Abstract Several recent studies have examined religious biographies, i.e. individual trajectories. However, little research has been conducted on the relevance of single life events in such as rites passage. One rite passage, confirmation training, preserved its popularity Finland despite declining church membership. The aim this study, therefore, was to examine Finnish training biographies. da...

The Scottish Meningococcus and Pneumococcus Reference Laboratory provides a national service for the laboratory confirmation of meningococcal and pneumococcal disease in Scotland. The main tests used for the laboratory confirmation of meningococcal disease are culture, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), antibody testing, and more recently DNA sequencing. This paper describes the automation of...

Speech recognition errors are inevitable in a speech dialog system. It is important to provide a dialog flow that allows the user to correct system errors and quickly return to the original dialog. This paper describes explicit, final and implicit confirmation styles that are implemented in the CAMMIA speech dialog system, and compares them from the viewpoint of usability. Our results show that...

The Scottish Meningococcus and Pneumococcus Reference Laboratory provides a national service for the laboratory confirmation of meningococcal and pneumococcal disease in Scotland. The main tests used for the laboratory confirmation of meningococcal disease are culture, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), antibody testing, and more recently DNA sequencing. This paper describes the automation of...

In this paper many of the classical paradoxes of induction confirmation are briefly discussed. Most of them are originated by qualitative views of confirmation. Some proposals to solve them are recalled, especially those which are based on the notion of converse coverage or entailment, jointly with a selection criterion. However, these solutions introduce new problems in the context of confirma...

In this paper we identify intonation cues that can disambiguate confirmation-seeking questions in adult-child dialogue in European Portuguese (EP). 301 examples of confirmation requests answered by two children and uttered by three different adults were analysed. Results show that (i) most confirmation-seeking questions (92.7%) do not present the intonation pattern previously identified for inf...

In this study the authors investigated how satisfaction levels of affection, behavioral confirmation, and status, as three human social needs, relate to age, physical loss, and subjective well-being. Results (N=883, aged 65 to 98 years) revealed that (a) affection was relatively high and status was relatively low in all age and loss groups; behavioral confirmation showed negative age and loss e...

The use of professional social networking sites (SNSs) such as LinkedIn has increased rapidly. Retaining existing users, i.e. IS continuance, has become a paramount issue. We argue that current IS continuance literature offers limited value for practitioners such as professional SNS operators. IS continuance literature employs an aggregate view of confirmation, offering a very limited understan...