a bstract   background: qualitative research focuses on social world and provides the tools to study health phenomena from the perspective of those experiencing them. identifying the problem, forming the question, and selecting an appropriate methodology and design are some of the initial challenges that researchers encounter in the early stages of any research project. these problems are parti...

one of the major aspects of quality of life is place-attachment which is affected by human-nature interactions. looking at such a critical issue in human settlements requires the study of the relationship between architecture and nature. it is a critical issue in the contemporary literature of built environment and is discussed in specific frameworks such as phenomenology and environmental psyc...

Natural systems harbor complex interactions that are fundamental parts of ecology and evolution. These interactions challenge our inclinations and training to seek the simplest explanations of patterns in nature. Not least is the likelihood that some complex processes might be missed when their patterns look similar to predictions for simpler mechanisms. Along these lines, theory and empirical ...

Modeling of nature’s complexity is among the outstanding challenges we are faced with in the geophysical sciences. Although many ideas have been proposed throughout the years, the most common approaches, being based on notions related to chance, turn out to be insufficient to study, on an individual basis, the vast variety of patterns seen in nature. To this end, a novel deterministic fractal g...

The six articulatory parameters of a three-dimensional tongue model were adjusted to replicate linguopalatal contact patterns measured with Electropalatography (EPG). The tongue model is based on artificially sustained articulations measured with MRI and the EPG data provides one possibility to tune the parameters to dynamic speech. A 3D model was generated of the palate and the electrode distr...

Fractals have experienced considerable success in quantifying the complex structure exhibited by many natural patterns and have captured the imagination of scientists and artists alike [Mandelbrot]. With ever widening appeal, they have been referred to both as "fingerprints of nature" [Taylor et al 1999] and "the new aesthetics" [Richards]. Recently, we showed that the drip patterns of the Amer...

An intelligent agent uses known facts including statistical knowledge to assign degrees of belief to assertions it is un certain about We investigate three principled techniques for doing this All three are applications of the principle of indi erence because they assign equal degree of belief to all basic situations consistent with the knowledge base They di er because there are competing intu...

Most approaches to generative phonology grant a privileged status to “natural” phonological rules, those that have a clear phonetic motivation. In Optimality Theory, for example, children are typically assumed to begin language learning with markedness constraints ranked above faithfulness constraints (see Smolensky 1996). The implication — often not made explicit — is that phonetically arbitra...