Impact of altering proximity on snack food intake in individuals with high and low executive function: study protocol.

BACKGROUND: Despite attempts to improve diet at population level, people living in material and social deprivation continue to consume unhealthy diets. Executive function - the ability to regulate behaviour and resist impulses - is weaker in individuals living in deprivation. Dietary interventions that educate and persuade people to reflect on and actively change behaviour may therefore disproportionately benefit individuals who are socioeconomically advantaged and have stronger executive function, thus exacerbating inequalities in health resulting from unhealthy diets. In contrast, manipulating environmental cues, such as how far away a food is placed, does not appeal to reasoned action and is thought to operate largely outside of awareness to influence behaviour. People eat more of a food when it is placed closer to them, an effect seemingly robust to context, food quality and body-weight status. However, previous studies of this 'proximity effect' are limited by small samples consisting mainly of university staff or students, biased towards higher socio-economic position and therefore likely stronger executive function. This study aims to test the hypothesis that placing food further away from a person decreases intake of that food regardless of executive function. METHODS/DESIGN: 156 members of the general public, recruited from low and high socio-economic groups, will be randomised to one of two conditions varying in the proximity of a snack food relative to their position: 20 cm or 70 cm. Participants are told they will be taking part in a relaxation study - and are fully debriefed at the conclusion of the session. The primary outcome is the proportion of participants eating any amount of snack food and the secondary outcome is the mean amount eaten. Executive function is assessed using the Stroop task. DISCUSSION: The proposed study takes a novel step by investigating the effect of proximity on snack food intake in a general population sample consisting of those with high and low executive function, appropriately powered to detect the predicted proximity effect. If this effect occurs irrespective of executive function and socio-economic position, it may have potential to reduce inequalities patterned by socio-economic position if implemented in real-world settings such as shops or restaurants. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Registered with the ISRCTN registry: ISRCTN46995850 on 07 October 2015.This study is supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Sackler Prize, a doctoral training grant awarded to JAH. The study was also partially funded by the Department of Health Policy Research Program (Policy Research Unit in Behavior and Health [PR-UN-0409-10109]).This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from BioMed Central via http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-016-3184-

Why Allowing Profile Name Reuse Is A Bad Idea

Twitter allows their users to change profile name at their discretion. Unfortunately, this design decision can be used by attackers to effortlessly hijack user names of popular accounts. We call this practice profile name squatting. In this paper, we investigate this name squatting phenomenon, and show how this can be used to mount impersonation attacks and attract a larger number of victims to potentially malicious content. We observe that malicious users are already performing this attack on Twitter and measure its prevalence. We provide insights into the characteristics of such malicious users, and argue that these problems could be solved if the social network never released old user names for others to use