BACKGROUND Because of immigration, female genital mutilation (FGM) is an issue of increasing concern in western countries. Nevertheless operators without a specific training may ignore the health condition of women subjected to this practice and fail to provide them adequate assistance. The purpose of the study was to estimate the current knowledge about FGM among social and health care assista...

We consider in this paper top-k query answering in social tagging (or bookmarking) applications. This problem requires a significant departure from existing, socially agnostic techniques. In a network-aware context, one can (and should) exploit the social links, which can indicate how users relate to the seeker and how much weight their tagging actions should have in the result build-up. We pro...

There is a growing consensus that asylum seekers with professional nursing skills should be allowed to work here, but obstacles prevail. For example, attaining UK registration is not easy because of the difficulty of obtaining certificates and references from an asylum seeker's home country. Furthermore, current immigration restrictions prevent asylum seekers from working for six months followi...

In the nearly 30 years since the passage of the Technology-Related Assistance to Individuals with Disabilities Act of 1988, technology-mediated instruction has been implemented successfully with both students without disabilities and students with a range of disabilities to help them meet the demands of instruction. In this special issue of Assistive Technology, a number of noted scholars contr...

Acceptability of case ellipsis on focused subjects and objects exhibits clear asymmetry which so far has not received a plausible explanation. Case ellipsis on focused direct objects occurs naturally, whereas case ellipsis on focused transitive subjects is unnatural whether the subject is contrastively focused or not. The main purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence that the d...

PURPOSE The authors investigated the extent to which differences in mobility device use existed by race/ethnicity and whether the effects were modified by age. METHOD Using Phase II of the National Health Interview Survey on Disability, the authors identified 7,148 mobility-impaired adults. Logistic regression models provided estimates of race/ethnicity, adjusting for predictors of device use...

The hide-and-seek game is considered an excellent domain for studying the interactions between mobile robots and humans. Prior to the implementation and test in our mobile robots TIBI and DABO, we have been devising different models and strategies to play this game and comparing them extensively in simulations. We propose the use of MOMDP (Mixed Observability Markov Decision Processes) models t...