Training for flexibility and changing technologies

Malta's quest to become a full member of the European Union, offers a challenge to the island's industrial base - a challenge that involves a shift from a labour intensive, highly protected manufacturing industry to a knowledge-based capital intensive industry, open to fierce global market competition. One major implication of this shift is that the attraction of more foreign and local investment will no longer be based on an abundant, hard working and cheap labour force but on a multi-skilled, polyvalent human resource that is capable of adapting itself to continuous rapid changes in product development and international market requirements. This implication involves the provision of a different training system that caters for the development of a human resource that will be treated by operating organisations as a valuable asset to be continuously invested upon rather than as a factor of production whose cost should be kept at a minimum.peer-reviewe

Training for flexibility and changing technologies

Malta's quest to become a full member of the European Union, offers a challenge to the island's industrial base - a challenge that involves a shift from a labour intensive, highly protected manufacturing industry to a knowledge-based capital intensive industry, open to fierce global market competition. One major implication of this shift is that the attraction of more foreign and local investment will no longer be based on an abundant, hard working and cheap labour force but on a multi-skilled, polyvalent human resource that is capable of adapting itself to continuous rapid changes in product development and international market requirements. This implication involves the provision of a different training system that caters for the development of a human resource that will be treated by operating organisations as a valuable asset to be continuously invested upon rather than as a factor of production whose cost should be kept at a minimum.peer-reviewe

Solving problems, the island way : human resourcefulness in action among the islanders of Gozo

This paper offers glimpses into how businesspersons, entrepreneurs and small business managers resolve their most pressing problems under conditions characterized by smallness and islandness in order to survive. Applying a nissological approach complemented by an action-oriented grounded method, the researcher explores and inductively analyses the mind-sets of islanders to explicate the basic socio-psychological process that influences how they resourcefully overcome problems associated with mistrust and powerlessness, transforming these into opportunities of trust-building and empowerment. Two concurrent and seemingly contradictory processes emerge from the analysis, suggesting that Gozitans – the residents of the small Mediterranean island of Gozo – apply both overt formal and covert informal processes to solve their problems.peer-reviewe

Detection of curved lines with B-COSFIRE filters: A case study on crack delineation

The detection of curvilinear structures is an important step for various computer vision applications, ranging from medical image analysis for segmentation of blood vessels, to remote sensing for the identification of roads and rivers, and to biometrics and robotics, among others. %The visual system of the brain has remarkable abilities to detect curvilinear structures in noisy images. This is a nontrivial task especially for the detection of thin or incomplete curvilinear structures surrounded with noise. We propose a general purpose curvilinear structure detector that uses the brain-inspired trainable B-COSFIRE filters. It consists of four main steps, namely nonlinear filtering with B-COSFIRE, thinning with non-maximum suppression, hysteresis thresholding and morphological closing. We demonstrate its effectiveness on a data set of noisy images with cracked pavements, where we achieve state-of-the-art results (F-measure=0.865). The proposed method can be employed in any computer vision methodology that requires the delineation of curvilinear and elongated structures.Comment: Accepted at Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP) 201

Shedding light on a living lab: the CLEF NEWSREEL open recommendation platform

In the CLEF NEWSREEL lab, participants are invited to evaluate news recommendation techniques in real-time by providing news recommendations to actual users that visit commercial news portals to satisfy their information needs. A central role within this lab is the communication between participants and the users. This is enabled by The Open Recommendation Platform (ORP), a web-based platform which distributes users' impressions of news articles to the participants and returns their recommendations to the readers. In this demo, we illustrate the platform and show how requests are handled to provide relevant news articles in real-time

The Massive Wolf-Rayet Binary SMC WR7

We present a study of optical spectra of the Wolf--Rayet star AzV 336a (= SMC WR7) in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Our study is based on data obtained at several Observatories between 1988 and 2001. We find SMC WR7 to be a double lined WN+O6 spectroscopic binary with an orbital period of 19.56 days. The radial velocities of the He absorption lines of the O6 component and the strong He{\sc ii} emission at $\lambda$4686\AA of the WN component describe antiphased orbital motions. However, they show a small phase shift of $\sim$ 1 day. We discuss possible explanations for this phase shift. The amplitude of the radial velocity variations of He {\sc ii} emission is twice that of the absorption lines. The binary components have fairly high minimum masses, $\sim$ 18 \modot and 34 \modot for the WN and O6 components, respectively.Comment: Accepted by MNRA

The Discovery of a Twelfth Wolf-Rayet Star in the Small Magellanic Cloud

We report the discovery of a relatively faint (V=15.5) early-type WN star in the SMC. The line strength and width of He II lambda 4686 emission is similar to that of the other SMC WNs, and the presense of N V lambda 4603,19 emission (coupled with the lack of N III) suggests this star is of spectral type WN3-4.5, and thus is similar in type to the other SMC WRs. Also like the other SMC WN stars, an early-type absorption spectrum is weakly present. The absolute magnitude is comparable to that of other (single) Galactic early-type WNs. The star is located in the Hodge 53 OB association, which is also the home of two other SMC WNs. This star, which we designate SMC-WR12, was actually detected at a high significance level in an earlier interference-filter survey, but the wrong star was observed as part of a spectroscopic followup, and this case of mistaken identity resulted in its Wolf-Rayet nature not being recognized until now.Comment: Accepted by PASP (November 2003 issue

Lill-mużika ta’ Chopin

Ġabra ta’ poeżiji u proża li tinkludi: Talba lil Ġesù Bambin ta’ Ivo Muscat Azzopardi – Il-kewkba tal-Milied ta’ Ġużè Galea – Il-Milied it-tajjeb! ta’ G. Borg Pantalleresco – Lill-mużika ta’ Chopin ta’ John Sciberras.N/