Health in Mind: Improving Education Through Wellness

Educators know that healthy students are better prepared to learn and succeed in school. It's also known that people who are better educated and obtain a college education have lower rates of health conditions and longer life expectancy. Yet current health and education policy misses several simple but vital opportunities to boost academic success through health promotion and school wellness. The nation's current generation of students could become the first to live shorter and less healthy lives than their parents. At the same time, our nation faces a growing achievement gap: Students who attend school in communities with lower socioeconomic status have lower academic outcomes than students in higher socioeconomic status communities. Overwhelmingly, the underserved communities predominantly comprise ethnic minority residents, which propagates a racial chasm. Research is increasingly confirming a link between the achievement gap and health disparities. For this reason, Healthy Schools Campaign and Trust for America's Health developed "Health in Mind: Improving Education Through Wellness". This effort focuses on policy recommendations for immediate, practical changes at the federal level to help close the achievement gap and create a healthy future for all children

Research in IAM - MSc Briefings

This share contains a set of slides intended to help Web Technology MSc students become acquainted with the research in IAM and so to choose a topic for their summer projects and dissertations

Integration of a Cognitive Assessment Task into Exergame Gameplay Elements

Lack of exercise is related to a variety of health issues, including cognitive decline in older adults. Tools for encouraging regular exercise such as exergames are a useful preventative measure, but regular screening for impairment is still important. However, standard cognitive screening methods can be both time-consuming and tedious. Integrating these screening methods into a frequently played exergame is one way to enable regular screening, but requires that the integration is not obtrusive and does not interfere with the gameplay. We present an exergame in which a standard cognitive screening tool, the AX-Continuous Performance Task, is integrated into the game in a non-obstrusive fashion. As an starting step in assessing this approach, we validate the comparability of the measurement capacity of this integrated tool by assessing user performance in the test with non-impaired adults. Our results indicate that the test is comparable to the traditional form of the test when conducted within the context of a game, and is not clearly perceived as a test rather than a gameplay element by the users. However, increasing task complexity through additional gameplay elements does interfere with task performance

An update on salicylic acid biosynthesis, its induction and potential exploitation by plant viruses.

Salicylic acid (SA) is a plant hormone essential for effective resistance to viral and non-viral pathogens. SA biosynthesis increases rapidly in resistant hosts when a dominant host resistance gene product recognizes a pathogen. SA stimulates resistance to viral replication, intercellular spread and systemic movement. However, certain viruses stimulate SA biosynthesis in susceptible hosts. This paradoxical effect limits virus titer and prevents excessive host damage, suggesting that these viruses exploit SA-induced resistance to optimize their accumulation. Recent work showed that SA production in plants does not simply recapitulate bacterial SA biosynthetic mechanisms, and that the relative contributions of the shikimate and phenylpropanoid pathways to the SA pool differ markedly between plant species.Work by AMM and JPC was supported by grants from UK Biotechnological and Biological Sciences Research Council (SCPRID grant number BB/J011762/1, and GCRF grant number BB/P023223/1). Work by TZ was supported by grants from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China (2018YFD020062, 2016ZX08010-001), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31371912) and a grant from the Ministry of Education of China (the 111 Project B13006)

Ensuring Compliance: The Case of the Private Rented Sector

regulation, law and economics, governance, compliance, renting

Interactive Multi-Submission Deposit Workflows for Desktop Applications

Online submission and publishing is the norm for academic researchers. With the pressure on these authors to submit their work to conferences, journals and Institutional Repositories, this leads to demands on the author to go through multiple web based interfaces, filling in forms with the same information multiple times before they can submit. At the same time, each of these services in turn will have made policy decisions on what types of format they allow and what templates the content has to conform to. The amount of work expected of the author does not adding up to the potential gain, thus most authors will only submit into the repository or publication where they foresee the most benefit. In this paper we propose a solution to this problem that embeds the workflow for multiple submissions into the desktop application of the author, most commonly Microsoft Word. We also propose extending the work done on the Microsoft Word Author Add-in tool to allow two-way negotiation between each repository and the desktop application

Salt Dissolution and Surface Subsidence in Central Kansas: A Seismic Investigation of the Anthropogenic and Natural Origin Models

Gradual subsidence in the Punkin Center study area, northeast Reno County, Kansas, has resulted in ponding of surface waters, abandonment of at least one oil well, and damage to county roads. Because the Punkin Center area is within the Burrton oil field and is underlain by the Hutchinson Salt Member, surface subsidence historically has been attributed to salt dissolution of anthropogenic origin. Subsidence that occurred significant distances from any known well sites has been attributed to unrecorded abandoned wells or complex asymmetric patterns of salt dissolution that originated at a drillhole. To ascertain the validity of the widely accepted anthropogenic salt-dissolution model, a 4-km seismic reflection profile was acquired along an east-west-oriented county road adjacent to an abandoned oil well. The expectation was that the residual Hutchinson Salt Member would be anomalously thin where maximum recorded surface subsidence occurred and thicker elsewhere. Contrary to expectations, the residual Hutchinson Salt Member is relatively thick (20-30 m) below areas of significant recent surface subsidence. There is no evidence of recent surface subsidence at those locations along the seismic profile where the rock salt has been totally leached. At these sites dissolution and subsidence is interpreted to predate European settlement in Kansas and to be of natural origin. The presence of dissolution and subsidence features related to natural processes has implications for developing an understanding of the potentially complex relationship between anthropogenic activities and pre-existing geologic conditions. Sinkhole development is apparently a natural and expected process along an irregular salt dissolution front. The geometry of this front may be influenced strongly by geologic factors (e.g., fracture patterns and facies distribution). The results are that not all modern sinkhole development has a clear-cut anthropogenic cause, and the potential for adverse impact resulting from anthropogenic activities will be influenced strongly by pre-existing geologic conditions. Efficient management decisions along the dissolution front related to well location and well-site practices should take into account natural processes that previously have and will continue to have an effect on salt dissolution and surface subsidence

Guest editorial: Queer theory and criminology

In 2015, queer theorist Heather Love called for her fellow queer scholars to recognise the centrality of the study of norms and deviance to ‘the intellectual genealogy’ of queer studies. She argued that queer approaches and understandings, with their ‘embrace of a politics of stigma’ and ‘reliance on a general category of social marginality’, were ‘borrowed’ from mid-20th century social science studies of deviance (Love, 2015: 75). For most criminologists, it is axiomatic that this tradition is equally central to our own genealogy, and our concerns with deviance, normativity, social control and the production of power and marginalisation. Despite this shared set of concerns, queer theory and criminology have little contemporary crossover. We share Love’s concern around this state of affairs, but where she is primarily concerned about the stakes for queer studies, the focus of our Special Issue is on what criminologists can gain from greater engagement with the analytic and conceptual tools of queer theory