Online education has become popular as an effective method of imparting knowledge to a wide audience efficiently and at low cost. Unlike traditional ”offline” courses, online courses open up the possibility of fine-grained tracking and monitoring of students’ activities, progress and performance. In turn, this creates the possibility of of analyzing the factors involved in student success, rete...

Under the APA (5 U.S.C. 551–553) our normal practice is to publish policies with a 30-day delay in effective date. In this case, however, we use the ‘‘good cause’’ exemption under 5 U.S.C. 553(d)(3) to make this rule effective upon publication. This rule relieves a restriction, and it is not in the public interest to delay its effective date. We believe that another nontoxic shot option likely ...

The behavior composition problem involves the automatic synthesis of a controller able to “realize” (i.e., implement) a desired target behavior specification by suitably coordinating a set of already available behaviors. While the problem has been thoroughly studied, one open issue has resisted a principled solution: if the target specification is not fully realizable, is there a way to realize...

Spatial ability has been recognized as a significant human skill involving the retrieval, retention, and transformation of visual information in a special context. The enhancement of the spatial ability and the effective method of training are rarely considered as an area of study in the education field. This study focuses on the enhancement of spatial visualization and mental rotation, which a...

An effective method for the automatic classification of facial expressions into emotional categories is presented. The system is able to classify the user facial expression in terms of the six Ekman’s universal emotions (plus the neutral one), giving a membership confidence value to each emotional category. The method is capable of analysing any subject, male or female of any age and ethnicity....

To extract terminological knowledge from data, Baader and Distel have proposed an effective method that allows for the extraction of a base of all valid general concept inclusions of a given finite interpretation. In previous works, to be able to handle small amounts of errors in our data, we have extended this approach to also extract general concept inclusions which are “almost valid” in the ...

BACKGROUND This study aimed to estimate the minimum effective anaesthetic concentrations of lidocaine required to block the femoral nerve under ultrasound (US) guidance in 90% (MEAC90) of patients. METHODS A minimum of 45 patients who had undergone knee arthroscopy were included in this observational study. All the patients received US-guided sciatic, obturator, and femoral nerve blocks. The ...

Control of calcium binding to and dissociation from cardiac troponin C (TnC) is essential to healthy cardiac muscle contraction/relaxation. There are numerous aberrant post-translational modifications and mutations within a plethora of contractile, and even non-contractile, proteins that appear to imbalance this delicate relationship. The direction and extent of the resulting change in calcium ...