This work presents the main theories and models formulated with the purpose of offering a global overview on the acquisition of knowledge and skills involved in the initial development of expert competence. Setting from this background, we developed an empirical…

Rich Internet Applications offer Web surfers a richer user experience, mainly due to better responsiveness and enhanced user interface capabilities. In recent years, existing design methodologies targeting traditional Web 1.0 applications were extended to also support RIAs. These extensions do…

In the 1970s Thomas McKeown and Archibald L Cochrane were two of the most influential voices in criticizing the dominance of medical thinking. A bibliometric study of the citations to McKeown's The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage or Nemesis and…

This paper describes the development of an image retrieval
system that combines probabilistic and ontological information1. The
process is divided in two different stages: indexing and retrieval. Three
information flows have been created with different kind of information
each one:…

In this paper, a restricted domain question answering (QA) system is described. The design architecture of this QA system and the features that allow the adaptation of the QA system to the medical domain are also presented. The advantages of…

Design and optimization of distillation columns for ethanol dehydration, using a hydrocarbon as entrainer, implies a good knowledge of vapor-liquid (VLE), liquid-liquid (LLE) and vapor-liquid-liquid equilibrium (VLLE). Chemical process simulation programs always require the use of a thermodynamic model that…

This article aims to describe specific practices of television spectators based on
recordings of English families and friends while watching football on television. Their conversations and the talk and events on television are transcribed and analysed with interactional sociolinguistic and…

Characterizations of the containment of a convex set either in an arbitrary convex set or in the complement of a finite union of convex sets (i.e., the set, described by reverse-convex inequalities) are given. These characterizations provide ways of verifying…

The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) progress targets have not been met. Nevertheless, the United Nations (UN) has not yet undertaken in-depth review in order to discover the reasons behind this lack of progress in achieving the MDG. From a political…

In big companies, managerial activities and organizational boundaries will over time hide most unevenly developed skill and knowledge distribution patterns; studying the organizations with the means of modern applied physics is thus quite difficult. People are forced to communicate along…