Good Self-Rated Health as an Indicator of Personal Capability in Old Age

Self-rated health, or self-assessed health, is based on asking individuals to evaluate their general health status on a four- or five-point scale, with response options ranging from ‘very good’ to ‘very poor’. This simple question has been one of the most frequently used health indicators for decades. In nursing research, the voices, interpretations and understanding of humans, as well as their ability to shape their experiences, are studied through the collection and analysis of primarily qualitative materials that are subjective and narrative in nature. However, knowledge about subjective experiences of health and illness, situated and filtered through the life-world of the individual, can also be sought using other approaches. The aim of this chapter is twofold. Firstly, it aims to outline perspectives on how epidemiology and population-based studies of self-rated health as an indicator of subjective experiences can generate new evidence to solve nursing problems and expand nursing knowledge. Secondly, based on the hypothesis that there is an association between good self-rated health and a person’s capability to master the gains and losses of late life, the chapter also aims to describe how personal capability can be operationalised as self-rated health, given that this seemingly simple question delegates to the individual the task of synthesising, in a single evaluation, the many dimensions that make up the complex concept of health and wellbeing in old age. Although a person’s capabilities are dependent on a large variety of factors, at the individual level, symptom experience, chronic illnesses and functional disability are paramount. Therefore, in this chapter, the focus will be on self-rated health as an indicator of personal capability in the fourth age – the period of late life characterised by illness, frailty, impairment and dependence on others. To study self-rated health during this period of life is especially interesting in that the discrepancy between subjective and objective health seems to increase with age, and older olds tend to rate their health as better than younger olds given the same level of disease and functioning.

Chat Me Out of Here!

Conversational user interfaces, aka chatbots, offer new ways of interaction that can be used not only for task-led applications, but also for learning itself. From drill-and-practice assistants to digital tutors and coaches, Conversational learning offers a variety of new and extensive options to support individuals through the learning process and to push the boundaries of classroom-based learning. However, Conversational Learning applications that go beyond simple question-and-answer dialogs are still rare. “Pit in the Warehouse” takes a new stance to Conversational Learning: by combining an dialogical escape room challenge with an interactive fiction approach and compelling storytelling, it creates an engaging and low-threshold type of game-based learning.

Los límites modalmente vagos de la simplicidad mereológica

Un objeto simple es un átomo mereológico, es decir, un objeto sin partes. Markosian (1998) postula lo que él llama the simple question: ¿bajo qué circunstancias es verdadero para un objeto que no posea partes? Este artículo analiza, primero, las respuestas a esa pregunta y, segundo, la tesis del nihilismo mereológico sobre composición material. Según esta última, en el mundo solo existen objetos simples que nunca componen nada. Esta tesis evita la vaguedad composicional al no existir límites espaciales indeterminados para un objeto sin partes, pero no elimina, considerando los descubrimientos de la física cuántica, la vaguedad modal en su localización.

“Missions and Momentum”

This chapter engages founders—aspiring, new, and seasoned—in a simple question: “In a city full of churches, why did we need yours? What’s your product?” Their varied answers to this question fall into three broad frameworks that characterize their assertions about their public benefit and their orientations toward their consumers. Those orientations—client-centeredness, comrade-centeredness, and convert-centeredness—serve as ideal cases for what they claim drives (or in older congregations drove) their belief that they could meet latent demands in their communities. The penultimate section of this chapter describes the difficulty founders have maintaining the vision and values they started their church with, a difficulty exacerbated by the religious ecologies their churches are embedded in and the changing priorities of their spiritually and materially maturing memberships. Like their secular nonprofit peers, churches are vulnerable to mission drift, vision hijacks, and vision stalls.

Bach and the Soprano Voice

The chapter begins with a simple question: given the fact that Bach’s music for sopranos was composed almost exclusively for boys, why have early music practitioners—including those endorsed in 2018 by the Bach Leipzig Archive—become so accustomed to using female sopranos? Taking account both of the rhetorical strategies that Bach uses in a representative group of soprano arias (choice of affect, use of topoi, scoring, and vocal writing) and the use of female sopranos in this repertory in concert, radio, and recordings since the nineteenth-century revival, this chapter proposes that Bach imbued his soprano arias with an intrinsic sense of femininity—passion, optimism, desire, compliance, modesty, and submission—that was central to his expression of Lutheran theology and that emerges as no less vital for listeners, even long after the original theological context had lost its relevance. The chapter also shows how Bach’s unacknowledged capacity for representing female subjectivity has influenced even the most historically informed performance practices.

Mechanotransduction as a major driver of cell behaviour: mechanisms, and relevance to cell organization and future research

How do cells process environmental cues to make decisions? This simple question is still generating much experimental and theoretical work, at the border of physics, chemistry and biology, with strong implications in medicine. The purpose of mechanobiology is to understand how biochemical and physical cues are turned into signals through mechanotransduction. Here, we review recent evidence showing that (i) mechanotransduction plays a major role in triggering signalling cascades following cell–neighbourhood interaction; (ii) the cell capacity to continually generate forces, and biomolecule properties to undergo conformational changes in response to piconewton forces, provide a molecular basis for understanding mechanotransduction; and (iii) mechanotransduction shapes the guidance cues retrieved by living cells and the information flow they generate. This includes the temporal and spatial properties of intracellular signalling cascades. In conclusion, it is suggested that the described concepts may provide guidelines to define experimentally accessible parameters to describe cell structure and dynamics, as a prerequisite to take advantage of recent progress in high-throughput data gathering, computer simulation and artificial intelligence, in order to build a workable, hopefully predictive, account of cell signalling networks.

Bone marrow runs the (bone) show

In this issue of JEM, a paper by Kim et al. (2021. J. Exp. Med.https://doi.org/10.1084/jem.20211872), asking a simple question through a remarkable alliance of human and mouse genetics, demonstrates that a prevalent hematological condition can lead to osteoporosis. This work is important by virtue of the quality of its results and its implication for the relationship between bone and its marrow.

Information Inundation on Platforms and Implications

Information Inundation and Polarization In the paper “Information Inundation on Platforms and Implications,” Gad Allon, Kimon Drakopoulos, and Vahideh Manshadi study the process of learning and opinion formation in the presence of platforms. The paper is motivated by the relatively recent changes in how people access and consume news. Specifically, more and more people access news through social platforms, such as Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter. The paper tries to answer a simple question: why is it that we become more polarized even though we have more information sources than ever? In this paper, the authors assume that people are almost rational and are not easily biased as a result of psychological biases. Yet the authors show that, even if people are good “statisticians” in the sense that they try to find the information that reduces their ignorance by the most significant amount, they choose to consume information that slows their ability to learn. In fact, the authors show that screening information sources results in polarization: everyone is sort of “stuck” in their side of the political map. We are essentially illustrating a mechanism that generates confirmation bias even for a seemingly rational reader.

Experiments with Fuzzy Methods for Forecasting Time Series as Alternatives to Classical Methods

Even though forecasting methods have advanced in the last few decades, economists still face a simple question: which prediction method gives the most accurate results? Econometric forecasting methods can deal with different types of time series and have good results, but in specific cases, they may fail to provide accurate predictions. Recently, new techniques borrowed from the soft computing area were adopted for economic forecasting. Starting from the importance of economic forecasts, we present an experimental study where we compared the accuracy of some of the most used econometric forecasting methods, namely the simple exponential smoothing, Holt and ARIMA methods, with that of two new methods based on the concept of fuzzy time series. We used a set of time series extracted from the Eurostat database and the R software for all data processing. The results of the experiments show that despite not being fully superior to the econometric techniques, the fuzzy time series forecasting methods could be considered as an alternative for specific time series.

Estimating the Completeness of Preserved Collections in Representing Global Biodiversity

There are an estimated 8.7 million eukaryotic species globally and knowledge of those organisms is organised about their scientific names and the specimens we have of those species (Sweetlove 2011, Mora et al. 2011). Likewise there are between 1.2 and 2.1 billion (109) specimens held in biodiversity collections globally (Ariño 2010). These collections constitute an infrastructure and scientific tool to understand, catalogue and study biodiversity. Yet we find it hard to answer the simple question, how many species are in a collection? This is not trivial to answer, collections are not completely inventoried, do not use the same taxonomy, and the volume of data is vast (Samy et al. 2013, Ariño 2010). We have developed a method that allows us to take a list of collections and to estimate the species richness contained within them. By doing this we will have a deeper insight into the scientific value of the world's biodiversity collections. Dealing with non-homogeneous and non-random, but incomplete, sampling of sites is a common issue that occurs in many ecological studies (Magurran and McGill 2011, Colwell et al. 2012, Gotelli and Colwell 2001). By using techniques and toolboxes, such as iNEXT (Chao et al. 2014b) and vegan (Oksanen et al. 2020) we can estimate species richness under these conditions. In the case of collections we consider not only the digitized and published proportion of preserved collections, but make extrapolations to the specimens that have not made their way to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) yet. Nevertheless, to calculate on such large datasets we need to employ innovative Big Data analytic tools. GBIF contains 1.8 billion observations that amount to 120 GB of data compressed. This can then be interrogated in the cloud or locally using tools such as Galaxy, which has made it possible to process large numbers of records in a single batch. We can now evaluate the biodiversity within collections, and divide the result by taxon and geographical region, and compare them to one another. Ultimately, this work will allow individual collections and consortia to evaluate their coverage of biodiversity and help them better target their collecting strategies.