Working Paper: Measuring Job Creation in Private Sector Development

The Donor Committee for Enterprise Development (DCED) Standard offers a best practice by outlining the key elements for practically and credibly estimating the results of Private Sector Development programmes, in a process which can be managed by programmes internally. It involves a few common impact indicators to ensure that donors will be able to add up their results across country programmes. The Standard is being piloted on a multi-agency basis; the DCED invites new programmes to join in adopting the approach

Combining Savings Groups with Agricultural Marketing in Tanzania

Preliminary findings of the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) programme in Tanzania suggest that by federating Savings Groups into collective marketing structures, the capacity of their members to engage in joint marketing is enhanced. The federated market structure leverages the trust and confidence, created amongst group members through regular financial transactions, to build a more solid platform to joint marketing structures

The Importance of Monitoring Sleep within Adolescent Athletes: Athletic, Academic, and Health Considerations

Opinion piece

Sleep Medication and Athletic Performance—The Evidence for Practitioners and Future Research Directions

Opinion piece

Increasing access to CBT for psychosis patients: a feasibility, randomised controlled trial evaluating brief, targeted CBT for distressing voices delivered by assistant psychologists (GiVE2)

Background: The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommends that Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for psychosis (CBTp) is offered to all patients with a psychosis diagnosis. However, only a minority of psychosis patients in England and Wales are offered CBTp. This is attributable, in part, to the resource-intensive nature of CBTp. One response to this problem has been the development of CBTp in brief formats that are targeted at a single symptom and the mechanisms that maintain distress. We have developed a brief form of CBTp for distressing voices and reported preliminary evidence for its effectiveness when delivered by highly trained therapists (clinical psychologists). This study will investigate the delivery of this intervention by a cost-effective workforce of assistant psychologists following a brief training and evaluate the acceptability and feasibility of conducting a future, definitive, randomised controlled trial (RCT). Methods: This is a feasibility study for a pragmatic, three-arm, parallel-group, superiority 1:1:1 RCT comparing a Guided self-help CBT intervention for voices and treatment as usual (GiVE) to Supportive Counselling and treatment as usual (SC) to treatment as usual alone (TAU), recruiting across two sites, with blinded post-treatment and follow-up assessments. A process evaluation will quantitatively and qualitatively explore stakeholder experience. Discussion: Expected outcomes will include an assessment of the feasibility of conducting a definitive RCT, and data to inform the calculation of its sample size. If evidence from a subsequent, fully powered RCT suggests that GiVE is clinically and cost-effective when delivered by briefly trained assistant psychologists, CBTp offered in these less resource-intensive forms has the potential to generate benefits for individual patients (reduced distress, enhanced recovery and enhanced quality of life), service-level patient benefit (increased access to evidence-based psychological therapies) and economic benefits to the NHS (in terms of the reduced use of mental health inpatient services). Trial registration: Current Controlled Trials, ISRCTN registration number: 16166070. Registered on 5 February 2019

Streamer Propagation as a Pattern Formation Problem: Planar Fronts

Streamers often constitute the first stage of dielectric breakdown in strong electric fields: a nonlinear ionization wave transforms a non-ionized medium into a weakly ionized nonequilibrium plasma. New understanding of this old phenomenon can be gained through modern concepts of (interfacial) pattern formation. As a first step towards an effective interface description, we determine the front width, solve the selection problem for planar fronts and calculate their properties. Our results are in good agreement with many features of recent three-dimensional numerical simulations.Comment: 4 pages, revtex, 3 ps file

Game Jam [4Research]

International audienceRecent years have witnessed a rise in Game Jams - organized events to create playable prototypes in avery short time frame. Game Jams offer a unique and quick way to prototype games. Beyond that, we believe Game Jams can also be seen as a design research method, situated in the research-through-design tradition, to create knowledge in a fast-paced, collaborative environment. The goal of this Game Jam is thus twofold: first, participants will use the Game Jam approach to investigate a research question; second, participants can, through actual practice, identify advantages and disadvantages of Game Jams as a research method. Hereby the Game Jam workshop provides a unique opportunity for HCI practitioners and researchers to gain experience in applying gameoriented methods for research

Recursive quantum repeater networks

Internet-scale quantum repeater networks will be heterogeneous in physical technology, repeater functionality, and management. The classical control necessary to use the network will therefore face similar issues as Internet data transmission. Many scalability and management problems that arose during the development of the Internet might have been solved in a more uniform fashion, improving flexibility and reducing redundant engineering effort. Quantum repeater network development is currently at the stage where we risk similar duplication when separate systems are combined. We propose a unifying framework that can be used with all existing repeater designs. We introduce the notion of a Quantum Recursive Network Architecture, developed from the emerging classical concept of 'recursive networks', extending recursive mechanisms from a focus on data forwarding to a more general distributed computing request framework. Recursion abstracts independent transit networks as single relay nodes, unifies software layering, and virtualizes the addresses of resources to improve information hiding and resource management. Our architecture is useful for building arbitrary distributed states, including fundamental distributed states such as Bell pairs and GHZ, W, and cluster states.Comment: 14 page

Magic state distillation in all prime dimensions using quantum Reed-Muller codes

We propose families of protocols for magic state distillation -- important components of fault tolerance schemes --- for systems of odd prime dimension. Our protocols utilize quantum Reed-Muller codes with transversal non-Clifford gates. We find that, in higher dimensions, small and effective codes can be used that have no direct analogue in qubit (two-dimensional) systems. We present several concrete protocols, including schemes for three-dimensional (qutrit) and five-dimensional (ququint) systems. The five-dimensional protocol is, by many measures, the best magic state distillation scheme yet discovered. It excels both in terms of error threshold with respect to depolarising noise (36.3%) and the efficiency measure know as "yield", where, for a large region of parameters, it outperforms its qubit counterpart by many orders of magnitude.Comment: Updated from V1 to include results on the remarkable d=5 cas