Considering the Importance of User Profiles in Interface Design

User profile is a popular term widely employed during product design processes by industrial companies. Such a profile is normally intended to represent real users of a product. The ultimate purpose of a user profile is actually to help designers to recognize or learn about the real user by presenting them with a description of a real user’s attributes, for instance; the user’s gender, age, educational level, attitude, technical needs and skill level. The aim of this chapter is to provide information on the current knowledge and research about user profile issues, as well as to emphasize the importance of considering these issues in interface design. In this chapter, we mainly focus on how users’ difference in expertise affects their performance or activity in various interaction contexts. Considering the complex interaction situations in practice, novice and expert users’ interactions with medical user interfaces of different technical complexity will be analyzed as examples: one focuses on novice and expert users’ difference when interacting with simple medical interfaces, and the other focuses on differences when interacting with complex medical interfaces. Four issues will be analyzed and discussed: (1) how novice and expert users differ in terms of performance during the interaction; (2) how novice and expert users differ in the perspective of cognitive mental models during the interaction; (3) how novice and expert users should be defined in practice; and (4) what are the main differences between novice and expert users’ implications for interface design. Besides describing the effect of users’ expertise difference during the interface design process, we will also pinpoint some potential problems for the research on interface design, as well as some future challenges that academic researchers and industrial engineers should face in practice

Multilevel omic data integration in cancer cell lines: advanced annotation and emergent properties

BACKGROUND: High-throughput (omic) data have become more widespread in both quantity and frequency of use, thanks to technological advances, lower costs and higher precision. Consequently, computational scientists are confronted by two parallel challenges: on one side, the design of efficient methods to interpret each of these data in their own right (gene expression signatures, protein markers, etc.) and, on the other side, realization of a novel, pressing request from the biological field to design methodologies that allow for these data to be interpreted as a whole, i.e. not only as the union of relevant molecules in each of these layers, but as a complex molecular signature containing proteins, mRNAs and miRNAs, all of which must be directly associated in the results of analyses that are able to capture inter-layers connections and complexity. RESULTS: We address the latter of these two challenges by testing an integrated approach on a known cancer benchmark: the NCI-60 cell panel. Here, high-throughput screens for mRNA, miRNA and proteins are jointly analyzed using factor analysis, combined with linear discriminant analysis, to identify the molecular characteristics of cancer. Comparisons with separate (non-joint) analyses show that the proposed integrated approach can uncover deeper and more precise biological information. In particular, the integrated approach gives a more complete picture of the set of miRNAs identified and the Wnt pathway, which represents an important surrogate marker of melanoma progression. We further test the approach on a more challenging patient-dataset, for which we are able to identify clinically relevant markers. CONCLUSIONS: The integration of multiple layers of omics can bring more information than analysis of single layers alone. Using and expanding the proposed integrated framework to integrate omic data from other molecular levels will allow researchers to uncover further systemic information. The application of this approach to a clinically challenging dataset shows its promising potential

The Cultivation of Intercultural Awareness in High School English Teaching

As we all know, language is an important carrier of communication and culture. Teaching English in high school should not only be regarded as a process of teaching basic linguistic knowledge on the surface, but also an indispensable way of learning culture for students. Language and culture can’t be separated from each other. It has been proved that cultivation intercultural awareness in English teaching can contribute to student’s intercultural communication abilities in English. Although, educators have realized the necessity of cultural transmission when teaching English recently, due to different reasons, the effect of teaching English in high school is less than satisfactory. In recent days, many educators put forward to an idea that English teachers in China play several roles at the same time in English teaching. English teachers must consider themselves as cultural transmitters. Only when they realize their identities and how important roles they play in English teaching process, will English teaching can be done more effectively and smoothly

Treatment with organic manure inoculated with a biocontrol agent induces soil bacterial communities to inhibit tomato Fusarium wilt disease

IntroductionOrganic manure, plant growth-promoting microorganisms, and biocontrol agents are widely used to sustainably control soil-borne diseases. However, how and whether organic manure inoculated with biocontrol agents alters soil microbiota and reduces disease severity is poorly understood.MethodsHere, we examined changes to the soil microbial community, soil properties, and incidence of Fusarium wilt disease in response to several fertilization regimes. Specifically, we studied the effects of inorganic chemical fertilization (CF), organic manure fertilization (OF), and Erythrobacter sp. YH-07-inoculated organic manure fertilization (BF) on the incidence of Fusarium wilt in tomato across three seasons.ResultsBF-treated soils showed increased microbial abundance, richness, and diversity compared to other treatments, and this trend was stable across seasons. BF-treated soils also exhibited a significantly altered microbial community composition, including increased abundances of Bacillus, Altererythrobacter, Cryptococcus, and Saprospiraceae, and decreased abundances of Chryseolinea and Fusarium. Importantly, BF treatment significantly suppressed the incidence of Fusarium wilt in tomato, likely due to direct suppression by Erythrobacter sp. YH-07 and indirect suppression through changes to the microbial community composition and soil properties.DiscussionTaken together, these results suggest that Erythrobacter sp. YH-07-inoculated organic manure is a stable and sustainable soil amendment for the suppression of Fusarium wilt diseases

Color Image Segmentation Based on Modified Kuramoto Model

AbstractA new approach for color image segmentation is proposed based on Kuramoto model in this paper. Firstly, the classic Kuramoto model which describes a global coupled oscillator network is changed to be one that is locally coupled to simulate the neuron activity in visual cortex and to describe the influence for phase changing by external stimuli. Secondly, a rebuilt method of coupled neuron activities is proposed by introducing and computing instantaneous frequency. Three oscillating curves corresponding to the pixel values of R, G, B for color image are formed by the coupled network and are added up to produce the superposition of oscillation. Finally, color images are segmented according to the synchronization of the oscillating superposition by extracting and checking the frequency of the oscillating curves. The performance is compared with that from other representative segmentation approaches