In the balance: report of a research study exploring information for weight management

This paper uses findings from a research study called Net.Weight to examine the concepts of interaction, information quality and Internet-based information from the perspective of people engaged in managing their weight. The Net.Weight study was a two-year project funded by the British government 19s Department of Health and located in the city of Brighton and Hove. It examined the potential for increased, innovative and effective uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to support the self management of weight. The study had several inter-related research strands and the findings discussed in the paper emerged primarily from participatory learning workshops and evaluative interviews. The paper demonstrates that the interaction between people is an important aspect of the information process, which is often neglected in the literature. It suggests that exploring the user-user dimension might add to the understanding of information effectiveness. It also suggests that an approach to information and health literacy which includes a social as well as an individual perspective is necessary. On quality assessment, it supports findings from other studies that organisational authority is a key measure of reliability for lay users and that quality assessment tools have a limited role in the assessment process. The Net.Weight participants embraced the Internet as a medium for weight management information only when it added value to their existing information and weight management practices and when it could be integrated into their everyday lives

Information to fight the flab: findings from the Net.Weight study

The purpose of the paper is to examine information use and information literacy in the context of weight management. It reports on a two-year study funded by the Department of Health known informally as the Net.Weight Study. Net.Weight examined the potential for increased, innovative and effective uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to support the self management of weight. The research was conducted in the city of Brighton & Hove by an inter-disciplinary team from the University of Brighton. The paper gives a brief overview of the various methods used in the study as a whole but discusses one strand, the user survey, in more detail. The survey gathered data on people’s information and ICT use around weight management. The design of the survey questionnaire required the adaptation of existing literacy assessment instruments and this process is described in this paper. The findings show that people use a wide range of information sources for information and support around weight management. The most useful sources are slimming groups, food packaging, friends and family, magazines, TV and health books, thus representing a variety of media, formal and informal, and including human sources. The internet was reported to be a useful source for around half the survey respondents and is most often used for information about diet and exercise. A majority of respondents described themselves as active information seekers and confident about their information skills. They are less confident about internet information than information generally and even less confident about using the internet to support weight management activities. The concept of literacies, particularly around information and health, provide a framework for examining the Net.Weight findings. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for health information policy and for those interested in applying information literacy theory to health. The role of healthcare practitioners in weight management information is addressed, as is the need for targeted rather than generic health information. It is suggested that the work done in the education sector to increase awareness of information literacy and improve skills could provide a useful model of good practice in a health context. However, the evidence provided by the Net.Weight study suggests that for such an approach to be relevant it needs to reflect the complexity of health information processes in everyday lives

Growth or decline in the Church of England during the decade of Evangelism: did the Churchmanship of the Bishop matter?

The Decade of Evangelism occupied the attention of the Church of England throughout the 1990s. The present study employs the statistics routinely published by the Church of England in order to assess two matters: the extent to which these statistics suggest that the 43 individual dioceses finished the decade in a stronger or weaker position than they had entered it and the extent to which, according to these statistics, the performance of dioceses led by bishops shaped in the Evangelical tradition differed from the performance of dioceses led by bishops shaped in the Catholic tradition. The data demonstrated that the majority of dioceses were performing less effectively at the end of the decade than at the beginning, in terms of a range of membership statistics, and that the rate of decline varied considerably from one diocese to another. The only exception to the trend was provided by the diocese of London, which experienced some growth. The data also demonstrated that little depended on the churchmanship of the diocesan bishop in shaping diocesan outcomes on the performance indicators employed in the study

Lift-and-Round to Improve Weighted Completion Time on Unrelated Machines

We consider the problem of scheduling jobs on unrelated machines so as to minimize the sum of weighted completion times. Our main result is a $(3/2-c)$-approximation algorithm for some fixed $c>0$, improving upon the long-standing bound of 3/2 (independently due to Skutella, Journal of the ACM, 2001, and Sethuraman & Squillante, SODA, 1999). To do this, we first introduce a new lift-and-project based SDP relaxation for the problem. This is necessary as the previous convex programming relaxations have an integrality gap of $3/2$. Second, we give a new general bipartite-rounding procedure that produces an assignment with certain strong negative correlation properties.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure

What makes you not a Sikh? : a preliminary mapping of values

This study sets out to establish which Sikh values contrasted with or were shared by non-Sikh adolescents. A survey of attitude toward a variety of Sikh values was fielded in a sample of 364 non-Sikh schoolchildren aged between 13 and 15 in London. Values where attitudes were least positive concerned Sikh duties/code of conduct, festivals, rituals, prayer Gurdwara attendance, listening to scripture recitation, the amrit initiation. Sikh values empathized with by non-Sikhs concerned family pride, charity, easy access to ordination and Gurdwaras, maintaining the five Ks, seeing God in all things, abstaining from meat and alcohol and belief in the stories of Guru Nanak. Further significant differences of attitude toward Sikhism were found in comparisons by sex, age and religious affiliation. Findings are applied to teaching Sikhism to pupils of no faith adherence. The study recommends the extension of values mapping to specifically Sikh populations

A bottom-up approach to emulating emotions using neuromodulation in agents

A bottom-up approach to emulating emotions is expounded in this thesis. This is intended to be useful in research where a phenomenon is to be emulated but the nature of it can not easily be defined. This approach not only advocates emulating the underlying mechanisms that are proposed to give rise to emotion in natural agents, but also advocates applying an open-mind as to what the phenomenon actually is. There is evidence to suggest that neuromodulation is inherently responsible for giving rise to emotions in natural agents and that emotions consequently modulate the behaviour of the agent. The functionality provided by neuromodulation, when applied to agents with self-organising biologically plausible neural networks, is isolated and studied. In research efforts such as this the definition should emerge from the evidence rather than postulate that the definition, derived from limited information, is correct and should be implemented. An implementation of a working definition only tells us that the definition can be implemented. It does not tell us whether that working definition is itself correct and matches the phenomenon in the real world. If this model of emotions was assumed to be true and implemented in an agent, there would be a danger of precluding implementations that could offer alternative theories as to the relevance of neuromodulation to emotions. By isolating and studying different mechanisms such as neuromodulation that are thought to give rise to emotions, theories can arise as to what emotions are and the functionality that they provide. The application of this approach concludes with a theory as to how some emotions can operate via the use of neuromodulators. The theory is explained using the concepts of dynamical systems, free-energy and entropy.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceEPSRC : University of StirlingGBUnited Kingdo

A Compact Digital Gamma-tone Filter Processor

Area consumption is one of the most important design constrains in the development of compact digital systems. Several authors have proposed making compact Cochlear Implant processors using Gamma-tone filter banks. These model aspects of the cochlea spectral filtering. A good area-efficient design of the Gamma-tone Filter Bank could reduce the amount of circuitry allowing patients to wear these cochlear implants more easily. In consequence, many authors have reduced the area by using the minimum number of registers when implementing this type of filter. However, critical paths limit their performance. Here a compact Gamma-tone Filter processor, formulated using the impulse invariant transformation together with a normalization method, is presented. The normalization method in the model guarantees the same precision for any filter order. In addition, area resources are kept low due to the implementation of a single Second Order Section (SOS) IIR stage for processing several SOS IIR stages and several channels at different times. Results show that the combination of the properties of the model and the implementation techniques generate a processor with high processing speed, expending less resources than reported in the literature.Collaboration with Sanchez-Rivera, related to, but not funded by, EPSRC grant EP/G062609/