Improving the Well-Being and Safety of Children with Sensors and Mobile Technology

The well-being and safety of children and young people are important aspects in all contexts of everyday life. In particular, a feeling of insecurity might be a problem when being alone. Bullying is also common among school-age children and teenagers. Hence, there is a great need for personalized support systems to resolve these problems. This article describes a new area of research in sensor and social web development to help indicate children’s insecurity in their daily environment. Deeper integration of sensors and the social web would allow us to foresee drastic changes in communities and new social–ethical scenarios will emerge.     

Documenting Discrimination: A Study of Recruitment Cases Brought to the Norwegian Gender Equality Ombud

This article investigates appointment cases brought to the Gender Equality Ombud over a ten-year period (1985–94). The study presented here aims to explore gender discrimination in recruitment and why it is so hard to document. An advantage of studying appointment cases brought to the Ombud is that the three parties — the plaintiff, the hiring authority and the Ombud — are all engaged in presenting arguments directly concerning gender discrimination. The two key questions are: how do hiring authorities argue to counter assertions of discrimination? And on what grounds are arguments accepted/not accepted by the Ombud? The cases investigated are divided into three categories: cases from male-dominated organizations, woman-dominated organizations and gender-balanced organizations. How the gender of the candidates has influenced the hiring process can only be read indirectly from most cases; hiring authorities usually argue that it is the concern for personal suitability that has been the decisive factor. In the analysis of the cases three main types of justifications of hiring preferences are identified: ‘continuity’, ‘renewal’ and ‘the woman is unfit’. The decision situation of the Ombud is uncertain in most cases. In many cases the juridical expertise of hiring authorities seems to be decisive. The demarcation line is unclear concerning which arguments should be accepted as impartial and which should be rejected because of vagueness or subjectivity.     

Socioeconomic stress in rural families: Part II from the co-guest editors

Dorothy Z. Price is Professor, Child and Family Studies, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164-2010. Mari S. Wilhelm is Associate Professor, School of Family and Consumer Resources, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721.     

Doing a good job badly Mind-sets in family therapy

This paper reports on a case in which family therapy was one of the approaches attempting to resolve an eating disorder in the second-born of twins, the youngest in an intact family of four children. The case is described in its referral, agency and chronological contexts. The initial referral suggested that there was no physical cause for the presenting problem, and advocated an investigation of family dynamics. Some evidence which seemed to support the dysfunctional family formulation was provided, and various hypotheses regarding family disturbance were pursued in therapy. These hypotheses were, on the surface, supported by systemic observations. When a rare pancreatic tumour which was underlying the eating disorder was diagnosed many months after the brief and unsuccessful interventions, ‘confirmation bias’, resistance and neutrality became important issues for the therapists to consider. The role of these processes in this case is discussed.     

Women in Movement Transformations in African Political Landscapes

Since the mid-1980s and especially after the early 1990s, women's organizations have increased exponentially throughout Africa as have the arenas in which women have been able to assert their varied concerns. Women are organizing locally and nationally and are networking across the continent on an unprecedented scale. They have in many countries been aggressively using the media to demand their rights in a way not evident in the early 1980s. In some countries they are taking their claims to land, inheritance and associational autonomy to court in ways not seen in the past. Women are challenging laws and constitutions that do not uphold gender equality. In addition, they are increasingly moving into government, legislative, party, NGO and other leadership positions previously the nearly exclusive domain of men. In these and other ways women have taken advantage of the new political openings that occurred in the 1990s, even if the openings were limited and precarious. This second generation of activism is markedly different from the earlier post-independence generation of women's mobilization. The reasons for these shifts are varied: the rise of multi-partyism and demise of military rule; the growing influence of the international women's movement; shifting donor strategies; the expansion of the use of the cell phone and the Internet in the late 1990s; coupled with a significant increase in secondary and university educated women. The article explores the major changes in women's mobilization in Africa by contrasting the current women's movements with those that emerged after independence.     

Fertility Decline and Increased Manifestation of Sex Bias in India

This paper argues that expectations - the process of evaluating the chances for future attainment of valued goals in the home community (stay decision) vs. alternative locations (move decision) - along with family norms about migration are major predictors of intention to move, which in turn is a proximate determinant of migration behaviour. Utilizing longitudinal data from the 1992 and 1994 waves of the Thailand National Migration Survey, logistic regression models show that a strikingly different set of expectations, household demographic indicators, and migrant capital factors were significant determinants of migration intentions for men and women; reflecting Thai gender roles. Migration intentions, in turn, predicted more permanent, but not temporary, survival strategy migration behaviour, while low household income predicted temporary but not more permanent migration behaviour. The measure of perceived family migration norms was a powerful determinant of migration behaviour, but the size of migrant networks was not a statistically significant determinant of either migration intentions or behaviour.     

Bayesian inference for Gaussian excursion set generated Cox processes with set-marking

This work considers spatial Cox point processes where the random intensity is defined by a random closed set such that different point intensities appear in the two phases formed by the random set and its complement. The point pattern is observed as a set of point coordinates in a bounded region W?? ^d together with the information on the phase of the location of each point. This phase information, called set-marking, is not a representative sample from the random set, and hence it cannot be directly used for deducing properties of the random set. Excursion sets of continuous-parameter Gaussian random fields are applied as a flexible model for the random set. Fully Bayesian method and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation is adopted for inferring the parameters of the model and estimating the random set. The performance of the new approach is studied by means of simulation experiments. Further, two forestry data sets on point patterns of saplings are analysed. The saplings grow in a clear-cut forest area where, before planting and natural seeding, the soil has been mounded forming a blotched soil structure. The tree densities tend to be different in the tilled patches and in the area outside the patches. The coordinates of each sapling have been measured and it is known whether this location is in a patch or outside. This example has been a motivation for the study.