OBJECTIVE The objective of our study was to compare the cost-effectiveness of two approaches to using MRI for the evaluation of patients with hearing loss. MATERIALS AND METHODS We developed a decision tree to compare the cost-effectiveness of conventional MRI with that of a proposed two-tiered model in which an initial 3D T2-weighted imaging examination was used to determine the need for com...

l2 research has shown that instruction in l2 pragmatics is necessary. the current study evaluated the impact of explicit instruction on efl learner's awareness and production of three speech acts of request, apology, and complaint. it also probed whether learners’ language proficiency plays any role in incorporating pragmatic instruction into the l2 classroom. iranian undergraduate students maj...

The advances in hardware and wireless technologies have made mobile communication devices affordable by a vast user community. With the advent of rich multimedia and social networking content, an influx of myriads of applications, and Internet supported services, there is an increasing user demand for the Internet connectivity anywhere and anytime. Mobility management is thus a crucial requirem...

A large number of problems in computer vision can be modelled as energy minimization problems in a Markov Random Field (MRF) or Conditional Random Field (CRF) framework. Graph-cuts based α-expansion is a standard movemaking method to minimize the energy functions with submodular pairwise terms. However, certain problems require more complex pairwise terms where the α-expansion method is general...

Large-scale high-speed mass-storage systems account for a large part of the energy consumed at data centers. To conserve energy consumed by these storage systems, we propose a high-speed tiered-storage system with a poweraware proactive method of storage-tiering management that minimizes loss of performance, which we have called the energy-efficient High-speed Tiered-Storage system (eHiTS). eHi...

Quality-tiered private labels have become a main strategy for grocery retailers. However, impacts of label development on wholesale prices and their effects retail price rigidity remain unanswered as appropriate data scarce. This paper fills this research gap by analyzing retail-pricing behavior passthrough categories with quality-tier differentiated labels. We find the speed to differ across c...

in this study, effect of two genotype imputation strategies, relatedness between reference panel and test populations and minor allele frequency on imputation error rate were examined with using a stochastic simulated population. reference panel and test populations were composed of 1,000 and 500 individuals, respectively. individuals in the reference panel were genotyped with using a high and ...