there is much discussion going on lately whether dam construction is economic or not in termsof social consequences. accordingly, various techniques and software have been released to estimate the real social cost of dam construction among which, the software simpacts has been used extensively by researchers, worldwide. the present version of simpacts software only focuses on adverse effects of...

there is much discussion going on lately whether dam construction is economic or not in termsof social consequences. accordingly, various techniques and software have been released to estimate the real social cost of dam construction among which, the software simpacts has been used extensively by researchers, worldwide. the present version of simpacts software only focuses on adverse effects of...

fasting is a form of islamic worship to approach god.  there is a direct relationship between fasting, abstaining from eating and drinking, and an individual’s health as well as his ill-health. therefore, it is of utmost importance in the islamic perspective to weigh the spiritual benefits achieved through fasting against its probable harmfulness to an individual’s health. regarding fasting, th...

Recommender systems are present in many web applications to guide our choices. They increase sales and benefit sellers, but whether they benefit customers by providing relevant products is questionable. Here we introduce a model to examine the benefit of recommender systems for users, and found that recommendations from the system can be equivalent to random draws if one relies too strongly on ...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate real-life benefit from directional microphone and noise reduction (“noise management” [NM]) processing using retrospective self-reports smartphone-based ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) combined with logging the acoustic environments. Method A single-blinded, counterbalanced crossover design used. Eleven hearing-impaired adults were bi...

Visualizations in real world environments benefit from the visual interaction between real and virtual imagery. However, compared to traditional visualizations, a number of problems have to be solved in order to achieve effective visualizations within Augmented Reality (AR). This chapter provides an overview of techniques to handle the main obstacles in AR visualizations. It discusses spatial i...

Upon first consideration, the Self-Managing Systems (and specifically Autonomic Systems) paradigm may seem to add too much additional functionality and overhead for systems that require strict real-time behavior. From our experience, not only does the Real-Time Systems area benefit from autonomicity, but the autonomic systems initiative requires the expertise of the RTS community in order to ac...

Real-time heuristic search algorithms that precompute search space specific databases have demonstrated exceptional performance in video-game pathfinding. We discuss the first steps towards extending these algorithms to additional search spaces which benefit from the real-time property. We present our initial progress in characterizing the performance of current algorithms based on search space...