A person experiences different stages throughout the life, causing dramatically varying behavior patterns. In applications such as online-shopping, it has been observed that customer behaviors are largely affected by their stages and are evolving over time. Although this phenomena has been recognized previously, very few studies tried to model the life-stage and make use of it. In this paper, w...

BACKGROUND AND GOALS Cats have become the most popular pet in the United States, yet statistics about veterinary care for cats remain troubling. Although most owners consider their cats to be family members, cats are substantially underserved, compared with dogs. In 2006, owners took their dogs to veterinarians more than twice as often as cats, averaging 2.3 times/year, compared with 1.1 times/...

F or a long time now, arbitrary boundaries have been used in the severity grading of chronic airflow limitation and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The lack of validation of these severity cut-points has been widely criticised, predominantly because they are based on clinical impressions and simplistic metrics. This is acknowledged by the Global Initiative of Chronic Obstructive L...