Quickly emerging from the fast-paced growth of mobile communications and wireless technologies, pervasive games take gaming away from the computer screen and back to the three-dimensional world. Nowadays games are designed to be played in public spaces like hospitals and rehabilitation centers, shopping malls, conferences, museums and other nontraditional game venues. The increasing deployments...

A 56-year time series of human plague cases (Yersinia pestis) in the western United States was used to explore the effects of climatic patterns on plague levels. We found that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), together with previous plague levels and above-normal temperatures, explained much of the plague variability. We propose that the PDO's impact on plague is conveyed via its effect on...

Pervasive applications are entering the mainstream, but at the present time, exhibit significant security weaknesses. Service-driven architectural approaches facilitate the development of pervasive applications, however, security with respect to access control and data privacy of pervasive applications are currently not managed comprehensively from design time through run time. This chapter pre...

Due to “Moore’s Law” [19] we have been witnessing an exponential increase in processing power, disk capacity and network bandwidth for more than four decades. Fueled by the underlying exponential increase in circuit density, which is expected to continue for at least another decade, it becomes economically feasible to build pervasive systems. A pervasive system consists of a large set of networ...

conclusions the results showed that despite the simultaneous high prevalence of sleep disturbances and sensory processing disorders in children with autism, there isn’t a significant relationship between the two conditions among these children. background autism is a neurological disorder that limits communication, socialization, and participation of children in symbolic play. sensory processin...

conclusions our findings highlighted the importance of ei and its aspects in asds in the university students recruited in the present study. therefore, improvement in ei and its dimensions can decrease autism symptoms and signs in individuals with asds. overall, the result of this study emphasizes the key role of ei as a plausible health predictor. background autism spectrum traits may present ...

Vegetation phenology in temperate grasslands is highly sensitive to climate change. However, it is still unclear how the timing of vegetation phenology events (especially for autumn phenology) is altered in response to climate change across different grassland types. In this study, we investigated variations of the growing season start (SOS) and end (EOS), derived from Moderate Resolution Imagi...

Foreword In 2011, now 20 years after M. Weiser's "The Computer for the 21st Century" (1991), the vision impacting the evolution of Pervasive Computing is still the claim for an intuitive, unobtrusive and distraction free interaction with omnipresent, technology-rich environments. In an attempt of bringing interaction "back to the real world" after an era of keyboard and screen interaction (Pers...