Recent empirical and case study evidence documents a strong association between the adoption of computers and increased use of college educated or non-production workers. With few exceptions, the conceptual link explaining how computer technology complements skilled labor or substitutes

In recent years research in the planning community has moved increasingly towards application of planners to realistic problems involving both time and many types of resources. For example, interest in planning demonstrated by the space research community has inspired work in observation scheduling

Despite the very extensive literature on dropout from higher education, much remains unknown about the nature of the dropout process. In large measure, the failure of past research to delineate more clearly the multiple characteristics of dropout can be traced to two major shortcomings; namely

With the introduction of the H.264/AVC video coding standard, significant improvements have recently been demonstrated in video compression capability. The Joint Video Team of the ITU-T VCEG and the ISO/IEC MPEG has now also standardized a Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of the H.264/AVC

Raising the standards of learning that are achieved through school education is an important national priority. Governments have been vigorous in the last ten years in making changes in pursuit of this aim. National curriculum testing, the development of the GCSE, league tables of school performance, initiatives to improve school planning and management, target setting, more frequent and thorough inspection; these are all means to the end. But the sum of all of these doesn’t add up to an effective policy because something is missing. Learning is driven by what teachers and pupils do in classrooms. Here, teachers have to manage complicated and demanding situations, channelling the personal, emotional and social pressures amongst a group of 30 or so youngsters in order to help them to learn now, and to become better learners in the future. Standards can only be raised if teachers can tackle this task more effectively—what is missing from the policies is any direct help with this task. In terms of systems engineering, present policy seems to treat the classroom as a bla k box. Certain inputs from the outside are fed in or make demands—pupils, teachers, other resources, management rules and requirements, parental anxieties, tests with pressures to

The availability of massive amounts of DNA sequence information has begun to revolutionize the practice of biology. As a result, current large-scale sequencing output, while impressive, is not adequate to keep pace with growing demand and, in particular, is far short of what will be required to obtain the 3-billion-base human genome sequence by the target date of 2005. To reach this goal, improved automation will be essential, and it is particularly important that human involvement in sequence data processing be significantly reduced or eliminated. Progress in this respect will require both improved accuracy of the data processing software and reliable accuracy measures to reduce the need for human involvement in error correction and make human review more efficient. Here, we describe one step toward that goal: a base-calling program for automated sequencer traces, phred, with improved accuracy. phred appears to be the first base-calling program to achieve a lower error rate than the ABI software, averaging 40%–50 % fewer errors in the data sets examined independent of position in read, machine running conditions, or sequencing chemistry.

various limitations of current recommendation methods and discusses possible extensions that can improve recommendation capabilities and make recommender systems applicable to an even broader range of applications. These extensions include, among others, an improvement of understanding of users and items

We developed a multidimensional coping inventory to assess the different ways in which people respond to stress. Five scales (of four items each) measure conceptually distinct aspects of problem-focused coping (active coping, planning, suppression of competing activities, restraint coping, seek-ing

Currently, computational linguists and cognitive scientists working in the area of discourse and dialogue argue that their subjective judgments are reliable using several different statistics, none of which are easily interpretable or comparable to each other. Meanwhile, researchers in content analysis have already experienced the same difficulties and come up with a solution in the kappa statistic. We discuss what is wrong with reliability measures as they are currently used for discourse and dialogue work in computational linguistics and cognitive science, and argue that we would be better off as a field adopting techniques from content analysis. 1

Machine learning for text classification is the cornerstone of document categorization, news filtering, document routing, and personalization. In text domains, effective feature selection is essential to make the learning task efficient and more accurate. This paper presents an empirical comparison of twelve feature selection methods (e.g. Information Gain) evaluated on a benchmark of 229 text classification problem instances that were gathered from Reuters, TREC, OHSUMED, etc. The results are analyzed from multiple goal perspectives—accuracy, F-measure, precision, and recall—since each is appropriate in different situations. The results reveal that a new feature selection metric we call ‘Bi-Normal Separation ’ (BNS), outperformed the others by a substantial margin in most situations. This margin widened in tasks with high class skew, which is rampant in text classification problems and is particularly challenging for induction algorithms. A new evaluation methodology is offered that focuses on the needs of the data mining practitioner faced with a single dataset who seeks to choose one (or a pair of) metrics that are most likely to yield the best performance. From this perspective, BNS was the top single choice for all goals except precision, for which Information Gain yielded the best result most often. This analysis also revealed, for example, that Information Gain and Chi-Squared have correlated failures, and so they work poorly together. When choosing optimal pairs of metrics for each of the four performance goals, BNS is consistently a member of the pair—e.g., for greatest recall, the pair BNS + F1-measure yielded the best performance on the greatest number of tasks by a considerable margin.