Keyword based categorisation of diary entries to support personal Internet content pre-caching on mobile devices

This paper presents a study into the effectiveness of our algorithm for automatic categorisation of real users' diary entries, as a first step towards personal Internet content pre-caching on mobile devices. The study reports an experiment comparing trial subjects allocations of 99 diary entries to those predicted by a keyword-based algorithm. While leaving considerable grounds for improvement, results are positive and show pave the way for supporting mobile services based on categorising users' diary entries

Calendar based contextual information as an Internet content pre-caching tool

Motivated by the need to access internet content on mobile devices with expensive or non-existent network access, this paper discusses the possibility for contextual information extracted from electronic calendars to be used as sources for Internet content predictive retrieval (pre-caching). Our results show that calendar based contextual information is useful for this purpose and that calendar based information can produce web queries that are relevant to the users' task supportive information needs

Understanding contextual interactions to design navigational context-aware applications

Context-aware technology has stimulated rigorous research into novel ways to support people in a wide range of tasks and situations. However, the effectiveness of these technologies will ultimately be dependent on the extent to which contextual interactions are understood and accounted for in their design. This study involved an investigation of contextual interactions required for route navigation. The purpose was to illustrate the heterogeneous nature of humans in interaction with their environmental context. Participants were interviewed to determine how each interacts with or use objects/information in the environment in which to navigate/orientate. Results revealed that people vary individually and collectively. Usability implications for the design of navigational context-aware applications are identified and discussed

The first fossil cyphophthalmid harvestman from Baltic amber

The first fossil cyphophthalmid harvestman (Opiliones: Cyphophthalmi) from Palaeogene (Eocene) Baltic amber is described. This is only the third fossil example of this basal harvestman lineage; the others being from the probably slightly younger Bitterfeld amber and the much older, early Cretaceous, Myanmar (Burmese) amber. Although incomplete and lacking most of the appendages, the new Baltic amber fossil can be identified as a female. The somatic characters preserved, especially spiracle morphology and the coxo-genital region, allow it to be assigned with some confidence to the extant genus Siro Latreille, 1796 (Sironidae). This fossil is formally described here as Siro balticus sp. nov. It resembles modern North American Siro species more than modern European ones, and can be distinguished principally on its relatively large size and the outline form of the body

Internet authentication based on personal history - a feasibility test

On the Internet, there is an uneasy tension between the security and usability of authentication mechanisms. An easy three-part classification is: 'something you know' (e.g. password); 'something you hold' (e.g. device holding digital certificate), and 'who you are' (e.g. biometric assessment) [9]. Each of these has well-known problems; passwords are written down, guessable, or forgotten; devices are lost or stolen, and biometric assays alienate users. We have investigated a novel strategy of querying the user based on their personal history (a 'Rip van Winkle' approach.) The sum of this information is large and well-known only to the individual. The volume is too large for impostors to learn; our observation is that, in the emerging environment, it is possible to collate and automatically query such information as an authentication test. We report a proof of concept study based on the automatic generation of questions from electronic 'calendar' information. While users were, surprisingly, unable to answer randomly generated questions any better than impostors, if questions are categorized according to appropriate psychological parameters then significant results can be obtained. We thus demonstrate the potential viability of this concept

Augmenting entry: the possibilities for utilizing geo-referenced information to improve mobile calendar applications

Today's mobile communication devices often offer extensive calendar facilities. However the use of these is often very limited through cumbersome interfaces and inappropriate designs for small devices. Prompted by previous work in mobile calendar usability, this paper discusses how augmentation of calendar entries with mobile spatial information could provide potential advantages and improve the usability of an electronic calendar

Geospatial Variation in Caesarean Delivery

Aim: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the variation in caesarean delivery rates across counties in Georgia and to determine whether county-level characteristics were associated with clusters. Design: This was a retrospective, observational study. Methods: Rates of primary and repeat caesarean by maternal county of residence were calculated for 2008 through 2012. Global Moran\u27s I (Spatial Autocorrelation) was used to identify geographic clustering. Characteristics of high and low-rate counties were compared using student\u27s t test and chi squared test. Results: Spatial analysis of both primary and repeat caesarean rate identified the presence of clusters (Moran\u27s I = 0.375; p \u3c .001). Counties in high-rate clusters had significantly lower access to midwives, more deliveries paid by Medicaid, higher proportion of births for women belonging to racial/ethnic minority groups and were more likely to be rural

Constituent quark scaling violation due to baryon number transport

In ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions at \roots\approx200 GeV, the azimuthal emission anisotropy of hadrons with low and intermediate transverse momentum ($p_T\lesssim 4$ GeV/c) displays an intriguing scaling. In particular, the baryon (meson) emission patterns are consistent with a scenario in which a bulk medium of flowing quarks coalesces into three-quark (two-quark) "bags." While a full understanding of this number of constituent quark (NCQ) scaling remains elusive, it is suggestive of a thermalized bulk system characterized by colored dynamical degrees of freedom-- a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). In this scenario, one expects the scaling to break down as the central energy density is reduced below the QGP formation threshold; for this reason, NCQ-scaling violation searches are of interest in the energy scan program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). However, as \roots is reduced, it is not only the initial energy density that changes; there is also an increase in the net baryon number at midrapidity, as stopping transports entrance-channel partons to midrapidity. This phenomenon can result in violations of simple NCQ scaling. Still in the context of the quark coalescence model, we describe a specific pattern for the break-down of the scaling that includes different flow strengths for particles and their anti-partners. Related complications in the search for recently suggested exotic phenomena are also discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 2 tables, 2 figures. Wording sharpened. Two tables added, to quantify the estimate of stopped quark fraction

The sejugal furrow in camel spiders and acariform mites

Camel spiders (Arachnida: Solifugae) are one of the arachnid groups characterised by a prosomal dorsal shield composed of three distinct elements: the pro-, meso- and metapeltidium. These are associated respectively with prosomal appendages one to four, five, and six. What is less well known, although noted in the historical literature, is that the coxae of the 4th and 5th prosomal segments (i.e. walking legs 2 and 3) of camel spiders are also separated ventrally by a distinct membranous region, which is absent between the coxae of the other legs. We suggest that this essentially ventral division of the prosoma specifically between coxae 2 and 3 is homologous with the so-called sejugal furrow (the sejugal interval sensu van der Hammen). This division constitutes a fundamental part of the body plan in acariform mites (Arachnida: Acariformes). If homologous, this sejugal furrow could represent a further potential synapomorphy for (Solifugae + Acariformes); a relationship with increasing morphological and molecular support. Alternatively, outgroup comparison with sea spiders (Pycnogonida) and certain early Palaeozoic fossils could imply that the sejugal furrow defines an older tagma, derived from a more basal grade of organisation. In this scenario the (still) divided prosoma of acariform mites and camel spiders would be plesiomorphic. This interpretation challenges the textbook arachnid character of a peltidium (or ‘carapace’) covering an undivided prosoma

F stars, metallicity, and the ages of red galaxies at z > 1

We explore whether the rest-frame near-UV spectral region, observable in high-redshift galaxies via optical spectroscopy, contains sufficient information to allow the degeneracy between age and metallicity to be lifted. We do this by testing the ability of evolutionary synthesis models to reclaim the correct metallicity when fitted to the near-UV spectra of F stars of known (sub-solar and super-solar) metallicity. F stars are of particular interest because the rest-frame near-UV spectra of the oldest known elliptical galaxies at z > 1 appear to be dominated by F stars near to the main-sequence turnoff. We find that, in the case of the F stars, where the HST ultraviolet spectra have high signal:noise, model-fitting with metallicity allowed to vary as a free parameter is rather successful at deriving the correct metallicity. As a result, the estimated turnoff ages of these stars yielded by the model fitting are well constrained. Encouraged by this we have fitted these same variable- metallicity models to the deep, optical spectra of the z \simeq 1.5 mJy radio galaxies 53W091 and 53W069 obtained with the Keck telescope. While the age-metallicity degeneracy is not so easily lifted for these galaxies, we find that even when metallicity is allowed as a free parameter, the best estimates of their ages are still \geq 3 Gyr, with ages younger than 2 Gyr now strongly excluded. Furthermore, we find that a search of the entire parameter space of metallicity and star formation history using MOPED (Heavens et al., 2000) leads to the same conclusion. Our results therefore continue to argue strongly against an Einstein-de Sitter universe, and favour a lambda-dominated universe in which star formation in at least these particular elliptical galaxies was completed somewhere in the redshift range z = 3 - 5.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX, uses MNRAS style file, incorporates 14 postscript figures, submitted to MNRAS. Changes include: inclusion of single stellar atmosphere model fits; more rigorous calculation of confidence regions; some re-structurin