This paper promotes socially intelligent animated agents for the pedagogical task of English conversation training for native speakers of Japanese. Since student-agent conversations are realized as role-playing interactions, strong requirements are imposed on the agents’ affective and social abilities. As a novel feature, social role awareness is introduced to animated conversational agents, th...

This paper reports on a novel application of an amphoteric water-soluble polyamidoamine named AGMA1 bearing 4-butylguanidine pendants. AGMA1 is an amphoteric, prevailingly cationic polyelectrolyte with isoelectric point of about 10. At pH 7.4 it is zwitterionic with an average of 0.55 excess positive charges per unit, notwithstanding it is highly biocompatible. In this work, it was found that A...

This work presents a metaheuristic approach to solve the Capacitated m-Ring Star Problem (CmRSP), a problem introduced by Baldacci et al. [1] which models the design of telecommunication networks with survivability properties. The CmRSP consists of finding a set of m cycles (rings), each of them including the central depot (the central telephone office), a subset of customers, and a set of opti...

Long-term oxygen therapy requires a practical regulated oxygen delivery system which works in the home. Although face-masks are cheap and efficient, they are awkward and need removal for talking and eating. Few patients would comply with this for 15 h her day. Nasal prongs are reliable, cheap, safe and well tolerated but are wasteful of oxygen. This waste is important both practically and finan...

Two heteroditopic receptors based on a calix[4]arene crown ether containing amidoanthraquinone pendants in cone and 1,3-alternate conformations (1 and 2, respectively) were synthesized. Photophysical properties of 1 and 2 were studied by UV-vis and fluorescence spectrophotometry in dried CH(3)CN. Both 1 and 2 showed the highest sensitivity towards F(-) through the appearance of a new charge tra...

Zusammenfassung Herstellung, Besitz und Verbreitung von kinderpornografischem Material (besser „child sexual exploitation material“, CSEM) stellt in Deutschland einen Straftatbestand dar ist stark im öffentlichen Fokus. Laut Bundeskriminalamt haben sich die aufgedeckten Straftaten diesem Bereich den letzten Jahren dramatisch erhöht. Nach einer Gesetzesreform aus dem Jahr 2021 wurden sämtliche d...

The stereoselectivity of the reaction between (R)-(-)-2-butylamine and the diastereomeric proton-bound complexes of (+)-catharanthine (C) or (-)-vindoline (V) with some chiral amido[4]resorcinarenes has been investigated in the gas phase by ESI-FT-ICR-MS. The reaction stereoselectivity (0.56 < k(homo)/k(hetero) < 16.9) is found to depend critically on the functional groups present in the chiral...

Two N-donor ligands (L(1) and L(2)) derived from a β-cyclodextrin (βCD) monomer and dimer were employed to mediate the hydrolytic activity and stability of the Ce(IV) ion in aqueous solution. Complexes Ce(IV)-L(1) and Ce(IV)-L(2) were prepared in situ and characterized by means of UV-vis and NMR measurements. Ce(IV)-L(1) catalyzed the hydrolysis of a DNA model, bis(4-nitrophenyl)phosphate (BNPP...

Bonacich (1987) suggested a family of centrality measures that provide a useful way of modeling questions of power and network constraint. However, the literature offers little guidance regarding the choice of  the parameter which alters the way the measure accounts for the effect of having powerful contacts in ones network. In this paper I explore the way the choice of the  parameter affect...