this survey attempted to measure online search skills amongst post graduate students of shiraz university. having examined the literature on online search skills, seven most frequently used and applicable online search skills were selected for this study. the two broad objectives were to measure the mean score of each skill and also the difference between students of different post graduate lev...

The difficulty of assessing the writing skill is well known. Different testing facets seem to affect the result of assessing the writing skill. In addition to the writer’s ability, the topic of the writing task, and methods of rating may contribute to the writer’s score. In this study, 50 EFL learners wrote four different types of writing tasks (convincing, describing, instructing, and explaini...

The paper evaluates two kernel-based methods on the problem of predicting precipitation based on observable variables. The support vector machine (SVM) method finds the two parallel hyperplanes that provide maximal separation of two subsets, excepting outliers. The minimax probability machine (MPM) method finds an optimal separating hyperplane that minimizes the probability of misclassification...

Common-sense folk psychology and mainstream philosophy of action agree about decisions: these are under an agent's direct control, and are thus intentional actions for which agents can be held responsible. I begin this paper by presenting a problem for this view. In short, since the content of the motivational attitudes that drive deliberation and decision remains open-ended until the moment of...

McFarland and Crouch (2002) reported substantial positive correlations (a) between the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and response speed and (b) between IATs assessing racism or self-esteem and ostensibly unrelated control IATs. Using an IAT measure in millisecond-difference score format, they concluded that the IAT was confounded with general cognitive ability. A reanalysis of these data usin...

In the early 1990s, a set of new techniques for manipulating mouse DNA allowed researchers to 'knock out' specific genes and observe the effects of removing them on a live mouse. In animal behaviour genetics, questions about how to deploy these techniques to study the molecular basis of behaviour became quite controversial, with a number of key methodological issues dissecting the interdiscipli...

The purpose of this study was to compare performance factors of youth soccer players according to position. A total of 101 high school soccer players were selected and were classified into goalkeeper (n=7), defense (n=37), midfield (n=39), and forward (n=18) positions. All subjects were subjected to the Wingate test for anaerobic capacity, shuttle run test for aerobic capacity, and pass, kick, ...

We introduce skill chaining, a skill discovery method for continuous domains. Skill chaining produces chains of skills leading to a salient event—where salience can be defined simply as an end-of-task reward, or as a more sophisticated heuristic (e.g., an intrinsically interesting event (Singh et al., 2004)). The goal of each skill in the chain is to reach a state where its successor skill can ...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study is to analyze clinical and radiological outcomes of patients (with a minimum of 14 years of follow-up) who underwent cruciate-retaining (CR) total knee arthroplasty (TKA) using a NexGen®-CR, comparing a patellar resurfacing group with a patellar retention group. METHODS From June 1996 to April 2002, 116 cases of TKA using a NexGen®-CR who had at least 14 y...

background : this study was to investigate the health literacy and influencing factors of older population in pension institution of xinjiang, china. methods : elderly people were selected from 44 pension institutions in urumqi, changji, karamay and shihezi and from september 2011 to june 2012 using random layer sampling method. the investigation was carried out by chi-nese citizen health liter...