483 research outputs found
Modeling Human Group Behavior In Virtual Worlds
Virtual worlds and massively-multiplayer online games are rich sources of information about large-scale teams and groups, offering the tantalizing possibility of harvesting data about group formation, social networks, and network evolution. They provide new outlets for human social interaction that differ from both face-to-face interactions and non-physically-embodied social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. We aim to study group dynamics in these virtual worlds by collecting and analyzing public conversational patterns of users grouped in close physical proximity. To do this, we created a set of tools for monitoring, partitioning, and analyzing unstructured conversations between changing groups of participants in Second Life, a massively multi-player online user-constructed environment that allows users to construct and inhabit their own 3D world. Although there are some cues in the dialog, determining social interactions from unstructured chat data alone is a difficult problem, since these environments lack many of the cues that facilitate natural language processing in other conversational settings and different types of social media. Public chat data often features players who speak simultaneously, use jargon and emoticons, and only erratically adhere to conversational norms. Humans are adept social animals capable of identifying friendship groups from a combination of linguistic cues and social network patterns. But what is more important, the content of what people say or their history of social interactions? Moreover, is it possible to identify whether iii people are part of a group with changing membership merely from general network properties, such as measures of centrality and latent communities? These are the questions that we aim to answer in this thesis. The contributions of this thesis include: 1) a link prediction algorithm for identifying friendship relationships from unstructured chat data 2) a method for identifying social groups based on the results of community detection and topic analysis. The output of these two algorithms (links and group membership) are useful for studying a variety of research questions about human behavior in virtual worlds. To demonstrate this we have performed a longitudinal analysis of human groups in different regions of the Second Life virtual world. We believe that studies performed with our tools in virtual worlds will be a useful stepping stone toward creating a rich computational model of human group dynamics
Integrated Nutrient Management in Corn Production: Symbiosis for Food Security and Grower’s Income in Arid and Semiarid Climates
Soil fertility and corn productivity is continuously declining due to removal of essential plant nutrients from the soils. The deficiencies of essential plant nutrients, organic matter, and beneficial soil microbes in soils had negative impact on soil fertility, corn productivity, and grower’s income, which has increased the problem of food insecurity under arid and semiarid climates. Best management practices including the proper use of plant nutrients increase (1) soil fertility and health, (2) yield per unit area, and (3) grower’s income (profitability). Our long-term field experiments on maize crop indicated that a significant increase in yield per unit area occurred with the integrated nutrient management (combined use of chemical fertilizers + organic fertilizers + biofertilizers). The integrated use of major plant nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash) along with different organic carbon sources (animal manures and plant residues) plus biofertilizers (beneficial microbes) significantly improves maize growth, yield and yield components, and grower’s income
Rice Crop Responses to Global Warming: An Overview
The mean temperature might rise up to range of 2.0–4.5 °C worldwide by the end of this century. Beside from this, a prediction has been made that rise in minimum night temperature will be at a quicker rate as compare to the maximum day temperature. Rising temperatures not only affect the crop growth process, but also lead to direct changes in other environmental factors and pose indirect effect on yield and quality of rice has been observed, so at the present stage, it aroused public attention. Breeds, including through breeding and biotechnology to improve high temperature tolerance of rice help to mitigate the negative effects of high temperature, however, progress in this area have been slow. By adopting different methods like sowing, water and nutrient management can also to some extent mitigate the effects of high temperature on rice performance, but in most cases, these techniques are influenced by many factors, such as crop rotation, irrigation and other constraints like their applications are hard to applied to large area. Therefore, this chapter addresses (1) empirical reduction of rice yield (2) highlights the key significant mechanisms that influence main grain quality attributes under high temperature stress (3) inducing stress resistance and adopting mitigation strategies for high performance of rice
Tuberculosis of the flexor carpi radialis muscle - A case report
Tuberculosis involving almost any organ of the body is a major problem in developing countries. The most commonly affected site in tuberculosis is the lung. Of the extra pulmonary tuberculosis, musculoskeletal involvement accounts for 1-5% of the cases. Muscular involvement in tuberculosis is a rare manifestation of extra pulmonary tuberculosis. Unusual presentations often go undetected and are associated with a diagnostic and therapeutic delay. This case report presents tuberculosis of the flexor carpi radialis
Firm Performance and the Nature of Agency Problems in Insiders-controlled Firms: Evidence from Pakistan
More than two centuries ago, Adam Smith (1776) showed
skepticism about the efficiency of joint stock companies because of the
separation of management from ownership. He observed that managers of
joint stock companies cannot be expected to watch over the business with
the same anxious vigilance as owners in a partnership would. Adam
Smith’s worry remained buried for a century and a half until Berle and
Means (1932) rekindled interest in this area when they hypothesised in
their book that dispersed shareholding is an inefficient form of
ownership structure. They argued that separation of ownership and
management control has changed the role of owner from being active to
the passive agent. Dispersed shareholders lack incentives to monitor
self-interested managers who possess only a small fraction of the total
shareholdings. The propositions by Adam Smith (1776) and Berle and Means
(1932) received some support when Jensen and Meckling (1976) tied
together the elements of property rights, agency costs, and finance to
develop a theory of ownership structure of a firm. Jensen and Meckling
asserted that agency costs are real, which the owner can reduce either
by increasing ownership stake of the agent in the firm or by incurring
monitoring and bonding costs. In early tests, several research studies
supported the views of Jensen and Meckling. However, these studies did
not account for endogeneity problem
Assistive multi-sensor framework for prevention and monitoring of pressure ulcers
Pressure ulcers (PU) are injuries to the skin and soft tissues due to prolonged pressure and have a significant impact on the quality of a patient’s life. The common risk factors of PU are pressure, shearing forces, friction, moisture, temperature, and immobility. The use of low-tech and high-tech devices is effective in distributing the high pressure exerted on the patient’s body. However, patients can still develop PU because these devices do not provide any real-time information about the risk factors of PU development. With the help of sensors, smart beds are effective to monitor and prevent the development of PU but the prevalence of PU around the globe is still high due to the aging population.
In this thesis, a multi-sensor framework is developed and tested to aid in the monitoring and prevention of PU. The proposed system is able to measure, process, and store real-time information about the numerous risk factors of PU. In addition, the framework does not need to be attached to the patient’s body in order to provide extra comfort. Different experiments are conducted to test the reliability and effectiveness of the proposed system. Experimental results indicate that the system is capable to provide the rate of repositioning, temperature, and pressure distribution
Adoption of green innovation practices in SMEs sector: evidence from an emerging economy
In developing world, awareness and environmental concerns
are forcing small and medium-sized enterprises to adopt green
practices. Hence it is important to distinguish the major
obstacles/barriers which hinders the adoption of green practices
in SMEs. This study utilizes a framework (three-phase) to classify
the major barriers/obstacles and solutions to eliminate these
obstacles in green innovation adoption. In total, twenty-five barriers and fifteen solutions were recognized through review of
existing literature and experts opinions. Fuzzy Analytical
Hierarchal Process (AHP) was utilized to rank these barriers and
Fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal
Solution (TOPSIS) is employed to give appropriate ranks to strategies/solutions to overcome the identified obstacles. The findings
of our study revealed that out of six major barriers, legal barriers
were the most critical obstacles in green innovation adoption in
Pakistani SMEs. Information barriers were the second critical green
innovation adoption obstacles/barriers in SMEs, followed by technical-barriers, managerial-barriers, economic-barriers and marketbarriers. These findings will offer insights to SMEs stockholders to
overcome and eradicate barriers to green innovation, who intend
to adopt green practices instead of conventional ones. Our study
analysis will assist SMEs in prioritizing the major factors influencing green innovation adoption
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