This issue of JAISE is focused on the theme of Challenges of Engineering Intelligent Environments. The last decade has produced very interesting advances in the development of Intelligent Environments (IEs). These advances have benefitted different aspects of such systems with different intensity. The main problem is that as IEs are composed of several components: hardware, software, networks, ...

Dendritic spines, the tiny protrusions that stud the surface of many neurons, are the location of over 90% of all excitatory synapses that occur in the CNS. Their small size has, in large part, made them refractory to conventional experimental approaches. Yet their widespread occurrence and likely involvement in learning and memory has motivated extensive efforts to obtain quantitative descript...

Smith (1998) uses the relationship between Maasai pastoralists and so-called Dorobo hunter-gatherers in East Africa as part of a framework for understanding archaeological finds on the Vredenberg Peninsula in South Africa. We argue that this relationship may be less marked by subservience, hierarchy, marginalization, and dependence than Smith’s sources indicate, and we explore the implications ...

C. N. THEOPHILIDES*{, S. C. AHEARN{, E. S. BINKOWSKI{, W. S. PAUL§ and K. GIBBS§ {Center for Advance Research of Spatial Information, Hunter College of The City University of New York, New York, NY 10021, USA {Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Hunter College of The City University of New York, New York, NY 10021, USA §Epidemiology and Disease Control Programs, Chicago Department of Heal...

By roughly 8,000 calendar years before the present (calBP), hunter-gatherers across a broad swath of north China had begun small-scale farming of broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica). According to traditional wisdom, this early millet farming evolved from the intensive hunter-gatherer adaptation represented by the late Pleistocene microblade tradition of nor...

This paper explores childhood social learning among Aka and Bofi hunter-gatherers in Central Africa. Existing literature suggests that hunter-gatherer social learning is primarily vertical (parent-to-child) and that teaching is rare. We use behavioural observations, open-ended and semi-structured interviews, and informal and anecdotal observations to examine the modes (e.g. vertical versus hori...

Escherichia coli O157:H7 (EC O157) is an important zoonosis. White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) have been implicated in transmission of this bacterium to humans and have been suggested as reservoirs that might affect carriage in cattle populations. Our study objectives were to estimate prevalence of EC O157 in feces of hunter-harvested deer and to describe fecal shedding patterns in a c...

Harvest can affect the ecology and evolution of wild species. The removal of key individuals, such as matriarchs or dominant males, can disrupt social structure and exacerbate the impact of hunting on population growth. We do not know, however, how and when the spatiotemporal reorganization takes place after removal and if such changes can be the mechanism that explain a decrease in population ...

In the last years, a large number of RDF data sets has become available on the Web. However, due to the semi-structured nature of RDF data, missing values affect answer completeness of queries that are posed against this data. To overcome this limitation, we propose RDF-Hunter, a novel hybrid query processing approach that brings together machine and human computation to execute queries against...

The emergence of agriculture in West-Central Africa approximately 5,000 years ago, profoundly modified the cultural landscape and mode of subsistence of most sub-Saharan populations. How this major innovation has had an impact on the genetic history of rainforest hunter-gatherers-historically referred to as 'pygmies'-and agriculturalists, however, remains poorly understood. Here we report genom...