Maternal and best friends\u27 influences on meal-skipping behaviours

Skipping meals is particularly common during adolescence and can have a detrimental effect on multiple aspects of adolescent health.&nbsp;Understanding the correlates of meal-skipping behaviours is important for the design of nutrition interventions. The present study examined&nbsp;maternal and best friends&rsquo; influences on adolescent meal-skipping behaviours. Frequency of skipping breakfast, lunch and dinner was&nbsp;assessed using a Web-based survey completed by 3001 adolescent boys and girls from years 7 and 9 of secondary schools in Victoria,&nbsp;Australia. Perceived best friend and maternal meal skipping, modelling of healthy eating (eating healthy food, limiting junk food,&nbsp;eating fruit and vegetables) and weight watching were assessed. Best friend and maternal factors were differentially associated with&nbsp;meal-skipping behaviours. For example, boys and girls who perceived that their best friend often skipped meals were more likely to&nbsp;skip lunch (OR &frac14; 2&middot;01, 95% CI 1&middot;33, 3&middot;04 and OR &frac14; 1&middot;93, 95% CI 1&middot;41, 2&middot;65; P,0&middot;001). Boys and girls who perceived that their mother&nbsp;often skipped meals were more likely to skip breakfast (OR &frac14; 1&middot;48, 95% CI 1&middot;01, 2&middot;15; P,0&middot;05 and OR &frac14; 1&middot;93, 95% CI 1&middot;42, 2&middot;59;&nbsp;P,0&middot;001) and lunch (OR &frac14; 2&middot;05, 95% CI 1&middot;35, 3&middot;12 and OR &frac14; 2&middot;02, 95% CI 1&middot;43, 2&middot;86; P,0&middot;001). Educating adolescents on how to&nbsp;assess and interpret unhealthy eating behaviours that they observe from significant others may be one nutrition promotion strategy to&nbsp;reduce meal-skipping behaviour. The involvement of mothers may be particularly important in such efforts. Encouraging a peer subculture&nbsp;that promotes regular consumption of meals and educates adolescents on the detrimental impact of meal-skipping behaviour on health&nbsp;may also offer a promising nutrition promotion strategy.</span

The Australian METS Profile – A Journey about Metadata

In any journey, there's a destination but half the 'fun' is getting there. This article chronicles our journey towards a common way of packaging and exchanging digital content in a future Australian data commons – a national corpus of research resources that can be shared and re-used. Whatever packaging format is used, it has to handle complex content models and work across multiple submission and dissemination scenarios. It has to do this in a way that maintains a history of the chain of custody of objects over time. At the start of our journey we chose METS extended by PREMIS to do this. We learnt a lot during the first two stages that we want to share with those travelling to a similar destination

Report of the METS Profile Development Project

This document reports on the outcome of the APSR METS Profile Development Project. The APSR METS profile project aimed to develop: • an open, extensible and standard way of packaging metadata for digital objects which could be relevant to both Australian and broader contexts; and • a generic, repository independent metadata submission and exchange profile for use among APSR repositories. The basis for this project was the draft METS exchange profile developed by the NLA as part of the 2006 APSR-funded PRESTA project. The project undertook to test this profile against actual implementations and then to register it with the Library of Congress

Survey of the vertebrate fauna of the Dotswood area, North Queensland

The results of a survey of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish of the Dotswood area west of Townsville are presented. Habitats included in the survey were woodland, open forest, tall open forest, closed forest (rainforest), riparian forest and rocky outcrops. A total of 297 species of vertebrates were observed using a variety of survey techniques including live trapping, pit trapping, observational transects, mist netting and spotlighting. Exact locations of observation and indices of relative abundance of each species are included

Vertebrate fauna of three mountain tops in the Townsville region, north Queensland : Mount Cleveland, Mount Elliot and Mount Halifax

Vertebrate fauna surveys were carried out on the summits of Mount Cleveland, Mount Elliot and Mount Halifax in north Queensland. The main focus was on mammals and birds, but observations on all vertebrate groups are included. Habitats included rainforest and open eucalypt/casuarina forest. The surveys recorded a total of 136 species of vertebrates including 17 mammal, 77 bird, 32 reptile and 10 frog species. Habitat descriptions and measures of relative abundance for mammals and birds are included

Limited evidence for quantitative contribution of rare and endangered species to agricultural production

Biodiversity underpins ecosystem functions that provide benefits to people, yet the role of rare and endangered species (RES) in supporting ecosystem services is unclear. Thus, it remains controversial whether arguments for conservation that focus on ecosystem services align with the protection of RES. We designed a systematic review protocol to critically assess the evidence for quantitative contributions of RES to terrestrial agricultural production, which is a key driver of biodiversity change and, simultaneously, could suffer from the loss of ecosystem services provided by biodiversity. Our review search criteria required that studies: 1) provide information on RES, 2) focus on an ecosystem service relevant for agriculture; and 3) include a quantitative measure of agricultural production. Surprisingly, we found only four studies that fulfilled these criteria, which was insufficient to perform a meta-analysis of results. Thus, we highlight here the gap in quantitative research, discuss the implications of this knowledge gap for the conservation of RES, and suggest future research directions. We conclude that further quantitative research is urgently needed to better inform conservation and agricultural policies, including research that focuses specifically on RES, incorporates more ecosystem services, and covers a wider range of climatic and socioeconomic contexts

How good are your fits? Unbinned multivariate goodness-of-fit tests in high energy physics

Multivariate analyses play an important role in high energy physics. Such analyses often involve performing an unbinned maximum likelihood fit of a probability density function (p.d.f.) to the data. This paper explores a variety of unbinned methods for determining the goodness of fit of the p.d.f. to the data. The application and performance of each method is discussed in the context of a real-life high energy physics analysis (a Dalitz-plot analysis). Several of the methods presented in this paper can also be used for the non-parametric determination of whether two samples originate from the same parent p.d.f. This can be used, e.g., to determine the quality of a detector Monte Carlo simulation without the need for a parametric expression of the efficiency.Comment: 32 pages, 12 figure

Adolescent television viewing and unhealthy snack food consumption: the mediating role of home availability of unhealthy snack foods

Objective To examine whether home availability of energy-dense snack foods mediates the association between television (TV) viewing and energy-dense snack consumption among adolescents.Design Cross-sectional.Setting Secondary schools in Victoria, Australia.Subjects Adolescents (n 2984) from Years 7 and 9 of secondary school completed a web-based survey, between September 2004 and July 2005, assessing their energy-dense snack food consumption, school-day and weekend-day TV viewing and home availability of energy-dense snack foods.Results School-day and weekend-day TV viewing were positively associated with energy-dense snack consumption among adolescent boys (&beta; = 0&middot;003, P &lt; 0&middot;001) and girls (&beta; = 0&middot;03, P &lt; 0&middot;001). Furthermore, TV viewing (school day and weekend day) were positively associated with home availability of energy-dense snack foods among adolescent boys and girls and home availability of energy-dense snack foods was positively associated with energy-dense snack food consumption among boys (&beta; = 0&middot;26, P &lt; 0&middot;001) and girls (&beta; = 0&middot;28, P &lt; 0&middot;001). Home availability partly mediated the association between TV viewing and energy-dense snack consumption.Conclusions The results of the present study suggest that TV viewing has a significant role to play in adolescent unhealthy eating behaviours. Future research should assess the efficacy of methods to reduce adolescent energy-dense snack food consumption by targeting parents to reduce home availability of energy-dense foods and by reducing TV viewing behaviours of adolescents

Population structure of graptolite assemblages

Graptolite rhabdosomes display a diverse suite of morphologies. The range of morphotypes present within most moderate to high diversity assemblages from the Ordovician and Silurian is similar, despite the different taxonomic composition of the faunas at different times. Survivorship analyses of graptolite faunas from the Ordovician and Silurian demonstrate strong similarities in the mortality rates of unrelated graptolites of similar functional morphology. It also shows a strong correlation of decreasing mortality rates amongst more mature colonies with increasing rhabdosome complexity. This similarity in both functional morphology and life history of graptolites suggests that they lived within a very stable planktic community structure