Eating and stress at work: The need for public health promotion intervention and an opportunity for food product development?

YesGiven the large proportion of time spent at work, it is surprising that relatively little research has been devoted to understanding food selection in the work place. A growing literature suggests that stress, particularly occupation-related stress, negatively impacts upon food choice and may contribute to population ill health. The consensus is that work stress induces consumption of foods that are high in sugar, fat and salt which are likely to contribute to overweight and have long-term detriment to health. The interaction between stress and eating appears to vary by sex and type of work undertaken. This paper argues an imperative for further longitudinal and intervention research to understand interactions between food choice and stress in the work context with a view to the design of dietary health promotion and the development of nourishing food products targeted at those experiencing stress and which could be made accessible in the work place

Multimodal discourse on online newspaper home pages: A social-semiotic perspective

In a short space of time, online newspapers have emerged to play an important role in the institutional construction of ‘news’ and the mass mediation of information. The home pages of online newspapers feature short verbal texts, and communicate using language, image, layout, colour, and other semiotic resources: they communicate multimodally. This thesis examines the multimodal discourse of three English-language online newspapers: the Bangkok Post (Thailand), the English-language edition (translated from Chinese) of the People’s Daily (China), and the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia). Between February, 2002 and April, 2006, three data collections were made (February-April, 2002; September-November, 2005; January-April, 2006) using a five-day ‘constructed week’ method. The main corpus was 15 home pages from each newspaper (five per collection per newspaper), but the total corpus (including other pages from each newspaper) was 603 web pages. Two senior editors (one each from the Bangkok Post and the Sydney Morning Herald) were interviewed. The multimodal discourse of the home pages was analysed using tools from Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA), and a ‘visual grammar’ of home pages building on the work of Kress & van Leeuwen (1996) was developed. In addition, a rank scale for online newspapers was proposed, and limitations of applying the tool of rank scale to this corpus were identified. An emerging genre - the headline-plus-lead-plus-hyperlink newsbite - was identified, and the design of newsbites on the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald and the evolution of their design over time was analysed. The use of images on the home pages in the corpus was analysed, and the increasing use of thumbnail images in the Sydney Morning Herald - particularly close-up thumbnails of faces - was investigated in further depth. The visual design of online newspaper home pages and the news texts appearing on them are an evolution of print news genres and their design practices. Newsbites and headline-only newsbits are verbally short, so the authors of newspaper home pages are forced to rely increasingly on visual communication in order to position stories and readers, and to communicate the values of the news institution on the home page as mediated by the screen. Thumbnail images are evolving as a new form of punctuation on some home pages, and this may be a short-lived, or an emerging historical trend in the development of punctuation, at least in online environments. Overall, online newspaper home pages are tending towards shorter texts, which communicate in novel ways. These short texts cannot communicate the values and ideology of news institutions in the way that extended verbal texts have done for centuries, yet this function of news texts remains important to the construction and maintenance of a readership, and therefore crucial to the home page of a newspaper. As a result, news institutions express values visually in their design of newspaper home pages. As readers become familiar with the meanings of online news design, they become adept at reading and understanding short stories within these multimodally-construed frames of reference. Ideology is increasingly fragmented on shorter timescales, but expressed over longer timescales in a hypermedia environment that affords and extends many of the pre-existing multimodal features of print newspaper discourse

Morphoseismic Features in the New Madrid Seismic Zone (central USA) and their Implications for Geotechnical Engineering

Morphoseismic features arc new landforms produced by earthquakes or pre-existing landforms modified by them. The New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) contains thousands of earthquake-related surface features distributed over 13,000 square kilometers. They are attributable to some combination of (1) seismically-induced liquefaction, (2) secondary deformation, and (3) seismically-induced slope failures. Most were produced by the series of great earthquakes that occurred in 1811-12, but some predate and some postdate those events. They are being modified by ongoing activities such a fluvial processes, mass wasting, eolian processes, hydrologically-induced liquefaction (HIL), mechanically-induced liquefaction (MJL), and human activities. Dynamic responses to ground motion include sand extrusion, sand intrusion, lateral spreading, faulting, subsidence, uplift, stream modification, landsliding, groundwater flooding, and explosion cratering. We have identified thirty-four types of morphoseismic features. While the formation of these features during and following earthquakes can be devastating to engineering structures in place at the time of the ground motion, they pose unique hazards to structures built over them for all subsequent time. Geotechnical engineers working in the NMSZ, or any other region where large earthquakes occur, need to recognize and compensate for them

Constraints on TeV-scale hybrid inflation and comments on non-hybrid alternatives

During hybrid inflation, the slowly-rolling inflaton field has a significant coupling to the trigger field which is responsible for most of the potential. Barring a fine-tuned accidental cancellation, this coupling induces a minimal one-loop contribution to the inflaton potential. The requirement that this contribution be not too large constrains a wide class of hybrid inflation models. Assuming that the inflaton perturbation generates structure in the Universe, the inflaton field and/or the trigger field after inflation have to be bigger than 10^9\GeV. This and other results make hybrid inflation at or below the TeV scale problematical. (There is no problem with hybrid inflation at the high energy scales normally considered.) `New' and thermal inflation seem to be viable alternatives for inflation at or below the TeV scale, including the case that quantum gravity is at the TeV scale. In any case, supersymmetry is needed required during inflation, in order to protect a scalar mass.Comment: 15 pages, one ref added in V

Band Structure of InAs/GaSb coupled quantum wells studied by magnetotransport

This thesis describes the characterisation of InAs/GaSb coupled quantum wells in the electron-dominated regime. The “inverted” band gap, created by electron-hole coupling within this material is predicted to give rise to a quantum spin Hall phase, where carrier dynamics are dominated by ballistic, spin-polarised, edge states. If it was possible to inject spin into these edge-states, this material could become the foundation for future spintronic devices. However, the effect of this electron-hole coupling on the electron dominated transport is relatively unexplored. Therefore, this thesis studies the electron dominated regime in a variety of quantum wells, and highlights the differences between this coupled system and the single 2DEG transport, seen in previous studies of single InAs wells. The effect the coupling has on the transport in the absence of a gate bias is probed by comparing the transport in a simple InAs/GaSb well to a similar well with an inter-layer AlSb barrier. Once it was determined that two carrier, electron-hole, transport exists in the InAs/AlSb/GaSb well, but not in the simple InAs/GaSb well, the effect of gate biases on the magnetotransport through the simple coupled well was also probed. In that case, the effects of higher order electron-hole coupling on the band-structure within this interesting coupled quantum well system was observed. Finally, the spin-orbit coupling within this strongly coupled quantum well system is investigated. The Dresselhaus and Rashba spin-orbit coupling terms are explicitly calculated and their dependences on a small gate bias are noted. In particular, the Rashba spin orbit coupling is not only much larger than that observed in single InAs quantum wells, but it shows a remarkable dependence on the quantum well growth conditions. This strong spin-orbit coupling could have a profound impact on the quantum spin Hall effect predicted to arise in this material system, perturbing the polarisation axis of the quantum spin Hall state

Caught in a ‘spiral’. Barriers to healthy eating and dietary health promotion needs from the perspective of unemployed young people and their service providers

NoThe number of young people in Europe who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) is increasing. Given that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to have diets of poor nutritional quality, this exploratory study sought to understand barriers and facilitators to healthy eating and dietary health promotion needs of unemployed young people aged 16–20 years. Three focus group discussions were held with young people (n = 14). Six individual interviews and one paired interview with service providers (n = 7). Data were recorded, transcribed verbatim and thematically content analysed. Themes were then fitted to social cognitive theory (SCT). Despite understanding of the principles of healthy eating, a ‘spiral’ of interrelated social, economic and associated psychological problems was perceived to render food and health of little value and low priority for the young people. The story related by the young people and corroborated by the service providers was of a lack of personal and vicarious experience with food. The proliferation and proximity of fast food outlets and the high perceived cost of ‘healthy’ compared to ‘junk’ food rendered the young people low in self-efficacy and perceived control to make healthier food choices. Agency was instead expressed through consumption of junk food and drugs. Both the young people and service providers agreed that for dietary health promotion efforts to succeed, social problems needed to be addressed and agency encouraged through (individual and collective) active engagement of the young people themselves

Factors determining the integration of nutritional genomics into clinical practice by registered dietitians

YesPersonalized nutrition has the potential to improve health, prevent disease and reduce healthcare expenditure. Whilst research hints at positive consumer attitudes towards personalized nutrition that draws upon lifestyle, phenotypic and genotypic data, little is known about the degree to which registered dietitians (RD) are engaged in the delivery of such services. This review sought to determine possible factors associated with the integration of the emerging science of Nutritional Genomics (NGx) into the clinical practice setting by practicing registered dietitians. Scope Search of online databases (Pubmed; National Library of Medicine; Cochrane Library; Ovid Medline) was conducted on material published from January 2000 to December 2014. Studies that sampled practicing dietitians and investigated integration or application of NGx and genetics knowledge into practice were eligible. Articles were assessed according to the American Dietetic Association Quality Criteria Checklist. Key findings Application of nutritional genomics in practice has been limited. Reluctance to integrate NGx into practice is associated with low awareness of NGx, a lack of confidence in the science surrounding NGx and skepticism toward Direct to consumer (DTC) products. Successful application to practice was associated with knowledge about NGx, having confidence in the science, a positive attitude toward NGx, access to DTC products, a supportive working environment, working in the clinical setting rather than the public health domain and being in private rather than public practice. Conclusions There is a need to provide RGs with a supportive working environment that provides ongoing training in NGx and which is integrated with clinical practice