It’s all a Matter of “Choice”. Understanding society’s expectations of older adult ICT use from a birth cohort\ud perspective

Little research exists that examines older adults and their Information and Communication Technology (ICT) use or society’s expectations of their use. Using an intensive interpretive interactionism case study methodology, this paper examines how older adults ages 65-75 (from the Lucky Few birth cohort) view their own use and how other birth cohorts view the Lucky Few's ICT use

NSDL EduPak: An Open Source Education Repository Solution

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PostersEducational organizations and institutions focused on establishing specialized digital collections, conducting educational research, or providing students, teachers and instructors with discipline-oriented pedagogical products and tools require basic technology to begin building educational digital repositories. To help meet these needs, the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) has announced the release of NSDL EduPak. Specifically designed for education, NSDL EduPak packages technology for digital storage, access, and workflow into a convenient bundle. This poster reviews three core EduPak components with examples of how they are used by education communities.National Science Foundatio

The effect of cold-calling on voluntary participation in a middle school science classroom

This action research study investigated the effect of cold-calling on voluntary participation in a middle school science classroom. Four sections of an eighth grade science class were observed: two of the sections were with a teacher who used cold-calling often, and two of the sections were with a teacher who does not use cold-calling. An observer recorded the number of students who volunteered to answer a question after it was first asked. Although the students in the class with the teacher who used cold-calling frequently had higher rates of voluntary participation, the results were not statistically significant; therefore, there is not enough evidence in this research to confidently claim that cold-calling increases voluntary participation in middle school science classrooms

Conceptualizing Resilience

"This commentary provides an overview of the idea of resilience, and acknowledges the challenges of defining and applying the idea in practice. The article summarizes a way of looking at resilience called a 'resilience delta', that takes into account both the shock done to a community by a disaster and the capacity of that community to rebound from that shock to return to its prior functionality. I show how different features of the community can create resilience, and consider how the developed and developing world addresses resilience. I also consider the role of focusing events in gaining attention to events and promoting change. I note that, while focusing events are considered by many in the disaster studies field to be major drivers of policy change in the United States disaster policy, most disasters have little effect on the overall doctrine of shared responsibilities between the national and subnational governments." (author's abstract

Gerontechnology

This book presents a typology that explains the diversity of ICT usage seen in older adults. It examines older adult use of everyday Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) across multiple life contexts (work, family, leisure, and community) allowing readers to understand how the growing aging population will use ICTs in their daily lives. The author offers a useful framework to practitioners (both in community based and institutional settings) who work with older adults to fully understand how technological interventions will be taken up

BIOZON: a hub of heterogeneous biological data

Biological entities are strongly related and mutually dependent on each other. Therefore, there is a growing need to corroborate and integrate data from different resources and aspects of biological systems in order to analyze them effectively. Biozon is a unified biological database that integrates heterogeneous data types such as proteins, structures, domain families, protein–protein interactions and cellular pathways, and establishes the relationships between them. All data are integrated on to a single graph schema centered around the non-redundant set of biological objects that are shared by each source. This integration results in a highly connected graph structure that provides a more complete picture of the known context of a given object that cannot be determined from any one source. Currently, Biozon integrates roughly 2 million protein sequences, 42 million DNA or RNA sequences, 32 000 protein structures, 150 000 interactions and more from sources such as GenBank, UniProt, Protein Data Bank (PDB) and BIND. Biozon augments source data with locally derived data such as 5 billion pairwise protein alignments and 8 million structural alignments. The user may form complex cross-type queries on the graph structure, add similarity relations to form fuzzy queries and rank the results based on analysis of the edge structure similar to Google PageRank, online at

BIOZON: a system for unification, management and analysis of heterogeneous biological data

BACKGROUND: Integration of heterogeneous data types is a challenging problem, especially in biology, where the number of databases and data types increase rapidly. Amongst the problems that one has to face are integrity, consistency, redundancy, connectivity, expressiveness and updatability. DESCRIPTION: Here we present a system (Biozon) that addresses these problems, and offers biologists a new knowledge resource to navigate through and explore. Biozon unifies multiple biological databases consisting of a variety of data types (such as DNA sequences, proteins, interactions and cellular pathways). It is fundamentally different from previous efforts as it uses a single extensive and tightly connected graph schema wrapped with hierarchical ontology of documents and relations. Beyond warehousing existing data, Biozon computes and stores novel derived data, such as similarity relationships and functional predictions. The integration of similarity data allows propagation of knowledge through inference and fuzzy searches. Sophisticated methods of query that span multiple data types were implemented and first-of-a-kind biological ranking systems were explored and integrated. CONCLUSION: The Biozon system is an extensive knowledge resource of heterogeneous biological data. Currently, it holds more than 100 million biological documents and 6.5 billion relations between them. The database is accessible through an advanced web interface that supports complex queries, "fuzzy" searches, data materialization and more, online at

A Theory of ICT User Types: Exploring Domestication and Meaning of ICTS through Comparative Case Studies

The population in the United States is aging, with a predicted 147% increase in the number of older adults (those over age 65) from 2000- 2050 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2008). At the same time, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are increasingly being used in work, leisure, and government. Despite these two trends towards an aging population and greater ICT use, very little is known about if and how older adults are using ICTs in their everyday lives (Birkland & Kaarst-Brown, 2011). Despite many calls for researchers to take a wider perspective (Bouwhuis, 2006; van Bronswijk, et al., 2009), most studies have concentrated on assistive devices or examining the care of older adults with health issues. In order to understand how older adults were using ICTs in their daily lives this study used a comparative case methodology of 17 cases, with each case consisting of an older adult and several members of their social network. Using domestication theory (Silverstone, 1994) and an interpretive interactionism approach (Denzin, 2001), this series of comparative case studies discovered five distinct domestication patterns. These domestication patterns, or user types, differ in how these users were introduced to, use, display, and the meaning they attribute to ICTs in their everyday lives

Re-thinking Fedora's storage layer: A new high-level interface to remove old assumptions and allow novel use cases

Traditionally, the pluggable storage interface in Fedora has followed a "low-level" paradigm where objects and datastreams are presented to the storage layer as independent, anonymous blobs of data. This arrangement has proven simple, reliable, and generally flexible. In the past few years however, there has been an increasing need for Fedora to mediate storage in more complex scenarios. Managing large numbers of big datastreams, multiplexing storage between different devices or cloud storage, and archiving content in a transparent manner are tasks that are difficult to achieve through Fedora currently