The evidence and the rationale for the use of honey as wound dressing

Although there are now several brands and types of honey wound-care products available as registered medical devices, there is little promotional advertising of honey products for wound care. The misconception that there is no evidence to support the use of honey, which seems to be quite common, may be due to this lack of advertising, and to the systematic reviews that have been published on honey concluding that the evidence is of low quality and/or there is a need for more evidence. However, the same lack of high-quality evidence exists with all the other options that clinicians have for dressing wounds. This places practitioners in a quandary. When clinical evidence of the highest level is not available, then decisions on modes of treatment need to be based on whatever evidence there is available. This review outlines the 16 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of honey in wound care published since Molan reviewed the previous 17 in 2006, which bring the total of participants in the trials up from 1,965 to 3,556 and broadens the range of types of wounds on which trials with honey have been conducted. Another important factor influencing the choice by clinicians of which product to use on a wound is scientific rationale. This review covers the evidence and explanation of mode of action for various bioactivities in honey which aid wound healing: a very broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity that is effective on antibiotic-resistant strains; activation of autolytic debridement; anti-inflammatory activity; antioxidant activity; stimulation of growth of cells for tissue repair; and an osmotic action. The need for standardisation of these bioactivities is discussed

AdSplit: Separating smartphone advertising from applications

A wide variety of smartphone applications today rely on third-party advertising services, which provide libraries that are linked into the hosting application. This situation is undesirable for both the application author and the advertiser. Advertising libraries require additional permissions, resulting in additional permission requests to users. Likewise, a malicious application could simulate the behavior of the advertising library, forging the user's interaction and effectively stealing money from the advertiser. This paper describes AdSplit, where we extended Android to allow an application and its advertising to run as separate processes, under separate user-ids, eliminating the need for applications to request permissions on behalf of their advertising libraries. We also leverage mechanisms from Quire to allow the remote server to validate the authenticity of client-side behavior. In this paper, we quantify the degree of permission bloat caused by advertising, with a study of thousands of downloaded apps. AdSplit automatically recompiles apps to extract their ad services, and we measure minimal runtime overhead. We also observe that most ad libraries just embed an HTML widget within and describe how AdSplit can be designed with this in mind to avoid any need for ads to have native code

An EEG study on emotional intelligence and advertising message effectiveness

Some electroencephalography (EEG) studies have investigated emotional intelligence (EI), but none have examined the relationships between EI and commercial advertising messages and related consumer behaviors. This study combines brain (EEG) techniques with an EI psychometric to explore the brain responses associated with a range of advertisements. A group of 45 participants (23females, 22males) had their EEG recorded while watching a series of advertisements selected from various marketing categories such as community interests, celebrities, food/drink, and social issues. Participants were also categorized as high or low in emotional intelligence (n = 34). The EEG data analysis was centered on rating decision-making in order to measure brain responses associated with advertising information processing for both groups. The findings suggest that participants with high and low emotional intelligence (EI) were attentive to different types of advertising messages. The two EI groups demonstrated preferences for “people” or “object,” related advertising information. This suggests that differences in consumer perception and emotions may suggest why certain advertising material or marketing strategies are effective or not

Online Casino Advertising: Testing the Limits of Commercial Speech

<span style="font-family: TimesNewRoman;"><font face="TimesNewRoman"><p align="left">The advent of the Internet has revolutionized the daily lives of everyone by giving increased access to information and consumer transactions, while also adding change and further complexity to the law. Gambling has adapted to the arrival of the Internet with online sports books</p></font></span><p align="left"><span style="font-family: TimesNewRoman; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: TimesNewRoman; font-size: xx-small;">2 </span></span><span style="font-family: TimesNewRoman;">and online casino gambling,</span><span style="font-family: TimesNewRoman; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: TimesNewRoman; font-size: xx-small;">3 </span></span><span style="font-family: TimesNewRoman;">both developing a presence on the Internet. These new online casinos have begun to advertise both on the Internet and through more traditional broadcasting, like radio and television.</span><span style="font-family: TimesNewRoman; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: TimesNewRoman; font-size: xx-small;">4 </span></span><span style="font-family: TimesNewRoman;">As a result, the Department of Justice has begun to crack down on online casino advertisers, primarily by threatening prosecution against advertisers through the Wire Act (18 U.S.C. &sect; 1084).</span></p

Campaigning and advertising: an evaluation of the components of constituency activism at recent British General Elections

It is becoming increasingly accepted among analysts of British voting behaviour that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, local campaigning matters. The widespread view, largely propagated by David Butler and his co-workers on the Nuffield election studies, has been that campaigning in the constituencies by party activists and their candidates has no influence on the outcome: the distribution of votes across the parties in each constituency is a function of the national campaign only. This view was initially challenged by studies of canvassing in the 1970s, and extended during the 1980s by studies of campaign spending in the constituencies; further support was provided by work in the late 1980s and early 1990s on party canvassing activity. This note takes the challenge forward with an analysis of the impact of different aspects of constituency campaigning

Advertising value equivalence – PR’s illegitimate offspring.

Public relations measurement and evaluation have long been major practice subjects. From the late 1970s onwards they have been identified as an important issue for research and practice implementation (McElreath, 1980, 1989; Synnott & McKie, 1997, Watson & Noble 2007; Watson 2008). The evolution of public relations measurement starts much earlier, with some suggesting that media monitoring practices can be identified from the late 18th century onwards (Lamme & Miller, 2010). Although the academic approach to measurement and evaluation has mostly favoured social science methodologies (Broom & Dozier 1990, Michaelson & Stacks 2011), there has been persistent and widespread practice use of Advertising Value Equivalence (AVE) to express the value of public relations activity for decades. Recent data (Daniels & Gaunt, 2009) found that AVE was used by 35% of a large international sample of practitioners. Early significant US practitioners, including Lee and Page, instituted media monitoring of programme outputs and AT&T developed sophisticated opinion researching to guide and monitor its communication activity (Cutlip 1994). Literature in the 1930s and 1940s indicate that these practices were extant, especially basic monitoring of media coverage (Batchelor, 1938). However, there are indications that AVE was in use from the 1940s onward. Plackard and Blackmon (1947) refer to it in the US and provide an example of its calculation. In the UK, the first warning against AVE came in a 1949 edition of the IPR Journal (J. L’Etang, personal communication, January 10, 2011). Both sources thus indicate it was an established practice by mid-century, although it did not surface in professional or quasi-academic literature till the late 1960s. AVE was further operationalized by the emergence of computer based analysis, such as offered by PR Data, in the mid-1960s (Tirone, 1977). From that decade onwards, its use became widespread, as indicated by industry coverage of awards and case studies and by award case studies. Latterly, AVE has been directly challenged by the Barcelona Declaration’s Principle 5 which stated that “AVEs are Not the Value of Public Relations” (AMEC, 2010). It added that AVEs “do not measure the value of public relations and do not inform future activity; they measure the cost of media space and are rejected as a concept to value public relations.” Time will tell whether AVE is replaced by other, valid metrics. This paper investigates the evolution of AVE, which has long been damned as illegitimate, and postulates whether it arose from clippings agencies, advertising planning practices or from other influences on public relations

Influence of Media on Overweight and Obesity Among Latino Youth

Outlines findings about how media marketing affects the health-related behaviors of Latino youth, including trends in television viewing, fast-food advertisement in low-income Latino communities, and snacking and caloric intake. Lists policy implications

"Lose 30lbs in 30 days" : assigning responsibility for deceptive advertising of weight-loss products

Purpose &ndash; The aim of this paper is to outline key social marketing issues apparent in deceptive weight-loss advertising, from the perspective of government policy-makers, manufacturers, the media, and consumers. The purpose is to examine the complexity of one aspect of the obesity battle and provide a framework for coordinated and integrated social marketing initiatives from a multiple stakeholder perspective.Design/methodology/approach &ndash; The results of deceptive weight-loss advertising are framed using the harm chain model, and the paper offers recommended solutions based on a framework of marketing, education and policy changes across the network of stakeholders.Findings &ndash; This paper concludes that a resolution to the harm created by deceptive weight-loss advertising can be achieved by the creation of a more holistic, system-wide solution to this important health and policy issue. This networked approach must involve all aspects of harm in a multi-stakeholder solution, including both upstream and downstream integration. Specific recommendations are made for policy-makers, manufacturers, the media, and consumers to achieve this goal.Social implications &ndash; From a marketing perspective, analyzing the issue of deceptive weight-loss advertising using the harm chain allows for the creation of a more holistic, system-wide solution involving stakeholders in all aspects of harm for this important health and policy issue.Originality/value &ndash; This research examines the problem of obesity and weight-loss advertising from the unique perspective of the harm chain framework. The authors make unified recommendations for various stakeholders including industry, media, government and consumers, in order to direct integrated social marketing and consumer-oriented strategies within this industry.<br /

Understanding the Detection of View Fraud in Video Content Portals

While substantial effort has been devoted to understand fraudulent activity in traditional online advertising (search and banner), more recent forms such as video ads have received little attention. The understanding and identification of fraudulent activity (i.e., fake views) in video ads for advertisers, is complicated as they rely exclusively on the detection mechanisms deployed by video hosting portals. In this context, the development of independent tools able to monitor and audit the fidelity of these systems are missing today and needed by both industry and regulators. In this paper we present a first set of tools to serve this purpose. Using our tools, we evaluate the performance of the audit systems of five major online video portals. Our results reveal that YouTube's detection system significantly outperforms all the others. Despite this, a systematic evaluation indicates that it may still be susceptible to simple attacks. Furthermore, we find that YouTube penalizes its videos' public and monetized view counters differently, the former being more aggressive. This means that views identified as fake and discounted from the public view counter are still monetized. We speculate that even though YouTube's policy puts in lots of effort to compensate users after an attack is discovered, this practice places the burden of the risk on the advertisers, who pay to get their ads displayed.Comment: To appear in WWW 2016, Montr\'eal, Qu\'ebec, Canada. Please cite the conference version of this pape

A systematic review and economic evaluation of exercise referral schemes in primary care: a short report

Background - It is estimated that only 39% of men and 29% of women in England achieve the levels of physical activity that are recommended to protect health and prevent disease. One approach to addressing this problem has been the development of exercise referral schemes (ERSs), in which health professionals refer patients to external exercise providers. These schemes have been widely rolled out across the UK despite concerns that they may not produce sustained changes in levels of physical activity and, therefore, may not be cost-effective interventions. The evidence to determine clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness was evaluated in 2009. This review seeks to update this earlier work by incorporating new evidence and re-examining the cost-effectiveness. Objectives- To assess the clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of ERSs compared with usual care. Design- Exhaustive searches of relevant electronic databases and journals were undertaken to identify new studies evaluating ERSs using a randomised controlled trial (RCT) design. RCTs that incorporated a qualitative evaluation of the intervention were identified in order to explore the barriers and facilitators to the uptake of and adherence to ERSs. Data were extracted using a previously designed tool and study quality assessed for potential bias. Where data could be pooled, meta-analyses were carried out. Qualitative analysis was also undertaken using a thematic approach. The cost-effectiveness was evaluated using a Markov structure which estimated the likelihood of becoming physically active and the subsequent risk reduction on coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke and type 2 diabetes mellitus. The model adopts a lifetime horizon, and a NHS and Personal Social Services perspective was taken with discounting at 1.5% for both costs and benefits. Results - The search identified one new RCT and one new qualitative study. The new data were pooled with existing data from the 2011 review by Pavey et al. [Pavey TG, Anokye N, Taylor AH, Trueman P, Moxham T, Fox KR, et al. The clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of exercise referral schemes: a systematic review and economic evaluation. Health Technol Assess 2011;15(44)] to give a total of eight studies with 5190 participants. The proportion of individuals achieving 90–150 minutes of at least moderate-intensity activity per week at 6–12 months’ follow-up was greater for ERSs than usual care (relative risk 1.12; 95% confidence interval 1.04 to 1.20). Older patients and those referred for CHD risk factors appeared to be more likely than others to increase their levels of physical activity. Qualitative evidence suggests that interventions enabling the development of social support networks are beneficial in promoting uptake and adherence. Exercise referral gained 0.003 quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) at an additional cost of £225 per person. The estimated mean incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) in the probabilistic sensitivity analysis was £76,276. In the univariate sensitivity analysis the results were very sensitive (ICERs ranged from  £100,000) to changes in the effect of ERSs on physical activity uptake and the duration of the protective effects and the direct health-related quality-of-life gains attributable to physical activity. Conclusions - Exercise referral schemes result in a small improvement in the number of people who increase their levels of physical activity. The cost-effectiveness analysis indicates that the ICER for ERSs compared with usual care is around £76,000 per QALY, although the cost-effectiveness of ERSs is subject to considerable uncertainty.National Institute for Health Research Health Technology Assessment programme