Two elements of the reform movement in undergraduate statistics education are greater emphasis on data production (a curricular change) and greater emphasis on classroom activities (a pedagogical change). This paper presents a sequence of closely related activities, using simple equipment, for introducing students to the basic concepts of experimental design. The activities take as their nomina...

Production of emphatic consonants by a speaker of Lebanese Arabic was examined using real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI). Emphatic consonants were found to be articulated with a lowered, more retracted tongue body than their nonempatic counterparts, with the narrowest emphatic constriction observed in the upper pharynx. Both progressive and regressive emphasis spread was observed; spre...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the competitive strategy emphasised by SMEs in order to cope with global competition. Design/methodology/approach – A self-administrative questionnaire was distributed to 300 potential respondents in the F&B and T&C manufacturing industries throughout Malaysia. A total of 212 respondents or small and medium enterprises returned the completed que...

A real-time, large scale, leaky-integrate-and-fire neural network processor realized using FPGA is presented. This has been designed, as part of a collaborative project, to investigate and implement biologically plausible models of the rodent vibrissae based somatosensory system to control a robot. An emphasis has been made on hard real-time performance of the processor, as it is to be used as ...

In this article, we survey machine repair problems (MRP) with an emphasis on historical developments of queuing models of practical importance. The survey proceeds historically, starting with developments in 1985, when the first published review on machine interference models appeared. We attempt to elaborate some basic MRP models of the real life congestion situations. The brief survey of some...

The first spoken dialogue system developed for the Persian language is introduced. This is a ticket reservation system with Persian ASR and NLU modules. The focus of the paper is on learning the dialogue management module. In this work, real on-line training data are used during the learning process. For on-line learning, the effect of the variations of discount factor (g) on the learning speed...