Building high quality cloud applications becomes an urgently required research problem. Nonfunctional performance of cloud services is usually described by quality-of-service (QoS). In cloud applications, cloud services are invoked remotely by internet connections. The QoS Ranking of cloud services for a user cannot be transferred directly to another user, since the locations of the cloud appli...

Inductive learning searches an optimal hypothesis that minimizes a given loss function. It is usually assumed that the simplest hypothesis that fits the data is the best approximate to an optimal hypothesis. Since finding the simplest hypothesis is NP-hard for most representations, we generally employ various heuristics to search its closest match. Computing these heuristics incurs significant ...

An important part of image enhancement is color constancy, which aims to make image colors invariant to illumination. In this paper the Color Dog (CD), a new learning-based global color constancy method is proposed. Instead of providing one, it corrects the other methods’ illumination estimations by reducing their scattering in the chromaticity space by using a its previously learning partition...

would have been expressed in fewer words! Another gentleman with true military fortiter in re friendship, told me my pamphlet was tit to line trunks with, reminding one of what O'Connell said to a writer, *'1 saw an excellent thing in your last essay !" " What was it ? what was it ?" eagerly cried Scriblerus. "It was a mutton pie," replied O'Connell!. I have therefore good reason to remember Lo...

S tudents often approach the familiar stories of the Bible wondering what more they can learn from texts they have been reading since childhood.As teachers, we face the challenge of getting students to focus on the text itself, without being overly influenced by the preconceptions and interpretations that have become attached to these stories through centuries of retelling and commentary. One d...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the Bedtime Pass Program (BPP), an extinction-based procedure for treating bedtime resistance in typically developing children. METHODS A randomized, controlled trial in which nineteen 3- to 6-year-old children demonstrating bedtime resistance were randomly assigned to a Bedtime Pass or Monitoring Control group. The experimental condition involved parent monitoring plus ...

Electrophysiological modeling of Magnetoand Electro-encephalography (MEG and EEG) rely on accurate forward solvers that relate source activities to sensor measurements. In comparing a Boundary Element (BEM) and a Finite Element Method (FEM) for forward electroencephalography, in our early numerical experiments, we found the FEM to have a better accuracy than the BEM. This triggered a quest to i...

BACKGROUND Some clinicians have questioned the accuracy of rapid diagnosis of group A streptococcal pharyngitis by commercial immunochemical antigen test kits in the setting of recent streptococcal pharyngitis, believing that the false-positive rate was increased because of presumed antigen persistence. METHODS We studied 443 patients--211 cases--who had clinical pharyngitis diagnosed as grou...