What determines the vulnerability of protected areas, a fundamental component of biodiversity conservation, to political instability and warfare? We investigated the efficacy of park protection at Garamba National Park (Democratic Republic of Congo) before, during and after a period of armed conflict. Previous analysis has shown that bushmeat hunting in the park increased fivefold during the co...

The concept of protecting civilians in armed conflict is enshrined in international humanitarian law and widely acknowledged in humanitarian norms. Making this concept operational in humanitarian service delivery is a challenge. Yet, there are many ways in which humanitarian workers could learn from local people about underlying tensions in their community and with these new insights adjust ser...

The purpose of this work is to classify parallel automata conflicts, to develop techniques for handling conflicts a-priori and a-posteriori, and to analyze the complexity of conflicts and other problems concerning parallel automata. Synchronous parallel automata having inputs and outputs, and which are useful for designing real time systems will be discussed. A-priori conflict detection for par...

This contribution provides an overview of the most important recent epidemiological studies examining anxiety disorders in the general population. results demonstrate that anxiety disorders are widespread, with lifetime prevalence rates ranging between 13.6% and 28.8% in Western countries. comorbidity among individuals with an anxiety disorder is high: three out of four people with a lifetime a...

The ability to imagine ourselves in the past, in the future or in different spatial locations suggests that the brain can generate cognitive maps that are independent of the experiential self in the here and now. Using three experiments, we asked to which extent Mental Time Travel (MTT; imagining the self in time) and Mental Space Navigation (MSN; imagining the self in space) shared similar cog...

Collision avoidance is one of the essential pillars of a wheeled robotic system. A wheeled mobile robot (called mobile robot for conciseness henceforth) requires for effective functioning an integrated system of modules for (i) map building, (ii) localization, (iii) exploration, (iv) planning and (v) collision avoidance. Often (i) and (ii) are entailed to be done simultaneously by robots result...

The process of resolving conflicts among software quality requirements is complex and difficult because of incompatibilities among stakeholders’ interests and priorities, complex cost-quality requirements dependencies, and an exponentially increasing resolution option space for larger systems. This paper describes an exploratory knowledge-based tool, the Software Cost Option Strategy Tool (S-CO...