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Health is the utmost importance to any human being. To take care of oneself in this busty world we need some assistance. The world is revolving with smart technologies so we need a smart health care assistance that tracks one's activities, moods and suggest precautious actions when required. The primary objective of this product is to be time efficient along with being as an easily accesses able personal health assistant. To build a cost efficient personal assistance with good quality, monitoring of the messages from user is necessary. At present they are managed in an impromptu way. The paper will put forward the use of a Personal assistance chatbot to handle the messages from users and collectively provide the appropriate answers to it. A model has been proposed to enumerate precautions for the health related issues.

Why are there so many improvised performances based on Austen and Shakespeare? ‘Austentatious, an Improvised Austen Novel’ are a theatrical troupe who regularly stage Austen-inspired stories prompted by the audience—with titles such as Man-Filled Park and Brute and Brutality. Similarly, ‘Impromptu Shakespeare’ invites spectators to throw balls with Shakespearean topoi onto the stage. Those that get caught in one of the actor’s breeches become the building blocks of that night’s performance. And ‘Sh!t-faced Shakespeare’ semi-improvise a Shakespeare play with an inebriated cast member.

Post-disaster need assessment deals with the accurate assessment of the need (i.e. demand and utility) for emergency resource at the shelters. While demand signifies the amount of resource required, utility represents the exigency of that requirement. Due to lack of, or imprecise need assessments immediately after a disaster, relief requirements are generally set up based on coarse estimates by logisticians regarding what people would normally need. The effectiveness of this estimation depends on the competencies and experience of the logistician in control, often leading to impromptu allocation of typically scarce emergency resources. Thus, forecasting the exact demand and enumerating the correct utility of emergency resources are inevitable.

Air quality is a source of increasing concern in several cities, due to the adverse health effects of significant pollution levels. For this reason, the need to assess the concentration of pollutants at high temporal and spatial resolution is perceived as very urgent. As such, there is a growing interest in building pervasive networks integrating different sensing technologies to achieve this capability. In this view, low cost smart sensors data could be fused together with fixed but more accurate multisensor devices and certified analyzers data to build hi-res maps (

Present Days multi-day, sight and sound applications winding up progressively well known for the clients of specially appointed systems. To help these applications the investigation of QoS issues in MANETs is fundamental. Hidden hub and exposed hubs are the fundamental drivers of execution corruption of these specially appointed systems. There is no thorough investigation to completely address these issues. Here in this paper novel double bustling tone based MAC convention is proposed to address every one of these issues. Utilizing reproduction we close with the relative Analysis of throughput and access postpone proportion of Ad Hoc systems for mixed media applications. We additionally consider various information rate backing of the correspondence divert in remote impromptu systems which rely upon the bit mistake rate of the correspondence channel.

As an important part of vocal guidance, piano performance and singing guidance are important ways to cultivate students' interest in piano and improve their improvisational level. With the development of education, especially the rapid popularization and promotion of big data and other information technologies, traditional teacher-led performance and singing teaching models have gradually met the learning needs of students and affected their learning effects. Therefore, it is indispensable to reform and innovate the guiding philosophy and methods of performance and songs. Therefore, how to introduce big data technology into piano performance and singing guidance is worthy of in-depth discussion. Online education has obvious advantages in auditory training. Whether it is impromptu feedback through online classrooms, or completion of homework through audio, it can have the effect of "grinding ears". On the one hand, the clear audio allows students to think aurally in a good auditory environment; on the other hand, through online interactive answering, teachers can accurately understand the development of the auditory perception of the entire class, so as to adjust the training content immediately. The subject studied the problems existing in the teaching of traditional piano playing and singing, and proposed different solutions for the computer artificial intelligence system and virtual image processing technology, so that image classification and video teaching have a better recognition effect, and promote vocal music teaching forward development of.

Consumers often schedule their activities in an attempt to use their time more efficiently. Although the benefits of scheduling are well established, its potential downsides are not well understood. The authors examine whether scheduling uniquely undermines the benefits of leisure activities. In 13 studies using unambiguous leisure activities that consumers commonly schedule (e.g., movies, a coffee break), they find that scheduling a leisure activity (vs. experiencing it impromptu) makes it feel less free-flowing and more work-like. Furthermore, scheduling diminishes utility from leisure activities, in terms of both excitement in anticipation of the activities and experienced enjoyment. Importantly, the authors find that maintaining the free-flowing nature of the activity by “roughly scheduling” (without prespecified times) eliminates this effect, thus indicating that the effect is driven by a detriment from scheduling rather than by a boost from spontaneity. The reported findings highlight an important opportunity for marketers to improve consumers’ experiences and utility by leveraging scheduling behavior while also providing important implications for consumer well-being from leisure consumption.

Background: Entrepreneurship has undergone significant transformations in the past decade due to crowd-based models of innovation and the increasing popularity of crowdfunding. Crowdfunding provides an alternative to the way entrepreneurs traditionally raise start-up and operational funds for a venture. Moreover, with crowdfunding platforms, citizens and communities are increasingly able to engage in entrepreneurial work not only for profit but also to address social and civic problems. Problem: Given the expanding boundaries of entrepreneurship, it is increasingly important for professional and technical communication teachers to prepare students to be ethical entrepreneurs and embody a widening array of rhetorical skills. Our teaching case addresses the question of how we might incorporate new and emerging forms of entrepreneurship, such as crowdfunding, into the professional and technical communication classroom in ways that foreground the social, civic, and ethical dimensions of that work. Situating the case: To address this question, we first situate our teaching case in relevant literature from professional and technical communication and social entrepreneurship, and then compare it with similar cases of crowdfunding being used for educational purposes. How the case was studied: We describe what we observed before, during, and after teaching a project structured thematically around civic crowdfunding. We had two sources of data: (1) a collection of teaching materials, including syllabi, day-to-day lesson plans, project prompts, in-class activities, correspondence between instructors, and informal teaching logs used to record impromptu reflections throughout the course of the semester; and (2) the civic crowdfunding project materials produced by students. About the case: Two distinct but related problems have motivated the development of this teaching case: (1) the context of 21st-century entrepreneurship has rapidly changed as a result of new approaches, including crowdfunding; (2) this shift has also led to an increased emphasis on civic and social matters of concern, which have increasingly become more important in contemporary business models. Ultimately, we seek to understand how entrepreneurial writing projects can meld commercial and financial motivations with civic exigencies, direct participation, and stakeholder engagement. As such, this civic crowdfunding sequence takes place over two phases: (1) students conducted primary and secondary research on a local problem or exigency and used this as evidence for a white paper and a project proposal; (2) students developed a feasible solution to this problem which then formed the basis for crowdfunding campaign materials, including a Kickstarter page, campaign video, and branding materials. Results: Our results focus on two projects that clearly foreground a social and civic mission; we point to these two projects not as perfect examples, but rather as illustrative cases of how students engaged crowdfunding as a form of civic entrepreneurship. Conclusions: Our teaching case has demonstrated the need to prepare students not only to pitch venture ideas for a small audience of investors, but also to consider how to identify and frame problems, construct stories about these problems as pressing matters of concern and, ultimately, develop ethical relationships with stakeholders and increasingly diverse investors.

Easy internet access and ubiquitous smart phones have augmented the number of images produced and accelerated the speed by which they are circulated (and likely also forgotten). By contrast to the great quantity of pictures disseminated in today’s connective media, a few photographs gain momentum and are declared to be “icons”. They stand out from the image abundance, grasp the attention of a broad, transnational public, and stir emotional reactions and heated debates. Usually, these iconic images are related to major news events and represent an ongoing conflict or crisis in society in a simple, univocal manner. They quickly turn into standard frames of reference in news and popular culture, seem to require no particular explanation, and are often proclaimed to “speak for themselves”. This article proposes the term “instant news icon” to define and gain a fuller understanding of the role performed by iconic images in today’s connective media, distinguished by convergence between platforms and blurred boundaries between media production and media consumption. First, the article builds a framework based on the concept instant news icon and then applies quantitative and qualitative analyses to study the processes of distribution and meaning-making involved in the emergence of one instant news icon, news photographs from 2015 of a young refugee girl playing with a police officer on a Danish motorway.

Evaluative contexts can be stressful, but relatively little is known about how different individuals who vary in responses to self-evaluation make emotion regulatory choices to cope in these situations. To address this gap, participants who vary in self-esteem gave an impromptu speech, rated how they perceived they had performed on multiple evaluative dimensions, and subsequently chose between disengaging attention from emotional processing (distraction) and engaging with emotional processing via changing its meaning (reappraisal), while waiting to receive feedback regarding these evaluative dimensions. According to our framework, distraction can offer stronger short-term relief than reappraisal, but, distraction is costly in the long run relative to reappraisal because it does not allow learning from evaluative feedback. We predicted and found that participants with lower (but not higher) self-esteem react defensively to threat of failure by seeking short-term relief via distraction over the long-term benefit of reappraisal, as perceived failure increases. Implications for the understanding of emotion regulation and self-esteem are discussed.

Summary This research furthers understanding of the factors that induce individuals to choose deception. Its goals were to expand and test a recent account of the cognition of deception, Activation–Decision–Construction–Action Theory (ADCAT), in a mock job interview inviting impromptu deception. Decisions to lie are hypothesized to depend on the truth and other information activated from long-term memory by the social context. Activated information then guides evaluation of the likely costs of truth telling and benefits of deception; 166 college students participated in the job interview, who learned about the position and then adopted the role of job applicants. Afterward, participants shared their thoughts when responding to five questions from the interview. The most important findings are that the negative expectations of sharing truths and the positive expectations of sharing deceptions each account for unique variance in deciding to lie. Implications for lie reduction and detection are considered.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In July 2015, Adrift Performance Makers (AdriftPM) developed the project Portable Soundscapes: An Acoustic Travelogue, travelling from Portsmouth, UK, to Thessaloniki, Greece, through Paris, Munich, Zagreb and Belgrade. Carrying pre-recorded Southsea sound clips in their luggage, they listened out for unexpected voicings, misplaced soundtracks, fleeting sonic passers-by. The project was curated as a series of online responses to inadvertent encounters with unfamiliar sonic environments. AdriftPM developed DIY strategies of aural dramaturgy, such as sonic conflations, sonic invitations, impromptu compositions, short poetic responses and dubious definitions of sound terminology. This project revealed sound design as the enabling condition of a theatre, as the very organizing principle of a performative dramaturgy of listening, therefore effecting a reversal of conventional understandings of theatre sound design, which presuppose theatre as the context and sound as the designed intervention. This art...

New and social media are increasingly used to raise issues of global justice. Images and texts representing distant suffering in an emotionally charged way involve users of social media in debates about ethical standards and moral responsibility. This raises the question of how social media users react to such evidence about instances of distant suffering. How and under which conditions are users’ involvement in discourses of global justice enhancing new practices of civic engagement and redefining the boundaries of solidarity? Our point of departure is the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe in fall 2015, which raised questions of distant spectatorship and moral responses with renewed urgency and immediacy. We consider the conditions of collective reception and interpretation of visual icons of human suffering, which became viral through social media in this period. We first situate social media reception in the framework for the analysis of moral spectatorship. We secondly explore the link between icon...

This article investigates the purpose and effects of presidential campaign visits. I recount common strategic rationales for rallies, town hall meetings, impromptu conversations, and the like, and then show how candidate visits are geographically assigned. I also investigate the impact of campaign visits, finding that while state-level political factors influence the location of visits, the visits themselves have little effect on local media markets. Finally, a bespoke survey is used to measure visits’ influence on visited and unvisited respondents in the closing stages of the 2012 presidential election: respondents are shown to have little knowledge about candidate visits, and the visits themselves have only a small and evanescent effect on voter intentions.

Between presentations at the recent conference on "Arab Women and BusinessManagement," IWSAW staffer Myriam Sfair conducted impromptu interviews with most of the presenters and some of the audience members. We present here some of the interesting voices and viewpoints that Myriam recorded. The comments of the conference participants contain valuable insights into Arab woman's role in management, the nature of the challenges she confronts, the future requirements for her continued success and progress in the professional world, and observations based on hard-won personal experience.

The rise of mobile food vending in US cities combines urban space and mobility with continuous online communication. Unlike traditional urban spaces that are predictable and known, contemporary vendors use information technology to generate impromptu social settings in unconventional and often underutilized spaces. This unique condition requires new methods that interpret online communication as a critical component in the production of new forms of public life. We suggest qualitative approaches combined with data-driven analyses are necessary when planning for emergent behavior. In Charlotte, NC, we investigate the daily operations, tweet content, and spatial and temporal sequencing of six vendors over an extended period of time. The study illustrates the interrelationship between data, urban space, and time and finds that a significant proportion of tweet content is used to announce vending locations in a time-based pattern and that the spatial construction of events is often independent of traditional urban form.

The paper discusses different forms and means of lexical meaning representation in quotidian and impromptu lexicography, as well as common and different trends in word meaning interpretation within different subdivisions of folk lexicography. By quotidian lexicography we understand the results of metalinguistic activity stimulated by associative priming experiments with pre-established lexicographic parameters. Studying folk lexicography that is thriving in the Wikilexia project allows for demonstrating all aspects of lexical meaning in its daily functioning. Impromptu lexicography, ubiquitous in contemporary journalism, sheds light on the means of interpreting new words and represents different communicative strategies employed by writers and readers, especially when dealing with interpreting words related to politics. In fiction, impromptu lexicography often shows the difference between thesauri of interlocutors and ways of overcoming communication breakdowns. Dictionary form as employed in contemporary literature also incorporates elements of quotidian and impromptu lexicography.

This paper, with an eye to the interpersonal component in translational activities, adopts a systemic functional approach to the examination and comparison of modal patterns in interpreted and translated discourses of Chinese Premier’s press conferences and his reports on the work of the government from 2008 to 2012. Following a comprehensive analysis of modality in terms of type, orientation and value, the study shows that, despite their differences in translational mode (i.e. written and spoken) and temporal constraint (i.e. prepared and impromptu), interpreted and translated diplomatic discourses share some common trends in modal distribution. In particular, the massive use of modulation and the favorite collocation of first person pronouns with volitive modal verbs such aswillare classic in discourses as such. Additionally, only a minimal number of low-valued modality is used in both translation and interpretation. Given the political sensitivity and policy orientation of diplomatic translation and the institutional identity of diplomatic translators, it is argued that an effective manipulation of modality is essential to their fulfillment of the capacity of “policy endorsers” in reproducing interpersonal connotations embedded in the source language. The paper may also shed some light on the research on translator/interpreters’ role.

The abundance and importance of temporary project teams in society introduces the need of understanding their nature. The purpose of this article thus is to highlight the existence of an only accidentally investigated type of team that we identify as Impromptu teams, and analyze their role in a temporary organization. Based on a detailed retrospective account of the infamous disaster on Mount Everest in 1996, we identify three examples of Impromptu teams. The three examples indicate that the teams are characterized by being triggered by an unexpected event, and formed through a bottom-up process, where joining the team is voluntary and the activities are based on a logic of appropriateness, rather than rule following. The identification and nature of Impromptu teams have implications far beyond Mount Everest, since most organizations at some point need to use teams similar to the identified examples.

This article states one of the extravehicular activity (EVA) incidence that happened in NASA space station. It also highlights how NASA carefully considers checklists for the emergency repairs and EVAs. EVAs – spacewalks – are planned months, even years in advance. The astronauts who are scheduled to perform them spend hour upon hour practicing them in the controlled environment of the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Expedition 46 Commander Scott Kelly and Flight Engineer Tim Kopra successfully repaired the International Space Station's Mobile Transporter rail car during a three-hour and 16-minute spacewalk—the third for Kelly, and the second for Kopra. The smoothness of the EVA is a testimony to NASA’s ability to handle emergencies. The major lesson learned from the EVA is that a thorough worksite inspection checklist should be made to ensure crew do not leave ISS in a poor configuration after an EVA.

Purpose – Online collaboration – a required method for many problem-solving situations in today’s work environments – has many aspects that are not clearly understood or explored. One of them is how work styles, specifically leadership styles, within a seemingly homogeneous teams with no prior role assignments affects the process and outcomes of collaboration. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the aspect of online collaboration to learn how different leadership styles that may emerge impact collaborative work. Design/methodology/approach – The work described here employs a user study involving 84 participants in 42 pairs, working in one of the three conditions across two sessions. The three conditions are defined based on the amount and the kind of awareness provided to the team members: no awareness of personal or team progress (C1), awareness of personal progress (C2), and awareness of both personal and team progress (C3). The log and chat data from the sessions where these teams work in collecting relevant information for two different topics are collected and analysed. Findings – Quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate the difference among the three conditions with respect to these two leadership styles. Specifically, it is found that those with the team awareness provided to them (C3) exhibited the least amounts of leadership, keeping the team relatively symmetric. The democratic nature of such teams also fostered more diverse searching behaviour and less need for communication. Originality/value – The work reported here is a first attempt to shed light on two kinds of connections: individual and team awareness to leadership style, and leadership style to diversity of information exploration.

This paper describes the development and production of an educational and reference app designed for the medical and pharmaceutical industries as well as interested members of the public. ‘Clinically Speaking’ consists of edited, impromptu movies of clinical interviews of patients with common and rare conditions archived over two decades. Each is indexed by subject area and disease, identified by short title and thumbnail and accompanied by a description and Wikipedia URL. The app design allows users to scroll down through subject areas such as cardiology and gastroenterology, then across to access several hundred edited cases. For users with Windows, Google or Android rather than iOS devices, a similar experience is delivered through a web-based version. The almost complete market penetration of smart phones and computers allows educational database material to be distributed very economically. An opportunity to partially recoup design and coding costs and cover on-going expenses of upgrades, server charges and annual developer fees is afforded by app store sales. Distributed worldwide via the app store, ‘Clinically Speaking’ constitutes a versatile vehicle for addition of further cases and provides experience of conditions that are infrequently seen in practice. Apps and mobile devices capture the current zeitgeist and constitute potentially powerful new vehicles for delivering reference material and clinical medical education. The development process, described herein, is slow, expensive and complex. The market is saturated and the rationale for adding further apps needs careful consideration.

Courses: Disaster Day (DD) is a single-class activity designed for public speaking classrooms, but could also be applied to courses addressing small group communication.Objectives: DD integrates fundamental skills of the basic speech course, fosters participation through group work, and introduces new concepts and skills. By the end of the activity, students should be able to (1) display fundamental speech skills by researching a topic quickly, organizing an informative speech, and delivering a presentation; (2) function effectively in a group by working cooperatively on a project with a tight deadline; and (3) understand basic elements of upcoming skills by creating an informative and visually appealing presentation for a mass audience before having visual aid instruction. DD has similar learning objectives to activities occurring later in the term (i.e., graded speeches) in order to introduce the students to expectations of future, more advanced assignments. As such, I do not treat DD as a graded activi...

In the archetypal American success story, social mobility often depends on physical mobility. But such narratives of individual progress became harder to sustain amid the congestion and economic division of the 19th-century city. Industrialization and poverty brought physical immobility and constraint, elements at odds with temporal narrative itself. Both these changes in city life and the textual crisis they engendered are reflected in the work of Stephen Crane. His New York fiction, built on linear narrative and authorial detachment, tracks individual economic failure in a city divided by class privilege and exploitation. His newspaper sketches, rather, are constructed in spatial rather than temporal terms, with a focus on crowds rather than individuals. Impromptu groupings gather and then disperse, occupying space rather than moving through it. Potential conflict is diffused, the latent energy of the crowd turned into a momentary community that reappropriates and reshapes both city and text.

Viewed up close, antibodies, cellular receptors, and viral proteins may look like sloppy piles of spaghetti, fettucine, and fusilli to the untrained eye, but that’s not what Ian Wilson sees. “Protein structures are things of beauty, with their complex web of intricately positioned and interlocking elements that fold up precisely to generate a particular biological function,” says Ian Wilson, a professor of structural biology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Ian Wilson. Image courtesy of BioMedical Graphics, The Scripps Research Institute. Broadly neutralizing antibody CR6261 bound to a hemagglutinin stem. Image courtesy of Marc-Andre Elsliger (The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA). Soluble HIV-1 envelope in complex with broadly neutralizing antibody PGT122. Image courtesy of Marc-Andre Elsliger (The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA). Wilson, who was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016, has dedicated his career to solving the structures of immune system proteins. He hopes that these structures will provide insights into how the immune system interacts with and neutralizes human pathogens and, thus, how improved vaccines and therapies can be designed. Wilson grew up in Perth, Scotland, with his parents and sister. His father, who was a journalist, enlisted Wilson to help cover the major soccer matches in his home town. During live matches, Wilson would take his father’s copy covering the game and, every few minutes, dictate it by telephone to the local newspaper for evening publication. “He would also send me to local soccer matches, and I would have to write up 50 words and send it in within 10 minutes of the match finishing,” says Wilson. He adds that this practice was excellent training for his career, which can include impromptu speaking events and writing abstracts, grants, and papers. After earning a degree in biochemistry from …

EMI (English-medium instruction) is increasingly prevalent and is an important site in which students are introduced to academic English. Research into classroom interaction in EMI in schools has been limited. Recent research into classroom interaction in EMI in higher education ( Basturkmen & Shackleford, 2015; McLaughlin & Parkinson, 2018 ) has drawn on the construct of language-related episodes (LREs) to investigate incidental instances during classroom interaction which is primarily focused on disciplinary content when attention shifts temporarily from content to language. The present article reports a study of LREs in two distinctive EMI, high school settings in South Korea. Analysis of recorded classes indicated that the occurrence of LREs was similar across both settings. LREs occurred frequently, focused mainly on disciplinary uses of vocabulary and were mainly teacher-initiated. Furthermore, the vast majority of the teacher-initiated episodes appeared to arise pre-emptively and not in response to errors, a finding that suggests the disciplinary teachers were proactive in shifting attention to language. Evolving content-driven discussion appeared to prompt the teachers to highlight the disciplinary register, and thus served as an impromptu, transitory means by which the teachers highlighted academic language use in their content teaching.

Social anxiety (SA) is thought to be maintained in part by avoidance of social threat, which exacerbates fear of negative evaluation. Yet, relatively little research has been conducted to evaluate the connection between social anxiety and attentional processes in realistic contexts. The current pilot study examined patterns of attention (eye movements) in a commonly feared social context – public speaking. Participants (N = 84) with a range of social anxiety symptoms gave an impromptu five-minute speech in an immersive 360°-video environment, while wearing a virtual reality headset equipped with eye-tracking hardware. We found evidence for the expected interaction between fear of public speaking and social threat (uninterested vs. interested audience members). Consistent with prediction, participants with greater fear of public speaking looked fewer times at uninterested members of the audience (high social threat) compared to interested members of the audience (low social threat) b = 0.418, p = 0.046, 95% CI [0.008, 0.829]. Analyses of attentional indices over the course of the speech revealed that the interaction between fear of public speaking and gaze on audience members was only significant in the first three-minutes. Our results provide support for theoretical models implicating avoidance of social threat as a maintaining factor in social anxiety. Future research is needed to test whether guided attentional training targeting in vivo attentional avoidance may improve clinical outcomes for those presenting with social anxiety.

This month's Book Forum is dedicated to the young children of the pandemic, most of whom may not have the words to describe how they're feeling, or the experience to know how strange things truly are, but no doubt they sense it. What follows are several reviews of texts that address anxiety and depression in children and teenagers. To introduce these resources, I give you impromptu thoughts from a very wise 6-year-old named Josie, serendipitously caught on film by her parents (Video S1 available online). This little one expresses everything I hoped to get across, but until now didn't have the right words.

“What is more important in our jobs: the research or the researchers?” This question came up recently during an impromptu phone conversation with my colleague Neil Garg of the University of Califor...

Due to the complexity of an open multi-agent system, agents&rsquo, interactions are instantiated spontaneously, resulting in beneficent collaborations with one another for mutual actions that are beyond one&rsquo, s current capabilities. Repeated patterns of interactions shape a feature of their organizational structure when those agents self-organize themselves for a long-term objective. This paper, therefore, aims to provide an understanding of social capital in organizations that are open membership multi-agent systems with an emphasis in our formulation on the dynamic network of social interactions that, in part, elucidate evolving structures and impromptu topologies of networks. We model an open source project as an organizational network and provide definitions and formulations to correlate the proposed mechanism of social capital with the achievement of an organizational charter, for example, optimized productivity. To empirically evaluate our model, we conducted a case study of an open source software project to demonstrate how social capital can be created and measured within this type of organization. The results indicate that the values of social capital are positively proportional towards optimizing agents&rsquo, productivity into successful completion of the project.

Fluency happens to be the main obstacle for EFL learners in mastering speaking. There are many ways to scaffold students’ speaking fluency; one of them is Just a Minute (JAM). JAM is an impromptu speech activity where the speaker is supposed to express their ideas on the given topic, within the duration of a minute, without hesitation and repetition. The purposes of this research are to describe the implementation of JAM, the impact of using JAM, and the students’ perception towards the use of JAM. Case study method was used in conducting the research. The qualitative data was obtained from observation, rubric, questionnaire, and interview. The participants of the research are nine students of XII Hotel Accommodation in SMKN 3 Bogor. The results of the research show that JAM can be well-implemented in English formal classroom, JAM has given positive impact in scaffolding students’ speaking fluency, and JAM has gained students’ positive perception towards its use. This study suggests the English teachers to try adapting JAM as a mean to help their students scaffold the speaking fluency.

The designer of the virtual environment have been trying for decades to provide the player with more enjoyable, comfortable and also informative user experiences, and yet still fail to ensure that the player follow the preset instructions and even implicit suggestions faithfully and naturally, due to the designer's invisibility during runtime, and the player's individual diversity and individual impromptu in manipulations. We believe that the camera is the mainly messenger for the designer and the player to communicate, and intend to build a bridge between them. By binding the designer's aesthetic ideas to the parameters of the camera's movement, we enable the player to roam in the virtual scene with the guidance from the designer. We also propose a navigation guiding language (NGL) to assist the binding and the guiding process. A user study is made to evaluate the performance of our method. Experiments and questionnaires have shown that our method can offer a more attentive and pleasing experience to the player with implicit guidance.

Opportunistic social matching is the concept of introducing individuals for various social interests when user-contexts are conducive to impromptu face-to-face meetings. Early prototypes have received positive feedback, yet they are susceptible to inaccurately reported match preferences and false-negative match recognition. This paper presents an alternative design for opportunistic social matching called the encounter opportunity browsing interface. The interface lets users indiscriminately browse and react to opportunities for social encounters nearby, which enables the gradual learning of users' match preferences. A preliminary qualitative assessment of the interface indicates that users seek trusted signals regarding the enjoyability of social encounter opportunities displayed.

In this work-in-progress we introduce our prototype, a portable speaker augmented to be used as an electronic music sketchpad which allows musicians to play, record and compose multi-track music on the fly. We developed the MusicFabrik cover for the portable speaker, a playable textile cover which, although in functional sketch stage now, shows promise of becoming a useful tool for impromptu loop creation and collaborative music playing. We present our initial user encounters of the sketch. See video: https://youtu.be/pe2QaYv1Imo.

This chapter examines the development of evaluative judgement from a professional education perspective, with a focus on the abilities students need to deal with problems that are both complex and novel. Professional work regularly entails engaging in knowledgeable action in previously unencountered situations and formulating impromptu methods for making judgements about the adequacy of one’s actions. From this perspective, evaluative judgement is an epistemic (knowledge-creating) activity. We show how developing evaluative judgement can be understood as learning to play a range of epistemic games, and how epistemic resourcefulness enables one to frame complex judgements in principled ways.

Gerombolan Pemburu Batu (Stone Hunters) is a community who appreciates the remains of valueson historical sites in many regions. The community uses Talents as a form of creativity to reproduce the talentsin the form of creative products. These marginal sites—locations unknown to many people—has become maininterest for impromptu visits. These visits offer the opportunity to learn cultural literacy in a fun way.

The Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach has recently demonstrated its effectiveness in simplifying the dynamic management of networking capabilities of infrastructure environments such as datacenters, e.g., by greatly enhancing the flexibility of dispatching features provided by industrial-grade switches. Inspired by the previous and more traditional scenario, we propose SDN adoption in infrastructure-less distributed multi-hop spontaneous networks based on the impromptu collaboration of fixed/mobile devices, with the goal of significantly improving the Quality of Service perceived by final users. To this purpose, the paper outlines our primary guidelines and reference architecture to support quality-aware packet dispatching. In particular, we present how collaborative nodes can exploit the SDN approach to appropriately manage the quality of different traffic flows, by avoiding undesired interference and by taking into consideration network capabilities/conditions and application-level requirements.

Doing scientific research is, in theory, a systematic and well-organised enterprise. In reality, however, things often go astray: field works get cancelled, interviews get side-tracked and participants drop out. The investigation of human lives, as it turns out, cannot do away with the messiness of human lives. In such cases, researchers must adapt to the new situation and yet stay on topic: in one word, they need to improvise. How, then, does research remain scientific? What matters is what is done afterwards; how hunches and surprises are turned into systematic investigations, analyses and interpretations. This argument will be illustrated with the story of an ‘impromptu’ fieldwork and its unpredictable consequences; or, rather, how staying on topic requires one to systematically stray away from it.

Too often sex-gender-sexuality intersects with pedagogy and shapes the belonging of young people in ways that teachers do not see. This chapter shows how the unexpected presence of a jumping mat in a middle-class, middle-school, co-ed drama class leads the teacher to devise an impromptu, incidental activity that exposes the embodied nature of belonging in the pedagogical space of the classroom. It reveals that normative notions of sex-gender-sexuality and belonging are embedded and inherent in schooling practices and structures, privilege certain types of sex-sexuality-gendered belonging over others and influence the way teachers view and treat young people. The chapter exposes how this constellation of conflating conditions works to constitute young people as students who belong/do not belong and are successful/unsuccessful in any pedagogical moment.

This electronic Air quality is nowadays a primary concern in several cities. More generally pollutant and toxic gases continuously, incidentally or purposedly released are now considered to be extremely relevant for their severe adverse health effects to exposed citizens. In this view, low cost smart chemical multisensors are arising as a reliable source for indicative data on Air Quality. Low cost UAVs are versatile platforms capable to host playloads integrating multi sensor technologies for short term, mobile monitoring tasks. The recently proposed tethered UAV platforms can be deemed as interesting solutions to build and rapidly deploy impromptu networks of air quality analyzers for short-term and focused environmental monitoring actions. In this work, we propose the integration of the ENEA MONICA multisensor platform as a measurement payload for the TopView SAV-ES UAV. The prototype has been flown on board of the SAV-ES platform for a test flight targeting the measurement of a plume generated with a brushwood controlled fire. The functional proof of concept flight have confirmed the possibility to use MONICA as a measurement payload for the targeted platform. © 2018 IEEE.

Toby is the only child born to a white mother, who is a teacher, and an Aboriginal father, whom he had never met. He grew up in Western Sydney living with his single mother and not mixing with any Aboriginal boys or girls of his age where he enjoyed playing impromptu, ‘knock up’, modified games of rugby league at school and after school with his friends. He wanted to join a rugby league club to play on the weekends with his friends but his mother would not allow him to. He was a lean boy and she was worried about him being hurt by boys who were much bigger and stronger than him. This meant that his involvement in rugby league was limited to the informal games he and his friends created and played during recess and lunchtime at school and after school as well as in his backyard with friends or out in the fields behind his house when not at school.

This chapter introduces the problem of absenteeism in Jinjiang Factory from two aspects—the seriousness of absenteeism and the factors that lead to the workers’ absences. Using the factory’s meeting minutes, the author shows that during the late 1970s and the 1980s, the problem of absenteeism is a phenomenon existing throughout the whole factory rather than only one or two workshops. Workers’ misbehavior in working time and periodic impromptu personal matters are two main types of factors leading to workers’ absences.

This article discusses how children in New Zealand make meaning in their spontaneous pretend play from kindergarten (four years old) through to their first year of primary school (five years old). The findings discussed here are taken from a wider project investigating children’s storytelling where 12 child participants were video recorded during their everyday storytelling experiences over a three-year period. This article reveals how children’s engagement in pretend play often involves playing out an impromptu storyline where ventriloquism is used to talk objects into life through paralinguistic features such as gesture, gaze and voice prosody. These findings suggest that through the act of ventriloquism in pretend play children learn to engage in complex meaning making activities in playful ways, orally formulating characters and building coherent and systematic storylines that can be identified as early literacy practices.