Australian digital inclusion index: discussion paper

One in five Australians, around 4 million people, are not online and not able to take advantage of the education, health and social benefits of being connected. Lack of digital connectivity has negative consequences for people’s social and economic participation, as well as their access to services and information. In a digital age, digital inclusion of the populace is also important to our nation’s economic and social performance. Digital inclusion is a complex and challenging problem for policy-makers, practitioners, and researchers. While the digital divide has narrowed, it has deepened, and as the internet increasingly becomes the default medium for communicating, informing and interacting, the disadvantages of being offline increase. Digital inclusion is not just about computers, the internet or even technology. It is about using online and mobile technologies as channels to improve skills, to enhance quality of life, to drive education and to promote economic wellbeing across all elements of society. Digital inclusion is fundamentally about social and economic participation. Access and affordability can present barriers to digital inclusion. However, an individual’s digital engagement is also affected by digital literacy (skills and ability), whether a person can see potential benefits of engagement and motivation and attitude, including concerns about safety and security. The Australian Digital Inclusion Index will be used to measure the extent of digital inclusion in Australia. • Telstra, the Swinburne Institute for Social Research and the Centre for Social Impact have joined forces to develop a new national measure of digital inclusion – the Australian Digital Inclusion Index. This discussion paper sets out our general approach to developing the Index, its objectives and key themes and provides examples of indicators that may form the basis of the index. The paper aims to encourage potential users of the index to provide feedback and suggestions to guide the development of the index to make it as robust and useful as possible

Research study: child marriage in India: situational analysis in three states

"By examining both secondary sources as well as primary data, this study explored attitudes and beliefs regarding child marriage within communities across three Indian states, as well as attitudes and practices of key institutional actors such as police personnel, government departments, community workers and Panchayat members.

Surrogate motherhood- ethical or commercial

"This report on Surrogate ―Motherhood: Ethical or Commercial‖ has six chapters including an introduction, a Literature Review and the Conclusion. Chapter II discusses the literature available on surrogacy both national and international documents and also analyses surrogacy arrangements across the globe, the legal issues so far, etc. at length. Chapter III chronicles the profile and plight of the surrogate mother before and after surrogacy and aims at analysing her status during the entire process taking into consideration each and every aspect of the surrogacy arrangement. Chapter IVlooks at the Commissioning Parents and aims to give an overview of the profile of the commissioning parents, their perspectives and views regarding surrogacy arrangement in India and a detailed analysis of different factors in surrogacy. This chapter also deals with the surrogacy clinics, primarily falling back on the detailed observations of the researchers during field visits as the medical practitioners concerned were unwilling to divulge information about their modus operandi. The last chapter consists of a conclusion on the existing situation of surrogate motherhood in India and recommendations for the formulation of a strong legal framework to address the issue of surrogacy in India.

THE IMPACT OF PLACEMENT IN SPECIAL CARE UNIT SETTINGS ON THE WELLBEING OF YOUNG PEOPLE AND THEIR FAMILIES

The Special Residential Services Board, established under Part 11 of the Children Act 2001, commissioned the Centre for Social and Educational Research to carry out this study into the Impact of Placement in Special Care Unit Settings on the Wellbeing of Young People and Their Families. Special Care Units are a relatively new part of the child care system in Ireland. They are facilities that provide a secure environment for young people who require protection because of a real and substantial risk to their health, safety, development or welfare. At the time the work for this report was carried out, all children placed in Special Care Units, had to be placed there on a High Court Order. When Part 3 of the Children Act 2001, is fully implemented, the process for obtaining a Special Care Order will be through the District Court. The Special Residential Services Board will be required to give a view to the Court on the appropriateness of any such Order. As Special Care Units have been in existence for a relatively short period of time, research in this area has been limited. This report therefore represents an important contribution to our knowledge of special care and the impact of these placements on young people. One of the functions of the Special Residential Services Board is to carry out a programme of research into specialist residential services, and we intend to develop a body of knowledge in this field. We would like to thank the researchers Dr Lorna Ryan, Mr Niall Hanlon and Ms Louise Riley and Ms Audrey Warren for her contributions to the final report. We would also like to thank the staff of the units and our colleagues across the Health Services Executive. Most importantly we would like to thank the children and families who took part in the research

The health benefits of a targeted cash transfer: The UK Winter Fuel Payment.

Each year, the UK records 25,000 or more excess winter deaths, primarily among the elderly. A key policy response is the "Winter Fuel Payment" (WFP), a labelled but unconditional cash transfer to households with a member above the female state pension age. The WFP has been shown to raise fuel spending among eligible households. We examine the causal effect of the WFP on health outcomes, including self-reports of chest infection, measured hypertension, and biomarkers of infection and inflammation. We find a robust, 6 percentage point reduction in the incidence of high levels of serum fibrinogen. Reductions in other disease markers point to health benefits, but the estimated effects are less robust

Open source intelligence, open social intelligence and privacy by design

Ponència presentada a European Conference on Social Intelligence (ECSI-2014)OSINT stands for Open Source Intelligence, (O)SI for (Open) Social Intelligence, PbD for Privacy by Design. The CAPER project has built an OSINT solution oriented to the prevention of organized crime. How to balance freedom and security? This position paper describes a way to embed the legal and ethical issues raised by the General Data Reform Package (GDRP) in Europe into this kind of surveillance platforms. It focuses on the indirect strategy to flesh out Privacy by Design principles (PbD) through Semantic Web Regulatory Models (SWRM). Institutional design, self-regulatory systems, and the possibility to build up a meta-level rule of law are discussed

Analysis of four studies in a comparative framework reveals: health linkage consent rates on British cohort studies higher than on UK household panel surveys

Background: A number of cohort studies and longitudinal household panel studies in Great Britain have asked for consent to link survey data to administrative health data. We explore commonalities and differences in the process of collecting consent, achieved consent rates and biases in consent with respect to socio-demographic, socio-economic and health characteristics. We hypothesise that British cohort studies which are rooted within the health sciences achieve higher consent rates than the UK household longitudinal studies which are rooted within the social sciences. By contrast, the lack of a specific health focus in household panel studies means there may be less selectivity in consent, in particular, with respect to health characteristics. Methods: Survey designs and protocols for collecting informed consent to health record linkage on two British cohort studies and two UK household panel studies are systematically compared. Multivariate statistical analysis is then performed on information from one cohort and two household panel studies that share a great deal of the data linkage protocol but vary according to study branding, survey design and study population. Results: We find that consent is higher in the British cohort studies than in the UK household panel studies, and is higher the more health-focused the study is. There are no systematic patterns of consent bias across the studies and where effects exist within a study or study type they tend to be small. Minority ethnic groups will be underrepresented in record linkage studies on the basis of all three studies. Conclusions: Systematic analysis of three studies in a comparative framework suggests that the factors associated with consent are idiosyncratic to the study. Analysis of linked health data is needed to establish whether selectivity in consent means the resulting research databases suffer from any biases that ought to be considered