The sequential-touching procedure is employed by researchers studying nonlinguistic categorization in toddlers. TouchStat 3.00 is introduced in this article as an adjunct to the sequential-touching procedure, allowing researchers to compare children's actual touching behavior to what might be expected by chance. Advantages over the Thomas and Dahlin (2000) framework include ease of use, and few...

Image segmentation of touching objects plays a key role in providing accurate classification for computer vision technologies. A new line profile based imaging segmentation algorithm has been developed to provide a robust and accurate segmentation of a group of touching corns. The performance of the line profile based algorithm has been compared to a watershed based imaging segmentation algorit...

Segmentation of a word into characters is one of the important challenges in optical character recognition. This is even more challenging when we segment characters in an offline handwritten document. Touching characters make this problem more complex. In this paper, we have applied water reservoir based technique for identification and segmentation of touching characters in handwritten Gurmukh...

In this paper we present a study in which participants played a collaborative augmented reality game together with two virtual agents, visible in the same augmented reality space. During interaction one of the virtual agents touches the user on the arm, by means of a vibrotactile display. We investigated whether social touch by a virtual agent in a collaborative setting would positively influen...

New technologies are being introduced into our lives on a almost daily basis. Touch technology is a recent one which changes the way we interact with devices. It influences the work environment a user works in: Instead of only a desk with a PC, the environment is enriched with devices like a smartphone or tablet. For these new products the user experience is important, whereas in Workflow Manag...

Like the first draft of a term paper, the antibody genes of some B cells require revisions. On page 2985, Panigrahi et al. show that this genetic editing is faulty in patients with two kinds of autoimmune disease. The results could lead to new tests and refined treatments for these diseases. During development in the bone marrow, maturing B cells reshuffle their antibody genes to fashion defens...

Touch is, I propose, a foundational, “intercorporeal” form of intimacy. Such intercorporeal intimacy precedes developmentally and undergirds permanently the “intersubjective” intimacy that is possible between adult subjects. For, it is in the affective intimacy of touching and being touched that we first realize (i.e., make real, actualize) both a coexistence or participation with other bodies,...

Small humanoid robots are becoming a more and more popular device for entertainment. While the literature shows many advanced techniques for the development of humanoid robot motions, for example motion retargeting, most of the commercially available products only provide a low level interface where each motion is described in terms of keyframes for which each joint angle is defined. In this pa...

The charge flow from a single C(60) molecule to another one has been probed. The conformation and electronic states of both molecules on the contacting electrodes have been characterized using a cryogenic scanning tunneling microscope. While the contact conductance of a single molecule between two Cu electrodes can vary up to a factor of 3 depending on electrode geometry, the conductance of the...

The idea of physical contact and touching in psychiatric care has, in many instances, been considered inappropriate. Psychiatry is often perceived as a verbal process and it has been generally believed that touching can provoke both aggressiveness and destructive manifestations of sexuality. However, recent research has suggested that touching can play an important role in psychiatric treatment...