Pilot of ‘Families for Health’ : community-based family intervention for obesity

Objective - To develop and evaluate ‘Families for Health’ - a new community based family intervention for childhood obesity. Design – Programme development, pilot study and evaluation using intention-to-treat analysis. Setting – Coventry, England Participants – 27 overweight or obese children aged 7-13 years (18 girls, 9 boys) and their parents, from 21 families. Intervention – ‘Families for Health’ is a 12 week programme with parallel groups for parents and children, addressing parenting, lifestyle change and social & emotional development. Main Outcome Measures – Primary: change in baseline BMI z-score at end of programme (3 months) and 9 month follow-up. Attendance, drop-out, parents’ perception of programme, child’s quality of life and self esteem, parental mental health, parent-child relationships and lifestyle changes were also measured. Results: Attendance rate was 62%, with 18 of the 27 (67%) children completing the programme. For the 22 children with follow-up data (including 4 drop-outs), BMI z-score was reduced by -0.18 (95%CI -0.30 to -0.05) at end of programme and by -0.21 (-0.35 to -0.07) at 9 months. Statistically significant improvements were observed in children’s quality of life and lifestyle (reduced sedentary behaviour, increased steps and reduced exposure to unhealthy foods), child-parent relationships and parents’ mental health. Fruit and vegetable consumption, participation in moderate/vigorous exercise and children’s self-esteem did not change significantly. Topics on parenting skills, activity and food were rated as helpful and were used with confidence by the majority of parents. Conclusions Families for Health is a promising new childhood obesity intervention. Definitive evaluation of its clinical effectiveness by randomised controlled trial is now required

Navigating the Political Waters of Open Access Publishing in Libraries

In recent years, many libraries have forayed into the world of open access (OA) publishing. While it marks a major shift in the mission of libraries to move from providing access to content to generating and creating content ourselves, it still involves the same basic values regarding access to information. The environment has changed, and libraries are adapting with new approaches and new staff skills to promote these fundamental values. The authors selected nineteen libraries and conducted phone interviews with a specific list of questions, encouraging discussion about how each library approached being a publisher. This chapter examines the politics and issues involved, and makes recommendations for defining our roles in this new territory. The authors highlight the approaches various libraries have taken—and the challenges faced—in selecting a platform, writing a business plan, planning for preservation, educating researchers about OA publishing, working with a university press, marketing, and navigating staff training issues. The chapter concludes with recommendations for areas of focus and future research

An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing: Version 0.5 (Draft for Comment)

Background: At the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) Membership Meeting at the 2017 Library Publishing Forum in Baltimore, Maryland, the community discussed how the LPC can respond to the current political climate. The discussion was wide-ranging, but kept coming back to the importance of library values and our responsibility as library publishers to center our publishing practice around them. A number of those present offered to devise a way for the conversation to continue beyond the Forum. That group included Marilyn Billings, Jason Boczar, Rebel Cummings-Sauls, Harrison W. Inefuku, Joshua Neds-Fox, Matt Ruen, Emily Stenberg, and Monica Westin, who proposed a task force to tackle the issues raised. This task force was charged with creating an Ethical Framework for Library Publishing . From July of 2017 to June of 2018, the task force members (listed on the title page as authors of this document) identified the topics to be covered in the framework, and then worked in subgroups to review the literature on those topics and identify existing resources of particular relevance to the community of library publishers. The subgroups then drafted the sections you see in this document. Throughout this process, they worked iteratively to devise a structure and format for the framework—a challenging task, and one for which there were many inspirations, but no clear models. In the end, they decided that the most effective structure for the document would break each section into an introduction , a scope statement , a review of existing resources , and a set of recommendations for library publishers. Some sections also include a note about new resources that are needed and/or further readings on the topic. Context: library publishing and ethics: Academic libraries have entered the publishing space due to changes in ways of disseminating information and in response to faculty members’ desire to control their own publishing destiny. This work has been enabled by the emergence of open source or low-cost technologies for publishing, but the motivations for it are broad and deep—for example, library publishers are also deeply engaged with emerging forms of scholarship (and emerging disciplines) that do not yet have a voice within the traditional publishing environment. These motivations often include a desire for increased openness and sustainability in the scholarly communication landscape. Unlike commercial publishers and traditional presses, the work of library publishers is largely funded through existing library budgets without a profit motive. The goal is instead to increase the impact of scholarship created by faculty and students affiliated with an institution and to disseminate that scholarship as broadly as possible, by emphasizing open access as a means of distribution. Because these publishing activities for academic libraries are a relatively recent endeavor, education and training for librarians as publishers is not fully established and thus one of the objectives for preparing this guide. Publishing as a role for librarians is increasing in importance for all academic libraries and is not limited to just research libraries, but also includes community colleges and four-year undergraduate institutions. Library publishers are also uniquely positioned to look beyond traditional prestige publishing priorities to partner with faculty, students, and organizations in order provide services such as data preservation and engage in publishing as pedagogy. As relative newcomers to the world of publishing, libraries are able to draw on a wealth of resources and expertise developed by more established players. To avoid reinventing the wheel, this document is structured primarily around existing resources. The framework pulls together existing publishing codes of ethics (many of which are included in the Publishing Practice section), along with resources from librarianship and other related fields, and contextualizes them for library publishers. The recommendations in each section attempt to distill a wealth of knowledge and guidance into a small set of actionable steps meant to answer the question, “But how do I get started?” They are by no means the only steps to be taken in these areas, but they may help library publishers begin to incorporate these important ethical considerations into their work. Future plans for the framework From the beginning of this project, the taskforce designed An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing to be an iterative document, more formal than a wiki but less so than a monograph or white paper. The founding group of authors worked on the framework with an understanding that every topic could not be covered, especially with a goal to create a document in less than a year. This framework was always envisioned as a starting place. In light of an iterative approach, we have decided to call this version 1 from the outset. The definitive version of An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing will always be the most current version. Versioning the document will also help make visible the historical transition. Version 2, the taskforce hopes, can be started by a new group of library publishing professionals with new views and ideas. In this way, we hope, An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing will never be a static, antiquated document created only from the viewpoint of a small group of people. It can, and should, be a community project

The Metabochip, a Custom Genotyping Array for Genetic Studies of Metabolic, Cardiovascular, and Anthropometric Traits

PMCID: PMC3410907This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Paradox in the pursuit of a critical theorization of the development of self in family relationships

This article starts with my dissatisfaction with the post-structuralist treatment of the production of subjectivity within regulatory discourses and practices due to its neglect of psychological processes. Taking starting points from within the history set out in the previous article, it highlights the paradox for critical psychologists like myself involved in both applying a post-structuralist critique to 'psy' discourses and trying to theorize subjectivity in a way that goes beyond the dualism of individual and society, of psychology and sociology. The relational, or intersubjective, approach to self that originates in object relations psychoanalysis as it emerged in the mid-20th-century UK is central to both of these activities; object of the former and resource for the latter. I explore the paradox that this creates for critical psychology, both epistemological and ontological. In aiming to provide a psycho-social account of self in family relationships, I deploy the radical conceptualisation of intersubjectivity initiated in British object relations theory as a way of going beyond both the individualized self and the neglect of psychological processes in constructionist theorizing subjectivity

High mannose N-glycans on red blood cells as phagocytic ligands, mediating both sickle cell anaemia and resistance to malaria

Acknowledgements We are grateful for the assistance provided by both the Microscopy and Histology Core Facility, and the Iain Fraser Cytometry Centre, at the University of Aberdeen. We thank Ann Wheeler and Matt Pearson from Edinburgh Super-Resolution Imaging Consortium for technical support with 3D SIM microscopy. We also thank Janet A. Willment and Bernard Kerscher, supervised by G.D.B., for providing the Fc fusion proteins, Jeanette A. Wagener, supervised by Neil A.R.G. Gow, for providing high purity chitin, Jan Westland for obtaining blood samples and Paul Crocker for useful discussions. Principal funding for this project was provided by Wellcome Trust grant 094847 (R.N.B, L.P.E, M.A.V). In addition, support was provided by Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council grants BBF0083091 (A.D. and S.M.H.) and BBK0161641 (A.D. and S.M.H.), Wellcome Trust grant 082098 (A.D.), Wellcome Trust grants 97377, 102705 (G.D.B) and funding for the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology at the University of Aberdeen MR/N006364/1 (G.D.B).Non peer reviewe