Assessment of the types of public building maintenance contracts in Saudi Arabia

The study revealed that Fixed Price, Cost Plus and Purchased Labour contracts are the top three maintenance contracts adopted whilst Unit Price, Cost Plus A Percentage Fee contracts are alternatives used in the Kingdom. Some other types of maintenance contract were thought to be inappropriate by ministry departments.     

Photo Sequencing

A group of people taking pictures of a dynamic event with their mobile phones is a popular sight. The set of still images obtained this way is rich in dynamic content but lacks accurate temporal information. We propose a method for photo-sequencing—temporally ordering a set of still images taken asynchronously by a set of uncalibrated cameras. Photo-sequencing is an essential tool in analyzing (or visualizing) a dynamic scene captured by still images. The first step of the method detects sets of corresponding static and dynamic feature points across images. The static features are used to determine the epipolar geometry between pairs of images, and each dynamic feature votes for the temporal order of the images in which it appears. The partial orders provided by the dynamic features are not necessarily consistent, and we use rank aggregation to combine them into a globally consistent temporal order of images. We demonstrate successful photo-sequencing on several challenging collections of images taken using a number of mobile phones.     

2-Transitivity is Insufficient for Local Testability

A basic goal in property testing is to identify a minimal set of features that make a property testable. For the case when the property to be tested is membership in a binary linear error-correcting code, Alon et al. (Trans Inf Theory, 51(11):4032–4039, 2005) had conjectured that the presence of a single low-weight codeword in the dual, and “2-transitivity” of the code (i.e., the code being invariant under a 2-transitive group of permutations on the coordinates of the code) suffice to get local testability. We refute this conjecture by giving a family of error-correcting codes where the coordinates of the codewords form a large field of characteristic two, and the code is invariant under affine transformations of the domain. This class of properties was introduced by Kaufman & Sudan (STOC, 2008) as a setting where many results in algebraic property testing generalize. Our result shows a complementary virtue: This family also can be useful in producing counterexamples to natural conjectures.     

On the Effective Deployment of Functional Formal Verification

We examine IBM's exploitation of formal verification using RuleBase—a formal verification tool developed by the IBM Haifa Research Laboratory. The goal of the paper is methodological. We identify an integrated methodology for the deployment of formal verification which involves three complementary modes: architectural verification, block-level verification, and design exploration.     

Languages, scripts, and the environment: Factors in developing concepts of print.

Preschool children bilingual in English and Hebrew were investigated for their understanding of concepts of print by means of two tasks. In the first, children had to understand that a printed word did not change its meaning if it moved to a new location. In the second, children had to make judgments about word length and ignore the size of the named objects. Previous research had shown bilingual French–English and Chinese–English children to excel in the first task, but only older Chinese–English bilinguals had an advantage in the second. The present study extended those results by investigating the effect of writing system in more detail. The study also examined the effect of the language of the environment by conducting parallel studies in environments in which either English or Hebrew was the community language. The results show that the bilingual children in both settings were more advanced than the monolinguals in both tasks and in both settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

通州门楼 中国北京

正在距北京三十英里的地方,一个由200多名具有国际知名度的中国艺术家组成的社区,缺乏一个互动吸引点、艺术展示区或接待场所。一个由艺术家、评论家和代理人组成的财团收购了一处地产,准备为通州的艺术组织建设一个这样的项目。这是一个分期项目,已完工的首期是门楼,包括定居在此的艺术家们的住房和工作室。项目场址被一堵现有的砖墙隔开,一边是一片树林,另一边是一片贫瘠的工业场     

Matching patterns in strings subject to multi-linear transformations

Suppose we are given two strings of real numbers. The longer string is called text and the other is called pattern. We consider problems within the following framework. Suppose each symbol of the pattern was modified by any transformation which is a member in some family of transformations. Find all occurences of the pattern in the text where the pattern may appear subject to any one of these transformations. Problems are introduced and efficient algorithms are given.     

The myth of informal place-making: stitching and unstitching Atarim Square in Tel Aviv

The metaphor of stitching/unstitching can be applied to the mechanism employed by authorities, professionals and users alike—each for a different purpose and under different circumstances—for appropriating the urban space. It views the urban space as a socio-political arena that involves ongoing negotiation. The metaphor is used in this paper to debate some basic premises of architectural discourse of the everyday. Analysis of Atarim Square on Tel Aviv's shoreline—focusing on three periods: the 1930s, 1960s and the 1990s—reveals ongoing and often simultaneous processes of ‘stitching and unstitching’. The key contention here is that formal (official and professional) spatial processes are not necessarily limiting, just as informal processes (personal and communal) are not always liberating, and that both are endemic to the socio-political construct of the everyday.     

Comparing the strength of query types in property testing: The case of k-colorability

We study the power of four query models in the context of property testing in general graphs, where our main case study is the problem of testing k-colorability. Two query types, which have been studied extensively in the past, are pair queries and neighbor queries. The former corresponds to asking whether there is an edge between any particular pair of vertices, and the latter to asking for the i ^th neighbor of a particular vertex. We show that while for pair queries testing k-colorability requires a number of queries that is a monotone decreasing function in the average degree d, the query complexity in the case of neighbor queries remains roughly the same for every density and for large values of k. We also consider a combined model that allows both types of queries, and we propose a new, stronger, query model, related to the field of Group Testing. We give upper and lower bounds on the query complexity for one-sided error in all the models, where the bounds are nearly tight for three of the models. In some of the cases, our lower bounds extend to two-sided error algorithms. The problem of testing k-colorability was previously studied in the contexts of dense graphs and of sparse graphs, and in our proofs we unify approaches from those cases, and also provide some new tools and techniques that may be of independent interest.