Developing a questionnaire to assess community severance, walkability, and wellbeing: results from the Street Mobility Project in London

This working paper describes the development of the survey questionnaire component of the toolkit designed to measure community severance, and assess its potential associations with transport and health. We discuss the cognitive testing and piloting of the questionnaire in two contrasting case study areas in inner London, and present results from the survey data

Accessing Patient Records in Virtual Healthcare Organisations

The ARTEMIS project is developing a semantic web service based P2P interoperability infrastructure for healthcare information systems that will allow healthcare providers to securely share patient records within virtual healthcare organisations. Authorisation decisions to access patient records across organisation boundaries can be very dynamic and must occur within a strict legislative framework. In ARTEMIS we are developing a dynamic authorisation mechanism called PBAC that provides a means of contextual and process oriented access control to enforce healthcare business processes. PBAC demonstrates how healthcare providers can dynamically share patient records for care pathways across organisation boundaries

Independent associations between different measures of socioeconomic position and smoking status: A cross-sectional study of adults in England

Introduction: To gain a better understanding of the complex and independent associations between different measures of socioeconomic position (SEP) and smoking in England. Aims and Methods: Between March 2013 and January 2019 data were collected from 120 496 adults aged 16+ in England taking part in the Smoking Toolkit Study. Of these, 18.04% (n = 21 720) were current smokers. Six indicators of SEP were measured: social grade, employment status, educational qualifications, home and car ownership and income. Models were constructed using ridge regression to assess the contribution of each measure of SEP, taking account of high collinearity. Results:: The strongest predictor of smoking status was housing tenure. Those who did not own their own home had twice the odds of smoking compared with homeowners (odds ratio [OR] = 2.01). Social grade, educational qualification, and income were also good predictors. Those in social grades C1 (OR = 1.04), C2 (OR = 1.29), D (OR = 1.39), and E (OR = 1.78) had higher odds of smoking than those in social grade AB. Similarly, those with A-level/equivalent (OR = 1.15), GCSE/vocational (OR = 1.48), other/still studying (OR = 1.12), and no post-16 qualifications (OR = 1.48) had higher odds of smoking than those with university qualifications, as did those who earned in the lowest (OR = 1.23), third (OR = 1.18), and second quartiles (OR = 1.06) compared with those earning in the highest. Associations between smoking and employment (OR = 1.03) and car ownership (OR = 1.05) were much smaller. Conclusions: Of a variety of socioeconomic measures, housing tenure appears to be the strongest independent predictor of smoking in England, followed by social grade, educational qualifications, and income. Employment status and car ownership have the lowest predictive power. Implications: This study used ridge regression, a technique which takes into account high collinearity between variables, to gain a better understanding of the independent associations between different measures of SEP and smoking in England. The findings provide guidance as to which SEP measures one could use when trying to identifying individuals most at risk from smoking, with housing tenure identified as the strongest independent predictor

Use of reflected GNSS SNR data to retrieve either soil moisture or vegetation height from a wheat crop

This work aims to estimate soil moisture and vegetation height from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) data using direct and reflected signals by the land surface surrounding a ground-based antenna. Observations are collected from a rainfed wheat field in southwestern France. Surface soil moisture is retrieved based on SNR phases estimated by the Least Square Estimation method, assuming the relative antenna height is constant. It is found that vegetation growth breaks up the constant relative antenna height assumption. A vegetation-height retrieval algorithm is proposed using the SNR-dominant period (the peak period in the average power spectrum derived from a wavelet analysis of SNR). Soil moisture and vegetation height are retrieved at different time periods (before and after vegetation's significant growth in March). The retrievals are compared with two independent reference data sets: in situ observations of soil moisture and vegetation height, and numerical simulations of soil moisture, vegetation height and above-ground dry biomass from the ISBA (interactions between soil, biosphere and atmosphere) land surface model. Results show that changes in soil moisture mainly affect the multipath phase of the SNR data (assuming the relative antenna height is constant) with little change in the dominant period of the SNR data, whereas changes in vegetation height are more likely to modulate the SNR-dominant period. Surface volumetric soil moisture can be estimated (R2  =  0.74, RMSE  =  0.009 m3 m−3) when the wheat is smaller than one wavelength (∼ 19 cm). The quality of the estimates markedly decreases when the vegetation height increases. This is because the reflected GNSS signal is less affected by the soil. When vegetation replaces soil as the dominant reflecting surface, a wavelet analysis provides an accurate estimation of the wheat crop height (R2  =  0.98, RMSE  =  6.2 cm). The latter correlates with modeled above-ground dry biomass of the wheat from stem elongation to ripening. It is found that the vegetation height retrievals are sensitive to changes in plant height of at least one wavelength. A simple smoothing of the retrieved plant height allows an excellent matching to in situ observations, and to modeled above-ground dry biomass

Actual and perceived units of alcohol in a self-defined "usual glass" of alcoholic drinks in England

Several studies have found participants pour more than 1 standard drink or unit as their usual glass. This is the first study to measure actual and perceived amounts of alcohol in a self-defined usual glass of wines and spirits in the general population

An Integrated Content and Metadata based Retrieval System for Art

In this paper we describe aspects of the Artiste project to develop a distributed content and metadata based analysis, retrieval and navigation system for a number of major European Museums. In particular, after a brief overview of the complete system, we describe the design and evaluation of some of the image analysis algorithms developed to meet the specific requirements of the users from the museums. These include a method for retrievals based on sub images, retrievals based on very low quality images and retrieval using craquelure type

Street Mobility Project: Health and Neighbourhood Mobility Survey Questionnaire

This questionnaire is provided for free use but please notify us if you use it, by emailing [email protected] It is provided as both a pdf file and a Word file

D7.2 1st experiment planning and community management

The present deliverable, outlines the overall strategy for approaching the tasks of (a) developing and sustaining an engaged school-based community of ProsocialLearn users; and (b)planning and facilitating small-scale and large-scale school-based evaluation studies of the Prosocial Learn technological solution. It also presents the preliminary work undertaken so far, and details the activities planned for M9-15 with respect to community development and small-scale studies