This issue of Systemic Practice and Action Research, celebrating the work of Peter Checkland, in the particular nature and development of soft systems methodology (SSM), would not have happened unless the work was seen by others as being important. No significant contribution to thinking happens without a secondary literature developing. Not surprisingly, many commentaries have accompanied the ...

The effects of body size and feed intake on N digestibility, pancreas and Liver weight, and digestive enzyme activities in male broiler chicks were compared with those induced by dietary tannins. Four groups (SSM, ad lib., pair-fed and young) of sixteen birds each (2 weeks old) were used as experimental animals. They were fed on experimental diets for 4 weeks, except the young group which were ...

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES An atlas-based automated liver segmentation method from three-dimensional computed tomographic (3D CT) images has been developed. The method uses two types of atlases, a probabilistic atlas (PA) and a statistical shape model (SSM). MATERIALS AND METHODS Voxel-based segmentation with a PA is first performed to obtain a liver region, then the obtained region is used as ...

Schwarzer M, Schrepper A, Amorim P, Osterholt M, Doenst T. Pressure overload differentially affects respiratory capacity in interfibrillar and subsarcolemmal mitochondria. Am J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol 304: H529 –H537, 2013. First published December 15, 2012; doi:10.1152/ajpheart.00699.2012.—Years ago a debate arose as to whether two functionally different mitochondrial subpopulations, subsar...

To evaluate the scalar ocean surface wind speeds obtained from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) we compare them over the time period from July 1987 through December 1997 with those from two global analyses: the NCEP/NCAR Annual Reanalysis and the ECMWF TOGA Global Surface Analysis. We perform a statistical analysis for the whole globe and present time series analyses for selected geo...

Land surface soil moisture (SSM) is crucial in research and applications in hydrology, ecology, and meteorology. A novel SSM retrieval model, based on the diurnal cycles of land surface temperature (LST) and net surface shortwave radiation (NSSR), has recently been reported. It suggests a promising avenue for the retrieval of regional SSM using LST and NSSR derived from geostationary satellites...

In this paper, we present Scene Structural Matrix (SSM) and apply it to the retrieval of landscape images. The SSM captures the overall structural characteristics of the scene by indexing the geometric features of the image. A binary image tree (bintree) is used to partition the image and from which we derive multi-resolution geometric structural descriptors of the image. It is shown that SSM i...

Management has become a key concern for the success of multicast deployment in the Internet. One of the most important management tasks for multicast is to verify the availability of the service to its users. This task is referred to as discovering or testing reachability. In this paper, we present a new mechanism, SSM-Ping, for discovering multicast reachability between (remote) end systems in...