An Improved Measure of Deaths due to COVID-19 in England and Wales

We address the question of: 'how many deaths in England and Wales are due to COVID-19?' There are two approaches to measuring COVID deaths - 'COVID associated deaths' and 'excess deaths'. An excess deaths type framework is preferable, as there is substantial measurement error in COVID associated deaths, due to issues relating to the identification of deaths that are directly attributable to COVID-19. A limitation of the current excess deaths metric (a comparison of deaths to a 5 year average for the same week), is that it attributes the entirety of the variation in mortality to COVID-19. This likely means that the metric is overstated because there are a range of other drivers of mortality. We address this by estimating novel empirical Poisson models for all-cause deaths (in totality; by age category; for males; and females) that account for other drivers including the lockdown Government policy response. The models are novel because they include COVID identifier variables (which are a variation on a dummy variable). We use these identifiers to estimate weekly deviations in COVID deaths (about the mean weekly estimate pertaining to the COVID dummy variable in our baseline model). Results from two sets of identifiers indicate that, over the periods when our weekly estimates of total COVID deaths and the current excess deaths measure differ (week ending 17th or 24th April 2020 - week ending 8th May 2020), the former is considerably below the latter - on average per week 4670 deaths (54%) lower, or 4727 deaths (63%) lower, respectively

“Just Imagine That…”: A Solution Focused Approach to Doctoral Research Supervision in Health and Social Care

Effective supervision in doctoral research is critical to successful and timely completion. However,supervision is a complex undertaking with structural as well as relational challenges for bothstudents and supervisors. This instructional paper describes an internationally applicable approach tosupervision that we have developed in the health and social care disciplines that offers structure, butis also dynamic and responsive to the needs of students and supervisors and aims to develop theresearch competency of students. Our approach called Solution Focused Research Supervision(SFRS) is based on solution focused approaches, adapted from Solution Focused Brief Therapy andquestioning techniques derived from coaching. This approach has enabled our supervision teams toeffectively develop focused research questions and decide on appropriate research methodologiesand methods. We offer the SFRS approach as a way of working that seeks to recognize and buildupon strengths, foster engagement and openness to learning as well as build trust between studentsand supervisors. The authors, from (countries deleted for peer review), are supervisors and studentswho have developed the approach and provide practical examples of its application

Perceptual Oscillations in Gender Classification of Faces, Contingent on Stimulus History

Perception is a proactive ‘‘predictive’’ process, in which the brain takes advantage of past experience to make informed guesses about the world to test against sensory data. Here we demonstrate that in the judgment of the gender of faces, beta rhythms play an important role in communicating perceptual experience. Observers classified in forced choice as male or female, a sequence of face stimuli, which were physically constructed to be male or female or androgynous (equal morph). Classification of the androgynous stimuli oscillated rhythmically between male and female, following a complex waveform comprising 13.5 and 17 Hz. Parsing the trials based on the preceding stimulus showed that responses to androgynous stimuli preceded by male stimuli oscillated reliably at 17 Hz, whereas those preceded by female stimuli oscillated at 13.5 Hz. These results suggest that perceptual priors for face perception from recent perceptual memory are communicated through frequency-coded beta rhythms

A new other-race effect for gaze perception

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The role of individual and social variables in task performance.

This paper reports on a data-based study in which we explored - as part of a larger-scale British-Hungarian research project - the effects of a number of affective and social variables on foreign language (L2) learners’ engagement in oral argumentative tasks. The assumption underlying the investigation was that students’ verbal behaviour in oral task situations is partly determined by a number of non-linguistic and non-cognitive factors whose examination may constitute a potentially fruitful extension of existing task-based research paradigms. The independent variables in the study included various aspects of L2 motivation and several factors characterizing the learner groups the participating students were members of (such as group cohesiveness and intermember relations), as well as the learners’ L2 proficiency and ‘willingness to communicate’ in their L1. The dependent variables involved objective measures of the students’ language output in two oral argumentative tasks (one in the learners’ L1, the other in their L2): the quantity of speech and the number of turns produced by the speakers. The results provide insights into the interrelationship of the multiple variables determining the learners’ task engagement, and suggest a multi-level construct whereby some independent variables only come into force when certain conditions have been met

COVID-19 mortalities in England and Wales and the Peltzman offsetting effect

There are two approaches to measuring COVID-19 deaths–‘COVID associated deaths’ and ‘excess deaths’. An excess deaths framework is preferable, as there is measurement error in COVID associated deaths, due to issues relating to imperfect information about deaths that are directly attributable to COVID-19. The standard measure of excess deaths (comparison of deaths to a 5-year average) is subject to an omitted variables problem, as it attributes the entirety of the variation in mortality to COVID-19. We propose a method to estimate a refined measure of COVID-19 excess deaths in England and Wales that addresses the omitted impact of the first blanket lockdown. Using the counterfactual, we obtain a first stage estimate of excess deaths. In the second stage, this is decomposed into estimates of a refined measure of COVID-19 excess deaths and the excess mortality impact of lockdown. Our results suggest: (i) a refined estimate of mean weekly COVID-19 excess deaths that is 63% of standard excess deaths; and (ii) a positive net excess mortality impact of the lockdown. We make a case that (ii) is due to the Peltzman offsetting effect, i.e. the intended mortality impact of the lockdown was more than offset by the unintended impact

Effect of height and colour of bee bricks on nesting occupancy of bees and wasps in SW England

This is the final version. Available on open access from Conservation Evidence via the DOI in this recordBee bricks are a novel solitary-bee nesting habitat made from reclaimed concrete, designed to be built into walls to provide nest sites in urban areas. We tested if cavity-nesting bees and wasps used bee bricks, and if they showed any preference for nesting in bricks of different colours or at different heights. We carried out surveys of solitary bees in 15 private urban gardens and eight rural public gardens, where the bee bricks were then placed for two years (2016-2017). Bee bricks were placed on structures that were either 1 m in height with 4 bricks (red, yellow, white and wooden control) or with three platforms where white bricks were placed at 0 m, 0.6 m or 1.0 m above the ground. The number of occupied nest holes was counted at the end of each summer. Nesting holes that were capped with mud were more common than those capped with chewed or cut leaves. The average % of holes capped with either mud or chewed leaf was greatest in red bricks and lowest in wooden controls. Only one brick out of 39 placed at ground level had capped holes, although the difference in the % of holes capped between heights was not statistically significant. Cavity-nesting bees and wasps use solitary-bee bricks for nests, but population level impacts are still untested.University of Exete

Importance of the inverted control in measuring holistic face processing with the composite effect and part-whole effect

Holistic coding for faces is shown in several illusions that demonstrate integration of the percept across the entire face. The illusions occur upright but, crucially, not inverted. Converting the illusions into experimental tasks that measure their strength - and thus index degree of holistic coding - is often considered straightforward yet in fact relies on a hidden assumption, namely that there is no contribution to the experimental measure from secondary cognitive factors. For the composite effect, a relevant secondary factor is size of the spotlight of visuospatial attention.The composite task assumes this spotlight can be easily restricted to the target half (e.g., top-half) of the compound face stimulus. Yet, if this assumption were not true then a large spotlight, in the absence of holistic perception, could produce a false composite effect, present even for inverted faces and contributing partially to the score for upright faces.We reviewevidence that various factors can influence spotlight size: race/culture (Asians often prefer a more global distribution of attention than Caucasians); sex (females can be more global); appearance of the join or gap between face halves; and location of the eyes, which typically attract attention. Results from five experiments then show inverted faces can sometimes produce large false composite effects, and imply that whether this happens or not depends on complex interactions between causal factors. We also report, for both identity and expression, that only top-half face targets (containing eyes) produce valid composite measures. A sixth experiment demonstrates an example of a false inverted part-whole effect, where encoding-specificity is the secondary cognitive factor.We conclude the inverted face control should be tested in all composite and part-whole studies, and an effect for upright faces should be interpreted as a pure measure of holistic processing only when the experimental design produces no effect inverted. This Document is Protected by copyright and was first published by Frontiers. All rights reserved. it is reproduced with permissio

Measurements of integral muon intensity at large zenith angles

High-statistics data on near-horizontal muons collected with Russian-Italian coordinate detector DECOR are analyzed. Precise measurements of muon angular distributions in zenith angle interval from 60 to 90 degrees have been performed. In total, more than 20 million muons are selected. Dependences of the absolute integral muon intensity on zenith angle for several threshold energies ranging from 1.7 GeV to 7.2 GeV are derived. Results for this region of zenith angles and threshold energies have been obtained for the first time. The dependence of integral intensity on zenith angle and threshold energy is well fitted by a simple analytical formula.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl