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The aim of this study is to expand our knowledge about the factors that condition late-life loneliness from a longitudinal perspective. We assess the long-term relationship between education, late-life loneliness and family trajectories in terms of the role of partnership and motherhood, as well as their timing for older women. We set two initial hypotheses: (1) family trajectory has a mediating effect and (2) education has a selection effect. Cross-sectional and retrospective data are drawn from the three waves of the SHARE survey (3rd, 5th and 7th waves), selecting a subsample of women aged 65 and over from 11 European countries (N = 10,615). After distinguishing eight different family trajectories by carrying out a Sequence Analysis, the Karlson-Holm-Breen method is used to assess the mediator effect of family trajectory on the relationship between education and loneliness. Multinomial analysis is used to explore whether the probability of different family trajectories of older European women is defined by their level of education. Our results show that education has a selection effect on family trajectories: a higher educational level increases the probability of a non-standardised family trajectory. Significant results of the mediator effect of family trajectory are however only observed for women with medium-level education, as being single and childless at older ages increases the probability of loneliness among these women. Adopting a life-course perspective has permitted us to introduce the longitudinal dimensions of life events, education and family trajectories to the study of feelings of loneliness among women in old age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The loss of a spouse/partner is a major stressor, undermining one's mental health, especially in mid-life and old age. Social ties are key moderators of the impact of bereavement, serving to enhance psychological resilience and facilitating social engagement and access to resources. Our aim was to explore the association between depression levels and the interaction between the composition of, and level of satisfaction with, social networks among women who have lost their husband. The study was undertaken from a cross-national perspective, examining women throughout Europe. We used data from the SHARE Survey (sixth wave; N = 6,820). Using linear regression models, we find negative evaluations of social relations influenced the mental health of European widows, mostly when relatives exclusively composed their social network. The perceived quality of that network had more impact on the mental health of older widows in Northern and Western European countries than in their Southern and Eastern counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Circulating fluidised bed combustion (CFBC) power plants produce large ash particles with elevated calcium (Ca) content as a by-product. Although it has pozzolanic potential, CFBC ash is not commonly accepted as an addition for cement. To enhance the activity of this material, in this experimental study CFBC ash was ground to a fineness equal to that of cement, simulating a joint milling with the clinker. This ground fly ash (GFA) was included in blended cements in ratios of 10, 20 and 40%. These new cements with GFA surpassed 52·5 MPa at 28 d for even substitutions as high as 40%. In comparison with a limestone addition – the most used in Europe – the cements with GFA presented higher compressive strength and better durability, with the only drawback being a slight reduction in workability. This CFBC fly ash could be used as clinker replacement once ground to a similar fineness to that of cement, allowing high reductions in clinker consumption and, consequently, its environmental impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diversification of caregiving arrangements in European societies has drawn attention to the factors that condition the use of care by older people. Social and family relations appear as a key factor, mainly to be related to the availability and accessibility to potential informal caregivers. Recent studies evidenced that geographical proximity and a larger social network increase the probability of receiving informal support in old age. However, the ways in which interpersonal relationships are associated with the use of formal care, as well as the cross‐country variability of this association, have been barely explored. Using a sample of 37,708 individuals aged 65 and over from Wave 6 of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), this study examines to what extent the characteristics of older people's social networks predict the use of three types of home care; formal, informal, or combined, exploring the cross‐European convergences and divergences. Binomial logistic regressions are conducted to compare four macro‐regions in continental Europe (northern countries: Denmark and Sweden; western countries: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Luxembourg; southern countries: Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal; and eastern countries: Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, and Croatia). The structure, availability, and accessibility to the members of the social network are the major predictors of the receipt of informal care everywhere. Regional divergences are observed regarding to formal care, alone or combined with informal caregivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have applied the k-means clustering technique on a maximum daily 8-h running average near-surface ozone (MDA8 O 3 ) gridded dataset over Europe at 1° × 1° resolution for summer 1998–2012. This has resulted in a spatial division of nine regions where ozone presents coherent spatiotemporal patterns. The role of meteorology in the variability of ozone at different time scales has been investigated by using daily meteorological fields from the NCEP-NCAR meteorological reanalysis. In the five regions of central-southern Europe ozone extremes (exceedances of the summer 95th percentile) occur mostly under anticyclonic circulation or weak sea level pressure gradients which trigger elevated temperatures and the recirculation of air masses. In the four northern regions extremes are associated with high-latitude anticyclones that divert the typical westerly flow at those latitudes and cause the advection of aged air masses from the south. The impact of meteorology on the day-to-day variability of ozone has been assessed by means of two different types of multiple linear models. These include as predictors meteorological fields averaged within the regions (“region-based” approach) or synoptic indices indicating the degree of resemblance between the daily meteorological fields over a large domain (25°–70° N, 35° W – 35° E) and their corresponding composites for extreme ozone days (“index-based” approach). With the first approach, a reduced set of variables, always including daily maximum temperature within the region, explains 47–66% of the variability (adjusted R 2 ) in central-southern Europe, while more complex models are needed to explain 27–49% of the variability in the northern regions. The index-based approach yields better results for the regions of northern Europe, with adjusted R 2 = 40–57%. Finally, both methodologies have also been applied to reproduce the interannual variability of ozone, with the best models explaining 66–88% of the variance in central-southern Europe and 45–66% in the north. Thus, the regionalisation carried out in this work has allowed establishing clear distinctions between the meteorological drivers of ozone in northern Europe and in the rest of the continent. These drivers are consistent across the different time scales examined (extremes, day-to-day and interannual), which gives confidence in the robustness of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is an extensive body of literature on the use of residential satisfaction to measure the impact of housing conditions on well-being in later life, less is known about differences and similarities between sub-populations and national contexts. By means of a cross-European analysis (EU15), this study aims to examine how objective and subjective factors of living conditions shape the perceptions of older Europeans about the adequacy of their residential environment. Two patterns of housing quality are explored: (1) international heterogeneity of the EU15 countries, and (2) intra-national heterogeneity, where we distinguish between households at risk of poverty and those not at risk in the elderly population of these countries. Data were drawn from the 2007 wave of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey, providing a sample of more than 58,000 individuals aged 65 years and older. The housing characteristics surveyed were reduced using tetrachoric correlations in a principal component analysis. The resulting predictors, as well as control variables (including gender, age, health status and tenure), are assessed using multiple linear regression analysis to explore their association with a high or low level of residential satisfaction. Despite a generally positive assessment by older Europeans of their living space, major geographic and household income differences existed in the factors that explained residential satisfaction. Identifying factors associated with residential satisfaction in different household income groups and national contexts may facilitate the development of EU policies that attempt to make 'ageing in place' a viable and suitable option for older Europeans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Background: Scarce data are available in Europe on the cost of treatment for ulcerative colitis (UC). Aim: To assess the cost of illness of moderate-to-severe UC in two scenarios: traditional treatment versus alternative treatment incorporating granulocyte, monocyte adsorption – apheresis (GMA-Apheresis; Adacolumn®). To determine the relative cost-effectiveness of both options in steroid-dependent patients. Methods: One-year cost-of-illness and cost-effectiveness analysis from the third-payer perspective using a decision tree model was carried out. Probabilities of each event were derived from the literature and an expert panel. Direct medical costs were obtained from official sources (€2004). Effectiveness was measured by the proportion of patients achieving clinical remission. Results: The average annual cost per patient treated with traditional treatment was estimated to be €6740; with GMA-Apheresis, the cost was estimated to be €6959. In steroid-dependent patients, the average annual cost was €6059 and €11,436, respectively. The proportion of patients achieving clinical remission with GMA-Apheresis was 22.5% higher. As second- and third-line therapy, a new course of corticosteroids and surgery was avoided in 18.5 and 4% of patients, respectively. Conclusions: Incorporating GMA-Apheresis (Adacolumn®) in the therapeutic management of moderate-to-severe UC patients is cost-effective and implies savings related to the reduction of adverse effects derived from corticosteroid use and to the decreased number of surgical interventions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article discusses the Eureka program for the telecommunications in Europe. The Eureka program is funded by 41 countries and it involves cluster that are devoted to telecommunications called Cooperation for a Sustained European Leadership in Telecommunications. Eureka, European Research Cooperation Agency, aims to enhance European competitiveness through its support to businesses, research centers and universities that carry out pan-European projects to develop innovative products, processes and services.

The article looks at a subset of European telecommunications research projects and how they help in the innovation strategy of a large telecommunications operator. Part of this program is six huge projects and special focus is made on the Opuce, or Open Platform for User-Centric Service Creation and Execution; Akogrimo, or Access to Knowledge through the Grid in a Mobile World; and Brein, or Business-Objective-Driven Reliable and Intelligent Grids for Real Business. It is pointed out that all three projects demonstrate that innovation is accomplished by combining and integrating formerly unrelated technologies into one project.

In this paper we tackle a problem of representative measuring points selection for temperature field reconstruction. This problem is a version of the more general Representative Selection (RS) problem, well-known in computer and data science. In this particular case, the objective is to select the best set of N measuring points (i.e. N representative points), in such a way that a reconstruction error is minimized when reconstructing the monthly average temperature field. We use a novel meta-heuristic algorithm, the Coral Reefs Optimization with Substrate Layer (CRO-SL), which is an evolutionary-type method able to combine several different search procedures within a single population. The CRO-SL is combined with the Analogue Method (AM) to identify the most representative points. This approach exhibits strong performance from experiments with gridded and un-gridded temperature field datasets (European Climate Assessment & Dataset (ECA) and ERA-Interim reanalysis (ERA)). Different aspects such as the error assessment and the comparison with alternative approaches, are discussed in the experimental analysis of this article. We show that the algorithm performs better than a greedy approach, i.e. the best solution for N points is different from the N best individual predictors. The solutions obtained with the proposed methodology are climatologically consistent and include points from Scandinavia, Central and Southern Europe, the Black Sea and Central and South Western Asia as the more representative in the case of the ECA dataset; similar areas are selected for ERA. We have found out that once the number of stations/points goes over a threshold, the improvement in the model is obtained by increasing the density of data in the given zones, instead of adding data from different zones to the algorithm. The method proposed may have direct application in Palaeoclimalogy, where there are a large amount of distributed proxies with scarce information, so the proposed approach could be useful to select the most important ones to reconstruct a desired field. • We solve a problem of representative measuring points selection for temperature field reconstruction. • The Analogue Method is used as reconstruction algorithm. • An evolutionary-type meta-heuristic is proposed to select the best set of representative points. • A reconstruction error for the temperature field is minimized by the algorithm. • Experiments in two monthly temperature datasets in Europe have shown the good performance of the algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]