n the late 1980s, following discussions with clients, legislative bodies and healthcare experts across Canada, Versa Services identified the primary challenges healthcare managers were facing in the delivery of dietary services. • Equipment in many hospital kitchens is outdated and food cannot be stored, prepared, or served in an efficient and sanitary manner. This leads to compromised storage ...

Drama managers guide a user through a story experience by modifying the experience in reaction to the user’s actions. Search-based drama management (SBDM) casts the dramamanagement problem as a search problem: Given a set of plot points, a set of actions the drama manager can take, and an evaluation of story quality, search can be used to optimize the user’s experience. SBDM was first investiga...

Young people can be valuable motivational resources for health promotion. A project implemented from 2009 through 2013 in a small American Indian community in northwest Arizona recruited American Indian young people aged 10 to 21 as agents of change for health promotion through radio programming. Thirty-seven participants were recruited and trained in broadcasting and creative writing technique...

Recently, both living and deceased organ donation rates have hit a plateau, despite increases in need for viable organs. One approach to improve donation rate is public education and policy; thus, it is necessary to understand the information the public is receiving regarding organ donation. We hypothesized that primetime medical dramas portray organ donation and transplantation in a negative m...

Interactive drama has been discussed for a number of years as a new AI-based interactive experience (Laurel 1986, Bates 1992). While there has been substantial technical progress in building believable agents (Bates, Loyall and Reilly 1992, Blumberg 1996, Hayes-Roth, van Gent and Huber 1996), and some technical progress in interactive plot (Weyhrauch 1997), no work has yet been completed which ...

Opinion There has been increasing interest in the field of medicine and in the social life of patients as well as health care providers in the realm of the media, namely, films and television shows. Table 1 lists some popular television series that are based on events germane to the medical field [1–7]. These shows constitute a genre in television, the ''medical drama. " A medical drama can be ...

Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen and the Ukranian writer LesiaUkrainka have some common themes in their dramas, to name a few – emphasis is placed on the conflict between the individual and society as well as the place of the artist in society. This paper makes an attempt to compare and contrast the traits found in their heroines in a feminist perspective.

Food is an essential physiological, cultural and social component of human life. How food is produced and consumed has dietary, cultural, environmental, ethical and societal consequences. Despite the central role that food plays within individual lives, public understanding of food and the wider agro-food system varies; much of this existing knowledge is acquired informally in kitchens, homes a...

It is possible to significantly ease kitchen chores with properly sized and appropriately arranged cupboards. In designing kitchen furniture and the optimal depth and the height of storage capacities, accessibility should be taken into consideration. It is known that the optimal storage zone is between 800 and 1100 mm and that there is reduced visibility and accessibility at the level between 1...

Dora, the robot, is trying to find object in its environment. Instead of just exhaustively searching everywhere, Dora is equipped with probabilistic reasoning, representations, and planning to exploit uncertain common-sense knowledge, such as that cornflakes are usually found in kitchens, while also accounting for the uncertainty of sensing in the real-world. Dora demonstrates how to combine ta...