Previous research has indicated that both cognitive and behavioral variables mediate the positive effect of optimism on quality of life (QOL), yet few attempts have been made to accommodate these constructs into a single explanatory framework. Adopting Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build perspective, we examined the relationships between optimism, self-rated health, resilience, exercise, and QOL in...

Regression models based on spectral indices are typically empirical formulae enabling the mapping of biophysical parameters derived from Earth Observation (EO) data. Due to its empirical nature, it remains nevertheless uncertain to what extent a selected regression model is the most appropriate one, until all band combinations and curve fitting functions are assessed. This paper describes the a...

The goal of this research was to investigate how service process fit and facilitating conditions affect usage behavior of SSTs. In this study, we formulated a technology usage model from the perspective of the TAM and customer value, and we collected check-in kiosk usage samples from the Taiwan airport by administering a face-to-face questionnaire to willing respondents, of which 429 were retur...

In this work we consider the problem of providing QoS guarantees to Grid users by means of advance reservation of resources. Advance reservation mechanisms provide with the ability to allocate resources to users based on agreed-upon QoS requirements and increase the predictability of a Grid system. However, incorporating such mechanisms into current Grid environments has proven to be a challeng...

With regard to the practice of hearing aid fittings, presently there is no unanimous concurrence among audiologists and speech-language pathologists as to what constitutes a successful hearing aid fitting. Many audiologists’ beliefs on successful fittings often lie with only one of the following levels namely impairment level, activity level, participation level, satisfaction level, health rela...

Survival analysis is applied to records for length of productive life of Angus cows, fitting several proportional hazards models. It is shown that a piece-wise Weibull model with a time-dependent stage effect can model the distinct annual culling pattern reasonably well. Analyses fitting a sire model suggest some genetic variability, with heritability estimates on the logarithmic scale ranging ...

Active Appearance Models (AAMs) represent the shape and appearance of an object via two low-dimensional subspaces, one for shape and one for appearance. AAMs for facial images are currently receiving considerable attention from the computer vision community. However, most existing work focuses on fitting AAMs to a single image. For many applications, effectively fitting an AAM to video sequence...

In vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy provides insight into metabolism in the human body. New acquisition protocols are often proposed to improve the quality or efficiency of data collection. Processing pipelines must also be developed to use these data optimally. Current fitting software is either targeted at general spectroscopy fitting, or for specific protocols. We therefore introduce the...

We investigate different techniques for fitting Bézier curves to surfaces in context of high-order curvilinear mesh generation. Starting from distance-based least-squares fitting we develop an incremental algorithm, which incorporates approximations of stretch and bending energy. In the process, the algorithm reduces the energy weight in favor of accuracy, leading to an optimized set of samplin...

Introduction: Robust broadband macromodelling techniques are of crucial importance for efficient time domain and frequency domain simulation of high-speed interconnect structures. The standard vector fitting (VF) algorithm starts from an S-parameter frequency response, sampled at a discrete set of frequencies. It computes a macromodel by minimising a weighted iterative cost function in the L2 s...