While crowdsourcing has been a cost and time efficient method to label massive samples, one critical issue is quality control, for which the key challenge is to infer the ground truth from noisy or even adversarial data by various users. A large class of crowdsourcing problems, such as those involving age, grade, level, or stage, have an ordinal structure in their labels. Based on a technique o...

This paper focuses on one of the most prominent manifestations of humorous communication in the present era – Internet-based humor. It explores both the content and the various forms of comic-texts in ‘humor hubs’ – large, dynamic, Websites containing verbal and visual humor. A content analysis of 400 humorous texts from eight salient Websites shows that the Internet functions both as a ‘carrie...

Colorization is an automatic technique to enhance greyscale images by introducing chromatic information. In this research we investigate to produce colorized medical images, potentially supporting in better understanding of anatomy, anomalies and infections. Begins with proposed mandatory preprocessing steps for medical images noise removal and edge improvement, followed by colorization process...

The debate on the organization modes has begun by discussing the nature of markets and hierarchies. Adding further perspectives to somewhat outdated economic views of organization, it was then made clear that network forms of organizations should be considered as a third type of coordination mode. As a result of this work, it is now commonly accepted that the dichotomous view of economic organi...

This article reviews three recent books on the EU: T.R. Reid’s The United States of Europe:The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (Penguin, New York, 2004); Mark Leonard’s Why Europe will Run the 21st Century (Fourth Estate, London, 2005); and Jeremy Rifkin’s The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (Tarcher/Penguin, New York, 2...

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t The lightning current derivative data recorded at the CN Tower during the past 18 years contain different kinds of noise and needs to be denoised for accurately determining the lightning current waveform parameters. It is usually a challenging task to denoise transient signals having large bandwidth without altering their waveshapes or shrinking their ampli...

We examine the dynamics of laser droplet generation that is dependent on the detachment pulse power. In the absence of the detachment pulse, undulating pendant droplets are formed at the end of a properly fed metal wire due to the impact of the primary laser pulse that induces melting. Eventually, these droplets detach, i.e. overcome the surface tension, because of their increasing mass. We sho...

Nietzsche’s criticisms were directed against what he reckons as the progressive ‘moral’ disintegration of late 19 century Germany. He described morality as “the doctrine of the relations of supremacy (Herrschafts-Verhältnissen) under which the phenomenon of ‘life’ comes to be.” This definition, however, is broad and mired in ambiguity, and as will be pointed out later, escapes multitudinous ‘mo...

The growing tension between China and a number of countries in Southeast Asia over the contested waters of the South China Sea has become one of the biggest potential flashpoints in the region—thus, a good indicator to use in testing the “China threat.” Concurrently, America’s handling of this “Asian problem” is becoming a litmus test for the future status of US primacy as the nation faces cruc...

The most influential approach of corporate governance, the view of shareholders’ supremacy does not take into consideration that the key task of modern corporations is to generate and transfer firm-specific knowledge. It proposes that, in order to overcome the widespread corporate scandals, the interests of top management and directors should be increasingly aligned to shareholder’ interests by...