University of Westminster

About: University of Westminster is a education organization based out in London, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Politics. The organization has 2944 authors who have published 8426 publications receiving 200236 citations. The organization is also known as: Westminster University & Royal Polytechnic Institution.

Egoistic, altruistic, and biospheric environmental concerns: a path analytic investigation of their determinants.

Abstract: Previous studies have shown that environmental concerns (ECs) can be reduced to a three-factor model - comprising altruistic, biospheric, and egoistic concerns - but there have been few studies examining individual difference predictors of ECs. In this study with 203 individuals from a British community sample, we show that biospheric concern was significantly associated with participants' age, political orientation, Machiavellianism, and the Big Five personality traits of Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, and Conscientiousness. Altruistic concern was significantly associated with sex, age, political orientation, and Machiavellianism, but not the Big Five traits, whereas egoistic concern was not significantly associated with any of these predictors except sex. These results are discussed in relation to previous work on ECs and pro-environmental behavior.

Associations between positive emotion and recovery of functional status following stroke.

Abstract: OBJECTIVE Accumulating evidence indicates the beneficial effects of positive emotion on health and general well-being in older age. Less evidence is available on whether positive emotion supports improvement in functional status after an acute medical event such as stroke. This study examined the association between positive emotion at discharge from inpatient medical rehabilitation and functional status 3 months later in persons with stroke. METHODS A longitudinal study using information from the Stroke Recovery in Underserved Patients database. The study included 823 persons aged 55 years or older with stroke and admitted to an inpatient medical rehabilitation facility. Information was collected during inpatient medical rehabilitation stay and approximately 3 months after discharge. RESULTS The mean age of the sample was 72.8 years (SD = 9.5), 51.5% were women and 53.8% were married. The sample was mostly non-Hispanic white (79.2%), followed by non-Hispanic black (15.0%) and Hispanic (5.8%). The average length of stay was 20.1 day (SD = 10.1). In multivariate regression analyses, discharge positive emotion score was significantly associated with higher overall functional status (b = 0.70, SE = 0.21, p = .001) as well as with higher motor (b = 0.37, SE = 0.17, p = .003) and cognitive (b = 0.30, SE = 0.05, p = .0001) status at 3-month follow-up after adjustment for relevant risk factors. CONCLUSIONS Our results indicate positive emotion is associated with gains in functional status after stroke. Findings have implications for stroke recovery programs and suggest the need to include measures of positive emotion inpatient assessments.

A Framework for Web service negotiation

Abstract: In a survey on the theory and practice of agent system deployment, conducted by the AgentLink workgroup on networked agents, it was found that there are an increasing number of initiatives for the migration of agents research towards new Internet technologies such as the semantic web, Grid, and Web services. In fact, Grid computing and multi-agent systems research have similar objectives. They both aim to achieve “large-scale open distributed systems, capable of being able to effectively and dynamically deploy and redeploy computational (and other) resources as required, to solve computationally complex problems” [Foster and Kesselman 2003]. On the one hand, service-oriented Grid architectures need to support dynamic cooperation, negotiation, and adaptive interactions between Web services controlling Grid resources for efficient resource and task allocation and execution. On the other hand, the Grid can facilitate agent communication, life-cycle management, and access to resources for agents. Although the relevance of Grid for agent research and vice versa has been identified in several forums, actual collaborative applications are still in their infancy. In this article, we discuss our recent work on deploying multi-agent negotiation techniques to facilitate dynamic negotiation for Grid resources as a step closer to an adaptive and autonomous Grid. In particular, we describe a Web service development of the Contract Net Protocol for negotiation between insurance companies and repair companies. We evaluate our approach to show the added value of negotiable interactions between Web services as opposed to inflexible single-shot interactions that are currently the state of the art.