In this paper, we describe a modeling framework which allows us to reason about the social-cultural behavior of humans in interaction scenarios. The objective is to provide explanatory and predictive power to an agent or robot which either witnesses or participates in the interaction: why have the human agents behaved the way they are and what kind of behavior can I expect as an answer to certa...

Background Growing evidence shows that hospitals are increasingly employing physicians. Objective To examine changes in U.S. acute care hospitals that reported employment relationships with their physicians and to determine whether quality of care improved after the hospitals switched to this integration model. Design Retrospective cohort study of U.S. acute care hospitals between 2003 and ...

The manufacturing organizations today are having a competition of supply chain versus supply chain. Existing research work fails to relate human metrics with supply chain performance. The authors intend to empirically assess the effects of human metrics on supply chain performance in the context of Indian manufacturing organizations. A rigorous literature review has identified 12 variables. The...

In this study, dynamic Bayesian networks have been applied to predict future biomass of geographically different but functionally equivalent fish species. A latent variable is incorporated to model functional collapse, where the underlying food web structure dramatically changes irrevocably (known as a regime shift). We examined if the use of a hidden variable can reflect changes in the trophic...

We examined 1454 juvenile Chinook salmon, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha (Walbaum), captured in nearshore waters off the coasts of Washington and Oregon (USA) from 1999 to 2004 for infection by Renibacterium salmoninarum, Nanophyetus salmincola Chapin and skin metacercariae. The prevalence and intensities for each of these infections were established for both yearling and subyearling Chinook salmon. ...

Freshwater fishes are highly vulnerable to human-caused climate change. Because quantitative data on status and trends are unavailable for most fish species, a systematic assessment approach that incorporates expert knowledge was developed to determine status and future vulnerability to climate change of freshwater fishes in California, USA. The method uses expert knowledge, supported by litera...

the enormous growth of the world wide web in recent years has made it necessary to perform resource discovery efficiently. for a crawler it is not an simple task to download the domain specific web pages. this unfocused approach often shows undesired results. therefore, several new ideas have been proposed, among them a key technique is focused crawling which is able to crawl particular topical...

The efficiency of a wireless sensor network (WSN) is dependent on the level of event detection reliability it achieves, and the associated consumed amount of energy. In this work, the potential performance improvement gained by using a routing metric that reflects the quality of links in terms of detection reliability is investigated. As a first main contribution, we derive the expression of su...

This paper deals with the quality of e-learning at AL-Balqa Applied University – Jordan. It discusses the already developed measures on the basis of statistical analysis for data gathered from e-learning elements which evaluates the quality of e-learning applications and systems. The main contribution of the paper is the proposal for the quality metrics with the features concerning elearning pl...