Search results for "Vulnerability"
showing 10 items of 407 documents
The resilience of Finnish farms: Exploring the interplay between agency and structure
2020
Resilience implies, in its essence, the capacity of a system to tolerate disturbances while retaining its essential functions. In the context of agriculture, resilience thinking calls for considering the ability of farms to thrive in turbulent times along with the ability of the ecological system – in which the agricultural production is embedded – to retain its function and integrity. Resilience is a relevant conceptual tool to analyse the contradictory management demands that farms are facing within the current neoliberal market regime: being economically viable and environmentally sustainable. In this study, the resilience of farms was operationalised through farmers' perceptions concern…
Unaccompanied minors in Sicily: promoting conceptualizations of child well-being through children’s own subjective realities
2020
Understanding unaccompanied minors’ (UAMs’) individual migration journeys and aspirations and hopes helps make sense of the meaning they ascribe to their personal and social reality in their quest for integration and mobility. Although the well-being of children is considered to be of the utmost importance in contemporary times, we still lack good evidence of what children themselves regard as key facets of this, from their own life experiences. Identifying different domains and dimensions of children’s well-being and touching upon its multifaceted nature, this study presents an alternative framework, showing how the quality of the reception path is fundamental to having successful results …
Mapping and assessing coastal resilience in the Caribbean region
2015
Assessing the vulnerability and resilience to coastal hazards is a critical worldwide issue, especially for hurricane-prone coastal regions such as the Caribbean. However, the development of a useful metric for vulnerability and resilience assessment has a lot of challenges. Cartography and GIS analysis can contribute effectively to the solution of the issue by integrating natural and human data layers for assessment, mapping, and visualization. This paper uses the new Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM) model to assess the resilience of 25 countries in the Caribbean region to hurricanes. The RIM indices of the countries were computed using three variables representing three dimensions: …
Mechanisms of Shared Vulnerability to Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Substance Use Disorders
2020
Psychoactive substance use is a nearly universal human behavior, but a significant minority of people who use addictive substances will go on to develop an addictive disorder. Similarly, though ~90% of people experience traumatic events in their lifetime, only ~10% ever develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Substance use disorders (SUD) and PTSD are highly comorbid, occurring in the same individual far more often than would be predicted by chance given the respective prevalence of each disorder. Some possible reasons that have been proposed for the relationship between PTSD and SUD are self-medication of anxiety with drugs or alcohol, increased exposure to traumatic events due to a…
The Potential Role of miRNAs in Cognitive Frailty.
2021
Frailty is an aging related condition, which has been defined as a state of enhanced vulnerability to stressors, leading to a limited capacity to meet homeostatic demands. Cognitive impairment is also frequent in older people, often accompanying frailty. Age is the main independent risk factor for both frailty and cognitive impairment, and compelling evidence suggests that similar age-associated mechanisms could underlie both clinical conditions. Accordingly, it has been suggested that frailty and cognitive impairment share common pathways, and some authors proposed “cognitive frailty” as a single complex phenotype. Nevertheless, so far, no clear common underlying pathways have been discove…
Self-worth contingencies and obsessionality: A promising approach to vulnerability?
2012
Abstract Cognitive behavioral theories (CBT) posit deficiencies in selfhood processes as possible vulnerability factors for obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). This paper presents two psychometric studies on the development of the Obsessional Concerns and Self Questionnaire (OCSQ), a measure of failure to attain self-worth in personal domains relevant to obsessionality. In the first study based on 563 community Spaniards, principal factor analysis of an 80 item pool resulted in a three factor solution and a final 35 item version (OCSQ-r). In the second study self-worth and symptom measures were administered to 152 Spanish, 142 Argentinean and 112 Canadian nonclinical samples. Group compari…
Facilitating climate change adaptation through communication:Insights from the development of a visualization tool
2015
Climate change communication on anticipated impacts and adaptive responses is frequently presented as an effective means to facilitate implementation of adaptation to mitigate risks to residential buildings. However, it requires that communication is developed in a way that resonates with the context of the target audience, provides intelligible information and addresses perceived barriers to adaptation. In this paper we reflect upon criteria for useful climate change communication gained over a three year development process of a web-based tool – VisAdapt™ – aimed at increasing the adaptive capacity among Nordic homeowners. Based on the results from continuous user-testing and focus group …
[RIU project: perceived changes by health agents and professionals after a health intervention in an urban area of socioeconomic disadvantage].
2013
Resumen Objetivo Describir los cambios percibidos por la población y los profesionales en relación con la salud y el uso de servicios tras la intervención RIU con agentes comunitarios en un barrio vulnerable. Diseño Estudio descriptivo cualitativo con entrevistas individuales y grupales y observación participante de octubre de 2008 a julio de 2009. Emplazamiento Barrio Raval (Algemesí-Valencia). Participantes Selección por muestreo opinático de 7 mujeres agentes de salud, todas las que finalizaron la intervención, y 10 profesionales implicados en la misma. Método Con las mujeres se mantuvo una entrevista grupal a los 6 meses, y una entrevista grupal y 7 individuales a los 9 meses de interve…
Security Challenges of IoT-Based Smart Home Appliances
2018
The Internet of Things, IoT, and the related security challenges are reaching homes in the form of smart appliances. If the appliances are compromised, they can be used in botnet attacks against Internet services and potentially cause harm to people and property through the local network, for example, by heating up too much or allowing unauthorized access. The aim of this study was to see how secure these devices are against remote and network attacks. Several devices were tested with attacks coming from the same Wi-Fi network to gain various levels of control of the devices. Their security against a Man-in-the-Middle attack was also studied to see differences in the susceptibility to conne…
How Vulnerable is the Reaction Time Concealed Information Test to Faking?
2021
The reaction time-based Concealed Information Test (RT-CIT) can be used to detect information a suspect wishes to conceal. While it is often argued that it is easily faked, empirical research on its vulnerability to faking is scarce. In three experiments, we tested whether receiving faking instructions enables guilty participants to fake an innocent test outcome in an RT-CIT. In Experiment 1, when not using a response deadline, we found the RT-CIT to be vulnerable to faking (d = 1.06). Experiment 2 showed that when using a response deadline, faking was ineffective (d = −0.25). Critically, Experiment 3 replicated these findings within one between-subject design, showing again a faking effect…