National Child Measurement Programme: Detailed Analysis of the 2006/07 National Dataset

The National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) weighs and measures the height of children in Reception (typically aged 4–5 years) and Year 6 (aged 10–11 years). The findings are used to inform local planning and delivery of services for children and gather population-level surveillance data to allow analysis of trends in excess weight. The programme also seeks to raise awareness of the importance of healthy weight in children. The NCMP is part of the government’s strategy to tackle the continuing rise in excess weight across the population. This report analyses the NCMP 2007/08 national dataset provided by the NHS Information Centre for Health and Social Care (NHS IC). The NHS IC collates and analyses NCMP data centrally after they have been collected at a local level and submitted by Primary Care Trusts (PCTs), with the support and cooperation of schools, children and parents. This report follows on from the report National Child Measurement Programme: 2007/08 school year, headline results (NHS IC 2007/08 NCMP report) published by the NHS IC in December 2008. It presents detailed secondary analysis to further our understanding of the epidemiology of child height, weight and Body Mass Index (BMI) across the country, and attempts to explain some of the findings presented in the NHS IC 2007/08 NCMP report. The National Obesity Observatory (NOO) will conduct further analyses following this report. The existence of different approaches to defining obesity means that the interpretation and comparison of prevalence data is more complex than it might initially appear. Health Survey for England (HSE) findings, in agreement with other data, show that over the last twenty years the proportion of the child population classified as overweight or obese has increased. In addition, HSE data also show an increase in mean BMI over the past decade for children. The NCMP dataset contains anonymised information on individual children who have been measured. This, combined with the size of the dataset, means the NCMP data provide a powerful tool to examine changes in child weight status. This can provide much more detail than simply the prevalence of overweight and obesity. This report presents analysis of PCT participation levels and investigates data quality issues in the collection of the 2007/08 NCMP dataset. Data on prevalence of underweight, healthy weight, overweight and obesity are analysed, comparing the 2007/08 data to 2006/07 and the 1990 baseline. Analyses by deprivation and ethnic group are also included. The report goes on to examine how the distribution of BMI differs by age and sex of the child sample population and investigates changes since the 1990 baseline. It also looks at the association between obesity prevalence and characteristics of both the individual children and the PCTs in which they were measured, using regression analysis

National child measurement programme: detailed analysis of the 2007/08 national dataset

This report presents detailed secondary analyses to further our understanding of the epidemiology of child height, weight and Body Mass Index (BMI) across England. It attempts to explain some of the findings presented in the NHS Information Centre for Health and Social Care 2007/08 NCMP report. The report provides analysis of PCT participation levels and investigates data quality issues in the collection of the 2007/08 NCMP dataset. Data on prevalence of underweight, healthy weight, overweight and obesity are analysed, comparing the 2007/08 data to the 2006/07, and the 1990 baseline. Analyses by deprivation and ethnic group are also included. The report further examines how the distribution of BMI differs by age and sex of the child sample population, and investigates changes since the 1990 baseline. It looks at the association between obesity prevalence and characteristics of the individual children and the PCTs in which they were measured using regression analysis

Formalized Verification of Snapshotable Trees: Separation and Sharing

Abstract. We use separation logic to specify and verify a Java program that implements snapshotable search trees, fully formalizing the specification and verification in the Coq proof assistant. We achieve local and modular reasoning about a tree and its snapshots and their iterators, although the implementation involves shared mutable heap data structures with no separation or ownership relation between the various data. The paper also introduces a series of four increasingly sophisticated implementations and verifies the first one. The others are included as future work and as a set of challenge problems for full functional specification and verification, whether by separation logic or by other formalisms.

Health economic assessment tools (HEAT) for walking and for cycling

Physical inactivity is a significant public health problem in most regions of the world, which is unlikely to be solved by classical health promotion approaches alone. The promotion of active transport (cycling and walking) for everyday physical activity is a win-win approach; it not only promotes health but can also lead to positive environmental effects, especially if cycling and walking replace short car trips. Cycling and walking can also be more readily integrated into people’s busy schedules than, for example, leisure-time exercise. These forms of physical activity are also more practicable for groups of the population for which sport is either not feasible because of physical limitations or is not an accessible leisure activity for economic, social or cultural reasons. There is a large potential for active travel in European urban transport, as many trips are short and would be amenable to being undertaken on foot or by bicycle. This, however, requires effective partnerships with the transport and urban planning sectors, whose policies are key driving forces in providing appropriate conditions for such behavioural changes to take place. This has been recognized by a number of international policy frameworks, such as the Action Plan for implementation of the European Strategy for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases 2012–2016, adopted by the WHO Regional Committee for Europe (1). The strategy identifies the promotion of active mobility as one of the supporting interventions endorsed by WHO Member States to address this highpriority topic in the European Region, as do other international policy frameworks such as the Toronto Charter for Physical Activity launched in May 2010 as a global call for action (2)

Modular termination verification for non-blocking concurrency

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016.We present Total-TaDA, a program logic for verifying the total correctness of concurrent programs: that such programs both terminate and produce the correct result. With Total-TaDA, we can specify constraints on a thread’s concurrent environment that are necessary to guarantee termination. This allows us to verify total correctness for nonblocking algorithms, e.g. a counter and a stack. Our specifications can express lock- and wait-freedom. More generally, they can express that one operation cannot impede the progress of another, a new non-blocking property we call non-impedance. Moreover, our approach is modular. We can verify the operations of a module independently, and build up modules on top of each other

Short-range order and precipitation in Fe-rich Fe-Cr alloys: Atomistic off-lattice Monte Carlo simulations

Short-range order (SRO) in Fe-rich Fe-Cr alloys is investigated by means of atomistic off-lattice Monte Carlo simulations in the semi-grand canonical ensemble using classical interatomic potentials. The SRO parameter defined by Cowley [Phys. Rev. B 77, 669 (1950)] is used to quantify the degree of ordering. In agreement with experiments a strong ordering tendency in the Cr distribution at low Cr concentrations (~< 5%) is observed, as manifested in negative values of the SRO parameters. For intermediate Cr concentrations (5% ~< c_Cr ~< 15%) the SRO parameter for the alpha-phase goes through a minimum, but at the solubility limit the alpha-phase still displays a rather strong SRO. In thermodynamic equilibrium for concentrations within the two-phase region the SRO parameter measured over the entire sample therefore comprises the contributions from both the alpha and alpha-prime phases. If both of these contributions are taken into account, it is possible to quantitatively reproduce the experimental results and interpret their physical implications. It is thereby shown that the inversion of the SRO observed experimentally is due to the formation of stable (supercritical) alpha-prime precipitates. It is not related to the loss of SRO in the alpha-phase or to the presence of unstable (subcritical) Cr precipitates in the alpha-phase.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

DEDD regulates degradation of intermediate filaments during apoptosis

Apoptosis depends critically on regulated cytoskeletal reorganization events in a cell. We demonstrate that death effector domain containing DNA binding protein (DEDD), a highly conserved and ubiquitous death effector domain containing protein, exists predominantly as mono- or diubiquitinated, and that diubiquitinated DEDD interacts with both the K8/18 intermediate filament network and pro–caspase-3. Early in apoptosis, both cytosolic DEDD and its close homologue DEDD2 formed filaments that colocalized with and depended on K8/18 and active caspase-3. Subsequently, these filamentous structures collapsed into intracellular inclusions that migrated into cytoplasmic blebs and contained DEDD, DEDD2, active caspase-3, and caspase-3–cleaved K18 late in apoptosis. Biochemical studies further confirmed that DEDD coimmunoprecipitated with both K18 and pro–caspase-3, and kinetic analyses placed apoptotic DEDD staining prior to caspase-3 activation and K18 cleavage. In addition, both caspase-3 activation and K18 cleavage was inhibited by expression of DEDDΔNLS1-3, a cytosolic form of DEDD that cannot be ubiquitinated. Finally, siRNA mediated DEDD knockdown cells exhibited inhibition of staurosporine-induced DNA degradation. Our data suggest that DEDD represents a novel scaffold protein that directs the effector caspase-3 to certain substrates facilitating their ordered degradation during apoptosis