This issue of the Kybernetes journal is concerned with the philosophical question Can a Machine Think? Famously, in his 1950 paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ [11], the British mathematician Alan Turing suggested replacing this question which he found “too meaningless to deserve discussion” with a simple [behaviourial] test based on an imagined Victorian-esque pastime he entitled the...

Speech production errors characteristic of dysarthria are chiefly responsible for the low accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR) when used by people diagnosed with it. The results of the small number of speech recognition studies, mostly conducted by assistive technology researchers, are a testimony to this statement. In the engineering community, substantial research has been conducted...

OBJECT The diagnosis of intracranial epidermoid cyst (IEC) relies solely on MRI, which is time and money consuming. The application of tumor biomarkers in IEC has never been systematically studied. Here we screened a group of commonly used tumor biomarkers to assess their diagnostic value in IEC. RESULTS Serum tumor biomarkers were assessed in 42 IECs and 42 paired healthy controls. Only seru...

Advanced bladder cancer remains particularly frequent in our practice. Aim: To evaluate the proportion of advanced bladder cancer at diagnosis and to describe the characterisitics at diagnosis. Materials and methods: We conducted a descriptive and retrospective study assessing 97 cases of advanced bladder cancer over a period of 10 years (January 2002 to January 2012) at the department of Urolo...

The aim of the present paper is to formulate a general integrated aggregate dynamic model for sustainable development, that will be both simple in structure and able to deal with the main objectives, processes and constraints applying to sustainable development in closed economic-ecological systems. General characteristics of models to be used for sustainable development are discussed. It turns...

Conflict resolution of familiar opponents was compared to that of unfamiliar ones in Xiphophorus helleri males. Under the Familiar condition, the two males which met had settled a contest against each other in a previously staged encounter in another aquarium. Thus one opponent was the previously dominant pair member, the other its previously subordinate. Under the Unfamiliar condition, two mal...

Hydrogen selective Pd and Pd alloy membranes can improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the coal gasification process by recovering high purity H2 from the syngas. Also, the high pressure CO2 in the retentate reduces the cost of carbon capture required for carbon sequestration. However, small quantities of H2S present in the gas stream poison the Pd membranes and reduce the hydrogen p...

The MARSIS orbital radar sounding data has provided our first insights into the internal structure, s-tratigraphy, and basal topography of the polar-layered deposits (PLD) [1]. In order to evaluate the impact of the various geoelectrical and structural characteristics of the deposits on the sounding data obtained by MARSIS and anticipated from SHARAD, we have constructed representative geoelect...

High speed i n d o o r diffused inf ra red wireless t r a n s m i s s i o n is g r e a t l y needed for data and mult i m e d i a applications. We inves t iga ted the error rate performance of OOK ( o n off keying), N R B I (nonreturn-to z e r o w i t h bit insersion), M-ary PPM (pulse pos i t ion m o d u l a t i o n ) , and t w o novel coded d i r e c t detect m o d u l a t i o n s , DCGPPM (d...

It is generally expected that inter-annual changes in radial growth among trees would be similar to the increase in altitude due to the limitation of increasingly harsher climatic factors. Here, we examine whether this pattern exists in alpine forests on the southeastern Tibetan Plateau. Increment cores were collected from mature trees at the lower, middle and upper limits of balfour spruce (Pi...