Spontaneous, informal gatherings among colleagues often spur greater exchanges of ideas than formal meetings. The K22 project aims to support these spontaneous collaborative interactions by embedding intelligent kiosks, small networked Intelligent Environments (IEs), in hallways, break rooms, and other informal meeting spaces. These kiosks will enable private capture and indexing of casual meet...

Hierarchical classifications, thesauri, and informal taxonomies are likely the most valuable input for creating, at reasonable cost, non-toy ontologies in many domains. They contain, readily available, a wealth of category definitions plus a hierarchy, and they reflect some degree of community consensus. However, their transformation into useful ontologies is not as straightforward as it appear...

Self-perceived communication competence (SPCC), communication apprehension (CA) and Willingness to communicate (WTC) are all well-researched constructs in language learning contexts. This research is an initiative to understand effects of SPCC and CA on WTC of Pakistani university students. Focusing on theoretical model in communication research by McCroskey and his colleagues, the current stud...

BACKGROUND Transfers of money and help with daily activities by family and friends are important sources of support for older people and contribute to their well being. On the other hand, older adults are not only recipients of support but also important providers of support and financial transfers as giving and receiving are often reciprocal. For this, it is important to understand the determi...

This paper describes a Social Network Analysis toolkit to monitor an Enterprise Social Network and help analyzing informal leadership as a function of social ties and topic discussions. The toolkit has been developed in the context of a regional project, Fiordaliso, funded by Regione Lazio (a region of central Italy) and leaded by Reply, an international network of specialized companies in the ...

CONTEXT Doctors have been known to treat or give consultation to patients informally, with none of the usual record keeping or follow up. They may wish to know whether this practice is ethical. OBJECTIVE To determine whether this practice meets criteria of medical ethics. DESIGN Informal medicine is analysed according to standard ethical principles: autonomy, beneficence and non-maleficence...