42,255 research outputs found
Smartphone Adoption amongst Chinese Youth during Leisure-based Tourism: Challenges and Opportunities.
With the spread of Information communications technology
(ICT) in China, the tourism industry has come to recognize the importance of examining the factors that influence adoption of smartphones during leisure-based tourism among Chinese youth, a vital segment in what the world’s greatest domestic, inbound, and outbound 10 tourism market will be by 2020. Using data collected from undergraduate students at a university in China, this study, based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) and theory of reasoned action (TRA), found that an extended model can predict travelers' intentions. A detailed profile of Chinese youth and their smartphone usage is provided, and the managerial implications of increased adoption of Internet-capable smart- 15 phones during leisure-based tourism are also explored
Turbulence Time Series Data Hole Filling using Karhunen-Loeve and ARIMA methods
Measurements of optical turbulence time series data using unattended
instruments over long time intervals inevitably lead to data drop-outs or
degraded signals. We present a comparison of methods using both Principal
Component Analysis, which is also known as the Karhunen--Loeve decomposition,
and ARIMA that seek to correct for these event-induced and mechanically-induced
signal drop-outs and degradations. We report on the quality of the correction
by examining the Intrinsic Mode Functions generated by Empirical Mode
Decomposition. The data studied are optical turbulence parameter time series
from a commercial long path length optical anemometer/scintillometer, measured
over several hundred metres in outdoor environments.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, submitted to ICOLAD 2007, City University,
London, U
Personalized Pancreatic Tumor Growth Prediction via Group Learning
Tumor growth prediction, a highly challenging task, has long been viewed as a
mathematical modeling problem, where the tumor growth pattern is personalized
based on imaging and clinical data of a target patient. Though mathematical
models yield promising results, their prediction accuracy may be limited by the
absence of population trend data and personalized clinical characteristics. In
this paper, we propose a statistical group learning approach to predict the
tumor growth pattern that incorporates both the population trend and
personalized data, in order to discover high-level features from multimodal
imaging data. A deep convolutional neural network approach is developed to
model the voxel-wise spatio-temporal tumor progression. The deep features are
combined with the time intervals and the clinical factors to feed a process of
feature selection. Our predictive model is pretrained on a group data set and
personalized on the target patient data to estimate the future spatio-temporal
progression of the patient's tumor. Multimodal imaging data at multiple time
points are used in the learning, personalization and inference stages. Our
method achieves a Dice coefficient of 86.8% +- 3.6% and RVD of 7.9% +- 5.4% on
a pancreatic tumor data set, outperforming the DSC of 84.4% +- 4.0% and RVD
13.9% +- 9.8% obtained by a previous state-of-the-art model-based method
Self-optimization of optical confinement in ultraviolet photonic crystal slab laser
We studied numerically and experimentally the effects of structural disorder
on the performance of ultraviolet photonic crystal slab lasers. Optical gain
selectively amplifies the high-quality modes of the passive system. For these
modes, the in-plane and out-of-plane leakage rates may be automatically
balanced in the presence of disorder. The spontaneous optimization of in-plane
and out-of-plane confinement of light in a photonic crystal slab may lead to a
reduction of the lasing threshold.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
Divergence and Shannon information in genomes
Shannon information (SI) and its special case, divergence, are defined for a
DNA sequence in terms of probabilities of chemical words in the sequence and
are computed for a set of complete genomes highly diverse in length and
composition. We find the following: SI (but not divergence) is inversely
proportional to sequence length for a random sequence but is length-independent
for genomes; the genomic SI is always greater and, for shorter words and longer
sequences, hundreds to thousands times greater than the SI in a random sequence
whose length and composition match those of the genome; genomic SIs appear to
have word-length dependent universal values. The universality is inferred to be
an evolution footprint of a universal mode for genome growth.Comment: 4 pages, 3 tables, 2 figure
Anomalous morphology in left hemisphere motor and premotor cortex of children who stutter
Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects the smooth flow of speech production. Stuttering onset occurs during a dynamic period of development when children first start learning to formulate sentences. Although most children grow out of stuttering naturally, ∼1% of all children develop persistent stuttering that can lead to significant psychosocial consequences throughout one’s life. To date, few studies have examined neural bases of stuttering in children who stutter, and even fewer have examined the basis for natural recovery versus persistence of stuttering. Here we report the first study to conduct surface-based analysis of the brain morphometric measures in children who stutter. We used FreeSurfer to extract cortical size and shape measures from structural MRI scans collected from the initial year of a longitudinal study involving 70 children (36 stuttering, 34 controls) in the 3–10-year range. The stuttering group was further divided into two groups: persistent and recovered, based on their later longitudinal visits that allowed determination of their eventual clinical outcome. A region of interest analysis that focused on the left hemisphere speech network and a whole-brain exploratory analysis were conducted to examine group differences and group × age interaction effects. We found that the persistent group could be differentiated from the control and recovered groups by reduced cortical thickness in left motor and lateral premotor cortical regions. The recovered group showed an age-related decrease in local gyrification in the left medial premotor cortex (supplementary motor area and and pre-supplementary motor area). These results provide strong evidence of a primary deficit in the left hemisphere speech network, specifically involving lateral premotor cortex and primary motor cortex, in persistent developmental stuttering. Results further point to a possible compensatory mechanism involving left medial premotor cortex in those who recover from childhood stuttering.This study was supported by Award Numbers R01DC011277 (SC) and R01DC007683 (FG) from the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIDCD or the National Institutes of Health. (R01DC011277 - National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD); R01DC007683 - National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD))Accepted manuscrip
Effect of pressure on the quantum spin ladder material IPA-CuCl3
Inelastic neutron scattering and bulk magnetic susceptibility studies of the
quantum S=1/2 spin ladder system IPA-CuCl3 are performed under hydrostatic
pressure. The pressure dependence of the spin gap is determined. At
GPa it is reduced to meV from meV at
ambient pressure. The results allow us to predict a soft-mode quantum phase
transition in this system at P GPa. The measurements are
complicated by a proximity of a structural phase transition that leads to a
deterioration of the sample.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
- …