Technical report and user guide: the 2010 EU kids online survey

This technical report describes the design and implementation of the EU Kids Online survey of 9-16 year old internet using children and their parents in 25 countries European countries

The development of a measure of social care outcome for older people. Funded/commissioned by: Department of Health

An essential element of identifying Best Value and monitoring cost-effective care is to be able to identify the outcomes of care. In the field of health services, use of utility-based health related quality of life measures has become widespread, indeed even required. If, in the new era of partnerships, social care outcomes are to be valued and included we need to develop measures that reflect utility or welfare gain from social care interventions. This paper reports on a study, commissioned as part of the Department of Health’s Outcomes of Social Care for Adults Initiative, that developed an instrument and associated utility indexes that provide a tool for evaluating social care interventions in both a research and service setting. Discrete choice conjoint analysis used to derive utility weights provided us with new insights into the relative importance of the core domains of social care to older people. Whilst discrete choice conjoint analysis is being increasingly used in health economics, this is the first study that has attempted to use it to derive a measure of outcome

Some Implications of Cognitive Psychology for Risk Regulation

Beginning with a set of books and articles published in the 1950s, cognitive psychologists have developed a new descriptive theory of how people make decisions under conditions of risk and uncertainty. A dominant theme in the theory is that most people do not evaluate risky circumstances in the manner assumed by conventional decision theory-they do not, that is, seek to maximize the expected value of some function when selecting among actions with uncertain outcomes. The purpose of this article is to consider some implications of the cognitive theory for regulatory policies designed to control risks to life, health, and the environment. Section I describes the theory and outlines the key differences between it and conventional decision theory. Sections II and III then address, in turn, two central questions about the uses of the theory. First, if people behave in the manner described by the cognitive psychologists, how will this shape the demands that citizens make, through the political system, for risk regulation, and how (if at all) might these demands differ from those that would be expected if citizens behaved, instead, in the manner assumed by conventional decision theorists? Second, if citizens make demands as predicted by the cognitive theory, how (if at all) might their behavior affect the regulatory responses that political actors supply

Early warning: a people-centred approach to early warning systems and the 'last mile'

The people-centred approach to early warning focuses on how communities can understand threats and avoid them. Disasters are partly caused by external hazards, but they also stem simply from vulnerability: people being in the wrong place without adequate protection. Perhaps the most well-known risk assessment method of recent years is the “vulnerability and capacity assessment”, developed by the Red Cross Red Crescent. There is a consensus that information must extend to communities so as to facilitate their adoption of protective actions. The linking of early warning and early action with development aspirations is what motivates people to engage. Factors as diverse as knowledge, power, culture, environment, lifestyle and personality often determine whether people heed warnings. Engaging people outside any warning system is called the “last mile” – a term that expresses the sentiment that warnings often do not reach those who need them most. Addressing vulnerability in disaster reduction is often similar to promoting development, but in the developed world “top-down” approaches to risk assessment and early warning dominate

TheChain: a fast, secure and parallel treatment of transactions

The Smart Distributed Ledger (aka blockchain) has attracted much attention in recent years. According to the European Parliament, this technology has the potential to change the lives of many people. The blockchain is a data structure built upon a hashed function in a distributed network, enabled by an incentive mechanism to discourage malicious nodes from participation. The consensus is at the core of the blockchain technology, and is driven by information embedded into a data structure that takes many forms such as linear, tree, and graph chains. The found related information will be subject to various validation incentives among the miners, such as proof of stake and proof of work. However, all the existing solutions suffer from a heavy state transition before dealing with the problem of a validation mechanism which suffers from resource consumption, monopoly or attacks. This work raises the following question: "Why is there a need for consensus where all participants can make a quick and correct decision?", and underlines the fact that sometimes ledger is subject to maintenance from regional parties in the data that leads to partial territories and eliminates monopoly, which is the hurdle to eliminating the trusted party. The validity of the blockchain transaction comes from the related information scattered above the data structure, and the authenticity lies in the digital signature. The aim is to switch from a validator based on incentives to a broadcaster governed by an unsupervised clustering algorithm, and the integrity does lie in the intersection among regions. However, the data structure takes advantage of the Petri network regarding its suitability. Building the entire ledger in the Petri network model will allow parallel processing of the transactions and securing of the total order between the participants on the memory reference layer. Moreover, it takes account of validation criteria quickly and safely before adding the new transaction list using the graph reachability