An acceptability predictor for websites.

User acceptance is a high priority for website design and implementation. Two significant, but largely separate, approaches to acceptability are: First, the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has explored the measurement of technical features of a website to gauge its accessibility. Second, human judgments about acceptability are obtained from intended users or experts. The present work explores the important question of how best to combine these two methods. Experiment One required new users to explore automatic website evaluation systems. They found two of four systems difficult or impossible to use and system outputs difficult to understand. Experiment Two combines formal properties and user judgments, using an automatic system to predict user judgments from formal website properties. A simple system was able to predict user judgments within 91% accuracy. Clearly, user judgments about websites can be predicted reliably, a result of value to designers

Cyclohexenones Through Addition of Ethyl Acetoacetate to 3-Aryl-1-(thiophen-3-yl)prop-2-en-1-one Derivatives

Chalcone derivatives 3a–i containing a thiophene ring were prepared by the condensation of 1-(thiophen-3-yl)ethanone with aromatic aldehydes in excellent yields. The Michael addition of ethyl acetoacetate 4 to chalcone derivatives 3a–i resulted in the formation of nine novel ethyl 6-aryl 4-(3-thienyl)cyclohex-3-en-2-one-1-carboxylate derivatives 6a–i.Keywords: Michael Addition, Ethyl Acetoacetate, Cyclohexenones, Cyclocondensatio

Efficacy of buffered sodium citrate alone and in combination with sodium diacetate againstListeria monocytogenes on beef franks

We assessed the antimicrobial efficacy of buffered sodium citrate alone and in combination with sodium diacetate against L. monoyctogenes on beef frank samples stored at 39°F. Initial inoculum level of L. monocytogenes was 1.5 log colony forming units (CFU)/cm2. After 6 weeks of incubation at 39°F, the pathogen reached 5.4 log CFU/cm2 in the control sample, but was 1.2 log CFU/cm2 and 0.85 log CFU/cm2 in samples treated with 1% buffered sodium citrate alone and in combination with 0.1% sodium diacetate, respectively. Use of buffered sodium citrate and the combination of buffered sodium citrate and sodium diacetate should improve safety of ready to eat foods by controlling L. monocytogenes during storage

Performance of soccer on the stock market: Evidence fromTurkey

Cataloged from PDF version of article.This paper assesses the effect of soccer success on stock market returns for three major Turkish teams (Besiktas, Fenerbahce and Galatasaray) after certain characteristics of the stock market are controlled for. The empirical evidence presented here suggests that Besikta's win against foreign rivals in the Winner's Cup increases stock market returns. The same effect is not present for the other two big teams (Fenerbahce and Galatasaray). The day of the week effect on the stock market and the relationship between risk and return are also presented. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Co doping induced structural and optical properties of sol-gel prepared ZnO thin films

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The preparation conditions for Co doping process into the ZnO structure were studied by the ultrasonic spray pyrolysis technique. Structural and optical properties of the Co:ZnO thin films as a function of Co concentrations were examined. It was observed that hexagonal wurtzite structure of ZnO is dominant up to the critical value, and after the value, the cubic structural phase of the cobalt oxide appears in the X-ray diffraction patterns. Every band-edge of Co:ZnO films shifts to the lower energies and all are confirmed with the PL measurements. Co substitution in ZnO lattice has been proved by the optical transmittance measurement which is observed as the loss of transmission appearing in specific region due to Co2+ characteristic transitions. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Observed climate variability and change in Urmia Lake Basin, Iran

This paper analyzes climate variability and change in the Urmia Lake Basin, northwest of Iran. Annual average of the following data time series has been analyzed by statistical methods: dry bulb temperature, maximum and minimum temperature, precipitation, and number of rainy and snowy days. We have also used mean monthly temperature and precipitation data for analysis of drought spells for the period 1964-2005 to find out whether fluctuations in the lake level are attributable to natural drought. Our results indicate that mean precipitation has decreased by 9.2% and the average maximum temperature has increased by 0.8°C over these four decades. The seasonal changes are particularly visible in winter and spring. Results of the Palmer Drought Severity Index show that on average, drought episodes have hit the Urmia Lake Basin every 5years and most of them reached severe levels, but recent droughts have become more intense and last longe

Query Answer Explanations under Existential Rules

Ontology-mediated query answering is an extensively studied paradigm, which aims at improving query answers with the use of a logical theory. In this paper, we focus on ontology languages based on existential rules, and we carry out a thorough complexity analysis of the problem of explaining query answers in terms of minimal subsets of database facts and related task

Translocation of natural microflora from muscle surface to interior by blade tenderization

The effect of blade tenderization on translocation of natural microflora from the surface to the interior of longissimus dorsi steaks aged for 7, 14, and 21 days was evaluated. Samples from the exterior and interior of steaks from blade-tenderized (BT) and non-blade-tenderized (N-BT) strip loins were analyzed for aerobic plate, coliform, and Escherichia coli counts. Results showed that BT translocated microorganisms (aerobic plate counts) from the exterior to the interior of muscle. Microorganism numbers increased with extended storage (P<.05). Counts of coliforms and Escherichia coli recovered from BT steaks were comparable to those from N-BT steaks because of very low exterior counts, showing the importance of good hygiene

iMAPPER: Interaction-guided Scene Mapping from Monocular Videos

Next generation smart and augmented reality systems demand a computational understanding of monocular footage that captures humans in physical spaces to reveal plausible object arrangements and human-object interactions. Despite recent advances, both in scene layout and human motion analysis, the above setting remains challenging to analyze due to regular occlusions that occur between objects and human motions. We observe that the interaction between object arrangements and human actions is often strongly correlated, and hence can be used to help recover from these occlusions. We present iMapper, a data-driven method to identify such human-object interactions and utilize them to infer layouts of occluded objects. Starting from a monocular video with detected 2D human joint positions that are potentially noisy and occluded, we first introduce the notion of interaction-saliency as space-time snapshots where informative human-object interactions happen. Then, we propose a global optimization to retrieve and fit interactions from a database to the detected salient interactions in order to best explain the input video. We extensively evaluate the approach, both quantitatively against manually annotated ground truth and through a user study, and demonstrate that iMapper produces plausible scene layouts for scenes with medium to heavy occlusion. Code and data are available on the project page