Automatic sleep stage classification based on easy to register signals as a validation tool for ergonomic steering in smart bedding systems

Ergonomic sleep studies benefit from long-term monitoring in the home environment to cope with daily variations and habituation effects. Polysomnography allows to asses sleep accurately, but is costly, time-consuming and possibly disturbing for the sleeper. Actigraphy is cheap and user friendly, but for many studies lacks accuracy and detailed information. This proof-of-concept study investigates Least-Squares Support Vector Machines as a tool for automatic sleep stage classification (Wake-N1-Rem to N2-N3 separation), using automatic trainingset-specific filtered features as derived from three easy to register signals, namely heart rate, breathing rate and movement. The algorithms are trained and validated using 20 nights out of a 600 night database from over 100 different healthy persons. Different training and test set strategies were analyzed leading to different results. The more person-specific the training nights to the test nights, the better the classification accuracy as validated against the hypnograms scored by experts from the full polysomnograms. In the limit of complete person-specific training, the accuracy of the algorithm on the test set reached 94%. This means that this algorithm could serve its use in long-term monitoring sleep studies in the home environment, especially when prior person-specific polysomnographic training is performed.     

Albanian Entrepreneurial Practices in Human Smuggling and Trafficking: On the Road to the United Kingdom via Brussels, 1995–2005

The authors studied the entrepreneurial culture among Albanian smugglers and traffickers using 43 Albanian judicial files in Belgium from 1995–2005. They analyse the niches that these “entrepreneurs” created as well as the way they invested profits. The authors also analyse the personal agency of the smuggled and trafficked clients, and practices that may help to explain the specific entrepreneurial culture. Short comparisons are made with other ethnic criminal groups engaged in similar activities during the same period in Belgium.     

Ideology,Practice, and Process? A Review of the Concept of Managerialism in Civil Society Studies

Managerialism is today a frequently applied concept in studies of how ideas and practices related to corporate management are diffused in society. Some assert that managerialism even is what mostly affects the development of contemporary civil society organizations. It is, however, far from clear how the concept of managerialism is used and defined across interest fields. The main conclusion in the present review, involving 105 peer-reviewed articles in civil society studies published between 1990 and 2014, is that the concept of managerialism is so broadly defined that it runs the risk of losing its analytical powers. To avoid this, the paper argues for a more precise conceptual use and suggests that the concept of managerialism should be applied to denote an ideology, the concept of management to capture managerial practices, and the concept of managerialization to describe an organizational change process.     

Unpacking Self-Rated Health and Quality of Life in Older Adults and Elderly in India: A Structural Equation Modelling Approach

The Study on global AGEing and adult health (SAGE) aims at improving empirical understanding of the health and well-being of older adults in low- and middle-income countries. A total of 321 adults aged 50 years and older were interviewed in rural Pune district, India, in 2007. We used Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to examine the pathways through which social factors, functional disability, risk behaviours, and chronic disease experience influence self-rated health (SRH) and quality of life (QOL) amongst older adults in India. Both SRH and QOL worsened with increased age (indirect effect) and limitations in functional ability (direct effect). QOL, socio-economic status (SES), and social networking had no significant effect on SRH. Smoking was associated with the presence of at least one chronic illness, but this did not have a statistically significant effect on SRH. Higher social networking was seen amongst the better educated and those with regular income, which in turn positively affected the QOL rating. QOL had a direct, but statistically not significant, effect on SRH. In conclusion, the indirect effects of age on SRH mediated through functional ability, and the effects of SES on QOL mediated through social networking, provide new understanding of how age and socio-economic status affect SRH and QOL. By allowing for measurement errors, solving for collinearity in predictor variables by integrating them into measurement models, and specifying causal dependencies between the underlying latent constructs, SEM provides a strong link between theory and empirics.     

Medical care and regional mortality differences within the countries of the European community

This paper addresses the question whether regional mortality differences within developed countries reflect differences in characteristics of medical care service. It adds two new elements to previous studies on this subject: it concentrates on selected ‘avoidable’ causes of death, and it makes parallel analyses for ten EC countries. The results show that levels of medical care supply contribute little to the explanation of regional differences in mortality from the selected conditions. It is concluded that if regional mortality differences are related to health care, factors other than the level of supply are probably involved.     

Voluntary Associations and Net Fertility During the Swedish Demographic Transition

This study investigates the role of changing social relations for fertility decline during the European fertility transition. The growth of voluntary associations at the end of the nineteenth century entailed a radical shift in the landscape of social relations in Sweden. By combining micro-census data from 1890 to 1900 with local-level membership data for three voluntary association groups, this article assesses the effect of parish-level voluntary association size on net fertility in Sweden using mixed-effects Poisson regression models. The results show that the adoption of fertility limitation during the transition period was associated with the creation and diffusion of the idea of respectability within large social network organisations, an idea that has previously been shown to be connected to fertility limitation. Furthermore, by applying a social network perspective, the results show that the strength of the effect was dependent on the structure of the social networks in terms of size, density, and homogeneity. Voluntary association size had the strongest effect for the free churches, which created dense heterogeneous networks through systems of social control, while the size of the temperance association showed no effect on fertility because the connections between nodes were sparse.     

Structure Learning of Contextual Markov Networks using Marginal Pseudo‐likelihood

Markov networks are popular models for discrete multivariate systems where the dependence structure of the variables is specified by an undirected graph. To allow for more expressive dependence structures, several generalizations of Markov networks have been proposed. Here, we consider the class of contextual Markov networks which takes into account possible context‐specific independences among pairs of variables. Structure learning of contextual Markov networks is very challenging due to the extremely large number of possible structures. One of the main challenges has been to design a score, by which a structure can be assessed in terms of model fit related to complexity, without assuming chordality. Here, we introduce the marginal pseudo‐likelihood as an analytically tractable criterion for general contextual Markov networks. Our criterion is shown to yield a consistent structure estimator. Experiments demonstrate the favourable properties of our method in terms of predictive accuracy of the inferred models.     

Searching for effective interventions for foster children under stress: a meta‐analysis

Foster children experience a lot of stress because of their life histories and changes in their family circumstances, such as foster care placement. It is important that foster parents recognize the early signs of stress in foster children and learn how to act in a non‐threatening and understanding manner. Family‐based interventions may help in this. In this paper, we report on a meta‐analysis of studies (n= 19) of the effectiveness of such interventions. All studies used a pre‐test/post‐test design. Both problem behaviour in foster children and the parenting skills of foster parents improved by 30%; however, none of the interventions were specifically intended to help young children (<4 years) to cope with stress. The importance of interventions for young foster children is discussed, as well as the necessary elements these interventions should include.