BACKGROUND Due to the armed conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s many families escaped to other countries. The main goal of this study was to explore in more detail the complexity of various family members' experiences and perceptions from their life before the war, during the war and the escape, and during their new life in Sweden. There is insufficient knowledge of refugee families' percepti...

Collaborative technologies and reasoning strategies gain prominence with the growth in multi-agent systems, ubiquitous sensor systems and ubiquitous computing. This paper presents an architecture for social reasoning for agents who share the task of reconnaissance Collision conflicts amongst a large group of mobile robots is best resolved with social reasoning that involve negotiation and under...

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...

Background Fitness exercise is popular and associated with improved health and social status. Taken to extremes, however, exercise can become an addiction. One suggested symptom of exercise addiction is "conflicts" with family and friends. However, it may be difficult to recognize excessive exercise patterns if they are accepted and encouraged by relatives. The aim of this study was to explore ...

Mobile robots moving in a crowd need to conform to the same social standards as the human participants. Imitating human behavior is a natural choice in these situations however, not every human behaves in the same way. On the other hand, it is known that humans tend to behave in a consistent way, with their behavior predictable by their social status. In this paper we consider a marketplace whe...

The consideration of information on social values in conjunction with biological data is critical for achieving both socially acceptable and scientifically defensible conservation planning outcomes. However, the influence of social values on spatial conservation priorities has received limited attention and is poorly understood. We present an approach that incorporates quantitative data on soci...

Theoretical models are often used to analyze reproductive conflicts in animal societies; for example, by determining the different sex-allocation optima of queen and workers. But who is in control (queen or workers, dominant or subordinate) is normally an implicit or explicit assumption of the model. Here, we introduce the concept of power (the ability to do or act in a situation in which confl...

Online Social Networks (OSNs) offer access control mechanisms to protect users’ sensitive information from undesired accesses. Yet, their information is still vulnerable to disclosure when their friends assign conflicting privacy policies: a user prohibits everyone from accessing his own content or profile but his friends allow others to see it. OSNs tend to select Permit-Take-Precedence when r...

Social Network Systems (SNSs) allow users to easily share data and link them to other users. For the sake of privacy, users may define policies over these data, which can trigger conflicts with other users. It happens that the resolution of these conflicts lead to unfair situations. We propose a characterization of this unfairness by introducing the concept of equity in SNSs. This allows us to ...