More work for Roomba? Domestic robots, housework and the production of privacy

Prof. Dr. Bernd Rautenstrauss (1959–2015) Pioneer in CMT Genetics

Work-related stress and health—risks, mechanisms and countermeasures

Holding Still: The Private Life of an Air Raid

Introduction

Communication robots are now getting popular. In particular, partner robots, which can perform personal services, are in high demand. However, they can be prohibitively expensive. Therefore, we considered a multi-user robot with a virtual agent service which could satisfy user demands. But, several issues need to be solved in order to achieve this purpose. Firstly, there is no general service platform for such robots. Secondly, even if we use the multi-user robot by executing the virtual agent service, the physical shape, and other characteristics of the multi-user robot sometimes creates a strong impression on users. Therefore, we proposed a virtual agent service platform, and the robot features modification for a multi-user robot. The robot can autonomously adjust its position according to each user’s physiological signals, which based on emotion in real-time. We presented a preliminary evaluation to determine whether the proposed method could improve users’ robot experience even for the users who are not familiar with the robot at all.

The widespread adoption of home robots shows a high demand for in-home assistance. Since single women account for a large proportion of the Chinese population, it is important to design home robots to support their lives at home. This study aims to explore the possible design features of home robots to support single women in China. Interviews and an online survey were used to gauge user perception and expectations of home robots. Our research reveals the unique lifestyle preferences of single women in China and how home robots could be designed to support their needs. We discuss our findings and design implications based on three aspects: lifestyle, intelligence, and sense, to inspire better robot design for women.

Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South

Psychosocial stress, both at work and at home, plays a role in sleep disturbances. Theoretical models of stress underscore the cumulative effect of stress from different domains in affecting health and well-being. However, previous research has not considered how work stress and stress in private life might interact to affect sleep. The study investigated potential synergistic effects of work stress and traumatic events in private life on sleep quality. Participants (N = 6552, average baseline age = 52) were a subset of the French GAZEL cohort who were working in 1999. Work stress was operationalized as high job demands and low decision latitude. These working conditions were self-reported in 1999 (study baseline). Traumatic events in the past 12 months were reported in 2000. Sleep quality was assessed in 2000 as disturbed sleep in the past 12 months, and current sleep problems was indexed by the sleep subscale of the Nottingham Health Profile questionnaire. The results showed that recent events interacted with decision latitude, but not job demands, in predicting sleep quality. However, contrary to our expectations, it was high and not low decision latitude at work that amplified the negative association between stressful events and sleep quality. Adjusted for baseline health, individuals with highest numbers of events and highest levels of decision latitude were at highest risk for impaired sleep. These results challenge the idea that high decision latitude always serves as a protective factor, and underscore the necessity for considering a broader life context when studying stress in a particular domain of life.

These are strange times. I never would have imagined in a million years that I would be writing my first ASLO presidential message during a global pandemic and a powerful anti-racism movement, #BlackLivesMatter. 2020 has both made the world come to a grinding halt, in terms of disrupting global travel while changing basic human contact, and awoken it from its slumber to acknowledge, understand, and hopefully move to correct racial injustice and inequity. These are uncharted waters and these strange times call for deep change. But what does all this mean for the future of scientific societies like ASLO? This question weighs heavy on me; I will solicit collective insight from all of you throughout my term as we steer ASLO into the future. I was at a bit of a loss before writing this message. As such, I did my due diligence and systematically went back and read the first and last presidential messages in the Bulletin of every president since Jon Cole to draw inspiration. It was a fascinating time capsule to look at how all these fantastic individuals addressed issues for the society, what they accomplished, and how they saw ASLO's future. I encourage you to do the exercise over coffee some morning. You will learn some interesting aspects about the society and how it operates. We are a member driven society and this shines through on their reflections. Mike Pace's outgoing presidential message provides an accurate portrait of where ASLO is at the moment on a more practical side. I invite you to consult it; this message however will be a more personal reflection. The last four presidents all started their first presidential message from some exotic or meaningful place and referenced how excited they were to attend the upcoming ASLO meeting. Like most of you, for the last 3 months I have been sitting at my kitchen table which has acted as my makeshift office developing Zoom ass. I have tried to manage my teenagers, my graduate students, and my general professional responsibilities from home as best I can. Although I had thoughts of finally developing some meaningful hobbies and reading some books I have collected over the years, I can only say that I have resisted falling into the trap of watching Tiger King. I have actively tried to practice self-compassion and advocate this practice to all those surrounding and working with me. You simply cannot function normally and you must try to build in moments to recharge. But I think I cracked the first week I spent, about 35 h on Zoom for professional purposes. I am sure many of you have too. Are you kidding me? Is this the future? I sincerely hope not. Do not get me wrong, I could not imagine getting anything done during this time without Zoom. And it will be positive in the long run as we will reduce our C footprints by traveling less for certain types of meetings. But as the weeks passed and I systematically saw my students faces grow increasingly tired and weary while watching my own mullet grow on my computer screen, I hope that as we move into the future, we can provide the proper balance of using virtual and face-to-face meetings to connect, not only as scientists, but as humans. In fact, I will not lie, I cheated. When one of my graduate students, living alone at the time, expressed on week 6 that she could not take the isolation, I went to see her, and well, I illegally gave her a hug. The brief moment of human contact was enough to get her through the next couple of weeks to when her partner returned from a long stint in the field. To those who have been alone during these strange times, I send you a BIG genuine hug. You can pick it up next time we are at a meeting together. That is a guarantee. In terms of expressing my excitement of attending an upcoming ASLO meeting, as we all know our joint ASLO-SFS meeting in Madison was canceled due to Covid-19. This was of course a great disappointment to many of us as it was going to be a wonderful meeting with over 1500 abstract submissions. I had two students slated to present for their very first time and there is always great pride in watching one's student present their work at an international meeting. They all work so hard and this is such a pivotal moment in their professional development. I was sad for them and for all the students slated to present their work. I have also never been to Madison. It is supposedly a wonderful town and I looked forward to visiting the Center for Limnology, such an iconic place for the study of inland waters with so many great people. Steve Carpenter and Nancy Grimm were the organizing co-chairs; given their scientific excellence, deep knowledge, and generous human spirit; it was certainly going to be terrific meeting scientifically and a lot of fun. I thank them and the organizing committee for their hard work. I will not be attending an ASLO meeting until I am a year into my presidency. We managed to postpone the meeting in La Palma Mallorca until late June 2021. This was done rather intentionally. Originally slated for February, peak flu season, and with so many unknowns, we thought that it would have a better chance of being held at that time. ASLO, like all scientific societies, invests heavily in its meeting preparation and conferences are an important part of society functioning. It is quite an effort that typically begins 2 yr (or more) before the actual meeting takes place. Since we have invested so much in the preparations already, our next meeting will be continued as planned, just a few months later. I wish to thank Nona Agawin, Iris Hendriks, and Eva Sintes who are the organizing co-chairs for the meeting and Nona in particular for her fantastic energy as well as suggesting and helping to reschedule the event. Of course, this whole pandemic situation has made us rethink the future of meetings. We have for a long time wanted to reduce our carbon footprints and hold more events virtually. The time is now. We do tend to travel too much. Attending a conference is very expensive and it is often difficult for people with young families, with disabilities, or restricted from travel for other reasons. Having more virtual options will make it a more inclusive process and inclusivity is a core ASLO value. Scientific conferences are of course an interesting travel choice. One could ask what is their purpose? In the purest sense, I suppose it is to share your science with others, learn from their on-going work to rapidly expand your own knowledge, find out about the latest technologies and methods, and try to foster collaborations through networking. One could also argue that all this could be achieved virtually. We are more networked then ever (too networked perhaps, where connections are numerous, but associations weak) and we can share information openly and access it relatively easily (even from our kitchen table). I attended a very successful virtual meeting (3 half days), where I experienced some aspects of this. And I have heard from others their general positive experiences of virtual meetings, with large attendances, with ongoing chats that solicited more questions than usual among many other positive outcomes. However, I have to confess, the virtual happy hour was a bit of a bust. It was pleasant enough, but I cannot imagine any serious scientific debate or any of those spontaneous events that result in a moment of deep connection and joy that you experience, be you introvert or extravert when you are face-to-face in some new location. Scientific meetings are a break from routine, and honestly a break. A chance to celebrate your achievements and hard work with colleagues young and more experienced, from everywhere and to be inspired by thought-provoking plenaries, award talks, and terrific sessions. It is a chance to meet your science crush, someone you have admired through the literature and cannot wait to meet in person. There is something about collectively being in the same place, caring about the same things—hundreds of people caring about water—the energy and charge of togetherness with purpose, which takes us out of the isolation we often feel spending hours alone in our offices. It is a chance to recharge our batteries and be inspired to move on to the next steps of our own careers. We all have conference stories. I will share the one that marked me in my early career. It was my very first scientific meeting, ASLO 1997 in Santa Fe, which I attended as a Ph.D. student. At that meeting, the Citation of Scientific Excellence Award was being given posthumously to Robert H. Peters and received by his partner, Antonella Cattaneo, an accomplished limnologist herself. Rob was a professor at McGill University and one of the founders of comparative limnology. He was my undergraduate advisor, but I had no clue of his prominence at the time that only came later and most vividly at that ASLO meeting when we were marking a life in science too short lived. After the award, there was a dinner in Rob's honor. The magical moment came later in the evening when John Lehman entered the restaurant and bought the 20 or 30 of us present a round of Scotch. John and Rob had ongoing debates in the literature about scientific reductionism vs. holism each standing firmly in their own camps. Defending their viewpoints was at times pretty cutting, but their arguments focused on the science and made you think. John had us all raise glass in honor of Rob, thanked him for the thought-provoking exchanges throughout the years, and expressed how much he was going to miss him. I will never forget that moment and how it made me feel about science and that the pursuit of excellence is through thoughtful challenge. I cannot imagine the authenticity and power of that moment in virtual space. We have certainly been talking about the future of meetings on the ASLO board. We need to be greener, more responsible, and more inclusive. We plan to provide virtual options in our upcoming meetings so that those with constraints or who prefer not to travel can participate. We also plan to make the hands-on experience more meaningful. There are many tools and practices to be more participatory, engaging, and even more fun! We are also considering different ways of hosting them to reduce travel while connecting broadly. Please share your thoughts, reflections, and experiences with our meetings committee, co-chaired by Beth Stauffer ([email protected]) and Kim Wickland ([email protected]), including what you have enjoyed in virtual space, to help ASLO serve you more holistically through our meetings in the future. With your shared collective experiences, we can better imagine this future of hybrid meetings together for ASLO. And now some gratitude. I enter this presidency as the first Gen X, the 6th woman, and as one of the few non-U.S. citizens to lead the society. It is an honor to serve and I thank you for your trust. I have a tough act to follow in Mike Pace. Mike is not only a superb scientist with a great breadth of knowledge, but he is a thoughtful, calm, and hardworking leader. He managed some rather difficult situations as president and I would like to thank him for his service. We managed in the last months to imagine the next steps for ASLO to set a strategic framework, so I look forward to working with him and the rest of the board toward this aim. Four fabulous women are rotating off the board: Linda Duguay, our past president; Ngozi Oguguah, our student board member and our first from the African continent; Diana Varela, Chair of our mentoring committee; and Kim Wickland who wore many hats as Awards committee Chair and now Meetings committee CoChair. I thank all of you for your service, thoughtful perspectives, and hard work; it has been such a pleasure to work with all of you. I will miss you very much! These are strange times. Covid-19 have taken the lives of thousands of people, disrupted people's livelihoods, and will have long-standing repercussions on the economy. All of us have been affected. I wish to send my sincerest condolences to those of you who have lost family members or loved ones through this pandemic. I am concerned for our early career researchers, students, and members with young families. This has been particularly tough on many of you. Let us as a scientific society be committed to helping to support and protect our most vulnerable, through our actions and words. Let us be gentle with ourselves and with each other as we move into the near future. My hope is we can emerge from these strange times by concretely moving toward a greener and bluer economy. We must also aspire to greater racial equity. ASLO will be committed to this; we are establishing a racial relations task force and are developing some concrete actions to help support and better connect our BIPOC members. By the time this is published, I hope some of these actions will be in place. Please see the Viewpoint from our thoughtful student board member Camille Gaynus in this issue on this topic, as well as an article by Ben Cuker, who has headed the ASLOMP program from many years. Finally, I did manage to leave my kitchen table and write this message from a special place: Lac Gustave a small headwater lake just north of Montreal where we have our family cottage. I will end my message with some Advice from a Lake. it is a bit sappy, inspirational card greeting, but honestly I like it and I think in these strange times, we could all benefit from it. Advice from a Lake: Be clear. Make positive ripples. Look beneath the surface. Stay calm. Shore up friendships. Take time to reflect. Be full of life!

ABSTRACTThe era of the Senegalese veteran was bookended by two public events: the elaborate celebrations in Paris and Dakar on July14, 1919 commemorating the soldiers’ contribution to Allied victory, and the death of Abdoylaye Ndiaye, the last surviving soldier, on 10 November 1998. During these eight decades, the French colonial state, its nationalist opponents, and its Senegalese neo-colonial successor sought through a variety of means – including carefully manicured battlefield cemeteries, larger than life statues of heroic soldiers, manifestos calling for civic equality in the colonies in exchange for the performance of military duty, and annual public parades on Armistice and later Senegalese Independence Day – to appropriate, transmit and transmute the image of the veteran across multiplegenerations for their own ends. On a personal level, the Senegalese combatants’ postwar experience was highlighted by three moments: their joyous return home and reunion with their loved ones; their gradual reintegration into Senegalese society – forever separated from others by the lingering trauma of their war-time experiences and the gulf everlastingly differentiating combatants from civilians; and the ongoing insult of receiving an unequal combatants’ pension in old age, which made a mockery of their personal sacrifices. Drawing on the oral histories of more than 80 Senegalese veterans, 60 of their descendants, and extensive archival collections, this piece explores the tensions during their lifetimes between the public representations of the soldiers and the reality of their private lives. Itconcludes that even though the veterans have physically passed from the scene, they have entered into collective mythology, and the memory of their war-time service, as well as its appropriation by others for their own ends, continues to endure.

The two main issues that continue to be in the focus of hot public discussions in Russian society are the Great Patriotic War (the German–Soviet war of 1941–1945, as part of World War II) and the tragedy of Stalinism. While the Great Patriotic War was widely reflected in Soviet literature and cinema, the Stalinist issue was seldom represented in Soviet art. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a period when Soviet and post-Soviet art contributed much to the debates on the Soviet past, and several significant anti-Stalinist films and literary works were created. Since the early 2000s, the cultural situation in Russian society has changed and nostalgia of the Soviet past has spread in the mass consciousness. The purpose of this research is to analyze how the Stalinist past is reconstructed in public memory in contemporary cinema narratives. We arrive at the conclusion that since the 2000s, public interest has drifted from images of war heroism to ordinary people’ lives under Stalin; the contemporary public interest is not the war heroes and famous victims of repressions, but the everydayness of ordinary Soviet citizens who tried to build their private lives, careers, friendships, and family relations under the conditions of pressure from the authorities, spreading fear in the society, shortage of goods, and loss of loved ones. We concentrate on several representative Russian TV serials, such as “Liquidation” (2007), “Maryina Roscha” (2012), and “Leningrad, 46” (2014–2015), because all of them are devoted to the first year of the Soviet peaceful life in different Soviet cities, such as Odessa, Moscow, and Leningrad.

In the midst of all the happenings in nursing news, it is sometimes helpful to step backwards and take a longer view on events. In my private time, I read a great deal of modern history and I often reflect on the lessons for contemporary life that we can learn from the past. Frequently, these concern the impact of political events on people's individual lives, and on their physical and mental health. Two aspects of a book on private life in Stalin's Russia (Figes 2007) have recently impressed me greatly. First, despite the almost unimaginable oppression, separation and trauma experienced by many (and deaths of millions) during those years of the 20th Century, some individuals did manage, incredibly, to reclaim their lives and those of their loved ones. If it is possible to generalise from such terrible events, and at the risk of gross over-simplification, it seems that the ability to retain one's personal integrity was often sustained by the past experience of a loving family life. Letters may never have been delivered, and indeed the addressee may have been long dead, but the memory of those close bonds was sometimes sufficient to enable individuals to re-build their lives after the terror was over. The second aspect of Figes' book, The Whisperers, is directly relevant to nursing research; for it relates how the author validated experiences remembered over a time interval of sometimes sixty years and when the average age of those giving interviews was eighty. In an Afterword, Figes describes the methodology of the project. He searched the archives for private papers about family life and then the research team conducted interviews (approximately 500) with the people who had donated them. He tells of his concern to ensure a representative social base; to get people to think reflectively about their lives; and ‘to disentangle direct memories from received impressions and opinions’ (p. 662). He refers to his ‘duty as a historian to tell these people's stories in a way that they can recognise as a truthful reflection of their experiences’ (p. 663). Final drafts were translated into Russian and validated by those interviewed. Finally, most of the materials generated by the project are available on line. This Afterword could be required reading not only for nurse historians but also for those who engage in any qualitative research. Many articles submitted to International Nursing Review justify the validation of their qualitative studies by quoting extracts from well-known research texts. This is understandable, because many of the authors are neophyte researchers who are struggling with the concept of validity in what their interviewees tell them. Sometimes, however, as I have tried to illustrate here, there are important lessons to be learned from apparently unrelated studies. Standing back, taking a long view, and reflecting on what might appear at first to be unconnected research, can sometimes provide the key to apparently insoluble research problems.

The purpose of this article is to present the biographies of the first ladies of the Third Polish Republic: Barbara Jaruzelska, Danuta Walesa and Jolanta Kwasniewska, as women who had a significant impact on the lives and activities of their spouses while they served as President of the Republic of Poland. It is an attempt to synthetically analyze their private lives, their scientific lives and their socio-political involvement. It seeks answers to the questions of whether the role of the first lady has been overestimated, and whether the balance of gains and losses has always been an added value for the president’s wife herself, as well as her loved ones.

Une approche de la fin de vie qui évolue. Réflexions à partir des vingt ans de pratique en soins palliatifs

The purpose of this article is to present the biographies of the first ladies of the Third Polish Republic: Maria Kaczyńska, Anna Komorowska oraz Agata Kornhauser-Duda, as women who had a significant impact on the lives and activities of their spouses while they served as President of the Republic of Poland. It is an attempt to synthetically analyze their private lives, their scientific lives and their socio-political involvement. It seeks answers to the questions of whether the role of the first lady has been overestimated, and whether the balance of gains and losses has always been an added value for the president‘s wife herself, as well as her loved ones.