This article provides food for thoughts elaborated by peer researchers who, basing on their studies and on current literature on relationships between Universal Design (UD) and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), wish to share few key issues related to the challenges offered by the involvement of final users in designing product and services. Referring to approaches from different...

This paper investigates the potential of defining a parsing representation for English data in Universal Dependencies, a crosslingual dependency scheme. We investigate structural transformations that change the choices of headedness in the dependency tree. The transformations make auxiliaries, copulas, subordinating conjunctions and prepositions heads, while in UD they are dependents of a lexic...

Adverbs can express a speaker’s attitude in a given situation on a specific matter. We constructed an adverb dictionary in which the attitude of the speaker is described. We also looked into whether or not adverbs could effectively be used as basic data to analyze reputations. We conducted three kinds of experiments to verify how effective and precise our dictionary was. First, we calculated th...

Over the past 20 years, understanding of the functioning of urban ecosystems has increased to the point where fairly sophisticated models of various subsystems have been developed by scientists working for federal, state, and local agencies, often in cooperation with university researchers. Each is designed to collect data and explore a specific urban/environmental system for issues related to ...

Data from Berlin (Germany) show a significant correlation between the increase in the stork population around the city and the increase in deliveries outside city hospitals (out-of-hospital deliveries). However, there is no correlation between deliveries in hospital buildings (clinical deliveries) and the stork population. The decline in the number of pairs of storks in the German state of Lowe...

This paper tests whether the strength of the "spring spike" in birth defects is related to agricultural production and urban location using Texas Birth Defects Registry data for the period 1996-2007. We find evidence of a spike in birth defects among children conceived in the spring and summer, but it is more pronounced in urban non-agricultural counties than in other types of counties. Further...

Great changes in land use/land cover from rapid urbanization have occurred in the PearlRiver Delta, China. As the primary cause of land development in the urbanization process,urban expansion has mostly occurred on land with higher NPP, significantly impacting theregional ecosystems. The primary purpose of this study was to reveal the impacts of urbanexpansion on the regional NPP. The land cove...

The study attempted to identify the prevalence and distribution of risk factors of non-communicable diseases among urban and rural population in Gujarat, India. Using the WHO stepwise approach, a cross-sectional study was carried out among 1,805 urban and 1,684 rural people of 15-64 years age-group. Information on behavioural and physiological risk factors of non-communicable diseases was obtai...