Evaluation of a city-region initiative to galvanise a community response to gambling-related harms

Background Community interventions have an important role in public health strategy for gambling harms yet many interventions are shaped by stigmatising notions of individual responsibility. This presentation describes a process evaluation of an intervention for galvanising community-level innovation, administered by a city-region government. The intervention comprised 12 community projects, a Lived Experience Advisory Panel and a Community of Practice. Methods The process evaluation focused on refining a coproduced logic model. Data collection consisted of n-42 qualitative interviews and a short survey (n-21) with stakeholders, including commissioner-facilitators, project leads and people with Lived Experience, during intervention delivery. Thematic analysis and complex intervention modelling were carried out with the outputs of this refined through consensus discussion. Results The modelling exercise revealed a highly complex intervention that was suited to the poorly understood, hidden and stigmatised issue of gambling-related harms. The Community of Practice fostered group identity, collaboration and learning, with commissioner-facilitators expanding this to support the sustainability of the community projects. The Lived Experience Advisory Panel helped develop project outputs and non-stigmatising health messages although impact on the community projects varied. Stigma and commercially-driven gambling normalisation presented challenges to projects with the greatest impact evident on skill development among professionals and community actors. The city-region government adapted its gambling harms strategy based on learning generated. Conclusions The findings suggest the combination of a Community of Practice, Lived Experience and commissioner-facilitation effectively galvanised a community response to gambling harms, generating vital learning for the field. Public health actors should explore applying the approach for other emerging and contested public health issues

Shocks in supersonic sand

We measure time-averaged velocity, density, and temperature fields for steady granular flow past a wedge and calculate a speed of granular pressure disturbances (sound speed) equal to 10% of the flow speed. The flow is supersonic, forming shocks nearly identical to those in a supersonic gas. Molecular dynamics simulations of Newton's laws and Monte Carlo simulations of the Boltzmann equation yield fields in quantitative agreement with experiment. A numerical solution of Navier-Stokes-like equations agrees with a molecular dynamics simulation for experimental conditions excluding wall friction.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Velocity correlations in dense granular flows

Velocity fluctuations of grains flowing down a rough inclined plane are experimentally studied. The grains at the free surface exhibit fluctuating motions, which are correlated over few grains diameters. The characteristic correlation length is shown to depend on the inclination of the plane and not on the thickness of the flowing layer. This result strongly supports the idea that dense granular flows are controlled by a characteristic length larger than the particle diameter

Does gravity cause load-bearing bridges in colloidal and granular systems?

We study structures which can bear loads, "bridges", in particulate packings. To investigate the relationship between bridges and gravity, we experimentally determine bridge statistics in colloidal packings. We vary the effective magnitude and direction of gravity, volume fraction, and interactions, and find that the bridge size distributions depend only on the mean number of neighbors. We identify a universal distribution, in agreement with simulation results for granulars, suggesting that applied loads merely exploit preexisting bridges, which are inherent in dense packings

Study of perturbed periodic systems of differential equations - The Stroboscopic method

Stroboscopic method for solving perturbed periodic systems of differential equation

The Delta-Delta Intermediate State in 1S0 Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering From Effective Field Theory

We examine the role of the Delta-Delta intermediate state in low energy NN scattering using effective field theory. Theories both with and without pions are discussed. They are regulated with dimensional regularization and MSbar subtraction. We find that the leading effects of the Delta-Delta state can be absorbed by a redefinition of the contact terms in a theory with nucleons only. It does not remove the requirement of a higher dimension operator to reproduce data out to moderate momentum. The explicit decoupling of the Delta-Delta state is shown for the theory without pions.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, uses harvma