Narrow Results

This paper concerns the risk that women faced during the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Hong Kong in 2003. The concept of a "risk society", which is developed by Ulrich Beck, has made a major contribution to our understanding of the SARS crisis. He points out that risk is not equally distributed among all people in society, but adheres to patterns that are based on class and gender. He also suggests that the increasing trend of individualization has created a set of obligations and responsibilities to people, any individuals who failed to avoid risk are seen as personal failure and to be blamed. During the SARS crisis, women were more likely to be infected by the virus, as the primary care takers of the family, in the community, and being health care workers in hospitals. However, women were at risk not only due to their role as carers, but the dominant and authoritative discourses that undermined their claims for protection. This paper attempts to deconstruct the discourses of the roles of women in health crises, and to discuss how the discourses interplay with other social structures to construct a "reality", to marginalise and silent women in a crisis situation.

Current domain-specific information extraction systems represent an important resource for biomedical researchers, who need to process vast amounts of knowledge in a short time. Automatic discourse causality recognition can further reduce their workload by suggesting possible causal connections and aiding in the curation of pathway models. We describe here an approach to the automatic identification of discourse causality triggers in the biomedical domain using machine learning. We create several baselines and experiment with and compare various parameter settings for three algorithms, i.e. Conditional Random Fields (CRF), Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Random Forests (RF). We also evaluate the impact of lexical, syntactic, and semantic features on each of the algorithms, showing that semantics improves the performance in all cases. We test our comprehensive feature set on two corpora containing gold standard annotations of causal relations, and demonstrate the need for more gold standard data. The best performance of 79.35% F-score is achieved by CRFs when using all three feature types.

While much of the state-of-the-art research in human–robot interaction (HRI) investigates task-oriented interaction, this paper aims at exploring what people talk about to a robot if the content of the conversation is not predefined. We used the robot head Furhat to explore the conversational behavior of people who encounter a robot in the public setting of a robot exhibition in a scientific museum, but without a predefined purpose. Upon analyzing the conversations, it could be shown that a sophisticated robot provides an inviting atmosphere for people to engage in interaction and to be experimental and challenge the robot's capabilities. Many visitors to the exhibition were willing to go beyond the guiding questions that were provided as a starting point. Amongst other things, they asked Furhat questions concerning the robot itself, such as how it would define a robot, or if it plans to take over the world. People were also interested in the feelings and likes of the robot and they asked many personal questions — this is how Furhat ended up with its first marriage proposal. People who talked to Furhat were asked to complete a questionnaire on their assessment of the conversation, with which we could show that the interaction with Furhat was rated as a pleasant experience.

Within the systemic framework of Environmental Psychology (Bechtel and Churchman, 2002) and following Urry (2002) and Pearce's approaches (2005), the aim of this research is to investigate within the context of urban tourism which world views emerge from a Discourse Analysis (Edwards, Potter, 1993). of the speech of native and non-native Sardinian residents. It addresses the issue of how social-physical diversity might be preserved (the problem of tourism sustainability, Di Castri, Balaji, 2002).

In this regard, forty in-depth narrative interviews of inhabitants with short- and long-term residential experience in Cagliari (Italy) were conducted and examined (Discourse Analysis). It was found that the native and non-native's rhetorical devices expressed similar representations of urban places, but in diverse relationship to social and place identity. Their environmental transitions were based on the tourist gaze, or the functional view and heritage pride. This displays some basic central dimensions of sustainable tourism.