We propose a camera-based assistive text reading framework to help blind persons read text labels and product packaging from hand-held objects in their daily life. To isolate the object from untidy backgrounds or other surrounding objects in the camera vision, we initially propose an efficient and effective motion based method to define a region of interest (ROI) in the video by asking the user...

flowers, gay curtains hide the marks on the windowsills where the bars used to be. I climb the stairs and go along the endless corridors with the cell-like bedrooms on one side and the open ward on the other. More visitors today, wives are going home for Bank Holiday and husbands have brought suitcases... Grandma holds up a baby to his mother: 'Hasn't he grown! You'll be home soon, Jean shuffle...

A chapter in The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, a book by Michael Sandel, the well-known Harvard political philosopher, provides a convenient stepping-off place for an analysis of the social issues involved in sports doping. The chapter is entitled “Bionic Athletes,” and despite the reference in the subtitle of the book to genetic engineering the chapter is m...

We consider the social norms of repeated matching games in the presence of finite probability trembles and show that such norms must be subgame perfect along the equilibrium path but need not be subgame perfect off the equilibrium path. This is consistent with the well known experimental results by Roth et. al. (1991) in which subjects play subgame perfect equilibria in the market game but play...

The main result is that a Bayesian Nash equilibrium in isotone pure strategies exists in a class of multi-unit auctions that includes the uniform-price, discriminatory, and Vickrey auctions, given riskneutrality and independent atomless types. We begin by considering all games of incomplete information in which types are atomless, each player’s action set is a finite lattice, and payoff is quas...

Neuropsychological impairments of English past tense processing inform a key debate in cognitive neuroscience concerning the nature of mental mechanisms. Dual-route accounts claim that regular past tense comprehension deficits reflect a specific impairment of morphological decomposition (e.g., jump + ed), disrupting the automatic comprehension of word meaning accessed via the verb stem (e.g., j...

Mobile visual search is a new class of applications that use images taken by camera phone to initiate search queries. It is a very challenging task mainly because of image affine transformations caused by viewpoints changes, and motion blur due to hand tremble. These problems are unavoidable in mobile visual search and often result in low recall. Query expansion is an effective strategy for rec...

Pte. J. W., cet. 24, ljftely admitted to hospital for " Paralysis agitans," presents marked symptoms of that rare affection ?Disseminated sclerosis. The disease appears to have supervened on a prolonged attack of secondary syphilis two years ago. His medical history sheet records several recent admissions for "ague" and "simple continued fever" which, according to the man's own statement, were ...

This paper reports results from social learning experiments where subjects choose between two options and each subject has a small chance of being perfectly informed about which option is correct. In treatment “sequence,” subjects observe the entire sequence of predecessors’ choices while in treatment “no-sequence” they only observe the number of times each option has been chosen. The theoretic...

Where it occurs the Asian citrus psyllid, Diaphorina citri, Kuwayama (Hemiptera: Psyllidae) is considered the primary vector of Huanglongbing, HLB, disease of citrus trees. The plant pathogenic bacterium associated with HLB causes economic losses to citrus industries worldwide. To better understand the general biology of D. citri, we undertook a sequencing project from adult psyllids. Few genes...