This case study explores the attitudes and perceptions of franchise owner-operators in regard to their acceptance of advanced Internet innovation and technologies. Because these franchisees serve a dual role as both the decision maker and the end user of new technology and innovation, they provide a dichotomy of perspectives that yield insights into many aspects of business leadership, customer...

Recent neuroimaging studies have obtained evidence of activation in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) during episodic encoding and retrieval. On the basis of a meta-analysis of MTL activations in studies that used positron emission tomography (PET), Lepage et al. (Hippocampus 1998;8:313-322) suggested that episodic encoding tends to involve the anterior MTL, whereas episodic retrieval tends to inv...

Modular robots offer an important benefit in evolutionary robotics, which is to quickly evaluate evolved morphologies and control systems in reality. However, artificial evolution of simulated modular robotics is a difficult and time consuming task requiring significant computational power. While artificial evolution in virtual creatures has made use of powerful generative encodings, here we in...

In this paper, we present a novel approach to support direct access and fast scan operations in a video streaming system. Our approach is based upon reshaping the normal linear encoding structure into some hierarchical tree, along with a proximity-based approximation scheme. Our scheme can support direct access, forward and backward fast scan operations with any speedup factors even for the nor...

Architecture design is a fundamental step in the successful application of Feed forward Neural Networks. In most cases a large number of neural networks architectures suitable to solve a problem exist and the architecture design is, unfortunately, still a human expert’s job. It depends heavily on the expert and on a tedious trial-and-error process. In the last years, many works have been focuse...