Editing Tasks Research Articles

Gedenkschrift for Brian Roy Stuckenberg (1930–2009)

Three years ago our esteemed colleague Brian Stuckenberg, the doyen of Afrotropical dipterology, left his professional fraternity and this world. Time flies like an arrow, yet our memories of Brian do not fade. This is best attested by the present issue of African Invertebrates that commemorates Brian's life and scientific career with contributions made by 37 fellow dipterists from 15 countries. The Gedenkschrift opens with a dedication article by A.H. Kirk-Spriggs, who provides a biography and summary of Brian's major achievements. The article is supplemented by Brian's previously unpublished reports on his two Madagascan expeditions and includes a full list of his publications. The following 20 articles deal with the taxonomy, nomenclature, systematics and biogeography of representatives of 19 families of nematoceran and brachyceran Diptera. In total, four new genera and 58 new species are described, with one genus and 16 species named after Brian. Most papers include identification keys. All articles are of a high standard and make a substantial addition to our knowledge of Afrotropical Diptera, still I would like to highlight several contributions. T. Dikow's detailed review of the Mydidae tribe Halterorchini is the first cybertaxonomic article in the history of African Invertebrates . By providing hyperlinks to ZooBank, Morphbank and GBIF, it sets a new standard for future taxonomic publications in the journal. J.-H. Stuke's revision of Stylogaster (Conopidae) is the most comprehensive and richly illustrated study done on this genus in the Afrotropics, and is directly linked to Brian's interest in this genus back in 1960s. Brian also had a particular interest in the bruchomyiine moth flies (Psychodidae) and himself contributed to the study of fossil and modern representatives of the genus Nemopalpus in the article prepared by R. Wagner. The Afrotropical Diptera fauna is still far from being exhaustively known, and Brian's legacy for the present and upcoming generations of dipterists is to study it in its entirety. I wish to thank all contributors to this Gedenkschrift and numerous reviewers, who critically evaluated all the manuscripts. Dr A.H. Kirk-Spriggs solicited contributions, co-ordinated the peer-review process and handled correspondence with the authors; this project would not have succeeded without him. I am grateful to Prof. D.J. Brothers, who expertly commented on numerous manuscripts and generously undertook the laborious task of language editing; copy-editing was also done by Prof. M.B. Markus. I sincerely appreciate meticulous work of Mr B. Muller, our graphics editor, and Dr M. Ovechkina, who did the proof-reading of each article and the entire issue. Last but not least, I would like to express my deep gratitude to the Deputy Director of the KwaZulu-Natal Museum Mr S. Miya and the Chief Financial Manager Mr M. Mazibuko for their overall and financial support of the journal. I regret that some manuscripts could not be included in this Gedenkschrift due to technical reasons; they will be published in the next issue of African Invertebrates , thus continuing to commemorate Brian. To cite this paper: Mostovski, M. 2012. Gedenkschrift for Brian Roy Stuckenberg (1930-2009). African Invertebrates 53 (1): (2).

SimpleFlow: A Non‐iterative, Sublinear Optical Flow Algorithm

AbstractOptical flow is a critical component of video editing applications, e.g. for tasks such as object tracking, segmentation, and selection. In this paper, we propose an optical flow algorithm called SimpleFlow whose running times increase sublinearly in the number of pixels. Central to our approach is a probabilistic representation of the motion flow that is computed using only local evidence and without resorting to global optimization. To estimate the flow in image regions where the motion is smooth, we use a sparse set of samples only, thereby avoiding the expensive computation inherent in traditional dense algorithms. We show that our results can be used as is for a variety of video editing tasks. For applications where accuracy is paramount, we use our result to bootstrap a global optimization. This significantly reduces the running times of such methods without sacrificing accuracy. We also demonstrate that the SimpleFlow algorithm can process HD and 4K footage in reasonable times.

Gender Differences in Interface Type Task Analysis

The three pillars of usability are efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction. Today’s human-computer interface (HCI), used in cellular phone, software, Internet, personal digital assistants and others should be designed to meet these three pillars. This research investigates the influence of two different interfaces on usability as they relate to gender. An experiment was conducted such that objective data were first captured while participants were performing specific image editing tasks, followed by a subjective evaluation of the participants’ experience. The independent variables were gender and the interface. The dependent variables were task completion time, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. Results suggest that males outperform females in new tasks while using a menu driven interface and both new and common tasks while using an icon based interface. Both genders seem to take longer time to complete the same task (for both common and new) using an icon based interface. It was also found that there was general agreement among gender and interface type on the level of perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of the image editing software used. Important differences in the distribution characteristics were noted. Implications for researchers and software developers are discussed.

PyMod: sequence similarity searches, multiple sequence-structure alignments, and homology modeling within PyMOL

BackgroundIn recent years, an exponential growing number of tools for protein sequence analysis, editing and modeling tasks have been put at the disposal of the scientific community. Despite the vast majority of these tools have been released as open source software, their deep learning curves often discourages even the most experienced users.ResultsA simple and intuitive interface, PyMod, between the popular molecular graphics system PyMOL and several other tools (i.e., [PSI-]BLAST, ClustalW, MUSCLE, CEalign and MODELLER) has been developed, to show how the integration of the individual steps required for homology modeling and sequence/structure analysis within the PyMOL framework can hugely simplify these tasks. Sequence similarity searches, multiple sequence and structural alignments generation and editing, and even the possibility to merge sequence and structure alignments have been implemented in PyMod, with the aim of creating a simple, yet powerful tool for sequence and structure analysis and building of homology models.ConclusionsPyMod represents a new tool for the analysis and the manipulation of protein sequences and structures. The ease of use, integration with many sequence retrieving and alignment tools and PyMOL, one of the most used molecular visualization system, are the key features of this tool.Source code, installation instructions, video tutorials and a user's guide are freely available at the URL http://schubert.bio.uniroma1.it/pymod/index.html

Image composition by constraining responses of filters

This study proposes a unified method for a wide variety of image composition tasks. The proposed method is developed by constraining the responses of a set of filters to a target image. Each filter describes an attribute of the target image. Also, each attribute field is assumed to be equal to the corresponding attribute field of an input source. The constraints imposed by all those attributes are weighted heterogeneously and formulated into a minimisation problem. For different tasks, the required attributes (e.g. gradient, texture and colour constraints) can be specified by different sources (e.g. from a given image, constructed from several images or specified by users). The framework is flexible and can be configured to meet a variety of image editing tasks. To validate the effectiveness of this method, a variety of applications have been presented, including face data illumination removal, remote-sensing images fusion, texture transfer, multi-focus image fusion, seamless texture tiling and text layer transfer. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed method is effective in performance for the presented image editing tasks with comparisons to classical methods for the specified tasks.

L1 Use and Language-Related Episodes (LREs) in an EFL Setting

Pair and small group work is infrequently welcomed in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes under the assumption that students tend to use their first language (L1), which is considered detrimental to learning the new language. From sociocultural perspective, however, students’ first language is claimed to play the role of an important psychological tool and can facilitate the learning process. Hence, the current study is an investigation to examine the impact of students’ L1 use on their collaborative interaction, specifically on the construct of language-related episodes (LREs), in completing form-focused editing tasks in pairs in an EFL context. The findings show that learners’ L1 can affect their interactional talk and can play certain socio-cognitive roles such as the provision of explanations for the suggestions made in pair, helping make sense of the utterances, sharing ideas instead of unilateral solutions to linguistic problems, and assisting one another in reaching solutions to the problems at hand. The functions were seen to be all conducive to the pair members’ target language development.

نظرات الشیخ محمد محیی الدین عبد الحمید فی تحلیل الشعر ونقده شرح ابن عقیل على ألفیة ابن مالک أنموذجا

Abstract Sheikh Mohammad Mohi Addin Abdulhamid’s Perspectives in Analyzing and Criticizing Poetry: Ibn Aqils Commentary on Alfiyah Ibn Malik as a Model By: Dr. Abu Al Fotoh Mustafa Juma Rashwan Sheikh Mohammad Mohi Addin Abdulhamid’s vision in editing “Sharah Ibn Aqeel” was characterized as comprehensive. He not only did editing tasks, but he also applied other literary critic tasks. His work, as a result, was interesting and convincing. This pairing between the two tasks opened the texts wide for him. His analysis and criticism of the poetic lines were varied. He cared for relating the text to its author. He also introduced the poet, stated the poem’s occasion, clarified the poetic purpose, determined the context, and criticized the language. He further explained the meaning and criticized it, and he also criticized the rhythm and the literary image. His criticism, in all, was at some times objective and at others it was subjective. He also justified and balanced most of his criticism. نظرات الشيخ محمد محيي الدين عبد الحميد في تحليل الشعر ونقده شرح ابن عقيل على ألفية ابن مالک أنموذجا د/ أبو الفتوح مصطفى

Outsourcing inspiration: The performance effects of ideological messages from leaders and beneficiaries

Although ideological messages are thought to inspire employee performance, research has shown mixed results. Typically, ideological messages are delivered by leaders, but employees may be suspicious of ulterior motives—leaders may merely be seeking to inspire higher performance. As such, we propose that these messages are often more effective when outsourced to a more neutral third party—the beneficiaries of employees’ work. In Study 1, a field quasi-experiment with fundraisers, ideological messages from a beneficiary—but not from two leaders—increased performance. In Study 2, a laboratory experiment with an editing task, participants achieved higher task and citizenship performance when an ideological message was delivered by a speaker portrayed as a beneficiary vs. a leader, mediated by suspicion. In Study 3, a laboratory experiment with a marketing task, the beneficiary source advantage was contingent on message content: beneficiaries motivated higher task and citizenship performance than leaders with prosocial messages but not achievement messages.

Special Aloe Issue

Special Aloe Issue Thanks go out to all of you who responded to my request for material for this special issue, and to the readers who support this publication. The past year has seen a lot of change in this publication. Contrast between text and background issues have been resolved. Articles being continued elsewhere (rather than concatenated) have been eliminated. And finally, issue size has been stabilized. I have strived to incorporate all suggestions received from readers, and all inquiries have been answered. While it’s not possible to satisfy all wishes or suggestions, the direction has been toward that of consensus. I hope that you have enjoyed the improvements of this past year, as this will be my final issue as editor. Compiling the articles for this special issue on the genus Aloe has been especially enjoyable, as I have come to highly appreciate the beauty and diversity of this group of plants. A new editor has been selected. Continue your support for this Journal and for the new editor. The task of editing is often thankless and the politics can take their toll. For those of you who are inclined to share your experiences with the readers of this great Journal, please strive to be prolific in writing and in submitting your work. This is a great hobby and it deserves to be shared with those who desire to learn more about succulent plants. My thanks go out to the readers of this Journal and to the CSSA for the opportunity to have undertaken this invigorating experience for the past year. Enjoy the articles in this issue and support the advertisers as seen within these pages.

Barbara Zipser, John the Physician’s Therapeutics: A Medical Handbook in Vernacular Greek, Studies in Ancient Medicine, Vol. 37 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. x + 377, €125.00/$185.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-90-04-17723-9.

Barbara Zipser, John the Physician’s Therapeutics: A Medical Handbook in Vernacular Greek, Studies in Ancient Medicine, Vol. 37 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. x + 377, €125.00/$185.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-90-04-17723-9. - Volume 55 Issue 1

Age of Onset of Bilingualism, Language Use, and the Volitional Subjunctive in Heritage Learners of Spanish

The present study investigates heritage learners’ recognition of native-like and nonnative-like mood selection in Spanish volitional constructions along two dimensions: age of onset of bilingualism in English (operationalized as age of arrival) and language use. Thirty-two heritage learners completed a grammaticality judgment (GJ) and an editing task, along with a background questionnaire about family language use, time abroad, and formal Spanish instruction. Participants born in the U.S. or who immigrated before age 6 were defined as early childhood bilinguals; the late childhood bilinguals had arrived in the U.S. between the ages of 6 and 12. No significant differences in ability to recognize Spanish volitional constructions were found between the early and late bilingual groups, but significant relationships were found between performance and several aspects of language use, including predominant home use of Spanish in the past and multiple trips abroad to hispanophone countries. Results suggest that age of arrival may be an inadequate proxy for age of onset of bilingualism and that language use may be an equally or more important determinant of language abilities.

Bayesian Scheme for Interactive Colourization, Recolourization and Image/Video Editing

We propose a general image and video editing method based on a Bayesian segmentation framework. In the first stage, classes are established from scribbles made by a user on the image. These scribbles can be considered as a multi-map (multi-label map) that defines the boundary conditions of a probability measure field to be computed for each pixel. In the second stage, the global minima of a positive definite quadratic cost function with linear constraints, is calculated to find the probability measure field. The components of such a probability measure field express the degree of each pixel belonging to spatially smooth classes. Finally, the computed probabilities (memberships) are used for defining the weights of a linear combination of user provided colours or effects associated to each class. The proposed method allows the application of different operators, selected interactively by the user, over part or the whole image without needing to recompute the memberships. We present applications to colourization, recolourization, editing and photomontage tasks.

Exploring the wiki user experience: The effects of training spaces on novice user usability and anxiety towards wiki editing

With the advent of Web 2.0, the number of IT systems used in university courses is growing. Yet research consistently shows that a significant proportion of students are anxious about computer use. The quality of first experience with computers has been consistently mentioned as a significant contributor to anxiety onset. However the effect of users’ first experience on system related anxiety has not to the authors’ knowledge been researched using controlled experiments. Indeed little experiment based research has been conducted on the wiki user experience, specifically users’ evaluations and emotional reactions towards editing. This research uses usability engineering principles to engineer four different wiki experiences for novice wiki users and measures the effect each has on usability, anxiety during editing and on anxiety about future wiki editing. Each experience varied in the type of training spaces available before completing six live wiki editing tasks. We found that anxiety experienced by users was not related to computer anxiety but was wiki specific. Users in the in-built tutorial conditions also rated the usability of the editing interface higher than users in the non-tutorial conditions. The tutorial conditions also led to a significant reduction in wiki anxiety during interaction but did not significantly affect future editing anxiety. The findings suggest that the use of an in-built tutorial reduces emotional and technological barriers to wiki editing and that controlled experiments can help in discovering how aspects of the system experience can be designed to affect usability and anxiety towards editing wikis.

Collaborative and individual output tasks and their effects on learning English phrasal verbs

Current second language (L2) instruction research has encouraged the use of collaborative output tasks in L2 classrooms. This study examined and compared the effectiveness of two types of output tasks (reconstruction cloze tasks and reconstruction editing tasks) for learning English phrasal verbs. Of interest was whether doing the tasks collaboratively led to greater gains of knowledge of the target verbs than doing the tasks individually, and also whether the type of task made a difference. The study was conducted in two intact low-intermediate adult English-as-a-second-language (ESL) classrooms. The effectiveness of the tasks was determined by how successfully learners completed the tasks and also by means of a vocabulary knowledge test administered before and after the treatment. The results showed that completing the tasks collaboratively (in pairs) led to a greater accuracy of task completion than completing them individually. However, collaborative tasks did not lead to significantly greater gains of vocabulary knowledge than individual tasks. The results, however, showed an effect of task type, with the editing tasks being more effective than the cloze tasks in promoting negotiation and learning. The findings contribute to the research that has examined the effectiveness of pedagogical tasks in L2 classrooms.

Geodesic image and video editing

This article presents a new, unified technique to perform general edge-sensitive editing operations on n-dimensional images and videos efficiently. The first contribution of the article is the introduction of a Generalized Geodesic Distance Transform (GGDT), based on soft masks. This provides a unified framework to address several edge-aware editing operations. Diverse tasks such as denoising and nonphotorealistic rendering are all dealt with fundamentally the same, fast algorithm. Second, a new Geodesic Symmetric Filter (GSF) is presented which imposes contrast-sensitive spatial smoothness into segmentation and segmentation-based editing tasks (cutout, object highlighting, colorization, panorama stitching). The effect of the filter is controlled by two intuitive, geometric parameters. In contrast to existing techniques, the GSF filter is applied to real-valued pixel likelihoods (soft masks), thanks to GGDTs and it can be used for both interactive and automatic editing. Complex object topologies are dealt with effortlessly. Finally, the parallelism of GGDTs enables us to exploit modern multicore CPU architectures as well as powerful new GPUs, thus providing great flexibility of implementation and deployment. Our technique operates on both images and videos, and generalizes naturally to n-dimensional data. The proposed algorithm is validated via quantitative and qualitative comparisons with existing, state-of-the-art approaches. Numerous results on a variety of image and video editing tasks further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

International Trans-Editing: Typical Intercultural Communication Strategies at the BBC World Service Turkish Radio

Whenever a piece of local news is transmitted to the global reader, it is not simply translated into another language, but becomes part of intercultural communication. The main aim in this paper is to investigate how international news stories written in English are prepared for Turkish readers. The comparative analysis of English and Turkish news stories from the BBC World Service’s websites shows that it involves a translating and an editing task, termed as "international trans-editing". This text analysis, along with an interview with the head of the BBC World Service Turkish Radio and participant observation conducted among their trans-editors, permit us to explore the peculiarities of this process and to identify some of its typical patterns.

Guidelines for the editing of dissertations and theses: A survey of editors’ perceptions

This article presents the findings of an empirical study undertaken to investigate South African editors’ perceptions of the tasks and responsibilities of the editor working with dissertations and theses. The general lack of explicit policy guidelines for the editing of dissertations and theses in South Africa, and the variation among sets of guidelines that do exist, create a possible ethical dilemma, with potential ramifications for the editor, the postgraduate student and the higher-education institution from which the qualification is to be obtained. As a first step in investigating this problem, this article examines editors’ perceptions of the responsibilities of an editor working on dissertations and theses. An e-mail survey questionnaire was employed to solicit the opinions of a sample of editors on which tasks (of 63 generic editing tasks) and modes (of 9 modes of editing and querying) are appropriate to the editing of dissertations and theses. The data yielded by the questionnaires were analysed using descriptive statistics and significance tests. Based on this analysis, a list of tasks that respondents view as part of the mandate of an editor working with dissertations and theses is formulated. The findings of the study suggest that while editors view the majority of copyediting and stylistic editing tasks to be appropriate when editing dissertations and theses, the same does not hold true for structural and content editing tasks. In addition, some conclusions about appropriate modes of editing and querying are also presented, and some avenues for further research suggested.

Toward evaluating material design interface paradigms for novice users

Material design is the process by which artists specify the reflectance properties of a surface, such as its diffuse color and specular roughness. We present a user study to evaluate the relative benefits of different material design interfaces, focusing on novice users since they stand to gain the most from intuitive interfaces. Specifically, we investigate the editing of the parameters of analytic bidirectional distribution functions (BRDFs) using three interface paradigms: physical sliders by which users set the parameters of analytic BRDF models, such as diffuse albedo and specular roughness; perceptual sliders by which users set perceptually-inspired parameters, such as diffuse luminance and gloss contrast; and image navigation by which material variations are displayed in arrays of image thumbnails and users make edits by selecting them. We investigate two design tasks: precise adjustment and artistic exploration. We collect objective and subjective data, finding that subjects can perform equally well with physical and perceptual sliders as long as the interface responds interactively. Image navigation performs worse than the other interfaces on precise adjustment tasks, but excels at aiding in artistic exploration. We find that given enough time, novices can perform relatively complex material editing tasks with little training, and most novices work similarly to one another.

Don’t Get Spooked! How to Collaborate with a Professional Medical Communicator (And Avoid Ghostwriting)

Substantial confusion exists about the role of medical writers and editors (hereafter, medical communicators) in medical publication. Much of the confusion is due to the failure to recognize the difference between terms. Ghostwriting is unethical, whereas professional medical communication refers to legitimate writing and editing services provided by individuals who comply with ethical guidelines. The purpose of this article is to shed light on this subject by reviewing relevant guidelines and by providing practical tips for authors interested in collaborating with medical communicators. Specifically, this article addresses a series of questions, such as what to expect from medical communicators, how to evaluate them, and how to collaborate ethically and efficiently with them. To ensure that the process is ethical, authors should begin collaborating with the medical communicator early in the process, continue doing so throughout manuscript development, and control manuscript content. In addition, authors should disclose substantial contributions and funding sources of the medical communicator and all other individuals not meeting authorship criteria. To ensure that the process is efficient, authors should delegate time-consuming technical writing and editing tasks to the medical communicator.

A Three-Stage Approach to Shadow Field Estimation From Partial Boundary Information

In this paper, we present a system for estimating the shadow field from a single natural image. Unlike previous works that require extensive user assistance, our system only needs the user to roughly specify the shadow boundary with a broad brush. As the user finishes drawing a stroke, the system starts to estimate the shadow field around the stroke and generates pretty accurate result even if the underlying surface is highly textured. We also propose an optimization scheme to propagate the estimated shadow field to the entire image, achieving a further reduction of user effort required for the system. The shadow field estimated by our system can be used to seamlessly remove the shadow from the image. It is also useful for many shadow editing tasks such as pasting an object's shadow from one image to another. Experimental results on a variety of photos are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed system.