This paper reviews and synthesises research findings to date on (1) the role of the tour guide as experience broker, (2) the relevance and efficacy of guide communication, and in particular the application of nature and heritage interpretation principles to enhance the guided tour experience, and (3) visitor demands and expectations of a tour guide’s communication. These collectively provide a ...

The comprehensive identification of functional transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) is an important step in understanding complex transcriptional regulatory networks. This study presents a motif-based comparative approach, STAT-Finder, for identifying functional DNA binding sites of STAT3 transcription factor. STAT-Finder combines STAT-Scanner, which was designed to predict functional STA...

BACKGROUND A single case of novel influenza A (H1N1) 09 infection was identified by PCR among a New Zealand high-school group that toured California in April 2009. Close monitoring of the tour group and their New Zealand contacts identified 11 other tour members with respiratory symptoms who were investigated. In all nine instances where nasopharyngeal swabs were indicated, tests were negative ...

Nowadays, more Virtual Environments (VEs) are becoming available on the Web. This means that VEs are becoming accessible to a larger and more diverse audience. It also means that it is more likely that the use of these VEs (i.e. how to interact with the virtual environment and the meanings of the associated virtual objects) may be different for different groups of persons. In order for a VE to ...

There is increasing interest in context-aware applications, ranging from traffic routing, location-based services, friend finding, context-aware messaging, virtual tour guides, to physical world search. We make three observations: (i) many contextaware applications use knowledge about the individuals (and groups of people), places and objects within a particular place, that is, they are place-b...

An 8-bit programmable square finder cum frequency divider architecture is presented. This special architecture includes a high speed parallel counter, clock trigger circuit, eight bit multiplier logic, sequence termination logic and sequence restarter logic. The entire architecture is divided into two parts: The frequency divider section and the square finder section. The frequency divider circ...

Some of the issues in case retrieval and maintenance of case-bases are discussed. Conventionally, nearest neighbor algorithm is applied for retrieval of similar cases. Uniqueness of feature-values is not rewarded in such similarity matching functions. In order to refine the retrieval process, a metric based on successful case usage in the past is incorporated. This metric is shown to be useful ...

Web-based Virtual Tour has attractive advantages over traditional 3D rendering approach in that it does not require labor intensive 3D modeling process or high bandwidth for realistic virtual tour yet provides virtual tour with free navigation and immersive experience of walking around through the WWW. In this paper, we focus on presenting a robust image registration technique for a web-based v...

—These Nowadays more Virtual Environment (VEs) are becoming available on the web. This means that VE are becoming more accessible to a larger and more diverse audience. It also means that the interpretation of VEs and their virtual objects (i.e. how to interact with the virtual environment and the meanings of the associated virtual objects) are more likely to differ from one group of persons to...