one of the controversial issues concerning the qur’ān in the contemporary era has been the claim of the existence of mythological stories in the qur’ān. primarily, muḥammad aḥmad khalaf allāh set forth this claim in his al-fann al-qaṣaṣī. one of khalaf allāh’s evidences for his claim is that on nine occasions the qur’ān has been accused of being mythical by the polytheists and the almighty god ...

We propose a method for high–order image subsampling using feedforward artificial neural networks (FANNs). Our method employs a tridiagonally symmetrical FANN, which is obtained by applying the design algorithm proposed in [1], and a small, fully connected FANN. We show that our subsampling method provides excellent speed–performance tradeoffs as compared to those of the method based exclusivel...

Donna L Berry ([email protected]) Fangxin Hong ([email protected]) Barbara Halpenny ([email protected]) Anne Partridge ([email protected]) Erica Fox ([email protected]) Jesse R Fann ([email protected]) Seth Wolpin ([email protected]) William B Lober ([email protected]) Nigel Bush ([email protected]) Upendra Parvathaneni ([email protected]) Dagmar Amtmann (dagmar...

controlled trials, observational studies, and the hierarchy of research designs. N Engl J Med 2000; 342:1887–92. 8. Hill AB. A short textbook of medical statistics. Vol 11. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984. 9. Muto CA, Jernigan JA, Ostrowksy BE, et al. SHEA guideline for preventing nosocomial transmission of multidrug-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus. Infect Control...

Allan Twynam BP Sunbury, England For help in preparation of this article, thanks to Curtis Boney, Ernie Brown, Steve Davies and George Hawkins, Sugar Land, Texas, USA; Jorge Gonzalez and Arthur Milne, Caracas, Venezuela; Satyaki Ray, Calgary, Alberta, Canada; and David Schoderbek, Burlington Resources Canada, Calgary. ClearFRAC, ClearPAC, CoalFRAC, FMI (Fullbore Formation MicroImager), FracCADE...

In this paper, we present a video chrominance subsampling method using feedforward neural networks. Experimental results show that our method outperforms spatial subsampling obtained via lowpass filtering and decimation both objectively and subjectively. Other advantages of our algorithm are computational efficiency and low memory requirements. Moreover, no pre– or post–processing is required b...

Recently, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) has evolved as a promising alternative to the standard backpropagation (BP) algorithm for training Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). PSO is advantageous due to its high search power, fast convergence rate and capability of providing global optimal solution. In this paper, the authors explore the improvements in forecasting accuracies of feedforward a...

Takayasu’s arteritis (TA) is an infl ammatory disease of large vessels that predominantly affects the aorta and its main branches such as supra-aortic trunks, renal and digestive arteries. The diagnosis is based on criteria proposed by the American College of Rheumatology and modifi ed by Sharma. These vascular lesions present a problem of surgical indications because of their pathogenic partic...