The ICT industry and services are on the verge of substituting quality of service and utility functions with quality of experience, QoE. While intuitive, QoE, has eluded the research community. QoE takes into account what the user is experiencing with new products and services. Once this information is collected, it becomes an input in the development of the new product or new service. But how ...

This article is an overview of the contributions of photography to sociology and a discussion of potential uses of photography in sociological research. Visual sociology, after contributing to several studies in the early decades of American sociology, disappeared to reemerge during the 1960s. In the meantime, the use of visual methods in ethnographic description, the study of social processes ...

Diabetic retinopathy, an eye disorder caused by diabetes, is the primary cause of blindness in America and over 99% of cases in India. India and China currently account for over 90 million diabetic patients and are on the verge of an explosion of diabetic populations. This may result in an unprecedented number of persons becoming blind unless diabetic retinopathy can be detected early. Aravind ...

*The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve bank of Philadelphia or the Federal Reserve System. 1 The economic Recovery Act of 2008, which was enacted on July 30, 2008, established the Federal housing Finance Agency (FhFA) by combining the Office of Federal housing enterprise Oversight (OFheO) and the Federal housing Financ...

The entire business landscape finds itself on the verge of a recession because of ongoing global economic turmoil. Thus, there is a heightened need to minimise and mitigate business risk and scrutinise information spending while ensuring compliance with regulatory mandates. This calls for decision makers to become vigilant in their spending and move towards an optimised information security inv...

We revisit the concept of superfluidity in bosonic lattice models in low dimensions. Then, by using numerical and analytical results obtained previously for equivalent spinless fermion models, we show that the gapless phase of 1D interacting bosons may be either superfluid or remarkablymetallic and not superfluid. The latter phase -the Bose metalshould be, according to the mentioned results, a ...

The most distal part of the circular muscle layer functions as the internal anal sphincter, which constitutes a high pressure zone at rest, but maintains a relaxed state during defecation. To elucidate such sphincter mechanisms of the smooth muscle cells, the circular muscle layer in the canine anal canal was examined within 2 cm from the anal verge. Both the mechanical and intracellular electr...

Our goal was to explore the factors influencing the visualization of anterior peritoneal reflections (APRs) using rectal MRI. We evaluated the usefulness of rectal MRI in measuring the distance from the anal verge to the APR and determining the relationship between the APR and the rectal tumor. Clinical and imaging data from 319 patients who underwent surgery after MRI examination between Octob...

We report on a study of the optical conductivity of single crystals of the high-Tc superconductor YBa2Cu4O8 in which superconductivity is suppressed by random substitution of Cu with Zn. The a-axis infrared spectrum, which is a direct measure of the charge dynamics in the CuO2 planes, is dominated by a bound state at ø120 cm21. This indicates that the low-energy electronic states are on the ver...