Assessing Hygiene Cost-Effectiveness

This paper introduces "hygiene effectiveness levels" as a tool for standardized analysis of costs and outcomes of hygiene promotion interventions. At the time of publication, the framework was being tested in WASHCost focus countries

Drawing flowcharts on touch-enabled devices

Users benefit from being able to draw flowcharts directly on touch-enabled devices without the hassle of dropdown menus for shape selection or operations to adjust shapes and sizes of drawn objects. This disclosure automatically creates shape elements that match a user’s intention based on the drawing positions, shapes, sizes of strokes, etc. Beautified versions of a user’s drawing strokes are generated and used to replace the strokes. Using the techniques of this disclosure, the touch device intelligently distinguishes between drawing positions, shapes, and handwriting. The techniques distinguish shape from handwriting text and eliminates interruptions to user workflow due to the need to switch between shape mode and text mode

Interest of Syntactic Knowledge for On-line Flowchart Recognition

International audienceIn this paper, we address the problem of segmentation and recognition of on-line flowcharts. Flowcharts are bi-dimensional documents, in the sense that the order of writing is not defined. Some statistical approaches have been proposed in the literature to label and segment the flowcharts. However, as they are very well structured documents, we propose to introduce some structural and syntactic knowledge on flowcharts to improve their recognition. For this purpose, we have used an existing grammatical off-line method with on-line a posteriori signal. We apply this work on a freely available database. The results demonstrate the interest of structural knowledge on the context to improve the recognition

12 Confused Men: Using Flowchart Verdict Sheets To Mitigate Inconsistent Civil Verdicts

The finality of jury verdicts reflects an implicit societal acceptance of the soundness of the jury\u27s decision. Regardless, jurors are not infallible, and the questions they are often tasked with deciding are unfortunately neither obvious nor clear. The length of trial, complexity of subject matter, volume of factual background, and opaqueness of law can converge in a perfect storm that may confound even the most capable juror. Although the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure provide decision rules to resolve inconsistent verdicts, the current remedies authorized by Rule 49—notably, the resubmission of the verdict to the jury and the ordering of a new trial—impose time and money costs on the jury, litigants, and judicial system. The increasing complexity of civil litigation raises the stakes by increasing the likelihood of juror error and the costs of relitigating the case. This Note proposes the creation of flowchart verdict sheets as a prophylactic against juror confusion. The flowchart verdict sheet builds upon current legal reform proposals to increase juror understanding while decreasing juror confusion and incorporates principles of effective visual design. By mitigating the confusion that can result in inconsistencies before the verdict is rendered, the flowchart verdict sheet enables the judicial system to avoid the costs associated with remedying inconsistent verdicts

Methods for Structural Pattern Recognition: Complexity and Applications

Katedra kybernetik

Contraction of Unconnected Diagrams using Least Cost Parsing

A free-hand diagram editor allows the user to place diagram components on the pane without any restrictions. This increase in flexibility often comes at the cost of editing performance, though. In particular it is tedious to manually establish the spatial relations between diagram components that are required by the visual language. Even worse are certain graph-like languages where it is a quite annoying task to explicitly link the node components. In this paper diagram contraction is proposed for solving these issues. The editor user can just roughly arrange a set of diagram components. On request the editor automatically creates a correct diagram from these components while preserving their layout as far as possible. Moreover, for several languages diagram contraction corresponds to linking node components appropriately. Such auto-linking is considered useful. It even has been integrated into first commercial modeling tools. The proposed approach can be applied to visual languages that are specified by means of hypergraph grammars. For syntax analysis an error-tolerant hypergraph parser is used, which computes a cost function by attribute evaluation. That way, unfavorable derivation (sub-)trees can be excluded at an early stage, and combinatorial explosion is mostly prevented

Structure Diagram Recognition in Financial Announcements

Accurately extracting structured data from structure diagrams in financial announcements is of great practical importance for building financial knowledge graphs and further improving the efficiency of various financial applications. First, we proposed a new method for recognizing structure diagrams in financial announcements, which can better detect and extract different types of connecting lines, including straight lines, curves, and polylines of different orientations and angles. Second, we developed a two-stage method to efficiently generate the industry's first benchmark of structure diagrams from Chinese financial announcements, where a large number of diagrams were synthesized and annotated using an automated tool to train a preliminary recognition model with fairly good performance, and then a high-quality benchmark can be obtained by automatically annotating the real-world structure diagrams using the preliminary model and then making few manual corrections. Finally, we experimentally verified the significant performance advantage of our structure diagram recognition method over previous methods

Promise and ontological ambiguity in the In Vitro Meat imagescape: From laboratory myotubes to the cultured burger

In vitro meat, also known as cultured meat, involves growing cells into muscle tissue to be eaten as food. The technology had its most high profile moment in 2013 when a cultured burger was cooked and tasted in a press conference. Images of the burger featured in the international media and were circulated across the internet. These images – literally marks on a two-dimension surface - do important work in establishing what in vitro meat is and what it can do. A combination of visual semiotics and narrative analysis shows that images of in vitro meat afford readings of their story that are co-created by the viewer. Before the cultured burger, during 2011, images of in vitro meat fell into four distinct categories: cell images, tissue images, flowcharts, and meat in a dish images. The narrative infrastructure of each image type affords different interpretations of what in vitro meat can accomplish and what it is. The 2013 cultured burger images both draw upon and depart from these images types in an attempt to present in vitro meat as a normal food stuff, and as ‘matter in place’ when placed on the plate. The analysis of individual images and the collection of images about a certain object or subject – known as the imagescape – is a productive approach to understanding the ontology and promise of in vitro meat and is applicable to other areas of social life