The challenge of an ageing electorate: changes in the formation of social policy in Europe?

Population ageing in Europe is likely to lead to changes in the provision of pensions and health services. Retirement ages, work practices and housing needs will be affected but changes are likely to be mediated via new technology and hence cannot be exactly predicted. While the ageing population is usually projected in terms of dependency or support ratios, in this paper projections are for older people as a proportion of eligible voters. American experience of the growing power of the elder's lobby is related to the European context, with emphasis on the growth of a framework for lobbying activity in a European context. While a mass movement of older people is even less likely in Europe than in the USA, public choice theory would suggest that as the numbers of older people rises towards 50% of eligible voters, politicians and policy makers will change their policies even without a united elderly bloc vote. There is also empirical evidence to suggest that policy makers perceive elderly people as a homogeneous, and hence a more powerful, bloc than their real divisions in terms of age, class, ethnicity and gender might indicate. The European situation differs from the American in that the proportion of older voters is very much higher over all and will be even higher in retirement areas and in areas of out migration. The development of a Europe of the regions may allow older peoples' pressure groups to have greater influence in Brussels, by-passing their national governments. They may therefore be more effective than at present appears likely when the situation is looked at from a national perspective. Older women who, in some countries will make up 30% of the potential electorate, may come to have a growing influence on social policy as they unite with younger women to improve access to equal European citizenship for caregivers and those who receive care

Local culture, globalisation and policy outcomes: an example from long term care.

It is argued that the impact of globalisation and global ideologies on social policy can depend on the ways that local cultures reinforce or combat global ideologies and pressures. The paper discusses the importance of local policy factors in shaping responses to globalisation, taking as an example the way in which global forces have affected outcomes for older people needing long term care in one marginalised province of a rich country. Local political, economic and sociocultural factors can reinforce global pressures for neo liberal policies and rising individualism and overwhelm the global ideologies of democracy and human rights (including gender rights and anti ageism) that might lead to better outcomes for older people and their caregivers. In the New Brunswick province of Canada, traditional cultural values can be seen as one factor allowing politicians to make suboptimal social policy choices.

Recycling the evidence: Different approaches to the reanalysis of elite life histories

The chapter considers the re-analysis of a specific data set, the life histories of a select group of pioneers of geriatric medicine collected by Professor Margot Jefferys' in 1991. It considers what these interviews demonstrate about changing attitudes to family and community amongst one particular group of professionals. The chapter concludes that to some extent the interviewees' professional identity and ability to develop geriatrics as a specialty in its own right depended on their recognition of family and community. However, in relation to policy, community and family are terms which have much changed in their meanings over the last twenty years and the interviews require reading with these changing contexts in mind

Confocal microscopy

Chapter focusing on confocal microscopy. A confocal microscope is one in which the illumination is confined to a small volume in the specimen, the detection is confined to the same volume and the image is built up by scanning this volume over the specimen, either by moving the beam of light over the specimen or by displacing the specimen relative to a stationary beam. The chief advantage of this type of microscope is that it gives a greatly enhanced discrimination of depth relative to conventional microscopes. Commercial systems appeared in the 1980s and, despite their high cost, the world market for them is probably between 500 and 1000 instruments per annum, mainly because of their use in biomedical research in conjunction with fluorescent labelling methods. There are many books and review articles on this subject ( e.g. Pawley ( 2006) , Matsumoto( 2002), Wilson (1990) ). The purpose of this chapter is to provide an introduction to optical and engineering aspects that may be o f interest to biomedical users of confocal microscopy

ARTMAP-DS: Pattern Discrimination by Discounting Similarities

ARTMAP-DS extends fuzzy ARTMAP to discriminate between similar inputs by discounting similarities. When two or more candidate category representations are activated by a given input, features that the candidate representations have in common are ignored prior to determining the winning category. Simulations illustrate the network's ability to recognize similar inputs, such as STAR and START, in a noisy environment.National Science Foundation (IRI-94-01659); Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409, N00014-95-1-0657

Segmentation ART: A Neural Network for Word Recognition from Continuous Speech

The Segmentation ATIT (Adaptive Resonance Theory) network for word recognition from a continuous speech stream is introduced. An input sequeuce represents phonemes detected at a preproccesing stage. Segmentation ATIT is trained rapidly, and uses a fast-learning fuzzy ART modules, top-down expectation, and a spatial representation of temporal order. The network performs on-line identification of word boundaries, correcting an initial hypothesis if subsequent phonemes are incompatible with a previous partition. Simulations show that the system's segmentation perfonnance is comparable to that of TRACE, and the ability to segment a number of difficult phrases is also demonstrated.National Science Foundation (NSF-IRI-94-01659); Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409, N00014-95-1-0G57

Owen Falls: electricity in a developing country

Goldsmiths' and Silversmiths' company of Londo

To Help the Helpless

A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements.for the Degree of Master of Arts Degree in Communication by Barbara Gail Wilson on October 12, 1984