56,328 research outputs found
Effect of exercise referral schemes in primary care on physical activity and improving health outcomes: Systematic review and meta-analysis
This is an open access article - Copyright @ 2011 BMJObjective: To assess the impact of exercise referral schemes on physical activity and health outcomes.
Design: Systematic review and meta-analysis.
Data sources Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, Cochrane Library, ISI Web of Science, SPORTDiscus, and ongoing trial registries up to October 2009. We also checked study references.
Study selection Design: randomised controlled trials or non-randomised
controlled (cluster or individual) studies published in peer review journals.
Population: sedentary individuals with or without medical diagnosis.
Exercise referral schemes defined as: clear referrals by primary care professionals to third party service providers to increase physical activity or exercise, physical activity or exercise programmes tailored to
individuals, and initial assessment and monitoring throughout programmes. Comparators: usual care, no intervention, or alternative exercise referral schemes.
Results Eight randomised controlled trials met the inclusion criteria, comparing exercise referral schemes with usual care (six trials), alternative physical activity intervention (two), and an exercise referral
scheme plus a self determination theory intervention (one). Compared with usual care, follow-up data for exercise referral schemes showed an increased number of participants who achieved 90-150 minutes of
physical activity of at least moderate intensity per week (pooled relative risk 1.16, 95% confidence intervals 1.03 to 1.30) and a reduced level of depression (pooled standardised mean difference −0.82, −1.28 to −0.35). Evidence of a between group difference in physical activity of moderate
or vigorous intensity or in other health outcomes was inconsistent at follow-up. We did not find any difference in outcomes between exercise referral schemes and the other two comparator groups. None of the
included trials separately reported outcomes in individuals with specific medical diagnoses. Substantial heterogeneity in the quality and nature of the exercise referral schemes across studies might have contributed
to the inconsistency in outcome findings.
Conclusions Considerable uncertainty remains as to the effectiveness of exercise referral schemes for increasing physical activity, fitness, or health indicators, or whether they are an efficient use of resources for
sedentary people with or without a medical diagnosis.This project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research Health Technology Assessment (NIHR HTA) programme
(project number 08/72/01) (www.hta.ac.uk/)
Regulatory Threat in Vertically Related Markets; The Case of German Electricity
Regulatory Threat in Vertically Related Markets; The Case of German Electricit
Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR
There has been much discussion of the right to explanation in the EU General
Data Protection Regulation, and its existence, merits, and disadvantages.
Implementing a right to explanation that opens the black box of algorithmic
decision-making faces major legal and technical barriers. Explaining the
functionality of complex algorithmic decision-making systems and their
rationale in specific cases is a technically challenging problem. Some
explanations may offer little meaningful information to data subjects, raising
questions around their value. Explanations of automated decisions need not
hinge on the general public understanding how algorithmic systems function.
Even though such interpretability is of great importance and should be pursued,
explanations can, in principle, be offered without opening the black box.
Looking at explanations as a means to help a data subject act rather than
merely understand, one could gauge the scope and content of explanations
according to the specific goal or action they are intended to support. From the
perspective of individuals affected by automated decision-making, we propose
three aims for explanations: (1) to inform and help the individual understand
why a particular decision was reached, (2) to provide grounds to contest the
decision if the outcome is undesired, and (3) to understand what would need to
change in order to receive a desired result in the future, based on the current
decision-making model. We assess how each of these goals finds support in the
GDPR. We suggest data controllers should offer a particular type of
explanation, unconditional counterfactual explanations, to support these three
aims. These counterfactual explanations describe the smallest change to the
world that can be made to obtain a desirable outcome, or to arrive at the
closest possible world, without needing to explain the internal logic of the
system
Socio-economic status and physical health outcomes : the need for change in theoretical formulations : thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University
The Black Report (Department of Health and Social Security, 1980) , which was a seminal publication in the field of health inequality, proposed several possible theoretical explanations for the phenomenon of socio-economic health inequality. To date the models proposed in the Black Report have yet to be improved on, or developed greatly. While research in the field of socio-economic health inequality has been substantial, the state of theoretical formulation which attempts to explain such inequality has remained static. The phenomenon of socio- economic health inequality will be established by producing evidence for how socio-economic status impacts on health from many countries, but especially from the United Kingdom, North America, Australasia, and Europe. Potential pathways for socio-economic status to impact on health outcomes will be assessed, and an illustration of potential pathways will be provided with an application. The theoretical approaches of the Black Report, along with a more recent conceptualisation, will be discussed. The potential contribution of psychological factors to socio-economic health inequality will be considered following the establishment of the relationship, proposal of potential pathways, and theoretical formulation discussions to demonstrate how such factors are involved in socio-economic health inequality. From these first four sections it can be deduced that current theoretical formulations to explain socio-economic health inequality are deficient. To contend with this deficiency it is proposed that a more holistic approach, which includes psychological factors, is necessary. Future research should seek to empirically validate links within the confines of a more holistic framework if our understanding of the relation between socio-economic status and physical health outcomes is to improve
Km4City Ontology Building vs Data Harvesting and Cleaning for Smart-city Services
Presently, a very large number of public and private data sets are available
from local governments. In most cases, they are not semantically interoperable
and a huge human effort would be needed to create integrated ontologies and
knowledge base for smart city. Smart City ontology is not yet standardized, and
a lot of research work is needed to identify models that can easily support the
data reconciliation, the management of the complexity, to allow the data
reasoning. In this paper, a system for data ingestion and reconciliation of
smart cities related aspects as road graph, services available on the roads,
traffic sensors etc., is proposed. The system allows managing a big data volume
of data coming from a variety of sources considering both static and dynamic
data. These data are mapped to a smart-city ontology, called KM4City (Knowledge
Model for City), and stored into an RDF-Store where they are available for
applications via SPARQL queries to provide new services to the users via
specific applications of public administration and enterprises. The paper
presents the process adopted to produce the ontology and the big data
architecture for the knowledge base feeding on the basis of open and private
data, and the mechanisms adopted for the data verification, reconciliation and
validation. Some examples about the possible usage of the coherent big data
knowledge base produced are also offered and are accessible from the RDF-Store
and related services. The article also presented the work performed about
reconciliation algorithms and their comparative assessment and selection
Estimating Position Bias without Intrusive Interventions
Presentation bias is one of the key challenges when learning from implicit
feedback in search engines, as it confounds the relevance signal. While it was
recently shown how counterfactual learning-to-rank (LTR) approaches
\cite{Joachims/etal/17a} can provably overcome presentation bias when
observation propensities are known, it remains to show how to effectively
estimate these propensities. In this paper, we propose the first method for
producing consistent propensity estimates without manual relevance judgments,
disruptive interventions, or restrictive relevance modeling assumptions. First,
we show how to harvest a specific type of intervention data from historic
feedback logs of multiple different ranking functions, and show that this data
is sufficient for consistent propensity estimation in the position-based model.
Second, we propose a new extremum estimator that makes effective use of this
data. In an empirical evaluation, we find that the new estimator provides
superior propensity estimates in two real-world systems -- Arxiv Full-text
Search and Google Drive Search. Beyond these two points, we find that the
method is robust to a wide range of settings in simulation studies
Regulatory Threat in Vertically Related Markets; The Case of German Electricity
This paper applies the concept of regulatory threat to analyse the electricity supply industry in Germany, where in contrast to other European member states, there is no ex-ante regulation of network access charges. Instead, network access relies on industrial self-regulation and ex-post control by the Cartel Office. The paper modifies the concept of regulatory threat to vertically related markets, stressing the balance between the level of the network access charges and (non-price) discrimination against their parties. The conceptual framework appears to explain developments in the German electricity sector accurately and thus provides a useful tool for policy analysis.regulation, discrimination, network industries, electricity
Policing in nonhuman primates: partial interventions serve a prosocial conflict management function in rhesus macaques.
Studies of prosocial policing in nonhuman societies traditionally focus on impartial interventions because of an underlying assumption that partial support implies a direct benefit to the intervener, thereby negating the potential for being prosocial in maintaining social stability for the benefit of the group. However, certain types of partial interventions have significant potential to be prosocial in controlling conflict, e.g. support of non-kin subordinates. Here, we propose a policing support hypothesis that some types of agonistic support serve a prosocial policing function that maintains group stability. Using seven large captive groups of rhesus macaques, we investigated the relationship between intervention type and group-level costs and benefits (rates of trauma, severe aggression, social relocation) and individual level costs and benefits (preferential sex-dyad targeting, dominance ambiguity reduction, access to mates, and return aggression). Our results show that impartial interventions and support of subordinate non-kin represent prosocial policing as both (1) were negatively associated with group-level rates of trauma and severe aggression, respectively, (2) showed no potential to confer individual dominance benefits, (3) when performed outside the mating season, they did not increase chances of mating with the beneficiary, and (4) were low-cost for the highest-ranking interveners. We recommend expanding the definition of 'policing' in nonhumans to include these 'policing support interventions'
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