Lossy compression techniques have been applied to image and text compression, yielding compression factors that are vastly superior to lossless compression schemes. In this paper, we present a preliminary study on a set of lossy transformations for XML documents that preserve the semantics. Inspired by previous techniques, e.g. lossy text compression and literate programming, we apply a simple ...

Formal education is not enough to ensure scientific literacy in a w^orld where ideas and technology are changing rapidly (Hacker & Harris 1992). Projects that invite citizens to be involved in ecological research in their ow^n backyards or neighborhoods may provide rich opportunities for community members of all ages to improve their science literacy (TrumbuU et al. 2000; Brewer 2002&) and thei...

I describe preliminary experiments in documenting Excelsior versions of spreadsheets using semantic wikis and literate programming. The objective is to create well-structured and comprehensive documentation, easy to use by those unfamiliar with the spreadsheets documented. I discuss why so much documentation is hard to use, and briefly explain semantic wikis and literate programming; although p...

Observers in both literate and preliterate cultures chose the predicted emotion for photographs of the face, although agreement was higher in the literate samples. These findings suggest that the pan-cultural element in facial displays of emotion is the association between facial muscular movements and discrete primary emotions, although cultures may still differ in what evokes an emotion, in r...

It has long been argued that spatial aspects of language influence people's conception of time. However, what spatial aspect of language is the most influential in this regard? To test this, two experiments were conducted in Hong Kong and Macau with literate Cantonese speakers. The results suggest that the crucial factor in literate Cantonese people's spatial conceptualization of time is their ...

Different types of icons can trigger different amount of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation to semi-literate users. The different motivational variables are also expected to have different amount of effect on the behavioral intention of the use of such users. Our study approaches these issues from two theoretical perspectives. Based on the theory of metaphor, we argue that an interface which co...

BACKGROUND The causes of death have changed with regard to the epidemiological and demographic events in society. There is no evidence of prior research into the epidemiological transition in Turkey. This transition in Turkey should be observed starting with the Ottoman Empire period (19th to early 20th century). However, information about the Ottoman Empire is quite limited. AIMS To discuss ...

This paper describes how to implement a documentation technique that helps readers to understand large programs or collections of programs, by providing local indexes to all identifiers that are visible on every two-page spread. A detailed example is given for a program that finds all Hamiltonian circuits in an undirected graph.

Object-oriented programming has brought many advantages to the software engineering community. The reuse of existing software components and application frameworks can improve the productivity in software development considerably. The same object-oriented techniques, i.e., inheritance and information hiding, that ease reusing software, can be applied to documentation and thus, enable its reuse....

Icons, or pictorial and graphical objects, are commonly used in human-computer interaction (HCI) fields as the mediator in order to communicate information to users. Yet there has been little studies focusing on a majority of the world’s population – semi-literate communities – in terms of the fundamental knowhow for designing icons for such population. In this study, two sets of icons belongin...