New parameters for daytime wandering

This study aimed to describe wandering using new parameters and to evaluate parameters as a function of cognitive impairment and mobility. Forty-four wanderers in long-term care settings were videotaped 12 times. Rate and duration of wandering episodes were plotted and used to derive parameters from values above and below case medians, proportion of hours wandering, and time of day. Participants wandered during 47% of observations; on average, the hourly rate was 4.3 episodes, the peak hourly rate was 18 episodes, and the peak hourly duration was 19.9 minutes. Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores was negatively correlated with overall duration and number of observations during which duration exceeded 15 minutes per hour, was positively correlated with number of observations without wandering, and was not significantly correlated with rate-related parameters. Mobility correlated positively with rate and duration parameters. Interaction of MMSE score and mobility was the strongest predictor of wandering duration. Parameters derived from repeated measures provide a new view of daytime wandering and insight into relationships between MMSE score and mobility status with specific parameters of wandering.

The impact of susceptibility to informational influence on the effectiveness of consumer testimonials

In this article we examine how a consumer's susceptibility to informative influence (SII) affects the effectiveness of consumer testimonials in print advertising. More specifically, we show that consumers that are high in SII and that seek consumption-relevant information from other people are more influenced by the strength of the testimonial information than the strength of the attribute information. Conversely, consumers low in SII place greater emphasis on the strength of the attribute information when forming their evaluations. Our results show that consumer psychological traits can have an important impact on the acceptance of testimonial advertising. Theoretical and managerial implications of our findings are discussed.

Is there something quantum-like about the human mental lexicon?

Following an early claim by Nelson & McEvoy suggesting that word associations can display `spooky action at a distance behaviour', a serious investigation of the potentially quantum nature of such associations is currently underway. In this paper quantum theory is proposed as a framework suitable for modelling the mental lexicon, specifically the results obtained from both intralist and extralist word association experiments. Some initial models exploring this hypothesis are discussed, and they appear to be capable of substantial agreement with pre-existing experimental data. The paper concludes with a discussion of some experiments that will be performed in order to test these models.

Shifting the child protection juggernaut to earlier intervention

"For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong (M.L. Mencken, US writer and social commentator). Nowhere is this quote more apt than when applied to finding over-simplified solutions to the complex problem of looking after the safety and well-being of vulnerable children. The easiest formula is, of course, to ‘rescue children from dysfunctional families’, a line taken recently in the monograph by the right wing think tank, Centre for Independent Studies (Sammut & O’Brien 2009). It is reasoning with fatal flaws. This commentary provides a timely reminder of the strong arguments which lie behind the national and international shift to supporting children and families through universal and specialist community-based services, rather than weighting all resources into statutory child protection interventions. A brief outline of the value of developing the resources to support children in their families, and the problems with 'rescuing' children through the child protection system are discussed.

Does the summative assessment of real world learning using criterion-referenced assessment need to be discipline specific?

This paper synthesises the existing literature on the contemporary conception of ‘real world’ and compares it with similar notions such as ‘authentic’ and ‘work integrated learning’. While the term ‘real world’ may be partly dependent on the discipline, it does not necessarily follow that the criterion-referenced assessment of ‘real world’ assessment must involve criteria and performance descriptors that are discipline specific. Two examples of summative assessment (court report and trial process exercise) from a final year core subject at the Queensland University of Technology, LWB432 Evidence, emphasise real world learning, are authentic, innovative and better prepare students for the transition into the workplace than more generic forms of assessment such as tutorial participation or oral presentations. The court report requires students to attend a criminal trial in a Queensland Court and complete a two page report on what they saw in practice compared with what they learned in the classroom. The trial process exercise is a 50 minute written closed book activity conducted in tutorials, where students plan questions that they would ask their witness in examination-in-chief, plan questions that they would ask their opponent’s witness in cross-examination, plan questions that they would ask in reexamination given what their opponent asked in cross-examination, and prepare written objections to their opponent’s questions. The trial process exercise simulates the real world, whereas the court report involves observing the real world, and both assessment items are important to the role of counsel. The design of the criterion-referenced assessment rubrics for the court report and trial process exercise is justified by the literature. Notably, the criteria and performance descriptors are not necessarily law specific and this paper highlights the parts that may be easily transferred to other disciplines.

Just Relations : Indigenous families in Australian lifestyle media

This paper argues that the increasing visibility of Indigenous families in the mainstream Australian media over the past ten years has produced new opportunities for addressing national injustices of the Stolen Generations. It shows how, as certain celebrities like Ernie Dingo, Nova Peris and Cathy Freeman, have become popular household names, a concurrent public interest in their family backgrounds has grown. Descriptive accounts of relationships and shared histories – propelled by the expansion of the lifestyle television genre in this context – has enabled some stories of the ‘Stolen Generations’ to be seen as ‘ordinary’, and part of a broader sense of everyday Australian life for the first time. With the aid of recent sexual citizenship research, the article illustrates that such middle-class representations give voice to new embodiments of citizenship in the post-apology era, making Indigenous justice more subjectively interconnected with life in the white Australian public sphere.

Empirical derivation and validation of a wandering typology

OBJECTIVES: To develop and validate a wandering typology. ---------- DESIGN: Cross-sectional, correlational descriptive design. ---------- SETTING:: Twenty-two nursing homes and six assisted living facilities. ---------- PARTICIPANTS: One hundred forty-two residents with dementia who spoke English, met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, criteria for dementia, scored less than 24 on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), were ambulatory (with or without assistive device), and maintained a stable regime of psychotropic medications were studied. ---------- MEASUREMENTS: Data on wandering were collected using direct observations, plotted serially according to rate and duration to yield 21 parameters, and reduced through factor analysis to four components: high rate, high duration, low to moderate rate and duration, and time of day. Other measures included the MMSE, Minimum Data Set 2.0 mobility items, Cumulative Illness Rating Scale—Geriatric, and tympanic body temperature readings. ---------- RESULTS: Three groups of wanderers were identified through cluster analysis: classic, moderate, and subclinical. MMSE, mobility, and cardiac and upper and lower gastrointestinal problems differed between groups of wanderers and in comparison with nonwanderers. ---------- CONCLUSION: Results have implications for improving identification of wanderers and treatment of possible contributing factors.

Estimates of crowding in long-term care: Comparing two approaches

Objective: Because studies of crowding in long-term care settings are lacking, the authors sought to: (1) generate initial estimates of crowding in nursing homes and assisted living facilities; and (2) evaluate two operational approaches to its measurement. ----- ----- Background: Reactions to density and proximity are complex. Greater density intensifies people's reaction to a situation in the direction (positive or negative) that they would react if the situation were to occur under less dense conditions. People with dementia are especially reactive to the environment. ----- ----- Methods: Using a cross-sectional correlational design in nursing homes and assisted living facilities involving 185 participants, multiple observations (N = 6,455) of crowding and other environmental variables were made. Crowding, location, and sound were measured three times per observation; ambiance was measured once. Data analyses consisted of descriptive statistics, t-tests, and one-way analysis of variance. ----- ----- Results: Crowding estimates were higher for nursing homes and in dining and activity rooms. Crowding also varied across settings and locations by time of day. Overall, the interaction of location and time affected crowding significantly (N = 5,559, df [47, 511], F = 105.69, p < .0001); effects were greater within location-by-hour than between location-by-hour, but the effect explained slightly less variance in Long-Term Care Crowding Index (LTC-CI) estimates (47.41%) than location alone. Crowding had small, direct, and highly significant correlations with sound and with the engaging subscale for ambiance; a similar, though inverse, correlation was seen with the soothing subscale for ambiance. ----- ----- Conclusions: Crowding fluctuates consistent with routine activities such as meals in long-term care settings. Furthermore, a relationship between crowding and other physical characteristics of the environment was found. The LTC-CI is likely to be more sensitive than simple people counts when seeking to evaluate the effects of crowding on the behavior of elders-particularly those with dementia-in long-term care settings. aging in place.

Call for action : investigating the role of business process management in green IS

Sustainable practices are more than ever on the radar screen of organizations, triggered by a growing demand of the wider population towards approaches and practices that can be considered "green" or "sustainable". Our specific intent with this call for action is to immerse deeper into the role of business processes, and specifically the contributions that the management of these processes can play in leveraging the transformative power of information systems (IS) in order to create environmentally sustainable organizations. Our key premise is that business and information technology (IT) managers need to engage in a process-focused discussion to enable a common, comprehensive understanding of process, and the process-centered opportunities for making these processes, and ultimately the organization as a process-centric entity, "green". Based on a business process lifecycle model, we propose possible avenues for future research.

Modelling the activation of words in human memory : the spreading activation, spooky-activation-at-a-distance and the entanglement models compared

Modelling how a word is activated in human memory is an important requirement for determining the probability of recall of a word in an extra-list cueing experiment. The spreading activation, spooky-action-at-a-distance and entanglement models have all been used to model the activation of a word. Recently a hypothesis was put forward that the mean activation levels of the respective models are as follows: Spreading � Entanglment � Spooking-action-at-a-distance This article investigates this hypothesis by means of a substantial empirical analysis of each model using the University of South Florida word association, rhyme and word norms.