Understanding walking and cycling using a life course perspective

Understanding of how walking and cycling change over time has been restricted to looking at time series data that reveals aggregate change, and time-limited longitudinal studies of individual behaviour. This thesis presents a study of the change and continuity in individual behaviour over the life course as well as inter-generational influence of, and inter-cohort similarities and differences in behavioural pathways. The behavioural trajectories of adults from two historically-separated birth cohorts, and parent-child dyads, were studied using biographical approach. Interpretive, visual biographies were produced that illustrated behavioural development through life events and transitions. Typologies were constructed to resolve common and distinct pathways in behavioural development.Behaviour change often accompanied changes in residence, employment, family structure and mobility resources. Some distinctions in trajectories were apparent along the dimensions of gender and cohort. The life-long potential for behaviour change was demonstrated by some adaptive, restorative and negative changes that occurred in later life. There was empirical suggestion that earlier cycling experiences were generative of, and influential on, later outcomes, and that some aspects of macro-level social and structural change had brought about cohort distinctions in the opportunity structure for walking and cycling over the life course.Findings were consolidated in a conceptual life course framework that proposed micro and macro-contextual influences of behaviour and addressed the temporal, gendered and inter-generational aspects of trajectory development. Emerging adulthood and, more tentatively, the work-retirement transition were periods of higher propensity for change that preceded periods of relative stability in the life course and behaviour. The findings have applications in the pursuit of measures to support life-long walking and cycling. Some recommendations for policy are made in light of indications that life course experience had distinguished some gender and cohort groups in their ability and readiness to make restorative change in behaviour

Integration: A new design model for apparel and retail environments

As founder of Brinkworth, a London-based design consultancy, I am writing this thesis from a creative practitioner’s perspective. The main research question is: How has the role and the activity of an interior designer for apparel retail environments evolved since the intervention of digital platforms, including social media and online shopping? Pertaining to this lead research question are the following two questions: How have customer behaviour patterns changed due to the intervention of digital and social media platforms? And how has brand engagement and communication with their customer community evolved with respect to the development of digital technologies? The title of this PhD by public works, Integration, describes the key approach to my new model, which delivers appropriate physical retail spaces through a four-way system of integration: brand, space, location and community. A donor building is designed so as to successfully host the brand and facilitate the fusing of its customer community within the building’s own local culture. It theorises that the physical branded retail space is at the heart of a brand’s external facing retail activity. It is primarily the place that gives an invaluable opportunity for the development of a personal relationship between the customer community and the brand. This space is also the nucleus in which platforms of digital immersion, product fusion and narrative are integrated within a central, physical hub. This concept of integration seeks to replace the convention of outmoded, repetitive, traditional retail rollout methods. This thesis of public works outlines new models of thinking taken from Brinkworth’s portfolio. Utilising the research methodology of reflexivity, it contributes new knowledge to the field of professional practice and academic research in apparel retail design, both in terms of the design work carried out and the reflection on that work. The thesis starts by examining the academic context through an analysis of the limited published practitioners’ literature that it seeks to succeed. The research extends into broader and relevant academic areas of study. The specifics of apparel retail design will then be discussed, providing a blueprint by which Brinkworth implements its strategies and demonstrating why the process is significant. An assessment of how to structure and approach interior design for retail, as well as evidence and project planning information will be included within the thesis, something that has not been previously documented in this field of study. A recently formulated Model of Integration is theorised, demonstrated and disseminated through the case studies selected in order to exemplify each retail environment typology. This dynamic Model of Integration, driven by the evolving relationship between the brand and its customer community, is reflected in the communicative relationship between online and physical retail environments. This, in turn, drives the creation of a new type of outcome. In support of this, the resulting physical retail spaces produced are named Activation Retail Environments. These multipurpose retail environments host activities broader than retail, and include hospitality, brand/product education and events, where the customer is an active participant in a spatial and personal relationship with the brand. Following the Academic Context, a chapter entitled Typologies and Strategies seeks to identify the key individual types of physical retail stores. It also demonstrates the optimum approach to tackling each category of store. My Model of Integration is illustrated through examples from Brinkworth’s portfolio in the following chapter, and the thesis evidences the discussed retail typologies through a broad selection of completed projects

A Humean account of laws and causation

The thesis proposes a new account of laws of nature and token causation within the Humean tradition. After a brief introduction in §1, I specify and defend in §2 a Humean approach to the question of laws and causation. In §3 I defend the view that laws are conditional generalisations which concern 'systems' and detail further issues concerning the scope, content and universality of laws. On the basis of the discussion concerning laws' logical form, I argue in §4 against a view of laws as mirroring the structure of causal relations. Moreover, I show how this conception is implicit in the best system account of laws, thereby giving us reason to reject that account too. §5 presents an alternative `causal-junctions conception' of laws in terms of four causal features often associated with laws: component-level and law-level dispositionality, and variable-level and law-level causal asymmetry. These causal features combine to demarcate a central class of laws called `robust causal junction laws' from which other laws can be accounted for. §6 provides a Humean analysis of the causal features used to characterise robust causal junction laws. This is done first by providing an analysis of dispositions in terms of systems and laws, and second, by providing an analysis of causal asymmetry in terms of relations of probabilistic independence. In §7, I then provide a nomological analysis of token causation by showing how the causal junctions described by robust causal junction laws can be chained together in a particular context

Project Retrosight. Understanding the returns from cardiovascular and stroke research: Case Studies

Copyright @ 2011 RAND Europe. All rights reserved. The full text article is available via the link below.This project explores the impacts arising from cardiovascular and stroke research funded 15-20 years ago and attempts to draw out aspects of the research, researcher or environment that are associated with high or low impact. The project is a case study-based review of 29 cardiovascular and stroke research grants, funded in Australia, Canada and UK between 1989 and 1993. The case studies focused on the individual grants but considered the development of the investigators and ideas involved in the research projects from initiation to the present day. Grants were selected through a stratified random selection approach that aimed to include both high- and low-impact grants. The key messages are as follows: 1) The cases reveal that a large and diverse range of impacts arose from the 29 grants studied. 2) There are variations between the impacts derived from basic biomedical and clinical research. 3) There is no correlation between knowledge production and wider impacts 4) The majority of economic impacts identified come from a minority of projects. 5) We identified factors that appear to be associated with high and low impact. This report presents the key observations of the study and an overview of the methods involved. It has been written for funders of biomedical and health research and health services, health researchers, and policy makers in those fields. It will also be of interest to those involved in research and impact evaluation.This study was initiated with internal funding from RAND Europe and HERG, with continuing funding from the UK National Institute for Health Research, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada and the National Heart Foundation of Australia. The UK Stroke Association and the British Heart Foundation provided support in kind through access to their archives

Components as coalgebras

In the tradition of mathematical modelling in physics and chemistry, constructive formal specification methods are based on the notion of a software model, understood as a state-based abstract machine which persists and evolves in time, according to a behavioural model capturing, for example, partiality or (different degrees of) nondeterminism. This can be identified with the more prosaic notion of a software component advocated by the software industry as ‘building block’ of large, often distributed, systems. Such a component typically encapsulates a number of services through a public interface which provides a limited access to a private state space, paying tribute to the nowadays widespread object-oriented programming principles. The tradition of communicating systems formal design, by contrast, has developed the notion of a process as an abstraction of the behavioural patterns of a computing system, deliberately ignoring the data and state aspects of software systems. Both processes and components are among the broad group of computing phenomena which are hardly definable (or simply not definable) algebraically, i.e., in terms of a complete set of constructors. Their semantics is essentially observational, in the sense that all that can be traced of their evolution is their interaction with the environment. Therefore, coalgebras, whose theory has recently witnessed remarkable developments, appear as a suitable modelling tool. The basic observation of category theory that universal constructions always come in pairs, has motivated research on the duality between algebras and coalgebras, which provides a bridge between models of static (constructive, data-oriented) and dynamical (observational, behaviour-oriented) systems. At the programming level, the intuitive symmetry between data and behaviour provides evidence of such a duality, in its canonical initial-final specialisation. This line of thought entails both definitional and proof principles, i.e., a basis for the development of program calculi directly based on (actually driven by) type specifications. Moreover, such properties can be expressed in terms of generic programming combinators which are used, not only to calculate programs, but also to program with. Framed in this context, this thesis addresses the following main themes: The investigation of a semantic model for (state-based) software components. These are regarded as concrete coalgebras for some Set endofunctors, with specified initial conditions, and organise themselves in a bicategorical setting. The model is able to capture both behavioural issues, which are usually left implicit in state-based specification methods, and interaction through structured data, which is usually a minor concern on process calculi. Two basic cases are considered entailing, respectively, a ‘functional’ and an ‘object-oriented’ shape for components. Both cases are parametrized by a model of behaviour, introduced as a strong (usually commutative) monad. The development of corresponding component calculi, also parametric on the behaviour model, which adds to the genericity of the approach. The study of processes and the ‘reconstruction’ of classical (CCS-like) process calculi on top of their representation as inhabitants of (the carriers of) final coalgebras, in an essentially pointfree, calculational style. An overall concern for genericity, in the sense that models and calculi for both components and processes are parametric on the behaviour model and the interaction discipline, respectively. The animation of both processes and components in CHARITY, a functional programming language entirely based on inductive and coinductive categorical data types. In particular this leads to the development of a process calculi interpreter parametric on the interaction discipline.PRAXIS XXI - Projecto LOGCAMP; POO11/IC-PME/II/S -Projecto KARMA; Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia; ALGORITMI Research Center

Self-Evaluation Applied Mathematics 2003-2008 University of Twente

This report contains the self-study for the research assessment of the Department of Applied Mathematics (AM) of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) at the University of Twente (UT). The report provides the information for the Research Assessment Committee for Applied Mathematics, dealing with mathematical sciences at the three universities of technology in the Netherlands. It describes the state of affairs pertaining to the period 1 January 2003 to 31 December 2008