Science City York (United Kingdom)

ABSTRACTWasted food has detrimental effects on the natural environment and on society. Although reducing food waste is seen as an ethical consumption behaviour, the influence of moral norms on food waste is still under debate and research has shown mixed results. To address this research gap, a temporal, extended norm activation model (NAM) is presented in this study, and it incorporates neutralization theory to explain how people negotiate moral issues. That is, individuals use several neutralization techniques to suppress their moral norms, which subsequently influence their intentions related to food waste. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS‐SEM) was used to analyse data from an online panel of UK consumers (n = 358). We found pathways between neutralisation techniques, moral norms and intentions towards avoiding food waste. The research shows that people use two neutralization techniques, “denial of responsibility” and “condemning the condemners” to dampen their moral norms, which further weaken their intentions to avoid food waste. Recommendations for policymakers and practitioners are made and de‐neutralisation tools are identified, such as making people aware of their internal dialogues, ensuring greater accountability in food waste reduction pledges and providing workplace training.

Schistosomiasis afflicts >250 million people worldwide, leading to an annual loss of >3 million disability adjusted life years. Schistosoma mansoni causes intestinal schistosomiasis with parasite eggs either transversing intestinal tissue or lodging within the liver and other organs, causing intestinal hemorrhage and liver pathology. Large (∼1cm) adult worms survive for years within blood vessels, but we lack a clear understanding of their impact on hemostasis. We used a chronic mouse model of schistosomiasis to determine the impact on platelet numbers, phenotype and function. Hemostatic function was assessed by platelet phenotyping (flow cytometry and proteomics), whole blood aggregometry and longitudinal coagulometry. Whilst platelets from schistosome-infected mice lack elevated surface P-selectin and activated αIIbβ3, unbiased proteomic analysis reveals infection-induced increases in MHC-I, IgM and IgG antibodies, and complement components. Whole blood from schistosome-infected mice spontaneously aggregates in the absence of exogenous agonists. Conversely, prothrombin and activated partial thromboplastin times are prolonged at the chronic stage of infection (10-12 weeks). In conclusion, our mouse model of S. mansoni infection shows wide-ranging changes in hemostatic function which may have clinically relevant implications for populations in endemic regions.

BackgroundIn Ghana, nearly one in four (25%) of the population are sickle cell disease carriers. Furthermore, 2% of all babies born (20 for every 1000 live births) has sickle cell disease. However, little is known about how parents negotiate the financial challenges facing parents of a child with sickle cell disease. This study explores the financial difficulties of parents and children living with sickle cell disease.MethodsThe study adopted a qualitative approach. Twenty-seven parents were purposively selected from a sickle cell clinic in Accra, Ghana. Data collection was through an in-depth, face-to-face interview, using an interview guide based on the research objectives, and analyzed using thematic analysis.ResultThe findings showed that parents faced multiple financial difficulties (both direct and indirect) as they met the direct cost of medications, routine laboratory investigations, and hospital admissions. The National Health Insurance scheme does not wholly cover these costs. Families also describe more indirect costs, such as those associated with maintaining their child’s well-being alongside those connected to their caring responsibilities, including the impact of giving up work and reducing working hours. Findings highlight the most pressing challenge, including the lack of access to financial support and a more general lack of understanding of the difficulties they faced on the part of policymakers.ConclusionSupporting sickle cell parents’ financial needs would improve their emotional and social well-being, enabling them to be more effective family carers.

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In times where personal contacts must be reduced and in-person meetings and appointments have become difficult, electronic services are continuously gaining relevance. This especially applies to the public-sector domain, where e-government services have become a main pillar for the interaction between citizens and public administrations. In the European Union (EU), such service must not only be provided on national level but must be made accessible to all EU citizens, in order to satisfy the needs of a converging European society. The EU and its legal bodies support the provision of pan-European e-government services by means of various legal and technical frameworks. Two relevant frameworks in this context are the Single Digital Gateway Regulation, which facilitates cross-border retrieval of user data, and the eIDAS Regulation, which enables authentication of users across borders by federating the EU Member States’ national identity management systems. While each framework has already successfully proven its potential individually, challenges arise when both frameworks are combined and jointly used by e-government services. This effect is even aggravated, if these e-government services do not follow a classical browser-based paradigm, but instead make use of and rely on mobile technologies. The Horizon 2020 project mGov4EU tackles these challenges. It develops technical solutions to help e-government services employ the full potential of the SDG and the eIDAS Regulation. Thereby, it especially focuses on mobile, i.e., app-based services. Technical solutions developed by mGov4EU will be evaluated by means of several mobile pilot applications. This paper identifies and describes the challenges addressed by mGov4EU and introduces mGov4EU’s solutions to overcome them. This way, this paper proposes a strategy to leverage the full potential of SDG and eIDAS also in mobile application scenarios, and hence paves the way for future successful mobile cross-border services.

In England, care to support people living at home is largely commissioned by local authorities (statutory organisations with responsibility for social care in specific localities) from non-statutory home-care providers (for-profit, not-for-profit, voluntary). This paper explores how managers of these services perceive commissioning arrangements and their impact on home-care providers, the care workforce and service users. Little formal research of providers' experiences of working with local authorities in a commissioning model is available. A qualitative study employed semi-structured telephone interviews with 20 managers of for-profit home-care providers from 10 selected local authority areas in England. Data were analysed using thematic analysis to identify main and subsidiary themes. Home-care providers reported operating in a complex and changeable partnership with commissioners, characterised by: (a) relationships ranging from transactional to collaborative, (b) providers expressing a strong sense of public service motivation, (c) commissioning practices that were complex to negotiate, time-consuming and overly prescriptive, (d) frequent changes in commissioning practices and a perceived lack of strategic planning, which were reported as contributing to uncertainty and tension for providers and confusion for service users. Attempting to operate a market model with tightly prescribed contracts is likely to be unsustainable. An alternative approach based on a collaborative model of joint responsibility for providing home care is recommended drawing on a conceptual framework of principal-steward relationships in contracting.

Widespread declines in farmland biodiversity have led to state‐funded schemes which take land out of production to create (semi‐)natural habitats for biodiversity (e.g. EU agri‐environment schemes; US Conservation Reserve Program). Common features of such schemes are grassland strips at the edges of agricultural fields, and we examine potential co‐benefits of these biodiversity set‐asides for contributing to grassland connectivity. Although set‐aside strips had negligible impact on landscape‐scale species persistence (using metapopulation models parameterized for flying insects run on 267 landscapes of ~30 000 ha across England), they nonetheless improved connectivity in 74% (198/267) of landscapes (comparing landscapes with and without set‐asides), as shown by range expansion rates increasing by up to 100%. Benefits of set‐aside strips varied according to species type (high/low dispersal, high/low population density), but had little benefit for species with low dispersal and small population sizes, which generally failed to expand. High dispersal/high density species were already successful expanders regardless of set‐asides (> 75% of simulations were successful without set‐asides) although expansion rates were still improved when set‐asides were added. Whilst alternative strategies for placement of set‐aside strips (more/less aggregated), revealed no consensus ‘better’ strategy across species types, set‐aside benefits were generally greatest in landscapes with intermediate availability of semi‐natural grassland (0.5‐4% cover). We conclude that small‐scale set‐asides have the potential to improve connectivity, which we expect to help some species track climate change, and connect habitat patches within existing climate space for others. However, set‐asides are unlikely to benefit low dispersal species which are probably at greatest risk from agricultural intensification.

Provide a proof of concept for the potential of using a novel RF resonant cavity device for accurately and repeatedly measuring fat and fat-free masses in phantom infants. Design, construct, and characterize an RF resonant cavity with dimensions compatible to holding an infant. The cavity was characterized using spherical phantoms of 0%fat, 50% fat, and 100% fat to empirically calibrate shifts in resonant frequency. The phantoms were constructed using emulsions of bovine lard, water, and dish soap inside spherical containers which do not interact with the electric field. The calibration phantoms were compared with a phantom of a test sample to assess the ability of the resonant cavity perturbation technique for measuring body composition. Phantoms of distinct %fat (0%, 50%, and 100%) were used to calibrate the resonant cavity for measuring body composition. The calibration phantoms were used to create calibration lines of unique %fat and were compared to a 475-mL sample of unknown %fat as a measure of how accurate the resonant cavity technique is for measuring body composition. A 475mL test sample was used to examine the robustness of the RCP technique. The sample was 25% fat and had a fat mass of ( )g. The measured fat mass from the RCP technique was g, or a 2% difference. The resonant cavity perturbation technique provides an accurate and repeatable measurement of fat mass in spherical phantoms and suggests the technology might be an effective obesity research tool for infants. Future studies will focus on extending the work to more complex anthropomorphic shapes.

Recently, an increasing number of public cloud vendors added Containers as a Service (CaaS) to their service portfolio. This is an adequate answer to the growing popularity of Docker, a software technology allowing Linux containers to run independently on a host in an isolated environment. As any software can be deployed in a container, the nature of containers differs and thus assorted allocation and orchestration approaches are needed for their effective execution. In this paper, we focus on containers whose execution value for end users varies over time. A baseline and two dynamic allocation algorithms are proposed and compared with the default Docker scheduling algorithm. Experiments show that the proposed approach can increase the total value obtained from a workload up to three times depending on the workload heaviness. It is also demonstrated that the algorithms scale well with the growing number of nodes in a cloud.