Multimedia Chinese Web Search Engines: A Survey

The objective of this paper is to explore the state of multimedia search functionality on major general and dedicated Web search engines in Chinese language. The authors studied: a) how many Chinese Web search engines presently make use of multimedia searching, and b) the type of multimedia search functionality available. Specifically, the following were examined: a) multimedia features - features allowing multimedia search; and b) extent of personalization - the extent to which a search engine Web site allows users to control multimedia search. Overall, Chinese Web search engines offer limited multimedia searching functionality. The significance of the study is based on two factors: a) little research has been conducted on Chinese Web search engines, and b) the instrument used in the study and the results obtained by this research could help users, Web designers, and Web search engine developers. By large, general Web search engines support more multimedia features than specialized one

Children's Color Association for Digital Image Retrieval.

In the field of information sciences, attention has been focused on developing mature information retrieval systems that abstract information automatically from the contents of information resources, such as books, images and films. As a subset of information retrieval research, content-based image retrieval systems automatically abstract elementary information from images in terms of colors, shapes, and texture. Color is the most commonly used in similarity measurement for content-based image retrieval systems. Human-computer interface design and image retrieval methods benefit from studies based on the understanding of their potential users. Today's children are exposed to digital technology at a very young age, and they will be the major technology users in five to ten years. This study focuses on children's color perception and color association with a controlled set of digital images. The method of survey research was used to gather data for this exploratory study about children's color association from a children's population, third to sixth graders. An online questionnaire with fifteen images was used to collect quantitative data of children's color selections. Face-to-face interviews investigated the rationale and factors affecting the color choices and children's interpretation of the images. The findings in this study indicate that the color children associated with in the images was the one that took the most space or the biggest part of an image. Another powerful factor in color selection was the vividness or saturation of the color. Colors that stood out the most generally attracted the greatest attention. Preferences of color, character, or subject matter in an image also strongly affected children's color association with images. One of the most unexpected findings was that children would choose a color to replace a color in an image. In general, children saw more things than what were actually represented in the images. However, the children's interpretation of the images had little effect on their color selections

44P. Search Engines and Academic Research Process

Information Technologies shape the way users retrieve information. The Internet has become one of the most important information resources where people look for various kind of information. Search engines are seen as a gateway to the online information. This paper describes a survey carried out on graduate students pursing Master or PhD to investigate the impact of search engines on their research process. Information quality, cost and copyright issue were examined to give an insight on how Internet was used as an information source. Overall, quality of information and time spent were the main influences when using search engines. Students are generally aware of copyright issues. However, most of them do not check copyright issue when downloading online materials. Nearly half of the participants also agree that search engines are biased towards English

Failure and Repair of the Slope of Railway Embankments and Expansive Soils

This paper mainly discusses the stability of the slope of the four sections of railway embankments of expansive soils, describes their basic condition and the properties of the soil materials, analyzes the types and causes of slope failures, discusses the repair of such slopes, and the remedial measures to prevent recurrent of the slides, and sums up experience of using expansive soils to construct railway embankments

Photo-production of lowest Σ1/2−∗\Sigma^*_{1/2^-} state within the Regge-effective Lagrangian approach

Since the lowest $\Sigma^{*}$ state, with quantum numbers spin-parity $J^{P} =1/2^{-}$, is far from established experimentally and theoretically, we have performed a theoretical study on the $\Sigma^*_{1/2^-}$ photo-production within the Regge-effective Lagrangian approach. Taking into account that the $\Sigma^*_{1/2^-}$ couples to the $\bar{K}N$ channel, we have considered the contributions from the $t$-channel $K$ exchange diagram. Moreover, these contributions from $t$-channel $K^*$ exchange, $s$-channel nucleon pole, $u$-channel $\Sigma$ exchange, and the contact term, are considered. The differential and total cross sections of the process $\gamma n \to K^{+}\Sigma^{*-}_{1/2^-}$ are predicted with our model parameters. The results should be helpful to search for the $\Sigma^*_{1/2^-}$ state experimentally in future.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Can probability of genetic mutation be an indicator of clinical relevance?

AbstractNPM1 gene mutation evaluated on a population basis is a valuable and realistic tool to reflect the pathophysiological relevance of cancer. In a comparison of the NPM1 cDNA of human bladder cancer with its consensus sequence, we have found that a higher NPM1 sequence identity in a population is consistent with poor tumor differentiation, advanced tumor stage, and likelihood of recurrence. These data imply that “probability” of NPM1 mutation is an indicator of status of malignancy

User Profiling for Search Engines’ Help Systems

The Help Systems information provided by search engines can facilitate or hinder its user’s information seeking process. This paper reports a study in how users would like to see search engines’ Help Systems to be organized and presented. Six aspects of Help Systems, including navigation, design elements, technical help, conceptual help, terminological, and strategic aspects, were used as the framework to develop questionnaire for further study in stereotyping search engine users. Overall users do not expect animations, videos and speech as part of a search engine’s Help System, technical help is desirable, and the navigation to find Help page and relevant content is important

Wikis and Collaborative Learning / Yun-Ke Chang, Miguel Angel Morales-Arroyo, Hla Than... [et.al].

Wikis have been used as a supporting tool for students‘ learning and collaboration. Tasks such as collaborative writing, joined glossaries creation, document discussion and review, group projects, reflection journals and others have been tried out using wikis as a facilitating tool (Ben-Zvi, 2007). However, few studies have reported how students actually perceive some well-claimed benefits. This study investigated the perception of learning activities facilitated by wiki, and the effectiveness of several roles wiki might play in constructive and collaborative learning. This study tried to answer the following questions. How do students perceive a wiki as a learning tool? How does a wiki support constructive learning skills? How does a wiki support student‘s collaborative learning skills? How does collaboration in wiki facilitate students‘ content learning and project work? The study was conducted using a survey method to examine the perception of wiki usage and collaborative and constructive learning. In the reported study, a questionnaire was used to collect data from 92 students in higher education. The results suggest that using wikis were perceived to enhance collaborative knowledge building among students, but it did not contribute much to learning the subject matters although students were more involved in the learning process than with conventional teaching methods. In another word, it indicates that students may not obtain better return of investment on the time spent in using wiki as a learning tool. While wiki did contribute to enrich the learning experience, further study is needed to investigate how to link learning process with learning outcome using this type of collaboration tools

Interface induced high temperature superconductivity in single unit-cell FeSe films on SrTiO3

Searching for superconducting materials with high transition temperature (TC) is one of the most exciting and challenging fields in physics and materials science. Although superconductivity has been discovered for more than 100 years, the copper oxides are so far the only materials with TC above 77 K, the liquid nitrogen boiling point. Here we report an interface engineering method for dramatically raising the TC of superconducting films. We find that one unit-cell (UC) thick films of FeSe grown on SrTiO3 (STO) substrates by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) show signatures of superconducting transition above 50 K by transport measurement. A superconducting gap as large as 20 meV of the 1 UC films observed by scanning tunneling microcopy (STM) suggests that the superconductivity could occur above 77 K. The occurrence of superconductivity is further supported by the presence of superconducting vortices under magnetic field. Our work not only demonstrates a powerful way for finding new superconductors and for raising TC, but also provides a well-defined platform for systematic study of the mechanism of unconventional superconductivity by using different superconducting materials and substrates