Prevalence, determinants and impact of unawareness about the health consequences of tobacco use among 17,929 school personnel in 29 African countries.

Objectives: To assess prevalence, determinants and impact of unawareness about the health consequences of tobacco use among school personnel in Africa. Design: Cross-sectional surveys. Setting: Twenty-nine African countries. Participants: Representative samples of school personnel from 29 African countries (n=17 929), using data from the 2006-2011 Global School Personnel Surveys. Outcome: We assessed if school personnel were aware of the following five facts about tobacco use: (1) tobacco use is addictive; (2) secondhand smoke exposure is harmful; (3) smoking causes lung cancer; (4) smoking causes heart disease and (5) smoking does not cause malaria. Using multivariate logistic regression, we measured the impact of unawareness of the health consequences of tobacco use on behaviour and attitudes towards tobacco control. Results: A median of 62.6% of school personnel were unaware of at least one health consequence of tobacco use. School personnel in countries with mandatory cigarette health warning labels had lower odds of being unaware of any health consequence of tobacco use than countries where health warning labels were not mandatory (adjusted OR [aOR]=0.51; 95% CI 0.37 to 0.71). A significant dose-response relationship was seen between being ignorant of 1; 2; or ≥3 tobacco use health consequences respectively (compared with not being ignorant of any), and the odds of the following outcomes: non-support of bans on tobacco industry sponsorship of school or extracurricular activities (aOR=1.47; 1.91; and 2.98); non-support of bans on all tobacco advertisements (aOR=1.24; 1.78; and 2.68) and non-support of policies prohibiting tobacco use by school personnel on campus (aOR=1.79; 4.45; and 4.56). Conclusions: Unawareness of the health consequences of tobacco use was associated with poor support for tobacco control policies. Intensified efforts are needed in African countries to warn about the dangers of tobacco use

Cook it, Eat it, Love it

My name is Marta, the voice behind the Cook it! Eat it! Love it! cooking blog from Dublin. I am a full time digital marketer who loves to cook, create and feed my husband Jakub & friends. My intention is to make food taste good through using natural ingredients. The purpose of this blog is to share my creations and passion for food with you! Nothing makes me happier than to hear that a recipe of mine has made it’s way into your home

Electrical conductivity of polycrystalline uranium dioxide

The electrical impedance of a disc-shaped sample of polycrystalline UO2 has been measured over a frequency range of 10 Hz to 10 MHz at temperatures between 108 and 380 K. Three distinct regions in the impedance profiles were observed; these have been associated with the region near the metallic electrodes, with the bulk material and with the grain boundaries. Activation energies for conduction have been determined in each of the three regions [0.17, 0.13 and 0.29 eV for the electrode, bulk and grain boundary contributions, respectively]. The impedance response has been modelled using a two-phase microstructure and an effective medium treatment. At low temperatures the boundary region is less conducting than the grain interior. However, at ambient temperatures and above, the boundary region dominates and electrical conduction takes place primarily through the boundaries

A methodology for full-system power modeling in heterogeneous data centers

The need for energy-awareness in current data centers has encouraged the use of power modeling to estimate their power consumption. However, existing models present noticeable limitations, which make them application-dependent, platform-dependent, inaccurate, or computationally complex. In this paper, we propose a platform-and application-agnostic methodology for full-system power modeling in heterogeneous data centers that overcomes those limitations. It derives a single model per platform, which works with high accuracy for heterogeneous applications with different patterns of resource usage and energy consumption, by systematically selecting a minimum set of resource usage indicators and extracting complex relations among them that capture the impact on energy consumption of all the resources in the system. We demonstrate our methodology by generating power models for heterogeneous platforms with very different power consumption profiles. Our validation experiments with real Cloud applications show that such models provide high accuracy (around 5% of average estimation error).This work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under contract TIN2015-65316-P, by the Gener- alitat de Catalunya under contract 2014-SGR-1051, and by the European Commission under FP7-SMARTCITIES-2013 contract 608679 (RenewIT) and FP7-ICT-2013-10 contracts 610874 (AS- CETiC) and 610456 (EuroServer).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

It Ain't Social, It Ain't Capital and It Ain't Africa

Two concepts have dominated the social sciences over the past decade. In the lead is globalisation. Not far behind is social capital. One attempts to deal with contemporary realities at the international level; the other at national or lower levels. The two rarely meet. For, as has been frequently observed, in raising the virtues of civil society to pedestal status, social capital has studiously ignored questions of power, conflict, the ruling elite and the systemic imperatives of (contemporary) capitalism. Though fundamentally flawed as a concept and equally flexible as the global financial system that it takes as its metaphor, globalisation cannot be so indicted. 1 For globalisation seeks to address the nature of the world at the turn of the millennium, by grounding concepts in prevailing empirical realities, and unavoidably confronts issues of control and dissent. By contrast, social capital purports to reign over a domain that ranges, even for a single author and leading promoter of social capital, Robert Putnam (1993 and 2000), from twelfth century Italy to twentieth century United States. Concepts with such scope of ambition should be treated with caution if not contempt. At a more polemical level, in drawing comparison wit

Lightweight Platforms for Managing Process Complexity

Managing engineering projects is becoming more complex especially when projects include networks of organizations. The complexity arises both from the growing number of relationships within a project as well as continual changes in project goals. The complexity impacts on process management as new ways are needed to manage the complex relationships and their continuing change. This paper proposes a systematic way to manage process complexity by developing the semantics to communicate within complex processes in meaningful ways. It then defines ways to implement these semantics in ways that allow users to create and change processes in terms natural to them. The paper considers the limitations of current collaborative technologies in supporting dynamic processes. The paper then describes the implementation on lightweight platforms and shows the application to supply chains, which many of which now require greater flexibility and collaboration

A comparison of Australian and Chinese teachers' attributions for student problem behaviors

The present study compared Australian and Chinese teachers' causal attributions for student behavior. A total of 204 Australian teachers and 269 Chinese teachers rated the importance of four causes (ability, effort, family, teacher) of six student problem behaviors. Results showed that both groups of teachers attributed misbehaviors most to student effort and least to teacher factors. Chinese teachers emphasized family factors more while Australian teachers placed greater importance on ability. There was significant variation in attribution patterns for different types of problems, with effort attribution being equally and strongly emphasized across cultural contexts and behavior types. The results are interpreted in the light of how individualistic and collectivistic values influence teacher thinking, and implications for school-based interventions for behavior problems are discussed.published_or_final_versio

Open modeling for designing community ecosystems

The paper proposes an open approach to modeling to cater for the emerging trend to complex adaptive systems. Such systems are seen as collections of people, programs, computers and other physical objects that must coexist and work towards a vision in a continually changing environment. The information system here is perceived as a network of physical, knowledge and other kinds of entities connected into a network that emerges as the environment evolves. The paper describes a community oriented approach to model such systems where each community is seen as a collection of such entities. The communities themselves are connected to create a system of systems or a community ecosystem where the communities collaborate to realize a continually emerging vision. The paper describes an open modeling approach for such ecosystems to provide designers a systematic way to design community coordination. It first uses living systems and complexity as metaphors to design community structures that ensure collaboration persists over a long time. The modeling methods provide a flexible approach to show networks of community collaborating within their context. An open approach is to provide users with a flexible method to create community networks using semantics natural to the user and emphasizing perspectives to visualize the complex relationships within such systems