Private rule-making and European governance - issues of legitimacy

Private rule-making is widely discussed as supporting institutional policy making and legislation at EU level. The following argues for a different perspective on private actor rule-making, focusing on the autonomy of social realms within which self-governance may be possible. From this perspective, private actor rule-making is considered as a potential gain in self-determination. Substantive autonomy and enhanced self-determination of all those affected are considered as prerequisites for accepting rules made by private actors. Opening the field for discussion, some manifestations of (envisaged) private rule-making at EU level are explored and discussed as to whether they should be accepted as legitimate forms of self-governance.

At Home in Care: Children living with birth parents on a Care Order

This study explored the processes, background information, and perceived reasons why children and young people returned home while remaining in care, in the five HSC Trusts in Northern Ireland. The research also focused on understanding the functions the Care Order had for social services, the birth parents, and young people involved.
It was found that on 31st March 2009, there were 193 children/young people living with their birth parents on a Care Order in Northern Ireland. This is eight per cent of the total population of Looked After children, and is lower than had been anticipated from governmental statistics. In total, the case files of 47 of these young people (24% of them) were reviewed, and interviews were conducted with ten of them and their birth parent/s.
The analysis revealed that the majority of them had in common a parental background history of alcohol abuse and domestic violence, and most return breakdowns in the study were related to continuing parental alcohol and/or drugs misuse. While some children had a planned return home after parents had engaged in supports and completed assessments, many young people had returns that were not planned, as they initiated the move themselves, or previous foster placements had broken down and there were no alternative placements identified for them. Many of these young people essentially ‘voted with their feet’, and social services were required to ensure that they remained safe in often less than optimal circumstances.
After returning home, for many, Care Orders remained for initially unintended lengthy periods because of the risks posed by parents’ intermittent alcohol abuse and their lifestyle, contact issues, and parents’ desire to ensure that their children were able to access the supports that they needed. Thus, Care Orders at home tended to serve two main functions: to either monitor and/or support the placement.

Tangible applications for regular objects:An end-user model for pervasive computing at home

This paper describes an end-user model for a domestic pervasive computing platform formed by regular home objects. The platform does not rely on pre-planned infrastructure; instead, it exploits objects that are already available in the home and exposes their joint sensing, actuating and computing capabilities to home automation applications. We advocate an incremental process of the platform formation and introduce tangible, object-like artifacts for representing important platform functions. One of those artifacts, the application pill, is a tiny object with a minimal user interface, used to carry the application, as well as to start and stop its execution and provide hints about its operational status. We also emphasize streamlining the user's interaction with the platform. The user engages any UI-capable object of his choice to configure applications, while applications issue notifications and alerts exploiting whichever available objects can be used for that purpose. Finally, the paper briefly describes an actual implementation of the presented end-user model. © (2010) by International Academy, Research, and Industry Association (IARIA).

Urban and rural differences in risk of admission to a care home: a census-based follow-up study

Research on admissions to care homes for older people has paid more attention to individual and social characteristics than to geographical factors. This paper considers rural-urban differences in household composition and admission rates. Cohort: 51,619 people aged 65 years or older at the time of the 2001 Census and not living in a care home, drawn from a data linkage study based on c.28% of the Northern Ireland population.Living alone was less common in rural areas; 25% of older people in rural areas lived with children compared to 18% in urban areas. Care home admission was more common in urban (4.7%) and intermediate (4.3%) areas than in rural areas (3.2%). Even after adjusting for age, sex, health and living arrangements, the rate of care home admission in rural areas was still only 75% of that in urban areas.People in rural areas experience better family support by living as part of two or three generation households. Even after accounting for this difference, older rural dwellers are less likely to enter care homes; suggesting that neighbours and relatives in rural areas provide more informal care; or that there may be differential deployment of formal home care services.

An Improvement of IP Address Lookup based on Rule Filter Analysis

Multi-bit trie is a popular approach performing the longest prefix matching for packet classification. However, it requires a long lookup time and inefficiently consumes memory space. This paper presents an in-depth study of different variations of multi-bit trie for IP address lookup. Our main aim is to study a method of data structure which reduces memory space. The proposed approach has been implemented using the label method in two approaches. Both methods present better results regarding lookup speed, update time and memory bit consumptions.

In and out of home care decisions: The influence of confirmation bias in developing decision supportive reasoning

The aims of this study were to identify the themes Social Workers regard as important in supporting decisions to remove children from, or return them to, the care of their parents. To further elicit underlying hypotheses that are discernible in interpretation of evidence. A case study, comprising a two-part vignette with a questionnaire, recorded demographic information, child welfare attitudes and risk assessments, using scales derived from standardised instruments, was completed by 202 Social Workers in Northern Ireland. There were two manipulated variables, mother’s attitude to removal and child’s attitude to reunification2 years later. In this paper we use data derived from respondents’ qualitative comments explaining their reasoning for in and out of home care decisions. Some 60.9% of respondent’s chose the parental care option at part one, with 94% choosing to have the child remain in foster care at part two. The manipulated variables were found to have no significant statistical effect. However, three underlying hypotheses were found to underpin decisions; (a)child rescue, (b) kinship defence and (c) a hedged position on calculation of risk subject to further assessment. Reasoning strategies utilised by social workers to support their decision making suggest that they tend to selectively interpret information either positively or negatively to support pre-existing underlying hypotheses. This finding is in keeping with the literature on ‘confirmation bias.’ The research further draws attention to the need to incorporate open questions in quantitative studies, to help guard against surface reading of data, which often does not ‘speak for itself.’