systematic series of exercises. A fragmentary Fantasia pro Organo, BWV 573 demonstrates how to construct phrases on standard scale sequences over a modulating scheme. Given Bach's technique of repeating sections with variations and developments, it should not be beyond a talented pupil to continue this. The definite final chord suggests that Bach did not intend continuing it himself. Next comes an Air, BWV 991 that appears to be a study for division variations. There is a plain version without bass, then a sixteenth-note variation, then the beginning of a thirty-secondnote variation featuring some galant Seufzer. This also relates to what Johann Joachim Quantz (1697–1773) called voluntary (willkürliche), i.e. florid, improvised ornaments. Again the incompleteness is unlikely to be because Bach [End Page 163] did not get around to finishing it, more likely it is intended for pupils to continue from given beginnings. Finally in this group is a chorale setting BWV 728 with the character of an exercise for Quantz's essential (wesentliche) ornaments: trills, mordents, and so on, usually written with special ornament signs. These three items are typical of Bach's integrated system where performance, improvisation, and composition are taught as a unity. P 224 survives only in a fragmentary state, roughly two-thirds of the book is missing (it was evidently already in this state by the 1780s). It is important for containing Bach's composing drafts of most of the first five French Suites, the only surviving autograph of the Suites (only Suites 1 and 4 approach being clean copies, and leaves are missing from Suites 1–3). All this explains the lack of editions of the 1722 book. An edition of the French Suites will have to take account of pupil copies in order to fill the substantial lacunae, and to reflect Bach's later thoughts. Fortunately Suites 1–4 are complete in a close copy made by a pupil, Bernhard Christian Kayser, who followed Bach from Cöthen to Leipzig in 1723 (D-B, Mus.ms.Bach...

TimeStream: Exploiting video streams for clock synchronization

Network Time Protocol (NTP) is the most commonly used protocol for clock synchronization on the Internet.In the wake of frequent news about attacks that use Network Time Protocol (NTP), we propose a TimeStream algorithm, which – in its plain version (without any extra settings) – successfully synchronizes computer clocks up to seconds, by processing data found in video streams that use HTTP Live Streaming (also known as HLS) protocol. Further increase of precision is possible with a proper setup of the origin video servers.TimeStream provides secure time synchronization without requiring new ports, new hardware, or expensive cryptography, and uses information which – currently – is already making at least 70% of all Internet traffic.We observe that some intrinsic properties of video streaming over HTTP and congestion control of TCP yield some useful properties that facilitate good performance of the proposed method even in adverse network conditions. These make TimeStream to be robust against packet delay manipulation attack in which, an attacker adds specifically crafted delays to packets carrying time information.To the best of our knowledge, TimeStream may be one of the first methods of its kind that uses structure and core features of video streams and underlying network transportation protocol, to extract information about time and opens a new line of research on almost real-time extraction of useful information from video content.

“The Eye’s Plain Version”: Visual Anatomy and Theories of Perception in Stevens

“The Eye’s Plain Version”:Visual Anatomy and Theories of Perception in Stevens Deric Corlew MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN regarding Wallace Stevens’ auditory imagination, the expressive techniques of sound and rhythm characteristic of his poetry. Comparatively little has been written about the role of visual perception in Stevens’ poetry, unless this perception is phrased through the abstract dialectic of reality and the imagination. Although critics such as Christopher Collins have noted “the dependency of imaging on the routines of perception” (90), the visual system has been almost ignored by Stevens’ critics, with the exception of a few isolated close readings and three short chapters in James Baird’s The Dome and the Rock: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. This neglect is made more troublesome by the critical consensus that images, colors, and light play a central role in Stevens’ poetry. The words “eye” and “eyes” appear one hundred and seventy-eight times in Stevens’ Collected Poems, often preceded by tantalizing and confounding adjectives such as “buxom,” “angelic,” and “clairvoyant.”1 Despite this fact, many critics discuss vision only in an abstract sense, finding Emerson’s disembodied “transparent eyeball” (from the opening pages of Nature) more relevant than Stevens’ own grossly physical “eyeball in the mud” (CPP 526). Such accounts describe vision through the framework of transcendence rather than as a physiological process. Indeed, few critics have noted the substantial evidence in Stevens’ poems that suggests his understanding of the physical process of vision, and none, to my knowledge, has connected this evidence to exigent hints from his biography indicating his probable research into visual perception and anatomy of the eye. And yet, as I will argue, Stevens’ verse thoughtfully explores theories of human visual perception and displays familiarity with the specialized language of optical anatomy. Far from using vision as a massive romantic trope, Stevens employs the particulars of the eye’s anatomy in ways that suggest a complex knowledge of perception that meaningfully alters conversations regarding his understanding of the mental and physical processes involved in the imagination. Stevens’ poetry reflects the neuroanatomical understanding that the eye is the only sense organ that is actually “mind,” an extension of the cortex and consequently part of the brain itself. It is the [End Page 207] only place where the brain directly touches the real world, indicating that the act of vision, far from transcending the body, is always limited and shaped by the physiology of the eye. Despite the large body of criticism addressing the relationship between reality and the mind in Stevens, this embodied understanding of the imagination is surprisingly absent in the critical literature. To take two prominent examples, both Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler view the physical process of vision as a burden to be lifted on the pathway to romantic transcendence. Bloom regards the visual aspect of Stevens’ poetry as a figuration hiding his ideological indebtedness, his “anxiety of influence,” to romantic precursors such as Emerson and Whitman: “Reality or the eye’s plain version thus turns out to be only a crossing between turnings, a continual troping in, through, and with the eye” (307). Bloom’s theoretical concern with aporias, disjunctions, and “crossings” ultimately transforms the “eye’s plain version” into an illegible abstraction, ignoring Stevens’ attempts to ground the imagination in the concrete, physiological process of vision. A more attentive and sympathetic critic of Stevens, Vendler nevertheless privileges the temporal over the visuospatial in his work. In her attempt to craft Stevens as a poet of physical desire, she argues that feeling is the organizing principle of his poetry, and that the visual—the conditions in which the world presents itself—is only the starting point: “This transformation of a spatial object into a temporal event is for Stevens the axis on which poetry turns. The world presented itself to him in visual terms; and yet poetry turned the visual object into the temporal integration, into that musical score for experience that we call a poem” (7). Both Bloom and Vendler ultimately assert that Stevens’ strategies for overcoming the physical limitations of the body—and vision in particular—involve a dissolution of the body as vision is “pursued to invisibility” (Vendler 49...

SEU-SECURE PARITY PREDICTION MULTIPLIER ON SRAM-BASED FPGAs

Modern SRAM-based field programmable gate array (FPGA) devices offer high capability in implementing satellites and space systems. Unfortunately, these devices are extremely sensitive to various kinds of unwanted effects induced by space radiations especially single-event upsets (SEUs) as soft errors in configuration memory. To face this challenge, a variety of soft error mitigation techniques have been adopted in literature. In this paper, we describe an area-efficient multiplier architecture based on SRAM-FPGA that provides the self-checking capability against SEU faults. The proposed design approach, which is based on parity prediction, is able to concurrently detect the SEU faults. The implementation results of the proposed architecture reveal that the average area and delay overheads are respectively 25% and 34% in comparison with the plain version while the conventional duplication with comparison (DWC) architecture imposes 117% and 22% overheads. Moreover, the single and multi-upset fault injection experiments reveal that the proposed architecture averagely provides the failure coverage of 83% and 79% while the failure coverage of the duplicated structure is 85% and 84%, respectively for SEU and MEU faults.

Modulo Search Trees (Plain and Z-Overlapped)

This paper exploits the modulo division operation to construct a tree which is termed as Modulo search tree with two versions out of which one is coined as Plain Modulo Search Tree and the other is termed as Z-Overlapped Modulo search Tree . The use of the term Modulo search tree implicitly implies the plain version of the tree. Searching Data in Modulo search tree will have better complexity as compared to the Binary Search tree. But the plain Modulo search tree structure requires more storage space to implement. Albeit, in contrast to the plain version of the Modulo search tree, Z-Overlapped version addresses the issue of extra storage and minimizes the storage requirement. And hence provides a flexibility (with the value of Z) to the implementer to choose a mid path between search time and storage space as and when required.

A Framework for Adaptive Game Presenters with Emotions and Social Comments

More and more games today try to adjust their gameplay to fit individual players; however, little work has been carried out in the same direction towards game presenter characters. Game commentary should take into account players' personalities along with game progress in order to achieve social player-adapted comment delivery that boosts the overall gameplay, engages the players, and stimulates the audience. In our work, we discuss a framework for implementing artificial game presenter characters that are based on game actions and players' social profiles in order to deliver knowledgeable, socially oriented comments. Moreover, the presented framework supports emotional facial expressions for the presenters, allowing them to convey their emotions and thus be more expressive than the majority of the commentary systems today. We prove our concept by developing a presenter character for multiplayer tabletop board games which we further put under usability evaluation with 9 players. The results showed that game sessions with presenter characters are preferred over the plain version of the game and that the majority of the players enjoy personalized social-oriented comments expressed via multimedia and emotions.

Breaking the Ice

This case explores the challenges of implementing an enterprise system (ES) across a university with a diverse organizational culture. This teaching case describes the process through which Southern University sought to implement the Delta student management system (SMS) and the challenges encountered due to the university’s organizational culture. The project team ran into a change resistant culture with organizational units that enjoyed autonomy in their business processes. Rather than attend to various needs by customizing the system, the project team implemented a plain version of the system. Although this approach ensured the project team was able to complete the implementation on time and within budget, it left behind many dissatisfied users and organizational members, and created resistance within the organization toward the system. Therefore, this case provides opportunities for students to discuss the impact of organizational culture and user resistance on IS implementations as well as the merits and limitations of the strategies employed by the project team to ensure the new system was implemented on time and within budget.

Design and effectiveness of a computer-based continuing education program for orthodontists.

The design of computer-based continuing education for health professionals is an important consideration for Internet delivery because the size of graphic files greatly affects the speed with which information is delivered. Orthodontists who had indicated an interest in computer-based continuing education were shown via CD-ROM either a dynamic version of a computer continuing education program (with transitions and animations to liven up the content) or a plain version (identical content except that the transitions and animations were omitted). The program provided new information about superelastic arch wires for the initial stage of orthodontic treatment. For both versions, over 90% of the viewers thought the program was well done and provided useful information. Six of the orthodontists who received the dynamic version felt that the animations were distracting rather than helpful; only one who received the plain version felt that it was lifeless. A follow-up questionnaire showed that two-thirds of those who viewed the program had subsequently reviewed the performance data for the initial wire they were using and 20% had changed it, so the computer program was effective in changing clinical behavior. Those who saw the plain version also were more likely to have changed their clinical procedures. For Internet delivery of information to highly motivated professionals, it appears that transitions and animations are not necessary and may be more likely to decrease than increase the effectiveness of the teaching material.

Damage Tolerance of a Composite Sandwich with Interleaved Foam Core

A composite sandwich panel consisting of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP) skins and a syntactic foam core was selected as an appropriate structural concept for the design of wind tunnel compressor blades. Interleaving of the core with tough interlayers was doen to prevent core cracking and improve damage tolerance of the sandwich. Simply supported sandwich beam specimens were subjected to low-velocity, drop-weight impacts as well as high-velocity, ballistic impacts. The performance of the interleaved core sandwich panels was characterized by localized skin damage and minor cracking of the core. Residual compressive strength (RCS) of the skin, which was derived from flexural test, shows the expected trend of decreasing with increasing size of the damage, impact energy, and velocity. In the case of skin damage, RCS values of around 50% of the virgin interleaved reference were obtained at the upper impact energy range. Based on the similarity between low velocity and ballistic impact effects, it was concluded that impact energy is the main variable controlling damage and residual strength, where as velocity plays a minor role. The superiority (in damage tolerance) of the composite sandwich with interleaved foam core, as compared with its plain version, is well established. This is attributable to the toughening effect of the interlayers which serve the dual role of crack arrestor and energy absorber of the impact loading.

Writing the Limits of Representation: Balzac, Zola, and Tournier on Art and Photography

In Wallace Stevens' An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, a certain Professor Eucalyptus philosophizes that search for reality is as momentous as the search for god.' If this search drives the scientist, the philosopher, or the poet, it is no less the quest of artists for whom the search is bound up with the need to confront the real with forms of their own making, forms that embody hypotheses about the nature of reality and of art. Crucial to the artist's search are both the limits of realistic representation-for as one of Balzac's artists notes: pour notre malheur, il est des effets vrais dans la nature qui ne sont plus probables sur la toile2-and the status of the representation: its referential relationship to an object considered outside the page or frame, what Stevens' poem terms eye's plain version... a thing apart, / The vulgate of experience (I.1-2). This paper will explore the limits of representation as they emerge in three short stories, in order of consideration: Zola's L'Inondation3, Michel Tournier's Les Suaires de Veronique in Le Coq de Bruy~re4, and Balzac's Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu5. All three stories adopt, at least superficially, the realistic aesthetics for which Balzac and Zola are the traditional models. Zola's story is based on an actual flood of the Garonne River; Balzac describes the events that befall the young Nicolas Poussin in a studio on the Quai des Grands Augustins three centuries before Picasso would take up residence there. Tournier's story takes place in Arles during the yearly Rencontres internationales de la Photographie, which the author most certainly attended, and its first person narrator could, by essentialist reduction, be taken as Tournier himself. This evocation of an actual historical setting serves to authenticate the events of the narrative, and in turn they are a foil for the realism of the painterly or photographic representations that figure in each story. The imbrication of first degree realism (the referential qualities of the narrative) and second degree realism (the discourse in the narrative concerning photographic and pictorial realism) complicate the reader's notions of representation and of referentiality. Each story dramatizes the limits of realist representation, that is,

1st Class

FIRST CLASS is an inductive expert system development tool written by William Hapgood and supplied by 1 st‐Class Expert Systems Inc. The product runs on IBM PC, XT and AT computers and close compatibles, running MS/DOS 2.0 or higher. It is sold in two versons, 1st‐Class (at $495 U.S.) and 1st‐Class Fusion (at $1295). This is a review of the plain version; but mention of ‘Fusion’ facilities is made where appropriate. 1st‐Class Expert Systems Inc. can be contacted at: 286 Boston Post Road, Wayland, Massachusetts 1778, USA (617 358–7722).