Seeking New Insights: A Design Thinking Approach to Persuasive Technology Aimed at Supporting Clients of a Weight Management Program

The application of persuasive technology has been shown to be effective in a weight management context. However, it has been observed that the impact is not as significant as predicted. The aim of this project was to investigate whether a Design Thinking approach could generate new insights that could be used to drive the development of an innovative application to help people on their weight management journey. Findings show that although no radically new user needs were identified, the needs that users did express most pertinently are not effectively met by currently available technology. Further, we examined the Design Thinking approach itself and sought to identify criteria for the design of successful insight gathering activities, through end-user engagement. We summarize these at the end of this paper

Adaptive web-based educational application for autistic students

Adaptive web-based applications have proven successful in reducing navigation and comprehension problems in hypermedia documents. In this paper, we describe a toolkit that is offered as an adaptive Web-based application to help autistic students incorporate to high education. The toolkit has been developed using a popular CMS in which we have integrated a client-side adaptation library. The toolkit described here was tried out during workshops with autistic students at Leeds Becketts University to gather (mostly qualitative) feedback on the adaptation and privacy aspects of the Autism&Uni platform. That feedback was later used to improve the toolkit

Enhancing User Immersion and Virtual Presence in Interactive Multiuser Virtual Environments through the Development and Integration of a Gesture-Centric Natural User Interface Developed from Existing Virtual Reality Technologies

Immersion, referring to the level of physical or psychological submergence of a user within a virtual space relative to that user's consciousness of the real-world environment, has predominantly been established as an indispensable part of interactive media designs. This is most prevalent in Virtual Reality (VR) platforms, as their applications are typically reliant on user believability. With a wide variation of possible methodologies for the enhancement of this feature, the collectively recognised paradigm lies on the emphasis of naturalism in the design of the virtual system [7]. Though widely used by some specialised VR applications [4] such concepts are yet to be fully explored in the more contemporary virtual systems such as Social Immersive Virtual Environment (SIVE). The focus of the study described in this paper are the techniques being developed to enhance user immersion, virtual presence and co-presence in a SIVE application, through the design and integration of a VR-based Natural User Interface (NUI) that allows users to naturally and intuitively interact with the virtual environment and other networked users through the utilisation of full body gesture controls. These gestural controls prioritise the emulation of the alternate equivalent of such real-wold interactions, whilst also providing an interface for the seamless and unobtrusive translation of the user's real-world physical state into the virtual environment through intuitive user to virtual avatar proprioceptive coordination. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

WiBAF into a CMS: Personalization in learning environments made easy

Adaptivity has proven successful in reducing navigation and comprehension problems in hypermedia documents. Authoring of adaptive hypermedia documents and especially of the adaptivity in these documents has been problematic or at least labour intensive throughout AH history. This paper shows how the integration of a CMS with an adaptive framework greatly simplifies the inclusion of personalization in existing educational applications. It does this within the context of European project Autism&Uni that uses adaptive hypermedia to offer information for students transitioning from high school to university, especially to cater for students on the autism spectrum as well as for non-autistic students. The use of our Within Browser adaptation framework (WiBAF) reduces privacy concerns because the user model is stored on the end-user's machine, and eliminates performance issues that currently prevent the adoption of adaptivity in MOOC platforms by having the adaptation performed on the end-user's machine as well (within the browser). Authoring of adaptive applications within the educational domain with the system proposed was tried out with first year students from the Design-Based Learning Hypermedia course at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) to gather feedback on the problems they faced with the platform

Tuberculosis incidence correlates with sunshine : an ecological 28-year time series study

Birmingham is the largest UK city after London, and central Birmingham has an annual tuberculosis incidence of 80 per 100,000. We examined seasonality and sunlight as drivers of tuberculosis incidence. Hours of sunshine are seasonal, sunshine exposure is necessary for the production of vitamin D by the body and vitamin D plays a role in the host response to tuberculosis. Methods: We performed an ecological study that examined tuberculosis incidence in Birmingham from Dec 1981 to Nov 2009, using publicly-available data from statutory tuberculosis notifications, and related this to the seasons and hours of sunshine (UK Meteorological Office data) using unmeasured component models. Results: There were 9,739 tuberculosis cases over the study period. There was strong evidence for seasonality, with notifications being 24.1% higher in summer than winter (p<0.001). Winter dips in sunshine correlated with peaks in tuberculosis incidence six months later (4.7% increase in incidence for each 100 hours decrease in sunshine, p<0.001). Discussion and Conclusion: A potential mechanism for these associations includes decreased vitamin D levels with consequent impaired host defence arising from reduced sunshine exposure in winter. This is the longest time series of any published study and our use of statutory notifications means this data is essentially complete. We cannot, however, exclude the possibility that another factor closely correlated with the seasons, other than sunshine, is responsible. Furthermore, exposure to sunlight depends not only on total hours of sunshine but also on multiple individual factors. Our results should therefore be considered hypothesis-generating. Confirmation of a potential causal relationship between winter vitamin D deficiency and summer peaks in tuberculosis incidence would require a randomized-controlled trial of the effect of vitamin D supplementation on future tuberculosis incidence

Explicitly symmetrical treatment of three-body phase space

We derive expressions for three-body phase space that are explicitly symmetrical in the masses of the three particles. We study geometrical properties of the variables involved in elliptic integrals and demonstrate that it is convenient to use the Jacobian zeta function to express the results in four and six dimensions.Comment: 20 pages, latex, 2 postscript figure

Oferta de vegetales y frutas en la alimentación escolar a partir de la adquisición local de alimentos: el caso de un municipio brasileño

Antecedentes/Objetivos: Los Programas de Alimentación Escolar (PAE) vinculados a la adquisición de alimentos locales se consideran estratégicos para la promoción de la Seguridad Alimentaria y Nutricional. En el año 2009 el gobierno brasileño implementó una legislación nacional para el PAE que hace obligatoria la adquisición local de alimentos de la agricultura familiar. El objetivo de esta investigación fue evaluar el impacto de la adquisición local de alimentos de la agricultura familiar en la oferta de vegetales y frutas en la alimentación escolar en un municipio de Santa Catarina/Brasil. Métodos: Estudio cuasi experimental, donde se analizaron las cantidades per cápita (kilogramo/alumno/año) y las variedades (n) de frutas y vegetales adquiridas en dos años anteriores (2008/2009) y dos posteriores (2010/2011) a la implementación de la actual legislación del programa. Se realizó un análisis descriptivo. Resultados: Los resultados muestran una reducción progresiva en la cantidad per cápita anual de frutas en los años analizados: 7 kg (2008); 5,8 kg (2009); 5,5 kg (2010) 4,4 kg (2011), con una tasa de variación de –37% en relación a 2008. Respecto a la variedad de las frutas, fueron adquiridas 6 en 2008, 2009 y 2010 y 5 en 2011. En 2010 y 2011, la agricultura familiar suministró 2 y 1 variedad respectivamente. En los vegetales se observó reducción en la cantidad en los dos primeros años y aumento en los dos posteriores: 1,9 kg (2008); 1,8 kg (2009); 2,9 kg (2010); 3,05 kg (2011), con una tasa de variación de 60% en relación a 2008. Además se observó un aumento en la variedad: 7 (2008), 6 (2009) y 11 (2010/2011), que puede atribuirse a la adquisición de alimentos de la agricultura familiar, ya que aportó 7 de las variedades en 2010 y 2011. Conclusiones: Aunque la legislación del programa parece no revertir la reducción en la adquisición de frutas del período estudiado, se evidencia un incremento de la cantidad y variedad de vegetales que redundan en la mejora de la calidad alimentaria. Estos resultados sugieren que la adquisición de alimentos locales influye positivamente en la alimentación escolar.Convocatoria MCT/MDS/SAGI/CNPq Nº36/2010

Breaking Of Conformal Invariance And Electromagnetic Field Generation In The Universe

It is shown that the breaking of the conformal invariance in quantum electrodynamics due to the trace anomaly results in the generation of long wave electromagnetic fields during inflationary stage of the universe evolution. If the coefficient of the logarithmic charge renormalization is large (due to a large number of charged particles species), these primordial electromagnetic fields can be strong enough to create the observed galactic magnetic fields.Comment: 6 pages, UM - TH - 93 - 0

Toedeling van zaken aan en binnen gerechten (2 delen)

This international comparative study was set up to make an inventory of ways to manage case assignment between and within courts. Index Part IIAustriaEngland and WalesItalyNetherlandsNorwayPortugalQuébec, CanadaDe doelstelling van dit project is om inzicht te verkrijgen in de wijze waarop andere landen hun stelsel van rechtspraak hebben ingericht (absolute en relatieve competentie). De huidige bepalingen over relatieve competentie worden als knellend ervaren. Zij raken aan belangrijke vragen over het rechtsbestel, bijvoorbeeld betreffende toegankelijkheid, beheersmatig optimale omvang, aansluiting bij competentie ketenpartners (politie, OM, deurwaarder, advocaten). Vragen: Hoe hebben te selecteren landen hun stelsel van rechtspraak ingericht? Welke knelpunten doen zich daarbij voor? Worden deze opgelost en zo ja hoe

Radiative corrections in K --> 3 pi decays

We investigate radiative corrections to K --> 3 pi decays. In particular, we extend the non-relativistic framework developed recently to include real and virtual photons and show that, in a well-defined power counting scheme, the results reproduce corrections obtained in the relativistic calculation. Real photons are included exactly, beyond the soft-photon approximation, and we compare the result with the latter. The singularities generated by pionium near threshold are investigated, and a region is identified where standard perturbation theory in the fine structure constant alpha may be applied. We expect that the formulae provided allow one to extract S-wave pi pi scattering lengths from the cusp effect in these decays with high precision.Comment: 57 pages, 17 figure