Although one might argue that little wisdom can be conveyed in messages of 140 characters or less, this PhD research sets out to explore if and what kind of knowledge can be acquired from different aggregations of social awareness streams. The expected contribution of this research is a network-theoretic model for defining, comparing and analyzing different kinds of social awareness streams and...

Two experiments were carried out to examine how adult readers of English learn to acquire the orthographic structure and function of Chinese characters selected from reading material in their first-semester college course in Chinese. The first experiment, an online lexical decision task, demonstrated that the learners qtiickly acquired knowledge about the orthographic structure of the character...

Lamarck has left many legacies for future generations of biologists. His best known legacy was an explicit suggestion, developed in the Philosophie zoologique (PZ), that the effects of use and disuse (acquired characters) can be inherited and can drive species transformation. This suggestion was formulated as two laws, which we refer to as the law of biological plasticity and the law of phenoty...

This study represents the first formal morphological and combined (morphological and molecular) phylogenetic analyses of the order Ephemeroptera. Taxonomic sampling comprised 112 species in 107 genera, including 42 recognized families (all major lineages of Ephemeroptera). Morphological data consisted of 101 morphological characters. Molecular data were acquired from DNA sequences of the 12S, 1...

Maintenance of garlic (Allium sativum L.) genetic resources has had a long tradition in the Czech Republic. The collection was founded in 1951 and its current holder is the Crop Research Institute, Department of Vegetables and Special Crops in Olomouc. The collection consists of 613 genotypes. The oldest genotype was acquired in 1954. The collection has been evaluated according to the Descripto...

French naturalist J.B. Lamarck is most commonly known for popularizing the theory that some traits acquired during the life of an organism can be inherited in his 1809 book. German biologist A. Weismann presented evidence in his 1891 book that acquired traits were not heritable in sexually reproducing animals. But so little was known about bacteria that they were considered to be the last stron...

We have developed a pen-based Japanese character input system for the blind (particularly persons with acquired blindness). The user of this system is able to directly input Japanese characters without using a keyboard. This system is composed of a personal computer and a control board with an electric tablet. The blind person is able to get the screen information by using a voice synthesizer. ...

Image Talk uses a single image to automatically create talking sequences in real time. The image can be acquired from a photograph, video clip, or hand drawn characters. This interactive system accepts Chinese text and talks back in Mandarin Chinese, generating facial expression in real-time. Image Talk analyzes Chinese text by converting it to a standard Pinyin system used in Taiwan and fetche...