The effectiveness of counselling with older people: results of a systematic review

In 2003 the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) commissioned a systematic review of the research evidence relating to counselling older people. This paper reports on some of the findings of this review, particularly those which address the effectiveness of counselling with this population. Electronic searches of the research literature spanned six databases and were supplemented by hand-searches of reference lists and key journals, along with an extensive search of the “grey” literature. The location of papers testing interventions which fall within a definition of counselling set out by the BACP, with samples aged 50 years of age or above resulted in the inclusion of 47 relevant studies. Studies investigated a variety of mental health problems in older people, particularly depression, anxiety, dementia and the psychological impact of physical conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Of the 47 studies, eight tested counselling as a generic treatment, 15 tested cognitive behavioural therapy, 13 tested reminiscence therapy, and 11 tested various other specific approaches. The review concluded that counselling is efficacious with older people, particularly in the treatment of anxiety and depression and outcomes are consistent with those found in younger populations. Evidence as to the efficacy of counselling interventions in the treatment of dementia is weak

Holding strategies in a bus-route model

A major source of delays in public transportation is the clustering instability, which causes late buses to become progressively later while the buses trailing it become progressively earlier. In this paper, we study this instability and how to neutralize it using the common practices of holding and schedule slack. Starting with an on-time route, we delay one or more buses at a single stop, and determine how these delays grow over time. We compare the effects of two different types of holding on the stability of the system, and briefly investigate how our results change with the use of timepoints.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures v2 has been moderately copyedited, but has no new content Paper has been submitted to Physical Review

The Future of Synthetic Securitization: A Comment on Bell & Dawson

Datorseende är ett snabbt växande, tvärvetenskapligt forskningsområde vars tillämpningar tar en allt mer framskjutande roll i dagens samhälle. Med ett ökat intresse för datorseende ökar också behovet av att kunna kontrollera kameror kopplade till datorseende system. Vid Linköpings tekniska högskola, på avdelningen för datorseende, har ramverket EDSDK++ utvecklats för att fjärrstyra digitala kameror tillverkade av Canon Inc. Ramverket är mycket omfattande och innehåller en stor mängd funktioner och inställningsalternativ. Systemet är därför till stor del ännu relativt oprövat. Detta examensarbete syftar till att utveckla ett demonstratorsystem till EDSDK++ i form av ett enkelt active vision system, som med hjälp av ansiktsdetektion i realtid styr en kameratilt, samt en kamera monterad på tilten, till att följa, zooma in och fokusera på ett ansikte eller en grupp av ansikten. Ett krav var att programbiblioteket OpenCV skulle användas för ansiktsdetektionen och att EDSDK++ skulle användas för att kontrollera kameran. Dessutom skulle ett API för att kontrollera kameratilten utvecklas. Under utvecklingsarbetet undersöktes bl.a. olika metoder för ansiktsdetektion. För att förbättra prestandan användes multipla ansiktsdetektorer, som med hjälp av multitrådning avsöker en bild parallellt från olika vinklar. Såväl experimentella som teoretiska ansatser gjordes för att bestämma de parametrar som behövdes för att kunna reglera kamera och kameratilt. Resultatet av arbetet blev en demonstrator, som uppfyllde samtliga krav.Computer vision is a rapidly growing, interdisciplinary field whose applications are taking an increasingly prominent role in today's society. With an increased interest in computer vision there is also an increasing need to be able to control cameras connected to computer vision systems. At the division of computer vision, at Linköping University, the framework EDSDK++ has been developed to remotely control digital cameras made by Canon Inc. The framework is very comprehensive and contains a large amount of features and configuration options. The system is therefore largely still relatively untested. This thesis aims to develop a demonstrator to EDSDK++ in the form of a simple active vision system, which utilizes real-time face detection in order to control a camera tilt, and a camera mounted on the tilt, to follow, zoom in and focus on a face or a group of faces. A requirement was that the OpenCV library would be used for face detection and EDSDK++ would be used to control the camera. Moreover, an API to control the camera tilt was to be developed. During development, different methods for face detection were investigated. In order to improve performance, multiple, parallel face detectors using multithreading, were used to scan an image from different angles. Both experimental and theoretical approaches were made to determine the parameters needed to control the camera and camera tilt. The project resulted in a fully functional demonstrator, which fulfilled all requirements