Childbearing and Marriage: Investigating the Importance of Context for Meaning-Making of First-Time Marriage

Previous research reveals that the temporal ordering of childbearing and marriage can have an impact on the meaning of first-time marriage. This article aims to obtain a deeper understanding of meaning-making of first-time marriage in relation to childbearing. Narrative interviews with 16 brides and grooms in 8 couples in Sweden were conducted. The material was analyzed in relation to the temporal ordering of childbearing and marriage. The study reveals that the construction of meaning of marriage does not only relate to the temporal context. Social factors such as social class or family formation might also be relevant for how meaning is constructed. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of meaning-making as a relational process constructed within particular contexts.     

On the characterization of weighted simple games

This paper has a twofold scope. The first one is to clarify and put in evidence the isomorphic character of two theories developed in quite different fields: on one side, threshold logic, on the other side, simple games. One of the main purposes in both theories is to determine when a simple game is representable as a weighted game, which allows a very compact and easily comprehensible representation. Deep results were found in threshold logic in the sixties and seventies for this problem. However, game theory has taken the lead and some new results have been obtained for the problem in the past two decades. The second and main goal of this paper is to provide some new results on this problem and propose several open questions and conjectures for future research. The results we obtain depend on two significant parameters of the game: the number of types of equivalent players and the number of types of shift-minimal winning coalitions.     

The amount of ergonomics and user involvement in 151 design processes

Ergonomics, usability and user-centered design are terms that are well known among designers. Yet, products often seem to fail to meet the users' needs, resulting in a gap between expected and experienced usability. To understand the possible causes of this gap the actions taken by the designer during the design process are studied in this paper. This can show whether and how certain actions influence the user-friendliness of the design products. The aim of this research was to understand whether ergonomic principles and methods are included in the design process, whether users are involved in this process and whether the experience of the designer (in ergonomics/user involvement) has an effect on the end product usability. In this study the design processes of 151 tangible products of students in design were analyzed. It showed that in 75% of the cases some ergonomic principles were applied. User involvement was performed in only 1/3 of the design cases. Hardly any correlation was found between the designers' experience in ergonomic principles and the way they applied it and no correlations were found between the designers' experience in user involvement and the users' involvement in the design process.     

“Yes,I Can”: Testing an Intervention to Increase Middle School Students’ College and Career Self‐Efficacy

Middle school is the appropriate time for students to begin exploring careers and improving self‐efficacy; however, empirically supported career and college readiness interventions for U.S. middle school students are limited. Examining the effect of an intervention that combined a virtual experience and a local college visit on middle school students (99 girls, 74 boys), the authors found that participating students had higher levels of college and career self‐efficacy than did nonparticipating students. The study shows that a workshop of the online Florida CHOICES program coupled with a campus visit increased middle school student career and college self‐efficacy. Future research should include longitudinal studies and use of diverse populations to improve generalizability of study results.     

Preverbal Infants' Ability to Encode the Outcome of Distributive Actions

This research examined whether 10‐month‐old infants expect agents to perform equal distribution of resources. In Experiment 1, infants saw a distributor performing either an equal distribution where one strawberry was given to each of two recipients, or an unequal distribution that favored one of the recipients. Infants looked longer at the unequal test event, suggesting that they expected the strawberries to be distributed equally. In Experiment 2, the potential recipients were replaced with inanimate objects to rule out a lower‐level alternative explanation of the results in Experiment 1 based on symmetric movement of the distributor. Infants' looking times did not reveal a preference for one of the two outcomes of the test events (i.e., symmetric or asymmetric movement). Experiment 3 controlled for the role of the distributive action, that is, here the distributors only removed barriers revealing strawberries that the recipients already had. No preference was observed when an equal or unequal initial allocation of resources was revealed. Experiment 4 assessed whether infants relied on affiliative information provided by the distributor's movements. The distributor made the same movements as in Experiment 1, but without distributing any strawberries, and no difference in looking times was observed. These findings support the view that preverbal infants expect agents to behave according to a simple principle: Resources are to be distributed equally among equivalent recipients. We discuss the possible links between such reactions and the emergence of an early sense of fairness.     

The FARSEEING real-world fall repository: a large-scale collaborative database to collect and share sensor signals from real-world falls

Background

Real-world fall events objectively measured by body-worn sensors can improve the understanding of fall events in older people. However, these events are rare and hence challenging to capture. Therefore, the FARSEEING (FAll Repository for the design of Smart and sElf-adaptive Environments prolonging Independent livinG) consortium and associated partners started to build up a meta-database of real-world falls.

Results

Between January 2012 and December 2015 more than 300 real-world fall events have been recorded. This is currently the largest collection of real-world fall data recorded with inertial sensors. A signal processing and fall verification procedure has been developed and applied to the data. Since the end of 2015, 208 verified real-world fall events are available for analyses. The fall events have been recorded within several studies, with different methods, and in different populations. All sensor signals include at least accelerometer measurements and 58 % additionally include gyroscope and magnetometer measurements. The collection of data is ongoing and open to further partners contributing with fall signals. The FARSEEING consortium also aims to share the collected real-world falls data with other researchers on request.

Conclusions

The FARSEEING meta-database will help to improve the understanding of falls and enable new approaches in fall risk assessment, fall prevention, and fall detection in both aging and disease.