Evaluation of the Choose Life North Lanarkshire Awareness Programme: Final Report

The Centre for Men’s Health at Leeds Metropolitan University, with consultants from MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, Glasgow, and Men’s Health Forum, Scotland (MHFS), were appointed to conduct the Choose Life (North Lanarkshire) evaluation, beginning in March 2011. The key evaluation questions are: 1. How has the social marketing approach to increase awareness of crisis service numbers and de-stigmatise understandings and attitudes about suicide worked? 2. Has the programme as implemented been effective? Which aspects of the programme have been particularly effective? 3. Has this programme been of benefit to the community, in particular young men aged 16-35? 4. What contribution has the community made to the effectiveness of the programme

Effectiveness of landmark analysis for establishing locality in p2p networks

Locality to other nodes on a peer-to-peer overlay network can be established by means of a set of landmarks shared among the participating nodes. Each node independently collects a set of latency measures to landmark nodes, which are used as a multi-dimensional feature vector. Each peer node uses the feature vector to generate a unique scalar index which is correlated to its topological locality. A popular dimensionality reduction technique is the space filling Hilbert’s curve, as it possesses good locality preserving properties. However, there exists little comparison between Hilbert’s curve and other techniques for dimensionality reduction. This work carries out a quantitative analysis of their properties. Linear and non-linear techniques for scaling the landmark vectors to a single dimension are investigated. Hilbert’s curve, Sammon’s mapping and Principal Component Analysis have been used to generate a 1d space with locality preserving properties. This work provides empirical evidence to support the use of Hilbert’s curve in the context of locality preservation when generating peer identifiers by means of landmark vector analysis. A comparative analysis is carried out with an artificial 2d network model and with a realistic network topology model with a typical power-law distribution of node connectivity in the Internet. Nearest neighbour analysis confirms Hilbert’s curve to be very effective in both artificial and realistic network topologies. Nevertheless, the results in the realistic network model show that there is scope for improvements and better techniques to preserve locality information are required

Passive characterization of sopcast usage in residential ISPs

Abstract—In this paper we present an extensive analysis of traffic generated by SopCast users and collected from operative networks of three national ISPs in Europe. After more than a year of continuous monitoring, we present results about the popularity of SopCast which is the largely preferred application in the studied networks. We focus on analysis of (i) application and bandwidth usage at different time scales, (ii) peer lifetime, arrival and departure processes, (iii) peer localization in the world. Results provide useful insights into users ’ behavior, including their attitude towards P2P-TV application usage and the conse-quent generated load on the network, that is quite variable based on the access technology and geographical location. Our findings are interesting to Researchers interested in the investigation of users ’ attitude towards P2P-TV services, to foresee new trends in the future usage of the Internet, and to augment the design of their application. I

Our Museum Special Initiative: An Evaluation

Our Museum: Communities and Museums as Active Partners was a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Special Initiative 2012 – 2016. The overall aim was to influence the museum and gallery sector to:* Place community needs, values and active collaboration at the core of museum and gallery work* Involve communities and individuals in decision-making processes* Ensure that museums and galleries play an effective role in developing community skills and the skills of staff in working with communitiesThis was to be done through facilitation of organisational change in specific museums and galleries already committed to active partnership with communities.Our Museum offered a collaborative learning process through which institutions and communities shared experiences and learned from each other as critical friends. Our Museum took place at a difficult and challenging time for both museums and their community partners. Financial austerity led to major cutbacks in public sector expenditure; a search for new business models; growing competition for funding; and organisational uncertainty and staff volatility. At the same time, the debate at the heart of Our Museum widened and intensified: what should the purpose of longestablished cultural institutions be in the 21st century; how do they maintain relevance and resonance in the contemporary world; how can they best serve their communities; can they, and should they, promote cultural democracy

The promise of community-based participatory research for health equity: a conceptual model for bridging evidence with policy.

Insufficient attention has been paid to how research can be leveraged to promote health policy or how locality-based research strategies, in particular community-based participatory research (CBPR), influences health policy to eliminate racial and ethnic health inequities. To address this gap, we highlighted the efforts of 2 CBPR partnerships in California to explore how these initiatives made substantial contributions to policymaking for health equity. We presented a new conceptual model and 2 case studies to illustrate the connections among CBPR contexts and processes, policymaking processes and strategies, and outcomes. We extended the critical role of civic engagement by those communities that were most burdened by health inequities by focusing on their political participation as research brokers in bridging evidence and policymaking

Network aware P2P multimedia streaming: capacity or locality?

P2P content providers are motivated to localize traffic within Autonomous Systems and therefore alleviate the tension with ISPs stemming from costly inter-AS traffic generated by geographically distributed P2P users. In this paper, we first present a new three-tier framework to conduct a thorough study on the impact of various capacity aware or locality aware neighbor selection and chunk scheduling strategies. Specifically, we propose a novel hybrid neighbor selection strategy with the flexibility to elect neighbors based on either type of network awareness with different probabilities. We find that network awareness in terms of both capacity and locality potentially degrades system QoS as a whole and that capacity awareness faces effort-based unfairness, but enables contribution-based fairness. Extensive simulations show that hybrid neighbor selection can not only promote traffic locality but lift streaming quality and that the crux of traffic locality promotion is active overlay construction. Based on this observation, we then propose a totally decentralized network awareness protocol, equipped with hybrid neighbor selection. In realistic simulation environments, this protocol can reduce inter-AS traffic from 95% to 38% a locality performance comparable with tracker-side strategies (35%) under the premise of high streaming quality. Our performance evaluation results provide valuable insights for both theoretical study on selfish topologies and real-deployed system design. © 2011 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 2011 IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P 2011), Kyoto, Japan, 31 August-2 September 2011. In Proceedings of P2P, 2011, p. 54-6