Project vital: Community revitalization industry report

ViTAL (Vitality Through Active Living) FIJIAN PROJECT The ViTAL project aims to aid in the reduction of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) through investment in the health and well-being of women by increasing the level of participation in physical activity (PA) and health eating across the community. Women are agents of change in families, communities and countries. The ViTAL program aims to support, other community-based programs such as community gardens, healthy cooking classes, healthy cookbooks, walking groups and other ongoing physical activity programs

Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Systematic Review

Animals play a profoundly important and intricate role in our lives today. Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, but they now work closely with us to assist the disabled, and in combat and search and rescue situations. Farm animals are a critical part of the global food supply chain, and there is increasing consumer interest in organically fed and humanely raised livestock, and how it impacts our health and environmental footprint. Wild animals are threatened with extinction by human induced factors, and shrinking and compromised habitat. This review sets the goal to systematically survey the existing literature in smart computing and sensing technologies for domestic, farm and wild animal welfare. We use the notion of \emph{animal welfare} in broad terms, to review the technologies for assessing whether animals are healthy, free of pain and suffering, and also positively stimulated in their environment. Also the notion of \emph{smart computing and sensing} is used in broad terms, to refer to computing and sensing systems that are not isolated but interconnected with communication networks, and capable of remote data collection, processing, exchange and analysis. We review smart technologies for domestic animals, indoor and outdoor animal farming, as well as animals in the wild and zoos. The findings of this review are expected to motivate future research and contribute to data, information and communication management as well as policy for animal welfare

Big data for monitoring educational systems

This report considers “how advances in big data are likely to transform the context and methodology of monitoring educational systems within a long-term perspective (10-30 years) and impact the evidence based policy development in the sector”, big data are “large amounts of different types of data produced with high velocity from a high number of various types of sources.” Five independent experts were commissioned by Ecorys, responding to themes of: students' privacy, educational equity and efficiency, student tracking, assessment and skills. The experts were asked to consider the “macro perspective on governance on educational systems at all levels from primary, secondary education and tertiary – the latter covering all aspects of tertiary from further, to higher, and to VET”, prioritising primary and secondary levels of education

NEET in Essex: A Review of the Evidence

This report reviews the published research evidence on the factors and processes that lead some young people into becoming ?Not in Employment, Education or Training? (NEET), and the policy interventions that are deemed to prevent this. It also includes a previously conducted Latent Class Analysis (LCA) of the 2009 Essex NEET cohort, which is analysed alongside the more general published evidence. The literature reviewed was generated from wide rage of bibliographic search engines, academics, policy makers and practitioners working in this field The review will contribute towards the development of more effective policy interventions, and provide an initial foundation for the development of a possible multi-method research project. A primary research project will be able to provide more robust inferences on the causes and processes of becoming NEET and on the interventions designed to prevent this. This will enable Essex County Council to better target and implement effective policy interventions, ultimately reducing the social and economic costs of youth unemployment in Essex

Restoring Health to Health Reform: Integrating Medicine and Public Health to Advance the Population\u27s Wellbeing

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a major achievement in improving access to health care services. However, evidence indicates that the nation could achieve greater improvements in health outcomes, at a lower cost, by shifting its focus to public health. By focusing nearly exclusively on health care, policy makers have chronically starved public health of adequate and stable funding and political support. The lack of support for public health is exacerbated by the fact that health care and public health are generally conceptualized, organized, and funded as two separate systems. In order to maximize gains in health status and to spend scarce health resources most effectively, health care and public health should be treated as two interactive parts of a single, unified health system. The core purpose of health reform ought to be the improvement of the population’s health. We propose five criteria that would significantly advance this goal: prevention and wellness, human resources, a strong and sustainable health infrastructure, robust performance measurement, and reduction of health disparities. Although the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act includes provisions addressing these criteria, population health is not a central focus of the reform. In order to guide health reform implementation and to inform future health reform efforts, we offer three major policy reforms: changing the environment to incentivize healthy behavioral choices, strengthening the public health infrastructure at the state and local levels, and developing a health-in-all policies strategy that would engage multiple agencies in improving health incomes. Adopting these reforms would facilitate integration and dramatically improve the population’s health, particularly when compared to the health gains likely to be realized from a continued focus on access to health care services

Heart rate control during treadmill exercise using input-sensitivity shaping for disturbance rejection of very-low-frequency heart rate variability

AbstractBackgroundAutomatic and accurate control of heart rate (HR) during treadmill exercise is important for prescription and implementation of training protocols. The principal design issue for feedback control of HR is to achieve disturbance rejection of very-low-frequency heart rate variability (VLF-HRV) with a level of control signal activity (treadmill speed) which is sufficiently smooth and acceptable to the runner. This work aimed to develop a new method for feedback control of heart rate during treadmill exercise based on shaping of the input sensitivity function, and to empirically evaluate quantitative performance outcomes in an experimental study.MethodsThirty healthy male subjects participated. 20 subjects were included in a preceding study to determine an approximate, average nominal model of heart rate dynamics, and 10 were not. The design method guarantees that the input sensitivity function gain monotonically decreases with frequency, is therefore devoid of peaking, and has a pre-specified value at a chosen critical frequency, thus avoiding unwanted amplification of HRV disturbances in the very-low-frequency band. Controllers were designed using the existing approximate nominal plant model which was not specific to any of the subjects tested.ResultsAccurate, stable and robust overall performance was observed for all 30 subjects, with a mean RMS tracking error of 2.96beats/min and a smooth, low-power control signal. There were no significant differences in tracking accuracy or control signal power between the 10 subjects who were not in the preceding identification study and a matched subgroup of subjects who were (respectively: mean RMSE 2.69 vs. 3.28beats/min, p=0.24; mean control signal power 15.62 vs. 16.31×10−4m2/s2, p=0.37). Substantial and significant reductions over time in RMS tracking error and average control signal power were observed.ConclusionsThe input-sensitivity-shaping method provides a direct way to address the principal design challenge for HR control, namely disturbance rejection in relation to VLF-HRV, and delivered robust and accurate tracking with a smooth, low-power control signal. Issues of parametric and structural plant uncertainty are secondary because a simple approximate plant model, not specific to any of the subjects tested, was sufficient to achieve accurate, stable and robust heart rate control performance

Adapting to change: Time for climate resilience and a new adaptation strategy. EPC Issue Paper 5 March 2020

The dramatic effects of climate change are being felt across the European continent and the world. Considering how sluggish and unsuccessful the world has been in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the impacts will become long-lasting scars. Even implementing radical climate mitigation now would be insufficient in addressing the economic, societal and environmental implications of climate change, which are expected to only intensify in the years to come. This means climate mitigation must go hand in hand with the adaptation efforts recognised in the Paris Agreement. And although the damages of climate change are usually localised and adaptation measures often depend on local specificities, given the interconnections between ecosystems, people and economies in a globalised world there are strong reasons for European Union (EU) member states to join forces, pool risk and cooperate across borders. Sharing information, good practices, experiences and resources to strengthen resilience and enhance adaptive capacity makes sense economically, environmentally and socially. The European Commission’s 2013 Adaptation Strategy is the first attempt to set EU-wide adaptation and climate resilience and could be considered novel in that it tried to mainstream adaptation goals into relevant legislation, instruments and funds. It was not very proactive, however. It also lacked long-term perspective, failed to put the adaptation file high on the political agenda, was under resourced, and suffered from knowledge gaps and silo thinking. The Commission’s European Green Deal proposal, which has been presented as a major step forward to the goal of Europe becoming the world’s first climate-neutral continent, suggests that the Commission will adopt a new EU strategy on adaptation to climate within the first two years of its mandate (2020-2021). In light of the risks climate change poses to ecosystems, societies and the economy (through inter alia the vulnerability of the supply chain to climate change and its potential failure to provide services to consumers), adaptation should take a prominent role alongside mitigation in the EU’s political climate agenda. Respecting the division of treaty competences, there are important areas where EU-wide action and support could foster the continent’s resilience to climate change. The European Policy Centre (EPC) project “Building a climate-resilient Europe”, which has culminated in this Issue Paper, has identified the following: (i) the ability to convert science-based knowledge into preventive action and responsible behaviour, thus filling the information gap; (ii) the need to close the protection gap through better risk management and risk sharing; (iii) the necessity to adopt nature-based infrastructural solutions widely and tackle the grey infrastructure bias; and (iv) the need to address the funding and investment gap. This Issue Paper aims to help inform the upcoming EU Adaptation Strategy and, by extension, strengthen the EU’s resilience to climate change. To that end, the authors make a call for the EU to mainstream adaptation and shift its focus from reacting to disasters to a more proactive approach that prioritises prevention, risk reduction and resilience building. In doing so, the EU must ensure fairness and distributive justice while striving for climate change mitigation and protecting the environment and biodiversity. To succeed, the new EU Adaptation Strategy will need to address specific challenges related to the information, protection, funding and investment gaps; and the grey infrastructure bias. To tackle and address those challenges, this Paper proposes 17 solutions outlined in Table 1 (see page 6)