F ROM THE EARLIEST times i t has been believed that living things can originate spontaneously from non-living material. For centuries it was thought, for example, that worms, frogs, insects and scorpions could originate in mud, or from dew or decaying meat, without parents. Known as the doctrine of spontaneous generation, this was the view of the classical Greek authors Aristotle, Lucretius and...

Photosynthesis Research Unit, U.S. Department of Agriculture/Agricultural Research Service, Urbana, Illinois 61801 (E.A.A.); Environmental Sciences Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973 (A.R.); and Department of Plant Biology (E.A.A., A.D.B.L.), Department of Crop Sciences (E.A.A., A.R.), and Institute for Genomic Biology (E.A.A., A.D.B.L.), University of Illinois at...

When the web becomes more and more whirling with tremendous data, traditional maintenance approaches for web warehouses exhibit poor performance. In this paper, we first demonstrate the requests to webviews has continuity, and then we propose the State Transfer Graph (STG), an adaptive tool for webview maintenance. Using STG, we can produce many concrete maintenance methods, which will effectiv...

A new mechanism is proposed to explain the appearance of the three known fermion generations in a natural way. The underlying idea is based on the discreteness of the spectrum of solutions of the gap equation appearing in models of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. Within such a framework, the number of parameters needed to describe the experimentally observed fermion spectrum is drastically ...

This paper presents results from a longitudinal study on first-year students’ expectations and actual reported use of information and communication technologies (ICT) at university. The study was interested in firstly, knowing if students from the Net Generation (≤ 25 years) would appropriate more ICT time for both social life and leisure, and study purposes than older students, as this forms t...

Background To engage students, researchers have been integrating clickers in classroom delivery for study. Clickers, also known as ‘personal response systems’[1], ‘student response systems (SRS), audience response systems (ARS), or personal response systems (PRS)’,[2] are a technology that allow students to respond to the teacher in real time and receive instant feedback from the teacher, thus ...

This paper presents a novel technique for synthesis of speed-independent circuits. It is based on partial order representation of the state graph called STG-unfolding segment. The new method uses approximation technique to speed up the synthesis process. The method is illustrated on the basic implementation architecture. Experimental results demonstrating its efficiency are presented and discus...

The challenge of narrative automatic generation is to produce not only coherent, but interesting stories. This study considers the problem within the Simplicity Theory framework. According to this theory, interesting situations must be unexpectedly simple, either because they should have required complex circumstances to be produced, or because they are abnormally simple, as in coincidences. He...

There are few studies on occupational choices in Germany, and the second generation occupational choice and mobility is even less investigated. Such research is important because occupations determine success in the labor market. In a country like Germany occupations also reflect a general socio-economic standing. This paper looks at the patterns of employment in Germany, analyzes how individua...

This paper explores the question of our responsibility to future generations in the light of our capacity to radically damage their quality of life, if not prevent their very existence. It introduces the concept of active future timescape as part of a strategy to expand our capacity to think about, empathise with, and take active consideration toward future generations. The notion that we have ...