User Desires Research Articles

Selection of power plants by evaluation and comparison using graph theoretical methodology

A deterministic quantitative model based on graph theoretical methodology has been developed to compare various technical and economical features of wind, hydro and thermal power plants and is used to evaluate and rank the power plants in ascending or descending order in accordance with the value of their suitability index. The plant with rank 1 is the optimized selection for the customer's/user's desires on the particular application under consideration. This suitability index is the permanent value of the plant attribute matrix, which is a combination of attribute rating matrix and attribute relative importance matrix. Three graphical methods of comprehensive comparison are also suggested to better educate the users/decision makers. The model developed is explained and illustrated with an example problem.

Interactive picture book with voice recording features and method of use

An apparatus comprises in combination a storybook and a separate audio recorder adapted for mounting on the storybook. The recorder may be used with any one of several storybooks by recording the storyline of each book by the purchaser for later playback by a child. Buttons corresponding to the several pages of the storybook are provided so that a child is able to correlate a button with each page to hear the story as well as read it. Dual recording devices may be played simultaneously wherein one may provide a background music or sound, while the other provides and audio representation of the text or whatever audio the user desires.

Receiver-driven bandwidth sharing for TCP and its application to video streaming

Applications using Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), such as web-browsers, ftp, and various peer-to-peer (P2P) programs, dominate most of the Internet traffic today. In many cases, users have bandwidth-limited last mile connections to the Internet which act as network bottlenecks. Users generally run multiple concurrent networking applications that compete for the scarce bandwidth resource. Standard TCP shares bottleneck link capacity according to connection round-trip time (RTT), and consequently may result in a bandwidth partition which does not necessarily coincide with the user's desires. In this work, we present a receiver-based bandwidth sharing system (BWSS) for allocating the capacity of last-hop access links according to user preferences. Our system does not require modifications to the TCP protocol, network infrastructure or sending hosts, making it easy to deploy. By breaking fairness between flows on the access link, the BWSS can limit the throughput fluctuations of high-priority applications. We utilize the BWSS to perform efficient video streaming over TCP to receivers with bandwidth-limited last mile connections. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed system through Internet experiments.

A New Solid-State Memory-Based Television Acquisition System

Virtually all television production equipment has become digital. Following the conversion, the majority of the television system infrastructure has become ever more computer-centric. The use of computer-type technology in nonlinear editing systems and servers as well as for the transfer of content as data and files has been widely accepted, and this transformation has brought random, nonlinear access to the content production and release process. However, despite the desire of users for the acquisition to follow suit, until now acquisition has remained inherently linear, using conventional tape media, albeit digital.

Changing Practice

Changes to professional work now ensure that social care and health care workers should be accountable to service users, and not only to their professional colleagues. This paper seeks to explore how this may eventually be realised in new working relationships that will profoundly affect mental health social work. These changes are driven by factors that are external to the social work profession-in policy initiatives that introduce measures of performance that incorporate the service user in both evaluating and planning services, in efforts to build new relationships, and in a breakdown of barriers between social work practitioners and service managers. While these changes are sometimes likely to be resisted by practitioners and service users alike, the demands of policy makers for a new professional accountability to service users can be used to pave the way for effective dialogue. The paper outlines the steps necessary to build confidence among both service users and service providers. This requires sensitive management and leadership. It also requires that action demonstrably follows from such dialogue. The paper uses evidence from Community Mental Health Teams in Swansea, over a three-year period, to demonstrate how the policy and management imperatives faced by service providers can be reconciled with the expressed desires of mental health service users.

An overview of electronic books: a bibliography

PurposeThe purpose is to bring together all bibliographic references of the published literature on electronic books (e‐books) and related technologies in one source so that it will save time for others in conducting literature searches and reviewing the developments.Design/methodology/approachThe information included in this bibliography is collected systematically from all the published sources in the world such as journal articles, conference papers, conference proceedings, books, reports and PhD theses on e‐books until the last quarter of 2004. Mainly it covers e‐books, e‐books publishing, the impact of e‐books on different types of users, e‐book publishing techniques and trends, e‐book user interfaces and other technologies related to e‐publications.FindingsAs computer usage continues to grow exponentially, the desire of users to use electronic publications (e‐publications) has also increased tremendously. This has led to the publication of materials in electronic form as e‐publications on both CD‐ROMs and web. The e‐book is one of the several forms of e‐publications and its popularity has been growing steadily for the past decade.Originality/valueThis bibliography will be useful to all researchers conducting research in any areas related to e‐books and e‐book publishing.

Penn State's Visual Image User Study

The Visual Image User Study (VIUS), an extensive needs assessment project at Penn State University, describes academic users of pictures and their perceptions. These findings outline the potential market for digital images and list the likely determinates of whether or not a system will be used. They also explain some key user requirements for teaching, independent learning, and collection management. The importance of picture collections maintained by individuals is underscored, as is the desire of users to easily mix pictures from their collections with those from databases and other sources. Two prototypical services were tested: an image database service and a more experimental peer-to-peer system named LionShare.

CORBA-based distributed and replicated resource repository architecture for hierarchically configurable home network

Home networks are typically ubiquitous computing networks consisting of various consumer devices and services. Although many middlewares have already been developed and used to implement partial services in home networks, none has yet emerged as a generic home network middleware architecture, as existing middlewares are designed to accommodate specific services, making them unable to cover all services or satisfy the desires of home users. Accordingly, the current paper presents a hierarchically configurable home network architecture as a generic and conceptual home network model, plus a middleware framework is proposed to realize the conceptual model. In the middleware framework, a distributed and replicated resource repository architecture is introduced to realize multi-services within a single home network platform. The proposed middleware was developed and implemented using CORBA within an IEEE1394-based home network, and its performance verified experimentally.

Bridging the semantic gap in sports video retrieval and summarization

One of the major challenges facing current media management systems and related applications is the so-called “semantic gap” between the rich meaning that a user desires and the shallowness of the content descriptions that are automatically extracted from the media. In this paper, we address the problem of bridging this gap in the sports domain. We propose a general framework for indexing and summarizing sports broadcast programs, with a high-level model of sports broadcast video using the concept of an event, defined according to domain-specific knowledge for different types of sports. Within this general framework, we develop automatic event detection algorithms that are based on automatic analysis of the visual and aural signals in the media. We have successfully applied the event detection algorithms to different types of sports including American football, baseball, Japanese sumo wrestling, and soccer. Event modeling and detection contribute to the reduction of the semantic gap by providing rudimentary semantic information obtained through media analysis. We further propose a novel approach, which makes use of independently generated rich textual metadata, to fill the gap completely through synchronization of the information-laden textual data with the basic event segments. We implemented an MPEG-7 compliant browsing system for semantic retrieval and summarization of sports video using the proposed algorithms.

Modeling and Control of Expressiveness in Music Performance

Expression is an important aspect of music performance. It is the added value of a performance and is part of the reason that music is interesting to listen to and sounds alive. Understanding and modeling expressive content communication is important for many engineering applications in information technology. For example, in multimedia products, textual information is enriched by means of graphical and audio objects. In this paper, we present an original approach to modify the expressive content of a performance in a gradual way, both at the symbolic and signal levels. To this purpose, we discuss a model that applies a smooth morphing among performances with different expressive content, adapting the audio expressive character to the user's desires. Morphing can be realized with a wide range of graduality (from abrupt to very smooth), allowing adaptation of the system to different situations. The sound rendering is obtained by interfacing the expressiveness model with a dedicated postprocessing environment, which allows for the transformation of the event cues. The processing is based on the organized control of basic audio effects. Among the basic effects used, an original method for the spectral processing of audio is introduced.

Development of Silicon Micro Multi-edged Tool Using Anisotropic Etching (1st Report)

This paper proposes a micro multi-edged tool made of silicon as a new tool in the micro/nano-cutting and the decision system of fabricating conditions to the tool. This new tool is expected to machine a softer material, like aluminum alloy, glass and so on, than iron because silicon is as hard as alloy tool steel and high speed tool steel. On this new tool, the pyramidal etch hillocks on Si(100) surfaces etched in aqueous KOH solution function as cutting edges because the shape and distribution of the hillocks are resemble to those of the cutting edges on grinding wheel surfaces. The multi-edged tool can be fabricated at the desire of user by only adjusting the etching conditions suitably because the topography of hillocks depends on them. Therefore, we have developed the decision system of the etching conditions corresponding to a specified tool. In this system, the genetic algorithms and the neural network model are applied and the suitable etching conditions; - temperature, concentration and time - are output corresponding to the inputs of average height and number of the hillocks. In this paper, the system is proved fit for practical use as the result of experiments.

Interactive imagination: Tapping the emotions through interactive story for compelling simulations

Most compassionate parents, teachers, or coaches will echo the belief that you must spark the imagination or touch the heart to teach the mind, train the body, or inspire a sense of wonder. This is also the storyteller's craft. How can we use story within interactive simulations to better teach, train, or inspire? Now that science and technology can make simulations more realistic, how can art make them more compelling through interactive fiction? The key is to use story to tap the depths of emotions, engaging the user's desire for exploration, learning, challenge, and adventure. In the new domain of training, story becomes the means more than the end. Can the compelling art of story transition from the passive media of motion pictures to the nonlinear interactivity of simulation? This is venturing beyond the reactive branching of cause-and-effect games or choose-your-own-ending adventure stories. This process is about the unpredictable expressiveness of audiences exchanging discourse with the author mediated through the digital media - the story engine.

A comparative analysis of the modification of sexual desire of users of oral hormonal contraceptives and intrauterine contraceptive devices

A comparative analysis of the modification of sexual desire of users of oral hormonal contraceptives and intrauterine contraceptive devices

Solution Selectors: A User-Oriented Answer to the Multiple Solution Problem in Constraint Solving

The development of solid modeling to represent the geometry of designed parts and the development of parametric modeling to control the size and shape have had significant impacts on the efficiency and speed of the design process. Designers now rely on parametric solid modeling, but often are frustrated by a problem that unpredictably causes their sketches to become twisted, contorted, or take an unexpected shape. Mathematically, this problem, known as the “multiple solution problem” occurs because the dimensions and geometric constraints yield a set of non-linear equations with many roots. In practice, this situation occurs because the dimensioning and geometric constraint information given in a CAD model is not sufficient to unambiguously and flexibly specify which configuration the user desires. This paper first establishes that only explicit, independent solution selection declarations can provide a flexible mechanism that is sufficient for all situations. The paper then describes the systematic derivation of a set of “solution selector” types by considering the occurrences of multiple solutions in combinations of mutually constrained geometric entities. The result is a set of eleven basic solution selector types and two derived types that incorporate topological information. In particular, one derived type “concave/convex” is user-oriented and may prove to be particularly useful.

Improving search results with data mining in a thematic search engine

The problem of obtaining relevant results in web searching has been tackled with several approaches. Although very effective techniques are currently used by the most popular search engines when no a priori knowledge on the user's desires beside the search keywords is available, in different settings it is conceivable to design search methods that operate on a thematic database of web pages that refer to a common body of knowledge or to specific sets of users. We have considered such premises to design and develop a search method that deploys data mining and optimization techniques to provide a more significant and restricted set of pages as the final result of a user search. We adopt a vectorization method based on search context and user profile to apply clustering techniques that are then refined by a specially designed genetic algorithm. In this paper we describe the method, its implementation, the algorithms applied, and discuss some experiments that has been run on test sets of web pages.

Design and Implementation of the EEIS Considering the Load of DB Server

Current Internet system of the entrance exam information to the university that is depending on searching key to solve the overloaded problem in the network and DB server or other tools to support HTML edit, haven't satisfied user's wants by supplying uniformed searching system. So this thesis will establish EEIS(Entrance Examination Information System) to prevent database overload phenomena when many users request a great amount of data at the same time and improve the decrease of speed and overload problem in DB server. EEIS playa role of bridge between outside client and DB server by placing VVS(Virtual View Server) between web server and DB server. By that method this system give users several usefulness in convenience and variety by supplying realtime data searching function to user. EEIS also give inner system manager more efficiency and speed in control the management system by solving those problem. This system is design and implementation to satisfy user's desire and give them more convenience and bring up the confidence of university that adopt this system at the end.

Brain-computer interface technology: a review of the Second International Meeting.

This paper summarizes the Brain-Computer Interfaces for Communication and Control, The Second International Meeting, held in Rensselaerville, NY, in June 2002. Sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and organized by the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health, the meeting addressed current work and future plans in brain-computer interface (BCI) research. Ninety-two researchers representing 38 different research groups from the United States, Canada, Europe, and China participated. The BCIs discussed at the meeting use electroencephalographic activity recorded from the scalp or single-neuron activity recorded within cortex to control cursor movement, select letters or icons, or operate neuroprostheses. The central element in each BCI is a translation algorithm that converts electrophysiological input from the user into output that controls external devices. BCI operation depends on effective interaction between two adaptive controllers, the user who encodes his or her commands in the electrophysiological input provided to the BCI, and the BCI that recognizes the commands contained in the input and expresses them in device control. Current BCIs have maximum information transfer rates of up to 25 b/min. Achievement of greater speed and accuracy requires improvements in signal acquisition and processing, in translation algorithms, and in user training. These improvements depend on interdisciplinary cooperation among neuroscientists, engineers, computer programmers, psychologists, and rehabilitation specialists, and on adoption and widespread application of objective criteria for evaluating alternative methods. The practical use of BCI technology will be determined by the development of appropriate applications and identification of appropriate user groups, and will require careful attention to the needs and desires of individual users.

Decentralized dynamic power control for cellular CDMA systems

The control of transmit power has been recognized as an essential requirement in the design of cellular code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems. Indeed, power control allows for mobile users to share radio resources equitably and efficiently in a multicell environment. Much of the work on power control for CDMA systems found in the literature assumes a quasi-static channel model, i.e., the channel gains of the users are assumed to be constant over a sufficiently long period of time for the control algorithm to converge. In this paper, the design of dynamic power control algorithms for CDMA systems is considered without the quasi-static channel restriction. The design problem is posed as a tradeoff between the desire for users to maximize their individual quality of service and the need to minimize interference to other users. The dynamic nature of the wireless channel for mobile users is incorporated in the problem definition. Based on a cost minimization framework, an optimal multiuser solution is derived. The multiuser solution is shown to decouple, and effectively converge, to a single-user solution in the large system asymptote, where the number of users and the spreading factor both go to infinity with their ratio kept constant. In a numerical study, the performance of a simple threshold policy is shown to be near that of the optimal single-user policy. This offers support to the threshold decision rules that are employed in current cellular CDMA systems.

A comparative analysis of the modification of sexual desire of users of oral hormonal contraceptives and intrauterine contraceptive devices

Objective: To compare the influence of oral hormonal contraceptives (OCs) and the use of intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUDs) on the modification of sexual desire.Materials and methods:A prospective observational study of 1073 women using OCs or an IUD at the Family Planning Center 'Marina Alta' in Alicante, Spain. In order to evaluate the relative risk regarding the decrease in libidoattributed to each contraceptive method, a logistic regression analysis was undertaken which considered the factors of age adjustment, level of studies, family planning information, relationship with partner,age when sexual relationships were initiated, parity, contraceptive method previously used and the duration of use of the contraceptive method.Results: No differences in the decrease of sexualdesire were observed between the use of the OC and IUD (odds ratio (OR) 1.32; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.70-2.49), yet differences were noted, however, in relation to age (OR 1.05; 95% CI 1.01-1.10).Although these differences were not statistically significant, a high level of awareness regarding family planning was shown to increase sexual desire when compared to a lower level of information on thissubject (OR 0.64; 95% CI 0.41-1.01). Sexual desire was seen to decrease if the quality of the relationship with the partner was average (OR 2.24; 95% CI 1.36-3.69) or poor (OR 4.69; 95% CI 1.93-11.4). Nulliparouswomen showed a greater decrease in sexual desire in relation to women who had already given birth (OR 1.57; 95% CI 1.00-2.47). Sexual desire was greater if the contraceptive method had already been in usefor 6-12 months (OR 0.41; 95% CI 0.17-0.98).Conclusions: Sexual desire does not vary in relation to the use of OCs or IUDs, yet it does decrease with age, in nulliparous women and in those withan average or poor relationship with their partner. Furthermore, sexual desire shows an increase between the first 6 and 12 months of contraceptive treatment.

The expanding world of wireless technology

Wireless systems and networks are proliferating at a rapid rate. The untethering of both personal and business communications is being propelled by technological advances in microelectronics, digital signal processing, and network software, as well as by the compelling desire of users to receive services anytime and anyplace. This growth situation is most evident with voice communications. More than 30 million Americans currently subscribe to and use cellular service. Projections are that by the start of the new millennium, more than 500 million people worldwide will subscribe to cellular and personal communications services (PCS) that will be primarily digital in nature.