How can we promote co-creation in communities? The perspective of health promoting professionals in four European countries

PurposeThe aim was to identify the competencies professionals need to promote co-creation engagement within communities.Design/methodology/approachCo-creation could contribute to building community capacity to promote health. Professional development is key to support co-creative practices. Participants were professionals in a position to promote co-creation processes in health-promoting welfare settings across Denmark, Portugal, France and United Kingdom. An overarching unstructured topic guide was used within interviews, focus groups, questionnaires and creative activities.FindingsThe need to develop competencies to promote co-creation was high across all countries. Creating a common understanding of co-creation and the processes involved to increase inclusivity, engagement and shared understanding was also necessary. Competencies included: How to run co-creation from the beginning of the process right through to evaluation, using feedback and communication throughout using an open action-oriented approach; initiating a perspective change and committing to the transformation of co-creation into a real-life process.Practical implicationsOverall, learning about underlying principles, process initiation, implementation and facilitation of co-creation were areas identified to be included within a co-creation training programme. This can be applied through the framework of enabling change, advocating for co-creative processes, mediating through partnership, communication, leadership, assessment, planning, implementation, evaluation and research, ethical values and knowledge of co-creative processes.Originality/valueThis study provides novel findings on the competencies needed for health promoting professionals to embed co-creative processes within their practice, and the key concerns that professionals with a position to mediate co-creation have in transferring the abstract term of co-creation into a real-world practice.

Improved visual inertial odometry based on deep learning

The traditional visual inertial odometry according to the manually designed rules extracts key points. However, the manually designed extraction rules are easy to be affected and have poor robustness in the scene of illumination and perspective change, resulting in the decline of positioning accuracy. Deep learning methods show strong robustness in key point extraction. In order to improve the positioning accuracy of visual inertial odometer in the scene of illumination and perspective change, deep learning is introduced into the visual inertial odometer system for key point detection. The encoder part of MagicPoint network is improved by depthwise separable convolution, and then the network is trained by self-supervised method; A visual inertial odometer system based on deep learning is compose by using the trained network to replace the traditional key points detection algorithm on the basis of VINS. The key point detection network is tested on HPatches dataset, and the odometer positioning effect is evaluated on EUROC dataset. The results show that the improved visual inertial odometer based on deep learning can reduce the positioning error by more than 5% without affecting the real-time performance.

Humorous Coping With Unrequited Love: Is Perspective Change Important?

A large number of studies suggest that humor is associated with mental well-being and effective as a means of coping. However, it is less well-understood which mechanisms are effective for this particular function of humor. The present study examines whether processes of change of perspective, which are often regarded as constitutive for humor, could be an effective coping-factor when facing unrequited love as a specific psychological burden. In a questionnaire study, N = 148 persons aged 18–65 years (w = 96) with actual or past experiences of unrequited love reported on their subjective burden due to this experience, their self-esteem and satisfaction with life, two scales for humor (Multidimensional Sense of Humor Scale: MSHS, and a self-constructed scale: Humorous Change of Perspective, HCOP) and a coping scale which measure change of perspective in the confrontation with goal blockages (Flexible Goal Adjustment, FGA). Results indicated that the burden of unrequited love [operationalized objectively as actuality of experience (dichotomous) or subjectively as burden experienced] and both indicators of well-being were negatively associated. Multiple regression analyses showed that humor was a significant moderator of this relationship in nearly all combinations of operationalizations of humor and indicators of well-being: Higher levels of humor are associated with better well-being even when the perceived burden was high. In addition, the study examined whether the coping effect of humor can be partly or mainly attributed to the individual's capacity to perspective change as captured by FGA. When including this scale as a covariate in the regression models, the moderation effect for MSHS did not persist; however, for HCOP the moderation effect remained unchanged: the moderator effect of humorous change of perspective proved to be independent of FGA. Taken together the results suggest that perspective-changing skills play a significant role in the coping effect of humor in dealing with psychological burdens. However, depending on which humor facet is measured, the entailed perspective change may or may not appear to go beyond what the individual's FGA can account for. This suggests that the coping effect caused by humorous change of perspective includes aspects that are also discussed for other coping resources as well as its own, humor-specific aspects. Potential avenues for future studies are discussed both with respect to the necessity for replication and extension of the present study and to the determination of other potential alleviativing effects of other facets of humor.

Conceptualizing Change in the Cuban Revolution

This paper will consider two levels within the study of the Cuban revolution: the meta-narratives of change and continuity that determine the academic literature on Cuba and inform political positioning in relation to the revolution, and the methodological challenges in understanding how people in Cuba experience change and continuity in their daily life. Transformation and continuity have been the two dominant analytical tropes used to interpret Cuban social and political life since the overthrow of the Batista regime in 1959. For Cuban scholars and politicians, a focus on change in reference to what was Cuba’s reality before the Revolution is a continuous concern and a powerful discursive mechanism in redefining and reinvigorating the revolutionary project. Simultaneously, in periods of crisis throughout the 62 years since the revolution, the capacity to demonstrate continuity with revolutionary principles while developing new mechanisms to redefine the political project has ensured the revolution’s subsistence. Conversely, continuity and change are also harnessed by critics of Cuba’s current regime to articulate the ever-imminent collapse of socialism in the region. Change has been their main focus of concern during critical historic moments that affected the trajectory of the Cuban revolutionary project. From this perspective, change embodies a promise of progress and implies a movement toward liberal democracy and a pro-US foreign policy, while continuity denotes failure, stagnation, and repression. At the core of the analysis of change in Cuba lies a concern with the nature of the state. Ethnographic data reveals the partialities and contradictions people experience in their daily life and across time. Two elements of ethnographic experience are particularly informative: life histories that span across the revolutionary period, and generational conflicts surrounding political issues. I will focus on the life history of key informants and the generational conflicts that surround their experience, a well as their material contexts (their neighborhood, their house, their job), all of which help to elucidate the complexities of studying change within a permanent revolution.

Measuring the contribution of mobility to malaria persistence

Background: To achieve the goal of malaria elimination, it is important to determine the role of human mobility of maintain parasite transmission. The Alto Jurua basin (Brazil) has one of the largest prevalence of malaria vivax and malaria falciparum in the Amazon. The goal of this work was to estimate the contribution of human commutation on the persistence of malaria in this region using data from a origin-destination survey.Methods: Data from the origin-destination survey was used to describe the intensity and motivation for commutation between rural settlements and urban areas in two municipalities, Mancio Lima and Rodrigues Alves. The relativetime-person spent in each locality per household was estimated. A logistic model was fitted to estimate the effect of commuting on the probability of getting malaria for a householder from a zone of residence commuting to another zone.Results: Our main results suggest that this population is not very mobile. 96% of household reported spending more than 90% of the annual person-hour at localities within the same zone of residence. Study and work are the most prevalent motivations for commuting, 40.5% and 29.5% respectively. Spending person-hours in urban Rodrigues Alves conferred relative protection to the residents of urban Mancio Lima. On the other hand, spending time in urban Rodrigues Alves conferred protection against malaria for those living in urban Mancio Lima. The opposite effect occurs for those spending time in the rural areas of both municipalities.Conclusion: In the alto Jurua region, the place one lives is a stronger determinant of malaria risk than the place ones commute. These municipalities of a hotspot of Plasmodium transmission, thus understanding the main fluxes is essential to planning control strategies because the probability of getting malaria is dependent on the intensity of transmission of both, the area of origin and the area to which the displacement take place. The natural conditions for the circulation of pathogens such as the Plasmodium spp, combined with the pattern of mobility of humans in the Amazon, make clear the need of disease control perspective change. It is essential that intersectoral public policies be the basis for health mitigation actions.