OBJECTIVE To explore relationships between patterns of smoking uptake and social context and attitudinal variables. DESIGN Cross sectional survey. SETTING Public schools in Tucson, Arizona and Albuquerque, New Mexico. PARTICIPANTS 982 children in grades 6-9 (ages 11-15 years). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Items measuring smoking history, nicotine dependence and quit attempts, susceptibility to...

Learning is becoming a central problem in trying to understand intelligence and in trying to develop intelligent machines. This paper describes some recent work on developing machines that learn in the domains of vision and graphics. We will introduce an underlying theory which connects function approximation techniques, neural network architectures and statistical methods. While these techniqu...

The standard approach of mechanism design theory insists on equilibrium behavior by participants. This assumption is captured by imposing incentive constraints on the design space. But in bridging from theory to practice, it often becomes necessary to relax incentive constraints in order to allow tradeo↵s with other desirable properties. This paper surveys a number of different options that can...

An adaptive method for polygonization of implicit surfaces is presented. The method insists on the shape of triangles and the accuracy of resulting approximation as well. The presented algorithm is based on the surface tracking scheme and it is compared with the other algorithms based on the similar principle, such as the Marching cubes and the Marching triangles methods. The main advantages of...

In this paper I explore some connections between the epistemology of modality and the epistemology of mathematics, and argue that they have far more in common than it may initially seem to be the case—even though modality need not (in fact, should not) be characterized in terms of possible worlds (as the modal realist insists) and mathematics need not (in fact, should not) be understood in term...

Wild neotropical blueberries, endemic of Central and South American areas, are promising yet still undisclosed sources bioactive compounds. Most research studies have addressed wild cultivated blueberries from Europe North America, despite the extremely wide variety species. In present paper, for first time, phenolic composition Disterigma alaternoides was investigated through ultra-high-perfor...

The controversy really took off when the US Government refused the French scientists a patent for the blood test but awarded it to Gallo. The Pasteur Institute challenged the patent in court. The dispute ended in an out of court settlement with a decision to share the credit. Today it is generally agreed that Montagnier’s group was the first to identify HIV, although Gallo’s group insists it co...

In a series of addresses, commencing with the Regensburg address in 2006, Benedict XVI engaged cultures and religions world perennial questions concerning rationality reason, catalyst for culture, ethical foundations political decisions, legality law. answers he provided, which emanate from Christian tradition’s equation God Jesus Christ, love, philosophers—the logos (λόγος)—Benedict invited hi...

The use of literary texts in teaching language has varied from the strict focus on translation and essential grammar vocabulary lists derived text to more creative uses like acting, writing debating. Nowadays, communicative approach prevails most classrooms insists immersing students into both target culture. In this paper, author argues that accomplish this, one can a number ways help learn, p...

This problem nicely illustrates the use of factorials and has a simple solution, though students often neglect the factor of two in the answer 2(N !)2. This omission can be instructive, as it leads naturally to generalizations of the problem: How does the answer change if there are N men and N − 1 women? What if men outnumber women by 2 or more? What if a sexist photographer insists that the li...