Children’s Food and Drink Purchasing Behaviour ‘‘Beyond the School Gate’’ : The Development of a Survey Module

Copyright © 2013 Wendy J.Wills et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly citedMany children eat a diet which supplies a higher than recommended amount of nonmilk extrinsic sugars and saturated fatty acids. The school setting is often targeted for nutrition intervention as many children consume food at school. In Scotland, attempts have been made to improve the nutritional content of food in schools and attention has now turned to food and drink available “beyond the school gate.” This paper describes the development of a module on food and drink purchasing behaviour. The Food Purchasing Module was designed to collect data, for the first time, from a representative sample of children aged 8–16 years about food and drinks purchased on the way to/from school, during break time/free periods, and at lunchtime, from outlets around schools. Cognitive testing of the module highlighted that younger children find self-completion questionnaires problematic. Older children have fewer problems with self-completion questionnaires butmany do not follow question routing, which has implications for the delivery of future surveys. Development of this survey module adds much needed evidence about effectively involving children in surveys. Further research exploring food and drinks purchased beyond the school gate is needed to continue to improve the nutritional quality of children’s dietsPeer reviewe

Synchronous Behavior of Two Coupled Electronic Neurons

We report on experimental studies of synchronization phenomena in a pair of analog electronic neurons (ENs). The ENs were designed to reproduce the observed membrane voltage oscillations of isolated biological neurons from the stomatogastric ganglion of the California spiny lobster Panulirus interruptus. The ENs are simple analog circuits which integrate four dimensional differential equations representing fast and slow subcellular mechanisms that produce the characteristic regular/chaotic spiking-bursting behavior of these cells. In this paper we study their dynamical behavior as we couple them in the same configurations as we have done for their counterpart biological neurons. The interconnections we use for these neural oscillators are both direct electrical connections and excitatory and inhibitory chemical connections: each realized by analog circuitry and suggested by biological examples. We provide here quantitative evidence that the ENs and the biological neurons behave similarly when coupled in the same manner. They each display well defined bifurcations in their mutual synchronization and regularization. We report briefly on an experiment on coupled biological neurons and four dimensional ENs which provides further ground for testing the validity of our numerical and electronic models of individual neural behavior. Our experiments as a whole present interesting new examples of regularization and synchronization in coupled nonlinear oscillators.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figure

Fibroblast Growth Factor 22 Is Not Essential for Skin Development and Repair but Plays a Role in Tumorigenesis

PMCID: PMC3380851This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Investigation of the input signal frequency effect on the formed pulse of the hydraulic-powered pulse machine

Nowadays, a special emphasis is placed on an output signal curve during the analysis of well drilling machines since these machines should have as high energy efficiency as it is possible. This work proposes factors that have an impact of input signal frequency on the formed pulse that are used to find the most efficient frequency for its further applying in the machine. Results of the conducted experiment are obtained by using a mathematical model that is created in Simulink Matlab

Investigation of Input Signal Curve Effect on Formed Pulse of Hydraulic-Powered Pulse Machine

Well drilling machines should have as high efficiency factor as it is possible. This work proposes factors that are affected by change of input signal pulse curve. A series of runs are conducted on mathematical model of hydraulic-powered pulse machine. From this experiment, interrelations between input pulse curve and construction parameters are found. Results of conducted experiment are obtained with the help of the mathematical model, which is created in Simulink Matlab

Dietary patterns of school-age children in Scotland : association with socio-economic indicators, physical activity and obesity

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Loved ones of remand prisoners: the hidden victims of COVID-19

In September 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) released their ‘criminal courts recovery plan’ . This detailed their intentions to pass temporary legislation to extend the time that defendants could be legally held in custody awaiting trial in England and Wales by two months. The MoJ’s request was couched as a response to the excess of cases created by the restrictions imposed on courts from the pandemic . However, evidence suggests that a bottleneck existed long before COVID hit, and that this pandemic has intensified rather than caused this backlog . A joint letter sent to the Government from national organisations with expertise in justice have said these changes were ‘not good for victims, witnesses, people remanded to prison or prisons’ . Expanding this argument, we critically consider the possible implications of this extension to the remand period for the loved ones (family, friends and significant others ) of people in prison, who are often marginalised by their absence in prison literature, practices, and policy decisions. The pandemic has resulted in some very difficult public health decisions and it is our intention to focus on some of the consequences of these decisions for the loved ones of remanded prisoners. It is important to remember that it is the act of imprisonment, of any length, ‘that constitutes the punishment’ meaning that legislations that change the prison experience (in this instance, the duration of remand) bring with them significant, additional repercussions to the lives of prisoners and their loved ones. While in this article we often detail how these are punitive consequences, we appreciate that they were not implemented for punitive purposes