Participation in everyday occupations and situations outside home for older adults living with and without dementia : places, familiarity and risks.

Participation in occupations and places outside the home has been related to health and social benefits as well as offering challenging and risks for older adults living with and without dementia, yet little is known about how this participation is experienced, also considering the places visited and the occupations performed. Places are central in a transactional and occupational perspective to understand how visiting, maintaining and abandoning them affects their participation outside the home. Acknowledging the complexity and interrelatedness properties of participation, with the embodiment of places by the occupation while it is embedded in the place, provides a new way of examining participation. Thus, the overarching aim of the fours studies was to explore and provide new knowledge on participation in places outside the home for older adults with mild-to-moderate dementia as compared with older adults without dementia, as well as developing an understanding of the transactions between the persons and the places, and how places outside home are associated with perceived participation. To attain this aim, the Participation in Activities and Places Outside Home (ACT-OUT) questionnaire was developed in Study I, as no tool existed that combined occupations and places. ACT-OUT was revised and aligned using cognitive interviews with 26 older adults living without dementia and five older adults living with dementia. ACT-OUT was then used in Study II, together with the occupational gap questionnaire OGQ, to evaluate stability and change in places visited outside home, and associations between number of places currently visited and perceived occupational gaps, and in Study III to consider factors, e.g. perceived risks, that potentially affected perceived participation outside the home with 35 older adults living with dementia, in comparison with 35 older adults living without dementia. Study IV used qualitative, mobile interviews to explore familiarity outside home as experienced by nine older adults living with dementia. Findings (Study II) showed that participants living with dementia visited places to a lesser extent than the comparison group. Social and cultural places as well as places for recreation and physical activity tended to be abandoned, in contrast to places for medical care. Overall, they maintained less places and abandoned more places than the group of comparison, and participation in places was associated with occupational gaps for those living without dementia. In Study III, number of places visited, were associated with the perception of participation outside home, but only for the group of persons living without dementia, while risks of falling and for getting lost were associated for those living with dementia. Findings in Study IV showed that familiarity was experienced in a continuous way, as a whole and in repeated occurrences in personal territories that encompassed diverse places and occupations. This thesis contributed new knowledge about how visiting places contributed to our understanding of the conception of participation outside the home of older adults living with and without dementia, including how perceived risks would influence participation. Familiarity was seen as an overarching concept that links place with participation outside the home, as personal territories including places support participation outside the home for older adults living with dementia

Revisiting a relational approach to Electronic music performance

The relationship between people and digital processors in electronic music performance has been a widely discussed topic since the first musical applications of microprocessors at the end of the 70s by the League of Automatic Music Composers. In this dissertation I make the point that this relationship is too often reduced to the role of machine agency with problematic consequences for new applications of micro and nano processors in performance: critical misunderstandings in the chain of mediations between people and machine stem from the lack of understanding of human actors, especially regarding their intuitive processes, and not from the assessment of machine behaviour. Starting from Herbert Simon's theory of bounded rationality, the discussion highlights how this faulty assessment was among the major causes of catastrophic outcomes of recent social phenomena involving new technology. Electronic music performance is also a social phenomenon that falls in this category. To make this point, I analyse two case studies closely related to improvisation that, contrary to more common approaches, successfully integrated new media displaying more attentiveness to human intuitive processes, as they are known today according to modern neuropsychology: the Berlin's Echtzeitmusik and the New London Silence. Once the narrative of the relationship between people and machines shifts to take into account modern notions of intuition and human and nonhuman agency, we open the field for alternative approaches to integrate micro and nano processors in electronic music performance. All the discourse that follows explores these alternative approaches proposing standpoints of observation that draw from relational aesthetics and actor-network theory. The thesis ends with the presentation of a portfolio of relational works exploring the aesthetic of the relationships among a broad variety of actors, providing practice-led examples to look for new narratives to answer the question: how do the relationships between human and nonhuman actors contribute meaningfully to the aesthetic of electronic music performance

Dwelling on ontology - semantic reasoning over topographic maps

The thesis builds upon the hypothesis that the spatial arrangement of topographic features, such as buildings, roads and other land cover parcels, indicates how land is used. The aim is to make this kind of high-level semantic information explicit within topographic data. There is an increasing need to share and use data for a wider range of purposes, and to make data more definitive, intelligent and accessible. Unfortunately, we still encounter a gap between low-level data representations and high-level concepts that typify human qualitative spatial reasoning. The thesis adopts an ontological approach to bridge this gap and to derive functional information by using standard reasoning mechanisms offered by logic-based knowledge representation formalisms. It formulates a framework for the processes involved in interpreting land use information from topographic maps. Land use is a high-level abstract concept, but it is also an observable fact intimately tied to geography. By decomposing this relationship, the thesis correlates a one-to-one mapping between high-level conceptualisations established from human knowledge and real world entities represented in the data. Based on a middle-out approach, it develops a conceptual model that incrementally links different levels of detail, and thereby derives coarser, more meaningful descriptions from more detailed ones. The thesis verifies its proposed ideas by implementing an ontology describing the land use ‘residential area’ in the ontology editor Protégé. By asserting knowledge about high-level concepts such as types of dwellings, urban blocks and residential districts as well as individuals that link directly to topographic features stored in the database, the reasoner successfully infers instances of the defined classes. Despite current technological limitations, ontologies are a promising way forward in the manner we handle and integrate geographic data, especially with respect to how humans conceptualise geographic space

A Formative Evaluation Research Study to Guide the Design of the Categorization Step Practice Utility (MS-CPU) as an Integral Part of Preparation for the GED Mathematics Test Using the Ms. Stephens Algebra Story Problem-solving Tutor (MSASPT)

abstract: The mathematics test is the most difficult test in the GED (General Education Development) Test battery, largely due to the presence of story problems. Raising performance levels of story problem-solving would have a significant effect on GED Test passage rates. The subject of this formative research study is Ms. Stephens’ Categorization Practice Utility (MS-CPU), an example-tracing intelligent tutoring system that serves as practice for the first step (problem categorization) in a larger comprehensive story problem-solving pedagogy that purports to raise the level of story problem-solving performance. During the analysis phase of this project, knowledge components and particular competencies that enable learning (schema building) were identified. During the development phase, a tutoring system was designed and implemented that algorithmically teaches these competencies to the student with graphical, interactive, and animated utilities. Because the tutoring system provides a much more concrete rather than conceptual, learning environment, it should foster a much greater apprehension of a story problem-solving process. With this experience, the student should begin to recognize the generalizability of concrete operations that accomplish particular story problem-solving goals and begin to build conceptual knowledge and a more conceptual approach to the task. During the formative evaluation phase, qualitative methods were used to identify obstacles in the MS-CPU user interface and disconnections in the pedagogy that impede learning story problem categorization and solution preparation. The study was conducted over two iterations where identification of obstacles and change plans (mitigations) produced a qualitative data table used to modify the first version systems (MS-CPU 1.1). Mitigation corrections produced the second version of the MS-CPU 1.2, and the next iteration of the study was conducted producing a second set of obstacle/mitigation tables. Pre-posttests were conducted in each iteration to provide corroboration for the effectiveness of the mitigations that were performed. The study resulted in the identification of a number of learning obstacles in the first version of the MS-CPU 1.1. Their mitigation produced a second version of the MS-CPU 1.2 whose identified obstacles were much less than the first version. It was determined that an additional iteration is needed before more quantitative research is conducted.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Educational Technology 201

Critical Realist Autoethnography in International Scholarships Impact Research: An Illustrative Proposal

International higher education scholarships can be an impactful tool of development. They have demonstrable potential to advance the knowledge, skills, and networks of individuals, who may then be able to use these outcomes in making significant contributions in their workplaces and societies. This evolving theory of change has rightly guided the growing body of academic research and professional evaluations in this area. However, this academic and grey literature tends to limit investigations to the post-completion stage, often focusing on exploring impact through such neoliberal indicators such as economic return, career progress, and links to the foreign country of study. This exploratory scope and methodological-theoretical design demonstrably limit the extent to which scholarships impact may be understood in terms of its emergence or appreciated in terms of its manifestation. I try to respond to this limitation in this paper; I pilot a critical realist autoethnography methodology in explaining how two recent graduate scholarships have impacted me. The study makes three contributions to this area of research and practice. Empirically, it extends support for current research findings in the area by offering the first scholarly account of a Palestinian's scholarship experiences and impact. Drawing on empirical findings, it demonstrates that scholarships impact is a dynamic, contingent, and co-constitutive process. Methodologically, it illuminates the practice of critical realist autoethnography in both exploring and explaining this process of scholarship impact. Practically, it proposes this alternative conceptual-methodological approach may be a powerful tool of evaluating—and simultaneously optimizing—scholarships impact

Investigating factors affecting purchase intention in collaborative consumption: the antecedents of social trust and self-efficacy

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonCollaborative consumption (CC) has transformed the way people consume goods and/or services nowadays. With the information communication technology (ICT), CC platforms connect the users to trade services and products. On the one side of the platform consists with consumers, on the other side of the platform consists with services and/or product providers. The increased popularity of the CC platforms has challenged many traditional incumbents. Several attempts have been made to address the issues, such as the social and economic impacts, drivers of CC, the attributes of the users and characteristics of the CC model. Nevertheless, limited research attention has explored how social trust and self-efficacy could affect people’s intention to participate in collaborative consumption, hence failing to explain how collaborative consumption could be promoted in society to support community building and the resource-saving consumption culture. To address this research gap, this study proposes a comprehensive framework that explains how social trust and self-efficacy drive users’ purchase purchase intentionin CC. The framework also investigates the antecedents of social trust through system quality, shared goals, social referral and network stability, whereas the antecedents of self-efficacy include social referral and shared goals. Employing partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) and importance-performance matrix (IPMA), with data collected from 373 respondents using TaskRabbit, a skill-based exchange collaborative consumption platform. The findings from this study reveal that both social trust and self-efficacy play vital roles in determining user’s purchase intention in CC. Social referral, system quality, and shared goals were found to positively affect social trust and self-efficacy. In particular, shared goals is proven as the strongest antecedent in determining social trust and self-efficacy, highlighting its relevance in promoting collaborative consumption. This study is the first to introduce and empirically test the effects of social referral on individuals’ self-efficacy. The framework developed in the study provides new insights into the understanding of social trust and self-efficacy in CC, leading to practical managerial implications for collaborative consumption platforms and firms

Spatial planning in a complex unpredictable world of change:Towards a proactive co-evolutionary type of planning within the Eurodelta

This book is a message to be humble before truth and reality and to relinquish the idea of controlling them. Planners do not have that much control. In retrospect, it was easy to conclude that in conditions of constant population growth and with an economy in fairly good shape, a linear model of urban development would be relatively easy to maintain: the origin of the idea of certainty and control. The population in the Western world is no longer growing though; on the contrary, many regions and cities are facing population decline. Added to that, the economy is proving quite uncertain as well. The two together impact on spatial development. This all means that we have to consider a fundamentally different perspective on the role of spatial planning and its position in urban and rural development. Instead of planning aiming to achieve controlled development, it might get more out of the various autonomous processes affecting urban and the rural areas. In addition to planners being experts or mediators, we might appreciate planners becoming managers of change, transition managers, adaptive responders and social entrepreneurs, supporting and guiding the various parties within urban and rural areas to find the positions which suit them best.This book acknowledges these new identities and positions, with the planner acting as a manager of change. This book tries to present arguments in support of a discipline of spatial planning which adopts a different stance to the world, a more adaptive stance, and with a keen eye for self-organization processes: an eye for non-linear kinds of planning in a world of change.<br/