The time cost of care

Extensive small scale studies have documented that when people assume the role of assisting a person with impairments or an older person, care activities account for a significant portion of their daily routines. Nevertheless, little research has investigated the problem of measuring the time that carers spend in care-related activities. This paper contrasts two different measures of care time – an estimated average weekly hours question in the 1998 Australian Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers, and diary estimates from the 1997 national Australian Time Use Survey. This study finds that diaries provide information for a more robust estimate, but only after one models the time use patterns in the days of carers to identify care-related activities, which diarists do not necessarily record as care. Such a measure of care time reveals that even people who offer only occasional assistance to a person with impairments tend to spend the equivalent of more than 10 minutes a day providing care. Most caregivers undertake the equivalent of a part-time job to help a friend or family member. Summing the average caregiving time provided by all household members reveals that over a quarter of Australian households caring for an adult or child provide the equivalent of a full-time employee’s labour, and another quarter work between 20 and 39 total weekly hours to provide informal care.Care, unpaid work, time estimation, family and gender roles, informal economic activity

Effects of new and old media on young children’s language acquisition, development, and early literacy : findings from a longitudinal study of Australian children

The current generation of young children has been described as &ldquo;digital natives&rdquo;, having been born into a ubiquitous digital media environment. They are envisaged as educationally independent of the guided interaction provided by &ldquo;digital immigrants&rdquo;: parents and teachers. This paper uses data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) to study children&rsquo;s (aged 0-8 years) development of vocabulary and traditional literacy; access to digital devices; parental mediation practices; the child&rsquo;s use of digital devices as recorded in time-diaries and, finally, the association between patterns of media use and family contexts on children&rsquo;s learning. The analysis shows the importance of the parental context framing media use in acquisition of vocabulary, and suggests that computer (but not games) use is associated with more developed language skills. Independently of these factors raw exposure to television is not harmful to learning. <br /

Digital natives? : new and old media and children’s language acquisition

The current generation of young children has been described as &ldquo;digital natives&rdquo;, having been born into a ubiquitous digital media environment. They are envisaged as educationally independent of the guided interaction provided by &ldquo;digital immigrants&rdquo;: parents and teachers. This paper uses data from the multiples waves of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) to study the effect of various media on children&rsquo;s development of vocabulary and traditional literacy. Previous research has suggested that time spent watching television is associated with less time spent reading, and ultimately, with inferior educational outcomes. The early studies of the &ldquo;new&rdquo; digital media (computers, games consoles, mobile phones, the Internet, etc.) assumed these devices would have similar effects on literacy outcomes to those associated with television. Moreover, these earlier studies relied on poorer measures of time spent in media use and usually did not control for the context of the child&rsquo;s media use. Fortunately, LSAC contains measures of access to digital devices; parental mediation practices; the child&rsquo;s use of digital devices as recorded in time use diaries; direct measures of the child&rsquo;s passive vocabulary; and teachers&rsquo; ratings of the child&rsquo;s literacy. The analysis presented shows the importance of the parental context framing the child&rsquo;s media use in promoting the acquisition of vocabulary, and suggests that computer (but not games) use is associated with more developed language skills. Independently of these factors, raw exposure to television is not harmful to learning, as previously thought.<br /

Patterns of walking for transport and exercise: a novel application of time use data

BACKGROUND: Walking for exercise is a purposeful or structured activity that can be captured relatively easily in surveys focused on leisure time activity. In contrast, walking for transport is an incidental activity that is likely to be missed using these same assessment approaches. Therefore, the purpose of this analysis was to utilize 1997 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey diary data to describe nationally representative patterns of walking for transport and for exercise. METHODS: Household members ≥ 15 years of age were recruited from over 4,550 randomly selected private dwellings in Australia. Time use diaries were collected for two designated days during all four seasons over the calendar year. 3,471 males and 3,776 females (94% household response rate and 84% person response rate) provided 14,315 diary days of data. The raw diary data were coded and summarized into bouts and minutes that included walking for transport and for exercise. RESULTS: Walking for transport was indicated on a higher proportion of days compared to walking for exercise (20 vs. 9%). Based on participant sub-samples ('doers'; those actually performing the activity) walking for transport was performed over 2.3 ± 1.4 bouts/day (12.5 minutes/bout) for a total of ≈28 mins/day and walking for exercise over 1.2 ± 0.5 bouts/day (47 minutes/bout) for a total of ≈56 mins/day. CONCLUSION: Although walking for transport is typically undertaken in multiple brief bouts, accumulated durations approximate public health guidelines for those who report any walking for transport

Optimal testing of multiple hypotheses with common effect direction

We present a theoretical basis for testing related endpoints. Typically, it is known how to construct tests of the individual hypotheses, but not how to combine them into a multiple test procedure that controls the familywise error rate. Using the closure method, we emphasize the role of consonant procedures, from an interpretive as well as a theoretical viewpoint. Surprisingly, even if each intersection test has an optimality property, the overall procedure obtained by applying closure to these tests may be inadmissible. We introduce a new procedure, which is consonant and has a maximin property under the normal model. The results are then applied to PROactive, a clinical trial designed to investigate the effectiveness of a glucose-lowering drug on macrovascular outcomes among patients with type 2 diabete

An Equivalence Scale for Time

This article proposes an ‘equivalence scale for time’ by which information on total working time in both paid and unpaid labour can be derived from information about paid working time and household structure. Different scales are offered for males and females, and an adjustment according to year is also provided. This proposal is based on highly significant and robust Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) analyses of time-use surveys involving 99,137 respondents from 28 western countries

Two-photon time-lapse microscopy of BODIPY-cholesterol reveals anomalous sterol diffusion in chinese hamster ovary cells

Background Cholesterol is an important membrane component, but our knowledge about its transport in cells is sparse. Previous imaging studies using dehydroergosterol (DHE), an intrinsically fluorescent sterol from yeast, have established that vesicular and non-vesicular transport modes contribute to sterol trafficking from the plasma membrane. Significant photobleaching, however, limits the possibilities for in-depth analysis of sterol dynamics using DHE. Co-trafficking studies with DHE and the recently introduced fluorescent cholesterol analog BODIPY-cholesterol (BChol) suggested that the latter probe has utility for prolonged live-cell imaging of sterol transport. Results We found that BChol is very photostable under two-photon (2P)-excitation allowing the acquisition of several hundred frames without significant photobleaching. Therefore, long-term tracking and diffusion measurements are possible. Two-photon temporal image correlation spectroscopy (2P-TICS) provided evidence for spatially heterogeneous diffusion constants of BChol varying over two orders of magnitude from the cell interior towards the plasma membrane, where D ~ 1.3 μm2/s. Number and brightness (N&B) analysis together with stochastic simulations suggest that transient partitioning of BChol into convoluted membranes slows local sterol diffusion. We observed sterol endocytosis as well as fusion and fission of sterol-containing endocytic vesicles. The mobility of endocytic vesicles, as studied by particle tracking, is well described by a model for anomalous subdiffusion on short time scales with an anomalous exponent α ~ 0.63 and an anomalous diffusion constant of Dα = 1.95 x 10-3 μm2/sα. On a longer time scale (t \u3e ~5 s), a transition to superdiffusion consistent with slow directed transport with an average velocity of v ~ 6 x 10-3 μm/s was observed. We present an analytical model that bridges the two regimes and fit this model to vesicle trajectories from control cells and cells with disrupted microtubule or actin filaments. Both treatments reduced the anomalous diffusion constant and the velocity by ~40-50%. Conclusions The mobility of sterol-containing vesicles on the short time scale could reflect dynamic rearrangements of the cytoskeleton, while directed transport of sterol vesicles occurs likely along both, microtubules and actin filaments. Spatially varying anomalous diffusion could contribute to fine-tuning and local regulation of intracellular sterol transport

The social disorganization of eating: a neglected determinant of the Australian epidemic of overweight/obesity

Background: Over the last 150 years, advanced economies have seen the burden of disease shift to non-communicable diseases. The risk factors for these diseases are often co-morbidities associated with unhealthy weight. The prevalence of overweight/obesity among adults in the advanced countries of the English-speaking world is currently more than two-thirds of the adult population. However, while much attention has concentrated on changes in diet that might have provoked this rapid increase in unhealthy weight, changes in patterns of eating have received little attention.Methods: This article examines a sequence of large-scale, time use surveys in urban Australia stretching from 1974 to 2006. The earliest survey in 1974 (conducted by the Cities Commission) was limited to respondents aged between 18 and 69 years, while the later surveys (by the Australian Bureau of Statistics) included all adult (15 years of age or over) living private dwellings. Since time use surveys capture every activity in a day, they contain much information about mealtimes and the patterns of eating. This includes duration of eating, number of eating occasions and the timing of eating. Inferential statistics were used to test the statistical significance of these changes and the size of the effects.Results: The eating patterns of urban Australian adults have changed significantly over a 32-year period and the magnitude of this change is non-trivial. Total average eating time as main activity has diminished by about a third, as have eating occasions, affecting particularly luncheon and evening meals. However, there is evidence that eating as secondary activity that accompanies another activity is now almost as frequent as eating at mealtimes. Moreover, participants seem not to report it.Conclusions: Contemporary urban Australians are spending less time in organized shared meals. These changes have occurred the over same period during which there has been a public health concern about the prevalence of unhealthy weight. Preliminary indications are that societies that emphasize eating as a commensal, shared activity through maintaining definite, generous lunch breaks and prioritizing eating at mealtimes, achieve better public health outcomes. This has implications for a strategy of health promotion, but to be sure of this we need to study countries with these more socially organized eating patterns

Role of the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus in neuroendocrine responses to daylength in the golden hamster

Daylength regulates reproduction in golden hamsters through a mechanism which involves the pineal indoleamine, melatonin. Retinal input to the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus (SCN) and sympathetic innervation of the pineal are critical to the inhibition of reproduction by short photoperiods. Since the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN) receives extensive input from the SCN in the rat, and may influence autonomic function via its brainstem and spinal cord projections, we studied the role of this nucleus in photoperiodically induced gonadal regression in the hamster. Bilateral electrolytic destruction of either the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) or suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus completely blocked testicular regression induced by either blinding or exposure to short days (10L:14D). Lesions in the retrochiasmatic hypothalamus (RCA) which may have interrupted the pathway of previously identified efferents from the SCN to the PVN were also effective in preventing short day-induced gonadal regression. Pineal melatonin content was measured in intact and lesioned hamsters sacrificed 3-5 h before lights on, at the time of the expected nocturnal peak. While SCN and RCA lesions significantly reduced pineal melatonin content, PVN lesions were still more effective in this regard. We conclude that the hamster's neuroendocrine response to photoperiod is mediated by neural pathways which include retinohypothalamic input to the SCN and efferents from this nucleus to the PVN which travel dorsocaudally through the retrochiasmatic area of the hypothalamus. Effectiveness of lesions restricted to the PVN suggests that direct projections from the PVN to spinal autonomic centers convey photoperiodic information which regulates pineal, and hence gonadal, function.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/24726/1/0000148.pd