OBJECTIVE To use listening sessions with groups of Latinas to develop a contextual understanding of the lives of immigrant women to inform program development and ultimately better serve the community's needs for domestic violence services. DESIGN AND SAMPLE This study was exploratory and descriptive, mixing qualitative listening sessions with quantitative methods. Seven listening group sessi...

Photographs are a means to capture the important events of our life for a long time. The advent of digital photography has much increased the number of photographs taken in our daily life. While at the concrete moment photos are often used to remember and share events such the arrival of a baby or a wedding, they might become a valuable asset at the end of the life to look back on the own roots...

The use of virtual characters becomes invariably common in computer games and other applications. So-called “bots” (computer-controlled virtual characters), may explain virtual settings in a natural way. We describe an example scenario in the online world Second Life [1] in order to explain to content creators how to create bots and script their behavior using the well established authoring lan...

Software agents help people with time consuming activities. One increasingly popular application for software agents is electronic commerce, namely having agents buy and sell goods and services on behalf of users. We recently conducted a real-life experiment in creating an agent marketplace, using a slightly modified version of the Kasbah system [Chavez96]. Approximately 200 participants intens...

This Eurocentric view fails to take into account the work of the Chinese alchemists, who also developed methods for manipulating minerals and altering the state of substances. Like western alchemists, the Chinese were obsessed with creating gold but, rather than creating gold for wealth, their obsession was with creating gold of the utmost purity for creating an elixir of life and a way to achi...