Numerical simulation can provide a useful tool for investigating the dynamics of phenomena like rock avalanches, within realistic geological contexts and in the framework of a better risk assessment and decision making. Difficulties in numerical modelling of a heterogeneous moving mass are mainly linked to the simulation of the complex behaviour assumed by the mass during propagation. The numer...

A data field approach coupled with binary time-frequency masking is presented for the speech enhancement problem. In this proposed approach, data field method is employed to model the time and frequency dependencies of speech. This formulation has proved to be very helpful in enhancing speech quality by exploiting the correlation of speech both in time and in frequency. The experimental results...

Esteban Moro, 2 Javier Vicente, Luis G. Moyano, Austin Gerig, J. Doyne Farmer, 4 Gabriella Vaglica, Fabrizio Lillo, 5, 6 and Rosario N. Mantegna 6 Instituto de Ciencias Matemáticas CSIC-UAM-UC3M-UCM, Madrid, Spain Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos (GISC) and Departamento de Matemáticas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, E-28911, Leganés (Madrid), Spain Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde P...

Dr Michael J Powers QC Clerksroom & ADR Chambers, Taunton A meeting of the Medico-Legal Society was held at The Medical Society of London, 11 Chandos Street, London W1, on Thursday, 13 January 2005. The President, Dr Neville Davis, MBE, was in the Chair. The President: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I think we are in for another treat this evening. Standing on my left, Michael Powers is ve...

Teachers of ethics in UK medical schools have agreed a core curriculum for ethics and law, which is published in this issue of the journal.' When I told a senior professor of medicine in my own clinical school of this consensus statement he gave a look of surprise and then shuddered. I interpret his look as astonishment that a group of medical ethicists can agree about anything. The shudder, I ...

Mind-maps have not received much attention in the user modeling and recommender system community, although they contain lots of information that could be valuable for user modeling and recommender systems. For this paper, we explored the effectiveness of standard user modeling approaches applied to mind-maps, and developed novel user modeling approaches that consider the unique characteristics ...

The May 24, 2001, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine contained a provocative article by two Danish researchers Asbjorn Hrobjartsson and Peter Gotzsche entitled “Is the Placebo Powerless?” Based on a meta-analysis of 130 clinical trials for a wide range of treatments (including pharmacologic, physical, and psychological protocols) that provided comparisons of placebo with non-treatment...

To the utmost disappointment of the interested party, this approach usually doesn’t work. The apparent expectation is that visualization is something like using a Web browser: here’s the URL, just click on it and out pops a pretty image. Reality, however, differs markedly from this vision. When people see a good visualization or movie of some data, they typically have no idea about the effort b...