The ideal guide to choosing the right word. Entries go beyond the word lists of a thesaurus, explaining important differences between synonyms. Provides over 17,000 usage examples. Lists antonyms and related words.

The Oxford American Desk Dictionary & Thesaurus Third Edition is a portable, all-in-one reference, seamlessly combining dictionary and thesaurus entries into one text. In addition to finding meanings, synonyms, and antonyms for a word together in one entry, users will appreciate a selection of the most helpful extra features.With up-to-date content backed by Oxford's language research program, and with an open, accessible new interior design, this is the ideal reference source for anyone requiring authoritative lexical information.

Although the notion is a relatively recent one, the notions and principles of Granular Computing (GrC) have appeared in a different guise in many related fields including granularity in Artificial Intelligence, interval computing, cluster analysis, quotient space theory and many others. Recent years have witnessed a renewed and expanding interest in the topic as it begins to play a key role in bioinformatics, e-commerce, machine learning, security, data mining and wireless mobile computing when it comes to the issues of effectiveness, robustness and uncertainty. The Handbook of Granular Computing offers a comprehensive reference source for the granular computing community, edited by and with contributions from leading experts in the field. Includes chapters covering the foundations of granular computing, interval analysis and fuzzy set theory; hybrid methods and models of granular computing; and applications and case studies. Divided into 5 sections: Preliminaries, Fundamentals, Methodology and Algorithms, Development of Hybrid Models and Applications and Case Studies. Presents the flow of ideas in a systematic, well-organized manner, starting with the concepts and motivation and proceeding to detailed design that materializes in specific algorithms, applications and case studies. Provides the reader with a self-contained reference that includes all pre-requisite knowledge, augmented with step-by-step explanations of more advanced concepts. The Handbook of Granular Computing represents a significant and valuable contribution to the literature and will appeal to a broad audience including researchers, students and practitioners in the fields of Computational Intelligence, pattern recognition, fuzzy sets and neural networks, system modelling, operations research and bioinformatics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceeding of the 7th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS 2006, held in Milan, Italy in June 2006. The 60 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on flexibility in database management and quering, vagueness and uncertainty in XML quering and retrieval, information retrieval and filtering, multimedia information access, user modeling and personalization, knowledge and data extraction, intelligent information extraction from text, and knowledge representation and reasoning.

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In the United States, health among racial and ethnic minorities, as well as poor people, is significantly worse than the overall U.S. population. Health disparities are reflected by indices such as excess mortality and morbidity and shorter life expectancy. Examining the Health Disparities Research Plan of the National Institutes of Health is an assessment of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Strategic Research Plan and Budget to Reduce and Ultimately Eliminate Health Disparities. It focuses on practical solutions to remedy the state of the current health disparity crisis. The NIH has played the leading role in conducting extensive research on minority health and health disparities for more than two decades. Although additional research is critical to facilitating a better understanding of the overarching social, economic, educational, and environmental factors that predispose groups to specific diseases and conditions, there is also a great need to translate the existing and new information into best care practices. This means increasing communication with affected populations and their communities. Examining the Health Disparities Research Plan of the National Institutes of Health presents solutions to improving the health disparities nationwide and evaluates the NIH strategy plan designed to actively correct and combat the ongoing health disparities dilemma.