The effects of online commentary on users\u27 information processing in the context of online discussion forums

The airline industry employs advanced e-commerce technologies to retain frequent customers and attract new passengers, but it is likely that not all airlines have clear knowledge about how many gaps should be filled between the status quo and an ideal website. This study proposes an integrated model for evaluating airlines’ websites in terms of the perspectives of “marketing mix 4Ps” and “website quality”. In order to verify the practicality and usefulness of this model, an empirical study of the Taiwanese airline industry is offered to illustrate the application of the proposed model. The model first applies the DEMATEL method to cope with the interdependencies between criteria. It then converts the criteria’s cause and effect relations into a visual structural map where the ANP method can help compute the weight of criteria. Finally, it uses the modified VIKOR method to rank e-commerce websites of the five Taiwanese airlines. Overall, the results show that the Taiwanese airlines still have a great deal of room to improve their websites. This proposed model not only provides helpful information for airlines to understand their websites’ quality level, but also contributes to industrial applications in terms of providing some worthwhile recommendations for building an ideal website

H. 264 Error Resilience Coding Based on Multihypothesis Motion Compensated Prediction

[[abstract]]In this paper, we propose efficient schemes for enhancing the error robustness of multi-hypothesis motion-compensate predictive (MHMCP) coder without sacrificing the coding efficiency significantly. The proposed schemes utilize the concept of reference picture interleaving and data partitioning to make the MHMCP-coded video more resilient to channel errors, especially for burst channel error. Besides, we also propose a scheme of integrating adaptive intra-refresh into the proposed MHMCP coder to further improve the error recovery speed. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed methods can effectively and quickly mitigate the error propagation and the penalty on coding efficiency for clean channels due to the inserted error resilience features is rather minor[[fileno]]2030144030009[[department]]電機工程學

Improved Quantum-Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm for Engineering Design Optimization

An improved quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm is proposed for solving mixed discrete-continuous nonlinear problems in engineering design. The proposed Latin square quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm (LSQEA) combines Latin squares and quantum-inspired genetic algorithm (QGA). The novel contribution of the proposed LSQEA is the use of a QGA to explore the optimal feasible region in macrospace and the use of a systematic reasoning mechanism of the Latin square to exploit the better solution in microspace. By combining the advantages of exploration and exploitation, the LSQEA provides higher computational efficiency and robustness compared to QGA and real-coded GA when solving global numerical optimization problems with continuous variables. Additionally, the proposed LSQEA approach effectively solves mixed discrete-continuous nonlinear design optimization problems in which the design variables are integers, discrete values, and continuous values. The computational experiments show that the proposed LSQEA approach obtains better results compared to existing methods reported in the literature

The Trajectory Analysis of Bevel Planetary Gear Trains

Introduction In the theory of Kinematics of Mechanisms, trajectories generated by planetary gear trains form an important family of curves, known as Epitrochoids or Hypotrochoids, depending on whether the gearing is external or internal In this paper, the geometry of trajectories generated by a tracer point on the planet of bevel planetary gear trains is studied. This study serves as a precursor to the workspace analysis of a new class of gear-coupled, three DOF (Degrees Of Freedom), four-jointed wrist mechanisms. Before further discussion, it is helpful to review briefly the trajectories generated by a spur planetary gear train because of the analogy between them

Comments on Three Multi-Server Authentication Protocols

Recently, Tsai et al., Liao et al. and Li et al. each proposed a multi-server authentication protocol. They claimed their protocols are secure and can withstand various attacks. However, we found some security loopholes in each of their schemes, for example, both Tsai et al.’s and Liao et al.‘s schemes suffers from server spoofing attack by an insider server. Li et al.s’ suffers from the lost smart card password-guessing attack. In addition, Liao et al.‘s scheme also has the off-line password-guessing attack. In this paper, we will first review then show the attacks on each of the schemes. Then, based on Li et al.’s scheme, we proposed a novel one and examined its security in several security features. After security analysis, we concluded that our protocol outperformed Li et al.’s scheme in the security feature of lost smart card password-guessing attack. Keywords: multi-server, password authentication protoco

Socioeconomic impacts of innovative dairy supply chain practices. The case of the Laiterie du Berger in the Senegalese Sahel

This study analyzes the Laiterie Du Berger (LDB)'s milk supply chain and its contribution to strengthening the food security and socioeconomic resources of Senegalese Sahelian pastoral households. Porter's value chain model is used to characterize the innovations introduced by the LDB dairy in its milk inbound logistics and supplier relationships. A socioeconomic food security index and qualitative data are used to assess the dairy's supply chain's contribution to strengthen smallholder households' livelihoods. Data for this research were obtained through individual surveys, focus groups and in-depth interviews of LDB managers and milk suppliers. Results show that milk income contributes significantly to household food security. Suppliers who stabilize their dairy income between rainy and dry seasons, diversify income sources and have larger herds are more likely to remain food secure. The LDB innovations contribute by helping herders access biophysical and economic resources, leading to better livestock feed and household food security. (Résumé d'auteur

Intraclass reliability for assessing how well Taiwan constrained hospital-provided medical services using statistical process control chart techniques

BACKGROUND: Few studies discuss the indicators used to assess the effect on cost containment in healthcare across hospitals in a single-payer national healthcare system with constrained medical resources. We present the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) to assess how well Taiwan constrained hospital-provided medical services in such a system. METHODS: A custom Excel-VBA routine to record the distances of standard deviations (SDs) from the central line (the mean over the previous 12 months) of a control chart was used to construct and scale annual medical expenditures sequentially from 2000 to 2009 for 421 hospitals in Taiwan to generate the ICC. The ICC was then used to evaluate Taiwan’s year-based convergent power to remain unchanged in hospital-provided constrained medical services. A bubble chart of SDs for a specific month was generated to present the effects of using control charts in a national healthcare system. RESULTS: ICCs were generated for Taiwan’s year-based convergent power to constrain its medical services from 2000 to 2009. All hospital groups showed a gradually well-controlled supply of services that decreased from 0.772 to 0.415. The bubble chart identified outlier hospitals that required investigation of possible excessive reimbursements in a specific time period. CONCLUSION: We recommend using the ICC to annually assess a nation’s year-based convergent power to constrain medical services across hospitals. Using sequential control charts to regularly monitor hospital reimbursements is required to achieve financial control in a single-payer nationwide healthcare system

Toward Inter-Connection on OpenFlow Research Networks

With the advance of Future Internet technologies, many research issues andideas are growing fast in recent years. In the field of network virtualization, softwaredefined network becomes a common topic on network research. In Taiwan, manyinstitutes and laboratories of universities already built their bench-scale testbed forresearch and educational use with OpenFlow protocol. As time goes by, stitchingexperimental networks is a growing trend to fulfill requirements for large scaleemulation. Hence, this paper revealed a progressing deployment which connectsdifferent experimental networks with centralized control policy. The objective is tobuild an integrated research network with a proposed solution which utilizesOpenFlow protocol to deal with the inter-connections. With a centralized controllerand implemented architecture, the deployment not only solves the limitation of VLANtag number in network but also improves the flexibility of configuration. This designcould be a solution for the realistic constraints of network environment in Taiwan, andit also supports the possibility of stitching regional experimental networks fornetworking research

Various criteria in the evaluation of biomedical named entity recognition

BACKGROUND: Text mining in the biomedical domain is receiving increasing attention. A key component of this process is named entity recognition (NER). Generally speaking, two annotated corpora, GENIA and GENETAG, are most frequently used for training and testing biomedical named entity recognition (Bio-NER) systems. JNLPBA and BioCreAtIvE are two major Bio-NER tasks using these corpora. Both tasks take different approaches to corpus annotation and use different matching criteria to evaluate system performance. This paper details these differences and describes alternative criteria. We then examine the impact of different criteria and annotation schemes on system performance by retesting systems participated in the above two tasks. RESULTS: To analyze the difference between JNLPBA's and BioCreAtIvE's evaluation, we conduct Experiment 1 to evaluate the top four JNLPBA systems using BioCreAtIvE's classification scheme. We then compare them with the top four BioCreAtIvE systems. Among them, three systems participated in both tasks, and each has an F-score lower on JNLPBA than on BioCreAtIvE. In Experiment 2, we apply hypothesis testing and correlation coefficient to find alternatives to BioCreAtIvE's evaluation scheme. It shows that right-match and left-match criteria have no significant difference with BioCreAtIvE. In Experiment 3, we propose a customized relaxed-match criterion that uses right match and merges JNLPBA's five NE classes into two, which achieves an F-score of 81.5%. In Experiment 4, we evaluate a range of five matching criteria from loose to strict on the top JNLPBA system and examine the percentage of false negatives. Our experiment gives the relative change in precision, recall and F-score as matching criteria are relaxed. CONCLUSION: In many applications, biomedical NEs could have several acceptable tags, which might just differ in their left or right boundaries. However, most corpora annotate only one of them. In our experiment, we found that right match and left match can be appropriate alternatives to JNLPBA and BioCreAtIvE's matching criteria. In addition, our relaxed-match criterion demonstrates that users can define their own relaxed criteria that correspond more realistically to their application requirements

Longitudinal Changes in Retinal Nerve Fiber Layer Thickness after Acute Primary Angle Closure Measured with Optical Coherence Tomography

PURPOSE. Longitudinal follow-up of peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness after an episode of acute primary angle closure (APAC) using Stratus optical coherence tomography (OCT). METHODS. Seventeen patients who had experienced a single unilateral APAC episode (intraocular pressure, Ͼ50 mm Hg) were enrolled. The average and superior, temporal, inferior, and nasal quadrant RNFL thicknesses of the affected and fellow eyes at 1, 4, and 12 weeks after remission were compared by using StratusOCT. The relationship between average RNFL thickness and interval of follow-up were evaluated with regression analysis. RESULTS. The mean duration of the APAC episode was 13.8 hours (range, 3-40). Comparison of the average and four quadrant RNFL thicknesses in the affected eyes longitudinally showed significant differences between 1 and 4, and 1 and 12 weeks, but not between 4 and 12 weeks. The average and four-quadrant RNFL thicknesses for the affected eyes were greater than the analogous values for fellow eyes at 1 week. In contrast, the inferior-and superior-quadrant RNFL thicknesses for the affected eyes were lower at 4 and 12 weeks, whereas the average and nasal quadrant values for the affected eyes were lower than those in fellow eyes at 12 weeks. Average RNFL thickness for the affected eyes was correlated with the interval of follow-up by using inverse regression analysis (P Ͻ 0.001; R 2 ϭ 0.60). Controlling for duration of APAC episode, the interval of follow-up on RNFL thickness reduction remained significant (P Ͻ 0.001, r ϭ Ϫ0.69). CONCLUSIONS. This study demonstrated an initial increase in diffuse RNFL thickness after a single APAC episode, followed by a subsequent decrease. (Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2007; 48:1659 -1664) DOI:10.1167/iovs.06-0950 A cute primary angle closure (APAC) is an ophthalmic emergency and a potentially blinding disease. Optic nerve damage can occur after the sudden rise in intraocular pressure (IOP) associated with an APAC episode. The optic disc appears edematous during this episode, and pallor with or without cupping may develop after remission. When treatment is delayed, vision may be markedly reduced to hand movement or light perception. 1 Perimetric examination during acute episodes is difficult and usually unreliable. After remission, visual field defects vary greatly in severity and type. 2 Measurement of retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness loss after APAC is very important, as it is both objective and sensitive in terms of detection of the optic disc damage with either normal or unreliable visual fields. Scanning laser polarimetry with fixed corneal compensator (SLP-FCC) has been used for quantification of RNFL thickness change after APAC in cross-sectional study, 5 However, the latter investigation included several patients with poor IOP control after an APAC episode, as determined by RNFL measurement at follow-up. Moreover, SLP-FCC has limited functionality in measurement of RNFL thickness because of the lack of correction for variation in corneal polarization axis and corneal curvature. StratusOCT is a powerful imaging technology that can measure RNFL thickness and image tissue structure to an axial resolution of Ͻ10 m. 7 The stronger association with function in StratusOCT RNFL measurement compared with SLP-VCC suggests that the former may be superior for evaluation of glaucoma progression. 8 Therefore, the purpose of this study was to use StratusOCT to detect longitudinal change (1-12 weeks) in RNFL thickness after remission from a single APAC episode. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this prospective study, longitudinal observations were made using RNFL measurements obtained from StratusOCT at 1, 4, and 12 weeks after a single episode of unilateral APAC. Seventeen consecutive patients were recruited while undergoing treatment in the emergency or the ophthalmology outpatient departments of the Chang Gung Memorial Hospital-Kaohsiung Medical Center over a 1-year period. The study and data accumulation were in conformity with all relevant Taiwanese laws, and the investigation was conducted in accordance with the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki. The APAC definition used for the study consisted of: The inclusion criteria were: (1) duration of episode less than 48 hours (interval from onset of acute symptoms to first hospital presentation); (2) resolution of acute episode and IOP control (Ͻ21 mm Hg) after antiglaucoma medication prescribed on first presentation, with interval between presentation and resolution under 2 hours (patients were treated with intravenous mannitol drip, oral acetazolamide, topical ␤-blocker and pilocarpine; the IOP was then rechecked 30 to 60 minutes after treatment); (3) subsequent laser iridotomy (LI) performed within 2 days of presentation on both affected and fellow eyes; and, (4) IOP Ͻ 21 mm Hg in both eyes for up to 12 weeks after treatment. Antiglaucoma medication was used to control IOP before and after LI in both eyes to prevent elevation (IOP Ͼ 21 mm Hg). The exclusion criteria were: (1) history of previous APAC in the affected or fellow eyes; (2) previous intraocular surgery, coexisting From th