This paper reports on the design of a vision-based exercise monitoring system. The system aims to promote well-being by making exercise sessions enjoyable experiences, either through real-time interaction and instructions proposed to the user, or via experience sharing or group gaming with peers in a virtual community. The use of avatars is explored as means of representation of the user's exer...

Banking technologies had two distinct generations: mass automation (MA) and electronic banking (EB). The established Technological Regime (TR) theory predicts that a bank’s accumulation in MA technologies may not impact its adoption of EB. On the hand, banks’ IT literacy acquired in the former generation is the primary antecedent of the adoption of EB. This study tests this theory and proposes ...

In natural habitats, bacteria spend most of their time in some form of growth arrest. Little is known about deleterious mutations in such stages, and consequently there is limited understanding of what evolutionary events occur. In a deleterious mutation accumulation experiment in prolonged stationary phase of Escherichia coli, about 0.03 slightly deleterious mutations were observed per genome ...

This paper investigates whether knowledge accumulating activities, such as exporting, R&D, or worker training, can enhance plants’ productivity. To this end we use plant level panel data for Irish manufacturing. Our results importantly indicate that productivity enhancing effects of these factors are found only for domestic firms, but not for foreign multinationals located in Ireland. We postul...

The evidence accumulation method for finding objects having shape which can be neither parameterized nor tabularized is proposed. The result is a multi-scale measure of existence of the detected object, in the accumulator congruent with the image domain, supplemented with local information on additional features of the object. The method is implemented for finding blood vessels in mammographic ...

The problem of load balancing on the hypercube is considered. A number of tokens are placed at the nodes and the goal is to redistribute them evenly throughout the network. Initially each of the p nodes stores up to m tokens. A simple algorithm is presented operating in time O(logp+m log logp) on average.

G35·6−0·4 is an extended radio source in the Galactic plane which has previously been identified as either a supernova remnant or an HII region. Observations from the VLA Galactic Plane Survey at 1.4 GHz with a resolution of 1 arcmin allow the extent of G35·6−0·4 to be defined for the first time. Comparison with other radio survey observations show that this source has a non-thermal spectral in...

This article provides a brief historical review in the field of creation and use of distributed systems for computerized accumulation and information processing (handling) in Soviet Union, and especially in its scientific centers such as Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and not only. The author tries to demonstratehow the chosen methods and ideas permitted to realize the systems, which coul...

The fundamental challenge for the next generation of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) systems is to contribute to the invention, fostering and support of cultures of participation in which humans can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. New models for knowledge creation, accumulation, and sharing are needed that allow, encourage, and support all par...

Asexual species accumulate deleterious mutations through an irreversible process known as Muller's ratchet. Attempts to quantify the rate of the ratchet have ignored the role of temporal environmental heterogeneity even though it is common in nature and has the potential to affect overall ratchet rate. Here we examine Muller's ratchet in the context of conditional neutrality (i.e., mutations th...