Water quality investigation of Loweswater, Cumbria

This is the final report to the Environment Agency: Water Quality Investigation of Loweswater, Cumbria. The project employs palaeolimnological techniques to evaluate the extent of eutrophication at Loweswater

How many crowdsourced workers should a requester hire?

Recent years have seen an increased interest in crowdsourcing as a way of obtaining information from a potentially large group of workers at a reduced cost. The crowdsourcing process, as we consider in this paper, is as follows: a requester hires a number of workers to work on a set of similar tasks. After completing the tasks, each worker reports back outputs. The requester then aggregates the reported outputs to obtain aggregate outputs. A crucial question that arises during this process is: how many crowd workers should a requester hire? In this paper, we investigate from an empirical perspective the optimal number of workers a requester should hire when crowdsourcing tasks, with a particular focus on the crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. Specifically, we report the results of three studies involving different tasks and payment schemes. We find that both the expected error in the aggregate outputs as well as the risk of a poor combination of workers decrease as the number of workers increases. Surprisingly, we find that the optimal number of workers a requester should hire for each task is around 10 to 11, no matter the underlying task and payment scheme. To derive such a result, we employ a principled analysis based on bootstrapping and segmented linear regression. Besides the above result, we also find that overall top-performing workers are more consistent across multiple tasks than other workers. Our results thus contribute to a better understanding of, and provide new insights into, how to design more effective crowdsourcing processes

Multidimensional Health Impact of Multicomponent Exercise and Sustainable Healthy Diet Interventions in the Elderly (MED-E): Study Protocol

Data concerning the combined effect of diet and exercise interventions on overall health in the elderly are scarce. The MED-E project's primary aim is to assess the effect of the different 3-month sustainable healthy diet (SHD) and multicomponent training (MT) interventions on several health outcomes in the elderly. A quasi-experimental study assigned older adults into four groups: (1) SHD, (2) MT, (3) SHD + MT, or (4) control group (CG). The SHD intervention included a weekly offer of a mixed food supply and individual and group nutritional sessions on the principles of an SHD. The MT groups were submitted to 50-min exercise sessions three times a week. The primary outcomes were blood biomarkers and metabolic profile alterations that were assessed pre- and post-intervention. Additionally, data on dietary intake and nutritional adequacy, physical fitness, body composition and anthropometry, cognitive function, quality of life, and geographical data were assessed at the same time points. The MED-E project's study protocol and future results will add to knowledge about the importance and beneficial contribution of combined SHD and MT interventions on healthy ageing policies

SPORTS DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT IN SWIMMING CLUBS: A PRELIMINARY STUDY ON PORTUGUESE SWIMMERS' PERCEPTIONS

The main purpose of this article was to analyse the perceptions of Portuguese swimmers about their context of sport development. We studied the perceptions of 207 Portuguese national level swimmers (Junior and Senior), both males and females, from 28 swimming clubs. The swimmers were differentiated into three groups, according to the club performance level. In this work was applied an adapted version of the Talent Development Environment Questionnaire for Sport (TDEQ), which revealed, statistically, as having an excellent (> .8) or satisfactory (> .6) reliability in 5 out of 7 factors. On the other hand, the commonalities linked to each variable show huge variance (between 0.04 and 0.768). Analysing the results about the swimmer's perceptions, data suggests that the sport development environment does not appear to be significantly different within the 28 Portuguese swimming clubs involved on different sporting divisions

Arrest in ciliated cell expansion on the bronchial lining of adult rats caused by chronic exposure to industrial noise

Workers chronically exposed to high-intensity/low-frequency noise at textile plants show increased frequency of respiratory infections. This phenomenon prompted the herein investigation on the cytology of the bronchial epithelium of Wistar rats submitted to textile noise. Workplace noise from a cotton-mill room of a textile factory was recorded and reproduced in a sound-insulated animal room. The Wistar rats were submitted to a weekly schedule of noise treatment that was similar to that of the textile workers (8 h/day, 5 days/week). Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used to compare the fine morphology of the inner surface of the bronchi in noise-exposed and control rats. SEM quantitative cytology revealed that exposure to noise for 5-7 months caused inhibition in the natural expansion of the area occupied by ciliated cells on the bronchial epithelium as adult rats grow older. This difference between noise-exposed and age-matched control rats was statistically significant (P<0.05) and documents that the cytology of the rat bronchial epithelium is mildly altered by noise exposure. The decrease in the area of bronchial cilia may impair the mucociliar clearance of the respiratory airways and, thus, increase vulnerability to respiratory infection

Membranes by the Numbers

Many of the most important processes in cells take place on and across membranes. With the rise of an impressive array of powerful quantitative methods for characterizing these membranes, it is an opportune time to reflect on the structure and function of membranes from the point of view of biological numeracy. To that end, in this article, I review the quantitative parameters that characterize the mechanical, electrical and transport properties of membranes and carry out a number of corresponding order of magnitude estimates that help us understand the values of those parameters.Comment: 27 pages, 12 figure

Glatiramer acetate reduces the risk for experimental cerebral malaria: a pilot study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Cerebral malaria (CM) is associated with high mortality and morbidity caused by a high rate of transient or persistent neurological sequelae. Studies on immunomodulatory and neuroprotective drugs as ancillary treatment in murine CM indicate promising potential. The current study was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of glatiramer acetate (GA), an immunomodulatory drug approved for the treatment of relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis, in preventing the death of C57Bl/6J mice infected with <it>Plasmodium berghei </it>ANKA.</p> <p>Methods and Results</p> <p>GA treatment led to a statistically significant lower risk for developing CM (57.7% versus 84.6%) in treated animals. The drug had no effect on the course of parasitaemia. The mechanism of action seems to be an immunomodulatory effect since lower IFN-gamma levels were observed in treated animals in the early course of the disease (day 4 post-infection) which also led to a lower number of brain sequestered leukocytes in treated animals. No direct neuro-protective effect such as an inhibition of apoptosis or reduction of micro-bleedings in the brain was found.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These findings support the important role of the host immune response in the pathophysiology of murine CM and might lead to the development of new adjunctive treatment strategies.</p