Acknowledgements

in editing my papers and teaching me yet more maths. Thanks also to my Mum for her support. Carpena Pedro also deserves a mention, for his useful comments on the papers I have written. And lastly, thanks to Belle and Sebastian for helping to keep me sane through all of this. i Executive summary Information theory and mathematics in general provide a large number of tech-niques for analysing strings of text, be that human languages or the “language ” of DNA. The aim of this project was to apply some of these techniques to analyse both written text and DNA, in order to extract useful information from these sources of information and explore properties of languages. In order to implement the tech-niques, I wrote software in both the Java and Perl programming languages. The key findings I have made are that an inter-word spacing analysis of human languages can be used in determining authorship of documents, and that a multifractal analysis of DNA in conjunction with a tree algorithm can be used to produce useful phylo-genetic trees which show relationships between organisms. I also found that DNA spectrograms could be useful. I evaluated the performance of the Jensen-Shannon divergence measure in finding coding and non-coding regions of DNA. i

Evaluating what we intend to reach: How should we measure children's quality of life in a palliative context? Searching for valid indicators of quality palliative care for children and their families

Background: Paediatric palliative care (PPC) is delivered in Belgium through 5 paediatric liaison teams (PLT). PPC aims to promote quality of life (QoL). However, validated short instruments available in French and able to capture QoL in a family-centred and holistic approach, are still lacking. Measuring QoL is challenging due to heterogeneity in age and disease; lack of consensus on when PPC starts; and legal/ethical requirements involved in researching children. Objectives: to analyse from the perspective of children, parents and health care professionals, the relevance, feasibility and acceptability of the new French version of the APCA-Children’s Palliative Outcome Scale (CPOS). Methods: After a cross-cultural validation of the English version of the CPOS [1] into a French version, a pilot-test was started among children and their parents, at one PLT in Belgium. The added SEIQoL interview guide [2] and QOLLTI-F [3] verified the completeness of dimensions covered by the CPOS. Focus groups and think aloud protocols among PLT were performed. Results: 6 children (8-18 years) and 9 parents participated. Social interactions of children did not seem to be sufficiently identified by the CPOS. Overall feasibility and acceptability of the other instruments were observed, except for the SEIQoL which could not be used among children with severe cognitive impairment. PLT showed strong interest to implement outcome measures for evaluating the quality of care provided. Perspectives: Further pilot-testing of CPOS is requested before extended multi-centric field-testing. [1] African Palliative Care Association. Guidelines for using the APCA African Children’s Palliative Outcome Scale. 2012. [2] A. Hickey, G. Bury, C. O’Boyle, F. Bradley, F. O’Kelly, W. Schannon, A new short form individual quality of life measure (SEIQoL-DW): application in a cohort of individuals with HIV/AIDS. BMJ 1996; 313:29-33. [3] R. Cohen, A. Leis, D. Kuhl., C.Charbonneau, P. Ritvo, F. Ashbury. QOLLTI-F: measuring family carer quality of life. Palliative Medicine 2006; 20(8):755-767