A qualitative study of the views of residents with dementia, their relatives and staff about work practice in long-term care settings

Background: Most people living in 24-hour care settings have dementia, and little is known about what makes long-term care a positive experience for them.Method: This carer-led qualitative study examined working practices in 24-hour long-term care-settings, including hospitals, nursing and residential homes, with the aim of finding out and making recommendations about such settings. Using semi-structured interviews, managers, nurses and care assistants were asked about work practices, such as how they coped with difficult behavior, about shifts, staffing levels, staff retention and training. Relatives of residents with dementia were asked about their role and perceptions of the care provided, and residents were asked for their opinions of their care.Results: Staff reported that residents presented with increasingly challenging behavior compared to the past, and that sometimes staffing levels and skills were inadequate. Of all the settings, hospitals had the most problems with staffing levels and retention, staff-relative relationships and staff support systems. Relatives saw their own role as positive. People with dementia of varying severity could usefully evaluate some of the services they received.Discussion: Dementia-specific training and education of staff in all long-term care-settings, including induction, should address the management of problem behavior in dementia and thereby improve staff fulfilment and relatives' satisfaction. The long-stay hospital may not be appropriate as a "home for life" for those with dementia, and we recommend that long-stay care settings should be able to cater flexibly for a range of resident needs

Modeling user mobility via user psychological and geographical behaviors towards point of-interest recommendation

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. The pervasive employments of Location-based Social Network call for precise and personalized Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation to predict which places the users prefer. Modeling user mobility, as an important component of understanding user preference, plays an essential role in POI recommendation. However, existing methods mainly model user mobility through analyzing the check-in data and formulating a distribution without considering why a user checks in at a specific place from psychological perspective. In this paper, we propose a POI recommendation algorithm modeling user mobility by considering check-in data and geographical information. Specifically, with check-in data, we propose a novel probabilistic latent factor model to formulate user psychological behavior from the perspective of utility theory, which could help reveal the inner information underlying the comparative choice behaviors of users. Geographical behavior of all the historical check-ins captured by a power law distribution is then combined with probabilistic latent factor model to form the POI recommendation algorithm. Extensive evaluation experiments conducted on two real-world datasets confirm the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art methods

Closed-Form Bayesian Inferences for the Logit Model via Polynomial Expansions

Articles in Marketing and choice literatures have demonstrated the need for incorporating person-level heterogeneity into behavioral models (e.g., logit models for multiple binary outcomes as studied here). However, the logit likelihood extended with a population distribution of heterogeneity doesn't yield closed-form inferences, and therefore numerical integration techniques are relied upon (e.g., MCMC methods). We present here an alternative, closed-form Bayesian inferences for the logit model, which we obtain by approximating the logit likelihood via a polynomial expansion, and then positing a distribution of heterogeneity from a flexible family that is now conjugate and integrable. For problems where the response coefficients are independent, choosing the Gamma distribution leads to rapidly convergent closed-form expansions; if there are correlations among the coefficients one can still obtain rapidly convergent closed-form expansions by positing a distribution of heterogeneity from a Multivariate Gamma distribution. The solution then comes from the moment generating function of the Multivariate Gamma distribution or in general from the multivariate heterogeneity distribution assumed. Closed-form Bayesian inferences, derivatives (useful for elasticity calculations), population distribution parameter estimates (useful for summarization) and starting values (useful for complicated algorithms) are hence directly available. Two simulation studies demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.Comment: 30 pages, 2 figures, corrected some typos. Appears in Quantitative Marketing and Economics vol 4 (2006), no. 2, 173--20

Photophysics of cage/guest assemblies : photoinduced electron transfer between a coordination cage containing osmium(II) luminophores, and electron-deficient bound guests in the central cavity

An octanuclear cubic Os4Zn4 coordination cage, containing Os(II) tris-diimine units at four of the eight vertices which are good photoelectron donors from their 3MLCT excited state, performs photoinduced electron transfer to electron-accepting organic guests which bind in the central cavity in water via the hydrophobic effect: the resulting charge-separated states have lifetimes of ca. 200 ps and have been characterized by transient absorption spectroscopy

High-Speed Rail Versus Air Transportation: Case Study of Madrid–Barcelona, Spain.

Travel time savings, better quality of the supplied services, greater comfort for the users, and improved accessibility are the main factors of success of High Speed Rail(HSR)links. This paper presents the results from a revealed and stated preference survey conducted to both HSR and air transport users in the Madrid Barcelona corridor. The data gathered from the stated preference survey was used to calibrate a modal choice model aiming at explaining competition between HSR and air transportation in the corridor. From the model, the authors obtain that prices and service frequency are the most important variables to compete with the other mode. In addition, they found that check-in and security controls at the airport are a crucial variable for the users in their modal choice. Other policies, such as the improvement of parking facilities at the train stations, play a secondary role

Airline customer loyalty through analysis of stated preference

This study evaluates airline customer loyalty and estimates the switching costs for a domestic airline route in Brazil through a stated preference survey. Several structures of discrete choice models were tested to represent the choice of behavior: multinomial logit, mixed logit random coefficients, multinomial logit incorporating systematic variations of preferences, mixed logit error component and mixed logit error component incorporating systematic variations of preferences. The results showed that loyal passengers are more likely to choose the dominant Brazilian airline Tam. The switching costs of passengers loyal to Tam, for this sample, are equivalent to 15% of the fare, which represents much more than the percentage for other companies. These passengers are less sensitive to variations in the fares and incur higher costs not to switch airlines

Heterogeneity in Preferences towards Complexity

We analyze lottery-choice data in a way that separately estimates the effects of risk aversion and complexity aversion. Complexity is represented by the number of different outcomes in the lottery. A finite mixture random effects model is estimated which assumes that a proportion of the population are complexity-neutral. We find that around 33% of the population are complexity-neutral, around 50% complexity-averse, and the remaining 17% are complexity-loving. Subjects who do react to complexity appear to have a bias towards complexity aversion at the start of the experiment, but complexity aversion reduces with experience, to the extent that the average subject is (almost) complexity-neutral by the end of the experiment. Complexity aversion is found to increase with age and to be higher for non-UK students than for UK students. We also find some evidence that, when evaluating complex lotteries, subjects perceive probabilities in accordance with Prospective Reference Theory

Testing for Complementarity: Glyphosate Tolerant Soybeans and Conservation Tillage

Many decisions in agriculture are made over combinations of inputs and/or practices that may form a technology system linked through complementarity. The presence of complementarity among producer decisions can have far-reaching implications for market outcomes and for the effectiveness of policies intended to influence them. Identifying complementarity relations, however, is made difficult by the presence of unobserved heterogeneity. Drawing on recent methodological advances, in this paper we develop a test for complementarity between glyphosate tolerant soybeans and conservation tillage that overcomes certain limitations of previous studies. Specifically, we develop a structural discrete choice framework of joint soybean-tillage adoption that explicitly models both complementarity and the correlation induced by unobserved heterogeneity. The model is estimated with a large unbalanced panel of farm-level choices spanning the 1998–2011 period. We find that glyphosate tolerant soybeans and conservation tillage are complementary practices. In addition, our estimation shows that farm operation scale promotes the adoption of both conservation tillage and glyphosate tolerant seed, and that all of higher fuel prices, more droughty conditions, and soil erodibility increase use of conservation tillage. We apply our results to simulate annual adoption rates for both conservation tillage and no-tillage in a scenario without glyphosate tolerant soybeans available as a choice. We find that the adoption of conservation tillage and no-tillage have been about 10% and 20% higher, respectively, due to the advent of glyphosate tolerant soybeans