Track

The overall purpose of the study is to identify the perception of the Grade 11 ABM students in San Sebastian College – Recoletos de Cavite (SSC-RdC) regarding the traditional and block schedule. The study concerns the student’s welfare and may provide suggestion and recommendation to the administration with regards to the appropriate schedule for the students. Using case study and convenience sampling design, these helped the researchers to provide and record the needed information from the respondents. It also helped in assessing the perception of the Grade 11 ABM students with regard to the benefits and effect to the students’ academic performance. Results revealed that of 40 students, 62.5% of the respondents agreed that they excel more in their academics with the blocked schedule than the traditional with the percentage of 35.5. The qualitative findings for the study leaded to certain conclusions: (1) The Grade 11 students taking the ABM strand preferred blocked schedule the most; (2) Blocked schedule is not that effective in maintaining the focus and attention span of the students; (3) Blocked scheduling is the most effective type of schedule based on the respondents’ perspective; (4) The time scheduling used has a major effect in the students’ achievement; (5) The instructor’s teaching strategies and the type of schedule used plays a major role in the comprehension and understanding of the lessons and concepts by the students. In terms of the effective schedule in the student’s learning, most of the respondents said that they prefer traditional schedule more than the blocked schedule. Thus, this concluded that there is significant relationship in scheduling system to the academic achievement of the students.

Wheel/rail dynamic forces are dependent upon the characteristics of both train and track, and lead to time-dependent degradation of the track. The quality of maintenance of both train and track affect the amplitude of these forces and therefore the rate of degradation of track. These relationships are being studied at Queensland University of Technology via a Rail CRC project, using test track and test vehicles provided by QR. A central part of the study is attempting to relate wheel/rail forces to the longitudinal vertical profile of the track; the profile is measured by QR’s Track Recording Car (TRC) and their Corrugation Analysis Trolley (CAT). However, because doing detailed measurements of the longitudinal profile frequently over the study period is impractical, the authors developed an innovative algorithm that converts track recording car (TRC) rail top offset measurements into suitably accurate longitudinal profiles. The study takes those profiles and correlates them against...

The Virtual Museum is an interactive, electronic museum where users can move from room to room, and select any exhibit in a room for more detailed examination. The exhibits in the museum are educational, encompassing topics such as medicine, plant growth, the environment, and space. To facilitate interaction with the museum, a new method for navigating through a prerendered 3D space, and interacting with objects in that space has been developed, called ‘virtual navigation’. Virtual navigation employs real-time video decompression for the display of, and interaction with, high-quality computer animation. In addition, a representation for 3D objects in animated sequences is used which permits pixel-accurate, frame-accurate object picking, so that a viewer can select any 3D object to trigger movement within the 3D space, to examine an exhibit in animated form, or to play a digital movie or soundtrack. The use of precomputed video permits 3D navigation in a realistic-looking space, without requiring special-purpose graphics hardware.

There is a critical need for validation studies of questionnaires designed to assess the level of control of asthma in children younger than 5 years old. To validate the Spanish version of the Test for Respiratory and Asthma Control in Kids (TRACK) questionnaire in children younger than age 5 years with symptoms consistent with asthma. In a prospective cohort validation study, parents and/or caregivers of children younger than age 5 years and with symptoms consistent with asthma, during a baseline and a follow-up visit 2 to 6 weeks later, completed the information required to assess the content validity, criterion validity, construct validity, test-retest reliability, sensitivity to change, internal consistency reliability, and usability of the TRACK questionnaire. Median (interquartile range) of the TRACK scores were significantly different between patients with well-controlled asthma, patients with not well-controlled asthma, and patients with very poorly controlled asthma (90.0 [...

This paper proposes an active contour algorithm for spectrogram track detection. It extends upon previously published work in a number of areas, previously published internal and potential energy models are refined and theoretical motivations for these changes are offered. These refinements offer a marked improvement in detection performance, including a notable reduction in the probability of false positive detections. The result is feature extraction at signal-to-noise ratios as low as− 1dB in the frequency domain.

The detection of tracks in spectrograms is an important step in remote sensing applications such as the analysis of marine mammal calls and remote sensing data in underwater environments. Recent advances in technology and the abundance of data requires the development of more sensitive detection methods. This problem has attracted researchers’ interest from a variety of backgrounds ranging between image processing, signal processing, simulated annealing and Bayesian filtering. Most of the literature is concentrated in three areas: image processing, neural networks, and statistical models such as the Hidden Markov model. There has not been a review paper which describes and critically analyses the application of these key algorithms. This paper presents an extensive survey and an algorithm taxonomy, additionally each algorithm is reviewed according to a set of criteria relating to their success in application. These criteria are defined to be their ability to cope with noise variation over time, track association, high variability in track shape, closely separated tracks, multiple tracks, the birth/death of tracks, low signal-to-noise ratios, that they have no a priori assumption of track shape and that they are computationally cheap. Our analysis concludes that none of these algorithms fully meets these criteria.

This paper proposes an active contour framework for spectrogram track detection. A potential energy is proposed which results in feature extraction at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 0.5 dB. We show, through complexity analysis, that this is achievable in real-time.

Knowledge management and more generally systems dealing with informa-tion creation, storage and retrieval are supposed to be a key factor for firms’ success. However, enthusiasm about their introduction is often paralleled by disenchantment and delusion about their effectiveness and real use. Taking such failures seriously, we investigate reasons leading to success or failure of KM dissemination. Using a case study approach, we investigate the link between organizational profile and structure and information needs to be supported by KM systems, and offer a general framework to explain why –holding technology constant- the end result may differ widely. We conclude our investigation by suggesting that coherence and match are crucial ingredients to make KM work.

Traditional ballasted railway track substructure usually consists of graded layers of granular media of ballast and subballast (capping) placed above a compacted subgrade (formation soil). Ballast particles breakdown and deteriorate progressively under heavy train cyclic loading. ...

El ferrocarril es sin duda, una de las principales infraestructuras de transporte. La red o malla que conforma con sus diferentes lineas (vias) y puntos de conexion (estaciones y cruces), son un elemento principal a tener en cuenta a la hora de configurar cualquier modelo territorial. Del mismo modo los diferentes servicios y flujos de viajeros y mercancias, son un factor estrategico para el desarrollo economico y social de un espacio regional. Definir y analizar el proceso historico y la estructuracion de la red ferroviaria andaluza, es el motivo de este estudio. Una aportacion de la Geografia del transporte y redes, al conocimiento estrategico de nuestra region.

The aim of this communication is to study the effectiveness of complaint management according to the quality of the relationship between the firm and the customer. We compare interactional (relational) and distributive (monetary) compensation in terms of preference for loyal and new customers. The results show that loyal customers prefer interactional efforts and purchase vouchers to refunding. New customers prefer distributive compensations and refunding.

This research investigates the artistic practice in Second Life that builds upon existing practices developed in virtual environments, and other forms of technology-mediated spaces; and sits within the field of knowledge of art and technology, and the emerging field of virtual worlds research. In the wider field of media arts practice engagement with virtual worlds as spaces for artistic practice (and protest), challenges and enhances our experience of the phenomena of imagining. Artists working in the Second Life space are exploring the potentials of this unique combination of the user-created, and the avatar mediated space. The research presents Kriti Island, the laboratory space for the ongoing artistic and imaginative practice research, but in particular presents, discusses and analyses, the participating artist interviews that were undertaken following the Kritical Works in SL exhibitions that the Island hosted in 2008 and 2009. Casey suggests that ‘imagination (in Western thou...

This research investigates the artistic practice in Second Life that builds upon existing practices developed in virtual environments, and other forms of technology-mediated spaces; and sits within the field of knowledge of art and technology, and the emerging field of virtual worlds research. In the wider field of media arts practice engagement with virtual worlds as spaces for artistic practice (and protest), challenges and enhances our experience of the phenomena of imagining. Artists working in the Second Life space are exploring the potentials of this unique combination of the user-created, and the avatar mediated space. The research presents Kriti Island, the laboratory space for the ongoing artistic and imaginative practice research, but in particular presents, discusses and analyses, the participating artist interviews that were undertaken following the Kritical Works in SL exhibitions that the Island hosted in 2008 and 2009. Casey suggests that ‘imagination (in Western thou...

Being the first stage of analysis within an image, low-level feature detection (edge and line detection) is a crucial step in the image analysis process and, as such, deserves suitable attention. This paper presents a systematic investigation into low-level feature detection in spectrogram images. The result of which is the identification of frequency tracks. Analysis of the literature identifies different strategies for accomplishing low-level feature detection. Nevertheless, the advantages and disadvantages of each are not explicitly investigated. Three model based detection strategies are outlined, each extracting an increasing amount of information from the spectrogram, and, through ROC analysis, it is shown that at increasing levels of extraction the detection rates increase. Nevertheless, further investigation suggests that model based detection has a limitation---it is not computationally feasible to fully evaluate the model of even a simple sinusoidal track. Therefore, alternative approaches, such as dimensionality reduction, are investigated to reduce the complex search space. It is shown that, if carefully selected, these techniques can approach the detection rates of model based strategies that perform the same level of information extraction.

In the recent years support vector machines (SVMs) have been successfully applied to solve a large number of classification problems. Training an SVM, usually posed as a quadratic programming (QP) problem, often becomes a challenging task for the large data sets due to the high memory requirements and slow convergence. We propose to apply boosting to Platt's Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) algorithm and to use resulting Boost-SMO method for speeding and scaling up the SVM training. Experiments on three commonly used benchmark data sets show that Boost-SMO achieves classification accuracy comparable to conventional SMO but is a factor of 3 to 10 faster. The speed-up could easily be orders of magnitude on the larger data sets. Keywords: Support vector machines, boosting algorithm, machine learning. Track: Pattern Recognition and Analysis. 1. Introduction SVMs have received a considerable attention in the recent years and many successful applications of SVMs have been descri...

Understanding the complex mechanisms of stress transfer and strain accumulation in layers of track substructure under repeated wheel loading is essential to predict the desirable track maintenance cycle as well as the design of the new track. Various finite element and ...

The objective of this paper is a generalization of printed media publications and publications of polymeric insulations’ manufacturers with a view to distinguish strengths and weaknesses of polymeric insulation, summarize experience in application of polymeric insulation and if possible to observe a tendency of its further development.

Channel routing is a key problem in VLSI physical design. The main goal of the channel routing problem is to reduce the area of an IC chip. If we concentrate on reducing track number in channel routing problem then automatically the area of an IC chip will be reduced. Here, we propose a new algorithm to reduce the number of tracks using four layers (two horizontal layers and two vertical layers). To be more specific, through this algorithm we convert a two-layer channel routing problem into a four-layer channel routing problem using VCG of the channel. Next, we show the experimental results and graphical structure of that solution.