In recent years, Web-based distance learning (WBDL) systems have become a popular learning environment for many western learners. While it has been established as an effective learning alternative, WBDL is not flourishing in Hong Kong as expected. This paper proposes that this is because Hong Kong students are not trained to learn independently and actively, as required in distance learning. Tr...

Freshly isolated strains of H. pertussis show meagre growth on Bordet Gengou medium, but a series of subcultures after isolation on the medium containing decreasing amounts of blood results in an ability to grow on blood-free medium, eventually demonstrating that the organisms become to thrive on ordinary agar medium. Imamura (1952), Asano (1953) and Fukumi et al. (1953) reported that H. pertus...

In this paper, we study the design of core-selecting payment rules for combinatorial auctions (CAs), a challenging setting where no strategyproof rules exist. We observe that in many real-world CAs, bidders are heterogeneous in size and value. Unfortunately, the rule most commonly used in practice, the Quadratic rule (Day and Cramton, 2012), significantly favors large over small bidders in term...

In March 2009, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) convened a meeting of “policymakers, researchers, and producers of health care data” to “begin developing a strategy to optimize the availability of information and data for enactment and implementation of health care reform.” The needs described by participants were as expected: timely information about “the likely concrete e...

This paper considers how habitat geometry affects New Zealand bird distributions on land-bridge islands, oceanic islands, and forest patches. The data base consists of distributions of 60 native land and freshwater bird species on 31 islands. A theoretical section examines how species incidences should vary with factors such as population density, island area, and dispersal ability, in two case...

An increasing concern affecting a growing aging population is working memory (WM) decline. Consequently, there is great interest in improving or stabilizing WM, which drives expanded use of brain training exercises. Such regimens generally result in temporary WM benefits to the trained tasks but minimal transfer of benefit to untrained tasks. Pairing training with neurostimulation may stabilize...

Tracheomalacia remains a special entity present also in children and adults. Tracheomalacia refers to a weakness of the trachea. Bronchoscopy is the "golden standard" for diagnosis. Differential diagnosis includes foreign body aspiration, difficult controlled asthma and other diseases. This disease may be congenital or it may be acquired. Acquired tracheomalacia can be treated. The main symptom...

In order for robots to be integrated effectively into human work-flows, it is not enough to address the question of autonomy but also how their actions or plans are being perceived by their human counterparts. When robots generate task plans without such considerations, they may often demonstrate what we refer to as inexplicable behavior from the point of view of humans who may be observing it....