BACKGROUND The Millennium Development Goals expire at the end of 2015 and global negotiations are underway to finalise the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Much activism has occurred encouraging a post-2015 health and development goal embedded in the highest attainable standard of health ('right to health'). Despite this, the right to health was absent in three key post-2015 intergovern...

our commentary on forman et al paper explores their thesis that right to health language can frame global health policy responses. we examined human rights discourse in the outcome documents from three 2015 united nations (un) summits and found rights-related terms are used in all three. however, a deeper examination of the discourse finds the documents do not convey the obligations and entitle...

The best way to summarize my view of the relationship between user models and discourse models is that they are separate, but related to each other. This paper will show why the two terms have completely distinct elements, and where the common ground between the two lies. It is also important to acknowledge at the outset that the two terms have not been well defined in the literature. For the d...

Dialogue in commercial games is largely created by teams of writers and designers who hand-author every line of dialogue and hand-specify the dialogue structure using finite state machines or branching trees. For dialogue heavy games, such as role playing games with significant NPC interactions, or emerging genres such as interactive drama, such hand specification significantly limits the playe...

Identity is a central focus of research in the social sciences, national and international politics, and everyday discourse. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary set of social scientists who study personal and social identity. The chapters span childhood through emerging adulthood. This chapter introduces the three goals of the volume: (1) illustrating how the study of identity deve...

BACKGROUND Understanding and addressing the needs of frail persons is an emerging health priority for Nova Scotia and internationally. Primary healthcare (PHC) providers regularly encounter frail persons in their daily clinical work. However, routine identification and measurement of frailty is not standard practice and, in general, there is a lack of awareness about how to identify and respond...

Previous research suggests that ‘‘away messages’’ in instant messaging express informational and entertainment communicative goals while displaying a users’ identity. This study investigated the extent to which these communicative goals are reflected in the language structure of away messages, by examining the speech acts performed through the production of 483 away messages crafted by 44 parti...

Daily experience is filled with objects that have been created by humans to serve specific purposes. For such objects, the very act of creation may be a key element of how people understand them. But exactly how does creator's intention matter? We evaluated its contribution to two forms of categorization: the name selected for an artifact, and intuitions about what an artifact "really" is. To c...