The DPSEEA model: one way to support the 'multiple narratives' of ecological Public Health

This poster was presented at the UK Public Health Association Conference (UKPHA) in March 2009.Ecological Public Health highlights the impact of globalization & capitalism on our physical & human landscapes. A shift in the Public Health paradigm, is argued, to move from an ideological-laden "single narrative" of unsustainable "risk assessment" to "multiple narratives" of sustainability, considering ecological breakdown and climate change. Public Health, globally is a more blended community, with an awareness of a diversity of philosophical and culturally-defined values, perspectives & thoughts but the "single narrative" (Atran 2007) of unecological, unsustainable Public Health persists. Drawing on Berlin's work he provides insight how certain political movements inspired individuals and nations' devotion to their 'ideology', by harnessing humans' ability for cognitively inflexibility, intellectual acquiescence and self-interested... These powerful prerequisites for the maintenance of Unsustainable Public Health ideology in the 21st Century remain. We should recognise these intellectual barriers, when striving for ecological, sustainable PH in the face of self-interested global Capitalism. The DPSEEA framework is one way to connect distal determinants of health and explain health development as interplay between humans and their surroundings. It highlights the intellectual shift required to move from a single narrative of "biological risk-assessment" to "multiple narratives" of environmentally contextualized, ecological, sustainable Public Health

The complexity of acyclic conjunctive queries revisited

In this paper, we consider first-order logic over unary functions and study the complexity of the evaluation problem for conjunctive queries described by such kind of formulas. A natural notion of query acyclicity for this language is introduced and we study the complexity of a large number of variants or generalizations of acyclic query problems in that context (Boolean or not Boolean, with or without inequalities, comparisons, etc...). Our main results show that all those problems are \textit{fixed-parameter linear} i.e. they can be evaluated in time $f(|Q|).|\textbf{db}|.|Q(\textbf{db})|$ where $|Q|$ is the size of the query $Q$, $|\textbf{db}|$ the database size, $|Q(\textbf{db})|$ is the size of the output and $f$ is some function whose value depends on the specific variant of the query problem (in some cases, $f$ is the identity function). Our results have two kinds of consequences. First, they can be easily translated in the relational (i.e., classical) setting. Previously known bounds for some query problems are improved and new tractable cases are then exhibited. Among others, as an immediate corollary, we improve a result of \~\cite{PapadimitriouY-99} by showing that any (relational) acyclic conjunctive query with inequalities can be evaluated in time $f(|Q|).|\textbf{db}|.|Q(\textbf{db})|$. A second consequence of our method is that it provides a very natural descriptive approach to the complexity of well-known algorithmic problems. A number of examples (such as acyclic subgraph problems, multidimensional matching, etc...) are considered for which new insights of their complexity are given.Comment: 30 page

Blogging for learning ethical practice

This poster was presented at the UK Public Health Conference (UKPHA) in March 2007.In considering the UK’s Public Health Competency Framework (Skills for Health), specifically adjunct Competency 10 ‘Ethical Management of Self’, it could be argued that for those training our Public Health Workforce they have to address challenging educational needs. As the Wanless reports of 2002 & 2004 highlight, we must produce PH practitioners that are able to effectively deliver actionable programmes within ethically complex scenarios of people’s daily lives. The problem is that Public Health represents a diverse workforce, devoid of a mandatory, universally accepted Code of Conduct or an agreed professional identity. With seven years experience of leading a Health Promotion BSc pathway and three years as a PCT Non-Executive Director, leading R&D/Public Health, it has come to my attention that part of a solution maybe extending Ethics into the realm of teaching ethical dispositions & transferable skills to our diverse PH workforce. To develop ethical dispositions, skills and flexible professional identities, I teach and am researching the use of Critical Thinking Skills in conjunction with established Medical Ethical Curricula. This poster outlines how Critical Thinking Skills can be taught alongside traditional Medical Ethics and how CT can link to the development of the UK Public Health Workforce today

Culture and e-commerce: An exploration of the perceptions and attitudes of Egyptian internet users

This paper examines the perceptions and attitudes that Egyptian users hold towards electronic shopping sites. Internet sites are globally available, opening up huge potential markets for online retailers. However, it remains unclear whether sites designed for the US or European markets will be acceptable in other cultures. This paper describes an exploratory card sorting study conducted with Egyptian consumers. The study was designed to examine the e-commerce interface features that are most salient to this user group and to explore how these relate to user intentions to engage in internet shopping. The results support the role of site familiarity in predicting purchase intentions within this cultural setting