Assessing financial competence

Some people have cognitive impairments that may reduce their capacity to manage their own financial affairs. The legal decision to limit a person's right to manage his or her own finances depends, in part, on an assessment of financial competence. Currently, tribunals and courts may receive information from a variety of different sources (e.g., family members, general practitioner, psychologist, social worker etc.) and have to reconcile this information in order to make guardianship decisions. The first aim of this article is to critique contemporary methods, procedures and practices for assessing financial competence. The second aim is to suggest a standard assessment framework that could be employed by tribunals and courts to help them evaluate the status of a person's financial competence.

Security issues within virtual worlds such as second life

The advancement in Internet and bandwidth has resulted in a number of new applications to be developed. An area of advancement has been in the development of virtual worlds, where people can interact together via virtual characters. Virtual World systems have been so complex that virtual lives can be lived, including all aspect of life such as education, commerce, social activities etc. Not surprisingly, the problems that exist in the real world such as theft, fraud, vandalism and terrorism, also exist in the virtual worlds. The more developed these virtual worlds become the greater the breaches of security will be in the virtual as well as the real world.This paper explores and categorises several security issues within the Virtual World of Second Life. It contributes to practice and research by emphasising the importance of security awareness for businesses and the general public in Virtual Worlds.

The visual/verbal nexus: conflating conventional notions of listening

This paper re-examines the terrain of traditional communication time-based studies in the context of a case study of the communication practices of higher education students in both formal and informal contexts through an online survey and semi-structured phenomenologically focussed interviews. While focussing on the nature of students’ listening behaviour for learning and for leisure, the study explores how ideas and information are mediated in contemporary communication environments which encompass mobile devices, social media, etc. In exploring the nexus between the visual and the verbal, the research probes the ways in which contemporary higher education students navigate the increasingly complex communication environment and questions the capacity of current multiliteracies theories, for example, to engage meaningfully with this less charted terrain. The data suggests that the rapid and pervasive changes due to digital affordances have now positioned listening in a pivotal position alongside the explosive visual communication media. The capacity of our current curricula to respond creatively to the increasingly complex mix of new communication paradigms is open to question.