Usability of Food and Beverage Packs in Hospital - Experiences from the Renal Ward

Abstract presented at The 21st IAPRI World Conference on Packaging, 19-22 June 2018, Zhuhai, Chin

Single Portion Packaging and the Use of User Test Protocols to Determine Patient Accessibility

In 2015, the UK National Health Service (NHS) established a taskforce to review single portion food and beverage packaging, which has been identified as a potential challenge to users in hospitals. Hence, a study was undertaken to determine the suitability and accessibility of the current single portion packs. The packaging was assessed using ISO 17480 (Guidelines for Accessible Packaging), Annex D. The standard determines a pass or fail of packaging opening asking a panel 20 older adults to open a pack. A pack is recorded as a failure if within the 20 people cohort, there is an example of pack being unable to be opened within the time limit (defined as 1 minute) or the overall satisfaction score ranks below 3 on a 5-point Likert scale. Ten standard single portion packaging items were randomly selected for testing. The packs were chosen to reflect a broad range of food and beverage and packaging types. The results showed that the standard provided useful assessment data, identifying that 70% of the packs were so poorly designed that they failed to pass the standard, with 50% of the packs having examples that were unopenable by the participants, whilst a further 20% rated poorly for satisfaction

Effect of work boot type on work footwear habits, lower limb pain and perceptions of work boot fit and comfort in underground coal miners

Lower limb injuries are highly prevalent in underground coal mining. Wearing gumboots with inadequate ankle support was thought to contribute to these injuries. Despite the uptake of leather lace-up boots, which provide more ankle support, no recent research could be found investigating the effect of this alternative work boot in underground coal mining. Consequently, this study aimed to determine whether boot type (gumboot, leather lace-up boot) influenced work footwear habits, foot problems, lower limb pain, lower back pain, or perceptions of work boot fit and comfort in underground coal miners. Chi-squared tests were applied to 358 surveys completed by underground coal miners to determine whether responses differed significantly (p \u3c 0.05) according to boot-type. There were no significant between-boot differences in regards to the presence of foot problems, lower limb pain or lower back pain. However, the types of foot problems and locations of foot pain differed according to boot type. Gumboot wearers were also more likely to state that their work boot comfort was either uncomfortable or indifferent, their work boot fit was poor and their current boot did not provide enough support. The introduction of more structured leather lace-up boots appears to have positively influenced the support and fit provided by mining work boots, although foot problems, lower limb pain and lower back pain continue to be reported. Further investigation is recommended to identify which specific boot design features caused these observed differences in work boot fit, comfort and locations of foot pain and how these design features can be manipulated to create an underground coal mining work boot that is comfortable and reduces the high incidence of foot problems and lower limb pain suffered by underground coal miners

Summary [January 1978]

This brief provides a summary of the world, UK and Scottish economic outlook. The upward movement in the Scotland/UK unemployment relative over the past few quarters is unlikely to portend a return to the poor relative performance of the Scottish economy which occurred in the early nineteen sixties. Nevertheless the outlook for the Scottish economy in 1978 is not very encouraging

Econometric forecasts for Scotland

In the first issue (July 1975) of the Fraser of Allander Institute Quarterly Economic Commentary, the special article, by Professor J McGilvray, reviewed the problems associated with constructing regional econometric models to forecast key economic variables. Since that time, a number of forecasts for the Scottish economy have been made in the main text or in special articles of the Quarterly Commentary. Many of these have been underpinned by forecasting relationships which have been estimated for particular sectors of the economy. Up to now we have been unable to produce a set of relationships which could genuinely be described as a 'model' of the Scottish economy. The reason for this is simple, but illustrative of the type of problem discussed by Professor McGilvray. To understand it one must be acquainted with the fundamental differences which exist between national and regional economic models

Absence of Evidence Is Not Evidence of Absence: The Color-Density Relation at Fixed Stellar Mass Persists to z ~ 1

We use data drawn from the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey to investigate the relationship between local galaxy density, stellar mass, and rest-frame galaxy color. At z ~ 0.9, we find that the shape of the stellar mass function at the high-mass (log (M*/Msun) > 10.1) end depends on the local environment, with high-density regions favoring more massive systems. Accounting for this stellar mass-environment relation (i.e., working at fixed stellar mass), we find a significant color-density relation for galaxies with 10.6 < log(M*/Msun) < 11.1 and 0.75 < z < 0.95. This result is shown to be robust to variations in the sample selection and to extend to even lower masses (down to log(M*/Msun) ~ 10.4). We conclude by discussing our results in comparison to recent works in the literature, which report no significant correlation between galaxy properties and environment at fixed stellar mass for the same redshift and stellar mass domain. The non-detection of environmental dependence found in other data sets is largely attributable to their smaller samples size and lower sampling density, as well as systematic effects such as inaccurate redshifts and biased analysis techniques. Ultimately, our results based on DEEP2 data illustrate that the evolutionary state of a galaxy at z ~ 1 is not exclusively determined by the stellar mass of the galaxy. Instead, we show that local environment appears to play a distinct role in the transformation of galaxy properties at z > 1.Comment: 10 pages, 5 Figures; Accepted for publication in MNRA

Advancing DNA barcoding and metabarcoding applications for plants requires systematic analysis of herbarium collections-an Australian perspective

Building DNA barcode databases for plants has historically been ad hoc, and often with a relatively narrow taxonomic focus. To realize the full potential of DNA barcoding for plants, and particularly its application to metabarcoding for mixed-species environmental samples, systematic sequencing of reference collections is required using an augmented set of DNA barcode loci, applied according to agreed data generation and analysis standards. The largest and most complete reference collections of plants are held in herbaria. Australia has a globally significant flora that is well sampled and expertly curated by its herbaria, coordinated through the Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria. There exists a tremendous opportunity to provide a comprehensive and taxonomically robust reference database for plant DNA barcoding applications by undertaking coordinated and systematic sequencing of the entire flora of Australia utilizing existing herbarium material. In this paper, we review the development of DNA barcoding and metabarcoding and consider the requirements for a robust and comprehensive system. We analyzed the current availability of DNA barcode reference data for Australian plants, recommend priority taxa for database inclusion, and highlight future applications of a comprehensive metabarcoding system. We urge that large-scale and coordinated analysis of herbarium collections be undertaken to realize the promise of DNA barcoding and metabarcoding, and propose that the generation and curation of reference data should become a national investment priority

A systematic variation of the stellar initial mass function in early-type galaxies

Much of our knowledge of galaxies comes from analysing the radiation emitted by their stars. It depends on the stellar initial mass function (IMF) describing the distribution of stellar masses when the population formed. Consequently knowledge of the IMF is critical to virtually every aspect of galaxy evolution. More than half a century after the first IMF determination, no consensus has emerged on whether it is universal in different galaxies. Previous studies indicated that the IMF and the dark matter fraction in galaxy centres cannot be both universal, but they could not break the degeneracy between the two effects. Only recently indications were found that massive elliptical galaxies may not have the same IMF as our Milky Way. Here we report unambiguous evidence for a strong systematic variation of the IMF in early-type galaxies as a function of their stellar mass-to-light ratio, producing differences up to a factor of three in mass. This was inferred from detailed dynamical models of the two-dimensional stellar kinematics for the large Atlas3D representative sample of nearby early-type galaxies spanning two orders of magnitude in stellar mass. Our finding indicates that the IMF depends intimately on a galaxy's formation history.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, LaTeX. Accepted for publication as a Nature Letter. More information about our Atlas3D project is available at http://purl.org/atlas3