Sexuality is intrinsic to a person's sense of self and can be an intimate form of communication that helps relieve suffering and lessens the threat to personhood in the face of life-limiting illness. Health professionals struggle to accept that people with life-limiting illness, especially older people, continue to be sexual beings. People facing life-limiting illness may appreciate the opportu...

Despite recent powerful tools aimed at creating virtual humans, the animation of such characters is still a major bottleneck in production, and there is a need to automate this task, especially when the number of involved agents grows. This work focuses on creating autonomous agents, capable of taking decisions based on their simulated perceptions and internal motivations. Since complete autono...

Throughout his 94 years of life, Carmine Melino brilliantly pursued different professional paths, his life being a constant stimulus for students, colleagues, friends and the family. Following the early formative years of study, here, we briefly list his scientific achievements in Occupational Medicine and Hygiene as well as his broad literary interests. Carmine was an inspiration to his genera...

Second Life is an online 3D virtual environment that offers interesting potential for use in education due to its widespread availability, flexibility, and its use of standard platforms and input devices. Given a broad design brief for a nine-week masters’ student project of using Second Life for education, we explored a range of potential ways of using the environment, and designed and impleme...

Independence in everyday life is a concern of many frail older people. There is a vision that in the near future this group will considerably gain independence and improve their quality of life by relying not only on human caregivers – who cannot grant round-the-clock assistance – but in addition on smart computer-based help capable of imitating human care-giving behaviour. This vision is expre...

The need for a concise definition for life has been accentuated by recent interest in computer based Artificial Life (A-Life). We attempt to apply conventional approaches to defining life in the domain of computer programs. Chemical autopoiesis in the physical space is accepted as necessary and sufficient for life. This forces us to make a distinction between physical and virtual entities. From...

the issue of urban decline in city centers and horizontal expansion of the city and its consequences is a challenge in sustainable development of the cities. in this regard, new approaches were shaped to define career planning, urban design and urban environmental quality concerns in new-urbanism pattern. the critical approach to modern urban pattern was formed based on scattered, non-human and...

Local bus network is the most popular transit mode and the only available transit mode in the majority of cities of the world. Increasing the utility of this mode which increases its share from urban trips is an important goal for city planners. Timetable setting as the second component of bus network design problem (network route design timetable setting vehicle assignment crew assignment) hav...

purpose: in this study, the relationship between sustainable agriculture and the quality of life in rural areas is miandeh dehestan in fasa county is examined. methodology: this study is descriptive-analytic and a survey research method was employed. data was collected through field studies. the research population of this study was the head of the rural families of mianded in fasa. using the c...