The health and sport engagement (HASE) intervention and evaluation project: protocol for the design, outcome, process and economic evaluation of a complex community sport intervention to increase levels of physical activity.

INTRODUCTION: Sport is being promoted to raise population levels of physical activity for health. National sport participation policy focuses on complex community provision tailored to diverse local users. Few quality research studies exist that examine the role of community sport interventions in raising physical activity levels and no research to date has examined the costs and cost-effectiveness of such provision. This study is a protocol for the design, outcome, process and economic evaluation of a complex community sport intervention to increase levels of physical activity, the Health and Sport Engagement (HASE) project part of the national Get Healthy Get Active programme led by Sport England. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The HASE study is a collaborative partnership between local community sport deliverers and sport and public health researchers. It involves designing, delivering and evaluating community sport interventions. The aim is to engage previously inactive people in sustained sporting activity for 1×30 min a week and to examine associated health and well-being outcomes. The study uses mixed methods. Outcomes (physical activity, health, well-being costs to individuals) will be measured by a series of self-report questionnaires and attendance data and evaluated using interrupted time series analysis controlling for a range of sociodemographic factors. Resource use will be identified and measured using diaries, interviews and records and presented alongside effectiveness data as incremental cost-effectiveness ratios and cost-effectiveness acceptability curves. A longitudinal process evaluation (focus groups, structured observations, in-depth interview methods) will examine the efficacy of the project for achieving its aim using the principles of thematic analysis. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: The results of this study will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, academic conference presentations, Sport England and national public health organisation policy conferences, and practice-based case studies. Ethical approval was obtained through Brunel University London's research ethics committee (reference number RE33-12)

A Survey of O VI, C III, and H I in Highly Ionized High-Velocity Clouds

(ABRIDGED) We present a Far-Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer survey of highly ionized high-velocity clouds (HVCs) in 66 extragalactic sight lines. We find a total of 63 high-velocity O VI absorbers, 16 with 21 cm-emitting H I counterparts and 47 ``highly ionized'' absorbers without 21 cm emission. 11 of these high-velocity O VI absorbers are positive-velocity wings (broad O VI features extending asymmetrically to velocities of up to 300 km/s). The highly ionized HVC population is characterized by =38+/-10 km/s and <log N_a(O VI)>=13.83+/-0.36. We find that 81% (30/37) of high-velocity O VI absorbers have clear accompanying C III absorption, and 76% (29/38) have accompanying H I absorption in the Lyman series. The lower average width of the high-velocity H I absorbers implies the H I lines arise in a separate, lower temperature phase than the O VI. We find that the shape of the wing profiles is well reproduced by a radiatively cooling, vertical outflow. However, the outflow has to be patchy and out of ionization equilibrium. An alternative model, consistent with the observations, is one where the highly ionized HVCs represent the low N(H I) tail of the HVC population, with the O VI formed at the interfaces around the embedded H I cores. Though we cannot rule out a Local Group explanation, we favor a Galactic origin. This is based on the recent evidence that both H I HVCs and the million-degree gas detected in X-ray absorption are Galactic phenomena. Since the highly ionized HVCs appear to trace the interface between these two Galactic phases, it follows that highly ionized HVCs are Galactic themselves. However, the non-detection of high-velocity O VI in halo star spectra implies that any Galactic high-velocity O VI exists at z-distances beyond a few kpc.Comment: 36 pages, 14 figures (3 in color), accepted to ApJS. Some figures downgraded to limit file siz

Enhancing declarative process models with DMN decision logic

Modeling dynamic, human-centric, non-standardized and knowledge-intensive business processes with imperative process modeling approaches is very challenging. Declarative process modeling approaches are more appropriate for these processes, as they offer the run-time flexibility typically required in these cases. However, by means of a realistic healthcare process that falls in the aforementioned category, we demonstrate in this paper that current declarative approaches do not incorporate all the details needed. More specifically, they lack a way to model decision logic, which is important when attempting to fully capture these processes. We propose a new declarative language, Declare-R-DMN, which combines the declarative process modeling language Declare-R with the newly adopted OMG standard Decision Model and Notation. Aside from supporting the functionality of both languages, Declare-R-DMN also creates bridges between them. We will show that using this language results in process models that encapsulate much more knowledge, while still offering the same flexibility

Saxion Emission from SN1987A

We study the possibility of emission of the saxion, a superpartner of the axion, from SN1987A. The fact that the observed neutrino pulse from SN1987A is in excellent agreement with the current theory of supernovae places a strong bound on the energy loss into any non-standard model channel, therefore enabling bounds to be placed on the decay constant, f_a, of a light saxion. The low-energy coupling of the saxion, which couples at high energies to the QCD gauge field strength, is expected to be enhanced from QCD scaling, making it interesting to investigate if the saxion could place stronger bounds on f_a than the axion itself. Moreover, since the properties of the saxion are determined by f_a, a constraint on this parameter can be translated into a constraint on the supersymmetry breaking scale. We find that the bound on f_a from saxion emission is comparable with the one derived from axion emission due to a cancellation of leading-order terms in the soft-radiation expansion.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures; minor changes, typos corrected, version to appear in JHE

High accuracy measure of atomic polarizability in an optical lattice clock

Despite being a canonical example of quantum mechanical perturbation theory, as well as one of the earliest observed spectroscopic shifts, the Stark effect contributes the largest source of uncertainty in a modern optical atomic clock through blackbody radiation. By employing an ultracold, trapped atomic ensemble and high stability optical clock, we characterize the quadratic Stark effect with unprecedented precision. We report the ytterbium optical clock's sensitivity to electric fields (such as blackbody radiation) as the differential static polarizability of the ground and excited clock levels: 36.2612(7) kHz (kV/cm)^{-2}. The clock's fractional uncertainty due to room temperature blackbody radiation is reduced an order of magnitude to 3 \times 10^{-17}.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 2 table