Trends in physical activity and sedentary behaviour in adolescence: ethnic and socioeconomic differences

Objective: To assess developmental trends in physical activity and sedentary behaviour in British adolescents in relation to sex, ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES).Design: A 5-year longitudinal study of a diverse cohort of students aged 11 - 12 years at baseline in 1999.Setting: 36 London schools sampled using a stratified random sampling procedure.Participants: A total of 5863 students categorised as white, black or Asian, and stratified for SES using the Townsend Index.Main outcome measures: Number of days per week of vigorous activity leading to sweating and breathing hard. Hours of sedentary behaviour, including watching television and playing video games. Data were analysed using multilevel, linear, mixed models.Results: Marked reductions in physical activity and increases in sedentary behaviour were noticed between ages 11 - 12 and 15 - 16 years. Boys were more active than girls, and the decline in physical activity was greater in girls (46% reduction) than in boys (23%). Asian students were less active than whites, and this was also true of black girls but not boys. Black students were more sedentary than white students. Levels of sedentary behaviour were greater in respondents from lower SES. Most differences between ethnic and SES groups were present at age 11 years, and did not evolve over the teenage years.Conclusions: Physical activity declines and sedentary behaviour becomes more common during adolescence. Ethnic and SES differences are observed in physical activity and sedentary behaviour in British youth that anticipate adult variations in adiposity and cardiovascular disease risk. These are largely established by age 11 - 12 years, so reversing these patterns requires earlier intervention

Towards critical event monitoring, detection and prediction for self-adaptive future Internet applications

The Future Internet (FI) will be composed of a multitude of diverse types of services that offer flexible, remote access to software features, content, computing resources, and middleware solutions through different cloud delivery models, such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Ultimately, this means that loosely coupled Internet services will form a comprehensive base for developing value added applications in an agile way. Unlike traditional application development, which uses computing resources and software components under local administrative control, FI applications will thus strongly depend on third-party services. To maintain their quality of service, those applications therefore need to dynamically and autonomously adapt to an unprecedented level of changes that may occur during runtime. In this paper, we present our recent experiences on monitoring, detection, and prediction of critical events for both software services and multimedia applications. Based on these findings we introduce potential directions for future research on self-adaptive FI applications, bringing together those research directions

Accessing Patient Records in Virtual Healthcare Organisations

The ARTEMIS project is developing a semantic web service based P2P interoperability infrastructure for healthcare information systems that will allow healthcare providers to securely share patient records within virtual healthcare organisations. Authorisation decisions to access patient records across organisation boundaries can be very dynamic and must occur within a strict legislative framework. In ARTEMIS we are developing a dynamic authorisation mechanism called PBAC that provides a means of contextual and process oriented access control to enforce healthcare business processes. PBAC demonstrates how healthcare providers can dynamically share patient records for care pathways across organisation boundaries

Contraceptive use among women in Ogoja and Obudu Local Government Areas, Cross River State, Nigeria

Sexual behaviour in human societies is embedded in a complex web of shared ideas. Moral rules and regulations, obvious associations and obscured symbols are part of the complex behaviour patterns. Sexual behaviour varies from one culture to another, from one stage of development to another as well as from one period of history to another. Many factors including biological, social, political, educational, economic and religious affect sexual behaviour. This study was undertaken to assess women’s knowledge of modern contraception, examine the role of culture in contraception use and find out the relationship between background characteristics and contraception use. The results of this study indicate that knowledge of contraception is relatively low in both rural and urban centres of the study area. Given the importance of family planning to the reduction of growing population, it is crucial to embark on an aggressive education and enlightenment of the people on the need to use contraception in order to prevent unwanted, unintended and ill-timed pregnancies. The media should be effectively harnessed to take its rightful position in the dissemination of information to the people

Effects of Thickening Time on the Application of Cement Slurry for High Pressure /High Temperature Drilling.

High pressure/High temperature operations remain a high challenge for the industry as deeper reservoir operations are pursued around the globe. In addition to deeper depths, an increasing number of wells are still being drilled and completed in much more hostile down-hole environments. Though high pressure/high temperature wells have always presented drilling challenges, their operations continued to remain very high as the vast reserves of hydrocarbon promised to bridge the gap between demand and supply for energy. The world’s energy demand is rising and favorable economics have allowed oil companies to continue to prospect and drill in these more challenging areas that are actually prone to high pressures / high temperatures than ever before. This paper addresses some of the challenges relative to cement slurry designs that requires careful engineering practices and needs proper cementing operations and optimization. It presents a simulation study using retarder sensitivity to select thickening time, optimize cement properties and also predict the subsequent HPHT sensitivity on cement slurries. The results showed that the modified Magnesium Oxide(mixture of water-glass and magnesium oxide) was best for slurry design for high pressure/high temperature which gave tighter matrix of cement paste. The application of retarder reduced the thickening time but the Water-Glass Solution improved the Magnesium Oxide cement thickening time, indicating that thickening time was dependent on time of exposure and on temperature. The rheological properties of the slurry showed that at HPHT, there were decreases in plastic viscosity, gel strength and the yield point. The study therefore determined one of the best cement slurry design practices for different down-hole applications in HPHT wells. KEY WORDS : Cement slurry, Thickening Time, Modified magnium Oxide,High temperature/High Pressure

Effects of Force Account Method on Procurement Process Compliance in Construction Projects

The effective and efficient use of resources by public organizations through the force account procurement method lowers the costs of various projects, enhancing the performance of the construction projects undertaken by Local Government Authorities. Despite the benefits obtained from the use of force accounts by procuring entities, there are still challenges facing its implementation in terms of value for money. The study is guided by Resource-based View. A Cross-sectional survey design was employed; Simple random sampling was used to select a sample of 116 secondary schools using force account. Primary data was collected using structured questionnaires and interviews, while secondary data was collected through a documentary review. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics to compute percentages and means of school respondents, and Multiple Regression was used for inferential statistics analysis. Qualitative data analysis was conducted using NVivo through Thematic analysis. The findings demonstrate the use of force account method has a positive and significant effect on procurement process compliance. However, secondary schools using the force account method face several challenges, including a lack of qualified personnel, difficulty in achieving intended quality, delay in delivery, inexperienced human resources to run and manage huge construction projects, poor record keeping, poor supervision, and top management interference. The study recommends capacity-building training for all force account users, a maximum threshold amount for force account usage, competent project implementation teams, or supervisors based on profession, expertise, and experience and the enforcement of ethical practices in procurement projects. Keywords: Force account, local government authorities, value for money, compliance

Effect of Reversible Invert Emulsion Fluid Additives on The Environment – An Environmental Concern During Drilling Operation

The effect of reversible invert emulsion drilling fluid additives on the soil has been examined in order to evaluate their toxicity and possible environmental impacts that may result from their indiscriminate disposal. Development of effective policies for discharges depends on consideration of the specific local environmental conditions that govern the fate of discharge materials, the scientific basis for assessing the potential for effects in that environment, and balanced consideration of the environmental effects and relative costs of discharge versus other disposal options. This paper reviews the framework that will help achieve general regulatory acceptance of the discharge of reversible invert emulsion mud. In this study, the contaminated soil samples were collected and analysed for metals (iron, copper, zinc, lead, nickel, chromium, manganese, calcium and magnesium) using Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometry (AAS) method. The results showed that Calcium (Ca) has the highest concentration followed by Iron (Fe), Copper (Cu) with varying level of toxic metals like lead (Pb), Nickel (Ni), Manganese (Mn) and Chromium (Cr) in the soil sample. Metals like Fe, Mn and Cu generally have values higher than that of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and World Health Organization Standards thereby implying possible negative impacts on the immediate environments. It is therefore recommended that wastes resulting from oil cuttings and drilling muds should be properly treated before it is disposed into the environment by oil exploration companies

Initiating dialogue between stakeholders and establishing a common language for community severance through cross disciplinary workshops

The concept of community severance has slowly been making its way into concrete transport plans and policies but it still lacks a consensual definition. This is because the issue has been approached by researchers from a range of disciplines, which have specific and diverse ways of constructing scientific knowledge. The objective of this paper, the first in a series of working papers to be generated by the Street Mobility and Network Accessibility research project is to build bridges between these different approaches and provide a base for the integration of community severance into public policy. The paper is the outcome of a series of workshops attended by a cross-disciplinary team of researchers and stakeholders, including policy-makers and local practitioners. On the basis of these discussions, a framework for cross-disciplinary research on community severance is developed, taking into consideration the chain of direct and indirect effects of transport infrastructure and motorised traffic and the range and complexity in the methodologies used for analysing and formulating solutions to the problem. In a second stage, we examine the consistency between this framework and the opinions and experiences of stakeholders

A Kinetic Basis For T Cell Receptor Repertoire Selection during an Immune Response

AbstractThe basis for T cell antigen receptor (TCR) repertoire selection upon repeated antigenic challenge is unclear. We evaluated the avidity and dissociation kinetics of peptide/major histocompatibility complex (MHC) tetramer binding to antigen-specific T lymphocytes isolated following primary or secondary immunization. The data reveal a narrowing of the secondary repertoire relative to the primary repertoire, largely resulting from the loss of cells expressing TCRs with the fastest dissociation rates for peptide/MHC binding. In addition, T cells in the secondary response express TCRs of higher average affinity for peptide/MHC than cells in the primary response. These results provide a link between the kinetics and affinity of TCR-peptide/MHC interactions and TCR sequence selection during the course of an immune response