We describe a digital system that allows people to have an interactive conversation with a human storyteller (a Holocaust survivor) who has recorded a number of dialogue contributions, including many compelling narratives of his experiences and thoughts. The goal is to preserve as much as possible of the experience of face-to-face interaction. The survivor’s stories, answers to common questions...

Aim Species on islands are at high risk of extinction due to environmental changes, including global warming, land-use alterations and invasions. At local scales, extinctions can be offset by strategies promoting in situ persistence. We explored how persistence-related traits plants—that is, linked belowground resource conservation, growth, size longevity—on edaphic respond variation insularity...

background and objectives: citrobacter freundii is an opportunistic pathogen causing nosocomial infections and resistant to various antibiotics. we aimed to determine the clonal relationship of c. freundii isolates using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (pfge). materials and methods: fifty clinical isolates of c. freundii were collected from the main hospital in kermanshah. after antibiotic sus...

conclusions the inter- and intra-hospital dissemination of resistant clones is a matter of concern and is an indicator of the level of the improvement and surveillance of standard hygiene, particularly disinfection and hand washing before and after contact with patients. given the emergence of mbl-producing strains, surveillance has become an important procedure to control the transmission of r...

Multifidelity optimization approaches seek to bring higher-fidelity analyses earlier into the design process by using performance estimates from lower-fidelity models to accelerate convergence towards the optimum of a highfidelity design problem. Current multifidelity optimization methods generally fall into two broad categories: provably convergent methods that use either the high-fidelity gra...

Evaluating large sets of items, such as business ideas, is a difficult task. While no one person has time to evaluate all the items, many people can contribute by each evaluating a few. Moreover, given the mobility of people, it is useful to allow them to evaluate items from their mobile devices. We present the design and implementation of a mobile service, Rankr, which provides a lightweight a...

Custodians of digital content take action when the material that they are responsible for is threatened by, for example, obsolescence or deterioration. At first glance, ideal preservation actions retain every aspect of the original objects with the highest level of fidelity. Achieving this goal can, however, be costly, infeasible, and sometimes even undesirable. As a result, custodians must foc...

Given a set of candidate items, Recommendation by Explanation constructs a justification for recommending each item, in the form of what we call an Explanation Chain, and then recommends those candidates that have the best explanations. By unifying recommendation and explanation, this approach enables us to find relevant recommendations with explanations that have a high degree of both fidelity...