Search

Most adolescents do not meet physical activity (PA) guidelines. The before-school segment has been identified as one promising opportunity for intervention; however, there is a need for contextual understanding of PA in this segment. This study aimed to examine: a) adolescents' PA levels across various locations before school (6:00am - school start), b) contributions of before-school PA to daily PA and PA guidelines, and c) correlates of location-specific before-school PA. A cross-sectional analysis was conducted using adolescents' (n = 148, mean age 14.7) accelerometer and GPS data. Adolescents averaged 9.7 min in before-school moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA), representing substantial contributions to daily activity. Most MVPA occurred away from home and school. Significant correlates included segment duration, age, socio-economic status, and PA self-efficacy. Future work should consider these patterns and correlates to support adolescents' PA through targeted interventions.

Gender norms are essential barometers of gender equality; inequitable gender norms are indicative of core inequalities in society that undermine the health of many groups. Fundamentally embedded in the gender system, prescriptive and restrictive gender norms have been shown to have deleterious effects on the health of women, men, girls and boys, as well as gender and sexual minorities. Gender norms are mutable, and there is potential to target and transform harmful and inequitable gender norms to drive gender equality. Gender-transformative approaches are needed, but a necessary first step is to identify and benchmark restrictive and inequitable gender norms, monitor change and progress, and highlight areas where interventions can be targeted for greatest effect. Efforts to do this are currently stymied by a lack of fit-for-purpose data. Routinely collected, population representative data on gender norms is urgently needed. This is vital to supporting and progressing gender equality and will contribute substantially to lifting population health.

Although numerous studies have examined how children raised in same-sex-parented families fare relative to children in different-sex-parented families, this body of work suffers from major methodological shortcomings. By leveraging linked administrative data from several population registers from the Netherlands covering the 2006-2018 period (n = 1,454,577), we overcome most methodological limitations affecting earlier research. The unique features of the data include complete population coverage, reliable identification of same-sex-parented families, a large number of children in same-sex-parented families (n = 3,006), multiple objective and verifiable educational outcomes, and detailed measures of family dynamics over children's entire life courses. The results indicate that children in same-sex-parented families outperform children in different-sex-parented families on multiple indicators of academic performance, including standardized tests scores, high school graduation rates, and college enrollment. Such advantages extend to both male and female children, and are more pronounced among children in female than male same-sex-parented families. These findings challenge deficit models of same-sex parenting.

Organisations possess and continuously generate huge amounts of static and stream data, especially with the proliferation of Internet of Things technologies. Collected but unused data, i.e., Dark Data, mean loss in value creation potential. In this respect, the concept of Computing Continuum extends the traditional more centralised Cloud Computing paradigm with Fog and Edge Computing in order to ensure low latency pre-processing and filtering close to the data sources. However, there are still major challenges to be addressed, in particular related to management of various phases of Big Data processing on the Computing Continuum. In this paper, we set forth an ecosystem for Big Data pipelines in the Computing Continuum and introduce five relevant real-life example use cases in the context of the proposed ecosystem., Part of proceedings: ISBN 978-1-6654-2744-9QC 20220816

Humanitarian migrants are amongst the most marginalised population groups in countries within the Global North, including Australia. An important channel for these migrants to successfully settle into the host society and improve their socio-economic outcomes is participation in the local education system, particularly in higher-education options. However, we know surprisingly little about the socio-demographic factors that structure inequalities in humanitarian migrants’ access to (higher) education, with evidence from robust quantitative studies being particularly scarce. The present study fills this important gap in knowledge by analysing Australian longitudinal survey data (Building a New Life in Australia; n = 2109 migrants and 8668 person-year observations) by means of random-effect panel regression models. Key results indicated that higher English-language proficiency and pre-arrival education levels are core factors fostering greater engagement with the Australian higher-education system amongst humanitarian migrants. Humanitarian-migrant women in our sample exhibited a greater adjusted likelihood of being a student than humanitarian-migrant men. Altogether, our findings confirmed inequalities in accessing the Australian higher-education system amongst humanitarian migrants, and that policy attention is required to redress this situation. However, they also stress that a ‘one size fits all’ policy strategy may be neither sufficient nor appropriate to boost their education prospects.

After years of public debate about same‐sex marriage, the Australian Government put the issue to the electorate in the “Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey” in late 2017. The survey asked voters whether the law should be changed to allow same‐sex couples to marry. Nationally, 61.6% of voters responded “Yes.” But there were marked variations by electoral division, with the proportion of “Yes” votes varying from 26.1% to 83.7%. The aim of this paper is to explore the geographical pattern of the percentage of voters responding “Yes” by federal electoral division and identify its correlates. Results of the survey by federal electoral division were obtained from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS ); other variables for electoral divisions were obtained from the ABS and the Australian Electoral Commission. Multiple linear regression and geographically weighted regression were employed to establish the relationship between the percentage of “Yes” responses at the electoral division level and the characteristics of electoral divisions’ populations. In 133 of 150 electoral divisions there was a majority of “Yes” responses. Strong predictor variables of the percentage “Yes” vote included the proportions of: the population describing themselves as having no religion, those with post‐school educational qualifications, those with a birthplace in Oceania, Europe, or the Americas, and those who did not vote for conservative parties in the 2016 federal election. A marginally better fit was obtained with geographically weighted regression. In conclusion, the geographical pattern of responses in the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey is closely associated with a small number of characteristics of an electoral division's population.

Digital marketing is a domain where data analytics are a key factor to gaining competitive advantage and return of investment for companies running and monetizing digital marketing campaigns on, e.g., search engines and social media. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end approach to enrich marketing campaigns performance data with third-party event data (e.g., weather events data) and to analyze the enriched data in order to predict the effect of such events on campaigns’ performance, with the final goal of enabling advanced optimization of the impact of digital marketing campaigns. The use of semantic technologies is central to the proposed approach: event data are made available in a format more amenable to enrichment and analytics, and the actual data enrichment technique is based on semantic data reconciliation. The enriched data are represented as Linked Data and managed in a NoSQL database to enable processing of large amounts of data. We report on the development of a pilot to build a weather-aware digital marketing campaign scheduler for JOT Internet Media—a world leading company in the digital marketing domain that has amassed a huge amount of data on campaigns performance over the years—which predicts the best date and region to launch a marketing campaign within a seven-day timespan. Additionally, we discuss benefits and limitations of applying semantic technologies to deliver better optimization strategies and competitive advantage.

Objective: This study investigates the effects of first and second births on time pressure and mental health and how these vary with time since birth and parental responsibilities. It also examines whether time pressure mediates the relationship between parenthood and mental health. Background: Childbirth is a major life course transition that adds a new role to parents' role set and contributes to role strain, of which time pressure is one manifestation. Longitudinal analyses can help determine whether the impact of children on parental time pressure endures or eases over time and whether any changes affect parents' mental health. Method: This study uses 16 years of panel data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (n = 20,009 individuals). The data are modeled using fixed effects panel regression models. Results: First and second births increase time pressure to a similar extent. Their estimated effects are larger for women than men and persist over time, but there is limited evidence of moderation by parental responsibilities. Maternal mental health improves after a first child, whereas second children are associated with declines in paternal mental health. These effects are long lasting. Mediation analyses suggest that in the absence of time pressure maternal mental health would improve significantly. Conclusion: Children have a stronger effect on mothers' than fathers' experiences of time pressure. These differences are not moderated by changes in parental responsibilities or work time following births. The increased time pressure associated with second births explains mothers' worse mental health. Implications Parenthood is an important factor underpinning gendered experiences of time pressure. Reducing time pressure among parents may improve parental mental health, particularly among mothers.

We investigate patterns of childcare use and its influence on the cognitive development of Indigenous children. The influence of childcare on Indigenous children's cognitive outcomes is less well understood than for non-Indigenous children due to a lack of appropriate data. We focus on a cohort of Indigenous children in Australia who have been followed from infancy and for whom rich information on childcare use and cognitive outcomes is observed. Compared to Indigenous children who never participated in childcare, Indigenous children who participated in childcare performed better on several early cognitive outcomes. Using regression and propensity score matching, we show that this difference is driven by selection into childcare, with children from more advantaged families being more likely to attend formal childcare. However, matching analysis results suggest that relatively disadvantaged children might benefit more from attending childcare, as indicated by the positive estimated effects found for those who never attended childcare.

The shear behavior of granular materials immersed in a viscous fluid depends on fluid properties (viscosity, density), particle properties (size, density) and boundary conditions (shear rate, confining pressure). Using computational fluid dynamics simulations coupled with molecular dynamics for granular flow, and exploring a broad range of the values of parameters, we show that the parameter space can be reduced to a single parameter that controls the packing fraction and effective friction coefficient. This control parameter is a modified inertial number that incorporates viscous effects.

By means of extensive coupled molecular dynamics-lattice Boltzmann simulations, accounting for grain dynamics and subparticle resolution of the fluid phase, we analyze steady inertial granular flows sheared by a viscous fluid. We show that, for a broad range of system parameters (shear rate, confining stress, fluid viscosity, and relative fluid-grain density), the frictional strength and packing fraction can be described by a modified inertial number incorporating the fluid effect. In a dual viscous description, the effective viscosity diverges as the inverse square of the difference between the packing fraction and its jamming value, as observed in experiments. We also find that the fabric and force anisotropies extracted from the contact network are well described by the modified inertial number, thus providing clear evidence for the role of these key structural parameters in dense suspensions.

By means of extensive coupled molecular dynamics–lattice Boltzmann simulations, accounting for grain dynamics and subparticle resolution of the fluid phase, we analyze steady inertial granular flows sheared by a viscous fluid. We show that, for a broad range of system parameters (shear rate, confining stress, fluid viscosity, and relative fluid-grain density), the frictional strength and packing fraction can be described by a modified inertial number incorporating the fluid effect. In a dual viscous description, the effective viscosity diverges as the inverse square of the difference between the packing fraction and its jamming value, as observed in experiments. We also find that the fabric and force anisotropies extracted from the contact network are well described by the modified inertial number, thus providing clear evidence for the role of these key structural parameters in dense suspensions.

Hiring household help could reduce housework time and alleviate subjective time pressure. Associations are assumed to be particularly apparent for women because they spend more time on housework than men. But empirical evidence on whether hiring help actually saves time or relieves time pressure is scant and inconclusive, chiefly because of data and methodological limitations. This study improves on earlier ones in that the authors examined panel data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (n = 5,124 couples) that enable modeling techniques that take account of selection effects, possible reverse causality, and unobserved heterogeneity. Contrary to some earlier studies, the authors show that outsourcing does in fact reduce housework time, narrow gender gaps, and lower women's subjective time pressure. They conclude that domestic outsourcing may save time and reduce subjective pressure for some women, but one consequence may be increased inequality between women who can and cannot afford domestic help.