Creating digital archives of personal and family memories is an area of growing interest, but which seemingly is often not supported by a thorough understanding of current home archiving practice. In this paper we seek to excavate the home archive. Based on extensive field research in family homes we present a taxonomy of the kinds of sentimental objects to be found in homes, and through in-dep...

This paper analyzes housing price dynamics in and outside of Telecom Corridor, a region near Dallas, Texas, with a high concentration of new economy firms. Using separate home price indexes in and outside this region, the paper tests whether home values are more volatile in the new economy area and compares mean-variance efficient portfolio weights on housing. The problem of hedging housing pri...

Pervasive systems, and domotics in particular, is an application area where heterogeneity is the norm, with thousands of autonomous heterogeneous devices live together and need to interoperate. One of the greatest difficulties in developing middleware for smart homes is that this kind of systems are extremely difficult to test and verify. We propose to reduce the testing costs by replacing actu...

We are witnessing the increasing need for pervasive Internet access from public places, such as airports and hotels. However, the inherent untrusted nature of public places makes deployment of public area wireless networks challenging. We have proposed the Home-based Authentication Protocol (HAP) that provides a framework by which to establish trust between a nomadic client and a service provid...

Emergency planning for vulnerable populations constitutes a major element of community disaster preparedness and is an area in which guidance is particularly sparse. As evidenced by the well-publicized deaths of nursing home residents following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the need to improve nursing home emergency preparedness is self-evident. Nevertheless, as efforts to improve preparedness d...

The increased use of social media, such as Twitter, was widely reported on Japanese media after the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011. This study is a qualitative investigation of the use of Twitter by the stranded commuters and their supporters in the Tokyo metropolitan area immediately after the earthquake. This paper describes the possibilities and problems of Twitter use under a...

Topical ophthalmic medications used on the ward and from the outpatient area have been taken and cultured for potential bacterial contamination in the laboratory. We examined 143 bottles used by patients who had had routine cataract surgery and trabeculectomy. We also examined for bacterial contamination 216 bottles of eyedrops used in the outpatient area of the hospital. No contamination was f...

OBJECTIVES Physical activity-an important determinant of health and function in old age-may vary according to the life-space area reached. Our aim was to study how moving through greater life-space areas is associated with greater physical activity of community-dwelling older people. The association between objectively measured physical activity and life-space area reached on different days by ...