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This research aims at establishing an RFID-based system for extended information extraction to search the extended information regarding the target object according to its identification and abstract descriptions. An RFID-based extended information extraction technology for business cards is addressed to assist the card receiver in comprehensive information retrieval via contact information on cards. Based on the attribute structuralization of personal information, this research constructs a thesaurus to define the terms used to represent personal features. By using the R-EIE-BC system, the card receiver can maintain the contact information corresponding to each card in the database. As the card receiver acquires the identification of the target card by RFID reader, the system will search the extended information related to the target person through the other information resources based on the abstract information of his, with which the extended information will be subsequently integrated to sketch a comprehensive and current profile of the target person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Courses:Public Speaking, Business and Professional Communication, Persuasion, Interviewing, or any other skill-based oral communication course Objectives:Students will become conscious of their own vocalized pauses in their verbal communication and will be able to remedy this common speech problem in this single-class activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, text detection in moving business cards for helping visually impaired persons using a wearable camera is presented. The current methods to help visually impaired persons to read the natural scene text, menus and book covers have three problems. First, they assumed that the blind persons are standing still and the captured scene is not moving. Second, the blind persons do not know that the menu or the book cover is captured by the camera. Third, these methods cannot "see" business cards to help the blind persons. The proposed method includes moving detection, thumb detection motion blur detection and text detection methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce the time complexity. The reduced rates for training and testing sets are 83.18% and 77.08%, respectively. The text detection rates for training and testing sets are 93.44% and 94.58%, respectively. The fps is 53 for 320 × 240 video frames. The program size is 102KB and can be run on mobile devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer automatic understanding of document images becomes an increasingly hot issue in digital image processing and pattern recognition field, in which business card recognition system is a hot topic. The paper develops business card recognition software with good application prospects. It mainly has the functions including image acquisition, pretreatment, card recognition and extraction, business card tilt correction, positive and negative matching of business card, business card storage and retrieval. The paper proposes two new algorithms, one is to use digital image region labeling and automation for realizing automatic recognition and extraction of single business card, the other is to use pixel area interpolation method for tilt correction. The results prove that the two algorithms have wider applicability. They not only can use digital image region labeling and automation for form recognition, but also can use pixel area interpolation method for circumvolving in any angle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) project, originates from a pilot launched in August 2008 by the European Council. OpenAlRE develops a network of open repositories providing free online access to knowledge produced by researchers receiving grants from Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), and archives peer-reviewed articles in a repository which is to provide open access to these articles within 6 or 12 months resp. after publication (depending on disciplinary area). OpenAlRE complements other EU-funded research infrastructures such as GEANT (providing European scientists with a highspeed research network) and PRACE (developing supercomputing capacity for highly demanding applications). The project's ambitious aims are implemented by 38 partner institutions in 27 European countries during a period of 36 months from December 1, 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on his life as a writer in relation with archives. The author states that he has a subconscious archive where conversations, objects, and images are stored. The author mentions the short story "The Encyclopedia of the Dead" and the film "The Age of Stupid" which reflects that archives are real. He argues that people have different archives which include medical files, business cards, and social media.

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This paper is about Japan and the different customs that have a made such a strong country. Throughout the paper you can see the history and general country information, social customs and manners, and the business customs and behaviors. Some specific information that can be found include: ethnic groups, climate, dress code, tipping, gift giving, business card usage, and negotiation style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores unusual artifacts and prints associated with the American printmaking firm of Currier and Ives. Some of the notable items discussed include a nineteenth-century transferware mug with a British manufacturer's mark "B&B" titled "Kentucky" which feature images from the Currier and Ives prints titled "A Mule Train on an Up Grade" and "A Mule Train on a Down Grade," originally drawn by artist Thomas Worth; an artistically altered 1881 print titled "The Great East River Suspension Bridge;" and a trade card marked "Copyright 1881 by J.M. Ives."

The article provides tips for businesses on how to establish or improve their web sites. A basic fundamental is getting people to visit the site through promotions on business cards, newspapers or billboards. Also important is the conversion rate or getting visitors to take action. According to the author, the web design should stand out and differentiate the company from the rest. Useful, detailed content is said to be the most important part of the web site which will help customers make a purchase decision. INSET: Parachuting into the web cost-efficiently.

A field experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of altercasting (Weinstein & Dutschberger, 1963) as a compliance-gaining technique. The central hypothesis predicts that positive altercasting messages should produce greater compliance than direct requests. Following Milgram's (1969) lost letter technique, 2,400 ostensibly “lost” letters were placed on car windshields throughout a metropolitan area along with a business card containing a handwritten altercasting or direct request message to mail the letter. The frequency of letters returned was used as a primary measure of compliance. The results do not demonstrate the effectiveness of altercasting as a compliance-gaining technique; on the contrary, they indicate that negative altercasting significantly reduces compliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how stock and custom trade cards, distributed by retailers throughout the United States for advertising purposes, became sought after items by the American public and contributed to the popularity of scrapbooking as a leisure activity in the late 19th century. The article traces the beginning of the movement to the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where numerous exhibitors distributed these cards to attendees. Some of the contextual factors that contributed to the popularity of trade cards included the development of a national market due to advances in transportation, communication and mass production.

The article presents sample disclosure for Automated Clearing House (ACH) cards used to initiate POS entries.

For a while now, Electronic Numbering, a convergent and highly efficient identifying standard on the Internet, has been discussed and debated and now is in trial. Although it is considered more robust technologically and economically, extremely useful and cost efficient, many researchers and organizations have not been euphoric about it. The major concern has been that such a technology can compromise the privacy of an individual, especially in the global electronic market space. Scholars have pointed out ample scenarios where this numbering scheme can be easily abused by hackers as well as governments that are not so open and/or are not democratic. In this paper, all these issues have been documented, summarized, and analyzed to give a better understanding of the issues at hand so users of this numbering system can have a clearer understanding of the technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ephemera are treasures of material culture that provide clues to our past, and so are artifacts that can contribute to what Foucault referred to as an ‘archaeology of knowledge’ that give us a glimpse of ‘the order of things.’ Tradecards, forerunners of American business cards, were often post-card sized advertisements for newly-manufactured goods or products for sale, or services made available to the public. In addition to offering specific information about particular businesses and industries, the cards also communicate, visually, contextualization clues of cultural ‘norms’ and social ‘interactions’ within and between cultures. The trade cards as visual representations of daily life in a by-gone era illustrate (quite viscerally at times) interactions of class, gender, race and ethnicity, analysis of which can offer insights into perceptions, realities and stereotypes that were shaped by the domestic and foreign policies of the times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the adoption of multipurpose identity cards in Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) and Klang Valley regions in Malaysia. The card is called "MyKad" and is the world's first implementation of a multipurpose smart identity card which can perform multiple government and private sector applications with one card. The card improve service to citizens an ensure the security of the information stored on the card. Maya also serves as a drivers license, passport, health card, automated teller machine (ATM) card, and Malaysian Electronic Payment System (MEPS).

A block adaptive binarisation method using a modified quadratic filter (MQF) to binarise business card images having ill conditions of very poor resolution, weak and irregular illumination, shadow and noise acquired in hand-held personal digital assistant cameras, is proposed. In the proposedmethod, a business card image is first partitioned into blocks of 8×8, among which character blocks (CBs) are extracted based on their block activity in DCT domain. Each CB is next enhanced by the MQF that is a result of modifying the quadratic filter (QF) to be proper for locally adaptive enhancement. The enhanced CB is then binarised with the same threshold used in the enhancement so that the enhancement and binarisation are associated consistently with each other. All the remaining blocks are next classified as background blocks and binarised as background. A binarised image is finally obtained by tiling each binarised block at its original position. Experimental results show that the quality of binarised images obtained by the proposed method is much better than that by the conventional global binarisation (GB) using QF and that by Rodtook and Rangsanseri's (2001) pixel adaptive binarisation. It is also better than that by Sauvola and Pietikäinen's (2000) pixel adaptive binarisation and that by Yang and Yan's (2000) adaptive logical level binarisation. In addition, the proposed method yields about 32, 28.2, 5.6, and 6.4% improvement of character recognition rate over GB using QF (GB-QF), Rodtook and Rangsanseri's method, Sauvola and Pietikäinen's method, and Yang and Yan's method, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction/Purpose: There are a wide variety of ways in which physicians choose to manage communications with their patients outside of official visits and interactions. Some defer to ancillary staff/services (e.g. surgery schedulers, medical assistants) or mid-level providers (e.g. registered nurses, physicians assistants) until the situation warrants a call back directly from the physician. Less commonly, some choose to provide their cell phone number to patients to provide them with direct access should the need arise. The purpose of this prospective study was to explore to what extent patients utilize the cell phone numbers of orthopaedic surgeons in the immediate period after it is provided to them. Methods: Seven fellowship-trained orthopaedic surgeons from 5 different subspecialties (adult reconstruction, foot and ankle, hand and wrist, spine, sports) in a single private, multi-site orthopaedic surgery group located in a major metropolitan area each provided their personal cell phone number to approximately 30 consecutive patients during a 1-month period. The surgeon's phone number was written down on a business card, and the surgeons themselves provided the card to the patient. Phone calls and voice mail messages received in the 30 days following the patient receiving the phone number were recorded, and the reasons for these calls were categorized as being 'appropriate' (e.g. acute postoperative issues, unclear instructions) or 'inappropriate' (e.g. administrative issues, medication refills, advanced imaging-related inquires). Logistic regression analysis was performed to determine if any patient variable or surgeon subspecialty was independently associated with calling the surgeon cell phone number. Results: Two-hundred seven patients, average age 51.5 years, were provided cell phone numbers. During the 30 days following administration of cell phone numbers, 21 patients (10.1%) made calls to their surgeon, for an average of 0.15 calls per patient. Six patients (2.9%) called more than once. Seventeen calls (54.8%) were deemed appropriate, and 14 calls (45.2%) inappropriate. Student's t-tests (age) and chi-square analysis (sex, visit type, surgeon subspecialty) did not reveal significant difference between callers and non-callers (Table 2). Sports had the highest proportion of patients calling (16.9%), whereas foot & ankle had the lowest (4.0%), though surgeon subspecialty did not differ significantly (p=.3119). Logistic regression analysis did not reveal age (p=.7147), sex (p=.8230), visit type (p=.8745), or surgeon subspecialty (p=.1960) to be associated with calling. Conclusion: Our study has demonstrated a low rate of patient utilization of surgeon cell phone number when provided to them. If surgeons choose to provide their cell phone number to patients, we recommend specifying appropriate reasons to call in order to maximize the effectiveness of this communication method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A genre's continuing success after migrating to a new medium may be due in part to whether the genre secures a place within a viable genre system. To explore the role of genre systems, this study examined the well-established genre of the résumé in its new position on self-published Web sites. Results from surveying 100 authors of self-published Web résumés revealed that many respondents used their résumés for the previously overlooked purpose of attracting clients for their self-employment. These self-employed respondents rated their résumés as significantly more useful than did those who had not used their résumés for this purpose. The self-employed were more likely to publicize their sites through such business-related genres as business cards and advertising material, and in turn, their sites drew in communication from more socially distant populations. These alternative publicity measures and communication networks suggest that the self-employed were able to situate their Web résumés within viable alternative genre systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the popularity of online applications for print jobs among printing customers in the U.S. The approach is known to print providers as Web to print, a server-based online generation of individual documents, including printing and publishing business processes. With this service, the user can fill out a form on a service provider's Web site to order business cards. According to the author, the secret for success with Web to print systems is to satisfy the needs of the customers, broaden sales options, and optimize production processes.

An efficient algorithm for rotational skew correction of business card images acquired in a PDA (personal digital assistant) camera is presented. The proposed method is composed of four parts: block adaptive binarisation (BAB), stripe generation, skew angle calculation and image rotation. In BAB, an input image is binarised block by block so as to lessen the effects of irregular illumination and shadow over the input image. In stripe generation, character string clusters are generated merging adjacent characters and their strings, and then only clusters useful for skew angle calculation are output as stripes. In skew angle calculation, the direction angles of the stripes are calculated using their central moments and then the skew angle of the input image is determined averaging the direction angles. In image rotation, the input image is rotated by the skew angle. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields root mean square error of 0.44° for test images of several types of business cards acquired by a PDA under various surrounding conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]