This article investigates the impact of unemployment on the likelihood of having a first child. Using micro-data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), I apply event history methods to analyze first-birth decisions in France, West Germany, and the UK (1994-2001). The results highlight weak negative effects of unemployment on family formation among men, which can be attributed to th...

We discuss the ethical and practical issues involved in developing virtual humans that relate personal, fictitious, human autobiographical stories (“back stories”) to their users. We describe a virtual human exercise counselor that interacts with users daily to promote exercise, and the integration of a dynamic social storytelling engine used to maintain user engagement with the agent and reten...

We present an approach to sensorimotor control in immersive environments. Our approach utilizes a high-dimensional sensory stream and a lower-dimensional measurement stream. The cotemporal structure of these streams provides a rich supervisory signal, which enables training a sensorimotor control model by interacting with the environment. The model is trained using supervised learning technique...

This paper builds a theoretical foundation of a first-person perspective systems analysis (1ppSA). First, the theoretical existence of 1ppSA is presupposed, and second, we presuppose that phenomenology is a basic theory of 1ppSA. With the two presuppositions we investigate whether it is possible to use Activity Theory (AT) as diagrammatic resources in order to build the foundation of 1ppSA. Alt...

Potentialities of skills in design are intriguing. Skills open up new perceptions of the world, transform human understanding and engagement with the world itself. Our explorations suggest that leveraging existing designer's skills and training for new skills might remarkably contribute in designing for richness of meaning. We developed several skills-based techniques and validated them through...

At first sight religion and geography have little in common with one another. Most people interested in the study of religion have little interest in the study of geography, and vice versa. So why include this chapter? The main reason is that some of the many interesting questions about how religion develops, spreads and impacts on people's lives are rooted in geographical factors (what happens...

The potential of skills in design is intriguing; as skills open up new perceptions of the world they allow meaning to arise as we engage with the world. Several skills-based techniques that leverage this potential have been developed, and integrated into the Designing in Skills framework. The framework builds on personal engagement of designers in their practice, and promotes them to take a fir...