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The aim of the research is to highlight the design for users with visual disabilities. In order to ensure validity, objectivity, and accurately information the following requirements were considered: Talking Signs, Tactile Maps, Floor Markings, Dual Signs, Color Contrast and Sans-serif Letters [3]. In conclusion, wayfinding systems are very important for disabled users and also guidelines recommended by the ADA and ANSI which includes the use of certain fonts, sizes, colors, contrasts, shapes, symbols, finishes, heights, and legibility. It is also recommended that a standard system be used to reduce confusion among users and to make it easier for new signs to be made [4].Hopefully teaching new guidelines and encourage new ideas for identification and instructional signage will help to make a more effective and easily manageable system for the disabled users and for the entire population [5]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Curtin University has developed a multimedia prototype system for use by speech therapists to assist in the rehabilitation of motor speech impaired patients. These are often stroke victims who have to relearn the ability to communicate effectively. The process is usually laborious and instead of the usual card-based prompts used by the therapist, this multimedia solution offers screen and audio prompts together with high quality digitised speech. The result is a reduced work load for the therapist. In parallel with this work, is a Mobility Aid Assistive Device Program for the visually impaired. The support clusters for all these groups, whether they be therapists, caregivers, manufacturers of hardware or software do not interact to the extent they might. The author proposes a collaborative digital ecosystem framework that would assist this challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a communication assistive method that uses sympathetic skin response (SSR) as the input indicator for a device that will assist the disabled. To develop this method, we investigated the influence of optimal display conditions. SSR evokes visual stimuli. Therefore, we first clarified the optimal combination of background and character colors. The results show that the perception of conspicuousness increased as the contrast ratio increased. Then we investigated the change in the SSR appearance ratio in the conspicuous display condition; the result showed that the contrast had no influence on the SSR appearance ratio. In the future, we will conduct experiments on more subjects and further clarify the influence of visual stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Eastern European countries included in the communist system of the USSR, parents of disabled children were encouraged to commit their disabled child to institutional care. There were strict legal regulations excluding them from schools. Medical assessments were used for care decisions. Nevertheless many parents decided to care for their disabled child at home within the family. Ukraine became an independent country in 1991, when communism was replaced by liberal democracy within a free market system. Western solutions have been sought for many social problems existing, but 'hidden,' under the old regime. For more of the parents of disabled children, this has meant embracing ideas of caring for their disabled children in the community, and providing for their social, educational, and medical needs, which have previously been denied. The issue of disability is a serious one for Ukraine where the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986 caused extensive radiation poisoning. This almost certainly led to an increase in the number of disabled children being born and an increase in the incidence of various forms of cancer. This paper is based on a series of observation visits to some of the many self-help groups established by parents, usually mothers, for their disabled children. It draws attention to the emotional stress experienced both by parents and their disabled children in the process of attempting to come to terms with the disabling conditions, and the denial of the normal rights of childhood resulting from prejudice, poor resources, ignorance, and restrictive legislation. Attempts have been made to identify the possible role and tasks of professional social workers within this context. International comparisons show that many parents and their children do not benefit from the medical model of disability, and that serious consequences include the development of depressive illness among those who find that little help is available from public services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The two asylums upon which this comparative study of patient records is based share many similarities. Situated only sixty kilometres apart, both are public teaching hospitals of two neighbouring cantons – Vaud and Geneva – in the French region of Switzerland, the Swiss Romande. In Switzerland, which is a confederation of states (cantons), there is little centralization of power. Thus, the responsibility for the mentally ill lies under cantonal jurisdiction. This explains the fact that there were different laws for different cantons, and that there were no massive ‘national’ mental hospitals. Over the course of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, most of the cantons established one or two public asylums for a variable, though not numerous population. In 1930, the largest of the twenty-five public institutions of Switzerland, Zurich's Rheinau, had 1,200 beds. The principal private institutions numbered twenty-one and catered mostly to members of the domestic and foreign middle class. The cantonal asylum of Vaud, named Cery, was established in 1873. It was an imposing building, corresponding to the type, popular in that era, of monumental u-shaped structures. It succeeded the first public asylum which began welcoming pauper lunatics in 1811. The asylum of Bel-Air, in the canton of Geneva, was established in 1900, replacing the first cantonal asylum, which had been constructed in 1838. Its composition of several pavilions represented a break from the u-system of buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

But in the black corners in the blackest ones, they lie down to weep for the fallen, mothers who gave them milk, sisters who bathed them, brides once of snow but now in the black of mourning, and now with fever; dazed widows, shattered women, letters and photographs which portray them as they were, there, eyes bursting from seeing them so much and so little, from so many silent tears, from so much absent beauty. The traumatic collective memory that most Spaniards have, even today, of the Civil War is explained not only by the events of the war of 1936 to 1939, but also by the experience of millions of Spaniards in the aftermath of the conflict itself. During the last weeks of the war as many as half a million Spaniards on the losing side fled to escape the justifiably feared repression of the victors. Most of the exiles who crossed the French border were confined in appalling conditions in refugee camps in the south of the country. Some managed to escape the German invasion of France and went on to Latin America, and above all Mexico. Yet many Republican veterans remained in France and joined the Resistance, so suffering a second experience of war even before they had had time to recover from the first. Two decades after the end of the Civil War, some 300,000 Republicans remained in exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agents of remembrance work in the borderlands linking families, civil society, and the state. There, during and after war, individuals and groups, mostly obscure, come together to do the work of remembrance. This entails their creating a space in which the story of their war, in its local, particular, parochial, familial forms, can be told and retold. The construction of the narrative – in stone, in ceremony, in other works and symbols – is itself the process of remembrance. Once completed in this initial phase, these ‘sites of remembrance’ are never stable, never fixed. In the process of composition, they begin to decompose, losing little by little the force and content of their original meaning and evocative power. The reason for this transformation is imbedded in the life cycle of agency itself. Those who join in this activity do so at the cost of other ventures; when their lives change, and other business calls, the bonds of such agency begin to fray, and unravel. I would like to offer an interpretation of one facet of this process of public recollection of war in the twentieth century. I want to suggest that an antidote to the use of the term ‘collective memory’ in a general or ethereal sense, floating somewhere in the cultural atmosphere of a period, may be found in the insistence upon the significance of agency in the work of remembrance of particular groups of survivors, whose bond is social and experiential. Following anthropologists, these groups may be termed ‘fictive kin’, ‘adoptive kin’, or ‘functional kin’, as opposed to those linked by blood bonds or marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The idea that poverty is a relative rather than an absolute concept appears to be widely accepted. Historians recognize that different societies define need and the necessity of relief in different ways. It has even been proposed that the term ‘poverty’ be replaced by ‘deprivation’, in that this automatically suggests greater flexibility and points to the dependency of the threshold of need on culturally determined variables. The relative nature of the concept of ‘poverty’ is usually attributed to two considerations. First, to a series of conventions about what is regarded as a necessity which define acceptable standards of living. Then, there are boundaries, which are also liable to change, that distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor, according to various sets of values and ideological frameworks. Even though they underline the importance of a relativist approach, historians, it seems, hold on to an element of objectivity in the shape of a hierarchy of need, albeit based on the notion of convention. This is seen as the key criterion through which different social and cultural milieux were accustomed to identify and measure poverty and to model their systems of welfare. Such assumptions, in my view, have deeply influenced studies in the field, imposing two major methodological orientations. On the one hand, such studies have considered that the population in receipt of welfare could be taken as revealing the structure if not the dimensions of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Daoyi, the most important organization above the level of the household was the Eight Banner system, in particular its occupational and organizational hierarchies. These overlapping hierarchies were the principal link between individuals and households on the one hand and the state on the other. The occupational hierarchy supplied the state with skilled manpower. The organizational hierarchy provided the local civil, fiscal, judicial, and military leadership, and in fact was the lowest layer of formal government administration in rural Liaoning. The Eight Banner registers provide detailed information on the position of individuals within these two hierarchies, recording the obligations, occupations, and offices of every adult male every three years. These data are an important source not only for the study of the structure of rural social hierarchy, but also for the study of social mobility within that hierarchy. Furthermore, when combined with our knowledge of household relationships and household structure from previous chapters, they enable us to analyze the interactions between the occupational, organizational, and household hierarchies in our population. In this chapter we describe both Eight Banner hierarchies. We do this because no similar study yet exists and because our understanding of rural banner society is consequently extremely rudimentary. In section I, we focus on the age pattern of entry to and exit from banner service, and the relationship with such life course events as marriage and headship. In sections II and III, we describe the occupational and organizational hierarchies. Finally in section IV, we provide some measures of career mobility within and between these two overlapping hierarchies. Banner service The basic unit of the Eight Banner occupational hierarchy in Daoyi was the adult male, or ding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fate and fortune in rural Liaoning were subject not only to the broad organizational constraints of the Chinese household and the Manchu banner, but also to the specific ecological setting of the local climate and land. In Chapter 3, we locate the spatial and temporal setting of our population and show how three such ecological circumstances–the seasonal harvest cycle, the annual fluctuation in climate and prices, and a secular trend of rising demographic pressure–defined the boundary conditions of demographic and social behavior in Daoyi and surrounding communities. The demographic response to seasonal cycles and short-term fluctuations consisted of variations in vital rates. The response to the secular trend of rising Malthusian pressure, however, was not just a sum of individual demographic responses, but rather a fundamental transformation of the household and banner systems that radically changed the domestic context of daily life. In Daoyi, in other words, organizational constraints such as the household and banner systems were in turn shaped by ecological conditions. The harvest cycle Throughout the world, rural life is dominated by the passing of the seasons. Daoyi is no exception. Its extreme northern location guarantees a short, intense, agricultural season with only one harvest. Spring does not arrive until May, which brings little rain, but more sunlight than any other month of the year. The transition in the weather is rapid. Farmers accordingly have to rush to prepare their fields and plant their crops before the rainy season in July and August. This concentration of activity during the spring planting renews with the autumn harvest in September. Like the spring, the fall is quite brief–often no more than one month long. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]