The Preventing Australian Football Injuries with Exercise (PAFIX) Study: a group randomised controlled trial

Background: Knee injuries are a major injury concern for Australian Football players and participants of many other sports worldwide. There is increasing evidence from laboratory and biomechanically focused studies about the likely benefit of targeted exercise programmes to prevent knee injuries. However, there have been few international studies that have evaluated the effectiveness of such programmes in the real-world context of community sport that have combined epidemiological, behavioural and biomechanical approaches. Objective: To implement a fully piloted and tested exercise training intervention to reduce the number of football-related knee injuries. In so doing, to evaluate the intervention's effectiveness in the real-world context of community football and to determine if the underlying neural and biomechanical training adaptations are associated with decreased risk of injury. Setting: Adult players from community-level Australian Football clubs in two Australian states over the 2007-08 playing seasons. Methods: A group-clustered randomised controlled trial with teams of players randomly allocated to either a coach-delivered targeted exercise programme or usual behaviour (control). Epidemiological component: field- based injury surveillance and monitoring of training/game exposures. Behavioural component: evaluation of player and coach attitudes, knowledge, behaviours and com- pliance, both before and after the intervention is implemented. Biomechanical component: biomechanical, game mobility and neuromuscular parameters assessed to determine the fundamental effect of training on these factors and injury risk. Outcome measures: The rate and severity of injury in the intervention group compared with the control group. Changes, if any, in behavioural components. Process evaluation: coach delivery factors and likely sustainability

Investigating people: a qualitative analysis of the search behaviours of open-source intelligence analysts

The Internet and the World Wide Web have become integral parts of the lives of many modern individuals, enabling almost instantaneous communication, sharing and broadcasting of thoughts, feelings and opinions. Much of this information is publicly facing, and as such, it can be utilised in a multitude of online investigations, ranging from employee vetting and credit checking to counter-terrorism and fraud prevention/detection. However, the search needs and behaviours of these investigators are not well documented in the literature. In order to address this gap, an in-depth qualitative study was carried out in cooperation with a leading investigation company. The research contribution is an initial identification of Open-Source Intelligence investigator search behaviours, the procedures and practices that they undertake, along with an overview of the difficulties and challenges that they encounter as part of their domain. This lays the foundation for future research in to the varied domain of Open-Source Intelligence gathering

The new biology of ageing

Human life expectancy in developed countries has increased steadily for over 150 years, through improvements in public health and lifestyle. More people are hence living long enough to suffer age-related loss of function and disease, and there is a need to improve the health of older people. Ageing is a complex process of damage accumulation, and has been viewed as experimentally and medically intractable. This view has been reinforced by the realization that ageing is a disadvantageous trait that evolves as a side effect of mutation accumulation or a benefit to the young, because of the decline in the force of natural selection at later ages. However, important recent discoveries are that mutations in single genes can extend lifespan of laboratory model organisms and that the mechanisms involved are conserved across large evolutionary distances, including to mammals. These mutations keep the animals functional and pathology-free to later ages, and they can protect against specific ageing-related diseases, including neurodegenerative disease and cancer. Preliminary indications suggest that these new findings from the laboratory may well also apply to humans. Translating these discoveries into medical treatments poses new challenges, including changing clinical thinking towards broad-spectrum, preventative medicine and finding novel routes to drug development

Exact Site Percolation Thresholds Using the Site-to-Bond and Star-Triangle Transformations

I construct a two-dimensional lattice on which the inhomogeneous site percolation threshold is exactly calculable and use this result to find two more lattices on which the site thresholds can be determined. The primary lattice studied here, the ``martini lattice'', is a hexagonal lattice with every second site transformed into a triangle. The site threshold of this lattice is found to be $0.764826...$, while the others have $0.618034...$ and $1/\sqrt{2}$. This last solution suggests a possible approach to establishing the bound for the hexagonal site threshold, $p_c<1/\sqrt{2}$. To derive these results, I solve a correlated bond problem on the hexagonal lattice by use of the star-triangle transformation and then, by a particular choice of correlations, solve the site problem on the martini lattice.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures. Submitted to Physical Review

Acute military psychiatric casualties from the war in Iraq

Background: The view that most military personnel evacuated from war zones are suffering from combat stress reactions, or are otherwise traumatised by the horrors of war, has an impact on all aspects of military psychiatry. Aims: To delineate the reasons for psychiatric aeromedical evacuation from Iraq from the start of build-up of UK forces in January 2003 until the end of October that year, 6 months after the end of formal hostilities. Method: A retrospective study was conducted of field and in-patient psychiatric assessments of 116 military personnel evacuated to the UK military psychiatric in-patient facility in Catterick Garrison. Results: Evacuees were mainly non-combatants (69%). A significant proportion were in reserve service (21%) and had a history of contact with mental health services (37%). Only 3% had a combat stress reaction. In over 85% of cases evacuation was for low mood attributed to separation from friends or family, or difficulties adjusting to the environment. Conclusions: These findings have implications especially for screening for suitability for deployment, and for understanding any longer-term mental health problems arising in veterans from Iraq

2D and 3D reconstructions in acousto-electric tomography

We propose and test stable algorithms for the reconstruction of the internal conductivity of a biological object using acousto-electric measurements. Namely, the conventional impedance tomography scheme is supplemented by scanning the object with acoustic waves that slightly perturb the conductivity and cause the change in the electric potential measured on the boundary of the object. These perturbations of the potential are then used as the data for the reconstruction of the conductivity. The present method does not rely on "perfectly focused" acoustic beams. Instead, more realistic propagating spherical fronts are utilized, and then the measurements that would correspond to perfect focusing are synthesized. In other words, we use \emph{synthetic focusing}. Numerical experiments with simulated data show that our techniques produce high quality images, both in 2D and 3D, and that they remain accurate in the presence of high-level noise in the data. Local uniqueness and stability for the problem also hold

Time reversal in thermoacoustic tomography - an error estimate

The time reversal method in thermoacoustic tomography is used for approximating the initial pressure inside a biological object using measurements of the pressure wave made on a surface surrounding the object. This article presents error estimates for the time reversal method in the cases of variable, non-trapping sound speeds.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, expanded "Remarks and Conclusions" section, added one figure, added reference