It is generally assumed that consumers in electronic shops feel more comfortable engaging in a dialog regarding their needs as opposed to inspecting detailed product features. However, empirical evaluations of needs-based recommender systems indicate that consumers are only confident about their buying decision if they can compare detailed information about product features. Ideally consumers s...

this research probes the impact of instruments of globalization on the religious identity. this is why the theories that are used here include: the implant theory of george gerbne, the relevant theory as developed by teriandis, the theory of cultural coexistence, the theories relating to the american consumer culture, and the spread of western modernity. today globalization through intensificat...

Value iteration is a popular algorithm for solving POMDPs. However, it is inefficient in practice. The primary reason is that it needs to conduct value updates for all the belief states in the (continuous) belief space. In this paper, we study value iteration working with a subset of the belief space, i.e., it conducts value updates only for belief states in the subset. We present a way to sele...

background: the period of hospital stay and the first month after discharge have been found to be the most problematic stages for family caregivers of stroke survivors. it is just at home that patients and caregivers actually understand the whole consequences of the stroke. the adult offspring often have more different needs and concerns than spousal caregivers. however, relatively little atten...

Assessment of exposure to airborne endotoxins has been studied for several years, especially in occupational environments, but a large number of procedures are used for sampling and analysis. This lack of standardization makes it very difficult to compare results and set internationally accepted threshold limit values (TLVs) or occupational exposure limits (OELs) for endotoxin exposure. This pa...

BACKGROUND Case-oriented small group discussions (COSGDs) can help students to correlate and integrate the basic science of dental materials into clinical application. We used COSGDs along with didactic lectures in dental material curriculum and hypothesized that case-oriented group discussions would be more effective than traditional lecture alone in terms of performance of students, student p...