Lasers have caused revolutionary changes in many fields of science and technology. Since 1960, six orders of magnitude, from 10 to 10 seconds, have been added to time-resolved observation of fast phenomena, which makes ultrafast research grows rapidly among materials science, biology, and chemistry. The use of these ultrashort high-power pulses went hand-in-hand with their development and alrea...

An increasing number of studies in a wide range of natural systems have investigated how pulses of resource availability influence ecological processes at individual, population, and community levels. Taken together, these studies suggest that some common processes may underlie pulsed resource dynamics in a wide diversity of systems. Developing a common framework of terms and concepts for the s...

We present previously undescribed spatial group patterns that emerge in a one-dimensional hyperbolic model for animal group formation and movement. The patterns result from the assumption that the interactions governing movement depend not only on distance between conspecifics, but also on how individuals receive information about their neighbors and the amount of information received. Some of ...

Religiosity and participation in religious activities have been linked with decreased risky behavior. In the current research, we hypothesized that exposure to the concept of God can actually increase people's willingness to engage in certain types of risks. Across seven studies, reminders of God increased risk taking in nonmoral domains. This effect was mediated by the perceived danger of a ri...

Experimental observations of rare giant pulses or rogue waves were done in the output intensity of an optically injected semiconductor laser. The long-tailed probability distribution function of the pulse amplitude displays clear non-Gaussian features that confirm the rogue wave character of the intensity pulsations. Simulations of a simple rate equation model show good qualitative agreement wi...

Research on dialogue deals with the study of language as it is used in conversation. Dialogue is a multi-agent activity and this makes conversational language markedly different from the kind of language found in texts. This chapter introduces the main phenomena that characterise language in dialogue interaction — including disfluencies, dialogue acts, alignment, grounding, and turn-taking — an...

We demonstrate a “Companion” ECA, which is able to provide advice and support to the user, taking into account emotions expressed by her through dialogue. The integration of all required multimodal I/O components is based on interaction strategies defining the shape of dialogue, on the ECA’s response times, and on the underlying affective strategy. The system supports free conversation on an ev...

Motivation: mapping influence from linguistic accommodation Question: Who influences whom in a conversation? • The influence relations are usually implicit in social interactions. Can we infer them from “who said what at what time”? (availability of many transcript data) • Existing approach — modeling the dynamics of turn-taking behavior, i.e. “who speaks next?” (e.g. you are influencing me if ...

Inviting further perspectives is both welcome and consistent with the rules on systems thinking presented in this significant and thoughtful paper, Systems Thinking. ‘Perspective-taking’ is the last of the four rules of DSRP following Distinction, Systems-making, and identifying Relationships. To make my own summary in terms of DSRP. First, the authors make Distinction of systems thinking in te...

The transitions between turns at talk in conversation tend to occur quickly, with only a slight gap of ∼100-300 ms between them. This estimate of central tendency, however, hides a wealth of complex variation, as a number of factors, such as the type of turns involved, have been shown to influence the timing of turn transitions. This article considers one specific type of turn that does not con...