Luminance contrast preferences of people with a vision impairment for elements in the built environment.

Background: Standards for building elements recommend a minimum luminance contrast of 30%. The basis of this value and the metric originally used is not known.

Objective: To begin to provide an evidence base for the specification of minimum contrast in building elements.

Issues in specifying contrast in building elements for people with a visual disability.

Background: Standards writers, national and international, have used different contrast calculations to set requirements in building elements for people with visual impairments. On the other hand, they have typically set a single requirement (30%) for specifying the minimum contrast. The systems are not linearly related and 30% means something rather different in each system.

Housing Design and Community Care: How Home Modifications Reduce Care Needs of Older People and People with Disability.

The extent to which housing design can minimise levels of community caregiving has remained largely unmeasured. This paper reports the potential for home modifications to reduce caregiving in the peoples' homes, particularly older people and people with a disability. It contributes to new knowledge in understanding how housing can play a role in community caregiving and acknowledges the role of the built environment in managing care levels in ageing societies.

Transforming Inclusion: Designing in the Experience of Greater Technological Possibility.

Universal Design seeks to contribute to the sustainability and inclusivity of communities and co-design and participatory methods are a critical tool in this evolution. The fact that technology permeates our society is undeniable and the form and materials that technology takes in turn shape the basics of human life such as being able to shower and toilet oneself. In contrast, the various existing approaches to co-design have very different sorts of metaphysical, epistemological and normative assumptions behind them.

Perceptions of Older People Regarding Their Vision and Incident Causation.

Purpose: It is widely known that visual impairment (VI) is a risk factor for falls, but patients or their eye care practitioners may not recognize other kinds of incidents as being problematic because of their vision. Consequently, older people with VI may have unmet needs for advice on how to carry out activities of daily living safely. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to understand whether older people with VI consider their vision as a causative factor of incidents they experience and their perceptions regarding the prevention of future incidents.

Cryptic plasticity underlies a major evolutionary transition.

The origin of eusociality is often regarded as a change of macroevolutionary proportions [1, 2]. Its hallmark is a reproductive division of labor between the members of a society: some individuals ("helpers" or "workers") forfeit their own reproduction to rear offspring of others ("queens"). In the Hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps), there have been many transitions in both directions between solitary nesting and sociality [2-5].

Future fitness and helping in social queues.

Helpers in primitively eusocial and cooperatively breeding animal societies forfeit their own reproduction to rear the offspring of a queen or breeding pair, but may eventually attain breeding status themselves. Kin selection provides a widely accepted theoretical framework for understanding these societies, but differences in genetic relatedness do not explain a universal societal feature: the huge variation between individuals in helping effort. An alternative explanation for this variation lies in a fundamental trade-off faced by helpers: by working harder, they increase the indirect component of their fitness, but simultaneously decrease their own future survival and fecundity.