Make Me Beautiful

don ’ t make me draw !

This paper describes the development of a software tool to support knowledge acquisition by means of rich pictures, for Object Oriented Analysis (OOA). Transposition of manual rich picture practise into software proved difficult, therefore we decided to follow a user-centered approach, design and implement a prototype with basic functionalities, then run a usability test with a few students and...

Beautiful to Me: Identity, Disability, and Gender in Virtual Environments

This paper examines the portrayal of disability, gender, and identity in virtual communities where representation is a matter of convenience, style, or whim. A survey was conducted of groups, identifying themselves as disabled, with a focus on gender, in the virtual space, Second Life. Four distinctive categories were analyzed in this study: groups associated with disabilities or being disabled...

Help me make it through the night.

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match.

Effective marriage matching, i.e. forming specific couples from pools of potential marriage partners, is vital for the success of dynamic longitudinal microsimulation models. This paper identifies some problems with a deterministic algorithm previously used in CORSIM, and in its “child” models, e.g., DYNACAN and POLISIM, for matching prospective marriage partners. It describes an alternative, s...

“You make me feel...”: Affective Causality in Language Communication

In this paper we analyse linguistic structures, such as “You make me feel angry”, which imply the possibility that a person can cause another person’s affect. We illustrate the concept of “affective causality”, based on an implicit-naïve theory of interpersonal relations linked to common sense. We present two theoretical alternative viewpoints (deriving from psychology and psychotherapy) which ...