The future of social is personal: the potential of the personal data store

This chapter argues that technical architectures that facilitate the longitudinal, decentralised and individual-centric personal collection and curation of data will be an important, but partial, response to the pressing problem of the autonomy of the data subject, and the asymmetry of power between the subject and large scale service providers/data consumers. Towards framing the scope and role of such Personal Data Stores (PDSes), the legalistic notion of personal data is examined, and it is argued that a more inclusive, intuitive notion expresses more accurately what individuals require in order to preserve their autonomy in a data-driven world of large aggregators. Six challenges towards realising the PDS vision are set out: the requirement to store data for long periods; the difficulties of managing data for individuals; the need to reconsider the regulatory basis for third-party access to data; the need to comply with international data handling standards; the need to integrate privacy-enhancing technologies; and the need to future-proof data gathering against the evolution of social norms. The open experimental PDS platform INDX is introduced and described, as a means of beginning to address at least some of these six challenges

Prevention and recovery care services in Australia: Developing a state-wide typology of a subacute residential mental health service model

AIMS: Community-based residential alternatives to hospitalization are an emerging service model. Evidence for their acceptability and effectiveness is promising but limited. Prevention and Recovery Care (PARC) services are one such residential model, offering short-term subacute treatment and care (usually between 7 and 28 days). PARC services in Victoria, Australia, are designed to support consumers with severe mental illness to either avoid a psychiatric hospital admission (step-up care) or transition from hospital back into the community (step-down care). As a precursor to a series of studies investigating the appropriateness, effectiveness and efficiency of PARC services, we aimed to investigate whether a typology of PARC services can be developed. METHODS: A manager or other appropriately knowledgeable staff member from each of the 19 adult PARC services included in the study completed a tool based on PARC operational guidelines (the Victorian PARC service mapping questionnaire) and a validated instrument measuring the quality of care in residential mental health settings (the Quality Indicator for Rehabilitative Care, QuIRC). Thirty (of 42) stakeholders participated in a modified Delphi study to select 23 from the available 230 variables for entry into a hierarchical cluster analysis. RESULTS: luster analysis produced three clusters of equal dissimilarity. At the 90% confidence level, there were four variables which were significantly different between clusters. These were the year the PARC was opened, the QuIRC Living Environment domain score, the proportion of all admissions that were a step-down admission from an inpatient unit, and how often families were invited to care meetings. Sensitivity analyses suggested the findings were robust to the method used to identify clusters. CONCLUSIONS: Although PARC services were broadly similar, their identified differences suggest there is variable model implementation across Victoria sufficient to generate a PARC service typology. This typology may prove important for interpreting differences in outcomes experienced by consumers and carers using PARC services, when applied in our analyses of service effectiveness. The value of conducting service mapping and typology studies is underscored. Further research to characterize subacute residential services, including recovery-promoting features of the built environment, is warranted

A systematic review of the health, social and financial impacts of welfare rights advice delivered in healthcare settings

BACKGROUND: Socio-economic variations in health, including variations in health according to wealth and income, have been widely reported. A potential method of improving the health of the most deprived groups is to increase their income. State funded welfare programmes of financial benefits and benefits in kind are common in developed countries. However, there is evidence of widespread under claiming of welfare benefits by those eligible for them. One method of exploring the health effects of income supplementation is, therefore, to measure the health effects of welfare benefit maximisation programmes. We conducted a systematic review of the health, social and financial impacts of welfare rights advice delivered in healthcare settings. METHODS: Published and unpublished literature was accessed through searches of electronic databases, websites and an internet search engine; hand searches of journals; suggestions from experts; and reference lists of relevant publications. Data on the intervention delivered, evaluation performed, and outcome data on health, social and economic measures were abstracted and assessed by pairs of independent reviewers. Results are reported in narrative form. RESULTS: 55 studies were included in the review. Only seven studies included a comparison or control group. There was evidence that welfare rights advice delivered in healthcare settings results in financial benefits. There was little evidence that the advice resulted in measurable health or social benefits. This is primarily due to lack of good quality evidence, rather than evidence of an absence of effect. CONCLUSION: There are good theoretical reasons why income supplementation should improve health, but currently little evidence of adequate robustness and quality to indicate that the impact goes beyond increasing income

Capabilities for Uniqueness and Borrowing

An important application of unique object references is safe and efficient message passing in concurrent object-oriented programming. However, to prevent the ill effects of aliasing, practical systems often severely restrict the shape of messages passed by reference. Moreover, the problematic interplay between destructive reads--often used to implement unique references--and temporary aliasing through "borrowed" references is exacerbated in a concurrent setting, increasing the potential for unpredictable run-time errors. This paper introduces a new approach to uniqueness. The idea is to use capabilities for enforcing both at-most-once consumption of unique references, and a flexible notion of uniqueness. The main novelty of our approach is a model of uniqueness and borrowing based on simple, unstructured capabilities. The advantages are: first, it provides simple foundations for uniqueness and borrowing. Second, it can be formalized using a relatively simple type system, for which we provide a complete soundness proof. Third, it avoids common problems involving borrowing and destructive reads, since unique references subsume borrowed references. We have implemented our type system as an extension to Scala. Practical experience suggests that our system allows type checking real-world actor-based concurrent programs with only a small number of additional type annotations

Difficulties in managing innovation

The article, in a special issue on the Microelectronics Education Programme, reflected on the experience of MEP and of the Alvey Programme of Research and Development in Advanced Information Technology

Age, mobility, and knowledge: an action research approach

The article reports a pilot project at the Norwegian Employment Service, where an intervention enabled older workers to teach younger workers, using older technology. Older workers are regarded as a resource, not as a problem