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The present paper examines the political construction of ageing and conflicts between generations. The process of construction is driven not merely by institutional actors and opinion leaders in the media, but also by citizens who talk to each other about politics. In my paper I have focused on the latter by observing online discussions that appear on the political forum Index.hu. Disagreement between old people' and 'young people' evolved mainly about the pension system, thus the examination of ageing constructions is embedded in this context. In spite of its numerous limits, the method used seems to be suitable for providing hypotheses for further research. In the first part of the study I present the applied theoretical approach in which the concept of stereotype is connected with the concept of social construction. After that I focus on investigating the activity, origin and contents of the stereotypes that influence the construction of ageing. In the third part of the study the components of the constructions are demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Healthy aging is one of the most important social issues. In this paper, we propose a method for abnormal activity detection without any manual labeling of the training samples. By leveraging the Field of View (FOV) modulation, the spatio-temporal characteristic of human activity is encoded into low-dimension data stream generated by the ceiling-mounted Pyroelectric Infrared (PIR) sensors. The similarity between normal training samples are measured based on Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence of each pair of them. The natural clustering of normal activities is discovered through a self-tuning spectral clustering algorithm with unsupervised model selection on the eigenvectors of a modified similarity matrix. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are employed to model each cluster of normal activities and form feature vectors. One-Class Support Vector Machines (OSVMs) are used to profile the normal activities and detect abnormal activities. To validate the efficacy of our method, we conducted experiments in real indoor environments. The encouraging results show that our method is able to detect abnormal activities given only the normal training samples, which aims to avoid the laborious and inconsistent data labeling process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age, as an embodied identity and as an organizing principle, has received scant attention in organization studies. There is a lack of critical appreciation of how age plays out in organizational settings, the material and discursive dynamics of age practices, how age discourses impact on the body, and how age and ageing intersect with other identity categories. This is curious since age works as a master signifier in contemporary society and is something that affects us all. In this introductory essay, we show how the papers in this special issue redress this lacuna by enhancing and challenging what we know about age and organizations. We also set out an agenda for stimulating research conversations to bring an age-sensitive lens to organizational analysis. We structure our analysis around two focal points: age as an embodied identity, and the symbolic meanings of age within organizing practices. In doing so, we aim to provide a catalyst not only for research on age in organizations but also about the aged nature of organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As consumption has become a major aspect that characterizes the life of people currently aged 55 and older, fervent public and academic debates have been raised around the accurate portrayal of seniors in advertising. While most of the previous quantitative and qualitative research highlighted the inappropriate ways of representing elders and the unsuitable framing of advertising claims, little research has been done so far to understand which are seniors' expectations regarding their portrayal in current advertising campaigns. Based on in-depth interviews with Romanian adults of the 55+ generation, this paper investigates how seniors understand ageing with respect to the manner in which they have been depicted in nowadays advertising and what are the detailed features of the offensive or inoffensive advertising campaigns targeting them. The findings revealed that participants that lost their status during ageing favor the use of chronological rather than cognitive images of their age. Additionally, the running of the natural surroundings in advertising were found as empowering for both the young and the older adults of our research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study provides a comprehensive data analysis on total fertility rates, birth rates, life expectancy, percentage share of over 65 year olds, infant mortality rates and adolescent-specific fertility rates, in Russia and Serbia, two decades after the fall of communism and compares it with general values in Europe. The main problems in the demography of Russia and Serbia are connected with economic process, caused by economy transition, from planned economy to the free market, as one of the consequences of the fall. Finally, the authors concluded that the Russian demographic situation is characterized by depopulation processes just like in Serbia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Contrast Sensitivity Function (CSF) describes how the visibility of a grating depends on the stimulus spatial frequency. Many published CSF data have demonstrated that contrast sensitivity declines with age. However, an age-dependent analytical model of the CSF is not available to date. In this paper, we propose such an analytical CSF model based on visual mechanisms, taking into account the age factor. To this end, we have extended an existing model from Barten (1999), taking into account the dependencies of this model’s optical and physiological parameters on age. Age-dependent models of the cones and ganglion cells densities, the optical and neural MTF, and optical and neural noise are proposed, based on published data. The proposed age-dependent CSF is finally tested against available experimental data, with fair results. Such an age-dependent model may be beneficial when designing real-time age-dependent image coding and display applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study examines the effects of youth empowerment programs (YEPs) on the psychological empowerment of young people aging out of foster care. Method: We used a two-group, cross-sectional survey to examine the effect of YEP participation on the psychological empowerment of youths aging out of Florida's foster care system. The study sample consisted of 193 young adults (99 YEP participants and 94 non-YEP participants), ages 18–24. Four dependent variables represented the 4 dimensions of psychological empowerment: perceived control, motivation to influence, sociopolitical skills, and participatory behavior. Results: YEP participants experienced significantly higher perceived control, motivation to influence their environments, self-efficacy, and participatory behavior than non-YEP participants even when controlling for age at program entry, gender, race, time in foster care, number of placements, and geographic location. Conclusions: Findings suggest that youth empowerment is possible in child welfare systems and may be beneficial to young people aging out of foster care. Implications for policy and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Background: The influence of genetic ancestry on Trypanosoma cruzi infection and Chagas disease outcomes is unknown. Methodology/Principal Findings: We used 370,539 Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) to examine the association between individual proportions of African, European and Native American genomic ancestry with T. cruzi infection and related outcomes in 1,341 participants (aged ≥ 60 years) of the Bambui (Brazil) population-based cohort study of aging. Potential confounding variables included sociodemographic characteristics and an array of health measures. The prevalence of T. cruzi infection was 37.5% and 56.3% of those infected had a major ECG abnormality. Baseline T. cruzi infection was correlated with higher levels of African and Native American ancestry, which in turn were strongly associated with poor socioeconomic circumstances. Cardiomyopathy in infected persons was not significantly associated with African or Native American ancestry levels. Infected persons with a major ECG abnormality were at increased risk of 15-year mortality relative to their counterparts with no such abnormalities (adjusted hazard ratio = 1.80; 95% 1.41, 2.32). African and Native American ancestry levels had no significant effect modifying this association. Conclusions/Significance: Our findings indicate that African and Native American ancestry have no influence on the presence of major ECG abnormalities and had no influence on the ability of an ECG abnormality to predict mortality in older people infected with T. cruzi. In contrast, our results revealed a strong and independent association between prevalent T. cruzi infection and higher levels of African and Native American ancestry. Whether this association is a consequence of genetic background or differential exposure to infection remains to be determined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Extensive studies have been carried out on Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism to elucidate mechanisms of aging and the effects of perturbing known aging-related genes on lifespan and behavior. This research has generated large amounts of experimental data that is increasingly difficult to integrate and analyze with existing databases and domain knowledge. To address this challenge, we demonstrate a scalable and effective approach for automatic evidence gathering and evaluation that leverages existing experimental data and literature-curated facts to identify genes involved in aging and lifespan regulation in C. elegans. Results: We developed a semantic knowledge base for aging by integrating data about C. elegans genes from WormBase with data about 2005 human and model organism genes from GenAge and 149 genes from GenDR, and with the Bio2RDF network of linked data for the life sciences. Using HyQue (a Semantic Web tool for hypothesis-based querying and evaluation) to interrogate this knowledge base, we examined 48,231 C. elegans genes for their role in modulating lifespan and aging. HyQue identified 24 novel but well-supported candidate aging-related genes for further experimental validation. Conclusions: We use semantic technologies to discover candidate aging genes whose effects on lifespan are not yet well understood. Our customized HyQue system, the aging research knowledge base it operates over, and HyQue evaluations of all C. elegans genes are freely available at http://hyque.semanticscience.org. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dominant aging identity theories ("mask of ageing", "social mask", M. Foucault's "disembodiment thesis", gerotranscendental theory) as well as the concept of the postmodern reflexive self of A. Giddens cannot be used to effectively explain old age identity in contemporary Lithuania. More suitable for this purpose is E. Goffman's concept of stigma that explains denial, evasion and marginalization of old age. These are the conclusions of a qualitative piece of research - involving in-depth interviews with elderly people - that was designed to examine the ways in which old age identity is created and aging is experienced by older people, as well as to ascertain whether the elderly experience stigmatization in everyday interactions. The data were collected from October 2010 - January 2011 in Vilnius (N=24): the selection of informants was targeted by gender, age group (60-74 and 75-89), level of education (primary, secondary, higher), and household type (households of several generations, single-generation and institutional households). To interpret the data, the method of abduction or inference to the best explanation (Harman, 1965) was used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on fieldwork in residential homes, arrangements for the care of older people are examined with reference, primarily, to Deetz’s theory of ‘corporate colonization’. Extending this theory, it is argued that grouping such people in care homes can result in a form of social segregation, one that reflects the management of the aged body in relation to normative constructions of dependence. Focusing on the experiences of residents, the everyday effects of narratives of decline on disciplining the lives of older people are assessed, with this analysis taking recourse to the work of Foucault (1979). The result is the identification of three related concepts at work in the colonizing process of the aged body: (i) appropriation of the body – the physical and social practices involved in placing older people in care homes; (ii) separation from previous identities – how a range of new subjectivities are produced in the process of becoming a ‘resident’; and (iii) contesting colonized identities – the ways in which residents can attempt to challenge normative concepts of managed physical and mental decline. Overall the disciplining of the body is theorized not only as an adjunct to the notion of corporate colonization but also, more generally, as a prominent and powerful organizing principle of later life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]