2,768 research outputs found
Letter from M.C. Morton, M.D., Director, Bluff Hospital, to Whom It May Concern, July 24, 1958
No full textThis letter, issued by Morton, M.C., M.D., Director, Bluff Hospital, Yokohama, Japan, explains that Tsugitada Kanamori has requested a certificate of ill health for the purpose of establishing dependency upon arrival to the Bluff Hospital in Yokohama. The letter describes his history of asthmatic attacks and the treatment for his cardiac asthma.This collection contains one box of documents belonging to Tsugitada Kanamori. Materials in this collection mostly pertain to Kanamori’s efforts regarding canceling his renunciation and reinstating his American citizenship
Letter from M.C. Morton, M.D., Director, Bluff Hospital, to Whom It May Concern, July 22, 1958
No full textThis letter, issued by Morton, M.C., M.D., Director, Bluff Hospital, Yokohama, Japan, explains that Tsugitada Kanamori has requested a certificate of ill health for the purpose of establishing dependency upon arrival to the Bluff Hospital in Yokohama. His illness had not been not identified.This collection contains one box of documents belonging to Tsugitada Kanamori. Materials in this collection mostly pertain to Kanamori’s efforts regarding canceling his renunciation and reinstating his American citizenship
2000 Sub-Librarians Meeting: Ace Atkins and M.C. Beaton
No full textThe Sub-Librarians planned and advertised a program with renowned science fiction and fantasy author Philip Jose Farmer. George Scheetz was instrumental in making that introduction. However, due to ill health, Farmer was unable to travel and had to cancel close to the program date.
However, on very short notice, Ace Atkins agreed to come to Chicago and speak to the group. Atkins had spoken to a very appreciative group of Sub-Librarians the previous year in New Orleans, and he gave another stellar performance in Chicago. He talked about his new book, Leaving\u27 Trunk Blues, which is another Nick Travers mystery, this one set in Chicago, from St. Martin\u27s Press.
St. Martin\u27s also stepped up and offered to have author M.C. Beaton join Ace as a speaker. M.C. Beaton is a pseudonym of Marion Chesney, who may be best known as the author of romance novels set during the English Regency. Her first detective story as M.C. Beaton came out for St. Martin\u27s in 1985. She has two series-one set in Scotland with Hamish Macbeth and one set in the Cotswolds with Agatha Raisin.
St. Martin\u27s generously provided copies of both authors\u27 books for signing after the program.
Marsha Pollak chaired the program, welcomed the audience, explained the change in speakers, called for toasts and introduced the authors
Indicators for selected (inter)national policies
No full textThis list contains indicators of a selection of (inter)national policies, as well as remote sensing enabled products and their variables
Drag it together with Groupie: making RDF data authoring easy and fun for anyone
No full textOne of the foremost challenges towards realizing a “Read-write Web of Data” [3] is making it possible for everyday computer users to easily find, manipulate, create, and publish data back to the Web so that it can be made available for others to use. However, many aspects of Linked Data make authoring and manipulation difficult for “normal” (ie non-coder) end-users. First, data can be high-dimensional, having arbitrary many properties per “instance”, and interlinked to arbitrary many other instances in a many different ways. Second, collections of Linked Data tend to be vastly more heterogeneous than in typical structured databases, where instances are kept in uniform collections (e.g., database tables). Third, while highly flexible, the problem of having all structures reduced as a graph is verbosity: even simple structures can appear complex. Finally, many of the concepts involved in linked data authoring - for example, terms used to define ontologies are highly abstract and foreign to regular citizen-users.To counter this complexity we have devised a drag-and-drop direct manipulation interface that makes authoring Linked Data easy, fun, and accessible to a wide audience. Groupie allows users to author data simply by dragging blobs representing entities into other entities to compose relationships, establishing one relational link at a time. Since the underlying representation is RDF, Groupie facilitates the inclusion of references to entities and properties defined elsewhere on the Web through integration with popular Linked Data indexing services. Finally, to make it easy for new users to build upon others’ work, Groupie provides a communal space where all data sets created by users can be shared, cloned and modified, allowing individual users to help each other model complex domains thereby leveraging collective intelligence
A Validated Framework for Measuring Interface Support for Interactive Information Seeking
No full textIn this paper we present the validation of an evaluation framework that models the support provided by search systems for different types of user and their expected types of seeking behavior. Factors determining the types of users include previous knowledge and goals. After an overview is presented, the framework is validated in two ways. First, the novel integration of the two existing information-seeking models used in the framework is validated by the correlation of multiple expert and novice analysis. Second, the framework is validated against the results produced by two separated user studies. Further, the refinements made by the first validation technique are shown to increase the accuracy of the framework through the second technique. The successful validation process has shown that the framework can identify both strong and weak areas of search interface design in only a few hours. The results produced can be used to either revise and strengthen designs or inform the structure of a user study
Parametric design-tool to optimize preliminary design of navigation lock chambers
No full textSummaryIn the twentieth century a substantial number of navigation locks were build in the Netherlands. The navigation locks built in that era mostly had a life span of 80 to 100 years. This means that in the coming years most of these locks will be in need of either renovation or replacement. Rijkswaterstaat, the administrator of most of the locks in the Netherlands, is likely to put out tenders for the renovation and replacement of these locks. Companies can subsequently submit a proposal for design and/or construction. This proposal includes a preliminary design of the lock. During this phase of the design multiple possible alternatives will be reviewed to check which of those satisfy the design requirements and how they will be implemented. The time available to create a proposal is limited and the preliminary design phase is time consuming due to the numerous design alternatives available. Therefore, several alternatives are often not elaborated, which already leads to converging in the design process in an early phase. When the time needed to create a design of the alternatives can be reduced, the converging can be postponed to the detailed design and more attention can be paid to out-of-the-box thinking during preliminary design. This time saving can be accomplished by the use of automation and parametric design. With parametric design all the possible alternatives can be calculated in a given range of parameters. After comparison of these generated alternatives a well-educated choice can be made for the direction in preliminary design. This research aims to optimize preliminary lock design in the tendering phase by creating a design-tool that automatically generates all plausible alternatives based on the Design Criteria and boundary conditions of the client. Eventually, the complete preliminary lock design can be accomplished with a parametric design tool. However, an advantage of a design tool is that it can be composed of different building blocks which all design a specific part of the navigation lock. The basis of the parametric design tool should be a relevant part of the lock when looking at the total costs of this part, the design costs, the variety of options and the relation with other parts. The lock chamber is chosen as a starting point for the design tool. The lock chamber, like the lock head and the mechanics, has high investment costs and a high percentage of design costs. The lock chamber however, is in contrast to the other parts of the lock, not heavily dependent on other components. This makes it an interesting component to make a parametric design tool out of. The parametric model, that has been developed as a part of this thesis, includes the commonly used chamber types for inland navigation locks. These common types are retaining wall structures with an under water concrete floor including sheet pile, combi and diaphragm walls, and a U-basin structure, which can be constructed in an open building pit or in a temporary retaining wall building pit. When the design tool is finished, research is conducted on the behaviour of the alternatives in different circumstances. The effects of the main design criteria are examined. These include the length of the chamber, width, depth, water drop and local soil profile. These values are mostly depended on the vessels that need to be accommodated and the local circumstances. Next to that, the impact of different construction methods, the use of materials and the variation in unit prices are elaborated. In this thesis the second Juliana lock near Gouda is used as reference case. For this case it has been found that a sheet pile wall structure is economically most attractive, followed by the U-basin with an open building pit, a diaphragm wall structure and least feasible a U-basin structure with a retaining wall building pit. It is concluded that the length of the lock does hardly impact the design of the alternatives. The width of the chamber does influence the dimensions of the structure. The floor has to be stronger for larger widths and, because of this, the diaphragm wall structure will become more attractive compared to the U-basin structures. The depth and water drop mainly impacts the dimensions of the walls. This, combined with the increased soil handling with open building pits, leads to decreasing interest in U-basin structures. When looking at the construction methods and materials, it can be noted that the length of the tension piles is especially important for the pile plan and the floor. The concrete strength for the U-basins is of importance, while the under water concrete strength and the casting method hardly influence the total costs. When looking at environmental impact, the alternative with the least material use is most attractive, the sheet pile wall structure followed, by the diaphragm wall structure. The type of material does heavily influence the environmental impact. The U-basin structures have more environmental impact due to the construction of a larger temporary building pit. The environmental impact consists of three main components, the used materials, transport of these materials and the processes for the construction of the lock. For the U-basin structures the last two components have a large impact, while for the retaining wall structures the materials used have a large footprint. The proposed CO2 taxes of € 0,05 an €0,20 per kg CO2 equivalent will lead to an average cost increase of respectively 4,5% and 16.5%. The impact per alternative differs, but does not influence the order of economical feasibility. As from a CO2 tax of € 0,68 per kg CO2 equivalent the diaphragm wall structure will become financially more attractive compared to the U-basin structure with open building pit. Despite the calculated strengths and costs, each structure has its own advantages, disadvantages and limitations in construction, final use and maintenance. Special attention should be paid to these properties, since certain construction methods may be excluded by design requirements and uncertainties can lead to high risk. Further research could focus on steel sheet or combi piles constructed in bentonite excavations, resolving the limitations of vibrations during sheet pile construction and the uncertainties of diaphragm walls.Civil Engineering | Hydraulic Engineerin
A Multi-Language Comparison of Influences on Author Verification using Character N-Grams
No full textWe create a new multi-language corpus for author verification based on Wikipedia talkpages, and evaluate the influence that differences in topic and time have on character n-gram author profiles. Topic alignment between two texts is found to increase author verification precision, and an authors writing style is found to change over time, but not more significantly after 3 years than after 1 year.Information ArchitectureWISElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
Early colonization of littoral communities on polyurethane coated substrates: A field and laboratory study
No full textMaterials used for urbanized coastal structures often create a hard substra te ready to be colonized. Elastocoast, a new coastal protection material made from stones and polyurethane, is such a material. This study examined the recovery and growth during the winter of 2007-2008 of the biological community on two dykes in the Netherlands which were refurbished with Elastocoast at the beginning of the storm season, and describes an algal colonization experiment done with Elastocoast in the laboratory. In the field, 4 months after the cons truction of the Elastocoast top layer, dyke vegetation has returned, though strongly zonated and leaving large patches without any vegetation. Main algal species are Enteromorplta mi1tima and Fucus spiralis. Animals found on the Elastocoast layer mainly consisted of Littoriua sp. and Patella Vulgata. The Elastocoast pilots in the field were examined for 25 weeks, it is expected that the biological community will recover further when given enough time. The laboratory experiment showed that by colonization by micro-algae under favorable circumstances can be fast and substantial, by numerous micro algae and animals. Elastocoast therefore seems to be a material which allows community recovery to be fast and according to the typical vegetation of that area
Adaptive Presentation Supporting Focus and Context
No full textThis paper focuses on how content adaptation is provided in adaptive and adaptable hypermedia systems. Questions that we investigate are: How focus and context can be supported by content-adaptation techniques? Are there any techniques that can be easily generalized to adapt the content of generic Web pages without requiring much effort from the author of the pages? How different adaptation techniques should be compared? We propose a new technique of adaptive presentation of Web content, which derives from fisheye views. This technique applies adaptation by modifying the scale of the visual elements in Web pages. We present an adaptable Web application that applies the technique to a set of real-world pages. We also identify existing adaptation techniques that relate to the proposed technique and examine their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we present and discuss the results of a pilot study which compared our fisheye technique against stretchtext adaptation. The results indicate that our technique is promising while they give valuable feedback about future work
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