Developing Interventions for Children's Exercise (DICE): a pilot evaluation of school-based exercise interventions for primary school children aged 7 to 8 years.

BACKGROUND: Developing Interventions for Children's Exercise (DICE) is an initiative aimed at determining effective school-based exercise programs. To assess feasibility, we conducted a pilot study of exercise sessions which varied in duration and frequency. METHODS: Exercise interventions were delivered to Year 3 pupils (age 7-8 years; n = 73) in primary schools within Yorkshire, UK. Evaluations were conducted using focus group sessions, questionnaires and observations. RESULTS: The study revealed positive aspects of all interventions, including favorable effects on children's concentration during lessons and identified the value of incorporation of the DICE concept into curriculum lessons. Children appeared enthused and reported well-being and enjoyment. Areas requiring attention were the need for appropriate timetabling of sessions and ensuring the availability of space. CONCLUSION: The concept and sessions were well-accepted by teachers who confirmed their full support of any future implementation There appears to be potential for the encouragement and empowerment of teachers to support physical activity and healthy school environments, and to take an interest in the health of their pupils. Ultimately, these findings should assist in the design of successful exercise interventions in the school setting

Gorceixia decurrens (Compositae: Vernonieae): nova espécie para o estado da Bahia, Brasil

Recent fieldwork and collections have added a new genus to the Compositae flora of Bahia State, Brazil. Gorceixia decurrens is newly recorded for the State from Caatinga woodland along the lower part of the Estrada Real, in the municipality of Rio de Contas. A full description is provided, its distribution and conservation status discussed; likely affinities in the Vernonieae are discussed with the conclusion that it belongs to the subtribe Piptocarphinae.Trabalhos de campo e coletas recentes na Bahia, Brasil, permitiram adicionar mais um gênero para a flora do Estado. Gorceixia decurrens foi coletada em 2001, em área de Caatinga Arbórea, na base da Estrada Real no município a Rio de Contas. É fornecida uma completa descrição da espécie e discussão sobre sua distribuição e estado de conservação. Também, é apresentada discussão do posicionamento do gênero monotípico nas Vernonieae concluindo-se que o mesmo pertence à subtribo Piptocarphinae

Adherence with NICE guidance on lifestyle advice for people with schizophrenia: a survey

Background Substantial weight gain is common in people taking antipsychotics. NICE recommends these patients are offered physical health screening and intervention. The STEPWISE trial is currently evaluating a lifestyle education programme in addition to usual care. However, it is difficult to define what constitutes “usual care”. Aims To define “usual care” for lifestyle management in people with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and first episode psychosis in STEPWISE study sites. Method Ten NHS Mental Health Trusts participated in a bespoke survey based on NICE guidance. Results Eight trusts reported offering lifestyle education programmes. Nine Trusts reported offering smoking cessation support. Reported recording of biomedical measures varied. Conclusions No consistent lifestyle education programme is currently offered across UK NHS Mental Health Trusts. The survey benchmarks ‘usual care’ for the STEPWISE study on which changes can be measured

Crystal Distortion and the Two-Channel Kondo Effect

We study a simple model of the two-channel Kondo effect in a distorted crystal. This model is then used to investigate the interplay of the Kondo and Jahn-Teller effects, and also the Kondo effect in an impure crystal. We find that the Jahn-Teller interaction modifies the characteristic energy scale of the system below which non-Fermi-liquid properties of the model become apparent. The modified energy scale tends to zero as the limit of a purely static Jahn-Teller effect is approached. We find also that the non-Fermi-liquid properties of the quadrupolar Kondo effect are not stable against crystal distortion caused by impurities.Comment: 11 page

Reporting issues in group sequential randomised controlled trials: a systematic review protocol of published journal reports

Background: Adaptive designs are somewhat underused, despite prominence given to methodology in the statistical literature. Some concerns relates to robustness of adaptive designs in decision making, acceptability of trial findings to change practice, anxiety about early stopping of trials and worry about wrong decision making. These issues could be linked to inadequate reporting of the conduct of such clinical trials. We assess the reporting of group sequential randomised controlled trials (RCTs), which are one of the most well-understood adaptive designs in the confirmatory setting. Methods: We undertake a systematic review searching Ovid MEDLINE from 1st January 2001 to 23rd September 2014 and including parallel group confirmatory group sequential RCTs that were prospectively designed using the Frequentist approach. Eligible trials are screened for completeness in reporting against the CONSORT 2010 checklist with some proposed modifications to capture issues such as statistical bias correction following early stopping. Descriptive statistics aided with forest plots on CONSORT compliance are presented. Discussion: Reporting of the conduct of adaptive designs is an area which has not been fully explored. Hence, the findings from this study can enlighten us on the adequacy in reporting of well-understood group sequential RCTs as a class of adaptive designs and on ways to address some of the cited concerns. Most importantly, the study can inform policy makers on the adequacy of the current CONSORT statements in enhancing reporting of such adaptive designs

Investigating organic aerosol loading in the remote marine environment

Aerosol loading in the marine environment is investigated using aerosol composition measurements from several research ship campaigns (ICEALOT, MAP, RHaMBLe, VOCALS and OOMPH), observations of total AOD column from satellite (MODIS) and ship-based instruments (Maritime Aerosol Network, MAN), and a global chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem). This work represents the most comprehensive evaluation of oceanic OM emission inventories to date, by employing aerosol composition measurements obtained from campaigns with wide spatial and temporal coverage. The model underestimates AOD over the remote ocean on average by 0.02 (21 %), compared to satellite observations, but provides an unbiased simulation of ground-based Maritime Aerosol Network (MAN) observations. Comparison with cruise data demonstrates that the GEOS-Chem simulation of marine sulfate, with the mean observed values ranging between 0.22 μg m−3 and 1.34 μg m−3, is generally unbiased, however surface organic matter (OM) concentrations, with the mean observed concentrations between 0.07 μg m−3 and 0.77 μg m−3, are underestimated by a factor of 2–5 for the standard model run. Addition of a sub-micron marine OM source of approximately 9 TgC yr−1 brings the model into agreement with the ship-based measurements, however this additional OM source does not explain the model underestimate of marine AOD. The model underestimate of marine AOD is therefore likely the result of a combination of satellite retrieval bias and a missing marine aerosol source (which exhibits a different spatial pattern than existing aerosol in the model)

New obstructions to symplectic embeddings

In this paper we establish new restrictions on symplectic embeddings of certain convex domains into symplectic vector spaces. These restrictions are stronger than those implied by the Ekeland-Hofer capacities. By refining an embedding technique due to Guth, we also show that they are sharp.Comment: 80 pages, 3 figures, v2: improved exposition and minor corrections, v3: Final version, expanded and improved exposition and minor corrections. The final publication is available at link.springer.co

EveTAR: Building a Large-Scale Multi-Task Test Collection over Arabic Tweets

This article introduces a new language-independent approach for creating a large-scale high-quality test collection of tweets that supports multiple information retrieval (IR) tasks without running a shared-task campaign. The adopted approach (demonstrated over Arabic tweets) designs the collection around significant (i.e., popular) events, which enables the development of topics that represent frequent information needs of Twitter users for which rich content exists. That inherently facilitates the support of multiple tasks that generally revolve around events, namely event detection, ad-hoc search, timeline generation, and real-time summarization. The key highlights of the approach include diversifying the judgment pool via interactive search and multiple manually-crafted queries per topic, collecting high-quality annotations via crowd-workers for relevancy and in-house annotators for novelty, filtering out low-agreement topics and inaccessible tweets, and providing multiple subsets of the collection for better availability. Applying our methodology on Arabic tweets resulted in EveTAR , the first freely-available tweet test collection for multiple IR tasks. EveTAR includes a crawl of 355M Arabic tweets and covers 50 significant events for which about 62K tweets were judged with substantial average inter-annotator agreement (Kappa value of 0.71). We demonstrate the usability of EveTAR by evaluating existing algorithms in the respective tasks. Results indicate that the new collection can support reliable ranking of IR systems that is comparable to similar TREC collections, while providing strong baseline results for future studies over Arabic tweets

Live imaging of alveologenesis in precision-cut lung slices reveals dynamic epithelial cell behaviour

Damage to alveoli, the gas-exchanging region of the lungs, is a component of many chronic and acute lung diseases. In addition, insufficient generation of alveoli results in bronchopulmonary dysplasia, a disease of prematurity. Therefore visualising the process of alveolar development (alveologenesis) is critical for our understanding of lung homeostasis and for the development of treatments to repair and regenerate lung tissue. Using long-term, time-lapse imaging of precision-cut lung slices, we show alveologenesis for the first time. We reveal that during this process, epithelial cells are highly mobile and we identify specific cell behaviours that contribute to alveologenesis: cell clustering, hollowing and cell extension. Using the cytoskeleton inhibitors blebbistatin and cytochalasin D, we showed that cell migration is a key driver of alveologenesis. This study reveals important novel information about lung biology and provides a new system in which to manipulate alveologenesis genetically and pharmacologically