User Resource Research Articles

“Individual plan” in a user-oriented and empowering perspective: A qualitative study of “individual plans” in Norwegian mental health services

The aim of this study is to describe what was emphasized as important in their Individual Plan-process by ten patients who were satisfied with their Individual Plan (IP), and also to explore how the process of development and use of the IP possibly can promote strengthened user participation. IP is both a process and a written master plan built on the user's own goals, needs and resources. It assumes an appointed service provider is coordinating the services involved and is intended to ensure increased user involvement and better coordination when extended services are needed. The study is based on two semi-structured interviews of patients, two years apart, and one interview of their coordinators. The analyses were based on Systematic Text Condensation. The findings comprise what the interviewees considered important in the process of development and use of an IP; how the goals were formulated and reached, to take active part in the IP process, to build up enough competence and knowledge to cope with daily life, as well as experiencing good relations with respect and mutuality, especially with the coordinator. These topics are not considered to be specific to IP but can be understood as more general aspects of adequate treatment and care. In any case, a well-functioning IP process seems to be able to improve user participation and empowerment.

Don't Fence Me In: Boundaries, Policy, and Deliberation in Maine's Lobster Commons

Describing the necessary conditions for collective action in the interest of natural resource conservation, common property theory asserts the need for clear boundaries. This pertains to material boundaries that circumscribe target resources and social boundaries that circumscribe resource user group identities. In reality, socioecological systems are rarely closed or static, so boundary imposition can generate transaction costs and perhaps reduce adaptive capacity if implemented without allowances for broad and repeated public deliberation. Participant observation, interview, survey, archival, and focus group data from Maine's lobster fishery demonstrate that flexible, broadly negotiated, informal boundaries characterized the fishery for decades, embedded in localist institutions under de facto comanagement. Federal regulatory pressures and industry changes triggered formalization of a more statist comanagement regime, overlaying codified boundaries under the guise of resource conservation. Fishing boat captains leveraged the legal boundary-drawing precedent to consolidate fishery access and decision making away from crew, neighbors, and family. Precipitating factors included trap limits and tangles, entry limits and resource declines in other fisheries, law enforcement, abandonment of apprenticeship, recreational entry, and mail-in ballots. Instrumentalism eroded diversified, multivalent social networks, and ecological outcomes are uncertain. This evidence suggests that despite seminal contributions of common property scholarship, some policy applications might be overly reductive or sidestep democratic debate between individual and communitarian concerns. Attention to dynamic interactions across institutions can ensure that emergent political alliances and incremental changes in distributive and processual norms around resource allocation are not overlooked.

Complex adaptive systems for management of integrated care

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how a complex adaptive systems (CAS) approach can be used to promote the integration of health and social care for the benefit of the user.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is a research review and a conceptual analysis of key issues identified in the growing literature on CAS. An application of the CAS approach to the field of integrated care is presented. The paper identifies crucial issues, notably: bringing together different providers and the place of the user as a co‐producer of care.FindingsThe benefits of the CAS approach to integrated care are distilled. Above all CAS provides managers of health and social care with an alternative mindset. Guiding principles are offered to these managers to facilitate development towards a more integrated system of health and social care. The possibility to benefit from the user's own resources is increased when organizations are viewed from a CAS perspective. CAS promotes emergent ways of working.Practical implicationsThe CAS approach makes possible a significant improvement in relationships between providers and users and managers and providers; a possibility of more productive relationships and better care outcomes, not least in terms of user satisfaction.Originality/valueThe paper shows that CAS literature applied to the health and social care field points the way for managers to rethink the functioning of the field, specifically to go beyond the present dominant but outdated machine model to one which encourages the cooperation of providers and users for better outcomes.

Towards ubiquitous video services through scalable video coding and cross-layer optimization

Video content as one of the key features of future Internet services should be made ubiquitously available to users. Moreover, this should be done in a timely fashion and with adequate support for Quality of Service (QoS). Although providing the required coverage for ubiquitous video services, wireless networks, however, pose many challenges especially for QoS-sensitive video streaming due to their inadequate or varying capacity. In this article, we propose a cross-layer video adaptation solution, which may be used for optimizing network resource consumption and user experienced quality of video streaming in wireless networks; thus improving the availability of video services to mobile users. Our solution utilizes the flexibility of the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) technology and combines fast and fair Medium Access Control (MAC) layer packet scheduling with long-term application layer adaptation. The proposed solution both improves the usage of network resources by dropping video data based on its priority when the network is congested but also reduces efficiently the number of useless packet transfers in a congested network. We evaluate our solution with a simulation study under varying network congestion conditions. We find that already application layer adaptation gains over 60% less base layer losses, momentous for SVC video decodability and quality, than in the case without any adaptation. When our MAC layer scheduling is enabled, nearly a zero loss situation with respect to packet losses carrying base layers can be attained, resulting in peak-signal-to-noise ratio values very close to the original.

Implication of livelihood diversification on wetland resources conservation: A case from Bangladesh

The Management of Aquatic Ecosystems through Community Husbandry was demonstrated in Hail Haor from 1999 to 2008 to ensure sustainable wetland resources management and conservation. This paper focused the importance of diversified livelihood options for the resources users to increase income, diversify income sources and improve the wetland productivity. A long-term support to 2,004 resources users was provided to explore income generation schemes through skills and credit. Income generation activities were adopted in 15 different types of trades that covered poultry and livestock rearing, fish culture, operating small business, tailoring or establishing tree nursery. These offered greater income and stability for the resources users. The overall income gained by the resources users around 64% where income generation activities contributed 50% of the total income they gained in 2006. Fishing effort was reduced almost 43% and over 14% fishers left fishing. New livelihoods helped them moving into other occupations reducing dependency on wetland resources that enabled habitat and fish stock recovery. Exploring diversified livelihoods could help the resources users to involve in wetland resources restoration process without livelihood deprivation. Key words: Resources user; livelihood option; fishing effort; wetland restoration; resources conservation DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/jowe.v5i0.4905 J Wet Eco 2011 (5): 59-65

Biodiversity and Livelihood of the Pangre Jhalas Wetland, Morang District, Nepal

There are different wetland ecosystems, different resources, diversity of environment and habitat, and diversity of resource user groups in a region. Local communities exploit these resources and incorporate them into their livelihood strategies. Among these biological diversities, fish are most important and most noticeable wetland resources because they pass through markets and have a recognized role in food supply. Indigenous communities depend on exploiting wetland fisheries. Since past few years, wetlands are degrading rapidly. Poor indigenous communities still relay on catching fish. These communities have characterized by unsuitable living conditions, low level of education, lack of skills and assets and inadequate services which would permit diversification of their livelihoods. We can notice such peculiar activities around the Pangre Jhalas wetland.The Geographical Journal of Nepal, Vol. 8-9, 2010-2011: 63-72

Maximizing the Profit of Telecom Telcos by a Novel Traffic Scheduling Policy

This paper introduces a novel traffic scheduling policy whose objectives is to maximize the profit of telecom telcos.Telecommunication network management is reconsidered from the business point of view, introducing competition between users forresources of the telecom telcos, in addition to existing competition between telcos themselves. Business control of network is supportedby loop back control that should be realized as on-line technology supplied with intelligent control algorithms. The results odsimulation, obtained through extensive testing, prove the correctness of proposed method for optimizing telco profit and show that,neither pure E nor pure L policy, can give the maximum profit. To specify and implement the proposed system we use unified modelinglanguage (UML). Ill. 4, bibl. 7, tabl. 1 (in English; abstracts in English and Lithuanian). http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.eee.113.7.615

Including coastal resource users in fisheries management evaluation of San Miguel Bay, Philippines

This paper examines an approach that integrates the judgment and perceptions of coastal resource users in prioritizing the criteria and indicators for fisheries management impact evaluation. Five criteria with corresponding indicators were identified and selected namely, acceptability, biotic diversity, economic performance, enforceability, and equity. The weights of importance of criteria and indicators were determined through the Analytic Hierarchy Process applied in a case study with 23 resource user groups (categorized as fishers, local government unit, non-government organization, private sector and women) in San Miguel Bay, Philippines. The results of this study revealed that overall, acceptability is the most important criterion in evaluating the impacts of fisheries management strategy in San Miguel Bay, especially for the local government units and fishers groups. The best measure of acceptability criterion are the indicators resource users participation in fisheries management process, level of awareness of resource users in fisheries resource management and number of fishers who belong to an organization. Ten groups have consistency ratios between 0.0 and 0.08 which are within the acceptable level of 0.10. Conversely, most groups (78%) have consistency ratios less than 0.26. Also, the results of the preference analysis are remarkable because among the representative groups, most fishers groups exhibited consistencies in their judgments (average consistency ratios of 0.06–0.08). Economic performance indicators were consistently judged across groups indicating that individuals present higher convergence of views toward economic objective.

In This Issue

In This Issue

Community Detection In The Collaborative Web

Most of the existing social network systems require from their users an explicit statement of their friendship relations. In this paper we focus on implicit Web communities and present an approach to automatically detect them, based on the user's resources manipulations. This approach is dynamic as user groups appear and evolve along with users interests over time. Moreover, new resources are dynamically labelled according to who is manipulating them. Our proposal relies on the fuzzy K-means clustering method and is assessed on large movie data sets.

Shifting baselines and memory illusions: what should we worry about when inferring trends from resource user interviews?

Shifting baselines and memory illusions: what should we worry about when inferring trends from resource user interviews?

Human aspects of siltation of Lake Baringo: Causes, impacts and interventions

Lake Baringo is one of the important fresh water lakes in the Kenyan Rift Valley that is primarily arid in nature. It is an important world Ramsar site and also important in terms of socio-economic diversity and biodiversity. Despite this, the lake is threatened by siltation resulting from human activities in its catchment. A study was carried out to identify the factors contributing to siltation and to suggest strategies and opportunities to mitigate the problem. Quantitative methods were used to collect data. Results indicated that the livelihoods of communities around Lake Baringo depend on livestock rearing, charcoal burning and cultivation. Poor land-use systems together with resource user conflicts, political marginalization, poverty, weak institutions and policies are factors contributing to land and water degradation. Negative impacts of siltation identified include destruction, of fish breeding areas, flooding, poor water quality affecting human and animal use and increased resource user conflicts. Strategies that various institutions are undertaking such as replanting indigenous vegetation, are showing little progress due to lack of co-ordination, the nature of the landscape, the lack of funding and political will. This paper has identified opportunities for soil management systems such as use of indigenous trees and grasses to enhance livelihoods for local communities, while at the same time conserving the soils.

Human behaviour: the key source of uncertainty in fisheries management

AbstractThere is broad consensus that the main problem facing fisheries globally is too many boats chasing too few fish. Unfortunately it is also possible to argue that there are too many proposed solutions and not enough practical answers to improving fisheries management. There is a deepening divide between those who propose alternative regulatory controls on fishers, including establishing large areas permanently closed to fishing, and those who argue for better alignment of incentives combined with broad participation of resource users in fishery management decisions (in simple terms, between top down and bottom up systems of governance). However despite the choice of policy instruments used, a consistent outcome is that resource users behave in a manner that is often unintended by the designers of the management system. Hence whilst uncertainty is broadly recognized as a pervasive feature of fisheries management, to date most of the attention has focussed on only part of that uncertainty – scientific uncertainty about the status of exploited resources. The effect of uncertainty generated on the human side of fisheries science and management has received much less attention. However, the uncertainty generated by unexpected resource user behaviour is critical as it has unplanned consequences and leads to unintended management outcomes. Using empirical evidence of unexpected resource user behaviour and reviewing current responses to unexpected management outcomes, we identify different approaches that both improve prediction of human behaviour in fisheries systems and identify management measures that are more robust to these sources of uncertainty. However, unless the micro scale drivers of human behaviour that contribute to macro scale implementation uncertainty are communicated effectively to managers and considered more regularly and in greater depth, unanticipated responses to management actions will continue to undermine management systems and threaten the sustainability of fisheries.

Traditional pastoralist decision-making processes: lessons for reforms to water resources management in Kenya

The purpose of this paper is to consider the vision for public participation in water resources management embedded in Kenya's 2002 Water Act, as it relates to pastoralists. The Act envisions that responsibility for management of water resources at the local level will be devolved to community-level bodies. Our approach was qualitative and included interviews with government officials and Gabra pastoralists, observation of and participation in traditional Gabra korra meetings and focus group discussions. We conclude that the ‘institutional model’ of participation being pursued through the creation of Water Resource User Associations is particularly problematic for mobile pastoralists such as the Gabra, and we suggest an alternative strategy that would focus on the fostering of deliberation processes.

The Strategy of Empowering Poor for Wetland Resources Conservation in Bangladesh

The Management of Aquatic Ecosystems through Community Husbandry was demonstrated in three wetlands of Bangladesh that facing a wide range of ecological threats, representing the users’ communities of the management areas to participate in the process of wetland governance for restoring resources. A long-term study from 1999 to 2008 was conducted with 5,202 households’ members forming 250 Resources User Groups to launch livelihood schemes for alternative income and to reduce dependency on wetland resources. The Resources User Groups were united into 13 Federations of Resources User Groups for institutional sustainability that took over all responsibilities for operating savings of their members and revolving funds for livelihood activities and adopting sustainable conservation measures of wetland resources with oversight provided by the co-management committees. The process of developing management capacities made them efficient and knowledgeable to implement all sorts of activities and to overcome problems. Ownership of the savings and the revolving funds developed confidence, selfidentity and skills and boosted up economic empowerment. Adoption of livelihood activities created self-employment opportunities of users for alternative means of earnings that reduced dependency on wetlands to let the resources reestablish. Cohesiveness among the members, networking between community institutions and linked up with comanagement committees and service providers generated an effective social capital. The resources users were empowered with a collective effort to build institutions and implement sustainable use practices resulting in wetland resilience of the resources.

Attitude of Farmers towards Cost-Sharing in the Second National Fadama Development Project (NFDP-II): The Case of Kogi State of Nigeria

This paper highlights the attitude of farmers towards the Second National Fadama Development Project (NFDP-II) implementation at the local level in Nigeria. The fadama II project focuses on government – farmer partnerships in the funding of agricultural enterprises with the aim of achieving sustainable and stable funding for agricultural development. The sample for the study was made up of male and female Fadama beneficiaries selected through multistage sampling from the fadama resource users groups (FRUGs) in Lokoja and Idah LGAs of Kogi State. The findings indicated that the majority (51.5%) of the respondents were in their productive years. The results show that the majority of the farmers had favourable attitude towards cost – sharing of the fadama II programme. However, the level of farmers’ participation in the planning, implementation and monitoring activities were very low except in the areas of financial management, maintenance of fadama investments and proffering conflict mitigation measures. The findings further indicates that late disbursement of funds from the African Development Bank (ADB), difficulty in collecting money from some farmers/high cost of administration, insufficient credit availability and the tendency of highly placed individuals/politicians to hijack the programme by registering personal resource user groups (FRUGs)/fadama community associations (FCAs) were problems militating against the effective implementation of the project. The study concludes that there is great need to specifically target vulnerable sub-groups such as widows, the elderly, castes and marginal fadama users through an inclusive participatory planning process to avoid situations of elite capture and conflicts in the on-going Fadama III project. Key words: Fadama II Project; Cost-Sharing; Community Demand Driven (CDD) Approach; Participation; Attitude.

Social acceptability of a marine protected area: The case of Reunion Island

This paper examines variations in social acceptability of a Marine Protected Area (MPA) prior to implementation. The influence of a number of factors, including socio-economic characteristics, perception of coral resources state of health and attitudes towards non-compliance with regulations are analysed. During May 2006, 640 questionnaires were distributed to school children around Reunion Island, Western Indian Ocean, for completion by their parents, following an informal educational activity made in school. From a 73% ( n = 469) response rate, results showed that 78% of participants were in favour of the MPA. Analysis further identified that those supportive of the MPA were generally from higher socio-professional categories, had a negative perception of the coral reef ecosystem's health and were not originally from Reunion. In contrast, locals (born in Reunion) from lower socio-professional categories or with no employment activity and having a positive perception of the health status of coral reefs offered no opinion on the MPA. Attitudes towards enforcement and compliance highlighted that SCUBA divers, fishers and jet skiers attributed a higher value to the protection of the coral reef environment through enforcement of MPA regulations than to their own use of the coral reef resource. When asked about the use of penalties to deter non-compliance, swimmers were awarded the lowest fines, followed by SCUBA divers, fishers then jet skiers being awarded the highest fines. Thus, the more severe the act of non-compliance by a resource user group was perceived to be, the more these users themselves disapproved of non-compliant behaviour and supported use of high penalties. The survey design through focusing on school children's parents, demonstrated a simple and cost-effective method for data collection while providing environmental education, which could be employed in similar case studies elsewhere.

Selected Papers from workshops ACSys2009 and IDC'2009

Dear SCPE Reader, The recent development of applications that exploit multiple information sources, distributed resource processing, user mobility, interaction and information sharing calls for novel models of coordination, data acquisition, transfer and integration, efficient access and processing of information. The articles presented in this issue propose some intelligent distributed models and algorithms that try to cope with the large quantity of information available to users in different application contexts, and draw from different computation paradigms such as multi-agent technology, biologically inspired computation, peer-to-peer systems, mobile ad hoc network, grid computing. The articles in this issue of SCPE are extended versions of selected papers presented at the workshops ACSys2009 and IDC’2009. ACSys2009, the 6 th Workshop on Agents for Complex Systems was held in Romania, TimiAŸoara, September, 26–29, 2009. The workshop was organized in the frame of the 11th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (SYNASC 2009). The aim of the ACSys2009 workshop was to bring together researchers and developers from academia and industry in order to discuss current scientific and technical results on using agent technology for solving complex, distributed real-world problems ( http://synasc09.info.uvt.ro/workshops/ACSys/ ). The article Algorithmic Solutions for Several Offline Constrained Resource Processing and Data Transfer Multicriteria Optimization Problems by Mugurel IonuA£ Andreica and Nicolae A¢AƒpuAŸ presents novel algorithmic solutions for several resource processing and data transfer multicriteria optimization problems. The results of most of the presented techniques are strategies which solve the considered problems (almost) optimally. The article Sensors Data—Stream Processing Middleware Based on Multi-Agent Model by Ovidiu Aritoni and Viorel Negru proposes a multi-agent architecture for an intelligent sensor data processing middleware that allows acquisition, interpretation and aggregation of sensor data-streams. A healthcare system is used for validating the architecture. The article Context-Aware Emergent Behaviour in a MAS for Information Exchange by Andrei Olaru, Cristian Gratie and Adina Magda Florea presents, based on authors’ previous work on self-organizing multi-agent systems for information exchange, two aspects of context-awareness—pressure and interest—that make the system's emergent behavior context-sensitive and, therefore, more adaptive to a changing environment. IDC’2009, the 3 rd International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing, was held in Cyprus, Ayia Napa, October 13–14, 2009. The aim of this symposium was to bring together researchers involved in intelligent distributed computing to allow cross-fertilization and synergy of ideas and to enable advancement of researches in the field ( http://www.idc2009.cs.ucy.ac.cy/ ). The article Efficient Broadcasting in MANETs by Selective Forwarding by Doina Bein, Ajoy K. Datta, and Balaji Ashok Sathyanarayanan presents a new protocol called Efficient Broadcasting by Selective Forwarding that minimizes the number of transmissions or retransmissions needed for broadcasting in mobile ad hoc networks. The article Group-Based Interactions for Multiuser Applications by Carmen Morgado, Jose C. Cunha, Nuno Correia, and Jorge Custodio presents a group-based model for the development of interactive applications where multiple users dynamically interact with each other, and which facilitates the organization, access and sharing of content by multiple users. It also describes examples to support communities in tourism and school campus scenarios. The article Exploring Carrier Agents in Swarm-Array Computing by Blesson Varghese and Gerard Mckee proposes a swarm-array computing approach to bridge the gap between autonomic and parallel computing. The feasibility of this proposal is validated by two simulation studies: using a multi-agent simulator on a Field-Programmable Gate Array, and using Message Passing Interface on a computer cluster. Great thanks are first given to SCPE and its Editor-in-Chief Dana Petcu who kindly offered the publication of this special issue. We would also like to thank George A. Papadopoulos, who helped with co-organizing IDC'2009. Viorel Negru, Adina Magda Florea, Costin BAƒdicAƒ

Perceptions of climate change, multiple stressors and livelihoods on marginal African coasts

Studies of multiple stressors in Africa often focus on vulnerable inland communities. Rising concentrations of the world’s poor live in coastal rural–urban areas with direct dependencies on marine as well as terrestrial ecosystem goods and services. Using participatory methods we elicited perceptions of stressors and their sources, impacts and consequences held by coastal communities in eastern Africa (Mtwara in Tanzania and Maputo in Mozambique). Respondent-informed timelines suggest wars, economic policies and natural increase have led to natural resource-dependent populations in marginal, previously little-inhabited lowland coastal areas. Respondents (n = 91) in interviews and focus groups rank climate stressors (temperature rise/erratic rain) highest amongst human/natural stressors having negative impacts on livelihoods and wellbeing (e.g., cross-scale cost of living increases including food and fuel prices). Sources of stress and impacts were mixed in time and space, complicating objective identification of causal chains. Some appeared to be specific to coastal areas. Respondents reported farms failing and rising dependence on stressed marine resources, food and fuel prices and related dependence on traders and credit shrunk by negative global market trends. Development in the guise of tourism and conservation projects limited access to land–sea livelihoods and resources in rural–urban areas (coastal squeeze). Mental modelling clarified resource user perceptions of complex linkages from local to international levels. We underline risks of the poor in marginal coastal areas facing double or multiple exposures to multiple stressors, with climate variability suggesting the risks of climate change.

Server selection methods in personal metasearch: a comparative empirical study

Server selection is an important subproblem in distributed information retrieval (DIR) but has commonly been studied with collections of more or less uniform size and with more or less homogeneous content. In contrast, realistic DIR applications may feature much more varied collections. In particular, personal metasearch--a novel application of DIR which includes all of a user's online resources--may involve collections which vary in size by several orders of magnitude, and which have highly varied data. We describe a number of algorithms for server selection, and consider their effectiveness when collections vary widely in size and are represented by imperfect samples. We compare the algorithms on a personal metasearch testbed comprising calendar, email, mailing list and web collections, where collection sizes differ by three orders of magnitude. We then explore the effect of collection size variations using four partitionings of the TREC ad hoc data used in many other DIR experiments. Kullback-Leibler divergence, previously considered poorly effective, performs better than expected in this application; other techniques thought to be effective perform poorly and are not appropriate for this problem. A strong correlation with size-based rankings for many techniques may be responsible.