Evaluation plan and recommendations - ‘Can’t Wait to be Healthy’: A briefing paper on evaluation for Leeds Childhood Obesity Prevention and Weight Management Strategy.

The rise in childhood obesity is a major public health challenge and a national priority for health action. Obesity is associated with many illnesses and is directly related to increased mortality and lower life expectancy. The Children’s Plan recognises child obesity as one of the most serious challenges for children and links it to a number of poor outcomes, physical, social and psychological (Department for Children, Schools and Families 2007). ‘Can’t wait to be healthy’- Leeds Childhood Obesity Prevention and Weight Management Strategy 2006-2016 is a comprehensive, city-wide strategy setting out actions to tackle the problem of childhood obesity for all children and young people 0-19 years. The strategy reviews the evidence around prevalence, causal factors and effective interventions. There is recognition of the complexity of the issue and the need for action on multiple levels and in different sectors, including health, education, environment and leisure services. The guiding principles are based on partnership working and local leadership, the active participation of parents, carers, children and young people, and the prioritisation of prevention and early intervention. ‘Can’t wait to be healthy’ was initiated by Leeds Primary Care Trust (PCT) and Children Leeds and its implementation is being overseen by a multi agency partnership. An initial action plan was agreed that gives an outline of proposed actions (2007-2010) grouped around strands of work. There are seven core objectives that are summarised in Box 1. A robust evaluation plan and reporting framework to measure progress and outcomes resulting from the strategy is required. This is supported by recent guidance for local areas indicating the importance of local evaluation and monitoring in tracking progress and informing commissioning (Cross Government Obesity Unit 2008a).The Centre for Health Promotion Research, Leeds Metropolitan University, was commissioned to work in collaboration with the Leeds Childhood Obesity Partnership to develop a strategic approach to evaluation. A series of workshops were held in Spring 2008 to enable stakeholders to engage with the planning process and to consider how evidence would be generated. The workshops used a ‘Theory of Change’ approach to develop understanding about how and why specific activities or combinations of activities work (Connell and Kubisch 1988). This resulted in a draft evaluation plan and recommendations for ongoing evaluation which are presented here. This briefing paper includes: • Summary of national guidance on indicators for childhood obesity • Evaluation planning process and approach • Theories of change and evaluation plans for each objective and for the overall strategy • Recommendations for evaluation of ‘Can’t wait to be healthy’ and priorities for data collectio

Assessing load-sharing within optimistic simulation platforms

The advent of multi-core machines has lead to the need for revising the architecture of modern simulation platforms. One recent proposal we made attempted to explore the viability of load-sharing for optimistic simulators run on top of these types of machines. In this article, we provide an extensive experimental study for an assessment of the effects on run-time dynamics by a load-sharing architecture that has been implemented within the ROOT-Sim package, namely an open source simulation platform adhering to the optimistic synchronization paradigm. This experimental study is essentially aimed at evaluating possible sources of overheads when supporting load-sharing. It has been based on differentiated workloads allowing us to generate different execution profiles in terms of, e.g., granularity/locality of the simulation events. © 2012 IEEE

Evaluation of the Choose Life North Lanarkshire Awareness Programme: Final Report

The Centre for Men’s Health at Leeds Metropolitan University, with consultants from MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, Glasgow, and Men’s Health Forum, Scotland (MHFS), were appointed to conduct the Choose Life (North Lanarkshire) evaluation, beginning in March 2011. The key evaluation questions are: 1. How has the social marketing approach to increase awareness of crisis service numbers and de-stigmatise understandings and attitudes about suicide worked? 2. Has the programme as implemented been effective? Which aspects of the programme have been particularly effective? 3. Has this programme been of benefit to the community, in particular young men aged 16-35? 4. What contribution has the community made to the effectiveness of the programme

The HPCG benchmark: analysis, shared memory preliminary improvements and evaluation on an Arm-based platform

The High-Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG) benchmark complements the LINPACK benchmark in the performance evaluation coverage of large High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems. Due to its lower arithmetic intensity and higher memory pressure, HPCG is recognized as a more representative benchmark for data-center and irregular memory access pattern workloads, therefore its popularity and acceptance is raising within the HPC community. As only a small fraction of the reference version of the HPCG benchmark is parallelized with shared memory techniques (OpenMP), we introduce in this report two OpenMP parallelization methods. Due to the increasing importance of Arm architecture in the HPC scenario, we evaluate our HPCG code at scale on a state-of-the-art HPC system based on Cavium ThunderX2 SoC. We consider our work as a contribution to the Arm ecosystem: along with this technical report, we plan in fact to release our code for boosting the tuning of the HPCG benchmark within the Arm community.Postprint (author's final draft

DKVF: A Framework for Rapid Prototyping and Evaluating Distributed Key-value Stores

We present our framework DKVF that enables one to quickly prototype and evaluate new protocols for key-value stores and compare them with existing protocols based on selected benchmarks. Due to limitations of CAP theorem, new protocols must be developed that achieve the desired trade-off between consistency and availability for the given application at hand. Hence, both academic and industrial communities focus on developing new protocols that identify a different (and hopefully better in one or more aspect) point on this trade-off curve. While these protocols are often based on a simple intuition, evaluating them to ensure that they indeed provide increased availability, consistency, or performance is a tedious task. Our framework, DKVF, enables one to quickly prototype a new protocol as well as identify how it performs compared to existing protocols for pre-specified benchmarks. Our framework relies on YCSB (Yahoo! Cloud Servicing Benchmark) for benchmarking. We demonstrate DKVF by implementing four existing protocols --eventual consistency, COPS, GentleRain and CausalSpartan-- with it. We compare the performance of these protocols against different loading conditions. We find that the performance is similar to our implementation of these protocols from scratch. And, the comparison of these protocols is consistent with what has been reported in the literature. Moreover, implementation of these protocols was much more natural as we only needed to translate the pseudocode into Java (and add the necessary error handling). Hence, it was possible to achieve this in just 1-2 days per protocol. Finally, our framework is extensible. It is possible to replace individual components in the framework (e.g., the storage component)