Do alcohol product labels stating lower strength verbal description, percentage alcohol‐by‐volume, or their combination affect wine consumption? A bar laboratory adaptive randomised controlled trial

A previous research study concluded that wine and beer labelled as lower in strength increase consumption compared with the same drinks labelled as regular strength. The label included both a verbal and numerical descriptor of strength. The present study aimed to estimate the effect of each of these label components. Adaptive, parallel group randomised controlled trial, comprising an internal pilot sample (N = 90) and a confirmatory sample (N = 57). University bar laboratory in London UK. One-hundred and forty-seven weekly wine drinkers were sampled from a nationally representative English panel. Participants were randomised to one of three groups to taste test wine in a bar-laboratory, varying only in the label displayed: (i) verbal descriptor only (Super Low); (ii) numerical descriptor only (4%ABV); and (iii) verbal descriptor and numerical descriptor combined (Super Low 4%ABV) [each group n = 49]. The primary outcome was total volume (ml) of wine consumed. Participants randomised to the numerical descriptor label group (4%ABV: M = 155.12ml, B = 20.30, 95% CI = 3.92, 36.69, p-value = 0.016) and combined verbal and numerical descriptor label group (Super Low 4%ABV: M = 154.59ml, B = 20.68, 95%CI = 4.32, 37.04, p-value = 0.014) drank significantly greater amounts than those randomised to the verbal descriptor label group (Super Low: M = 125.65ml). This bar laboratory study estimated that a greater quantity of 'lower' strength wine was consumed when the label included a numerical strength descriptor compared with a verbal only strength descriptor. [Abstract copyright: This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Changing Human Behavior to Prevent Disease: The Importance of Targeting Automatic Processes

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.122691

WroNG -- Wroclaw Neutrino Generator of events for single pion production

We constructed a new Monte Carlo generator of events for neutrino CC single pion production on free nucleon targets. The code uses dynamical models of the DIS with the PDFs modified according to the recent JLab data and of the Delta excitation. A comparison with experimental data was done in three channels for the total cross sections and for the distributions of events in invariant hadronic mass.Comment: 6 pages, 13 figures, Presented by J.T. Sobczyk at the 3rd International Workshop on Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions in the Few-GeV Region, 17-21 March, Gran Sasso(Italy),to appear in the Proceeding

Impact on alcohol purchasing of a ban on multi-buy promotions: A quasi-experimental evaluation comparing Scotland with England and Wales

Aims: To evaluate the impact of the 2011 Scottish ban on multi-buy promotions of alcohol in retail stores. Design and setting: Difference-in-differences analysis was used to estimate the impact of the ban on the volume of alcohol purchased by Scottish households, compared with those in England and Wales, between January 2010 and June 2012. Participants: A total of 22356 households in Scotland, England and Wales. Measurements: Records of alcohol purchasing from each of four categories (beer and cider, wine, spirits and flavoured alcoholic beverages), as well as total volume of pure alcohol purchased. Findings: Controlling for general time trends and household heterogeneity, there was no significant effect of the multi-buy ban in Scotland on volume of alcohol purchased either for the whole population or for individual socio-economic groups. There was also no significant effect on those who were large pre-ban purchasers of alcohol. Most multi-buys were for beer and cider or for wine. The frequency of shopping trips involving beer and cider purchases increased by 9.2% following the ban (P<0.01), while the number of products purchased on each trip decreased by 8.1% (P<0.01). For wine, however, these effects were not significant. Conclusions: Banning multi-buy promotions for alcohol in Scotland did not reduce alcohol purchasing in the short term. Wider regulation of price promotion and price may be needed to achieve this. © 2013 The Authors. Addiction published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for the Study of Addiction

The psychological impact of human papillomavirus testing in women with borderline or mildly dyskaryotic cervical smear test results: 6-month follow-up

State anxiety (S-STAI-6), distress (GHQ-12), concern and quality of life (EuroQoL-EQ-5D) 6 months after human papillomavirus (HPV) testing in women with borderline or mildly dyskaryotic smear test results were assessed based on a prospective questionnaire study, with 6-month follow-up after the smear test result. Two centres participated in an English pilot study of HPV testing. Participants included two groups of women receiving abnormal smear test results: (tested for HPV and found to be (a) HPV positive (n=369) or (b) HPV negative (n=252)) and two groups not tested for HPV (those receiving (c) abnormal smear test results (n=102) or (d) normal smear test results (n=288)). There were no differences in anxiety, distress or health-related quality of life between the four study groups at 6 months. Levels of concern about the smear test result remained elevated in all groups receiving an abnormal smear test result, and were highest in the group untested for HPV. Predictors of concern across all groups receiving an abnormal smear test were perceived risk of developing cancer, being HPV positive or untested for HPV, sexual health worries and the smear being a woman's first smear test. The raised anxiety and distress observed in women immediately after being informed of an abnormal smear test result and that they are HPV positive was no longer evident at 6 months. Concern about the smear test result was however still raised in these women and those who tested negative for HPV, and particularly among those who did not undergo HPV testing

On two weak CC Delta production models

We perform a detail analysis of two models of neutrino CC Delta production on free nucleons. First model is a standard one based on nucleon-Delta transition current with several form-factors. Second model is a starting point for a construction of Marteau model with sophisticated analytical computations of nuclear effects. We conclude that both models lead to similar results.Comment: 9 pages, includes 9 figures, accepted for publication in J. Phys.

Communicating the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of government policies and their impact on public support: a systematic review with meta-analysis.

Low public support for government interventions in health, environment and other policy domains can be a barrier to implementation. Communicating evidence of policy effectiveness has been used to influence attitudes towards policies, with mixed results. This review provides the first systematic synthesis of such studies. Eligible studies were randomized controlled experiments that included an intervention group that provided evidence of a policy's effectiveness or ineffectiveness at achieving a salient outcome, and measured policy support. From 6498 abstracts examined, there were 45 effect sizes from 36 eligible studies. In total, 35 (N = 30 858) communicated evidence of effectiveness, and 10 (N = 5078) communicated evidence of ineffectiveness. Random effects meta-analysis revealed that communicating evidence of a policy's effectiveness increased support for the policy (SMD = 0.11, 95% CI [0.07, 0.15], p < 0.0001), equivalent to support increasing from 50% to 54% (95% CI [53%, 56%]). Communicating evidence of ineffectiveness decreased policy support (SMD = -0.14, 95% CI [-0.22, -0.06], p < 0.001), equivalent to support decreasing from 50% to 44% (95% CI [41%, 47%]). These findings suggest that public support for policies in a range of domains is sensitive to evidence of their effectiveness, as well as their ineffectiveness

Time series classification with ensembles of elastic distance measures

Several alternative distance measures for comparing time series have recently been proposed and evaluated on time series classification (TSC) problems. These include variants of dynamic time warping (DTW), such as weighted and derivative DTW, and edit distance-based measures, including longest common subsequence, edit distance with real penalty, time warp with edit, and move–split–merge. These measures have the common characteristic that they operate in the time domain and compensate for potential localised misalignment through some elastic adjustment. Our aim is to experimentally test two hypotheses related to these distance measures. Firstly, we test whether there is any significant difference in accuracy for TSC problems between nearest neighbour classifiers using these distance measures. Secondly, we test whether combining these elastic distance measures through simple ensemble schemes gives significantly better accuracy. We test these hypotheses by carrying out one of the largest experimental studies ever conducted into time series classification. Our first key finding is that there is no significant difference between the elastic distance measures in terms of classification accuracy on our data sets. Our second finding, and the major contribution of this work, is to define an ensemble classifier that significantly outperforms the individual classifiers. We also demonstrate that the ensemble is more accurate than approaches not based in the time domain. Nearly all TSC papers in the data mining literature cite DTW (with warping window set through cross validation) as the benchmark for comparison. We believe that our ensemble is the first ever classifier to significantly outperform DTW and as such raises the bar for future work in this area

Transverse Enhancement Model and MiniBooNE Charge Current Quasi-Elastic Neutrino Scattering Data

Recently proposed Transverse Enhancement Model of nuclear effects in Charge Current Quasi-Elastic neutrino scattering [A. Bodek, H. S. Budd, and M. E. Christy, Eur. Phys. J. C{\bf 71} (2011) 1726] is confronted with the MiniBooNE high statistics experimental data. It is shown that the {\it effective} large axial mass model leads to better agreement with the data.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure