Building Better Brains: Board Books and Thirty Million Words

Illustrations by Kate Francis Special Report Education Building Better Brains

Thirty-something million: should they be exceptions?

There are over 30 million people in the United States with disabilities or functional limitations (of which a major cause is aging), and this number is increasing. An examination of the role of human factors in addressing this population is presented which includes both special designs for disability/aging and the incorporation of disability/aging into mainstream human factors research and educ...

A Thirty Million Year-Old Inherited Heteroplasmy

Due to essentially maternal inheritance and a bottleneck effect during early oogenesis, newly arising mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations segregate rapidly in metazoan female germlines. Consequently, heteroplasmy (i.e. the mixture of mtDNA genotypes within an organism) is generally resolved to homoplasmy within a few generations. Here, we report an exceptional transpecific heteroplasmy (predict...

Practical Relevance Ranking for 10 Million Books

In this paper we briefly describe our production environment and some of the open questions about relevance ranking for 10 million books. Then we describe our participation in the Prove It task of the INEX Social Book Search Track. We found that the queries supplied with the Prove It topics were not specific enough to provide good retrieval results. In contrast, the fact fields of the topics, w...

Document Recognition for a Million Books

As initiatives such as Google Book Search (http://books.google.com) and the Open Content Alliance (http://www.opencontentalliance.org) advance efforts to digitize millions of books, there is great potential to make available vast amounts of information. To truly unlock this knowledge, however, it will be necessary to process the resulting digital page images to recognize important content, incl...