Social media, eating disorders and recovery

Social media use is rapidly increasing; whilst the dangers of using social media have been highlighted by previous research, less attention has been paid to the positive influences of social media. This study aimed to explore experiences of using social media in people recovering from an eating disorder (ED). Objectives were to understand how people with EDs use social media in relation to their ED and recovery, and the perceived helpful and unhelpful aspects of using social media during their recovery. In depth interviews with 15 adults (aged 19-40) recovering from an ED were thematically analysed. Participants also shared examples of social media posts that were helpful and less helpful in their recovery, which were included in the thematic analysis. Four key themes were identified: motivating recovery, a supportive space to share and be open, maintains difficulties, and navigating social media. Participants’ social media use appeared to change dependent on their motivations, needs, and stages of recovery. Findings have important implications for clinical practice, working alongside, not against, social media use in those with EDs. Further research is needed in order to greater understand the role social media plays during the recovery process

Quantum heuristic algorithm for traveling salesman problem

We propose a quantum heuristic algorithm to solve a traveling salesman problem by generalizing Grover search. Sufficient conditions are derived to greatly enhance the probability of finding the tours with extremal costs, reaching almost to unity and they are shown characterized by statistical properties of tour costs. In particular for a Gaussian distribution of the tours along the cost we show that the quantum algorithm exhibits the quadratic speedup of its classical counterpart, similarly to Grover search.Comment: Published versio

‘This restless enemy of all fertility’: exploring paradigms of coastal dune management in Western Europe over the last 700 years

Drifting sand has inundated settlements and damaged agricultural land along the coasts of Western Europe for the last 700 years. The need to control sand migration has been an important driver of the management of coastal sand dunes and here we analyse original archival materials to provide new insights into historically changing coastal dune management practices. Records of coastal sand movement in Denmark, The Netherlands, Britain, Ireland and France were reviewed and three distinct management approaches were identified. The ways in which these approaches have played out in space and time were examined with particular reference to records from landed estates in Britain and Ireland. We demonstrate how historical evidence can be used to inform contemporary debates on dune management strategy and practice. We propose a new place-based approach to the future management of coastal dunes that can incorporate both expert and locally produced ‘knowledges’ and that is underpinned by an understanding of how both natural forces and human interventions have shaped these dune landscapes over time

A two-dimensional geostatistic method to simulate the precision of abundance estimates

In this paper, we outline a geostatistic method to simulate the relative precision (coefficient of variation, CV) of total abundance estimates of one species in a predetermined, stratified area when it is appropriate to treat the observations within each stratum as realizations of a second-order homogenous and ergodic random process. To model the spatial correlations, a variogram is fitted to normal-transformed values of the original observations. Based on the variogram and its corresponding covariance matrix, extensive simulations on a fine grid that includes the sample locations provide random realizations of the process. The normal values are back-transformed to original observation space by nonparametric reversed bootstrap, as well as by a parametric Weibull approach. The method is applied to a total of 1069 shrimp (Pandalus borealis) abundance observations from 11 annual surveys in the Barents Sea (1992–2002) where a 20 nautical mile sampling grid has been applied. On average, the CV was estimated to be 6.4% for the applied regular grid when the simulations were conditional on the observations, compared with 8.1% when the sampling locations within each of the six strata were random