bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
‘I like to go out to be energised by different people’: an exploratory analysis of mobility and wellbeing in later life
Authors: ZIEGLER FRIEDERIKE , SCHWANEN TIM 
Published: May 2011

ABSTRACTThis paper adds to the growing number of studies about mobility and wellbeing in later life. It proposes a broader understanding of mobility than movement through physical space. Drawing on the ‘mobility turn’ in the social sciences, we conceptualise mobility as the overcoming of any type of distance between a here and a there, which can be situated in physical, electronic, social, psychological or other kinds of space. Using qualitative data from 128 older people in County Durham, England, we suggest that mobility and wellbeing influence each other in many different ways. Our analysis extends previous research in various ways. First, it shows that mobility of the self – a mental disposition of openness and willingness to connect with the world – is a crucial driver of the relation between mobility and wellbeing. Second, while loss of mobility as physical movement can and often does affect older people's sense of wellbeing adversely, this is not necessarily so; other mobilities can at least to some extent compensate for the loss of mobility in physical space. Finally, wellbeing is also enhanced through mobility as movement in physical space because the latter enables independence or subjectively experienced autonomy, as well as inter-dependence in the sense of relatively equal and reciprocal social relations with other people.
Continuity and change in older adults' perceptions of out-of-home mobility over ten years: a qualitative–quantitative approach
Authors: MOLLENKOPF HEIDRUN , HIEBER ANNETTE , WAHL HANS-WERNER 
Published: May 2011

ABSTRACTThis research report starts from the assumption that a solely geriatric and transport-related view of out-of-home mobility needs to be extended to incorporate other aspects of perceived and experienced mobility. In particular, our goal is to understand better the stability and change in people's perceptions of out-of-home mobility over ten years. We concentrate on: (a) the subjective meaning of mobility over time, including perceived changes in mobility and perceived reasons for change; (b) trends in satisfaction with various mobility domains; and (c) a case-oriented exploration of inter-individual variation over time. A qualitative–quantitative data-analytic approach was applied to data collected from 82 participants on three occasions over ten years in 1995, 2000 and 2005. The mean age of the sample in 2005 was 75.2 years. The results indicate overall stability in the meaning attached to mobility between 1995 and 2005, while the perceived changes point to major losses in the array of mobility experiences and decreasing satisfaction with mobility opportunities, out-of-home leisure activities and travelling, but in contrast satisfaction with public transport increased. Case studies exemplified the reasons for the pronounced variation in satisfaction with mobility dynamics over time. In conclusion, the findings confirm that out-of-home mobility remains of utmost importance when people move from late midlife into old age.
‘Option recognition’ in later life: variations in ageing in place
Authors: PEACE SHEILA , HOLLAND CAROLINE , KELLAHER LEONIE 
Published: May 2011

ABSTRACTDuring the 1970s, American gerontologist M. Powell Lawton and colleagues saw the person–environment system as fundamental to defining the quality of later life. They proposed the environmental docility hypothesis that weighed whether the more competent the person, the less dependent they are on environmental circumstances. This work was later advanced to show that environmental pro-activity, including adaptation, could reinforce control and autonomy. While that theoretical development focused on the micro-environment of accommodation, it can be applied to the macro-environment of community living. This paper, which utilises data from an empirical study ‘Environment and Identity in Later Life’, examines both the micro and macro scales, develops the theoretical content of the person-competence model, considers the complexity of person–environment interaction, and argues that over time some people find that their attachments to particular environments are compromised by declining competence or changes in the environment, or both. The point at which change impacts on an individual's independence and wellbeing is reached when adaptive behaviour cannot rebalance the macro- and micro-environmental press. This point, termed ‘option recognition’, leads to a range of strategic responses including: modification of behaviour or environment; structural support using formal and informal services; and relocation; all of which impact on self-identity.
The myth of independence for older Americans living alone in the Bay Area of San Francisco: a critical reflection
Authors: PORTACOLONE ELENA 
Published: May 2011

ABSTRACTRemaining at home in older age is generally considered a sign of independence and therefore an important achievement. More than five million Americans aged over 75 years live alone, a number that is destined to increase thanks to advances in longevity. Living alone can allow the expression of one's preferences, but it can also bring out hardships hardly visible to outsiders, especially in an individualistic society such as the United States of America that rewards self-sufficiency. According to the sociologist Rose, in neo-liberal societies citizens have a duty to be free, self-reliant and independent. In this paper, Rose's theory and the political economy perspective serve as frameworks by which to examine how discourses around independence are translated in the experiences of 22 older adults aged over 75 living at home alone in the Bay Area of San Francisco. Participant observation and 41 in-depth interviews from 2006 to 2010 illustrate how being independent can be an essential component of individual identities. The informants' narratives shed light on the impact of policies that facilitate or regulate the moral imperative of independence. The findings underline the need to assess how discourses around independence are translated in minority populations, to promote studies and initiatives on interdependence, and to encourage international comparisons on living alone in older age.
Older adults, falls and technologies for independent living: a life space approach
Authors: BAILEY CATHY , FORAN TIMOTHY G. , NI SCANAILL CLIODHNA , DROMEY BEN 
Published: May 2011

ABSTRACTThis paper draws attention to the need for further understanding of the fine details of routine and taken-for-granted daily activities and mobility. It argues that such understanding is critical if technologies designed to mitigate the negative impacts of falls and fear-of-falling are to provide unobtrusive support for independent living. The reported research was part of a large, multidisciplinary, multi-site research programme into responses to population ageing in Ireland, Technologies for Independent Living (TRIL). A small, exploratory, qualitative life-space diary study was conducted. Working with eight community-dwelling older adults with different experiences of falls or of fear-of-falls, data were collected through weekly life-space diaries, daily-activity logs, two-dimensional house plans and a pedometer. For some participants, self-recording of their daily activities and movements revealed routine, potentially risky behaviour about which they had been unaware, which may have implications for falls-prevention advice. The findings are presented and discussed around four key themes: ‘being pragmatic’, ‘not just a faller’, ‘heightened awareness and blind spots’ and ‘working with technology’. The findings suggest a need to think creatively about how technological and other solutions best fit with people's everyday challenges and needs and of critical importance, that their installation does not reduce an older adult to ‘just a faller’ or a person with a fear-of-falls.
Use of the global positioning system to measure the out-of-home mobility of older adults with differing cognitive functioning
Authors: SHOVAL NOAM , WAHL HANS-WERNER , AUSLANDER GAIL , ISAACSON MICHAL , OSWALD FRANK , EDRY TAMAR , LANDAU RUTH , HEINIK JEREMIA 
Published: May 2011

ABSTRACTCognitive impairment manifests in changed out-of-home mobility. Until recently, the assessment of outdoor mobility relied on the reports of family care-givers and institutional staff and used observational approaches, activity monitoring or behavioural checklists. This article presents data for 41 mildly demented, mildly cognitively impaired and healthy men and women aged 64–90 years in Tel-Aviv (Israel) who took part in an interdisciplinary project, SenTra, that is studying the outdoor activities of elderly people using advanced tracking technologies and that involves researchers from geography, social work, gerontology, psychology and medicine. The participants were tracked for 28 consecutive days using a location kit that combined a global positioning system (GPS) with radio frequency identification. The high-resolution spatial and temporal data enabled detailed analysis of the differences in the timing and distance of the participants' daily outdoor mobility patterns. It was found that the spatial range of the mobility of elderly people with cognitive impairment is severely restricted, with most out-of-home time spent in close proximity to their residences. We conclude that GPS is an advanced research tool able to understand out-of-home behaviour better than was possible with previous methods.
Wellbeing, independence and mobility: an introduction
Authors: SCHWANEN TIM , ZIEGLER FRIEDERIKE 
Published: May 2011

ABSTRACTThis paper introduces the theme of the special issue on wellbeing, independence and mobility. We begin with outlining the complexity of each of these notions and then turn towards their interdependence. It is argued that the links between wellbeing, independence and mobility are manifold and contextual in older people's everyday lives: they differ between places, between individuals and across phases in each individual's unique lifecourse. The inherent complexity of those links can be examined fruitfully and understood better if a geographical or environmental analytical perspective is adopted. We also suggest that the interdependence of wellbeing, independence and mobility in later life needs to be understood in the context of neo-liberal governmentality and the creation of particular ways of being and acting for older people. The piece concludes with a brief description of the papers brought together in the special issue.
Artistic representations: Clues to efficient coding in human vision
Authors: GRAHAM DANIEL J. , MENG MING 
Published: May 2011

AbstractIn what ways is mammalian vision—and in particular, human vision—efficiently adapted to its ecology? We suggest that human visual artwork, which is made for the human eye, holds clues that could help answer this question. Paintings are readily perceived as representations of natural objects and scenes, yet statistical relationships between natural images and paintings are nontrivial. Although spatial frequency content is generally similar for art and natural images, paintings cannot reproduce the dynamic range of luminance in scenes. Through a variety of image manipulations designed to alter image intensity distributions and spatial contrast, we here investigate the notion that artists’ representational strategies can efficiently capture salient features of natural images, and in particular, of faces. We report that humans perform near flawless discrimination of faces and nonfaces in both paintings and natural images, even for stimulus presentation durations of 12 ms. In addition, contrast negation and up-down inversion have minimal to no effect on performance for both image types, whereas 1/f noise addition significantly affects discrimination performance for art more than for natural images. Together, these results suggest artists create representations that are highly efficient for transmitting perceptual information to the human brain.
The diffusion of language change in real time: Progressive and conservative individuals and the time depth of change
Authors: Nevalainen Terttu , Raumolin-Brunberg Helena , Mannila Heikki 
Published: May 2011

AbstractA major issue in the study of language change is the degree to which individual speakers participate in ongoing linguistic changes as these progress over time. In this study, we examine the hypothesis, suggested by research based on the apparent-time model, that in any given period most people are neither progressive nor conservative with regard to ongoing changes, but rather fall between these polarities. Our data come from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, which spans over 270 years. A computational model was developed to establish which language users were progressive and which conservative with respect to several ongoing changes that progressed in real time between the early 15th and late 17th centuries. The changes studied ranged from morpheme replacements to more abstract structural patterns. Our results indicate that the degree to which language users participated in changes in progress depended on the type of language change analyzed, the stage of development of the change, and the rate of diffusion of the process over time. The model also enabled the identification of groups of leaders of linguistic change in Tudor and Stuart England.
Attitudinal and sociostructural factors and their role in dialect change: Testing a model of subjective factors
Authors: Kammacher Louise , Stæhr Andreas , Jørgensen J. Normann 
Published: May 2011

AbstractThe causation of language change is a problem with a high profile in sociolinguistics. This paper presents two contrasting models of language change: one that is based on sociopsychological factors (Kristiansen & Jørgensen, 2005) and one that rejects them (the Napoleon Principle, Brink & Lund, 1979). In a longitudinal study of individuals' changing pronunciation of the Danishaj-diphthong over 20 years, we test predictions following from the sociopsychologically oriented model. By the mid-1980s, female speakers used moreaj-pronunciations that are associated with high socioeconomic status than did male speakers. However, in guise tests, females revealed a more positive attitude toward speech associated with low socioeconomic status. Our prediction that female speakers would change their speech patterns to include moreaj-pronunciations associated with low socioeconomic status is supported by an analysis of the same female speakers' pronunciations as recorded in the mid-2000s.
OutsideIn(X)Modular type inference with local assumptions
Authors: VYTINIOTIS DIMITRIOS , PEYTON JONES SIMON , SCHRIJVERS TOM , SULZMANN MARTIN 
Published: May 2011

AbstractAdvanced type system features, such as GADTs, type classes and type families, have proven to be invaluable language extensions for ensuring data invariants and program correctness. Unfortunately, they pose a tough problem for type inference when they are used aslocaltype assumptions. Local type assumptions often result in the lack of principal types and cast the generalisation of local let-bindings prohibitively difficult to implement and specify. User-declared axioms only make this situation worse. In this paper, we explain the problems and – perhaps controversially – argue for abandoning local let-binding generalisation. We give empirical results that local let generalisation is only sporadically used by Haskell programmers. Moving on, we present a novel constraint-based type inference approach for local type assumptions. Our system, calledOutsideIn(X), is parameterised over the particular underlying constraint domain X, in the same way as HM(X). This stratification allows us to use a common metatheory and inference algorithm.OutsideIn(X)extends the constraints of X by introducing implication constraints on top. We describe the strategy for solving these implication constraints, which, in turn, relies on a constraint solver for X. We characterise the properties of the constraint solver for X so that the resulting algorithm only accepts programs with principal types, even when the type system specification accepts programs that do not enjoy principal types. Going beyond the general framework, we give a particular constraint solver for X = type classes + GADTs + type families, a non-trivial challenge in its own right. This constraint solver has been implemented and distributed as part of GHC 7.
A note on the genuine Sieve of Eratosthenes
Authors: NYKÄNEN MATTI 
Published: May 2011

AbstractO'Neill (The genuine Sieve of Eratosthenes. J. Funct. Program. 19(1), 2009, 95–106) has previously considered a functional implementation for the genuine Sieve of Eratosthenes, based on the well-known heap data structure. Here, we develop it further by adapting this data structure to this particular application.
Using CALL in a formal learning context to develop oral language awareness in ESL: an assessment
Authors: Vincent-Durroux Laurence , Poussard Cécile , Lavaur Jean-Marc , Aparicio Xavier 
Published: May 2011

AbstractFrench learners at university meet difficulties in the comprehension of oral English. Being in a formal context of language learning, they need to develop language awareness to compensate for insufficient exposure to the English language.To meet the students’ needs, data was collected in order to pinpoint the main errors made by French learners in listening tasks. The errors were then analyzed and put into perspective with the system of oral English; a connection clearly appeared between the errors and what is barely heard or cannot be heard in reference to written English, hinting at what could cause poor oral comprehension. Three areas of knowledge appeared to be missing in the students’ background: the links between morpho-syntax and phonology, the mastery of phonological data found in dictionaries and the possible recourse to strategies in order to compensate for what has not been heard properly. These issues were addressed in an on-line program designed for non-beginners of English at university.This paper deals with the assessment of the progress made by users of the program in a formal learning situation. Two groups of learners were considered: students whose major is English, and students for whom the study of English is optional. Two series of tests were implemented, before and after the use of the program. The tests focused on the ability of learners to read IPA transcription, to count syllables in oral English, and to pronounce auxiliaries and prepositions in different contexts.The results to be discussed establish that the two groups of learners significantly improved their knowledge of oral English. Of particular interest is the fact that, even if the two groups had significantly different knowledge of oral English before using the program, with non-specialists of English having poorer knowledge, the two groups obtain similar results on the post-test, showing greater progress on the part of the non-specialists. All learners appear to improve dramatically their knowledge of IPA and their ability to use it.The progress measured by the tests was corroborated by other modes of assessment: a survey on the students’ judgment as regards the usefulness of the program, and individual interviews focusing on what the students recall from the content of the program. In the latter, the students used relevant meta-linguistic and meta-cognitive expressions, showing their ability for further progress in developing listening abilities in English as a Second Language (ESL).
A computer assisted method to track listening strategies in second language learning
Authors: Roussel Stéphanie 
Published: May 2011

AbstractMany studies about listening strategies are based on what learners report while listening to an oral message in the second language (Vandergrift, 2003; Graham, 2006). By recording a video of the computer screen while L2 learners (L1 French) were listening to an MP3-track in German, this study uses a novel approach and recent developments in computer technology to examine objectively what learners do while listening. The videos of the participants’ screens show the movements of the mouse and its time-course, and therefore the pauses and the backward or forward movements learners do in order to master their listening task. In this study, “self-regulation” indicates the capacity of the listener to exercise physical control over the listening input by using the mouse. Our point is that the recorded physical movements of the mouse during the listening task are a good indicator of metacognitive activity. This is independent of what the learner reports. The data and the time-courses of the mouse were then analyzed, from both a psycholinguistic and a linguistic point of view. This enabled us, on the one hand, to define a typology of listening strategies depending on the initial level of the participants and to show that, on the whole, the opportunity to have personal control over information input/intake does improve all the learners’ information processing. On the other hand, tracking the movements of the mouse while a learner individually listens to an oral text on a computer also has a methodological interest and equally allowed us to verify some precise research hypotheses about the links between linguistic features, for example, place of German compounds and final position of the verb in a subordinate clause, self-regulation strategies and comprehension.
A study of a multimedia web annotation system and its effect on the EFL writing and speaking performance of junior high school students
Authors: Hwang Wu-Yuin , Shadiev Rustam , Huang Szu-Min 
Published: May 2011

AbstractThe aim of this study was to improve students’ English as Foreign Language (EFL) writing and speaking performance with appropriate learning activity design supported by Virtual Pen (VPen), a multimedia web annotation system. Students’ perceptions toward using VPen and learningactivities, attitude toward using VPen, actual VPen usage and their relationships were also investigated. After the experiment the students perceived that VPen was easy to use and useful during learning activities, and generally had a positive attitude toward using VPen. Furthermore, the students believed that learning activities were ‘playful’ and useful for improving writing and speaking performance. Further investigation revealed that the students’ actual VPen usage had a significant correlation with speaking and writing performance and that students’ speaking and writing performance significantly correlated with learning achievement. Based on our findings, we conclude that designed learning activities supported by the VPen system could facilitate students’ writing and speaking performance and therefore improve their learning achievement.