Load testing of IT applications is fraught with the challenges of time to market, quality of results, high cost of commercial tools, and accurately representing production like scenarios. It would help IT projects to be able to test with a small number of users and extrapolate to scenarios with much larger number of users. This in turn will cut down cycle times and costs and allow for a variety...

This paper investigates the composition of search engine results pages. We define what elements the most popular web search engines use on their results pages (e.g., organic results, advertisements, shortcuts) and to which degree they are used for popular vs. rare queries. Therefore, we send 500 queries of both types to the major search engines Google, Yahoo, Live.com and Ask. We count how ofte...

Sponsored search has gained considerable attention in Web searchrelated studies. In this paper, we investigate into the user interaction process on search engine result pages (SERPs) considering the influence of sponsored search results. We integrate different styles of sponsored links into SERPs to systematically study how they affect users’ behavioral preferences. Based on an analysis into us...

The lagging reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) affects States' plans for sustaining mature programs. This study used the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) program survey in order to assess changes in access and satisfaction for Georgia's SCHIP (PeachCare) and Medicaid children as PeachCare matured 2000 to 2003. Adjusting for fa...

The majority of applications requiring high resolution images to derive and analyze data accurately and easily. Image super resolution is playing an effective role in those applications. Image super resolution is the process of producing high resolution image from low resolution image. In this paper, we study various image super resolution techniques with respect to the quality of results and p...

The data quality of a vector spatial data can be assessed using the data contained within one or more data warehouses. Spatial consistency includes topological consistency, or the conformance to topological rules (Hadzilacos & Tryfona, 1992, Rodríguez, 2005). Detection of inconsistencies in vector spatial data is an important step for improvement of spatial data quality (Redman, 1992; Veregin, ...

Recently, content based 3D shape retrieval has been an active area of research. Benchmarking allows researchers to evaluate the quality of results of different 3D shape retrieval approaches. Here, we propose a new publicly available 3D shape benchmark to advance the state of art in 3D shape retrieval. We provide a review of previous and recent benchmarking efforts and then discuss some of the i...

To better meet users’ underlying navigational requirement, search engines like Baidu has developed general recommendation engine and provided related entities on the right side of the search engine results page(SERP). However, users’ behavior have not been well investigated after the association of individual queries in search engine. To better understand users’ navigational activities, we prop...

Users of web search engines are known to mostly focus on the top ranked results of the search engine result page. While many studies support this well known information seeking pattern only few studies concentrate on the question what users are missing by neglecting lower ranked results. To learn more about the relevance distributions in the so-called long tail we conducted a relevance assessme...

In this issue of the Health Care Financ­ ing Review, we focus on the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of cancer survi­ vors who are enrolled in Medicare man­ aged care (MMC). Over the past few years, NCI and CMS have been collaborat­ ing on the creation of a surveillance data set that links data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) cancer registry program with the e...