2,737 research outputs found
Making a HIIT: High-intensity interval training interventions in educational settings
High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is gaining interest in the school setting due to various factors, such as research associating higher intensity physical activity with lower cardiometabolic risk, its similarity children’s intermittent patterns of physical activity, and its time-efficient protocols. The aim of this thesis was to explore the effectiveness and feasibility of HIIT in schools.
The first study was a published systematic review and meta-analysis on school-based HIIT (Chapter Two). It determined that compared to a control group, the group completing HIIT had significant improvements to cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and blood biomarkers. However, it identified that current studies had limited involvement of end-users, minimal integration within school practice, and poorly documented evaluations of their intervention implementation.
The second study of this thesis, Making a HIIT, aimed to address these limitations. It was guided by self-determination theory and the theory of expanded, extended, and enhanced opportunities. Chapter Three provides its published protocol. In phase one, HIIT workouts were co-designed with students and teachers within the Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum. In phase two, these workouts were incorporated into HPE lessons for an 8-week intervention that was completed by students involved in the co-design process and additional students. A control group continued normal HPE lessons.
Chapter Four presents the co-design process used in five classes at three schools (121 students, aged 12 – 14 years) to design 33 HIIT workouts. This included: 1) identifying barriers and facilitators to exercise to create evaluation criteria for the HIIT workouts; 2) using heart rate monitors and engaging in pre-made HIIT workouts; 3) defining HIIT parameters (intensity and interval length); 4) creating HIIT workouts using the parameters and evaluation criteria; 5) trialling and modifying the HIIT
workouts based on class feedback and intensity data. Analysis of teacher interviews and student discussions determined the methodology was feasible within the HPE curriculum and supported educative outcomes.
A comprehensive process evaluation of the Making a HIIT intervention is presented in Chapter Five. This was guided by the Framework for Effective Implementation. Three schools and 15 classes participated in phase two of Making a HIIT. Overall, 79% of eligible students (n = 308, mean age: 13.0 ± 0.6 years, 148 girls) provided consent. The average number of HIIT workouts provided by teachers and attended by students was 10 ± 3 and 6 ± 2, respectively. During HIIT workouts, the percentage of time students spent at ≥ 80% of heart rate maximum was 55% (interquartile range: 29% - 76%). On average, students rated their enjoyment of HIIT workouts as neutral to positive. Teachers found the workouts simple to implement but provided insights into the time
implications of integrating the workouts into their lessons; elements that helped facilitate the HIIT workouts; and the use of HIIT within the classroom. This chapter identified areas for future focus, including methods for maximising dosage delivered, while providing promising insight into the satisfaction of HIIT
expressed by students and teachers.
Chapter Six expanded on the fidelity of Making a HIIT as discussion on the quantification of heart rate data in the current literature was warranted. It presented evidence of variation in the heart rate data within-students, between-students, and over time. Further, it discussed considerations for fidelity measurement in the school setting and presented rating of perceived exertion (RPE) as an additional option for achieving this. The within-person correlation between heart rate and RPE data (r = 0.39; p < 0.001) suggests RPE is a suitable option when HR is unavailable.
Chapter Seven and Chapter Eight evaluated the effects of the HIIT intervention and the possible moderator role of the co-design process. The results of Chapter Seven indicate that the co-design process did not affect students’ initial levels of enjoyment, autonomous motivation, self-efficacy, perceived competence, relatedness, or autonomy during HIIT. Similarly, there were no differences in the groups over time, which could be due to the use of workouts that were designed to: be engaging; modifiable for different abilities; and encourage social interactions. Chapter Eight demonstrated that students completing HIIT had significant improvements over time in cardiorespiratory fitness, muscular power, and inhibition, but that these were not significantly different from the control group.
This could be as: 1) the control group was still completing high-intensity physical activity during their HPE lessons; 2) the intervention, which occurred in ‘real-world’ context, was not as effective as previous controlled studies; and 3) the dosage of HIIT was too low for additional improvements in the intervention group to occur.
This thesis makes significant and novel contributions to the literature on school-based HIIT through co-designing HIIT workouts, integrating Making a HIIT within the curriculum, and conducting an in-depth process evaluation. Combined, these enhance our understanding of school-based HIIT in an ecologically valid manner. Finally, this thesis identifies challenges that stem from ‘real-world’ implementation of HIIT interventions that warrant future investigation
Opening the system to the environment: new theories and tools in classical and quantum settings
The thesis is organized as follows. Section 2 is a first, unconventional, approach to the topic of EPs. Having grown interest in the topic of combinatorics and graph theory, I wanted to exploit its very abstract and mathematical tools to reinterpret something very physical, that is, the EPs in wave scattering. To do this, I build the interpretation of scattering events from a graph theory perspective and show how EPs can be understood within this interpretation. In Section 3, I move from a completely classical treatment to a purely quantum one. In this section, I consider two quantum resonators coupled to two baths and study their dynamics with local and global master equations. Here, the EPs are the key physical features used as a witness of validity of the master equation. Choosing the wrong master equation in the regime of interest can indeed mask physical and fundamental features of the system. In Section 4, there are no EPs. However I transition towards a classical/quantum framework via the topic of open systems. My main contribution in this work is the classical stochastic treatment and simulation of a spin coupled to a bath. In this work, I show how a natural quantum--to--classical transition occurs at all coupling strengths when certain limits of spin length are taken. As a key result, I also show how the coupling to the environment in this stochastic framework induces a classical counterpart to quantum coherences in equilibrium. After this last topic, in Section 5, I briefly present the key features of the code I built (and later extended) for the latter project. This, in the form of a Julia registry package named SpiDy.jl, has seen further applications in branching projects and allows for further exploration of the theoretical framework. Finally, I conclude with a discussion section (see Sec. 5) where I recap the different conclusions gathered in the previous sections and propose several possible directions.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC
Classical and quantum algorithms for scaling problems
This thesis is concerned with scaling problems, which have a plethora of connections to different areas of mathematics, physics and computer science. Although many structural aspects of these problems are understood by now, we only know how to solve them efficiently in special cases.We give new algorithms for non-commutative scaling problems with complexity guarantees that match the prior state of the art. To this end, we extend the well-known (self-concordance based) interior-point method (IPM) framework to Riemannian manifolds, motivated by its success in the commutative setting. Moreover, the IPM framework does not obviously suffer from the same obstructions to efficiency as previous methods. It also yields the first high-precision algorithms for other natural geometric problems in non-positive curvature.For the (commutative) problems of matrix scaling and balancing, we show that quantum algorithms can outperform the (already very efficient) state-of-the-art classical algorithms. Their time complexity can be sublinear in the input size; in certain parameter regimes they are also optimal, whereas in others we show no quantum speedup over the classical methods is possible. Along the way, we provide improvements over the long-standing state of the art for searching for all marked elements in a list, and computing the sum of a list of numbers.We identify a new application in the context of tensor networks for quantum many-body physics. We define a computable canonical form for uniform projected entangled pair states (as the solution to a scaling problem), circumventing previously known undecidability results. We also show, by characterizing the invariant polynomials, that the canonical form is determined by evaluating the tensor network contractions on networks of bounded size
Cohen-Macaulay binomial edge ideals of small graphs
A combinatorial property that characterizes Cohen-Macaulay binomial edge ideals has long been elusive. A recent conjecture ties the Cohen-Macaulayness of a binomial edge ideal JG to special disconnecting sets of vertices of its underlying graph G, called cut sets. More precisely, the conjecture states that JG is Cohen-Macaulay if and only if JG is unmixed and the collection of the cut sets of G is an accessible set system. In this paper we prove the conjecture theoretically for all graphs with up to 12 vertices and develop an algorithm that allows to computationally check the conjecture for all graphs with up to 15 vertices and all blocks with whiskers where the block has at most 11 vertices. This significantly extends previous computational results
Effects of municipal smoke-free ordinances on secondhand smoke exposure in the Republic of Korea
ObjectiveTo reduce premature deaths due to secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure among non-smokers, the Republic of Korea (ROK) adopted changes to the National Health Promotion Act, which allowed local governments to enact municipal ordinances to strengthen their authority to designate smoke-free areas and levy penalty fines. In this study, we examined national trends in SHS exposure after the introduction of these municipal ordinances at the city level in 2010.MethodsWe used interrupted time series analysis to assess whether the trends of SHS exposure in the workplace and at home, and the primary cigarette smoking rate changed following the policy adjustment in the national legislation in ROK. Population-standardized data for selected variables were retrieved from a nationally representative survey dataset and used to study the policy action’s effectiveness.ResultsFollowing the change in the legislation, SHS exposure in the workplace reversed course from an increasing (18% per year) trend prior to the introduction of these smoke-free ordinances to a decreasing (−10% per year) trend after adoption and enforcement of these laws (β2 = 0.18, p-value = 0.07; β3 = −0.10, p-value = 0.02). SHS exposure at home (β2 = 0.10, p-value = 0.09; β3 = −0.03, p-value = 0.14) and the primary cigarette smoking rate (β2 = 0.03, p-value = 0.10; β3 = 0.008, p-value = 0.15) showed no significant changes in the sampled period. Although analyses stratified by sex showed that the allowance of municipal ordinances resulted in reduced SHS exposure in the workplace for both males and females, they did not affect the primary cigarette smoking rate as much, especially among females.ConclusionStrengthening the role of local governments by giving them the authority to enact and enforce penalties on SHS exposure violation helped ROK to reduce SHS exposure in the workplace. However, smoking behaviors and related activities seemed to shift to less restrictive areas such as on the streets and in apartment hallways, negating some of the effects due to these ordinances. Future studies should investigate how smoke-free policies beyond public places can further reduce the SHS exposure in ROK
Medicinal cannabis as a potential treatment for chronic pain and anxiety
Since its legalisation in Australia in 2016, the most common indications for which medicinal cannabis is prescribed are chronic pain and anxiety. This thesis aimed to explore the real-world use of cannabis for these indications, and the potential of translating this evidence into a clinical trial setting.
The effectiveness and tolerability of medicinal cannabis for chronic pain, with a subset analysis on arthritis was explored using data from the CA Clinics Observational Study (CACOS). The chronic pain patients and arthritis subset reported significantly reduced pain intensity, with dry mouth, somnolence, and fatigue the most common AEs reported.
The incidence of AEs in this cohort, and the association that these may have with concomitant medicines, cannabis constituents, and dose was also reported. Each patient was taking a median of six concomitant medications. Patients taking a gabapentinoid were more likely to report dizziness, and those taking a tricyclic antidepressant were more likely to report somnolence and anxiety.
Next in this thesis clinical trial protocols were developed, the first to examine the efficacy of a transdermal CBD cream on patients with osteoarthritis. The second protocol follows a review on aromatase inhibitor associated-arthralgia, and proposes an oral CBD-extract to improve joint pain and health-related quality of life (HRQoL).
Finally, use of cannabis for anxiety was reviewed and the effectiveness and tolerability of cannabis for anxiety, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was explored using CACOS data. Significantly reduced anxiety was observed in patients with unspecified anxiety and PTSD, and the most common AEs reported were dry mouth, somnolence, and fatigue.
The observed improvements in various HRQoL outcomes in both the chronic pain and anxiety cohorts, and the possible safety concerns raised in this thesis supports ongoing exploration of medicinal cannabis in clinical trial settings
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When to Hold and When to Fold: Studies on the topology of origami and linkages
Linkages and mechanisms are pervasive in physics and engineering as models for avariety of structures and systems, from jamming to biomechanics. With the increasein physical realizations of discrete shape-changing materials, such as metamaterials,programmable materials, and self-actuating structures, an increased understandingof mechanisms and how they can be designed is crucial. At a basic level, linkagesor mechanisms can be understood to be rigid bars connected at pivots around whichthey can rotate freely. We will have a particular focus on origami-like materials, anextension to linkages with the added constraint of faces. Self-actuated versions typ-ically start flat and when exposed to an external stimulus - such as a temperaturechange or magnetic field - spontaneously fold. Since these structures fold all at once,and the number of folding patterns accessible to a given origami are exponential, theyare prone to folding to a configuration other than the desired one. Other work hassuggested methods for avoiding this misfolding, but it assumes ideal, rigid origami. Here, we expand on these models to account for the elasticity of real structures andintroduce methods for accounting for Gaussian curvature in them. We also explorehow to find and set an upper bound on minimal forcing sets, or the minimum set offolds required to force an origami, and present a graph theory algorithm for findingthem in arbitrary origami. Taken altogether, these origami studies give insight intohow the physical properties of origami influence folding and a new set of tools foravoiding misfolding. Next, we turn back to a more fundamental study of linkagesand present a new method for finding the manifold of their critical points. We thendemonstrate a design protocol that utilizes this manifold to create linkages with tun-able motions, before turning to several example structures, including the four-barlinkage and the Kane-Lubensky chain
Nearly Gorenstein local rings defined by maximal minors of a matrix
We investigate the nearly Gorenstein property of a local ring defined by the
maximal minors of a specific matrix with entries in the formal
power series ring over a field . Our findings
allow us to present numerous concrete examples, such as nearly Gorenstein rings
that are not almost Gorenstein and vice versa
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