Stakeholder Requirements for an Ethical Framework to Sustain Multiple Research Projects in an Emerging Living Lab Involving Older Adults.

Living Lab (LL) research should follow clear ethical guidelines and principles. While these exist in specific disciplinary contexts, there is a lack of tailored and specific ethical guidelines for the design, development, and implementation of LL projects. As well as the complexity of these dynamic and multi-faceted contexts, the engagement of older adults, and adults with reducing cognitive and physical capacity in LL research, poses additional ethical challenges. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 26 participants to understand multistakeholder experiences related to user engagement and related ethical issues in emerging LL research. The participants' experiences and concerns are reported and translated into an ethical framework to guide future LL research initiatives.

Presence-only data and the em algorithm.

SUMMARY: In ecological modeling of the habitat of a species, it can be prohibitively expensive to determine species absence. Presence-only data consist of a sample of locations with observed presences and a separate group of locations sampled from the full landscape, with unknown presences. We propose an expectation-maximization algorithm to estimate the underlying presence-absence logistic model for presence-only data. This algorithm can be used with any off-the-shelf logistic model. For models with stepwise fitting procedures, such as boosted trees, the fitting process can be accelerated by interleaving expectation steps within the procedure. Preliminary analyses based on sampling from presence-absence records of fish in New Zealand rivers illustrate that this new procedure can reduce both deviance and the shrinkage of marginal effect estimates that occur in the naive model often used in practice. Finally, it is shown that the population prevalence of a species is only identifiable when there is some unrealistic constraint on the structure of the logistic model. In practice, it is strongly recommended that an estimate of population prevalence be provided.

Modernisation and children's blood pressure: On and off the tourist trail in Nepal.

Blood pressure and anthropometric measurements were taken for 231 children between 11 and 14 years in the Annapurna area of Central Nepal, a popular tourist destination. Children from villages on the tourist trail, whose lifestyles were generally more modernised, were compared with children from nearby villages off the tourist trail. Indications of greater modernisation on the trail included the findings that fathers of children living on the trail were less likely to work as farmers than fathers of those off the trail (P = 0.003), and children living on the trail were much more likely to have seen television (P < 0.001). Children on the tourist trail were taller and heavier (P < 0.001), and had higher body mass indices (P = 0.003) and biceps skinfolds (P = 0.005). They also had higher diastolic blood pressure than children living off the trail (P = 0.02). The differences in weight appeared to account for the effect of living on the trail on diastolic blood pressure, since when weight was added to the model it showed a significant association with diastolic blood pressure (P = 0.02) and the effect of location became nonsignificant. For the biceps skinfold and systolic blood pressure, there was a significant sex difference in the effect of living on the trail (P = 0.04 and P = 0.05 respectively), such that among girls there were greater increases associated with living on the trail than there were among boys. The findings suggest that lifestyle changes linked to the development of tourism in Nepal are associated from an early age with potentially deleterious changes in cardiovascular characteristics and demonstrate that such socioeconomic changes can have quite local effects. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 12:478-486, 2000. Copyright 2000 Wiley-Liss, Inc.