Supporting memory and identity in older people: findings from a ‘Sandpit’ process

Identity in old age is challenged by physical changes, evolving roles within the family, and life transitions such as retirement. Supporting identity is therefore important in later life, and might be assisted by media technologies which allow people to reflect on their lives, record their personal histories and share these with family, friends and caregivers. This possibility was explored in two creative ‘Sandpits’ with older people as part of the SUS-IT project, funded by the New Dynamics of Ageing programme in the UK. Discussions were held with PC and non-PC user groups of retirement age to understand memory and identity practices and elicit reactions to three novel product concepts. These included a Reminiscing Radio for life review, a Story Lamp for associating spoken stories with photographs and memorabilia, and a pair of virtual reality Travel Glasses for transporting you back to a special place in the past. The main findings of these discussions will be presented, along with concepts generated by the participants in a re-design exercise. This paper will also show how the sandpits enabled older people to be involved in the design process by allowing them to shape early design concepts through exploring their own ideas and motivations

Editorial: Spotlight on aging: anthropological factors impacting physiology, prevention and management of aging conditions

Human longevity and the increased life expectancy have come with concerning burdens of ageing related non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including obesity, diabetes, cancer, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. Although people of all age groups, regions, and countries are affected by NCDs, these conditions are often associated with older age groups (WHO, 2021). Ageing is characterised by physical and mental decline of the human organism, which is a complex interaction between very diverse mechanisms of anthropometry and body composition, metabolic, hormonal, and neuromuscular. For example, most recent discoveries explained ageing development by associating relative bone mass changes and the growing body size with insulin production mechanisms throughout the life course (Lin et al., 2021)

Consorting issues paper: review of the use of the consorting provisions by the NSW Police Force

New consorting provisions came into effect in New South Wales on 9 April 2012 and are set out in the Crimes Act 1900 in Division 7, Part 3A. It is now an indictable offence punishable by up to 3 years imprisonment and/or a $16,500 fine to habitually consort with convicted offenders after receiving a warning from police. Anyone can be warned or charged with consorting. Consorting includes face to face contact and other means of communication such as electronic media. The provisions are being used by the NSW Police Force to address organised criminal activity and local crime issues. The Ombudsman is required to review the operation of the consorting provisions and prepare a report for the Commissioner of Police and the Attorney General who will table it in Parliament. The NSW Ombudman\u27s Office has released this paper outlining what it considers to be the main issues emerging from the use of the new consorting provisions in their first 12 months of operation. The public is invited to make submissions. Submissions close on 28 February 2014. Find out more about making submissions here

Radicals of 0-regular algebras

We consider a generalisation of the Kurosh--Amitsur radical theory for rings (and more generally multi-operator groups) which applies to 0-regular varieties in which all operations preserve 0. We obtain results for subvarieties, quasivarieties and element-wise equationally defined classes. A number of examples of radical and semisimple classes in particular varieties are given, including hoops, loops and similar structures. In the first section, we introduce 0-normal varieties (0-regular varieties in which all operations preserve 0), and show that a key isomorphism theorem holds in a 0-normal variety if it is subtractive, a property more general than congruence permutability. We then define our notion of a radical class in the second section. A number of basic results and characterisations of radical and semisimple classes are then obtained, largely based on the more general categorical framework of L. M\'arki, R. Mlitz and R. Wiegandt as in [13]. We consider the subtractive case separately. In the third section, we obtain results concerning subvarieties and quasivarieties based on the results of the previous section, and also generalise to subtractive varieties some results for multi-operator group radicals defined by simple equational rules. Several examples of radical and semisimple classes are given for a range of fairly natural 0-normal varieties of algebras, most of which are subtractive

Free associations mirroring self- and world-related concepts: Implications for personal construct theory, psycholinguistics and philosophical psychology

People construe reality by using words as basic units of meaningful categorization. The present theory-driven study applied the method of a free association task to explore how people express the concepts of the world and the self in words. The respondents were asked to recall any five words relating with the word world. Afterwards they were asked to recall any five words relating with the word self. The method of free association provided the respondents with absolute freedom to choose any words they wanted. Such free recall task is suggested as being a relatively direct approach to the respondents’ self- and world-related conceptual categories, without enormous rational processing. The results provide us, first, with associative ranges for constructs of the world and the self, where some associative dimensions are defined by semantic polarities in the meanings of peripheral categories (e.g., Nature vs. Culture). Second, our analysis showed that some groups of verbal categories that were associated with the words world and self are central, while others are peripheral with respect to the central position. Third, the analysis of category networks revealed that some categories play the role of a transmitter, mediating the pathway between other categories in the network

Transformation of scientists and engineers into managers

The purposes of this research were to determine the principal problems and obstacles faced by specialists during the transition period when they are becoming managers, and to discover ways by which their difficulties might be avoided or overcome. It was found that senior management officials are unaware--or tend to ignore the importance--of the transition process and its problems, that little attention has been given to developing management training to overcome transition problems, and that much of the training which is offered is largely irrelevant to these problems

From remembering to envisioning product use: an informal design technique

To be able to get insight in potential use experiences of design proposals, designers would ideally have continuous access to a diverse group of end-users who could give feedback. Since in practice this is not possible designers often have to rely on other sources to be able to reflect on the use issues of their design proposals. Previous research has shown that designers often apply informal techniques to reflect on use issues, in which personal knowledge and experience of previous projects serve as a frame of reference.. However, this knowledge often remains implicit. In this study we explore a technique in which members of a design team make all personal knowledge and assumptions about use in a certain product domain explicit. In this technique we distinguish remembering, imagining, experiencing and envisioning use. The information that is gathered in this way is captured in a matrix which structures use situation aspects and corresponding use issues. These issues concern user experience, usability as well as performance. In three workshops with different designers we explored the benefits and limitations of such a technique. Particularly iterating between remembering, imagining and experiencing worked very well to evoke experiences of the designer