OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to measure the sleep quality and anxiety level of a group of employees, as well as determine the relationship between sleep quality and anxiety and other factors. METHODS A total of 130 of 185 employees at a university campus were enrolled in this cross-sectional study. A descriptive questionnaire, the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, and the Beck Anxiety In...

A conventional assumption of product homogeneity when the commodity of interest is actually heterogeneous will lead to errors in an analysis of the incidence of policies, such as taxes. In this article, an equilibrium displacement model is used to derive analytical solutions for price, quantity, and quality effects of ad valorem and per unit taxes. The results show how parameters determine the ...

Iris localisation and segmentation are challenging and critical tasks in iris biometric recognition. Especially in non-cooperative and less ideal environments, their impact on overall system performance has been identified as a major issue. In order to avoid a propagation of system errors along the processing chain, this paper investigates iris fusion at segmentation-level prior to feature extr...

Smoking, sperm quality and testosterone level Dear Sir, Trummer et al. reported on the semen parameters of 1154 infertile men. These authors divided their sample into smokers and non-smokers, and concluded that smoking does not affect conventional semen parameters (Trummer et al., 2002). However this study (like most such studies) was cross-sectional. I want to suggest that had the authors cond...

This paper presents QUEST++ , an open source tool for quality estimation which can predict quality for texts at word, sentence and document level. It also provides pipelined processing, whereby predictions made at a lower level (e.g. for words) can be used as input to build models for predictions at a higher level (e.g. sentences). QUEST++ allows the extraction of a variety of features, and pro...

We describe the submissions of the University of Sheffield (USFD) for the phraselevel Quality Estimation (QE) shared task of WMT16. We test two different approaches for phrase-level QE: (i) we enrich the provided set of baseline features with information about the context of the phrases, and (ii) we exploit predictions at other granularity levels (word and sentence). These approaches perform cl...

This paper proposes to integrate security parameters into the Service Level Specification (SLS) template proposed in the Tequila project to improve SLA-based management of QoS [8, 21]. Integrating those parameters in the QoS part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) specification is essential in particular for secure multimedia services since the QoS is negotiated when the multimedia service is...

Can noncooperative behaviour of merchants lead to a market allocation that prima facie seems anticom-petitive? We introduce a model in which service providers aim at optimizing the number of customers who use their services, while customers aim at choosing service providers with minimal customer load. Each service provider chooses between a variety of levels of service, and as long as it does n...

When designing software architectures, an architect relies on a set of pre-defined styles commonly named architectural patterns. While architectural patterns embody high level design decisions, an architectural tactic is a design strategy that addresses a particular quality attribute. Tactics; in fact, serve as the meeting point between the quality attributes and the software architecture. To g...

The goal of programming support systems is to make it possible for application developers to produce software faster, without any degradation in software quality. However, it is essential that this goal must not be achieved at the cost of performance: programs written in a high-level language and intended to solve large problems on highly parallel machines must not be egregiously less efficient...