An evaluation of the Cheshire and Merseyside Public Health Network 'Drink a Little Less, See a Better You' social marketing campaign

Drink a Little Less, See a Better You: The NHS Health Check and Wind Down initiative is a social marketing campaign designed to reduce alcohol harm in the target group - men between the ages of 35-55 years - in the pub setting. In order to understand the impact of this initiative, the Cheshire and Merseyside Public Health Network commissioned the Centre for Public Health Research at the University of Chester to carry out an evaluation.Cheshire and Merseyside Public Health Networ

Battlegrounds of environmental change

The Thames catchment encompasses one of Europe’s largest cities, the UK’s principal aquifer, an extensive zone of coastal interaction and much else. It presents a unique conjunction of geological, hydrogeological, environmental and socio-economic factors that are intrinsically linked by the effects of environmental change and the pressures of developmen

Automatic inference of causal reasoning chains from student essays

While there has been an increasing focus on higher-level thinking skills arising from the Common Core Standards, many high-school and middle-school students struggle to combine and integrate information from multiple sources when writing essays. Writing is an important learning skill, and there is increasing evidence that writing about a topic develops a deeper understanding in the student. However, grading essays is time consuming for teachers, resulting in an increasing focus on shallower forms of assessment that are easier to automate, such as multiple-choice tests. Existing essay grading software has attempted to ease this burden but relies on shallow lexico-syntactic features and is unable to understand the structure or validity of a student’s arguments or explanations. Without the ability to understand a student’s reasoning processes, it is impossible to write automated formative assessment systems to assist students with improving their thinking skills through essay writing. In order to understand the arguments put forth in an explanatory essay in the science domain, we need a method of representing the causal structure of a piece of explanatory text. Psychologists use a representation called a causal model to represent a student\u27s understanding of an explanatory text. This consists of a number of core concepts, and a set of causal relations linking them into one or more causal chains, forming a causal model. In this thesis I present a novel system for automatically constructing causal models from student scientific essays using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. The problem was decomposed into 4 sub-problems - assigning essay concepts to words, detecting causal-relations between these concepts, resolving coreferences within each essay, and using the structure of the whole essay to reconstruct a causal model. Solutions to each of these sub-problems build upon the predictions from the solutions to earlier problems, forming a sequential pipeline of models. Designing a system in this way allows later models to correct for false positive predictions from downstream models. However, this also has the disadvantage that errors made in earlier models can propagate through the system, negatively impacting the upstream models, and limiting their accuracy. Producing robust solutions for the initial 2 sub problems, detecting concepts, and parsing causal relations between them, was critical in building a robust system. A number of sequence labeling models were trained to classify the concepts associated with each word, with the most effective approach being a bidirectional recurrent neural network (RNN), a deep learning model commonly applied to word labeling problems. This is because the RNN used pre-trained word embeddings to better generalize to rarer words, and was able to use information from both ends of each sentence to infer a word\u27s concept. The concepts predicted by this model were then used to develop causal relation parsing models for detecting causal connections between these concepts. A shift-reduce dependency parsing model was trained using the SEARN algorithm and out-performed a number of other approaches by better utilizing the structure of the problem and directly optimizing the error metric used. Two pre-trained coreference resolution systems were used to resolve coreferences within the essays. However a word tagging model trained to predict anaphors combined with a heuristic for determining the antecedent out-performed these two systems. Finally, a model was developed for parsing a causal model from an entire essay, utilizing the solutions to the three previous problems. A beam search algorithm was used to produce multiple parses for each sentence, which in turn were combined to generate multiple candidate causal models for each student essay. A reranking algorithm was then used to select the optimal causal model from all of the generated candidates. An important contribution of this work is that it represents a system for parsing a complete causal model of a scientific essay from a student\u27s written answer. Existing systems have been developed to parse individual causal relations, but no existing system attempts to parse a sequence of linked causal relations forming a causal model from an explanatory scientific essay. It is hoped that this work can lead to the development of more robust essay grading software and formative assessment tools, and can be extended to build solutions for extracting causality from text in other domains. In addition, I also present 2 novel approaches for optimizing the micro-F1 score within the design of two of the algorithms studied: the dependency parser and the reranking algorithm. The dependency parser uses a custom cost function to estimate the impact of parsing mistakes on the overall micro-F1 score, while the reranking algorithm allows the micro-F1 score to be optimized by tuning the beam search parameter to balance recall and precision

Measuring the impact of research access for human skeletal remains stored in English museum contexts.

This thesis evaluates the relationship between research and the preservation of skeletal remains stored in English museums, through the lens of researcher access to those collections. Preservation is an important issue in archaeology; however, it is under-represented in the bioarchaeological literature. This has led to a lack of understanding regarding the factors that most affect the preservation of human remains. Few studies have explored the impact of post-excavation factors on the preservation of human remains, and this study was proposed to address this shortage. The primary aim of this study was to assess to what extent research causes changes to the condition of skeletal remains, and whether the information we gain from research is balanced against the potential damage it may cause. To achieve this aim, a new methodology was developed that involved the creation of a retrospective baseline condition assessment of the skeletal remains. Utilising this retrospective assessment enabled the change in preservation over time to be calculated without the need for a longitudinal study. The second aim was to evaluate other potential causes of deterioration to see if any had a greater impact than research through access. Where other factors affecting deterioration were discovered, their significance was discussed, as were the repercussions for museum storage and research. The data collected from holdings of skeletal remains in institutions outside of London, showed that whilst research access did have an impact on the preservation of the skeletal remains studied, this impact was to a lesser degree than other factors evaluated in this research. Predominantly, the start (or retrospective baseline) preservation of the skeletal remains and the quality of the museum storage were the most significant factors that affected the preservation of the remains. This thesis highlights the problems we, as researchers, as well as the skeletal remains we curate, could potentially face in the future. It recommends that greater consideration be given to the preservation of skeletal remains that are curated. Funding overall needs to be increased, whether this is through core government funding or an alternative source. Furthermore, planning for long term storage of skeletal collections is essential. The quality of museum storage and the amount of space available for storage must also be addressed, as these are significant issues in the long-term preservation and conservation of skeletal remains

Palliative radiotherapy: Evolving role and policy challenges

Radiotherapy remains a key modality in the palliation of advanced malignancy managing both local primary tumour effects such as pain and bleeding as well as the sequelae of metastatic disease. Its role continues to evolve in line with advances in radiation technology, which have facilitated dose escalation and reduced toxicity. Injudicious use of such advancements has the potential to magnify the cost of delivering palliative radiotherapy without achieving significant gains in terms of outcomes, and therefore well-designed trials to assess the clinical efficacy are essential. From a policy perspective a key concern remains the heterogeneity in dose fractionation schedules currently utilised internationally which lack a strong evidence base and may be influenced by reimbursement policy that incentivises longer, more complex and less cost-effective schedules. International consensus is required on study end-points in palliative radiotherapy research to enable comparison between case series and facilitate randomised controlled trial design. Patient reported outcome measures should be developed that capture the value of radiation treatment for different indications both in achieving symptom control but also improving quality of life. The timing and appropriate use of radiation therapy are generally guided by the clinical assessment of the radiation oncologist, once a referral has been made. An analysis of outcomes from national-level epidemiological studies has the potential to guide appropriate utilisation and identify those patients most likely to derive benefit from radiotherapy in different tumour types. Lastly education and training remain at the heart of reducing inequalities in access to radiotherapy for patients who would benefit. This includes both radiation oncologists for whom many training schemes do not prioritise palliative care and the wider multidisciplinary team who are involved in the management of cancer patients at all stages. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

The United Nations' 'responsibility to protect' and the world's press: establishing a new humanitarian norm?

Since 2005 the United Nations has officially endorsed, though not always managed to enact, the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine designed to safeguard human lives when a state either fails to protect, or grievously threatens, its own citizens. To what extent, how and when have these principles informed press journalism around the world and its news coverage of potential and actual R2P crises? This chapter briefly contextualizes the recent historical emergence of the R2P principle, and then, based on a systematic and detailed analysis of the world’s press across a ten-year period, summarizes key findings relating to press performance – both progressive and problematic – in the establishment of the R2P norm

Low-Cost QCM Sensor System for Screening Semen Samples

Artificial insemination is a well-established part of modern agricultural practice. A viable semen sample is judged by the total number of spermatozoa (sperm) in the sample and the motility of the sperm. In this paper, we report the development of a reusable measurement cell and electronics for screening semen samples based on the Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM) and Universal Frequency to Digital Converter (UFDC-1) to produce a low-cost sensor system. After introducing the semen sample at one end of the measurement cell, sperm swim down a channel before causing a frequency change on the QCM. Data is presented that shows the different frequency changes using a commercial frequency counter caused by porcine semen samples, one two days old and one twenty one days old. Similar data is presented for a motile semen sample measurement using the low-cost UFDC-1