Introduction Recent natural and man-made disastrous events underscore the importance of emergency evacuation planning and management for buildings and facilities (Averill et al., 2005). Although building codes include provisions for egress design, their prescriptive nature poses many limitations in terms of providing effective evacuation for specific buildings, each of which is unique. Human be...

The concept of attention is defined by multiple inconsistent metaphors that scientists use to identify relevant phenomena, frame hypotheses, construct experiments, and interpret data. (1) The Filter metaphor shapes debates about partial vs. complete filtering, early vs . late selection, and information filtering vs. enhancement. (2) The Spotlight metaphor raises the issue of spacevs. object-bas...

This research provides evidence that people overestimate the extent to which their actions and appearance are noted by others, a phenomenon dubbed the spotlight effect. In Studies 1 and 2, participants who were asked to don a T-shirt depicting either a flattering or potentially embarrassing image overestimated the number of observers who would be able to recall what was pictured on the shirt. I...

[Clark, D. M., & Wells, A. (1995). A cognitive model of social phobia. In: R. G. Heimberg, M. R. Liebowitz, D. A. Hope, & F. R. Schneier (Eds.), Social phobia: diagnosis, assessment, and treatment (pp. 69-93). New York: Guildford Press] cognitive model of social phobia suggests that both public and private sources of information contribute to the construction of the self as a social object, whi...

This work is aimed at investigating the role of resolution in fractal dimension map estimation, analyzing the role of the different surface spatial scales involved in the considered estimation process. The study is performed using a data set of actual Cosmo/SkyMed Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images relevant to two different areas, the region of Bidi in Burkina Faso and the city of Naples in ...

The obesity epidemic, which started in the industrialized world, has progressed to become a worldwide pandemic in which the number of obese individuals worldwide now exceeds those who are malnourished. Unlike other pandemics, however, obesity does not cause disease directly but instead functions as a potent independent risk factor for a number of chronic pathologies, including type 2 diabetes, ...

The color perceived to belong to the illumination of objects is often based on cues from the scene within which the objects are perceived, instead of being based on any view of the source itself. We present measurements of illuminant color estimation by human observers for moving, spectrally filtered spotlights. The results show that when only one illuminant is in the field of view, estimates o...

DBpedia Spotlight [5] is an open source project developing a system for automatically annotating natural language text with entities and concepts from the DBpedia knowledge base. The input of the process is a portion of natural language text, and the output is a set of annotations associating entity or concept identifiers (DBpedia URIs) to particular positions in the input text. DBpedia Spotlig...