Information use intrigues information behavior researchers, though many have struggled with how to conceptualize and study this phenomenon. Some work suggests that information may have social uses, hinting that information use is more complicated than previous frameworks suggest. Therefore, we use a micro-sociological, symbolic interactionist approach to examine the use of one type of informati...

When a person moves through an overlapping environment they can travel in a closed, Euclidean loop but still end up in a different place to where they started. Although such environments are unusual, they do confer potential advantages for navigation. Three independent attributes of spatial overlap, as applied to 3-D virtual environments (VEs), are described, together with their likely effects ...

This project involves using mathematical models to optimize the performance of a diffractive optical element. Unlike the usual optimization problem, we will seek methods for finding an optimal design in the presence of environmental variability. Sources of variability can include changes in manufacturing or operating conditions. The methods will be applied to designing a diffractive optical ele...

the first and second laws of thermodynamics have been employed to evaluate energy and exergetic efficiency of the single effect absorption chiller which is used for air conditioning purpose. the performance analysis has been carried out by developing a computer program in ees and modeling the chiller and its components. to evaluate entropy of the water/lithium bromide solution at any point, an ...

UNLABELLED 'Melina' assists users to compare the results of four public softwares for DNA motif extraction in order to both confirm the reliability of each finding and avoid missing important motifs. It is also useful to optimize the sensitivity of software with a series of different parameter settings. AVAILABILITY Melina is available at http://www.hgc.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/Melina/.

floorplanning is an important step in physical design of vlsi circuits. it is used to plan the positions of a set of circuit modules on a chip in order to optimize the circuit performance. however, modern floorplanning takes better care of providing extra options to place dedicated modules in the hierarchical designs to align circuit blocks one by one within certain bounding box for helping seq...

one of the main constraints in aloe vera production is poor information about optimum nutrients that are helpful for growth and production. the objective of this study was to optimize nutrient solution for aloe vera cultivation in soilless culture. therefore, to determine the best nutrients the experiment was conducted in a greenhouse during 2011 in the agricultural faculty, university of guila...

China is facing a dramatic aging of its population. Little is known about the factors that influence the place of death and the trends in the place of death for elderly people in China. The purposes of this study were: (1) to examine the impact of the socioeconomic status (SES) on place of death for elderly Chinese residents; and (2) to assess temporal trends in the place of death over the last...