(Eco)design for a revitalized built environment: towards a new model for an active mixed-use architecture for the rejuvenation of the city of Durban.

Master’s degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.The purpose of this research document was to determine a relevant and responsible architecture that could act as a model of an active mixed-use building typology that would contribute towards the rejuvenation of the Durban inner city, utilising biodiversity as an active component of building design to improve the built environment as well as the livelihood of the urban user. The nature of this architecture was generated through the investigation of current literature, case and precedent studies and personally conducted interviews with informed professionals that would provide knowledge and insight to ultimately confirm the hypothesis; that the integration of nature with the built environment can utilise ecological system services to contribute towards urban sustainability and resiliency targets, whilst simultaneously connecting the urban user with biodiversity and effectively providing a positive influence on their physical, mental and psychological well-being. Ultimately, the data gathered in this document would inform an appropriate architecture that will meet the requirements of the eThekwini 2040 Inner City Local Area Plan and act as a model for future projects within the Durban built environment

Using self-determination theory to predict self-management and HRQoL in moderate-to-severe COPD

Objective: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a long-term condition that detrimentally affects health-related quality of life (HRQoL), with self-management proposed as an effective treatment. Using self-determination theory (SDT), this research explored psychological need satisfaction, frustration, and behavioural regulation to explain indicators of self-management. Design and Main Outcome Measures: Cross-sectional, questionnaire-based methods in people on a pulmonary rehabilitation waiting-list. 72 participants completed SDT, HRQoL, and self-management knowledge questionnaires. Path analyses investigated the ability of SDT concepts to predict self-management knowledge and HRQoL. Results: Chi-square tests found no significant differences (χ2(13, N=72) = 16.7, p > 0.05) between the just – and over-identified models, and multiple measures suggested an acceptable fit to the data. Relatedness frustration positively predicted controlled regulation and autonomy and relatedness satisfaction positively predicted autonomous regulation. The associations between the other needs and the different regulation types were not statistically significant. Both regulation types strongly predicted HRQoL (35% variance explained) and self-management knowledge (22% variance explained). Conclusion: SDT concepts can predict more self-determined self-management regulation, self-management knowledge, and HRQoL and provide a framework for researchers and healthcare professionals to develop future health interventions for people with COPD. Greater research is needed to understand basic psychological need frustration in health contexts

Utility of international normative 20 m shuttle run values for identifying youth at increased cardiometabolic risk

The purpose of this study was to examine the ability of international normative centiles for the 20 m shuttle run test (20mSRT) to identify youth at increased cardiometabolic risk. This was a cross-sectional study involving 961 children aged 10–17 years (53% girls) from the United Kingdom. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves determined the discriminatory ability of cardiorespiratory fitness percentiles for predicting increased cardiometabolic risk. ROC analysis demonstrated a significant but poor discriminatory accuracy of cardiorespiratory fitness in identifying low/high cardiometabolic risk in girls (AUC = 0.58, 95% CI: 0.54–0.63; p = 0.04), and in boys (AUC = 0.59, 95% CI: 0.54–0.63; p = 0.03). The cardiorespiratory fitness cut-off associated with high cardiometabolic risk was the 55th percentile (sensitivity = 33.3%; specificity = 84.5%) in girls and the 60th percentile (sensitivity = 42.9%; specificity = 73.6%) in boys. These 20mSRT percentile thresholds can be used to identify children and adolescents who may benefit from lifestyle intervention. Nonetheless, further work involving different populations and cardiometabolic risk scores comprising of different variables are needed to confirm our initial findings

ClassyFire: automated chemical classification with a comprehensive, computable taxonomy

Additional file 5. Use cases. Text-based search on the ClassyFire web server. (A) Building the query. (B) Sparteine, one of the returned compounds

Factors associated with low fitness in adolescents – A mixed methods study

Background: Fitness and physical activity are important for cardiovascular and mental health but activity and fitness levels are declining especially in adolescents and among girls. This study examines clustering of factors associated with low fitness in adolescents in order to best target public health interventions for young people. Methods: 1147 children were assessed for fitness, had blood samples, anthropometric measures and all data were linked with routine electronic data to examine educational achievement, deprivation and health service usage. Factors associated with fitness were examined using logistic regression, conditional trees and data mining cluster analysis. Focus groups were conducted with children in a deprived school to examine barriers and facilitators to activity for children in a deprived community. Results: Unfit adolescents are more likely to be deprived, female, have obesity in the family and not achieve in education. There were 3 main clusters for risk of future heart disease/diabetes (high cholesterol/insulin); children at low risk (not obese, fit, achieving in education), children ‘visibly at risk’ (overweight, unfit, many hospital/GP visits) and ‘invisibly at risk’ (unfit but not overweight, failing in academic achievement). Qualitative findings show barriers to physical activity include cost, poor access to activity, lack of core physical literacy skills and limited family support. Conclusions: Low fitness in the non-obese child can reveal a hidden group who have high risk factors for heart disease and diabetes but may not be identified as they are normal weight. In deprived communities low fitness is associated with non-achievement in education but in non-deprived communities low fitness is associated with female gender. Interventions need to target deprived families and schools in deprived areas with community wide campaigns

Who Sets the Agenda? Analyzing Key Actors and Dynamics of Economic Diversification in Kazakhstan Throughout 2011–2016

This contribution attempts to answer the key question: Who sets the agenda for economic diversification in the context of Kazakhstan? This question remains critical in current scholarly debates. Although Kazakhstan, a young post-Soviet developing nation, has received fair scholarly attention with regard to the agenda setting stage of the policy cycle, the existing literature has yet failed to (1) empirically establish who actually sets the agenda for a certain policy issue and (2) employ the Internet research methods. This paper seeks to fill these gaps. The literature review of Kazakh-specific agenda setting publications suggests that among the major actors, the government tends to exert predominant influence, though other actors may also play a role, for example, media and academia. This research is driven by Internet penetration rate data and focuses on the period from January 2011 until December 2016. The findings lead to two key conclusions. First, think tanks seem to set the government agenda for economic diversification policy in Kazakhstan. Second, the government, while exhibiting the larger agenda setting magnitude vis-à-vis the other actors, shapes the subsequent debates as measured by the number of relevant references in media, think tanks, and academic publications. This research seeks to contribute to existing agenda setting theories in the Internet era by defining the most important actor(s), specifically in the Kazakh context based on longitudinal dynamics in attention

Child Fitness and Father’s BMI Are Important Factors in Childhood Obesity: A School Based Cross-Sectional Study

BACKGROUND: This study examines obesity and factors associated with obesity in children aged 11-13 years in the UK. METHODS: 1147 children from ten secondary schools participated in a health survey that included blood samples, fitness test and anthropometric measures. Factors associated with obesity were examined using multilevel logistic regression. FINDINGS: Of the children examined (490 male; 657 female) a third were overweight, 1 in 6 had elevated blood pressure, more than 1 in 10 had high cholesterol, 58% consumed more fat than recommended, whilst 37% were classified as unfit. Children in deprived areas had a higher proportion of risk factors; for example, they had higher blood pressure (20% (deprived) compared to 11% (non-deprived), difference: 9.0% (95%CI: 4.7%-13.4%)). Obesity is associated with risk factors for heart disease and diabetes. Maintaining fitness is associated with a reduction in the risk factors for heart disease (high blood pressure and cholesterol) but not on risk factors for diabetes (insulin levels). In order of importance, the main risk factors for childhood obesity are being unfit, having an obese father, and being large at birth. CONCLUSION: The high proportion of children with risk factors suggests future interventions need to focus on community and policy change to shift the population norm rather than targeting the behaviour of high risk individuals. Interventions need to focus on mothers' lifestyle in pregnancy, fathers' health, as well as promoting fitness among children. Obesity was not associated with deprivation. Therefore, strategies should be adopted in both deprived and non deprived areas

A cross-curricular physical activity intervention to combat cardiovascular disease risk factors in 11-14 year olds: 'Activity Knowledge Circuit'

Background: Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of mortality worldwide. Risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease have been shown to track from childhood through to adulthood. Previous school-based physical activity interventions have demonstrated modest improvements to cardiovascular disease risk factors by implementing extra-curricular activities or improving current physical education curriculum. Few have attempted to increase physical activity in class-room taught curriculum subjects. This study will outline a school-based cross-curricular physical activity intervention to combat cardiovascular disease risk factors in 11-14 year old children. Method/Design: A South Wales Valley school of low socio-economic status has been selected to take part. Participants from year eight (12-13 years) are to be assigned to an intervention group, with maturation-matched participants from years seven (11-12 years) and nine (13-14 years) assigned to a control group. A cross-curricular physical activity intervention will be implemented to increase activity by two hours a week for 18 weeks. Participants will briskly walk 3200 m twice weekly during curriculum lessons (60 minutes duration). With the exception of physical education, all curriculum subjects will participate, with each subject delivering four intervention lessons. The intervention will be performed outdoors and on school premises. An indoor course of equal distance will be used during adverse weather conditions. Cardiovascular disease risk factors will be measured pre- and post-intervention for intervention and control groups. These will take place during physical education lessons and will include measures of stature, mass, waist, hip, and neck circumferences, together with skinfold measure's taken at four sites. Blood pressure will be measured, and fitness status assessed via the 20 m multi-stage fitness test. Questionnaires will be used to determine activity behaviour (physical activity questionnaire for adolescence), diet (seven day food diary) and maturation status. Fasting blood variables will include total cholesterol, lowdensity lipoprotein cholesterol, high density lipoprotein cholesterol, triglycerides, insulin, glucose, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, interleukin-6, adiponectin, and fibrinogen. Motivational variables and psychological well-being will be assessed by questionnaire. Discussion: Our study may prove to be a cost effective strategy to increase school time physical activity to combat cardiovascular disease risk factors in children.</p

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe