OBJECTIVE To investigate how affordable cigarettes are in developed and developing countries, and to calculate by how much the affordability of cigarettes has changed between 1990 and 2001; and secondly, to investigate the relation between cigarette affordability and consumption. DESIGN Affordability was defined as the cost of cigarettes relative to per capita income. Trends in cigarette affo...

In this paper, exact closed-form expressions are derived for the outage probability (OP) of the maximal ratio combining (MRC) scheme in the κ-μ shadowed fading channels, in which both the independent and correlated shadowing components are considered. The scenario assumes the received desired signals are corrupted by the independent Rayleigh-faded co-channel interference (CCI) and background wh...

Extracting text objects from scene images is a challenging problem. In this paper, by investigating the properties of single characters and text objects, we propose a new text extraction approach for scene images. First, character energy is computed based on the similarity of stroke edges to detect candidate character regions, then link energy is calculated based on the spatial relationship and...

This international comparison investigates students’ knowledge structure coherence in physics across five countries. In particular, this study investigates two possible hypotheses explaining the conflicting results obtained by Ioannides and Vosniadou (2002) and diSessa, Gillespie, and Esterly (2004) about students’ understandings of force in Greece and the United States. Ioannides and Vosniadou...

There is a growing interest in mining opinions using sentiment analysis methods from sources such as news, blogs and product reviews. Most of these methods have been developed for English and are difficult to generalize to other languages. We explore an approach utilizing state-of-the-art machine translation technology and perform sentiment analysis on the English translation of a foreign langu...

BACKGROUND The management of pediatric melanoma (PM) has largely been extrapolated from adult data. However, the behavior of PM appears to differ from its adult counterparts. Therefore, an international PM registry was created and analyzed. METHODS Twelve institutions contributed deidentified clinicopathologic and outcome data for patients diagnosed with PM from 1953 through 2008. RESULTS O...

With economic and cultural globalization, the trend of globalization of higher education becomes inevitable. Using the concept of competitiveness, the authors established a principal component analysis (PCA) model to examine disciplinary competitiveness in stomatology of various higher education institutions worldwide. A total of forty-four universities entered the final list according to these...

The 17 International Conference on Flow Injection Analysis was held in Krakow, Poland, from 3 to 8 July, 2011. The conference was organized under the auspices of the Committee of Analytical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Japanese Association for Flow Injection Analysis (JAFIA). This was the first time that Poland had hosted this conference, which has been held regularly sin...