Explaining volunteering in old age : a social reinforcement perspective

Volunteering has been widely accepted as potentially a very good means to engage older persons and to maximize their contribution to society. There is a need to understand the entire process of volunteering, the reasons that motivate older persons to participate in volunteer services and activities and to appreciate why committed elderly volunteers continue to involve themselves in volunteering. The present study attempts to explore the possible motivational and sustainable aspects in the process of volunteering guided by a social reinforcement perspective. It further aims to propose an explanatory model for the initiation and sustainability of volunteering involving older persons in Hong Kong. A theoretical framework of the study focuses on the social reinforcement perspective within the cognitive-behavioral approach in explaining the volunteering process in terms of antecedences, pre-conditions, actual experience and consequences of volunteering. A questionnaire was distributed to explore the different aspects of volunteering, including the patterns of volunteer services, volunteer involvement, reasons for and effects of volunteering and personal profile of the volunteers. The target of the study was hospital volunteers aged 60 or above. The research design was a mail questionnaire survey using self-administered procedures. A total of 287 elderly respondents, 63 men and 224 women aged 60 to 86 years, drawn from the database of the Hospital Authority were assessed. The response rate was 30.3% with 1,359 valid responses. The study showed that older volunteers satisfied the pre-conditions for volunteering, such as having good health, free time and financial stable. The present study revealed that a great majority (74%) of the older volunteer respondents was inspired by altruistic reasons of wanting to help and to feel contented and approximately half were initially motivated by the altruistic motive of social responsibility. Social motives of seeking social exposure, making new friends and sharing of experiences were other important initial reasons. These factors were sustained when respondents reported the reasons for their continued participation in volunteering. The respondents perceived obvious positive changes in physical, psychological, cognitive and social well-being and they were satisfied and gratified with the volunteering experiences. The research also revealed the positive changes in volunteer’s life satisfaction, exposure and experience, self-appraisal and confidence. The positive outcomes of volunteering, such as enhanced self-esteem, life satisfaction and personal exposure help to affirm the initial intention of volunteering, which in turn reinforces the continual participation in volunteer services with the evidence of consistent findings of both initial and continual participation in volunteering

Road Segmentation with Neural Networks

Autonomous driving is the next biggest technological advance in the automobile industry. However, the current technology is still very much in its infancy. Networks of sensors such as cameras and LIDAR systems are used to record and measure the road condition. While neural networks are used to understand the road condition and make the correct decision to drive the vehicle. In this paper, we are specifically focusing on the road segmentation of autonomous vehicle technology. We will be going over the two approaches to road segmentation by Oliveira, et al [5] and Caltagirone, et al [2], and we will compare the performance of each approach on a road benchmark dataset called KITTI dataset

Third- and Fourth-Graders’ Perspectives on Social Exclusion: A Group Concept Mapping Study

The focus of the present study was to examine third- and fourth-graders’ thoughts on social exclusion of peers with learning difficulties; participants’ responses were expected to corroborate Aboud’s (1988, 2008) social-cognitive developmental theory of prejudice. Moreover, Trochim’s (1989) Group Concept Mapping method was applied to engage the children in the data collection and analysis processes. The second goal of this study was to observe the participants’ capabilities in completing the research tasks. Findings revealed four themes in children’s responses: (a) differences between children, (b) challenges experienced by children with learning difficulties, (c) others’ negative attitudes, and (d) traits leading to disapproval from others. The partial corroboration of Aboud’s theory suggested that third- and fourth-graders are developing cognitive flexibility to become less prejudiced. Hence, this may be an ideal period to introduce educational interventions about learning difficulties and social exclusion. Furthermore, the participants were capable of providing meaningful responses but would benefit from individual and step-by-step guidance during the research tasks

Cantonese time-compressed speech test

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (p. 27-30)."A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, June 30, 2009."published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

Lower Bounds on Expansions of Graph Powers

Given a lazy regular graph G, we prove that the expansion of G^t is at least sqrt(t) times the expansion of G. This bound is tight and can be generalized to small set expansion. We show some applications of this result