The effect of the owner’ s personality on the behaviour of owner-dog dyads

We describe the relationships between dog owners’ personality attributes (assessed via questionnaire), their behaviours and the dog’s behaviours observed during brief dog-owner and dog-stranger interactions (N = 78). Interactions comprised the owner commanding the dog to sit, and the stranger showing a ball to the restrained dog and then hiding it. Owners scoring higher on neuroticism and openness used more commands (gestural and verbal) when asking the dog to sit, and the dogs of owners higher on neuroticism obeyed with a longer latency and spent more time looking at the stranger. More extraverted owners praised their dog more, and it took longer for their dogs to look at the stranger but they spent more time looking at the stranger, whereas dogs of more agreeable owners spent more time looking at the ball. Based on these results we conclude that some aspects of owners’ personality appear to be tied to their dog’s attentional concerns

Mesh-based numerical implementation of the localized boundary-domain integral equation method to a variable-coefficient Neumann problem

An implementation of the localized boundary-domain integral-equation (LBDIE) method for the numerical solution of the Neumann boundary-value problem for a second-order linear elliptic PDE with variable coefficient is discussed. The LBDIE method uses a specially constructed localized parametrix (Levi function) to reduce the BVP to a LBDIE. After employing a mesh-based discretization, the integral equation is reduced to a sparse system of linear algebraic equations that is solved numerically. Since the Neumann BVP is not unconditionally and uniquely solvable, neither is the LBDIE. Numerical implementation of the finite-dimensional perturbation approach that reduces the integral equation to an unconditionally and uniquely solvable equation, is also discussed

Strange Carers

The present comment focuses on the distinction between attachment as bond formation and expectations of availability and responsiveness (security) within attachment relationships. We enumerate key components of bonding and functions of carer secure base support. Our analysis has implications for design and suggests that robots are unlikely to serve effectively as sole carers. Even with robots as part-time carers, attachment-like bonds would likely focus on human carers. Similarly, although infants and children would certainly build expectations regarding the availability and responsiveness of robot carers, the quality of human care would probably be the determining influence on later development and competence. Notwithstanding their limitations of robots as attachment figures they have considerable potential to extend parental care and enrich infant exploration. The Sharkey’s paper and further consideration of robots as carers for infants, children, older adults, an

Information Modeling for a Dynamic Representation of an Emergency Situation

In this paper we propose an approach to build a decision support system that can help emergency planners and responders to detect and manage emergency situations. The internal mechanism of the system is independent from the treated application. Therefore, we think the system may be used or adapted easily to different case studies. We focus here on a first step in the decision-support process which concerns the modeling of information issued from the perceived environment and their representation dynamically using a multiagent system. This modeling was applied on the RoboCupRescue Simulation System. An implementation and some results are presented here.Comment:

Acoustic and Device Feature Fusion for Load Recognition

Appliance-specific Load Monitoring (LM) provides a possible solution to the problem of energy conservation which is becoming increasingly challenging, due to growing energy demands within offices and residential spaces. It is essential to perform automatic appliance recognition and monitoring for optimal resource utilization. In this paper, we study the use of non-intrusive LM methods that rely on steady-state appliance signatures for classifying most commonly used office appliances, while demonstrating their limitation in terms of accurately discerning the low-power devices due to overlapping load signatures. We propose a multilayer decision architecture that makes use of audio features derived from device sounds and fuse it with load signatures acquired from energy meter. For the recognition of device sounds, we perform feature set selection by evaluating the combination of time-domain and FFT-based audio features on the state of the art machine learning algorithms. The highest recognition performance however is shown by support vector machines, for the device and audio recognition experiments. Further, we demonstrate that our proposed feature set which is a concatenation of device audio feature and load signature significantly improves the device recognition accuracy in comparison to the use of steady-state load signatures only

TYPES OF STRATEGIES FOR THE TOURISTIC FIRMS

to develop new ideas, products, services and destinations. For example, there is aninternational interest in developing niches, which are specific interests and activities thatpeople might find interesting as an activity for their holiday. Recent developments thatcharacterize this include the rise of natural-based ecotourism products, of wine and food-based tourism, following on people’s interests, provides an example of a successfuldevelopment of niche products. With all these roles, researchers as well as governmentshave agreed on the need of development strategies, as a successful and beneficial waytowards the future.strategy, corporate strategy, business strategy, developing strategies, tourismoperators