A statistical physics study of punctuation effects on sentence lengths is presented for written texts: Alice in wonderland and Through a looking glass. The translation of the first text into esperanto is also considered as a test for the role of punctuation in defining a style, and for contrasting natural and artificial, but written, languages. Several log-log plots of the sentence length-rank ...

A great deal of work on adaptive query processing has been done over the last few years: Adaptive query processing has been used to detect and correct optimizer errors due to incorrect statistics or simplified cost metrics; it has been applied to long-running continuous queries over data streams whose characteristics vary over time; and routing-based adaptive query processing does away with the...

In this paper, we propose intuitive motion-based interfaces for map navigation on mobile devices with built-in cameras. The interfaces are based on the visual detection of the devices self-motion. This gives people the experience of navigating maps with a virtual looking glass. We conducted a user study to evaluate the accuracy, sensitivity and responsiveness of our proposed system. Results sho...

The project management discipline is expanding within many engineering activities. This discipline can facilitate strivings toward successful accomplishment of an engineering project. Therefore, many academic institutes teach the “project management” program. This study presents a novel approach that educates engineering students to become successful project managers based on contextual learnin...

Ambivalence, the presence of positive and negative reactions toward an object, typically involves the subjective experience of conflict. We investigate the role that the perceived validity of each side of an ambivalent attitude plays in producing subjective ambivalence (SA). Consistent with the metacognitive model of attitudes, we demonstrated that SA is reduced when people doubt either the pos...

The functional perspective on attitudes suggests that individuals will be more persuaded by advertisements that match their individual needs or attitude functions. Although previous research provided correlational support for this functional approach, the current study aimed to provide a stronger, experimental test. A pilot study validated situational manipulations of the value-expressive and k...