While software is so important for all facets of the modern world, software development itself is not a perfect process. Agile software engineering methods have recently emerged as a new and different way of developing software as compared to the traditional methodologies. However, their success has mostly been anecdotal, and research in this subject is still scant in the academic circles. This...

For hierarchical clustering, dendrograms provide convenient and powerful visualization. Although many visualization methods have been suggested for partitional clustering, their usefulness deteriorates quickly with increasing dimensionality of the data and/or they fail to represent structure between and within clusters simultaneously. In this paper we extend (dissimilarity) matrix shading with ...

Incorporating results from a previously developed finite element model, an uncertainty and parameter sensitivity analysis was conducted using preliminary site-specific data from Horonobe, Japan (data available from five boreholes as of 2003). Latin Hypercube Sampling was used to draw random parameter values from the site-specific measured, or approximated, physicochemical uncertainty distributi...

For hierarchical clustering, dendrograms provide convenient and powerful visualization. Although many visualization methods have been suggested for partitional clustering, their usefulness deteriorates quickly with increasing dimensionality of the data and/or they fail to represent structure between and within clusters simultaneously. In this paper we extend (dissimilarity) matrix shading with ...

This paper presents a method for learning artistic portrait lighting template from a dataset of artistic and daily portrait photographs. The learned template can be used for (1) classification of artistic and daily portrait photographs, and (2) numerical aesthetic quality assessment of these photographs in lighting usage. For learning the template, we adopt Haar-like local lighting contrast fea...

It is first pointed out that most often used reliability coefficient α and one-factor model based reliability ρ are seriously biased when unique factors are covariated. In the case, the α is no longer a lower bound of the true reliability. Use of Bollen’s formula (Bollen 1980) on reliability is highly recommended. A web-based program termed “STERA” is developed which can make stepwise reliabili...

Accurate estimation of aboveground biomass and carbon stock has gained importance in the context of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol. In order to develop improved forest stratum–specific aboveground biomass and carbon estimation models for humid rainforest in northeast Madagascar, this study analyzed texture measures derived from WorldVie...

The blood pressure patterns obtained from a linearly or stepwise deflating cuff exhibit personalized traits, such as fairly uniform peak patterns and regular beat geometry; it can support the diagnosis and monitoring of hypertensive patients with reduced sensitivity to fluctuations in Blood Pressure BP over time. Monitoring of personalized trait in Oscillometric Arterial Blood Pressure Measurem...

By applying multivariate statistical analysis, this research aimed to estimate the heritability and find relationships between the vegetative and reproductive characteristics of Prunus scoparia and Prunus elaeagnifolia. Twenty genotypes of each species were selected randomly from cultivated populations and twenty-two traits including the tree, leaf, flower, nut and kernel attributes were measur...