Dormitory rooms Essay Example for Free

Dormitory rooms Essay As students move on in their lives after high school to college, many think that their lives will become paradise. With many house rules abandoned and without a curfew, students get the first taste of adulthood. Many think everything will be easy; however, from the dining halls to having no money students learn that being an adult is harder than parents display. Campus life shows students what they perceive is very different than the reality of life. In my opinion, living on campus in a dorm, supplies a student the full experience of the college life. When I imagined living in a dorm room, I imagined a very small room and hardly having any space to walk around. However, the rooms are actually quite big. There is plenty of room to walk around and even play some crazy, goofy games with a roommate. I thought the most exciting part of living on campus was going to be able to meet new people and live in a new environment. Because I am so far from home, my biggest hope was having a roommate who was easy to get along with and could have fun, and I definitely got that. The bathroom situation, I thought, was going to be the worst part of living on campus. However, in reality, it is not as bad as I had thought. As a student-athlete living in a dorm where the entire floor houses athletes, the bathroom has a maximum of five people using the facilities at a time. This works because of each athlete on a different schedule. In actuality, living on campus is very exciting and there should be no worry considering the problem with space, meeting new people, or the bathroom being very full to the point of not being able to use it. As an athlete living on campus at Western Nebraska Community College the athlete receives a dorm family. A dorm family is a family around town that â€Å"adopts† the student for the two years while attending the school. The family opens up their hearts and lets the athlete come into the family. The family attends sports events that the athlete plays and supports the athlete. I have a dorm family, and I love them. When I first thought of having a family that would open up their home and family to me I thought it was going to be awkward. However, having a family in town that has opened up their home and hearts has been great. It helped me know that there are people here in town who are willing to help and support me. Additionally, living in the dorms and living on their own, without parents, helps students find many new found freedoms that they did not have before. With living in the dormitories many students stay out late on all nights of the week, because they had a curfew at home and now they do not. The first week of school I stayed out late when I could. However, this staying out late situation did not last long, because I had been slammed with homework and after I was done with my homework all I wanted to do was sleep. With these newfound freedoms I learned very quickly how I was going to manage my time and make sure I got my sleep. When first living on campus I learned how easy I had it while living under my parents’ roof and the responsibilities that I didn’t have that I have now. When thinking that I was moving out of my parents’ house I thought it was going to be great. The freedoms I would have were going to be tremendous compared to what I had back home. However, when thinking of the freedoms I never thought of the responsibilities that I was going to have. When at home, laundry was done and living on campus causes me to do my own laundry and pay a dollar fifty for it. At home I always had someone harping on me to do my homework, make my bed, and clean my room, but on campus there is no one around to do that except myself. I had to learn to manage my time wisely and make sure I stayed up in my schoolwork. As a new freshman in college, like myself, sees his or her schedule and thinks, â€Å"man this is going to be a tough year. † This was my reaction when I saw mine at least. As a new student at any school I thought classes were going to be hard, one, because I didn’t know anyone; two, because I want to accomplish a difficult degree; three, because I didn’t know how I was going to manage the homework load and basketball at the same time. Although, when I got to the campus and started the school year I found out that staying caught up with school really was not as hard as many people make college seem. College classes are a lot like high school classes, just a lot more homework. Once I figured out how I could manage my time with basketball, study time, and have somewhat of a social life, my days became easier. Furthermore, expecting high quality food when entering into a college is putting a lot of confidence into the cooks that have to cook for hundreds of people everyday, three times a day. As a freshmen student entering into the college experience, I expected the food to be very good. I understood that the cooks had to cook for many people each day, but I expected that the food was going to have a lot of taste. When I first came to the campus and had my first meal the food was very good. The food on campus did not necessarily get any worse; it had gotten old. When I say old, I do not mean spoiled or rotten, I mean boring. The food all ends up tasting the same each and everyday. By the third week of living and eating on campus at the dining hall I began to realize how much I loved my mother’s home cooked meals. Lastly, money is a big problem for many college students. When I thought I was going to save all my graduation money for college, I thought that I was going to have a lot of money, but as reality turns out I have no money. Living on campus and living on my own made me realize the things I need to buy and the things I just want. The difference between what I needed and what I wanted was crucial for me to determine what I should spend my money on and what I should not. As a student-athlete I go to my parents a lot for money still, because I do have not time for a job considering homework, school, and practice time. In conclusion, campus life shows students that what they perceive is very different than the reality of life. Students living on campus have to share a dorm room with someone, the room is big, and there is not a lot of girls in the bathroom at once. Athletes have a dorm family who â€Å"adopts† them and welcomes them into their home. Students have a lot of freedom and can stay out late, but might have a lot of homework so it would be smart to not stay out. Many students also have a schedule with classes that may seem tough, but if they manage their time they will be just fine. The food is not high quality food, and it gets old. Students living on campus begin to miss the home cooked meals. Finally the money problem, I thought I was going to have a lot of money but turns out, I do not have a lot of money, I will buy what I need and not what I want.

Literature Review On Web Usage Mining Computer Science Essay

Literature Review On Web Usage Mining Computer Science Essay The Internet has become the largest database ever existed. During the early times of this decade it has been estimated that the internet is having more than 350 million pages [11]. But through a research conducted a few years ago it was found that the indexed part of World Wide Web alone consists of a minimum of 11.3 billion pages [12]. Also the number of people using the internet is growing exponentially. A survey conducted by Computer Industry Almanac itself is an evident for this fact. According to the results of the survey the number of online users had crossed one billion in 2005 while it was only 45 million in 1995. They had also predicted the number to cross two billion by 2011[13]. For the users of the internet finding the required information from this large volume of data has become extremely difficult. So it has become essential to find efficient ways for information retrieval. Also it has been found that more than 90% of the data is in unstructured format. So organizing and structuring this data has become a very important issue among researchers. With this large amount of information available on the web business processes needs to transcend from simple document retrieval to knowledge discovery. Business people were trying to get useful patterns from the available data which will help them for better understanding of their customer needs which in turn provides better customer satisfaction. Literature Review on Web Usage Mining Web mining helps the web designers in discovering the knowledge from the information available in the web. Also it helps the users in getting the fast retrieval of the information they are looking for. Three major areas of web mining are Web content mining- Trying to get useful information from the text, images, audio and video in web pages Web structure mining- Trying to understand the link structures of the Web which will help in categorization of Web pages. Web usage mining- Trying to get useful information from the server logs to understand what the users are looking for. It also helps in personalization of web pages. Though all the three categories of web mining are interlinked, in this research we were going to discuss about the web usage mining. Web usage mining helps the web masters to understand what the users were looking for so that they can develop the strategies to help the user to get the required information quickly. Web mining is generally implemented by using the navigational traces of users which give the knowledge about user preferences and behavior. Then the navigational patterns were analyzed and the users were grouped into clusters. The classification of navigational patterns into groups helps to improve the quality of personalized web recommendations. These web page recommendations were used to predict the web pages that are more likely to be accessed by the user in near future. This kind of personalization also helps in reducing the network traffic load and to find the search pattern of a particular group of users. Data mining techniques like, clustering, sequential pattern mining and association rule mining were used in web mining. All these techniques were used to extract interesting and frequent patterns from the information recorded in web server logs. These patterns were used to understand the user needs and help the web designers to improve the web services and personalization of web sites. Web Access Sequence Generally the web usage mining will be done based on the navigation history stored in the logs of the web server. This navigation history is also called as Web Access sequence which will contain the information about the pages that a user visit, the time spent on each page and the path in which the user traverse with in the website. So the web access sequences will contain all the details of the pages that a user visited during a single session. This data that we get from the log files will be subjected to various data mining techniques to get the useful patterns which can describe the user profile or behavior. These patterns will act as the base knowledge for developing the intelligent online applications, to improve the quality of web personalization, web recommendations etc The web mining can be generally classified in to two categories online mining and offline mining. In offline mining we use the data stored in the log files to find the navigational patterns while in online mini ng the requests of users in his current active session will be used. Current user profile will be decided by matching the recommendations from both the online and offline methods. Several systems have been designed to implement the web usage mining. Among many Analog is one of the first systems developed for Web Usage mining. It has two components online component and offline component. The offline component will reformat the data available in the log file. Generally the web server log will contain the information like IP address of the client, the time in which the web page is requested, the URL of the web page, HTTP status code etcà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ Then the data available will be cleaned by removing the unwanted information after which the system will analyze the users activities in the past with the information available in the log files of the web server and classify the users session into clusters. Then the online component will classify the active user sessions based on the model generated by the offline component. Once the user group is found then the system will give a list of suggestions to each user request. The suggestions will depend on the user grou p to which the user belongs. Clustering Techniques One of the important portions of web usage mining is the process of clustering the users in to groups based on their profile and search pattern. The clustering of the users session can be done in several ways. Christos et al. represents each page as a unique symbol which makes the web access sequence to a string [1]. Consider S as the set consisting of all possible web access sequences. Then the web mining system will process this set S in offline as a background process or during the idle time to group the pages in to clusters such that similar sequences were in the same cluster. The formed clusters were represented by means of weighted suffix tree. The clustering is done by constructing a similarity matrix [1] which then is given as input to k windows clustering algorithm [10] to generate the clusters with very similar Web access sequence. When two web access sequences have the same length then the global alignment has to be taken into account rather than the local alignment. Also the scores were calculated for both the local and the global alignment. A simple way to calculate the scores is to assign a positive value to a matching sequence and a negative value for a mismatch. Two web access sequences were said to be similar if they have the maximum alignment in their sequence. Some times the web pages listed in the sequence may be unimportant to the user. The user may have reached that page by a wrong click. In such cases the users will immediately leave that page. So the user will stay only for a short time in these kinds of unimportant pages. So before considering the web sequence alignment we have to take care of all these factors in order to get the useful patterns. C.Suresh et al had proposed an approach in which the clusters were identified based on the distance based clustering methods also they had developed a framework to compare the performance of various clustering methods based on the replicated clustering. In traditional methods, the distance between two user sessions will be calculated using the Euclidean-distance measure. But experiments show that the Sequence Alignment Method is better in representing the behavioral characteristics of web users than the Euclidean-distance method. Cadez et al [14] categorizes the users session as general topics and the behavior of each particular topic is represented by morkov chain. Fu et al. [15] uses Balanced Iterative Reducing and Clustering using Hierarchies (BIRCH) algorithm for clustering at page level. BIRCH is a distance-based hierarchical algorithm and it is used for clustering the web user sessions. It has been noticed that the increase in the number of pages is diminishing the performance of the BIRCH algorithm. Since each website contains hundreds of pages considering each page as a separate state will make the clustering unmanageable. To overcome this difficulty the authors proposed an approach to generalize the sessions using attribute-oriented induction. In this new approach the clustering of pages will be done at the category level. It is has been always a difficult job to map a particular page to a specific category but it can be done by using clustering algorithms. The commonly used algorithm for clustering is k-means algorithm but the major disadvantage of k-means algorithm is, we have to specify number of clusters to be found in advance which is not possible in real world scenario. To overcome this problem, researchers were using the fuzzy ART neural networks, an unsupervised learning approach. In this approach there is no need to specify the number of cluster in advance. The main issue with fuzzy ART neural network is the category proliferation which leads to the unrestricted growth of clusters. Sometimes the fuzzy ART network will produces a large number of clusters with only a few members in each cluster. After considering the merits and demerits of both the algorithms the authors had proposed a hybrid approach called FAK. The FAK algorithm has two phases in the first phase fuzzy ART is used as an initial seed generator to generate the clusters. From the identified clusters we will remove the cluster whose centroids were nearer to others t hereby addressing the category proliferation problem. The first phase will be followed by applying the k-means algorithm in the second phase to get the final clusters. They found that the FAK algorithm performs much better than the other methods. The most important to be considering during the clustering is the number of user sessions that should be taken into account for clustering. In most cases the designers will decide it is enough to consider the first N sessions of a user for the decent recovery of his web cluster. Also they will decide whether to consider or not the sessions with the short session lengths because those sessions may not be helpful in identifying the clusters. So the two main factors we have to consider while performing the clustering is the number of user sessions to be considered and the minimum session length. Combining the web content mining and web usage mining An experiment was conducted in order to extract the navigational pattern of the websites user [6]. The experiment aims at predicting the users gender and whether they are interested in certain website sections. The results of the experiment were analyzed and it is found that the model was only 56% accurate. The reason for low accuracy is found to be the failure to include the web content in the classification model. It is believed that exploring the content of the page will helps in better understanding of the user profile thereby the classification accuracy will be improved. The web usage mining and web content mining can be combined together and it is used in the area of web personalization. In the web personalization the contents of the web page will differ for each user according to their navigational pattern. In this technique the web links that the user may visit in the near future will be predicted based on their profile. Those predicted links will be dynamically displayed in the webpage that the user requested. Also web links of the frequently visited pages will be highlighted at the same time pages which were not visited for a long time will be removed. This hybrid approach is implemented by doing an initial clustering based on the contents of the web pages followed by the Web Access Sequence alignment. Text clustering can be done effectively by spherical k-means algorithm [10]. Since the multiple sequence alignment consumes more time and space it can be effectively replaced by the iterative progressive alignment. Weighted suffix tree is used to find the most frequent and important navigational pattern with little memory and computational costs. It has been proved that the content exploitation has improved the performance by 2-3%. In the model proposed by Liu [7] the contents of the web pages and the information from the web server log files is used together in order to extract the meaningful patterns. The extracted contents of the web page represented by means of character N-grams. The users of the web site can be classified by two approaches namely proactive and reactive approach. The proactive approach tries to map each request to a user before or during the users interaction with the site. While the reactive approach maps each request to a user after the user completes the interaction with the site. In order to use the proactive approach the browser cookies needs to be enabled and it is necessary that the user must be aware of cookies. So it is always easy to use reactive approach which does not require the user to have any prior knowledge. An experiment has been conducted with 1500 sample sessions to evaluate the proposed method. The results show that the system is 70% accurate in classification and 65% i n prediction. The success of the website also depends on the user perceived latency of documents hosted in web server. It is obvious that short User Perceived Latency will have a positive effect towards the user satisfaction. This has been also proved by a study conducted by Zona Research Inc. in 1999. The study shows that if a web site takes more than eight seconds to download then a 30% of the visitors is more likely to leave the site [35]. User perceived latency is influenced by many factors like fast internet connection, increasing the bandwidth of ISP, etc One way to reduce the UPL is by using the browser cache. In this approach frequently accessed will be pre-fetched and stored in browser cache. Generally Web cache is implemented by using the proxy server. All the requests from the user to a web server will be interpreted by the proxy servers. If the proxy server has a valid copy of the response then it will give the results to the users. Otherwise the requested will be forwarded to the original server. The real server will send the response to the proxy server. The proxy server will retain a copy of the response in the cache and then send the results to the users. The main Problem with the web cache is if the cache is not up to date then the users will be provided with stale data. Also if a large amount of users access a web server simultaneously then it may results in severe caching problems which may results in the unavailability of the web pages. To overcome all these issues author suggested an approach which combines the web prefetching and caching together. In this approach we have to first identify the objects that needs to be pre-fetched in a web cache environment fr om the information available in the log files. After identifying the objects we have to group these objects into clusters for each client group. When a user requests for an object first he will be assigned to one of the client group then the proxy server will fetches all the cluster objects of that particular client group. Finally the requested object will be delivered to the user. To have a minimal UPL we have to predict the users preferences based on the pages he had already visited. The importance of the page is determined by the weights assigned to the page by the algorithm. If two or more pages have the same weight then we rely on the page rank. Page Rank [22] is A probability distribution used to represent the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page. Page rank can be assigned to the document of all sizes. If a document is having a page rank of 0.5 then it means that if a user clicks on a link randomly then there is 50% probability for the link to land on the particular document. Consider a web site consisting of four pages P1, P2, P3, and P4. Initially the page rank of all the pages will be same. Since there are four pages each page will be assigned with a page rank of 0.25. If all the pages P2, P3 and P4 posses link to only P1 then each of the three pages will contribute 0.25 page rank to P1. The page rank of P1 can be calculated by using the following formula. PR (u1) = PR (u2) + PR (u3) + PR (u4) If suppose page P2 is having another one link to page P3 and if P4 is having links to all the three pages then the link-vote value will be divided among all the outbound links of a page. So Page P2 will contribute 0.125 to page P1 and 0.125 to page P3. Similarly P4 will contribute one third of its page rank value to P1. The general formula for calculating the page rank value for any page is as follows. PR (u) =à ¢Ã‹â€ Ã¢â‚¬Ëœ PR (v) Bp is the set of all pages linking to page P L (v) is number of links from page v Web Page recommendation is an important section in web personalization. Weighted Association rule mining is used to predict the page recommendations. In this method we assign a weight to each web page. The importance of the page is determined by the weight assigned to the page. In this approach the weight for each page is assigned based on the frequency in which the page is visited by the user and the time spent by the user on a particular page. The frequency weight of a page FW is calculated using the following formula FW (p) =Number of visits on a page (P) Total number of visits on all pages X PR (P) Where PR is the page rank of p. Time spent on each page reflects the relative importance of each page for a user. Bcause the user will spend more time on the page he is interested in and he will quickly traverse the other unwanted pages. The two factors that we have to consider while calculating the actual time spent on a page is as follows. The size of the web page and the transfer rate, the assumption is that the transfer rate is constant for a user then the time spent on a page will be inversely proportional to the amount of useful information available to the user from that page. The weight of a page can be calculated using the following formula TW (P) =Time spent on a page (p)/page size of (p) Max pÆ P Time spent on a page (p)/page size of (p) Based on these two values the total page weight is calculated as follows W (p) =FW (p) +TW (p) According to the page rank algorithm, the link to important page will appear as an outbound link in many pages. Web prefetching reduces the latency. In prefetching the networks idle time is utilized to fetch the anticipated web pages. In [7] Chen et al. proved that the cache hit ratio had enhanced to 30-75% through pre-fetching. Also the access latency can be reduced by 60% when we combine the caching and pre-fetching techniques [8]. Pre-fetching takes place only if the network bandwidth is less than the predetermined threshold also only the web pages that are not available in the cache will be pre-fetched. Pre-fetching increases the network traffic but at the same time it helps in reducing the latency. Several approaches were available for web pre-fetching like Top-10 approach, Domain-top approach, etc In top-10 approach web proxies will be periodically updated by the web servers regarding the most popular document information. The proxies will then send this update information to the clients [9]. In domain-top approach the web proxies will first search for the popular domains and then it looks for the important documents in each domain. A suggestion list will be prepared for the user with the knowledge of the proxy server about the popularity of domains and documents and this list will be used for users future requests. In this dynamic web pre-fetching technique user preference list will be maintained for each user which will contain the list of web sites which will be available for immediate access to the user. This user preference list will be stored in the database of the proxy server. Dynamic web pre-fetching technique uses the intelligent agents to monitor the network traffic. When ever the network traffic is low then the system increase the pre-fetching similarly in a heavy traffic it will reduce the pre-fetching thereby helps in utilizing the idle time of the network also maintains the traffic constant. The number of web links to be pre-fetched depends on the usage of bandwidth and weights of the web pages. While assigning the weights to the web pages preferences will be given to the links which are accessed frequently and recently. By using this technique the cache hit ratio has been increased by 40-75% and latency is reduced to 20-63%. The log file modeling is the important task in web usage mining. If we use an accurate model for modeling the web log file then the accuracy of web page prediction scheme will also increase. The most commonly used model is Markov model. In markov model each page represents the state and the visited sequence of a pair of page represents the transition between two pages. The accuracy of the traditional first order markov model is less because of the lack of in-depth analysis. In contrast the second order markov model is more accurate but the time complexity of the model is high. In [11] they had proposed a hybrid approach called dynamic nested markov model in which the second order markov model is nested with in the first order markov model. In the dynamic markov model the insertion and removal of nodes is much easier. The node will contain all the information about the web pages like the web page name, inlink list which is a list that contains the name of the previous web page, count of the web page which will represents the number of times the current web page is reached from the previous web page and the outlink list contains the list of nodes which contains the name of the next web page and its count. In this model the number of nodes will be always same as the number of web pages. Since we have replaced the transition matrix structure in the traditional markov model with the dynamic linked list the time complexity of the proposed model is less than the traditional model. Also the model covers The experiment conducted with the web site that serves 1200 users and receives a minimum of 10,000 requests per day. The experimental data is split into three sets DS1 which contains 3000 pages, DS2 with 1000 pages and DS3 with 1500 pages. It has been shown that DS1 has taken 537 ms and DS2 has taken 62 ms and DS3 has taken 171 ms. So it is evident that time taken for DNMM generation is directly proportional to the number of web pages and the size of the log file. The latency can also be reduced by client side pre-fetching. A prefetching model proposed by Jaing [3] is based on the users search pattern and the access rate of all the links in a web page. Each link will have a counter which will be incremented whenever it is clicked by a user. The access rate is the ratio of the links counter value to the counter value of that particular page. The pre-fetcher will fetch the web pages whose access rate is high. The main advantage of this model is that this model can be executed independently in clients machine. But the disadvantage of this model is that it will increase the processing overhead of the clients computer. Initially the web pages will contain one HTML document it may include some images. But in recent days several HTML documents were embedded in to a single web page. In such cases the browser displays the embedded documents along with the requested documents. These embedded documents decrease the prediction accuracy of the system. Also if the user requests a page by typing the URL in the browser navigation bar then these requested will not be taken in to account by any link analysis method. To overcome these drawbacks kim has proposed a prefetching algorithm. In this algorithm the request patterns were represented by means of a link graph. The nodes of the graph represent the unique URL of the HTML documents and the edges represent the hyperlink or an embedded link and it is directed from the referring document to the referred document. When a user requests a webpage then the access counter value of the node corresponding to that particular web page or document will be incremented by o ne. Also when a user traverses from one page to another page then the access counter value of the corresponding edge will be incremented by one. It has been assumed that the user is browsing a page that is displayed on the browser if the user does not make another request within a minimum interval of time. By this time the prefetching module will be executed and the prefetched documents will be stored in the cache. Agarwal, R. (2010). An Architectural Framework for Web Information Retrieval based on Users Navigational Pattern. Time, 195-200. Dimopoulos, C., Makris, C., Panagis, Y., Theodoridis, E., Tsakalidis, A. (2010). A web page usage prediction scheme using sequence indexing and clustering techniques. Data Knowledge Engineering, 69(4), 371-382. Elsevier B.V. doi: 10.1016/j.datak.2009.04.010. Georgakis, a, Li, H. (2006). User behavior modeling and content based speculative web page prefetching. Data Knowledge Engineering, 59(3), 770-788. doi: 10.1016/j.datak.2005.11.005. Jalali, M., Mustapha, N., Mamat, A., Sulaiman, N. B. (2008). A new classification model for online predicting users future movements. Architecture, 0-6. Kim, Y., Kim, J. (2003). Web Prefetching Using Display-Based Prediction. Science And Technology, 0-3. Liu, H., Keselj, V. (2007). Combined mining of Web server logs and web contents for classifying user navigation patterns and predicting users future requests. Data Knowledge Engineering, 61(2), 304-330. doi: 10.1016/j.datak.2006.06.001. Nair, A. S. (2007). Dynamic Web Pre-fetching Technique for Latency Reduction. Science, 202-206. doi: 10.1109/ICCIMA.2007.303. Nigam, B., Jain, S. (2010). Generating a New Model for Predicting the Next Accessed Web Page in Web Usage Mining. 2010 3rd International Conference on Emerging Trends in Engineering and Technology, 485-490. Ieee. doi: 10.1109/ICETET.2010.56. Pallis, G., Vakali, a, Pokorny, J. (2008). A clustering-based prefetching scheme on a Web cache environment. Computers Electrical Engineering, 34(4), 309-323. doi: 10.1016/j.compeleceng.2007.04.002. Park, S., Suresh, N., Jeong, B. (2008). Sequence-based clustering for Web usage mining: A new experimental framework and ANN-enhanced K-means algorithm. Data Knowledge Engineering, 65(3), 512-543. doi: 10.1016/j.datak.2008.01.002. S. Chakrabarti, M. van der Berg, B. Dom, Focused crawling: a new approach to topic-specific web resource discovery, in: Proceedings of 8th Int. WorldWide Web Conf. (WWW8), 1999. A. Gulli, A. Signorini, The indexable web is more than 11.5 billion pages, in: Special interest Tracks and Posters of the 14th International Conference onWorld Wide Web, Chiba, Japan, 2005. A. Banerjee, J. Ghosh, Clickstream clustering using weighted longest common subsequences, in: Proc. of the Web Mining Workshop at the 1st SIAM Conference on Data Mining, 2001 I. Cadez, D. Heckerman, C. Meek, P. Smyth, S. White, Visualization of navigation patterns on a Web site using model-based clustering, in: Proceedings of the Sixth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2001), Boston, MA, 2000, pp. 280-284. Y. Fu, K. Sandhu, M.-Y. Shih, A generalization-based approach to clustering of Web usage sessions, in: B. Masand, M. Spiliopoulou (Eds.), Web Usage Analysis and User Profiling: International WEBKDD99 Workshop, San Diego, CA, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1836, Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg, 2000, pp. 21-38.

EhlersDanlos Syndrome :: essays papers

EhlersDanlos Syndrome Ehlers-Danlos sydrome (EDS) is a rare inherited group of connective tissue disorders characterized by defects of the major structural protein in the body (collagen). Collagen is a tough fibrous protein that plays an essential role in binding, holding together, strengthening, and providing elasticity to bodily cells and tissues. There are six major types of EDS that I will discuss, however I will only go into detailed discussion on two of the six types of EDS. The two major types of EDS are Classical EDS and Hypermobile EDS. These two types make up 90% of all EDS cases. I will discuss the general symptoms of these two types along with pathology, then diagnostic factors, and the different treatments for this disorder (Smith). EDS can vary in severity and are transmitted as autosomal recessive, autosomal dominant, or X-linked recessive traits. The primary characteristics are hyperextensible skin and joints (Dia. 1-2, pg.6), tendency to bruise easily (Dia. 3, pg.6), reduced wound healing capability, pseudotumors, and ocular defects. Differences within the six types may reflect inter/intra familial variability or genetic heterogeneity. Each type of EDS is classified symptoms and signs that are resulted (Clarke, D., Skrocki-Czerpak, K., Neumann-Potash, L). There are approximately six types of EDS that have been distinguished but other types exist that are very uncommon. Classical, Hypermobile, Vascular, Kyphoscoliosis, Arthrochalasia, and Dermatosparaxis. Classical and Hypermobile make up over 90% of all reported cases of EDS. With the Classical type of EDS a person would have hyperextensible (stretchy) skin with widened atrophic scars and joint hypermobility. The skin is smooth and velvety with tissue fragility and easy brusability. Also evident are molluscoid pseudotumors (fleshy lesions associated with scars) frequently found over pressure points (e.g. elbows) and subcutaneous spheroids, which are commonly mobile and palpable on the forearms and shins. Complications of joint hypemobility include sprains, dislocation are common in the shoulder, patella and temporomandibular joints Muscle hypotonia and slower gross motor development also can occur It is inherited in an autosomal dominant manner (Clarke, D., Skrocki-Czerpak, K., Neuman n-Potash, L.). In the Hypermobile type of EDS the joints of the body experience Hypermobility, which is the dominant clinical manifestation. General joint hypermobility affects large (elbows, knees) and small (fingers and toes) joints are evident. Skin is hyperextensible, smooth/velvety, and bruising occurs easily as well. Reoccurring joint dislocations are common, and joints such as shoulder, patella, and temporomandibular joint dislocate frequently. Chronic joint and limb pain is a common amongst individuals with Hypermobile type EDS. EhlersDanlos Syndrome :: essays papers EhlersDanlos Syndrome Ehlers-Danlos sydrome (EDS) is a rare inherited group of connective tissue disorders characterized by defects of the major structural protein in the body (collagen). Collagen is a tough fibrous protein that plays an essential role in binding, holding together, strengthening, and providing elasticity to bodily cells and tissues. There are six major types of EDS that I will discuss, however I will only go into detailed discussion on two of the six types of EDS. The two major types of EDS are Classical EDS and Hypermobile EDS. These two types make up 90% of all EDS cases. I will discuss the general symptoms of these two types along with pathology, then diagnostic factors, and the different treatments for this disorder (Smith). EDS can vary in severity and are transmitted as autosomal recessive, autosomal dominant, or X-linked recessive traits. The primary characteristics are hyperextensible skin and joints (Dia. 1-2, pg.6), tendency to bruise easily (Dia. 3, pg.6), reduced wound healing capability, pseudotumors, and ocular defects. Differences within the six types may reflect inter/intra familial variability or genetic heterogeneity. Each type of EDS is classified symptoms and signs that are resulted (Clarke, D., Skrocki-Czerpak, K., Neumann-Potash, L). There are approximately six types of EDS that have been distinguished but other types exist that are very uncommon. Classical, Hypermobile, Vascular, Kyphoscoliosis, Arthrochalasia, and Dermatosparaxis. Classical and Hypermobile make up over 90% of all reported cases of EDS. With the Classical type of EDS a person would have hyperextensible (stretchy) skin with widened atrophic scars and joint hypermobility. The skin is smooth and velvety with tissue fragility and easy brusability. Also evident are molluscoid pseudotumors (fleshy lesions associated with scars) frequently found over pressure points (e.g. elbows) and subcutaneous spheroids, which are commonly mobile and palpable on the forearms and shins. Complications of joint hypemobility include sprains, dislocation are common in the shoulder, patella and temporomandibular joints Muscle hypotonia and slower gross motor development also can occur It is inherited in an autosomal dominant manner (Clarke, D., Skrocki-Czerpak, K., Neuman n-Potash, L.). In the Hypermobile type of EDS the joints of the body experience Hypermobility, which is the dominant clinical manifestation. General joint hypermobility affects large (elbows, knees) and small (fingers and toes) joints are evident. Skin is hyperextensible, smooth/velvety, and bruising occurs easily as well. Reoccurring joint dislocations are common, and joints such as shoulder, patella, and temporomandibular joint dislocate frequently. Chronic joint and limb pain is a common amongst individuals with Hypermobile type EDS.

Cultural Concepts of Leisure Essay examples -- Leisure Culture Cultura

Cultural Concepts of Leisure Modern American culture seems to have the need for discrepancy between leisure and work more than any other culture in the world. We really forget the possibility that other meanings besides our own might exist. I would like to explore the different meanings that leisure has for people of other cultural backgrounds and compare them with those of European descent. It is important to keep in mind that there is no way of regarding any culture in which the results can be taken as truth about the culture in its entirety. Values and ideals vary from person to person and from community to community. There are, however, commonalties found spread throughout the body of a culture and these can be very meaningful. The western concept of leisure in most cases contains some notion of the need to get away from pressures, to have time for one's self, in order to do exactly what one would be doing were they not required to work. This is one concept which has not been found in some other cultures. In fact it was quite an offensive idea to the Indo-Canadian women interviewed for the Journal of Leisure research. These women had arrived in Canada in 1903 and made themselves homes here despite difficulty posed by extreme discrimination against Asian immigrants at the time. There were ten women interviewed for this study. Although it provides a strictly female view this research provides valuable insight into the cultural perception of leisure in India. Before conducting their interviews, researchers Susan C. Tirone and Susan M. Shaw sought advice from a professor from the Indo-Canadian community, familiar with qualitative research methods. She explained that using terms like leisure, hobbies and recreat ion would pr... ...ople tend to be so perplexed about wasting time and about making the most of the time when they don't have to work that they drive themselves to exhaustion in an attempt to make "good use" of their leisure time. This is because of the extent to which we differentiate between the two. The majority of us are completely absorbed in the system of consumerism; We work in order to have money, we have money in order to buy things to amuse ourselves with. We now see leisure as if it were something we must get as much as possible of in the time allotted, and we gain little or no rejuvenation and replenishment from it as a result. There is evidence everywhere of the possibility of a world in which the line between work and leisure is much much thinner and it is becoming a very critical issue and we have a lot to gain by considering the views of other cultures in this matter.

Winston Churchill :: essays research papers

Winston Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace on Nov. 30, 1874. His father was Lord Randolph Churchill, who descended directly from the 1st duke of Marlborough, of whom Winston was to write a biography. His mother was Jennie Jerosme, an American. Churchill's childhood was unhappy. He spent most of his time at school, something he didn't really love. His teachers caracterized him as bright, but stubborn and obstinate. He loved to read history and poetry, however, and was fascinated by soldiers and battles. From childhood he had an extraordinary memory. Winston Churchhill didn't want to go to university. Instead, he enrolled in the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. He graduated in 1894. After service in Cuba and India, he worked as a war- correspondent in Northern India, Sudan and in South Africa, where he was captured by the Boers. His daring escape made him an overnight celebrity. Churchill always wanted to become a politician. His wish came true in 1900, when he was elected to the Parliment as a Conservative, and he quickly made his mark. His political sympathies began to change, however, and he "changed sides" in 1904, when he abandoned the Conservative party for the Liberals. When the Liberals came to power in 1905, Churchill entered the government as secretary of state for the colonies. In 1908, the year of his marriage to Clementine Hosier, he became a member of the cabinet as president of the Board of Trade. Winston's political missions became more and more important, in 1910 he became a member of the Admirality. In 1913-1914 Churchill completed British naval preparations for war. During World War Churchhill made some fatal mistakes in war strategy. This was one of the main reasons that he was removed from the Admirality when the Conservatives (many of whom now detested him) joined the government in 1915. After a period of active military service in France, he was re-elected in the Parliment. He became minister of munitions under the prime minister David Lloyd George. He subsequently served as secretary of state for war and air and for the colonies and helped negotiate the treaty that created the Irish Free State. But he lost both his office and his seat in Parliament when Lloyd George's coalition government fell in 1922. Over the next year or two, Churchill gradually moved back into alliance with the Conservatives. He used to remark with a mischievous twinkle, "Any fool can rat, but I flatter myself that it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat." Returning to Parliament in 1924, he was offered the post of chancellor of the exchequer in

Strategies by Apple for Successful Change

Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs recently described apple as a mobile device company. Apple once considered a desktop computer company is slowly moving towards mobile devices. This statement shows how apple’s strategy has changed significantly in past few years. Challenges faced in the past – The major challenge Apple faced in the past was the isolation it has created from other products and companies in the market. Apple users had very limited options. The other challenge faced by the Apple was the compatibility of its product with the other products available in the market. Core Competency – Apple’s core competency is to provide exceptional experience through superb user interface. Apple provide this experience along with very large ecosystem of various online distribution system (App stores) where user can find almost every application they need. Strategy – Apple’s strategy is to provide superior product in the market through innovation. Apple also charges premium price for these product and keeps high margins. Strategy Execution – Moving towards mobile products -Apple identified the customer behavior of moving away from desktop computers towards mobile products at the very early stage. Apple realized it much earlier then any other computer manufacture or software company. In last few years Apple created two superior mobile products, iPhone and iPad. iPhone was superior then any other mobile phone product in the market and because of that Apple captured the big percentage of smartphone market. iPad had the first mover advantage in the market backed by superb marketing of the product and created a new market space for product. Ecosystem Creation – Apple also created a very effective ecosystem of apps store for their products. This ecosystem gave Apple more acceptances in the market and among the customers. Apple also created the ecosystem for developers to develop the application for their products, which help them to get continuous supply of very good application for their products. High Margins – Apple charge premium price for its products and makes big profits since manufacturing cost is considerable low once product is designed and developed. Apple also charges a big percentage of the data plan price from the mobile service provider and big percentage from apps store application and it is another big source of profits for them. Also by managing and keeping tight control on these distribution channels, Apple dictates the terms to their suppliers. Timing for implementation – Apple’s timing of the implementation in last few years has been very good. They understood the need of the customers in the market in advance and developed the products to meet that need much in advance then any other competitors.

“Country Lovers” by Nadine Gordimer and “Veronica” by Adewale Maja Pearce Essay

Explore the ways in which relationships are shaped and influenced by traditional cultural expectations in the short stories you have studied. Relationships – platonic and intimate – are sometimes built from cultural expectations; but to what extent are people willing to go to uphold those traditions? I will discuss two short stories â€Å"Country Lovers† by Nadine Gordimer and â€Å"Veronica† by Adewale Maja Pearce, in which both focus on close relationships which are condemned from the start due to strict and uncompromising cultural expectations. Cultural influences are portrayed strongly by the non-British writers; one is set in an unnamed African village, and the other Apartheid South Africa. Both stories tragically show the destructive effect on relationships, when a tenacious fixation with tradition causes them to be obeyed beyond the point of humaneness, and everything else – including love – is disregarded. In â€Å"Country Lovers† the protagonists Paulus (heir to wealthy farming business) and Thebedi (a black farm worker) form an inter-racial relationship in the period of Apartheid rule in South Africa. During Apartheid the divide between blacks and whites was immense. Skin colour determined every aspect of social life. Whilst the affluent whites had their own well-equipped facilities, living in large houses and having well-paid jobs, blacks had to manage with a much lower standard of life. â€Å"Apartheid laws prohibited most social contact between races† (Microsoft Encarta 2006) and inter-racial sex and marriage were strongly opposed by law making it virtually impossible for a blossoming relationship such as Paulus’ and Thebedi’s to progress. They stood at two different sides of the track, whilst Paulus was son of a rich farmer, Thebedi worked on his farm. The contrast between them is great; and so their economic and social differences would be deeply frowned upon. An instance of the contrast, is the scene after Paulus and Thebedi met at the riverbed it says â€Å"and each returned home with the dark – she to her mother’s hut, he to the farmhouse†. A hut in comparison to a house proves the extent of Apartheid and the blacks living conditions. Njabulo, also a slave labourer would have lived here, and he had feelings for Thebedi. Njabulo’s relationship with Thebedi is also dictated by the expectations of a black man in that time, and also his limitations because of it. For example, Paulus returned from school, and brought Thebedi gifts, because he could afford to, although â€Å"Njabulo said he wished he could have bought her a belt and earrings† (line 35). He couldn’t display his love for her, because he didn’t have the means. When Njabulo made arrangements to marry her, he couldn’t offer her parents the customary cow that should have been given in place of Thebedi. This also shows that the customs of the blacks could not be taken under consideration whilst segregation that was going on. Also, when the â€Å"very light† (line 114) baby was being born it simply states â€Å"Njabulo made no complaint†. The preceding sentences had been very long and descriptive with many clauses, but this contrasting short simple one gives it importance and could show that he didn’t care, but could also show that he couldn’t do anything about it and so just accepted it. Despite the fact that it had been proven that Thebedi had had an intercourse with a white man, Njabulo maybe couldn’t ask her about it because he was a second-class citizen and couldn’t do anything. Also, maybe he felt uncomfortable to question her in regards to the baby, because it wasn’t uncommon for white men to rape black women in those times. Cultural expectations forced Njabulo to keep quiet, and so it impacted negatively upon their relationship. There was no trust or compassion between them as he had â€Å"no complaint† when Thebedi had another man’s child. Despite Thebedi’s marriage, the love between Paulus and Thebedi seemed very pure. In line 1 of the story it sets the scene for what the whole story is based upon – â€Å"The farm children play together when they are small; but once the white children go away to school they soon don’t play together any more, even in the holidays†. It immediately drags us into the harshness of living under Apartheid. The entire tone of the narrator is cool and unemotional, perhaps to show the thoughts and feelings of the time. Most white people didn’t really care about the inequality during the Apartheid system, and so had no compassion towards the blacks or to what they were going through. The unemotional tone of the story could also reflect the harshness of the people that were for apartheid or unsympathetic towards the experiences of black people, as the writer Nadine Gordimer was a strong activist in the anti-apartheid movement. The opening line shows how there is no discrimination when the children are young, but as they get older they discover the divide, and so blacks begin to call whites â€Å"missus and baasie† and blacks drop further and further behind in schooling. The story uses country specific words to show that it is not set in England such as â€Å"koppies† – small hill in South Africa. The story sharply contrasts the everyday relationships between whites and blacks as they get older to say â€Å"The trouble was Paulus Esendyck did not seem to realise that Thebedi was now simply one of the crowd of farm children down at the kraal†. He goes against the norm and continues to entertain their relationship, rather than just stop his feelings for her. The language used here such as â€Å"the trouble† shows that it was a problem that Paulus could not just forget Thebedi. Even when he grew up and out of childhood and experienced the things of adulthood, it did not discourage his love for her. Although it was expected of Paulus to like these white girls as it suggests in the story â€Å"the sight of their dazzling bellies and thighs in the sunlight had never made him feel what he felt now†, â€Å"The head girl of the ‘sister’ school was said to have a crush on him he didn’t particularly like her† he had stronger feelings for Th ebedi. In the story, Paulus and Thebedi both go on a walk but unaware of each other but then meet whilst on the walk. This could symbolise that they each want to follow their own paths, but it leads back to one another, â€Å"they had not arranged this, it was an urge each followed independently†. They then go into deep conversation, and during this scene the writer uses lots of descriptive language and imagery to depict their surroundings, such as, â€Å"twisted and tugged at the roots of white stinkwood and Cape willow trees that loped out of the eroded earth around them† and â€Å"old, and eaten trees held in place by vigorous ones, wild asparagus brushing up between the trunks, and here and there prickly-pear cactus sunken-skinned and bristly†. This technique may have been used prolong Paulus and Thebedi’s scene of happiness and contentment with each other – â€Å"she laughed a lot†¦sharing her amusement with the cool shady earth†. Another view is that nature is the only thing around them, it is not discriminatory and doesn’t judge them allowing them to be happy. The turning point in the story is when Paulus and Thebedi have intercourse and it is a blissful time, it says â€Å"they were not afraid of one another†¦this time it was so lovely, so lovely he was surprised†. Although, due to the segregation of the time inter-racial relationships were forbidden (as they were illegal) and so their meetings had to be secret, for being found out would have incurred harsh punishments and being socially shunned. Paulus and Thebedi hide their love from others, specifically by making excuses for Thebedi’s gift â€Å"she told her father the missus had given these (gilt hoop earrings) as a reward for some work she had done†, and by sneaking in and out of the farmhouse â€Å"she had to get away before the house servants, who knew her, came in at dawn†. They both lead double lives. Paulus leaves for veterinary school and Thebedi marries Njabulo – the lives they â€Å"should† be leading if they stuck to the cultural expectations. Once the baby is born everything changes. The writer constantly refers to childhood, during the key scene when Paulus searches for Thebedi and their baby, â€Å"He drank a glass of fresh, still-warm milk in the childhood familiarity of his mother’s kitchen† and also â€Å"For the first time since he was a boy he came right in the kraal†. Children are usually associated with innocence and naivety, and so maybe this was used to contrast with the act of murder he will commit, or maybe to remind the readers of the relationship he had with Thebedi when he was younger. In lines 132-134, the long sentences used increase the suspense and tension for the reader, as they are eager to find out what happens next, whilst the writer rambles on about non-essential information. There is a change in Paulus as he no longer enters into long conversations with Thebedi; his language is short and clipped as he says â€Å"I want to see. Show me†. After Thebedi shows him his child, she uses an anecdote which corresponds to the situation, â€Å"the gang of children had trodden down a crop in their games or transgressed in some other way†¦and he the white one among them must intercede with the farmer†. This shows that the baby was the product of some â€Å"transgression† and the responsibility befell on him, Paulus to put it right. You can see that he felt some sorrow or regret as it says â€Å"he struggled for a moment with a grimace of tears, anger and self-pity†. The relationship between Paulus and Thebedi had been destroyed because of the cultural expectations, as it says â€Å"she could not put her hand to him†. Thebedi could not even console her young lover, as she had no idea how he would react, maybe in anger he could hurt her, and he was confused â€Å"I don’t know†¦ I feel like killing myself†. This was now no longer an intimate relationship although they shared a close moment, a chance to reconcile their love Paulus walked out, because the traditions had made it impossible for them to try and rekindle their affection for one another – â€Å"For a moment there was the feeling between them that used to come when they were alone down at the riverbed† Others opinions and views of Paulus are that the prospect of being prosecuted outweighed his love for Thebedi and his child. He had to reassure that she had never been near the farm house, and willing her to take it away and finally did the only thing he could to make sure he was not found out. The last line summarises the whole story, even though they continued a relationship from childhood it was doomed from the beginning due to the pressures and harshness of living in a segregated society, â€Å"It was a thing of our childhood, we don’t see each other any more. â€Å" Adewale Maja-Pearce depicts the tragic story ‘Veronica’ in which two members of a rural African village born and raised together, begin to lead very different lives on the ground of hampering cultural expectations. The narrator Okeke recollects his experiences in the village, and his platonic relationship with a fatalistic childhood friend Veronica. Set in the middle of the last century, views of the roles of men and women were rigid and unyielding. The story shows how African women of the time were subjected to constant pressure and mounting responsibilities which in turn leads to fatal consequences. In Afrcian society, men were traditional â€Å"breadwinners† and it was a woman’s role to do childrearing and house work. Veronica automatically adopted the responsibilities of her entire family as ‘since she was the eldest child†¦bringing up the other children had fallen on her’. The adjective â€Å"fallen† does not show the responsibility in a good light, as it suggests that a heavy burden has been dropped onto her. It also describes her family situation as she had to take on tasks stereotypically associated with men- such as â€Å"chopping firewood†, as well as taking on maternal roles such as catering for her siblings. Her father abuses her â€Å"listening to her scream†, and is described as a â€Å"brute†, and her mother described as â€Å"weak†. Maja-Pearce may have used the characters as allegory for the political views of the African country. Veronica is a symbol of the abused and mistreated citizens whilst her father symbolises the government and their indifference and apathy towards the citizens deprivation, and her mother could symbolise th e â€Å"weak† bystanders that can’t do anything due to their lack of means. This view also ties in with the fact that historically during this period a civil war would soon be in progress, and also that Maja-Pearce had written several stories that challenge the principles of African society. The relationship between Veronica and Okeke is told solely from Okeke’s point of view as he gives a background, until he talks of his leaving the village. The writer could have done this to show that Veronica’s situation was probably much worse than Okeke knew about, and so the reader would imagine terrible things would happen to her whilst Okeke heard â€Å"screams in the night†, and so empathise with her more. This technique could be seen as building tension and anticipation for when they meet, or to show that this crucial dialogue is a very important part of the story. A turning point in the story when Okeke and Veronica’s friendship is ended by Okeke’s plans to leave his home village and make a life for himself in the city, whilst Veronica refuses to abandon her family. The parting conversation shows just how much cultural tradition has been impressed on Veronica. When Okeke suggests that she leave the village, she replies â€Å"Me!†. This could be vewed as mock indignance, because she feels that Okeke is telling her to forget her set role in society, or it could be seen as genuine surprise at him suggesting that she should give up everything near to her. Okeke then asks for her reasons for staying and she says ‘I can’t just leave my family’.