Building Virtual Age-Friendly Communities in Minecraft

A key theme of Age-Friendly Honolulu’s initiative is intergenerational exchange. The initiative believes that youth need to be aware of aging issues, demographic change, and think critically about the potential impact on their lives. The goal of the Age-Friendly Honolulu Youth Engagement Initiative is to teach youth about the role of the built environment and community features in promoting active aging and engagement among older adults. This article describes a new program in the field that teaches youth and older adults to assess the built environment and then use design thinking and Minecraft (a popular video game in which players use 3-D blocks to create virtual lands) to develop and envision ideas to improve the livability of their neighborhood.     

Open Order Rescheduling in Job Shops with Demand Uncertainty: A Simulation Study

This paper addresses the problem of open order rescheduling in a job shop. Results are reported of experiments conducted in a simulation model of an 8-machine job shop. Four different order updating policies are examined. The due-date process is modeled to include several realistic features about the pattern of due-date variability. These features are parameterized and tested at several levels. Tardiness results indicate that open order rescheduling is beneficial only when allowances are loosely set. The results indicate that inventory performance is improved by order rescheduling, particularly in cases when due dates are revised to earlier times than originally forecast.     

Raymond Williams and sociology

The purpose of this article is to recover Williams as a major theoretical inspiration for the social sciences, specifically, as the inaugurator of what might be regarded as a research paradigm, cultural materialism. In the first section, Williams's encounter with the discipline of sociology is traced and distinguished as a critical alternative to the presently ascendant – at least in the USA – neo‐Durkeimian school of ‘cultural sociology’. In the second section, his cultural‐materialist programme is proposed as a powerful analytical framework for the study of culture and society today. In the final section, a key concept of Williams's cultural materialism, mobile privatization, is selected illustratively and proposed as a powerful analytical tool for studying the production and technological mediation of typical modes of communicative sociality in the early twenty‐first century.     

Evaluating consumer satisfaction in residential continuing care settings

The outcome of the project reported on here is a client-centered consumer satisfaction questionnaire designed to evaluate new models of residential continuing care in Alberta, Canada. Satisfaction is defined as a multi-dimensional construct that is grounded in the consumer's experience. Consultation with the clients of the services during development of the instrument ensured that characteristics important to the clients were assessed. The result is an instrument with which to measure satisfaction that is fully client-centered and that, with appropriate modifications, can be used to monitor any client-centered program for cognitively-able continuing care clients.     

The production of criminological experiments

This article examines the production of crime and justice field experiments during the 1990s. Data were collected on the characteristics of criminological experiments funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the principal research agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, during the 10-year period from 1991 through 2000. The analyses find that, whereas the funds available for research and evaluation at the NIJ increased during this period, the number of projects and the amount of funds awarded supporting field experiments declined. The article describes the characteristics of the experiments funded and assesses the extent to which the reduced support can be attributed to the characteristics of NIJ research funding, research topics, researchers, or criminal justice operational agencies.     

Reporting cumulative proportion of subjects with an adverse event based on data from multiple studies

Experience has shown us that when data are pooled from multiple studies to create an integrated summary, an analysis based on naïvely‐pooled data is vulnerable to the mischief of Simpson's Paradox. Using the proportions of patients with a target adverse event (AE) as an example, we demonstrate the Paradox's effect on both the comparison and the estimation of the proportions. While meta analytic approaches have been recommended and increasingly used for comparing safety data between treatments, reporting proportions of subjects experiencing a target AE based on data from multiple studies has received little attention. In this paper, we suggest two possible approaches to report these cumulative proportions. In addition, we urge that regulatory guidelines on reporting such proportions be established so that risks can be communicated in a scientifically defensible and balanced manner. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Alterations in IGF-I affect elderly: role of physical activity

The growth hormone–insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I) axis is an important physiological regulator muscle for development. Although there is evidence that aging muscle retains the ability to synthesize IGF-I, there is also evidence that aging may be associated with attenuation of the ability of exercise to induce an isoform of IGF-I that promotes satellite cell proliferation. However, it is clear that overexpression of IGF-I in the muscle can protect against age-related sarcopenia. Strength training appears to be the intervention of choice for the prevention and treatment of sarcopenia. IGF-I has been implicated in the loss of the muscle with age, and IGF-I expression levels change as a consequence of strength training in older adults. However, it seems that advancing age, rather than declining serum levels of IGF-I, appears to be a major determinant of life-time changes in body composition in women and men. We concluded that resistive exercise is a significant determinant of muscle mass and function. Elevated levels of IGF-I have been found in physically active compared to sedentary individuals. Recent work suggests that IGF-I as a mediator plays an important role in muscle hypertrophy and angiogenesis, both of which characterize the anabolic adaptation of muscles to exercise.     

Civil Society Opposition to Nonferrous Metals Mining in Montana

This paper discusses the opposition of civil society to nonferrous metals mining in Montana. The mineral resources and mining history of Montana are discussed, as is the vibrant civil society of that state. Montana’s civil society has opposed mining due to its environmental effects, particularly upon areas of high conservation value. This opposition has involved litigation and the implementation of a ban on the use of cyanide by the mining industry. The paper concludes with a discussion of whether this opposition to mining has damaged the economy of the state and Montana’s future as an example of the “New West,” wherein amenities based growth act as the principal agent of economic activity.