The social relationships of three generations identified as disabled in childhood

Social isolation and loneliness have received substantial attention for their impacts on well-being and mortality. Both social isolation and loneliness can be experienced by anyone across the life course, but some are more vulnerable than others. One risk factor for poorer social outcomes is disability. We draw on data from three longitudinal studies, the National Child Development Study (Great Britain), Next Steps (England) and the Millennium Cohort Study (UK) to compare social relationships across three generations, born between 1958 and 2000/02 in countries of the UK. We examine social relationships at different life stages and how they differ between those who were and were not identified as disabled when they were teenagers. Adjusting for family background and educational attainment, which are associated with both disability and poorer social outcomes, we identify the long-term consequences of childhood disability for risks of social isolation among the older cohort. For the younger cohorts, we evaluate early indications of such patterns. We find substantially smaller intimate and friendship networks, and lower perceived social support among 50-year-olds who were disabled in childhood. Today’s disabled youth and teenagers also experience greater social isolation and risks of loneliness than their non-disabled contemporaries

The Achilles tendon total rupture score : a study of responsiveness, internal consistency and convergent validity on patients with acute Achilles tendon ruptures

Background The Achilles tendon Total Rupture Score was developed by a research group in 2007 in response to the need for a patient reported outcome measure for this patient population. Beyond this original development paper, no further validation studies have been published. Consequently the purpose of this study was to evaluate internal consistency, convergent validity and responsiveness of this newly developed patient reported outcome measure within patients who have sustained an isolated acute Achilles tendon rupture. Methods Sixty-four eligible patients with an acute rupture of their Achilles tendon completed the Achilles tendon Total Rupture Score alongside two further patient reported outcome measures (Disability Rating Index and EQ 5D). These were completed at baseline, six weeks, three months, six months and nine months post injury. The Achilles tendon Total Rupture Score was evaluated for internal consistency, using Cronbach's alpha, convergent validity, through correlation analysis and responsiveness, by analysing floor and ceiling effects and calculating its relative efficiency in comparison to the Disability Rating Index and EQ 5D scores. Results The Achilles tendon Total Rupture Score demonstrated high internal consistency (Cronbachs alpha > 0.8) and correlated significantly (p < 0.001) with the Disability Rating Index at five time points (pre-injury, six weeks, three, six and nine months) with correlation coefficients between -0.5 and -0.9. However, the confidence intervals were wide. Furthermore, the ability of the new score to detect clinically important changes over time (responsiveness) was shown to be greater than the Disability Rating Index and EQ 5D. Conclusions A universally accepted outcome measure is imperative to allow comparisons to be made across practice. This is the first study to evaluate aspects of validity of this newly developed outcome measure, outside of the developing centre. The ATRS demonstrated high internal consistency and responsiveness, with limited convergent validity. This research provides further support for the use of this outcome measure, however further research is required to advocate its universal use in patients with acute Achilles tendon ruptures. Such areas include inter-rater reliability and research to determine the minimally clinically important difference between scores

Intention and motor representation in purposive action

Are there distinct roles for intention and motor representation in explaining the purposiveness of action? Standard accounts of action assign a role to intention but are silent on motor representation. The temptation is to suppose that nothing need be said here because motor representation is either only an enabling condition for purposive action or else merely a variety of intention. This paper provides reasons for resisting that temptation. Some motor representations, like intentions, coordinate actions in virtue of representing outcomes; but, unlike intentions, motor representations cannot feature as premises or conclusions in practical reasoning. This implies that motor representation has a distinctive role in explaining the purposiveness of action. It also gives rise to a problem: were the roles of intention and motor representation entirely independent, this would impair effective action. It is therefore necessary to explain how intentions interlock with motor representations. The solution, we argue, is to recognise that the contents of intentions can be partially determined by the contents of motor representations. Understanding this content-determining relation enables better understanding how intentions relate to actions

Assessment of Psychophysiological Differences of West Point Cadets and Civilian Controls Immersed within a Virtual Environment

Abstract. An important question for ecologically valid virtual environments is whether cohort characteristics affect immersion. If a method for assessing a cer-tain neurocognitive capacity (e.g. attentional processing) is adapted to a cohort other than the one that was used for the initial normative distribution, data ob-tained in the new cohort may not be reflective of the neurocognitive capacity in question. We assessed the psychophysiological impact of different levels of immersion upon persons from two cohorts: 1) civilian university students; and 2) West Point Cadets. Cadets were found to have diminished startle eyeblink amplitude compared with civilians, which may reflect that cadets experienced less negative affect during the scenario in general. Further, heart rate data re-vealed that Cadets had significantly lower heart rates than Civilians in the “low ” but not “high ” immersion condition. This suggests that “low ” immersion conditions may not have the ecological validity necessary to evoke consistent affect across cohorts

Multicore-Aware Reuse Distance Analysis

This paper presents and validates methods to extend reuse distance analysis of application locality characteristics to shared-memory multicore platforms by accounting for invalidation-based cache-coherence and inter-core cache sharing. Existing reuse distance analysis methods track the number of distinct addresses referenced between reuses of the same address by a given thread, but do not model the effects of data references by other threads. This paper shows several methods to keep reuse stacks consistent so that they account for invalidations and cache sharing, either as references arise in a simulated execution or at synchronization points. These methods are evaluated against a Simics-based coherent cache simulator running several OpenMP and transaction-based benchmarks. The results show that adding multicore-awareness substantially improves the ability of reuse distance analysis to model cache behavior, reducing the error in miss ratio prediction (relative to cache simulation for a specific cache size) by an average of 69% for per-core caches and an average of 84% for shared caches