Is brief advice in primary care a cost-effective way to promote physical activity?

This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 3.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial.Aim: This study models the cost-effectiveness of brief advice (BA) in primary care for physical activity (PA) addressing the limitations in the current limited economic literature through the use of a time-based modelling approach. Methods: A Markov model was used to compare the lifetime costs and outcomes of a cohort of 100 000 people exposed to BA versus usual care. Health outcomes were expressed in terms of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). Costs were assessed from a health provider perspective (£2010/11 prices). Data to populate the model were derived from systematic literature reviews and the literature searches of economic evaluations that were conducted for national guidelines. Deterministic and probability sensitivity analyses explored the uncertainty in parameter estimates including short-term mental health gains associated with PA. Results: Compared with usual care, BA is more expensive, incurring additional costs of £806 809 but it is more effective leading to 466 QALYs gained in the total cohort, a QALY gain of 0.0047/person. The incremental cost per QALY of BA is £1730 (including mental health gains) and thus can be considered cost-effective at a threshold of £20 000/QALY. Most changes in assumptions resulted in the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) falling at or below £12 000/QALY gained. However, when short-term mental health gains were excluded the ICER was £27 000/QALY gained. The probabilistic sensitivity analysis showed that, at a threshold of £20 000/QALY, there was a 99.9% chance that BA would be cost-effective. Conclusions: BA is a cost-effective way to improve PA among adults, provided short-term mental health gains are considered. Further research is required to provide more accurate evidence on factors contributing to the cost-effectiveness of BA.NICE Centre for Public Health Excellenc

“I-Do” Feminism Courtesy of Martha Stewart Weddings and HBC’s Vow To Wow Club : Inventing Modern Matrimonial Tradition with Glue Sticks and Cuisinart

This article examines the wedding gift registry as a newly invented tradition and part of the increasing commodification of everyday life and its rites of passage. The research involves both a deconstructive discursive analysis and a critique of the visual rhetoric in advertisements promoting registries for the newly engaged. To consider the cultural context within which marketing for wedding gift registries is proliferating, the author begins with the stories of two connected figures, both lifted from national newswires. Then she argues that the escalating trend of the wedding registry gains momentum because of its placement between these two conjoined images, namely: the spectre of the scandalous and hysterical “runaway bride” and her sister, the hip and paradoxical “I-Do Feminist.”Cet article examine la liste de mariage en tant que tradition nouvellement inventée et comme faisant partie de la mercantilisation croissante de la vie quotidienne et de ses rites de passage. La recherche implique à la fois une analyse déconstructiviste du discours et une critique de la rhétorique visuelle des publicités faisant la promotion des listes de mariage pour les nouveaux fiancés. Afin de considérer le contexte à l’intérieur duquel prolifèrent ces mises en marché des listes de mariage, l’auteure commence par les histoires de deux représentations connectées, tirées toutes deux d’émissions nationales. Elle soutient ensuite que la tendance à l’escalade que l’on constate dans les listes de mariage gagne en vigueur parce qu’elles se situent entre ces deux images conjointes que sont : le spectre de la scandaleuse et hystérique « mariée en fuite » et sa soeur branchée et paradoxale, la féministe « Oui, je le veux »

Matrix Shanks Transformations

Shanks' transformation is a well know sequence transformation for accelerating the convergence of scalar sequences. It has been extended to the case of sequences of vectors and sequences of square matrices satisfying a linear difference equation with scalar coefficients. In this paper, a more general extension to the matrix case where the matrices can be rectangular and satisfy a difference equation with matrix coefficients is proposed and studied. In the particular case of square matrices, the new transformation can be recursively implemented by the matrix $arepsilon$-algorithm of Wynn. Then, the transformation is related to matrix Pad\ue9-type and Pad\ue9 approximants. Numerical experiments showing the interest of this transformation end the paper

Fairy Tale Films

In this, the first collection of essays to address the development of fairy tale film as a genre, Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix stress, the mirror of fairy-tale film reflects not so much what its audience members actually are but how they see themselves and their potential to develop (or, likewise, to regress). As Jack Zipes says further in the foreword, “Folk and fairy tales pervade our lives constantly through television soap operas and commercials, in comic books and cartoons, in school plays and storytelling performances, in our superstitions and prayers for miracles, and in our dreams and daydreams. The artistic re-creations of fairy-tale plots and characters in film—the parodies, the aesthetic experimentation, and the mixing of genres to engender new insights into art and life— mirror possibilities of estranging ourselves from designated roles, along with the conventional patterns of the classical tales.” Here, scholars from film, folklore, and cultural studies move discussion beyond the well-known Disney movies to the many other filmic adaptations of fairy tales and to the widespread use of fairy tale tropes, themes, and motifs in cinema.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1060/thumbnail.jp

The Matrix Theory S-Matrix

The technology required for eikonal scattering amplitude calculations in Matrix theory is developed. Using the entire supersymmetric completion of the v^4/r^7 Matrix theory potential we compute the graviton-graviton scattering amplitude and find agreement with eleven dimensional supergravity at tree level.Comment: 10 pages, RevTeX, no figure