An aid to the development of Botswana's resources

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

An aid to the development of Botswana's resources

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

An aid to the development of Botswana's resources

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Improving Patients’ Understanding of Fall Risk and Prevention Interventions with the Use of Multimedia Education

https://digitalcommons.psjhealth.org/stvincent-bootcamp/1030/thumbnail.jp

Health triage in development management

A unique collaboration between the WHO Healthy Cities Collaborating Centre, Bristol City Council and Bristol NHS is spawning a new approach to development management. Sitting within a rich seam of planning and health policy collaboration in the Bristol local strategic partnership; this innovative approach uses a health triage method for the screening of planning applications. Initial work on the approach was supported by a departmental planning student placement. An ongoing programme of action research is focussing on design and testing of new working practices to sift through the council’s many monthly planning applications according to potential risks health. Using wider determinants of health model, applications will be rapidly assessed for potential risk to public health; including physical activity, health inequalities and diet. The outcome of this will be used to categorise applications according to risk and so better focus limited technical resources that can be used to support health and well-being. Final policies and processes are still in development, and it is hoped that the highest risk developments will trigger a full health impact assessment

Does ‘playtime’ reduce stimulus-seeking and other boredom-like behaviour in laboratory ferrets?

Much environmental enrichment for laboratory animals is intended to enhance animal welfare and normalcy by providing stimulation to reduce 'boredom'. Behavioural manifestations of boredom include restless sensation-seeking behaviours combined with indicators of sub-optimal arousal. Here, we explored whether these signs could be reduced by extra daily play opportunity in laboratory ferrets (Mustela putorius furo). Specifically, we hypothesised that playtime would reduce restlessness, aggression, sensation-seeking and awake drowsiness, even 24 h later in the home-cage. Female ferrets (n = 14) were group-housed in enriched multi-level cages. Playtime involved exploring a room containing a ball pool, paper bags, balls containing bells, and a familiar interactive human for 1h. This was repeated on three consecutive mornings, and on the fourth, home-cage behaviour was compared between ferrets which had experienced the playtime treatment versus control cage-mates which had not. Their investigation of stimuli (positive=mouse odour or ball; ambiguous = empty bottle or tea-strainer; and negative = peppermint or bitter apple odour) was also recorded. We then swapped treatments, creating a paired experimental design. Ferrets under control conditions lay awake with their eyes open and screeched significantly more, but slept and sat/stood less, than following playtime. They also contacted negative and ambiguous stimuli for significantly longer under control conditions than following playtime; contact with positive stimuli showed no effects. Attempts to blind the observer to treatments were unsuccessful, so replication is required, but the findings suggest that playtime may have reduced both sub-optimal arousal and restless sensation-seeking behaviour, consistent with reducing boredom

Moving Upstream: An Intersectoral Collaboration to Build Sustainable Planning Capacity in Rural and Appalachian Communities

As part of an effort to address health inequities in Appalachian and rural Ohio, the state’s Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services developed an upstream intersectoral health innovation that specifically addressed the lack of infrastructure and other capacity issues that create barriers to obtaining federally funded prevention services among communities with the highest need for those services. The department partnered with two nonprofit organizations and a university to create a performance-based, stepping-stone investment strategy that provided monetary awards to community organizations and included intensive, customized training and technical assistance that promoted capacity- building for data-driven strategic planning. This article discusses successes and lessons learned from implementing this infrastructure development initiative, which strengthened capacity of local prevention workforces in six Appalachian and rural communities. The findings will be helpful to foundations as they structure and evaluate funding opportunities to sustainably address persistent inequities in health and mental health

Topobo : a 3-D constructive assembly system with kinetic memory

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-116).We introduce Topobo, a 3-D constructive assembly system em- bedded with kinetic memory, the ability to record and playback physical motion. Unique among modeling systems is Topobo's coincident physical input and output behaviors. By snapping together a combination of Passive (static) and Active (motorized) components, people can quickly assemble dynamic biomorphic forms like animals and skeletons, animate those forms by pushing, pulling, and twisting them, and observe the system repeatedly play back those motions. For example, a dog can be constructed and then taught to gesture and walk by twisting its body and legs. The dog will then repeat those movements and walk repeatedly. Our evaluation of Topobo in classrooms with children ages 5- 13 suggests that children develop affective relationships with Topobo creations and that their experimentation with Topobo allows them to learn about movement and animal locomotion through comparisons of their creations to their own bodies. Eighth grade science students' abilities to quickly develop various types of walking robots suggests that a tangible interface can support understanding how balance, leverage and gravity affect moving structures because the interface itself responds to the forces of nature that constrain such systems.by Hayes Solos Raffle.S.M