Power-law distributions have a wide range of applications including physics, economics, and biology. We derive a new family of densities with support on the real line which obeys a broken power law called the volcano distribution. An estimation procedure is also outlined. The volcano density is very flexible as it can be unbounded or bimodal. It allows for an infinite mean or an undefined mean....

From the first introduction of the notion of “Reactive Systems” and development of specification languages (such as Temporal Logic and Statecharts) and verification methods for this class of systems, it has been stated that this notion encompasses a wider class of systems than just programs or hardware designs, and should be applicable to other complex systems unrelated to computers. In a simil...

The purpose of this special section is to highlight three cutting edge articles relating to the experience of learning Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). The year 2010 marks 25 years since the initial publication regarding a new, emerging model of couples’ therapy, later named EFT (Johnson & Greenberg, 1985, 1988; see Johnson, 2004 for a comprehensive description of EFT). Since that time, there...

In this paper we consider episodic memory for system design in im­ age retrieval. Time and location are the main factors in episodic memory, and these types of data were combined for image event clustering. We conducted a user studies to compare five image browsing systems using searching time and user satisfaction as criteria for success. Our results showed that the browser which clusters imag...

In this paper, we investigate the problem of predicting people’s professions under social context. Previous work considering clothing information as well as fore/background context preliminarily proves the feasibility of predicting professions. In this paper, we discuss this problem in a more general case — multiple people in one photo with arbitrary poses, and argue that with appropriately bui...

With the advent of techniques for gene isolation based on polymerase chain reaction (PCR), there is an increasing need for methods to complete missing cDNA parts, especially in the more difficult 5′ side. While library construction and screening is always a possibility, the process is time-consuming and does not promise isolation of complete cDNAs. For this reason, several PCR-based methods hav...

The development of Internet technologies and the concept of open source enable more and more people to be involved in generating content on the Web. Every day, an enormous amount of content is generated in various formats of audio, video and text. However, the rapidly growing volume of information makes it harder for users to identify the content they are interested in and that they can build u...

2 weeks after the Great Tohoku earthquake followed by the devastating tsunami, we have sent open-ended questionnaires to a randomly selected sample of twitter users and also analyzed the tweets sent from the disaster-hit areas. We found that people in directly affected areas tend to tweet about their unsafe and uncertain situation while people in remote areas post messages to let their follower...