This longitudinal study has examined the associations between perceived supportive and unsupportive spousal behavior and changes in distress in couples coping with cancer. We tested whether people relatively low in their sense of personal control were more responsive to spousal supportive and unsupportive behavior than were people relatively high in personal control. Patients with colorectal cancer and their partners (n = 70) completed questionnaires at two assessment points: 3 (at baseline) and 9 months (at follow-up) after the diagnosis. We assessed perceived spousal supportive (SSL) and unsupportive (SSL-N) behavior, sense of personal control (Pearlin & Schooler's Mastery), and depressive symptoms (CES-D) in both patients and partners. Multilevel analysis (MLwiN) was used to examine changes in distress over time in a dyadic context. Patients and partners who perceived more spousal support reported less distress over time, but this only applied to those relatively low in personal control. Moreover, partners who perceived more unsupportive spousal behavior reported more distress, again only if they were relatively low in personal control. Patients and partners relatively high in personal control reported relatively low levels of distress, regardless of spousal behavior. In conclusion, people relatively low in personal control may be more adversely affected by unsupportive behavior and benefit more from supportive behavior than people relatively high in personal control.
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Digitalization enables public organizations to personalize their services, tuning them to the specific situation, abilities, and preferences of the citizens. At the same time, digital services can be experienced as being less personal than face-to-face contact by citizens. The large existing volume of academic literature on personalization mainly represents the service provider perspective. In contrast, in this paper we investigate what makes citizens experience a service as personal. The result are eight dimensions that capture the full range of individual experiences and expectations that citizens expressed in focus groups. These dimensions can serve as a framework for public sector organizations to explore the expectations of citizens of their own services and identify the areas in which they can improve the personal experiences they offer.
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Ladies and gentlemen, this is quality awareness. Like brushing your teeth, quality is a daily personal obligation.
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Present study focuses on revealing and developing personal constructs regarding problem behaviour in classrooms. The main idea is that teachers opinions about their students and themselves influence the way they interact with them. Their thoughts and ideas about students - their personal constructs - are generally unconscious. We used the Personal Construct Theory from Kelly (1955) and his Repertory Grid Technique for exploration mental constructs. They can give an impulse to the development of thinking and acting of teachers. We think it can help them to build up their professional identity towards problem children. Twenty-nine teachers formed the sample that worked with this method. We investigated the number of unique construct pairs mentioned by the teachers. This number happened to be remarkably high. While assessing pupils, the teachers use primarily personality characteristics. There is hardly any agreement between the teachers constructs, which complicates their communication about their pupils. We considered the number of construct pairs named by one participant. This number seems to depend on the type of education the teacher is involved in. The type of the school the teacher is working at also influences the average scores on the constructs. We shall also turn to the issue of pupils sex and its role if any in the teachers scores. No significant differences have been found.
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The user’s experience with a recommender system is significantly shaped by the dynamics of user-algorithm interactions. These interactions are often evaluated using interaction qualities, such as controllability, trust, and autonomy, to gauge their impact. As part of our effort to systematically categorize these evaluations, we explored the suitability of the interaction qualities framework as proposed by Lenz, Dieffenbach and Hassenzahl. During this examination, we uncovered four challenges within the framework itself, and an additional external challenge. In studies examining the interaction between user control options and interaction qualities, interdependencies between concepts, inconsistent terminology, and the entity perspective (is it a user’s trust or a system’s trustworthiness) often hinder a systematic inventory of the findings. Additionally, our discussion underscored the crucial role of the decision context in evaluating the relation of algorithmic affordances and interaction qualities. We propose dimensions of decision contexts (such as ‘reversibility of the decision’, or ‘time pressure’). They could aid in establishing a systematic three-way relationship between context attributes, attributes of user control mechanisms, and experiential goals, and as such they warrant further research. In sum, while the interaction qualities framework serves as a foundational structure for organizing research on evaluating the impact of algorithmic affordances, challenges related to interdependencies and context-specific influences remain. These challenges necessitate further investigation and subsequent refinement and expansion of the framework.
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This report is the final report for the FPGA accelerated PID controller, part of the Distributed Control Systems project. This project runs within the Lectoraat Robotics and High Tech Mechatronics of Fontys Hogeschool Engineering Eindhoven. The Lectoraat has the goal to develop applicable knowledge to support education and industry. This knowledge is acquired with projects run in conjunction with the industry. The report will go into detail for the software designed for this project, not the hardware design. This report is intended for follow up students working on the Distributed Control Systems project. Within this report the assumption is made that the reader is at least familiar with the terms EtherCAT, FPGA, Linux and PID controllers. However for each part a small basic introduction is included. For readers looking for the accomplishments in this project, the results are in chapter six. Following are short descriptions of the chapters in this report. The first chapter will give a short introduction to the project. It talks about why the project was conceived, where the project was done and what the expected end result is. The second chapter, the problem definition, talks about how the project has been defined, what is included and what is not and how the customer expects the final product to function and look like. The third chapter details the methodology used during this project. All the research preformed for this project will be described in the forth chapter. This chapter goes into the research into the Xilinx Zynq 7000 chip, Beckhoff's EtherCAT system, how the Serial Peripheral Interface works and how a PID controller functions. Following in chapter five the design is expanded upon. First the toolchain for building for the Zynq chip is explained. This is followed by and explanation of the different software parts that have been designed. Finally chapters six and seven provide the results and the conclusions and recommendations for this project.
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This paper investigates how management accounting and control systems (operationalized by using Simons’ (1995a) levers of control framework) can be used as devices to support public value creation and as such it contributes to the literature on public value accounting. Using a mixed methods case study approach, including documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews, we found diverging uses of control systems in the Dutch university of applied sciences we investigated. While belief and interactive control systems are used intensively for strategy change and implementation, diagnostic controls were used mainly at the decentral level and seen as devices to make sure that operational and financial boundaries were not crossed. Therefore, belief and interactive control systems lay the foundation for the implementation of a new strategy, in which concepts of public value play a large role, using diagnostic controls to constrain actions at the operational level. We also found that whereas the institution wanted to have interaction with the external stakeholders, in daily practice this takes place only at the phase of strategy formulation, but not in the phase of intermediate strategy evaluation.
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The application of DC grids is gaining more attention in office applications. Especially since powering an office desk would not require a high power connection to the main AC grid but could be made sustainable using solar power and battery storage. This would result in fewer converters and further advanced grid utilization. In this paper, a sustainable desk power application is described that can be used for powering typical office appliances such as computers, lighting, and telephones. The desk will be powered by a solar panel and has a battery for energy storage. The applied DC grid includes droop control for power management and can either operate stand-alone or connected to other DC-desks to create a meshed-grid system. A dynamic DC nano-grid is made using multiple self-developed half-bridge circuit boards controlled by microcontrollers. This grid is monitored and controlled using a lightweight network protocol, allowing for online integration. Droop control is used to create dynamic power management, allowing automated control for power consumption and production. Digital control is used to regulate the power flow, and drive other applications, including batteries and solar panels. The practical demonstrative setup is a small-sized desktop with applications built into it, such as a lamp, wireless charging pad, and laptop charge point for devices up to 45W. User control is added in the form of an interactive remote wireless touch panel and power consumption is monitored and stored in the cloud. The paper includes a description of technical implementation as well as power consumption measurements.
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The purpose of the research was the development of a questionnaire that can measure the behaviour of groups of students (for instance departments' cohorts) in Personal Information Management (PIM). Variables for the questionnaire were derived from the international literature on PIM. The questionnaire has been tested out on 79 students (last year before graduation) from four different departments of the Academy of ICT&Media at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. The students' responses were checked on consistency, item non response, desirability bias and information value of the results. All these criteria indicated that the questionnaire is an adequate tool for the assessment of PIM at an institutional level. The results that have been found for the four departments have not yet been discussed with the managers of the Academy and those of the individual departments. [De hier gepubliceerde versie is het 'accepted paper' van het origineel dat is gepubliceerd op www.springerlink.com . De officiële publicatie kan worden gedownload op http://www.springerlink.com/content/n0h3k71u85024xnt/]
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Helen Kopnina explains how some pivotal events in her personal life have led to the development of an appreciation of Nature. This article also reflects on whether the love of Nature or care for the environment is learned or inherited. https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/article.php?t=ecocentrism-personal-story LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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