where Th is the threshold. The foreground image is composed of all foreground pixels. The threshold is computed with the help of the user, who is prompted to place ellipses on the mice that are visible in 7 randomly selected frames. Using this information, the optimal threshold Th for background subtraction is computed by minimizing a cost function that counts false alarms (the number of pixels...

This study reports a simple experiment using induced-value items to assess the accuracy of the Becker, DeGroot, Marschak (BDM) method (1964 Behavioral Science) for measuring preferences. Although the BDM mechanism is incentive compatible the data indicate that it can be empirically unreliable due to susceptibility to subject misconceptions about the game form. The resulting choices appear to re...

Effective data analysis ideally requires the analyst to have high expertise as well as high knowledge of the data. Even with such familiarity, manually pursuing all potential hypotheses and exploring all possible views is impractical. We present DataSite, a proactive visual analytics system where the burden of selecting and executing appropriate computations is shared by an automatic server-sid...

BACKGROUND Increasing socio-economic inequalities in health, within a country as well as internationally, give rise to a timely question: Are there any systematic differences between people from differing social backgrounds with regard to their attitude to seeking professional medical assistance when experiencing physical problems of varying kinds? MATERIAL AND METHOD The data material is tak...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the impact of regime changes in the composition and patterns of recruitment of the Portuguese ministerial elite throughout the last 150 years. The ‘out-of-type’, violent nature of most regime transformations accounts for the purges in and the extensive replacements of the political personnel, namely of the uppermost officeholders. In the case of Cabi...

the objective of the present research is to study the effect of the social capital on the competitive behavior of the companies with the applied nature. the research method is descriptive-analytic and has a correlational type.the statistical population of the research includes sixty managers of the food industry companies in hamedan. the statistical sample of the research includes fifty two man...

This article provides a brief history and background of workers' compensation programs for occupationally injured and ill workers in the United States. It presents the basic principle involved in workers' compensation and briefly discusses the disability benefits to which workers are generally entitled. It also discusses why there are settlements in this disability program and the availability ...

We propose a generative model for social networks, both undirected and directed, that takes into account two fundamental characteristics of the user: background (specifically, the real world groups to which the user belongs); and behavior (namely, the ways in which the user engages in surfing activity and occasionally adds links to other users encountered this way). Our experiments show that ne...

R ecent years have seen adaptation come to the fore of the international climate change debate. The focus is centred largely upon enhancing the capacity of developing countries and the poorest to adapt to the impacts of climate change. As a result, interventions to facilitate adaptation need to identify and address key barriers to ensure that societies are resilient in the face of a changing cl...