This study assessed whether community participation in health related activity was a reality or just popular development rhetoric. Using action research methodology, focus group discussions and informal contacts were made with farm workers consisting of twelve families in Umkomaas, south of Durban in the province of Kwa Zulu Natal. The aim was to establish whether this community could be active...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to investigate whether generalized trust and/or social participation at an individual level have negative associations with unmet healthcare needs. METHODS Door-to-door interviews were conducted by trained interviewers to collect information. The 8,800 study participants included 220 adults sampled systematically using the resident registration database fr...

Comparative Advantage, Segmentation and Informal Earnings: A Marginal Treatment Effects Approach This paper employs recently developed econometric models of marginal treatment effects to analyze the relevance of labor market comparative advantage and segmentation in the participation and earnings performance of workers in formal and informal jobs in Argentina. A novel household data set on info...

It is crucial to achieve effective solid waste management involving not only formal/government agencies, but also individual/informal/voluntary actions in order to create a healthy environment. This study conducted to unveil the factors that increase individuals’ community participation in solid waste management policy. The data were matched with a literature review on existing waste policies t...

This study is on the determinants of credit access by small scale farmers in Dekina Local Government Area of Kogi State, Nigeria. The specific objectives are to; identify the major source of credit among the small scale farmers; estimate the determinants of farmers’ access to formal credit; compare the farm income of farmers who have access to formal credit and those who have not and identify c...

In this paper we present a framework for describing cooperative work in informal domains such as an office. We argue that standard models of such work are inadequate for describing the adaptibility and variabil ity observed in offices, and are fundamentally misleading as metaphors for understanding the skills and knowledge needed by computers or people to do the work. The basic claim in our alt...

Participation is an important factor in team success. We propose a new metric of participation equality that provides an unbiased estimate across groups of different sizes and across those that change size over time. Using 11 h of transcribed utterances from informal, fluid, colocated workgroup meetings, we compared the associations of this metric with coded equality of participation and standa...

Distributed organizations, with distributed cooperative work, are a fact of life. How can new technologies help? Distributed video is an appealing choice, carrying more contextual information than voice alone and, arguably, better at conveying subtle cues, such as the emotional states. Although new commercial systems are being introduced, they focus primarily on providing new technology. Most a...

This paper describes the status of the ISocRob MSL robotic soccer team as required by the RoboCup 2011 qualification procedures. The most relevant technical and scientifical developments carried out by the team, since its last participation in the RoboCup MSL competitions, are here detailed. These include cooperative localization, cooperative object tracking, planning under uncertainty, obstacl...