Choosing the Best Auto Insurance Choice System

In this Article, Mr. Joost reviews the auto insurance choice system and highlights recent legislative history in various states pertinent to the choice system. Acknowledging that there is growing interest in the concept of choice in auto insurance, the author recognizes that there is a lack of any consensus as to the best mechanism to use to assure that consumers can make an informed and rational choice. The author examines eight different possible choice mechanisms. He next summarizes the issues and problems that ought to be addressed in any choice system. In conclusion, any auto insurance reform proposal must be cost driven in the sense that it must offer real hope of significant premium reductions to those who can not afford insurance costs

Populous: A tool for populating ontology templates

We present Populous, a tool for gathering content with which to populate an ontology. Domain experts need to add content, that is often repetitive in its form, but without having to tackle the underlying ontological representation. Populous presents users with a table based form in which columns are constrained to take values from particular ontologies; the user can select a concept from an ontology via its meaningful label to give a value for a given entity attribute. Populated tables are mapped to patterns that can then be used to automatically generate the ontology's content. Populous's contribution is in the knowledge gathering stage of ontology development. It separates knowledge gathering from the conceptualisation and also separates the user from the standard ontology authoring environments. As a result, Populous can allow knowledge to be gathered in a straight-forward manner that can then be used to do mass production of ontology content.Comment: in Adrian Paschke, Albert Burger begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting, Andrea Splendiani, M. Scott Marshall, Paolo Romano: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences, Berlin,Germany, December 8-10, 201

Lesion evidence for a critical role of left posterior but not frontal areas in alpha-beta power decreases during context-driven word production

Acknowledgements The authors are grateful for the patients and their families, as well as for the other volunteer participants for taking part in this study. We would like to thank Donatella Scabini and Brian Curran for patient delineation, Brian Curran, Clay Clayworth and Callum Dewar for lesion reconstruction, Amber Moncrief and Selvi Paulraj for helping design the materials, Paige Mumford and Laura Agee for help with audio recordings, Kristoffer Dahlslätt for invaluable discussions, and the members of the Center for Aphasia and Related Disorders at the VAHCS in Martinez, CA, for neuropsychological testing. Funding This work is supported by grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (446‐13‐009 to V.P., 275‐89‐032 to J.R.), the National Institutes of Health (NINDS R37 NS21135 to R.T.K), and by the Nielsen Corporation. Data accessibility This article's supporting data and materials can be obtained upon request.Peer reviewedPostprin

CHORUS Deliverable 4.5: Report of the 3rd CHORUS Conference

The third and last CHORUS conference on Multimedia Search Engines took place from the 26th to the 27th of May 2009 in Brussels, Belgium. About 100 participants from 15 European countries, the US, Japan and Australia learned about the latest developments in the domain. An exhibition of 13 stands presented 16 research projects currently ongoing around the world

Developing a kidney and urinary pathway knowledge base

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Chronic renal disease is a global health problem. The identification of suitable biomarkers could facilitate early detection and diagnosis and allow better understanding of the underlying pathology. One of the challenges in meeting this goal is the necessary integration of experimental results from multiple biological levels for further analysis by data mining. Data integration in the life science is still a struggle, and many groups are looking to the benefits promised by the Semantic Web for data integration.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We present a Semantic Web approach to developing a knowledge base that integrates data from high-throughput experiments on kidney and urine. A specialised KUP ontology is used to tie the various layers together, whilst background knowledge from external databases is incorporated by conversion into RDF. Using SPARQL as a query mechanism, we are able to query for proteins expressed in urine and place these back into the context of genes expressed in regions of the kidney.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The KUPKB gives KUP biologists the means to ask queries across many resources in order to aggregate knowledge that is necessary for answering biological questions. The Semantic Web technologies we use, together with the background knowledge from the domain’s ontologies, allows both rapid conversion and integration of this knowledge base. The KUPKB is still relatively small, but questions remain about scalability, maintenance and availability of the knowledge itself.</p> <p>Availability</p> <p>The KUPKB may be accessed via <url>http://www.e-lico.eu/kupkb</url>.</p

Melody in Human–Cat Communication (Meowsic) : Origins, Past, Present and Future

The recently funded, five-year, project Melody in Human–Cat Communication (Meowsic) has received vast media attention, both nationally and around the world. In this paper we summarize how our activities got started, our published results so far, the present situation and how we envision our planned, future research, including some of the core hypotheses to be addressed by the project

A Study of Adoption and Effects of DevOps Practices

Many organizations adopt DevOps practices and tools in order to break down silos within the organization, improve software quality and delivery, and increase customer satisfaction. However, the impact of the individual practices on the performance of the organization is not well known. In this paper, we collect evidence on the effects of DevOps practices and tools on organizational performance. In an extensive literature search we identified 14 DevOps practices, consisting of 47 subpractices. Based on these practices, we conducted a global survey to study their effects in practice, and measure DevOps maturity. Across 123 respondents, working in 11 different industries, we found that 13 of the 14 DevOps practices are adopted, determined by 50\% of the participants indicating that practices are `always', `most of the time', and 'about half of the time' applied. There is a positive correlation between the adoption of all practices and independently measured maturity. In particular, practices concerning sandboxes for minimum deployment, test-driven development, and trunk based development show the lowest correlations in our data. Effects of software delivery and organizational performance are mainly perceived positive. Yet, DevOps is also considered by some to have a negative impact such as respondents mentioning the predictability of product delivery has decreased and work is less fun. Concluding, our detailed overview of DevOps practices allows more targeted application of DevOps practices to obtain its positive effects while minimizing any negative effects.Comment: to be published in conference proceedings of 28th IEEE ICE/ITMC & 31st IAMOT Conference IEE