99 research outputs found
Multiple Long-Term Conditions (MLTC) and the Environment: A Scoping Review
No full textBackground: Multiple Long Term conditions (MLTC) are a major health care challenge associated with high service utilisation and expenditure. Once established, the trajectory to an increased number and severity of conditions, hospital admission, increased social care need and mortality is multifactorial. The role of wider environmental determinants in the MLTC sequelae is unclear. Aim: the aim of this review was to summarise and collate existing evidence on environmental determinants on established MLTC. Methods: comprehensive search of Medline, Embase, Cochrane, CINAHL and Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE), from inception to 4th June 2022 in addition to grey literature. Two authors independently screened and extracted papers. Disagreements were resolved with a third author. Results: searches yielded 9079 articles, 12 of which met the review’s inclusion criteria. Evidence of correlations between some environmental determinants and increased or decreased risks of MLTC were found, including the quality of internal housing/living environments, exposure to airborne environmental hazards and a beneficial association with socially cohesive, accessible and greener neighbourhood environments. Conclusions: The majority of the 12 included papers focused on the built and social environments. The review uncovered very limited evidence, indicating a need for further research to understand the role of environmental determinants in MLTC
Is phone time smart time? Investigating the effects of your smartphone on attention
No full text43% of people in the world owned a smartphone in 2016 (Han & Yi, 2018; Kim & Koh, 2018). We view smartphones as an extension of ourselves and have since become addicted. 50% of users check their phones within minutes of waking up and it is the last thing they check before going to bed. Of those most affected are females, who tend to spend an average of 5.2 hours on their smartphones vs. 3.9 hours for males (Nayak, 2018). Students bring their phones to class and do not realize how distracting they are. When asked on average how many times they access their phones, students reported only 3 times per class, but in reality it was over 20 times (Felisoni & Godoi, 2018). This has serious implications on their academic performance. Our hypothesis: The closer and more visible the phone is to an individual, the more it will negatively impact their ability to focus their attention on a task-relevant activity. Conclusions: Females reportedly use their phones more than males, however our results indicate this causes no negative impact on their attention when compared to males. Students significantly underestimate how often they check their phones, so it is highly likely that their self-reported phone usage number was inaccurate. This could explain the weak correlations we found between phone access and scores. Class A performed better than Class B when their phones were not present, implying two things: Class A included more students who are more reliant on their phones. The type of class structure or the type of subject impacts attention. The authors of the d2 Test of Attention indicated that scores on a second trial will always improve. Yet CP performance for Class A was significantly better on their first trial (without phone) than their second trial (with phone). This implies that the presence of a smartphone does negatively impact cognitive performance. The presence of your phone CAN impact performance from a min. of 2% up to 23%.Not peer reviewedStudent Research Day Poster (2019
Understanding water resources conditions in data scarce river basins using intelligent pixel information, Case: Transboundary Indus Basin
No full textWater ManagementCivil Engineering and Geoscience
Unveiling Global Narratives: A Multilingual Twitter Dataset of News Media on the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict
No full text<p>We present a dataset that collects tweets from news media channels worldwide that pertain to the Russo-Ukrainian war. This dataset spans a period of February 2022-May 2023. The dataset is unique in its global scope, encompassing tweets in various languages and from different parts of the world. Additionally, we extracted information about the stance, sentiment, prominent entities & concepts that occur in tweets to be able to answer questions about the discourse: who says what (prominent entities), who stands (stance) where on what aspect (prominent concepts), how are the aspects portrayed (sentiment). We also downloaded the images attached to the post and classified them to extract image tags for each image. The dataset includes 1,524,826 tweets, out of which 306,295 tweets have images, for 60 languages.<br><br>The source code for the collection and processing of tweets can be found on here: <a href="https://github.com/sherzod-hakimov/ru-ua-news-discourse-twitter"><em>https://github.com/sherzod-hakimov/ru-ua-news-discourse-twitter</em></a></p>
<p>Each entry in the dataset is a single JSON line and has the following entries:</p>
<pre><code>{
'tweet_id':
'lang':
'stanza_output':
'stanza_named_entities':
'sentiment':
'stance':
'channel':
'country':
'verified':<br>'image_tags':
}</code></pre>
<pre> </pre>
<p><em><strong>If you need access to the full text of the dataset, please</strong> <strong>contact us via an email: <a href="mailto:[email protected]">sherzodhakimov (at sign) gmail.com</a></strong></em><br><br>If you find the resources useful, please cite us:<br><br>```</p>
<p>@inproceedings{hakimov2023unveiling,<br> title={Unveiling Global Narratives: A Multilingual Twitter Dataset of News Media on the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict}, <br> author={Sherzod Hakimov and Gullal S. Cheema},<br> booktitle={Proceedings of the 2024 {ACM} International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, {ICMR} 2024},<br> year={2024}<br>}<br>```</p>
Estimation of Distribution of Income in Pakistan, Using Micro Data
No full textIncome distribution entered the post war discussion of economic development fairly late. Until the 1960s much of the focus was on industrialisation and the need for capital accumulation. Pakistan was no exception as in the early 60s economic expansion became the main target and means to political identity. Rapid population growth associated with steep decline in mortality demanded acceleration of production to keep pace. Overall aggregate expansion was much faster than before but without benefit for the poor. In that context emerged a new professional interest in income distribution. Haq’s (1964) study was one of the oldest studies conducted to measure inequality in personal income distribution in the high income brackets in the urban areas of Pakistan. The main objective of the author was to present the income distribution pattern in terms of the relative shares of different income groups as well as in terms of Pareto coefficients and concentration ratio during the period 1948-49 to 1957-58 for which published tax data was available. While recognising the limitations of the data used, the author went on to calculate various measures of income inequality including Pareto coefficient and Lorenz curve. The author also made comparison of Pakistan’s income distribution with U.S.A. and U.K.
#MeToo in the Post–Arab Spring Era:A Strategy of Resistance Get access Arrow
No full textThis chapter investigates the contemporary #MeToo movements in the Middle East. The #MeToo movement generated responses from all over the Arab world, where women broke deep-seated taboos and spoke about their experiences with sexual violence. In this chapter, the author argues that Arab #MeToo movements inform and are informed by major political and cultural changes in the region, including the Arab Spring and the subsequent development of human rights and democratic resistance movements. For instance, during protests, women in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria faced systematized and politically motivated processes of gendered violence in public spaces as a political weapon of oppression. Therefore, the Arab #MeToo movements discuss widespread aspects of sexual violence in public spaces, workplaces, and domestic violence as intertwined with and motivated by politics. This examination of #MeToos in the Arab world establishes these movements as continuous forms of resistance to all forces of gender-based political oppression, discrimination, and fear in the post–Arab Spring era.</p
Robust drought forecasting in Eastern Canada: Leveraging EMD-TVF and ensemble deep RVFL for SPEI index forecasting
No full textDrought stands as a highly perilous natural catastrophe that impacts numerous facets of human existence. Drought data is nonstationary and noisy, posing challenges for accurate forecasting. This study proposes a novel hybrid framework integrating TVF-EMD preprocessing, LASSO feature selection and Ensemble Deep RVFL modeling for improved multistep ahead drought prediction. Using decomposed SPEI values, six machinelearning techniques (Support Vector Regression (SVR), Simple RVFL, Ensemble Deep RVFL, and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), XGBoost, Random Forest (RF)) were applied to forecast the SPEI 12 12 drought index. The present study involved forecasting drought in two Canadian stations located in the eastern region (Charlottetown in Prince Edward Island and Fredericton in New Brunswick), where agriculture is rainfed and mostly affected by drought. The statistical period of 1980–2022 was considered for analysis. Following the decomposition of drought data with TVF-EMD, lagged data was generated using the TVF-EMD results. Training time was decreased by utilizing the Lasso regression feature selection algorithm to select effective inputs. Various statistical measures, including the root mean square error (RMSE) and correlation coefficient (R), were employed to assess the precision of the models. The research findings indicated that the TVF-ED-RVFL model achieved the highest level of precision in forecasting multistep ahead (1,3,6 and 12) SPEI 12 drought index for both Charlottetown and Fredericton stations. During testing, the TVF-ED-RVFL model predicted 1-month SPEI 12 for Charlottetown (R = 0.9995, RMSE = 0.0352) and Fredericton (R = 0.9974, RMSE = 0.0560). For multistep ahead forecasting, the Rvalues range from 0.9924 for 3-months ahead to 0.9242 for 12-months ahead in Charlottetown and range from 0.9846 for 3-months ahead to 0.8293 for 12-months ahead in Fredericton. By increasing the forecasting horizon, the accuracy of models decreased. The present study’s outcomes can contribute to enhancing water management practices during periods of drought.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaDepartment of Environment, Energy and Climate ActionGovernment of Prince Edward IslandAtlantic Canada Opportunities Agenc
Physiological and cognitive measures during prolonged sitting: Comparisons between a standard and multi-axial office chair
No full textProlonged sitting, common in many workplaces, reduces blood flow to the lower limb and has negative health outcomes. CoreChair is an active-sitting chair that encourages increased movement to help mitigate these outcomes. Physiological and cognitive measures were recorded in ten participants over four hours of sitting in both the CoreChair and a traditional office chair. Sitting in both chairs led to increases in calf circumference (p<0.0001), reduced tactile sensitivity (p=0.02), and a cognitive decline in attention (p=0.035) over time. However, the increase in calf circumference was smaller in the CoreChair at the second (p= 0.017) and third hour (p= 0.012) compared to the traditional chair. Additionally, for the attention task, the traditional chair generated more attention-task errors (p=0.005), while no changes were observed with the CoreChair (p=0.13). These findings suggest that during prolonged sitting CoreChair may have modest physiological and cognitive benefits compared to a traditional chair
Decentralization : the way forward for rural development?
No full textSpecial strategies are needed to address the widespread incidence of rural poverty in developing countries, but initiatives aimed at improving the rural standard of living have not consistently reduced poverty. The author examines the rationale for a specific rural focus in poverty reduction programs and reviews recent attempts to encourage rural development. He discusses the role decentralization could play in rural development programs and analyzes recent efforts to implement decentralized rural development programs. The author concludes that although decentralization initiatives have a long history, much more needs to be understood about various components of decentralization before sound advice can be given to policymakers. He suggests a conceptual model - based on a"souffle"theory of decentralization - that incorporates the essential elements of political, fiscal, and institutional decentralization as they related to rural development outcomes. Like a souffle that requires just the right combination of milk, eggs, and heat to rise, a successful program of decentralization must include just the right combination of political, fiscal, and institutional elements to improve rural development outcomes.Economic Theory&Research,Decentralization,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Environmental Economics&Policies,Regional Rural Development,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Regional Rural Development,Poverty Assessment,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems
Techno-economic-environmental analysis of tri-generation system in vertical farm applications
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