The millennial mum:technology use by new mothers

Becoming a mother presents a woman with new challenges and a need to access new sources of information. This work considers the increase in the use of online parenting support as the first group of millennials become parents. Initial results from a survey comparing the use of technology pre and post the experience of childbirth is presented. The survey reveals that mothers are likely to increase the time they spend online and are strongly motivated by seeking social contact. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this survey for healthcare professionals wishing to give information and support through online media and suggests how HCI professionals can become involved in this work

A reasonable benchmarking frontier using DEA : an incentive scheme to improve efficiency in public hospitals

There exists research relating management concepts with productivity measurement methods that offers useful solutions for improving management control in the public sector. Within this sphere, we connect agency theory with efficiency analysis and describe how to define an incentives scheme that can be applied in the public sector to monitor the efficiency and productivity of managers. To fulfill the main objective of this research, we propose an iterative process for determining what we define as a ‘reasonable frontier’, a concept that provides the foundation required to establish the incentive scheme for the managers. Our ‘reasonable frontier’ has the following properties: i) it detects the presence of outliers, ii) it proposes a procedure to establish the influence introduced by extreme observations, and iii) it sorts out the problem of data masking. The proposed method is applied to a sample of hospitals taken from the public network of the Spanish health service. The results obtained confirm the applicability of the proposal made. Summing up, we define and apply a useful method, combining aspects of agency theory and efficiency analysis, which is of interest to those public authorities trying to design effective incentive schemes which influence the decision making of the public managers

Prioritized Metric Structures and Embedding

Metric data structures (distance oracles, distance labeling schemes, routing schemes) and low-distortion embeddings provide a powerful algorithmic methodology, which has been successfully applied for approximation algorithms \cite{llr}, online algorithms \cite{BBMN11}, distributed algorithms \cite{KKMPT12} and for computing sparsifiers \cite{ST04}. However, this methodology appears to have a limitation: the worst-case performance inherently depends on the cardinality of the metric, and one could not specify in advance which vertices/points should enjoy a better service (i.e., stretch/distortion, label size/dimension) than that given by the worst-case guarantee. In this paper we alleviate this limitation by devising a suit of {\em prioritized} metric data structures and embeddings. We show that given a priority ranking $(x_1,x_2,\ldots,x_n)$ of the graph vertices (respectively, metric points) one can devise a metric data structure (respectively, embedding) in which the stretch (resp., distortion) incurred by any pair containing a vertex $x_j$ will depend on the rank $j$ of the vertex. We also show that other important parameters, such as the label size and (in some sense) the dimension, may depend only on $j$. In some of our metric data structures (resp., embeddings) we achieve both prioritized stretch (resp., distortion) and label size (resp., dimension) {\em simultaneously}. The worst-case performance of our metric data structures and embeddings is typically asymptotically no worse than of their non-prioritized counterparts.Comment: To appear at STOC 201

“Sticking jewels in your life”: Exploring women’s strategies for negotiating an acceptable quality of life with multiple sclerosis

This study explored women’s strategies for living with multiple sclerosis (MS). Twenty-seven women were interviewed, most of whom had lived with MS for more than five years. Analysis of the semi-structured interviews followed the interpretative phenomenological approach. The women portrayed living with MS as an ongoing process of negotiation, and described gaining quality of life through looking after their health; maintaining a familiar self-image, particularly through meaningful occupations, and adapting pre-illness skills and interests to their changing levels of physical functioning; actively valuing positive life experiences, including finding benefits in adversity; clarifying values, priorities and philosophy of life; and maintaining mutual, caring relationships. Some regarded MS as presenting opportunities for personal growth. Without minimizing the very substantial difficulties that MS presents, the findings suggest that well-being derives from both managing the illness and also embracing life’s wider experiences, including change and growth. Implications for rehabilitation and counseling professionals are considered

Black bream in the Blackwood: 2005-06 recreational fishing creel survey

The status of the recreational fishery in the Blackwood Estuary, south-western Australia, was quantitatively assessed via a boat-based creel survey from September 2005 to August 2006. Sampling was stratified by both season and day-type and, in total, was conducted on 144 days over the 12-month period. Daily sampling consisted of a count of number of anglers throughout the estuary (for fishing effort), and surveys of catches by boat-based and shore-based recreational anglers