Code Club at the MPI for Psychiatry

At the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry (MPIP) people with different programming skills, from wet-lab scientists to bioinformaticians, work together. Also, quite a lot of PhD students who haven't received a formal education in computer science perform primarily computational work. After more than a one and half year break, we revived the Code Club at the MPIP with monthly meetings. There we hold tutorials about programming topics, discuss problems encountered in the last month and find partners for code review. Our main goal is to increase the quality of the research software and scripts developed and used for our research at the MPIP. In the talk, I will give an overview about our motivation and the implementation of the Code Club

The Impact of the Relationship and Family Status in Retirement Age on Women’s Incorporation of Technical Devices in Their Everyday Life

Older people and specifically women at retirement age are typically not associated with technological competence. However, some of them are avid users and little is known about the ways they incorporate technical devices in their everyday life. In this study, we depict how women’s relationship and family status at retirement age have an influence on their technology usage. Having interviewed women between 65 and 75 years old, we describe three types of lifestyles where our analysis follows the women’s approach to technical devices. The ‘GrandMother’ focusses on her family and local community, the ‘Half Couple’ emphasizes her husband and marriage and the ‘Independent’ concentrates on herself. Generally, the smart phone is used as an extension of their personal lifestyle and routines of everyday life: the GrandMothers direct their digital technology usage inwards, the Independents outwards and the Half Couples are split between those who use it sideways or not at all. For the GrandMothers, their technical devices are a facilitator of their daily duties and existing ties whereas the Independents have a strong self-motivated interest to use social media as an entertainment platform and as an extension of their interests. For the Half Couples, their mobile phones are either nice to have or simply unnecessary. Our study adds to the limited literature on older women’s technology usage and presents an understanding of how technologies are incorporated in a certain life phase