We describe initial work on extensions to word highlighting for multiparticipant chat to aid users in finding messages of interest, especially during times of high traffic in chat rooms. We have annotated a corpus of chat messages from a technical chat domain (Ubuntu’s technical support), indicating whether they are related to Ubuntu’s new desktop environment Unity. We also created an unsupervi...

Synchronous chat rooms have been used to support students’ collaborative learning. However, little work has empirically studied its relationship with students’ sense of community and furthermore the role of personality in affecting students’ chat room behavior. In this paper, we report results of a user experiment (with 489 students). We find that students who have actively used chat room posse...

We describe some common problems experienced by users of computer-based text chat, and show how many of these problems relate to the loss of timing-specific information. We suggest that thinking of chat as a streaming media data type might solve some of these problems. We then present a number of alternative chat interfaces along with results from user studies comparing and contrasting them bot...

We report a major revision of the CHecklist for Autism in Toddlers (CHAT). This quantitative CHAT (Q-CHAT) contains 25 items, scored on a 5 point scale (0-4). The Q-CHAT was completed by parents of n = 779 unselected toddlers (mean age 21 months) and n = 160 toddlers and preschoolers (mean age 44 months) with an Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC). The ASC group (mean (SD) = 51.8 (14.3)) scored hig...

We present a conversation analysis of openings sequences of online text-based chat counseling. Particular about this chat counseling is that the clients made available their help question through pre-screening. The data consisted of 40 chat sessions with pre-screening and 34 sessions without pre-screening from the Dutch alcohol and drugs chat service. In the chat sessions with pre-screening, th...

The perinuclear zone (PNZ) of the supraoptic nucleus (SON) contains some GABAergic and cholinergic neurons thought to innervate the SON proper. In mice expressing enhanced green fluorescent protein (eGFP) in association with glutamate decarboxylase (GAD)65 we found an abundance of GAD65-eGFP neurons in the PNZ, whereas in mice expressing GAD67-eGFP, there were few labeled PNZ neurons. In mice e...

The nonneural cholinergic system of immune cells is pivotal for the maintenance of immunological homeostasis. Here we demonstrate the expression of choline acetyltransferase (ChAT) and cholinergic enzymes in murine natural killer (NK) cells. The capacity for acetylcholine synthesis by NK cells increased markedly under inflammatory conditions such as experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EA...