This paper deals with the optimal time to invest in an energy e¢ ciency enhancement. There is a broad consensus that such investments quickly pay for themselves in lower energy bills and spared emission allowances. However, investments that at …rst glance seem worthwhile usually are not undertaken. Our aim is to shed some light on this issue. In particular, we try to assess these projects from ...

The use of a free gait becomes necessary when walking over discontinuous terrain or when performing changes in the heading of the robot. If no look-ahead planning is possible, the free gait must be generated reactively. We present a basic gait generation strategy and a heuristic enhancement of it that results in a significant efficiency improvement. In the search for a better strategy, we decid...

The assumption that restoring physical habitat heterogeneity will increase biodiversity underlies many river restoration projects, despite few tests of the hypothesis. With over 6,000 in-stream habitat enhancement projects implemented in the last decade at a cost exceeding $1 billion, there is a clear need to assess the consistency of responses, as well as factors explaining project performance...

This paper gives an overview of research in human and animal imitation mechanisms. The different types of imitative behavior are described as well as the evolutionary reasons for imitation abilities in humans and animals. Known and hypothesized mechanisms behind imitation are also covered. The concepts Goal emulation, Response facilitation and Stimulus enhancement are often confused with pure i...

Timeless human esthetics implies a sense of beauty, a pleasing impulse, naturalness, and a youthful appearance relative to one’s age. The goal for esthetic treatment should be an enhanced but natural appearance that imparts a vibrant and believable appearance to the patient. This should be our goal in dental esthetics: a result that would be considered “bright, beautiful, but believable.” Nowad...

In this letter, we propose a novel speech enhancement algorithm based on data-driven residual gain estimation. The entire system consists of two stages. At the first stage, a conventional speech enhancement algorithm enhances the input signal while estimating several signalto-noise ratio (SNR)-related parameters. The residual gain, which is estimated by a data-driven method, is applied to furth...

Goldfish virus-2 replication was enhanced in vitro by pretreatment of CAR cells with subcytotoxic concentrations of carbaryl and toxaphene. This phenomenon was time and temperature dependent. Shortening of pretreatment with carbaryl eliminated enhancement, which was observed for toxaphene only with substantially increased concentrations. Decreasing the temperature of pretreatment (4 degrees C) ...

Fingerprint images vary in quality. In order to ensure that the performance of an automatic fingerprint identification system (AFIS) will be robust with respect to the quality of input fingerprint images, it is essential to incorporate a fingerprint enhancement module in the AFIS system. In this paper, we introduce a new fingerprint enhancement algorithm which decomposes the input fingerprint i...

How can second language teachers retrieve texts that are rich in terms of the grammatical constructions to be taught, but also address the content of interest to the learners? We developed an Information Retrieval system that identifies the 87 grammatical constructions spelled out in the official English language curriculum of schools in Baden-Württemberg (Germany) and reranks the search result...

The role of protein phosphatases in regulating synaptic transmission in the CA1 region of the hippocampus was examined using slices pretreated with calyculin A, a specific inhibitor of protein phosphatases 1 and 2A. Stimulation of afferents at 1 Hz (but not 0.1 Hz) for periods of 5-10 min caused a long-lasting enhancement of synaptic transmission. The increase in synaptic responses was not due ...