Evaluation of the Child Maintenance Options Service

Aim We wanted to establish whether the Child Maintenance Options Service telephone helpline increased the likelihood of separated parents making arrangements for child maintenance. What is the Child Maintenance Options Service? Definitions of child maintenance vary, for this study it was defined as financial support that helps towards a child’s everyday living costs when the parents have separated. The Child Maintenance Options Service offers information and support to help parents make decisions about their child maintenance arrangements. Findings Overall, parents were positive about the helpfulness of the service. While positive results were achieved after just one or two short telephone calls, the service was most effective for those who had more in-depth and personalised contact with the service. Maintenance arrangements Around 7% of parents, referred by the Jobcentre Plus, who had more in-depth interaction with the service later made maintenance arrangements that they would not otherwise have had. Parents who were more recently separated and where there was regular contact between the non-resident parent and the child and between parents, were more likely to have a maintenance arrangement in place eight to nine months after contact with the service. There was some evidence that the service helps to ensure that maintenance is working. Over two-fifths of parents who had some contact with the service did not have a maintenance arrangement eight to nine months later. Methodology We conducted a telephone survey of a random sample of helpline users, between February and September 2009. A total of 2,767 parents participated in two research interviews: an initial ‘baseline’ and an ‘outcomes’ interview around six to nine months later. We worked with freelancer Eleanor Ireland on this project

Body fatness or anthropometry for assessment of unhealthy weight status? Comparison between methods in South African children and adolescents

A variety of methods are available for defining undernutrition (thinness/underweight/under-fat) and overnutrition (overweight/obesity/over-fat). The extent to which these definitions agree is unclear. The present cross-sectional study aimed to assess agreement between widely used methods of assessing nutritional status in children and adolescents, and to examine the benefit of body composition estimates. The main objective of the cross-sectional study was to assess underweight, overweight and obesity using four methods: (i) BMI-for-age using WHO (2007) reference data; (ii) BMI-for-age using Cole et al. and International Obesity Taskforce cut-offs; (iii) weight-for-age using the National Centre for Health Statistics/WHO growth reference 1977; and (iv) body fat percentage estimated by bio-impedance (body fat reference curves for children of McCarthy et al., 2006). Comparisons were made between methods using weighted kappa analyses. Subjects Individuals (n 1519) in three age groups (school grade 1, mean age 7 years; grade 5, mean age 11 years; grade 9, mean age 15 years). Results In boys, prevalence of unhealthy weight status (both under- and overnutrition) was much higher at all ages with body fatness measures than with simple anthropometric proxies for body fatness; agreement between fatness and weight-based measures was fair or slight using Landis and Koch categories. In girls, prevalence of unhealthy weight status was also higher with body fatness than with proxies, although agreement between measures ranged from fair to substantial. Methods for defining under- and overnutrition should not be considered equivalent. Weight-based measures provide highly conservative estimates of unhealthy weight status, possibly more conservative in boys. Simple body composition measures may be more informative than anthropometry for nutritional surveillance of children and adolescents

Exploring the managerial perspective on developing a new sport team brand

In recent years, research examining new sport teams has emerged. A total of ten senior sales and market executives were interviewed from recent expansion teams from Major League Soccer (MLS) to analyze team brand development for this study due to its continued expansion efforts across North America and the fact that the MLS continues to compete for market share against other “Big Four” sport teams in their respective cities. Utilizing content analysis, findings from this study identified four themes when developing a new team brand. These themes were Market Research, Soccer Culture, Brand Associations, and Supporter-Led Initiatives. Practical implications are provided for developing a new team brand

Sport Management Internship Quality and the Development of Political Skill: A Conceptual Model

Internships are a key component of sport organizations and the sport management curriculum. Due to the vastness of internships both in academia and the sport profession, it is imperative to understand the effectiveness of internships for both the organization and the intern. While previous research has focused on quality control, the agency’s perspective of internships, the student’s perspective, and how to link the theory to practice, scholars have yet to examine the effects of sport management internships on the development of essential professional skills and/or attributes. Given the political nature of obtaining and keeping a job in the sport business, the purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual model that allows the effectiveness of a sport management internship to be evaluated according to its effect on the political skill of interns. Understanding the internship as one component of the sport management curricula, the conceptual model links sport management students’ developmental experiences, and internship quality to the development of political skill, and three secondary outcomes (i.e., domain-specific self-efficacy, sport industry identification, and future employment intentions). In doing so a comprehensive method for evaluating the effectiveness of internships that prioritizes the student’s growth is offered

Refactoring for introducing and tuning parallelism for heterogeneous multicore machines in Erlang

This research has been generously supported by the European Union Framework 7 Para-Phrase project (IST-288570), EU Horizon 2020 projects RePhrase (H2020-ICT-2014-1), agreement number 644235; Teamplay (H2020-ICT 2017-1) agreement number 779882, and EPSRC Discovery, EP/P020631/1. EU COST Action IC1202: Timing Analysis On Code-Level (TACLe), and by a travel grant from EU HiPEAC.This paper presents semi‐automatic software refactorings to introduce and tune structured parallelism in sequential Erlang code, as well as to generate code for running computations on GPUs and possibly other accelerators. Our refactorings are based on the lapedo framework for programming heterogeneous multi‐core systems in Erlang. lapedo is based on the PaRTE refactoring tool and also contains (1) a set of hybrid skeletons that target both CPU and GPU processors, (2) novel refactorings for introducing and tuning parallelism, and (3) a tool to generate the GPU offloading and scheduling code in Erlang, which is used as a component of hybrid skeletons. We demonstrate, on four realistic use‐case applications, that we are able to refactor sequential code and produce heterogeneous parallel versions that can achieve significant and scalable speedups of up to 220 over the original sequential Erlang program on a 24‐core machine with a GPU.PostprintPeer reviewe

Full Bloom: Diegetic UI for musical phrases in virtual reality

We propose a novel system for communicating musical note pitch and sequence information to users within a virtual reality environment. Our approach utilizes ‘Blooms,’ objects that resemble flowers with various petal arrangements. These formations, when constructed in view of users, act as diegetic, user-parsable encodings of their inputs. Blooms exist within the virtual space as simulated physics objects that collectively serve the role of a user interface

Perceptions of the barriers to effective inclusion in one primary school: Voices of teachers and teaching assistants

This study examined the barriers to inclusion in one primary school in the north of England. Qualitative data were collected from teachers and teaching assistants through the use of a focus group. The evidence suggested that practices within the school were varied and ranged from highly inclusive to highly exclusive. Some teachers worked in good faith to develop effective inclusion for learners with special educational needs. Conversely, other teachers displayed negative attitudes towards these pupils and this impacted negatively on the school's commitment to inclusion. Lack of funding, resources and training were identified as key barriers to inclusion. Parental resistance to inclusion was also evident within the context of this school and there was a strong feeling that the inclusion agenda was problematic in the context of the standards agenda. Despite these issues there was a strong sense that practitioners should be willing to commit to the principles of inclusive education and the study considers some ways in which schools can advance their practice in this respect. Within this study the term ‘practitioner’ is used to represent teachers and teaching assistants

Media involvement in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women/Girls (MMIWG) epidemic

The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) epidemic was created to raise awareness about the high rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls. Media coverage for MMIWG survivors in United States and Canada remains lacking, as mainstream reporting is almost non-existent for Indigenous women and girls. Out of 506 MMIWG cases, only one-quarter were reported by local, regional, or national media (UIHI, 2018). These victims are commonly overshadowed by other cases comprised of non-Hispanic White (NHW) women who go missing. In Canada's local press, missing and murdered NHW women were referred to 511 times compared to 82 times for Indigenous women (Gilchrist, 2010). Further, Indigenous women and girls who are abuse survivors and are reported in the media are usually depicted in negative and stereotypical contexts like sex-work and criminal behavior, which is in stark contrast to their NHW counterparts. However, advocates of the MMIWG epidemic have created increased social media exposure by sharing survivors' stories. During an 11-month study using data from Twitter, over 107,400 tweets included #MMIW and #MMIWG; these hashtags were used to shift perceptions of Indigenous women/girls and to apply political pressure to increasing news coverage of current rates of MMIWG (Moeke-Pickering et al., 2018). Increasing Indigenous representation and exposure via the media creates the opportunity to generate discussions, encourage activism, and ultimately, promote systemic-level changes for justice among Indigenous women and girls. The purpose of this poster presentation is to highlight the impact of media involvement in relation to the MMIWG epidemic.Psycholog

Incidence and correlates of delirium in a West African mental health clinic

Objective: <br/> <br/> To determine the incidence of delirium in those patients presenting to a psychiatric clinic in Nigeria and to examine if any demographic or clinical variables were correlated with this diagnosis. <br/> <br/> Method <br/> <br/> A prospective survey design; 264 consecutive new referrals to a psychiatric clinic in Nigeria were assessed for the presence of delirium using a standardised diagnostic scale. Data was analysed for normality and appropriate statistical test employed to examine the relationships between the presence of delirium and demographic and clinical variables. <br/> <br/> Results <br/> <br/> Of individuals presenting to the mental health clinics, 18.2% had delirium. No demographic variable was significant regarding the presence or absence of delirium. With regard to clinical variables duration of current symptoms, referral source and the presence of comorbid physical illness were significantly associated with the presence of delirium. Most delirium was due to infections. Nearly all patients with delirium were prescribed psychotropic medication (95.2%), and most attributed their symptoms to a spiritual cause.Conclusion(s) Delirium presents more commonly to psychiatry services in the less developed world compared to the West. Development efforts should focus on recognition and management of delirium to improve outcomes and maximise resource