In recent years, visual surveillance has gained importance in security, law enforcement and military applications. Due to the wide use of video surveillance systems, the amount of data that has to be monitored and interpreted has increased enormously. Nowadays, the pure mass of information that has to be handled by the operators of such systems has overgrown their capabilities. It is therefore ...

Programs should create and enforce written policies on the designation, retention, and disposal of abandoned embryos. In the absence of program-specific policies, it is ethically acceptable for a program or facility to consider embryos to have been abandoned if at least 5 years have passed since contact with an individual or couple, diligent efforts have been made to contact the individual or c...

The matter of ‘abandoned embryos’ arises when surplus IVF embryos are frozen and stored for later use. If the fertility clinic or storage facility in question does not have clear direction about what to do with these embryos, and/or payment for storage ceases, and/or the embryo providers cannot be reached, the embryos raise an ethical and practical challenge. On the one hand, there is a commitm...

As an alternative to the tracking-based approaches that heavily depend on accurate detection of moving objects, which often fail for crowded scenarios, we present a pixelwise method that employs dual foregrounds to extract temporally static image regions. Depending on the application, these regions indicate objects that do not constitute the original background but were brought into the scene a...

We offer a defense of one aspect of Paul Horwich’s response to the Liar paradox—more specifically, of his move to preserve classical logic. Horwich’s response requires that the full intersubstitutivity of ‘ ‘A’ is true’ and A be abandoned. It is thus open to the objection, due to Hartry Field, that it undermines the generalization function of truth. We defend Horwich’s move by isolating the gra...

The invertebrate populations of stony desert sites contaminated by ancient metalliferous activities in the Nabatean, Roman and Byzantine periods were significantly different from those found in adjacent ancient abandoned field systems. Consequently, it is apparent that such invertebrates potentially have uses as biomonitors of metalliferous pollution derived from ancient anthropogenic activitie...

A lot of oil and gas reservoirs have been or will be abandoned in petroleum industry. In this study, we pointed out that these oil and gas reservoirs might be transferred into exceptional enhanced geothermal reservoirs with very high temperatures by oxidizing the residual oil with injected air. A concept to generate power from these exceptional enhanced geothermal reservoirs by using geothermal...

BACKGROUND Arsenic is a carcinogenic heavy metal that has a species-dependent health effects and abandoned metal mines are a source of significant arsenic exposure. Therefore, the aims of this study were to analyze urinary arsenic species and their concentration in residents living near abandoned metal mines and to monitor the environmental health effects of abandoned metal mines in Korea. ME...