Alistair Law
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PROVIDER: S-EPMC1126408 | biostudies-literature | 2003 Jul
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Background and objectivesEnglish and Welsh laws require "contemporaneous" consent to sexual relations, often precluding "non-capacituos" people living with advanced dementia from these human interactions.Research design and methodsThe views of people living with dementia, carers, professionals, and over-55s were explored on implications of current laws on sexuality in dementia. Thirty-five participants from England were recruited through purposive selective sampling. Audio-taped semistructured interviews were transcribed and thematically analyzed with each stakeholder group coded separately.ResultsCommon themes across stakeholders were (i) law reform needed due to their hammer-like effect ignoring the individual; (ii) dissonant theme of needing the law for protection; (iii) negative impact of denied intimacy on individuals and partners; (iv) support for Advance Decisions on Intimacy with caveats; (v) less support for involvement of Court of Protection and Powers of Attorney; (vi) call for review of capacity concept with support for an assent model. People living with dementia described shame and stigma associated with policing of their sexuality and perception of being singled out for protection and intrusion into their lives. For informal carers (mostly wives), the theme of "what about me" emerged, demonstrating that for the long-term partnered, this is a couple's issue.Discussion and implicationsPractical implications of this study include need to address ageism and ableism; human rights education for society and professionals; starting point of presumed capacity for sexual relations with consensus on how and when this should be rebutted; and care homes' certification requirements should incorporate assessment of the relationship health of their residents.
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Project description:BACKGROUND: Zipf's law and Heaps' law are observed in disparate complex systems. Of particular interests, these two laws often appear together. Many theoretical models and analyses are performed to understand their co-occurrence in real systems, but it still lacks a clear picture about their relation. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We show that the Heaps' law can be considered as a derivative phenomenon if the system obeys the Zipf's law. Furthermore, we refine the known approximate solution of the Heaps' exponent provided the Zipf's exponent. We show that the approximate solution is indeed an asymptotic solution for infinite systems, while in the finite-size system the Heaps' exponent is sensitive to the system size. Extensive empirical analysis on tens of disparate systems demonstrates that our refined results can better capture the relation between the Zipf's and Heaps' exponents. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The present analysis provides a clear picture about the relation between the Zipf's law and Heaps' law without the help of any specific stochastic model, namely the Heaps' law is indeed a derivative phenomenon from the Zipf's law. The presented numerical method gives considerably better estimation of the Heaps' exponent given the Zipf's exponent and the system size. Our analysis provides some insights and implications of real complex systems. For example, one can naturally obtained a better explanation of the accelerated growth of scale-free networks.
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2015-09-01 | GSE72561 | GEO