Eyegaze is a powerful source of information in face-to-face conversation. Our previous work showed addressees can use this information rapidly and flexibly, speeding referential disambiguation when the speaker was clearly looking at a target object versus a similar competitor. However, monitoring eyegaze demands attentional resources which may also have costs during collaborative tasks. Since t...

Gaze is instrumental in coordinating face-to-face social interactions. But little is known about gaze use when social interactions co-occur with other joint activities. We investigated the case of walking while talking. We assessed how gaze gets allocated among various targets in mobile conversations, whether allocation of gaze to other targets affects conversational coordination, and whether r...

Nanowire solar cells are promising candidates for powering nanosystems and flexible electronics. The strain in the nanowires, introduced during growth, device fabrication and/or application, is an important issue for piezoelectric semiconductor (like CdS, ZnO, and CdTe) based photovoltaic. In this work, we demonstrate the first largely enhanced performance of n-CdS/p-Cu(2)S coaxial nanowire pho...

OBJECTIVES To study the care of women victims of violence provided by nurses in emergency services and to analyse the practices that target the empowerment of women and gender equity. METHODS A qualitative, descriptive study conducted by means of interviews with 10 nurses of an emergency and obstetrics unit of a university hospital and local emergency service of a city in southern Brazil from...

Conversations provide an intuitive and simple model for analyzing interactions among composite web services. A conversation is the global sequence of messages exchanged among the peers participating to a composite web service. Interactions in a composite web service can be analyzed by investigating the temporal properties of its conversations. Conversations can be specified in a top-down or bot...

Natural language conversation is widely regarded as a highly difficult problem, which is usually attacked with either rule-based or learning-based models. In this paper we propose a retrieval-based automatic response model for short-text conversation, to exploit the vast amount of short conversation instances available on social media. For this purpose we introduce a dataset of short-text conve...

In applied linguistics, washback, or backwash, refers to the influence of tests on teaching and learning. Though there is now a large body of research investigating the impact of tests on educational processes and outcomes, the possible effect of language tests on the psychological environment of language classrooms remains underexplored. This study examined the effect of IELTS on the classroom...