Representing older people: towards meaningful images of the user in design scenarios

Designing for older people requires the consideration of a range of difficult and sometimes highly personal design problems. Issues such as fear, loneliness, dependency, and physical decline may be difficult to observe or discuss in interviews. Pastiche scenarios and pastiche personae are techniques that employ characters to create a space for the discussion of new technological developments and as a means to explore user experience. This paper argues that the use of such characters can help to overcome restrictive notions of older people by disrupting designers' prior assumptions. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences using pastiche techniques in two separate technology design projects that sought to address the needs of older people. In the first case pastiche scenarios were developed by the designers of the system and used as discussion documents with users. In the second case, pastiche personae were used by groups of users themselves to generate scenarios which were scribed for later use by the design team. We explore how the use of fictional characters and settings can generate new ideas and undermine rhetorical devices within scenarios that attempt to fit characters to the technology, rather than vice versa. To assist in future development of pastiche techniques in designing for older people, we provide an array of fictional older characters drawn from literary and popular culture.</p

Grain boundary ferromagnetism in vanadium-doped In2_2O3_3 thin films

Room temperature ferromagnetism was observed in In$_2$O$_3 thin films doped with 5 at.temperatures ranging from 300 to 600$\,^{\circ}{\rm C}$. X-ray absorption fine structure measurement indicated that vanadium was substitutionally dissolved in the In$_2$O$_3$ host lattice, thus excluding the existence of secondary phases of vanadium compounds. Magnetic measurements based on SQUID magnetometry and magnetic circular dichroism confirm that the magnetism is at grain boundaries and also in the grains. The overall magnetization originates from the competing effects between grains and grain boundaries.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, accepted by Europhysics Letter

On Using Magnetic and optical methods to determine the size and characteristics of nanoparticles embedded in oxide semiconductors

Films of oxides doped with transition metals are frequently believed to have magnetic inclusions. Magnetic methods to determine the amount of nanophases and their magnetic characteristics are described. The amount of the sample that is paramagnetic may also be measured. Optical methods are described and shown to be very powerful to determine which defects are also magnetic.Comment: Manuscript of poster to be presented at MMM-Intermag 2010. Accepted for publication in Magnetic Trans of IEE

Relaxation rate of the reverse biased asymmetric exclusion process

We compute the exact relaxation rate of the partially asymmetric exclusion process with open boundaries, with boundary rates opposing the preferred direction of flow in the bulk. This reverse bias introduces a length scale in the system, at which we find a crossover between exponential and algebraic relaxation on the coexistence line. Our results follow from a careful analysis of the Bethe ansatz root structure.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figure

Magneto-optical properties of Co/ZnO multilayer films

Multilayer films of ZnO with Co were deposited on glass substrates then annealed in a vacuum. The magnetisation of the films increased with annealing but not the magnitude of the magneto-optical signals. The dielectric functions for the films were calculated using the MCD spectra. A Maxwell Garnett theory of a metallic Co/ZnO mixture is presented. The extent to which this explains the MCD spectra taken on the films is discussed.Comment: This paper was presented at ICM (2009) and is accepted in this form for the proceeding

A framework for deriving semantic web services

Web service-based development represents an emerging approach for the development of distributed information systems. Web services have been mainly applied by software practitioners as a means to modularize system functionality that can be offered across a network (e.g., intranet and/or the Internet). Although web services have been predominantly developed as a technical solution for integrating software systems, there is a more business-oriented aspect that developers and enterprises need to deal with in order to benefit from the full potential of web services in an electronic market. This ‘ignored’ aspect is the representation of the semantics underlying the services themselves as well as the ‘things’ that the services manage. Currently languages like the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) provide the syntactic means to describe web services, but lack in providing a semantic underpinning. In order to harvest all the benefits of web services technology, a framework has been developed for deriving business semantics from syntactic descriptions of web services. The benefits of such a framework are two-fold. Firstly, the framework provides a way to gradually construct domain ontologies from previously defined technical services. Secondly, the framework enables the migration of syntactically defined web services toward semantic web services. The study follows a design research approach which (1) identifies the problem area and its relevance from an industrial case study and previous research, (2) develops the framework as a design artifact and (3) evaluates the application of the framework through a relevant scenario

Growth of high quality yttrium iron garnet films using standard pulsed laser deposition technique

Thin films with properties comparable to bulk single crystals were grown by pulsed laser deposition using a substrate temperature of only 500 °C. This was achieved by a careful choice of both the oxygen pressure in the deposition chamber and the temperature of the air anneal. The best films were grown on gadolinium gallium garnet substrates but we also report data for films grown on the diamagnetic substrate yttrium aluminium garnet. The films were analysed using X-ray diffraction, near edge X-ray absorption and magnetometry. Our best films had a magnetisation of 143 emu/cm 3 and a coercive field of ~1 Oe

Enhanced magnetic properties in ZnCoAlO caused by exchangecoupling to Co nanoparticles

We report the results of a sequence of magnetisation and magneto-optical studies on laser ablated thin films of ZnCoAlO and ZnCoO that contain a small amount of metallic cobalt. The results are compared to those expected when all the magnetization is due to isolated metallic clusters of cobalt and with an oxide sample that is almost free from metallic inclusions. Using a variety of direct magnetic measurements and also magnetic circular dichroism we find that there is ferromagnetism within both the oxide and the metallic inclusions, and furthermore that these magnetic components are exchange-coupled when aluminium is included. This enhances both the coercive field and the remanence. Hence the presence of a controlled quantity of metallic nanoparticles in ZnAlO can improve the magnetic response of the oxide, thus giving great advantages for applications in spintronics

Prediction of Peptide Reactivity with Human IVIg through a Knowledge-Based Approach

The prediction of antibody-protein (antigen) interactions is very difficult due to the huge variability that characterizes the structure of the antibodies. The region of the antigen bound to the antibodies is called epitope. Experimental data indicate that many antibodies react with a panel of distinct epitopes (positive reaction). The Challenge 1 of DREAM5 aims at understanding whether there exists rules for predicting the reactivity of a peptide/epitope, i.e., its capability to bind to human antibodies. DREAM 5 provided a training set of peptides with experimentally identified high and low reactivities to human antibodies. On the basis of this training set, the participants to the challenge were asked to develop a predictive model of reactivity. A test set was then provided to evaluate the performance of the model implemented so far