Socialisation theories have traditionally focused on how children are socialised in a rather unidirectional manner, according to a transmission model. However, more recent research and theories show that children are not just passive recipients, but active agents in their socialisation process. At the same time, children are subordinated to adult control. In school, they are regimented and invo...

We describe a qualitative user study that we conducted with 64 people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA) in India recruited from private sector clinics. Our aim was to investigate information gaps, problems, and opportunities for design of relevant technology solutions to support HIV treatment. Our methodology included clinic visits, observations, discussion with doctors and counsellors, contextual in...

Value Congruence within Voluntary Associations. A social psychological extension of social capital theory. Social capital theory assumes that the interaction within voluntary associations leads to the development of generalised trust, norms of reciprocity and the strengthening of networks of civic engagement. Social psychological research however does not offer any evidence for the introduction...

in this paper attempts have been made to study the discourses dominating political islam to answer these questions: how can one categorize these diverse political islam discourses? what are the similarities and differences among these discourses in general, and with the islamic revolution discourse in particular? the research methodology employed for this study is historical-comparative and the...

The paper will report about the idea, aim and concept of the European Commission project MOTIVATION starting 2008 and lasting two years. This coordination action will compile an exchange between the partner countries 1 (Austria, France, Germany, Netherlands, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden) about different factors, which influence the image of sciences and technology. Young people often have obsolete a...

This paper reports on the evaluation of a Virtual Social Space (VSS) intended to resolve the problems of isolation and lack of socialisation in a continuing professional distance education Masters programme in Information Technology (MA in ITM). These phenomena are due to geographical dispersion and disparate time schedules of learners. Very often, peer-to-peer socialisation in distance educati...

Sentences form coherent relations in a discourse without discourse connectives more frequently than with connectives. Senses of these implicit discourse relations that hold between a sentence pair, however, are challenging to infer. Here, we employ Brown cluster pairs to represent discourse relation and incorporate coreference patterns to identify senses of implicit discourse relations in natur...

Previous experimental studies on concessive connectives have only looked at their local facilitating or predictive effect on discourse relation comprehension and have often viewed them as a class of discourse markers with similar effects. We look into the effect of two connectives, but and although, for inferring contrastive vs. concessive discourse relations to complement previous experimental...

Studies of discourse relations have not, in the past, attempted to characterize what serves as evidence for them, beyond lists of frozen expressions, or markers, drawn from a few well-defined syntactic classes. In this paper, we describe how the lexicalized discourse relation annotations of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) led to the discovery of a wide range of additional expressions, annota...