This paper presents SMIL PhotoShow, an authoring tool for photo books, which allows the creation of enhanced multimedia presentations, enriched with audio (music or spoken) comments, transition effects and animations in a very simple way. Our tool allows to create a digital counterpart of a printed photo book with the aim to bridge the gap between digital web albums and printed photo books. Sin...

Rates of schizophrenia differ significantly between groups defined at the social level, eg, urban/rural comparisons, neighborhoods, and ethnic minority status. While earlier studies were not able to determine if the social environment influenced the development of schizophrenia (causation) or whether individuals at risk aggregated in adverse social environments (selection), the recent developme...

Epidemiological studies have suggested that the association between city upbringing and minority status with risk for schizophrenia can be explained by social mechanisms. Neuroimaging approaches hold promise for investigating this claim. Recent studies have shown that in healthy individuals, city upbringing and minority status are associated with increased activity in brain circuits involved in...

The impact of the social environment on asthma has recently begun to receive increasing attention. This article reviews the current literature to investigate the impact of the social environment at three levels-the neighborhood level, the peer level, and the family level-and to explore pathways through which the social environment "gets under the skin" to impact asthma onset and morbidity. Rese...

Social experiences occurring during infancy have been demonstrated to exert persistent effects on neurobiological and behavioral outcomes. This social modulation of the developing brain has been observed in humans and animal models of abuse, neglect, and variation in parental style. Although the mechanisms through which these effects are achieved likely involve diverse cellular and molecular pa...

Civil wars dramatically reduce income. Peace might therefore be expected to generate a dividend which both the government and the private sector can spend. Paradoxically, those civil wars which are prolonged and therefore do most damage create only small instant peace dividends. Income has fallen because capital has been lost and so cannot recover until capital has been reaccumulated. However, ...

This paper discusses the interactive vision approach, which advocates using knowledge from the human sciences on the structure and dynamics of human-human interaction in the development of machine vision systems and interactive robots. While this approach is discussed generally, the particular case of the system being developed for the Aurora project (which aims to produce a robot to be used as...

While agents and environments are two intimately connected concepts, most approaches for multi-agent development focus on the agent-specific part of the system, whereas the handling of concerns related to the environment is often neglected or delegated to implementation level constructs. In this paper we demonstrate that building on an environment specification with expressive semantics is inst...

Are cooperative decisions typically made more quickly or slowly than non-cooperative decisions? While this question has attracted considerable attention in recent years, most research has focused on one-shot interactions. Yet it is repeated interactions that characterize most important real-world social interactions. In repeated interactions, the cooperativeness of one's interaction partners (t...

A familial vulnerability to schizophrenia is agreed even though the exact genes involved seem elusive. But despite epidemiological evidence showing different rates of schizophrenia in sociocultural groups that would be considered genetically similar, the causal role of the environment is still hotly contested. Many service users, social scientists and clinicians are convinced that social factor...