Regular expressions as violin bowing patterns

String players spend a significant amount of practice time creating and learning bowings. These may be indicated in the music using up-bow and down-bow symbols, but those traditional notations do not capture the complex bowing patterns that are latent within the music. Regular expressions, a mathematical notation for a simple class of formal languages, can describe precisely the bowing patterns that commonly arise in string music. A software tool based on regular expressions enables performers to search for passages that can be handled with similar bowings, and to edit them consistently. A computer-based music editor incorporating bowing patterns has been implemented, using Lilypond to typeset the music. Our approach has been evaluated by using the editor to study ten movements from six violin sonatas by W. A. Mozart. Our experience shows that the editor is successful at finding passages and inserting bowings; that relatively complex patterns occur a number of times; and that the bowings can be inserted automatically and consistently

Primary School Children’s Responses to Food waste at School

Purpose: This paper seeks to understand children’s responses to food waste in school by exploring children’s view on food waste and empowering them to discuss and develop their own solutions. Design/methodology/approach: Using creative problem-solving approach and photo voice technique, we conducted focus group discussions with 28 primary school children in the UK. Findings: Children have a clear understanding of the consequences of food waste for individuals, society, and the environment. They displayed negative emotions concerning food waste and responded positively to the possibility of food recycling. Their solutions to reduce food waste will require multiple stakeholder engagement, including self-regulation, peer-monitoring, teacher supervision and family support. However, rather than relying on intervention schemes that require significant adult involvement, children placed a heavy emphasis on self-regulation, playing an active role in addressing food waste in school. Originality: This research extends previous understanding, by showing children as agentic consumers that can shape food waste solutions in school. These findings are of use to primary teachers and local education authorities, to aid children in developing their own solutions to reduce food waste in their own schools

Little angels: The mediation of parenting

This Article does not have an abstract

Eating behaviour, behavioural problems and sensory profiles of children with avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID), autistic spectrum disorders or picky eating: same or different?

Background Not much is known at present about the behavioural and sensory profiles of children with avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID), the newest addition to the eating disorder diagnostic category in DSM-V. Our aims were to examine eating difficulties, behavioural problems and sensory hypersensitivity in ARFID children, relative to typically developing children with no reported feeding, mental or physical health problems, as well as children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD; typically associated with a high prevalence of eating problems) or Picky Eating (PE). Methods Four hundred and eighty-six parents of children with ARFID (n = 29), ASD (n = 56), PE (n = 143) or no reported difficulties (n = 259) completed (online) the Behavioral Pediatric Feeding Assessment Scale, the Child Eating Behaviour Questionnaire, Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, and the Sensory Experiences Questionnaire about the children. Results The ARFID, ASD and PE groups had eating difficulties, behavioural problems and sensory hypersensitivity, relative to the typically developing group, and differed significantly on only some of the dimensions assessed. Specifically, the ARFID group had the lowest food-responsiveness and differed significantly from the PE and typically developing (but not from ASD) groups while the ASD group had significantly greater behavioural problems and social and non-social sensitivity than all other groups. Conclusions Notable overlap in eating difficulties, behavioural problems and sensory profiles of children with ARFID, ASD or PE, with more severe aberrations in ARFID (food-responsiveness) and ASD (hypersensitivity and social problems) on specific dimensions, argue for a dimensional approach to improve therapy and management of children with these disorders

Responsiveness to healthy advertisements in adults: An experiment assessing beyond brand snack selection and the impact of restrained eating.

The objective of this study was to explore the impact of different advertising messages on adults’ snack choice. Eighty participants (18-24 years old) were offered the choice between two snack packs following exposure to one of three advertising conditions. The snack packs contained either healthy or high fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) foods. Participants were exposed to commercials containing either non-food products, healthy food products or HFSS food products and their subsequent choice of snack pack was recorded. The Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (DEBQ) was used to assess the impact of external, restrained and emotional eating behaviour on snack pack selection following exposure to advertisements. The majority of unrestrained participants preferentially choose the HFSS snack pack irrespective of advertisement condition. In contrast, high restrained individuals exposed to the healthy eating advertisement condition preferentially selected the healthy snack pack while those in other advertisement conditions refused to take either snack pack. The healthy eating message, when distributed through mass media, resonated with restrained eaters only. Exposure to healthy food adverts provoked restrained eaters into choosing a snack pack; while exposure to other messages results in restrained eaters refusing to take any foods

Exploring the contribution of lifestyle to the impact of education on the risk of cancer through Mendelian randomization analysis

Data availability: UK Biobank individual level data used in this work can be accessed after applying for access at https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/enable-your-research/apply-for-access. Genetic association data are publicly available in the original studies.Supplementary Information is available online at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1038/s41598-024-54259-7#Sec17 .Educational attainment (EA) has been linked to the risk of several types of cancer, despite having no expected direct biological connection. In this paper, we investigate the mediating role of alcohol consumption, smoking, vegetable consumption, fruit consumption and body mass index (BMI) in explaining the effect of EA on 7 cancer groupings. Large-scale genome wide association study (GWAS) results were used to construct the genetic instrument for EA and the lifestyle factors. We conducted GWAS in the UK Biobank sample in up to 335,024 individuals to obtain genetic association data for the cancer outcomes. Univariable and multivariable two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses and mediation analyses were then conducted to explore the causal effect and mediating proportions of these relations. MR mediation analysis revealed that reduced lifetime smoking index accounted for 81.7% (49.1% to 100%) of the protective effect of higher EA on lower respiratory cancer. Moreover, the effect of higher EA on lower respiratory cancer was mediated through vegetable consumption by 10.2% (4.4% to 15.9%). We found genetic evidence that the effect of EA on groups of cancer is due to behavioural changes in avoiding well established risk factors such as smoking and vegetable consuming.Brunel Research Initiative and Enterprise Fund to FD. This research has been conducted using the UK Biobank Resource under project 44566 (https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/2018/12/genetic-and-non-genetic-factors-able-to-predict-and-modify-the-risk-of-different-types-of-cancer/)

Associations of adolescents’ diet and meal patterns with school performance in the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1986: A Mendelian randomisation study

Data availability: Data will be made available on request.Supplementary data are available online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666323024984?via%3Dihub#appsec1 .Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Background: Several observational studies indicate that dietary habits in children and adolescents are associated with school performance. These associations are heavily confounded by socio-economic characteristics, such as household income and parents’ educational attainment, amongst other factors. The objective of this study was to explore the association between diet and school performance in adolescents from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1986 (NFBC1986). Methods: Dietary and school performance data were collected using self-reported questionnaires from adolescents in the NFBC1986 cross-sectional, 16-year follow-up study. In this work we derived exploratory factors for the dietary variables, frequency of skipping main meals and school performance variables, performed genome-wide association studies (GWAS) against these factors to obtain genetic association data and conducted one-sample and two-sample Mendelian randomisation (MR) analyses using individual level data for up to 9220 adolescents in NFBC1986 and GWAS results from external cohorts. We report observational and MR effects of diet on school performance and cognition-related phenotypes. Results: The observational study and the one-sample Mendelian randomisation analysis showed that high fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) consumption was associated with poor school performance in general/science subjects (−0.080, −0.128 to −0.033) and staple food consumption with better school performance in general/science subjects (0.071, 0.024 to 0.119) and physical education (0.065, 0.021 to 0.110). Findings from our two-sample MR analysis identified dietary principal components described best as whole brain bread, wheat, cheese, oat cereal and red wine to be associated with higher educational attainment and other cognition-related phenotypes. Conclusion: Using genetics, we highlighted the potential role of HFSS food consumption and consumption of the components of a staple food diet for school performance. However, further research is required to find conclusive evidence that could support a causal role of diet on school performance.This work was supported by the Waterloo foundation [to L.Z., F.D., T.D.]. The funders were not involved in the analysis and interpretation of the data; in the writing of the report; or in the decision to submit the paper for publication. The NFBC1986 genetic data generation and dietary data collection was supported by NIMH (MH063706, Smalley and Järvelin), the European Commission (EURO-BLCS, Framework 5 award QLG1-CT-2000-01643, coordinator: Järvelin) and Academy of Finland (EGEA-project nro 285 547), and is currently funded by the Joint Programming Initiative a Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life (EU JPI HDHL) (proposal number 655), with joint funding by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) [MR/S03658X/1]

Contributing to the creative economy imaginary: universities and the creative sector

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper explores the relationship between the creative economy and universities. As funders, educators and research bodies, universities have a complicated relationship with the creative economy. They propagate its practice, ‘buying-in’ to the rhetoric and models of creative value, particularly in teaching, research and knowledge exchange. Third mission activities also play a role, seeking to affect change in the world ‘outside’ academia through collaboration, partnerships, commercialisation and social action. For arts and humanities disciplines, these practices have focused almost exclusively on the creative sector in recent years. This paper asks how the third mission has been a site where universities have modified their function in relation to the creative economy. It considers the mechanisms by which universities have been complicit in propagating the notion of the creative economy, strengthening particular constructions of the idea at the level of policy and everyday practice. It also briefly asks how a focus on alternative academic practice and institutional forms might offer possibilities for developing a more critical creative economy. The argument made is that the university sector is an important agent in the shaping and performance of the creative economy, and that we should take action if we wish to produce a more diverse, equitable space for learning, researching, and being under the auspices of ‘creativity’

A pervasive approach to a real-time intelligent decision support system in intensive medicine

The decision on the most appropriate procedure to provide to the patients the best healthcare possible is a critical and complex task in Intensive Care Units (ICU). Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) should deal with huge amounts of data and online monitoring, analyzing numerous parameters and providing outputs in a short real-time. Although the advances attained in this area of knowledge new challenges should be taken into account in future CDSS developments, principally in ICUs environments. The next generation of CDSS will be pervasive and ubiquitous providing the doctors with the appropriate services and information in order to support decisions regardless the time or the local where they are. Consequently new requirements arise namely the privacy of data and the security in data access. This paper will present a pervasive perspective of the decision making process in the context of INTCare system, an intelligent decision support system for intensive medicine. Three scenarios are explored using data mining models continuously assessed and optimized. Some preliminary results are depicted and discussed.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Patterns of ambulatory care utilization in Taiwan

BACKGROUND: We used the insurance claims of a representative cohort to quantify the patterns of ambulatory care visits, especially the doctor-shopping phenomenon, in Taiwan. METHODS: The ambulatory visit files of the 200,000-person cohort datasets from the National Health Insurance Research Database in 2002 were analyzed. Only a visit with physician consultation would be considered. We computed the visit patterns both by visit count and by patient count. RESULTS: In 2002, there were 182,474 eligible people with 2,443,003 physician consultations. During the year, 87.4% of the cohort had visited physician clinics and 57.5% had visited hospital-based outpatient or emergency departments. On average, a person had 13.4 physician consultations and consulted 3.4 specialties, 5.2 physicians, and 3.9 healthcare facilities in a year. In 2002, 17.3% of the cohort had ever visited different healthcare facilities on the same day; 23.5% had ever visited physicians of the same specialty at different healthcare facilities within 7 days and the percentage of second visits was 3.8% of all visits. Besides, 7.6% of the cohort had visited two or more specialties at the same facility on the same day, and such visits make up 2.5% of all visits. CONCLUSION: The people in Taiwan did visit the physicians and outpatient departments frequently. Many patients not only consulted several physicians of different specialties and at different healthcare facilities during the year, but also switched the physicians and facilities quickly. An effective referral system with efficient data exchange between facilities might be the solution