Respite and the Internet: Accessing care for older adults in the 21st Century

Contrary to popular belief, fewer numbers of older adults today are living in extended care facilities (ECFs) and other institutional settings. Rather, adult children, adult grandchildren, and aged spouses prefer the home setting as the environment in which to provide care to older adult family members. Benefits exist with regard to the provision of care within the home setting; however, tremendous stress may be placed upon these informal caregiving systems as family members find themselves with little time for activities other than those related to the provision of care. Respite care is invaluable in alleviating and preventing the physical and psychological depletion associated with caregiving by granting family members the opportunity to relinquish temporarily the demands of providing care for someone on a continual basis. As a means of connecting family members to sources of respite care and related services, the Internet possesses significant potential. Without ever leaving the home environment and the older adult care recipient(s), family members can utilize the Internet to access information about respite care services.     

养老社区环境健康预警系统的设计与实现

当前环境健康问题日益受到重视,尤其是基础体质较差的老年群体,易受环境健康风险的威胁。针对该问题,将现代化的信息技术与发展潜力巨大的养老社区相组合,给老年人提供动态化、个性化的环境健康信息服务,提升养老社区的智慧元素,具有重要的社会效益。基于Java Web技术,完成了养老社区环境健康预警系统,在实时和预报环境气象数据的支持下,实现了感冒、高血压、慢性支气管炎等常见老年疾病发病指数的动态预报与个性化预警。通过对老年人、家属、医务人员、管理员等不同角色的需求分析和功能设计,高效地实现了医务人员的统筹管理、社区老人的及时提醒和老人家属的远程通知。该系统不仅适用于养老社区,对于居家养老的集中管理也具有应用潜力。     

Preschool children’s learning with technology at home

We produced case studies of fourteen families based on nine rounds of data collection during the period from June 2008 to October 2009. We focused on fourteen children who were three years old when our visits started and used an ecocultural approach to examine their experiences of learning and playing with technologies at home. The study describes i) which technologies children encounter at home, ii) how family practices influence children’s encounters with technology, and iii) what children are learning through their interactions with technology. We present a framework of four areas of learning that could be supported by technology: acquiring operational skills, extending knowledge and understanding of the world, developing dispositions to learn, and understanding the role of technology in everyday life.     

Parents,pre‐schoolers and learning with technology at home: some implications for policy

Schemes that seek to ensure that children have access to technology at home have, so far, been aimed at children over the age of 8. However, there is likely to be an increasing policy interest in extending similar schemes to pre‐school children given widespread commitment to the value of early intervention in children's education and family life. We draw on three research studies conducted by the authors to discuss the range of technologies that children encounter at home, the different forms their learning takes and family support for learning. We use these findings to provide starting points for considering the implementation of similar schemes for pre‐school children and their parents in the future, identifying several questions to consider when developing policy on home access to technology for pre‐schoolers: which technologies are most appropriate? Will access to technology at home lead to increased use? What roles do parents play in supporting learning? Which forms of learning are most likely to be promoted?     

Strategies of parental regulation in the media-rich home

This paper investigates practices of domestic regulation of media within the family, focusing on parental attempts to manage children’s access to and use of new media. Theoretically, the paper seeks to integrate the specific literature on domestic rules and regulation of media use with the broader literature on the rules and roles in social situations, arguing that parental strategies in relation to domestic media reveal both the enactment of and the negotiations over the typically informal and implicit rules and roles in family life. These issues are explored using data from two surveys: (1) the ‘Young People, New Media’ project surveyed 1300 children and their parents, examining the social, relational and contextual factors that shape the ways in which families develop rules for managing the introduction of the personal computer and the multiplication of television sets, among other new media changes, in the home; (2) the ‘UK Children Go Online’ project surveyed 1500 children and their parents, updating the picture by examining the introduction of the Internet into the family home. On the basis of these data, it is argued that despite the ‘newness’ of media as they successively arrive in the home, there are considerable consistencies over time in the responses of families, it being the slow-to-change relations between parents and children that shape patterns of domestic regulation and use.     

Effects of Rapid Economic Development on Traditional Patterns of Elder Support in China

From 1992 to 2006, dramatic changes took place among older adults in China in terms of living arrangements, household type, and financial support received. Traditional patterns of elder support are changing, as the social security system now provides elders with sources of support other than their children. The trend of population aging and changes in family size has special implications for China??s traditionally filial culture. Despite these changes, family members remain the primary caregivers for older adults. Coresidence of elderly parents with their children is influenced by the number but not the gender of children. In-home care provided by non-family members will strengthen the function of elder support in this filial culture.     

Home curation versus teenage photography: Photo displays in the family home

In this paper we report an empirical study of the photographic portrayal of family members at home. Adopting a social psychological approach and focusing on intergenerational power dynamics, our research explores the use of domestic photo displays in family representation. Parents and their teenagers from eight families in the south of England were interviewed at home about their interpretations of both stored and displayed photos within the home. Discussions centred on particular photographs found by the participants to portray self and family in different ways. The findings show that public displays of digital photos are still curated by mothers of the households, but with more difficulty and less control than with analogue photos. In addition, teenagers both contribute and comply with this curation within the home, whilst at the same time developing additional ways of presenting their families and themselves online that are ‘unsupervised’ by the curator. We highlight the conflict of interest that is at play within teen and parent practices and consider the challenges that this presents for supporting the representation of family through the design of photo display technology.     

Finding the Consensus Shape for a Protein Family

We define and prove properties of the consensus shape for a protein family, a protein-like structure that provides a compact summary of the significant structural information for a protein family. If all members of the protein family exhibit a geometric relationship between corresponding α-carbons, then that relationship is preserved in the consensus shape. In particular, distances and angles that are consistent across family members are preserved. For the consensus shape, the spacing between successive α-carbons is variable, with small distances in regions where the members of the protein family exhibit significant variation and large distances (up to the standard spacing of about 3.8 Å) in regions where the family members agree. Despite this non-protein-like characteristic, the consensus shape preserves and highlights important structural information. We describe an iterative algorithm for computing the consensus shape and prove that the algorithm converges. As a by-product we produce a multiple structure alignment for the family members. We present the results of experiments in which we build consensus shapes for several known protein families.     

Review Essay: Prospects for Old-Age Income Security in Hong Kong and Singapore

This review shows that Hong Kong and Singapore face a distinct and serious challenge to old-age income security due to their mix of public pension provision and intergenerational family support. They are among the fastest ageing societies internationally and will be the oldest in Asia after Japan by 2030. Yet their public pensions remain weak. Defined contribution pensions, even for full-career workers, are projected to replace just 17% of net lifetime average earnings in Singapore and 41% in Hong Kong, compared to 70% across the OECD countries. Instead, older persons in Singapore and Hong Kong depend mainly on their adult children for income security in the form of co-residence and cash transfers. More than half of them live with adult children. In Singapore, more than two-thirds receive financial support from the younger generation, compared to just 5% on average in Europe. Current welfare theory would suggest that Singapore and Hong Kong portray an extreme variant of welfare regime where the state??s role is more limited than in the liberal regime and the family??s role more central than in the Southern European regime. The sustainability of current old-age income security arrangements is therefore particularly vulnerable to new social risks that threaten the stability of traditional family structures. Already co-residence and financial support from adult children are declining. A fuller assessment of the prospects for old-age income security must focus on the interaction of pension policy and family support for elderly persons in different gender and income groups.     

Unsupervised analysis of top-k core members in poly-relational networks

Poly-relational networks such as social networks are prevalent in the real world. The existing research on poly-relational networks focuses on community detection, aiming to find a global partition of nodes across relations. However, in some real cases, users may be not interested in such a global partition. For example, commercial analysts often care more about the top-k core members in business competitions, and relations among them that are more important to their competitions. Motivated by this, in this paper, we investigate an unsupervised analysis of the top-k core members in a poly-relational network and identify two complementary tasks, namely (1) detection of the top-k core members that are most tightly connected by relevant relations, and (2) identification of the relevant relations via analysis on the importance of each relation to the formation of the top-k core members. Towards this, we propose an optimization framework to jointly deal with the two tasks by maximizing the connectivity between the candidates of the top-k core members across all relations with a synchronously updated weight for each relation. The effectiveness of our framework is verified both theoretically and experimentally.     

Probabilistic belief networks for genetic counseling

This paper describes a program, GenInfer, which uses belief networks to calculate risks of inheriting genetic disorders. GenInfer is based on Pearl's (J. Pearl, Artif. Intell. 29 (1986) 241-288) algorithm for fusion and propagation in probabilistic belief networks. It is written in Common Lisp. GenInfer can calculate genotypes for any family affected with any single-gene inherited disorder. Besides considering both negative and positive information in the pedigree. GenInfer takes into account additional information about the specific disorder as well as supplementary information for family members. The output consists of genotype probabilities for all family members and estimated genetic risks for prospective children of the consultands. Belief networks provide a way to calculate probabilities for systems of conditionally dependent variables. The impacts of various pieces of information are propagated and fused in such a way that, when equilibrium is reached, each proposition can be assigned a degree of belief consistent with the axioms of probability theory. In Pearl's algorithm, information is communicated through the network by messages sent between nodes. Pearl's basic algorithm cannot directly handle multiple-connected networks, which arise in the genetic counseling domain whenever a family pedigree includes consanguinity or more than one child per couple. GenInfer makes use of two cycle breaking methods, clustering and conditioning, to handle these situations.     

Extending family to school life: College students’ use of the mobile phone

The current study seeks to understand if there is a pattern between college students’ mobile phone usage and their family members at home, and to what degree it affects their college life. Three focus group interviews were conducted on February 1, February 2, and February 15, 2006. A total of 40 undergraduate students who were majoring in communication studies participated in the study. One of the main findings is that the mobile phone is “a must” for college students to keep in contact with their family. Other findings suggest that college students use mobile phones to have more frequent contact with their family and to fulfill family roles. College students also utilize mobile phones to share experiences and emotional and physical support with their parents.     

Real world applications of a fuzzy decision model based on relationships between goals for finance services and sequencing for the assembly of cars

Real world applications of a decision model of relationships between goals based on fuzzy relations are presented. In contrast to other approaches the relationships between decision goals or criteria for each decision situation are represented and calculated explicitly. The application fields are decision making for financial services and optimization of production sequences in car manufacturing.     

An ontology for causal relationships between news and financial instruments

In recent years, people have begun to pay more and more attention to the effect of news on financial instrument markets (i.e., the markets for trading financial instruments). Researchers in the financial domain have conducted many studies demonstrating the effect of different types of news on trade activities in financial instrument markets such as volatility in trade price, trade volume, trading frequency, and so on. In this paper, an ontology for knowledge about news regarding financial instruments is provided. The ontology contains two parts: the first part presents a hierarchy framework for the domain knowledge that primarily includes classes of news, classes of financial instrument markets participants, classes of financial instruments, and primary relations between these classes. In the second part, a causal map is used to demonstrate how classes of news are causally related with classes of financial instruments. Finally, a case concerning the “9/11 American terror attack” is analyzed. On the basis of the ontology, it is first comprehensive to understand the knowledge about news in financial instrument markets; second, it helps building trading models based on news in the financial instrument markets; third, systems (e.g., systems for prediction of stock price based on news, systems for supporting financial market participants to search relevant news) design and development in this domain are facilitated and supported by this ontology.     

Finding the Consensus Shape for a Protein Family

We define and prove properties of the consensus shape for a protein family, a protein-like structure that provides a compact summary of the significant structural information for a protein family. If all members of the protein family exhibit a geometric relationship between corresponding -carbons, then that relationship is preserved in the consensus shape. In particular, distances and angles that are consistent across family members are preserved. For the consensus shape, the spacing between successive -carbons is variable, with small distances in regions where the members of the protein family exhibit significant variation and large distances (up to the standard spacing of about 3.8 Å) in regions where the family members agree. Despite this non-protein-like characteristic, the consensus shape preserves and highlights important structural information. We describe an iterative algorithm for computing the consensus shape and prove that the algorithm converges. As a by-product we produce a multiple structure alignment for the family members. We present the results of experiments in which we build consensus shapes for several known protein families.     

基于Kano模型的家庭成员通信需求的研究与设计

随着人民日益增长的数字化美好生活需要,家庭内部成员间的通信交流方式已从“单一”的语音通话向“多元化”的信息通信方式转变。目前家庭网主要提供成员间语音通话服务,已较难满足成员间视频化、社区化等多样化的通信需求。本文使用Kano模型针对家庭成员间的通信需求进行调研与分析,并将需求优先级排序转化为设计目标的重要程度,在满足用户需求的前提下,提升办理体验,同时为类似通信类产品研究与设计提供参考。     

Evidence-based guidelines for the informal use of computers by children to promote the development of academic,cognitive and social skills

The use of computers in the home has become very common among young children. This paper reviews research on the effects of informal computer use and identifies potential pathways through which computers may impact children's development. Based on the evidence reviewed, we present the following guidelines to arrange informal computer experiences that will promote the development of children's academic, cognitive and social skills: (1) children should be encouraged to use computers for moderate amounts of time (2–3 days a week for an hour or two per day) and (2) children's use of computers should (a) include non-violent action-based computer games as well as educational games, (b) not displace social activities but should instead be arranged to provide opportunities for social engagement with peers and family members and (c) involve content with pro-social and non-violent themes. We conclude the paper with questions that must be addressed in future research.

Practitioner Summary: This paper reviews research on the effects of informal computer use on children's academic, cognitive and social skills. Based on the evidence presented, we have presented guidelines to enable parents, teachers and other adults to arrange informal computer experiences so as to maximise their potential benefit for children's development.     

Haven or hell? Telework,flexibility and family in the e-society: a Marxist analysis

The reconfiguration of the home-work boundary that at-home telework entails has significant implications for gender issues and the use of ubiquitous information and communications technologies (ICTs). By presenting a Marx-inspired dialectical analysis of the family and home as both ‘haven and hell’, we develop a critique of proposed advantages for women home workers. Not only do we question the ability of ICTs to deliver the promises made on their behalf – we show how this socio-technical innovation may in fact contribute to compounding the double-burden of work associated with gender roles within the home. Contemporary critical understanding of the e-society should incorporate the influence of at-home teleworking because of its implications for the use of ubiquitous ICTs in the home environment, the shaping of work relations and its impact on gender issues. This increasing use of ICTs outside of the workplace is matched by the growing consensus within the European Union on the desirability of flexible working coupled with family friendly policies. This paper explores some of the rhetoric and research surrounding the proposed benefits of at home ‘telework’ and the likely cost–benefits, from an employee's perspective, in terms of increased freedom, reduced burden and ‘flexibility’.     

Entropy on covers

As a generalization of partitions, covers allow overlaps between their members. In this paper, we will propose a family of entropy-like measures over covers, which are anti monotonic with regard to the partial order defined by refinement relations of covers. In parallel to the entropy theory, we also develop their conditional forms, which in turn lead to a family of semi-metrics on covers. These make it possible to apply entropy-based techniques in data mining or machine learning to problems naturally modelled by covers.     

Psychological effects of physical deficiencies in the residences on elderly persons: a case study in Trabzon Old Person's Home in Turkey

In this study, elderly persons' physical and spiritual necessities and their satisfaction in their residences are investigated by applying a comprehensive questionnaire on the residents of Trabzon Old Person's Home. By grouping the residents of the home according to their age, gender, marital status, occupation, health conditions, cultural status, and economic conditions, their expectations are determined. Physical conditions of the home are also examined in order to determine whether the necessities of the residents are met or not. The questionnaire consisting of 75 questions is applied to 60 people, and 4500 data points are analyzed by using SPSS software. In the results of this study, physical deficiencies that require elderly persons want to be in Trabzon Old Person's Home are determined. It is also determined that 86.7% of the residents are pleased with living in the old persons' home and they could get used to living in the old persons' home but 73.3% of the residents do not want to send someone in their family to the old person's home. These contradictory results show that residents do not want to live in old person's home but they adapt in there because of compulsoriness. This situation affects the residents' psychological well-being in a negative way.