Giving urban policy its 'medical': assessing the place of health in area-based regeneration

How does regeneration affect health and how have successive urban policy evaluations sought to measure such impacts? This article draws on a systematic review of national-level evaluation documentation relating to government-funded, area-based regeneration initiatives in the UK since 1980. The review examined whether health impacts had been intended and, if so, how they had been measured. The process and difficulties of conducting the review raise significant questions about policy formulation and evaluation. Is evidence-based policy possible where evaluations are not stored centrally? In short, a model policy development as 'enlightened' or incremental is hard to sustain where a lack of systematic storage of data means that researchers, policy makers and practitioners may struggle to produce clear answers to important policy questions

Do urban regeneration programmes improve public health and reduce health inequalities? A synthesis of the evidence from UK policy and practice (1980–2004)

Objectives: To synthesise data on the impact on health and key socioeconomic determinants of health and health inequalities reported in evaluations of national UK regeneration programmes. Data Sources: Eight electronic databases were searched from 1980 to 2004 (IBSS, COPAC, HMIC, IDOX, INSIDE, Medline, Urbadisc/Accompline, Web of Knowledge). Bibliographies of located documents and relevant web sites were searched. Experts and government departmental libraries were also contacted. Review methods: Evaluations that reported achievements drawing on data from at least two target areas of a national urban regeneration programme in the UK were included. Process evaluations and evaluations reporting only business outcomes were excluded. All methods of evaluation were included. Impact data on direct health outcomes and direct measures of socioeconomic determinants of health were narratively synthesised. Results: 19 evaluations reported impacts on health or socioeconomic determinants of health; data from 10 evaluations were synthesised. Three evaluations reported health impacts; in one evaluation three of four measures of self reported health deteriorated, typically by around 4%. Two other evaluations reported overall reductions in mortality rates. Most socioeconomic outcomes assessed showed an overall improvement after regeneration investment; however, the effect size was often similar to national trends. In addition, some evaluations reported adverse impacts. Conclusion: There is little evidence of the impact of national urban regeneration investment on socioeconomic or health outcomes. Where impacts have been assessed, these are often small and positive but adverse impacts have also occurred. Impact data from future evaluations are required to inform healthy public policy; in the meantime work to exploit and synthesise "best available" data is required

Language-universal constraints on the segmentation of English

Two word-spotting experiments are reported that examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) [1] is a language-specific or language-universal strategy for the segmentation of continuous speech. The PWC disfavours parses which leave an impossible residue between the end of a candidate word and a known boundary. The experiments examined cases where the residue was either a CV syllable with a lax vowel, or a CVC syllable with a schwa. Although neither syllable context is a possible word in English, word-spotting in both contexts was easier than with a context consisting of a single consonant. The PWC appears to be language-universal rather than language-specific

A randomised, controlled, double blind, non-inferiority trial of ultrasound-guided fascia iliaca block vs. spinal morphine for analgesia after primary hip arthroplasty

We performed a single centre, double blind, randomised, controlled, non-inferiority study comparing ultrasound-guided fascia iliaca block with spinal morphine for the primary outcome of 24-h postoperative morphine consumption in patients undergoing primary total hip arthroplasty under spinal anaesthesia with levobupivacaine. One hundred and eight patients were randomly allocated to receive either ultrasound-guided fascia iliaca block with 2 mg.kg−1 levobupivacaine (fascia iliaca group) or spinal morphine 100 μg plus a sham ultrasound-guided fascia iliaca block using saline (spinal morphine group). The pre-defined non-inferiority margin was a median difference between the groups of 10 mg in cumulative intravenous morphine use in the first 24 h postoperatively. Patients in the fascia iliaca group received 25 mg more intravenous morphine than patients in the spinal morphine group (95% CI 9.0–30.5 mg, p < 0.001). Ultrasound-guided fascia iliaca block was significantly worse than spinal morphine in the provision of analgesia in the first 24 h after total hip arthroplasty. No increase in side-effects was noted in the spinal morphine group but the study was not powered to investigate all secondary outcomes

Sound propagation over uneven ground and irregular topography

The development of theoretical, computational, and experimental techniques for predicting the effects of irregular topography on long range sound propagation in the atmosphere is discussed. Irregular topography here is understood to imply a ground surface that (1) is not idealizable as being perfectly flat or (2) that is not idealizable as having a constant specific acoustic impedance. The study focuses on circumstances where the propagation is similar to what might be expected for noise from low-altitude air vehicles flying over suburban or rural terrain, such that rays from the source arrive at angles close to grazing incidence

UW-BHI at MEDIQA 2019: An Analysis of Representation Methods for Medical Natural Language Inference

Recent advances in distributed language modeling have led to large performance increases on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, it is not well understood how these methods may be augmented by knowledge-based approaches. This paper compares the performance and internal representation of an Enhanced Sequential Inference Model (ESIM) between three experimental conditions based on the representation method: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), Embeddings of Semantic Predications (ESP), or Cui2Vec. The methods were evaluated on the Medical Natural Language Inference (MedNLI) subtask of the MEDIQA 2019 shared task. This task relied heavily on semantic understanding and thus served as a suitable evaluation set for the comparison of these representation methods

Experimental verification of the temperature coefficient of resistivity

We have created an experimental procedure for determining the temperature coefficient of resistivity, $\alpha_R$, for introductory physics laboratories. This method examines the relationship between temperature and resistivity to establish $\alpha_R$ within 10% of the accepted value

Determination of the coefficient of thermal expansion by measuring frequency of a heated music wire

Engaging with physical and material properties through empirical observation is a fundamental part of undergraduate physics and engineering education. Several works have proposed experiments to determine thermal physical constants of materials such as finding the coefficient of linear expansion. As Dajbych and Polak et al. have shown, methods for experimentally verifying physical constants can be done by measuring the frequency of a plucked high-carbon steel wire on a guitar. Building upon our previous work, we have extended our method to verify the coefficient of linear thermal expansion through an accessible procedure directed at introductory physics education

A supply chain approach to meat goat industry development

The Victorian goat meat industry is a significant contributor to export earnings, which is derived largely from the harvest of feral goats. The potential for exports of farmed goat meat into Asian product markets is being developed in a supply chain approach with producers, processors, exporters and Asian importers. Producers have been networked in four locations to improve supply capability and participate in production and economic benchmarking. In the absence of an existing market for premium farmed goat meat, a larger group of producers are cooperating with a marketer to develop a niche market in the Asian food service sector. This presents a challenge to the group in developing commercial relationships and playing a role in the marketing of their goat meat