Grandchild Care, Intergenerational Transfers, and Grandparents’ Labor Supply

Published in Review of Economics of the Household https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-013-9221-x</p

Comparison between observed children's tooth brushing habits and those reported by mothers

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Information bias can occur in epidemiological studies and compromise scientific outcomes, especially when evaluating information given by a patient regarding their own health. The oral habits of children reported by their mothers are commonly used to evaluate tooth brushing practices and to estimate fluoride intake by children. The aim of the present study was to compare observed tooth-brushing habits of young children using fluoridated toothpaste with those reported by mothers.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A sample of 201 mothers and their children (aged 24-48 months) from Montes Claros, Brazil, took part in a cross-sectional study. At day-care centres, the mothers answered a self-administered questionnaire on their child's tooth-brushing habits. The structured questionnaire had six items with two to three possible answers. An appointment was then made with each mother/child pair at day-care centres. The participants were asked to demonstrate the tooth-brushing practice as usually performed at home. A trained examiner observed and documented the procedure. Observed tooth brushing and that reported by mothers were compared for overall agreement using Cohen's Kappa coefficient and the McNemar test.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Cohen's Kappa values comparing mothers' reports and tooth brushing observed by the examiner ranged from poor-to-good (0.00-0.75). There were statistically significant differences between observed tooth brushing habits and those reported by mothers (p < 0.001). When observed by the examiner, the frequencies of dentifrice dispersed on all bristles (35.9%), children who brushed their teeth alone (33.8%) and those who did not rinse their mouths during brushing (42.0%) were higher than those reported by the mothers (12.1%, 18.9% and 6.5%, respectively; p < 0.001).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>In general, there was low agreement between observed tooth brushing and mothers' reports. Moreover, the different methods of estimation resulted in differences in the frequencies of tooth brushing habits, indicative of reporting bias. Data regarding children's tooth-brushing habits as reported by mothers should be considered with caution in epidemiological surveys on fluoridated dentifrice use and the risk of dental fluorosis.</p

Who pays for home care? A study of nationally representative data on disabled older Americans

Background: We examine who pays for services that support disabled older Americans at home. We consider both personal sources (e.g., out-of-pocket payment, family members) and publicly funded programs (e.g., Medicaid) as sources of payment for services. We examine how the funding mix for home care services is related to older people’s economic resources, needs for care, and other socio-demographic characteristics. Methods: Our sample consists of 11,725 person-years from the 1989, 1994, 1999, and 2004 waves of the National Long-Term Care Survey. Two-part regression analyses were performed to model hours of care received from each payer. “Random effects” and “fixed effects” estimation yielded similar results. Results: About six in ten caregivers (63 %) providing home care services are paid by personal sources alone. By contrast, 28 % receive payment from publicly funded programs alone, and 9 % from a combination of personal and public program sources. Older people with family incomes over 75,000 dollars per year receive 8.5 more hours of home care overall than those in the lowest income category (less than 15,000 dollars). While the funding mix for home care services is strongly related to older people’s economic resources, in all income groups at least 65 % of services are provided by caregivers paid in whole or in part from personal sources. In fact, almost all (97 %) home care received by those with family incomes over 75,000 dollars per year are financed by personal sources alone. Conclusions: We outline the implications that heavy reliance on personally financed services and economic disparities in overall services use has for disabled older Americans and their families

Long-term care of the disabled elderly: do children increase caregiving by spouses?

Intergenerational transfers, Families, Long-term care, Disability,

A near-instantaneous and non-invasive erasure design technique to protect sensitive data stored in secure SRAMs

International audienceOn-chip memories, and in particular SRAMs, are among the most critical components in terms of data security because they might contain sensitive data such as secret keys. Whenever a tampering event is detected, one should be able to erase efficiently and rapidly the full content of a memory holding such sensitive data, but current solutions based on simple power-off leadto very long erasure times. In this paper, we present a non-invasive design technique based on an innovative mechanism to remove electric charges from SRAM bitcells still powered on, beforerefreshing them with a new content not correlated with the previous one. The particularity of this novel hardware countermeasure is to be natively compatible with any SRAM circuit designed from pushed-rule foundry bitcells. We have designed and characterized an 8kB SRAM in 22nm FD-SOI process technology exploiting the proposed security strategy demonstrating an erase operation accomplished in the nanosecond time scale (versus 295$\mu$s with the conventional power-off solution) at the cost of an additional area of less than 5%. We have also shown that our solution is more efficient than a solution without prior erasure consisting in writing identical data to all memory addresses in a single clock cycle (1 ns). The use of the latter drops the ratio of zeroized addresses at 92%, while increasing the operating energy consumption by 2.1x under nominal operating conditions