Background: One-third of the U.S. population has prediabetes, but 90% remain undiagnosed because healthcare providers are not screening for this condition. Objective: The purpose of this quality improvement project was to monitor prediabetes screening and identification, and implement evidence-based recommendations including registered dietician referral. Methods: This project involved using an evidence-based screening tool to measure individual risk of prediabetes. Aggregate data was collected to evaluate screening implementation, evidence-based recommendations offered by providers, and assess patient risk factors. Results: The percentage of patients at risk for prediabetes was 41.3% (n = 111). The most frequent risks were identified as overweight, history of hypertension, family history of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), and older age. Providers offered education on weight loss 68.5% (n = 76) and exercise 76.6% (n = 85) but referred 33.3% (n = 37) patients for nutrition education. The screening rates were 52.3% (n = 176) and 72.5% (n = 244) in clinics A and B respectively. Conclusions: A gap remains in using evidence-based recommendations to decrease risk of prediabetes. Prediabetes screening identified a greater percentage of persons in this population. Implications for Nursing: There is a need for consistent practice of evidence-based recommendations. This project set the benchmark for future efforts to educate, encourage, and measure providers successes.

The project aims at exploring the process of designing recommender systems from a users’ perspective. Recommendations are the systems that can help users navigate in the overload of information, that is currently available online. This project focuses on the recommender network of Strossle, which provides article recommendations across various publishers’ websites. User-centered research has been performed to understand the current system and how that influences the users’ perceived experience. The goal was to develop a more engaging content experience for the Strossle recommendation system. This is done by means of participatory design methods. As people tend to use recommendations very sporadic and they often do not really know what they are looking for. The emphasis was on finding the balance between exploratory browsing and navigating towards the users’ preferences. In order to achieve this, a more dynamic widget has been developed that offers navigation in various related topics.

Interactive TV in motorsport, specifically Formula 1, is an established service that has been developed over the last 20 years. Market research reveals trends in broadcasting pointing towards, in the future, sports, in general, will be consumed via VR. Broadcasting interactive TV with VR acting as the medium, however, is an unfamiliar territory where a gap in research exists in interaction design.The purpose of this thesis is to research the viewing habits of inexperienced and experienced viewers of F1 through empirical work that includes literature review, observation and interviews. The insights gathered are then conceptualized through workshops and sketching. These, in turn, helps produce a set of iterated prototypes that are usability tested to extract insights which reveal design recommendations for ergonomics and interface and elements for augmenting the viewing experience the designer should keep in mind when developing for VR broadcasted interactive motorsport TV.

OBJECTIVE: Excess body weight in children has become a serious public health concern worldwide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) demonstrated that childhood obesity has tripled since the 1970s in the United States. To prevent childhood obesity, the CDC recommends that children achieve 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity each day. A variety of wearable monitors are available for objectively assessing activity but these methods are complicated by the lack of established values for the activity intensity and comparability across devices. The purpose of this study is to establish activity intensity cutpoins for the MotionWatch8 (MW8) accelerometer in children by comparison with the gold standard cutpoints established for the Actigraph GT1M accelerometer. MATERIAL/METHODS: 40 children (ages 9-13 years) from Syracuse, NY were enrolled in this study. All participants were required to wear the two different monitors on the dominant wrist as they performed a resting activity (4-minute sitting), a 4-minute slow-paced walk, a 4-minute faster-paced walk, and a 2-minute vigorous running game to mimic the different intensities a child might perform in a free-living environment. Linear regression and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were performed to assess sensitivity and specificity of MW8 intensity cutpoints. RESULT: Mean value for each activity were positively correlated between MW8 and the Actigraph (r=0.85, p<0.001). The optimal cutpoints for differentiating sedentary from light physical activity, light from MVPA, and moderate from vigorous activity were (≤32 counts, ≥ 371.5 counts, and ≥ 859.5 counts per 30 second interval, respectively). CONCLUSION: The MW8 is a simple and objective instrument for measuring physical activity in children. This study provides usable cutoff values for further testing the validity of the MW8 for measuring physical activity patterns among children.

Magister Artium (Human Ecology) - MA(HE) / The research focused on 60 coloured, Afrikaans-speaking men and women residing in Bellville South who completed a structured questionnaire and open-ended interview questions. Their perceptions held on the influence of male unemployment on family relations with specific reference to gender role perception, relational satisfaction, communication, decision making, finances and labour within the family were investigated. Unemployment of the male partner was found to have no statistically significant differences for the manner in which males and females perceive their gender roles, finances and labour distribution within the family. Statistically significant differences were found for the manner in which males and females perceive decision-making and communication within the family when the male partner is unemployed. The results revealed that unemployment does not have an influence on role perception and that the respondents uphold a traditional role perception. Decision making was not male dominated, as more egalitarian decision were taken. The respondents expressed combination gender roles with regard to management of finances and appeared to be satisfied with family and partner relations. The minority of respondents who experienced problems with communication attributed this to the consequences of being unemployed. The survival of families during these challenging periods. A Social agencies need to offer services to empower families to deal with the affects of unemployment on family life to ensure multi-disciplinary approach, provided by a team of professionals is the basis for recommendations for proposed support I programme development, access and further research.

This study is looking at “the changed” world for employees that were lucky and could continue their work from places other than the office since the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak using teleworking tools. Their numbers grew exponentially and while they still had to perform their duties as usual, they could not rely on the security infrastructure built at the office. The attackers saw this immediately and took the opportunity to unleash various techniques with malicious intent. Now the time is right to find out whether the coronavirus pandemic did at least some good and to what extent the remote workers are aware of information security guidelines. This quantitative study begins with the formation of the research question and first thoughts about the research model. Then the search thru the literature thoroughly finds mostly used attacks as well as the best way how to protect against them and the review of theory builds a research model that fits the aim of the study. Thru a quantitative online survey via snowballing method answers from users from all over the world are collected and analyzed and the hypotheses drawn from the model are verified. Lastly, results are discussed, and a conclusion is provided. The study findings are that the teleworkers are quite highly aware of information security awareness or ISA, thanks to sufficient knowledge and attitude towards information security, and in turn, this awareness leads to correct behavior in information security. More specifically, knowledge is more strongly associated with ISA of telework risks than recommendations, attitude, on the other hand, is more strongly related to telework recommendations than the risks, also ISA of telework risks has a greater influence on behavior than ISA of telework recommendations. The contribution of this study is the revelation that the impact of telework and the coronavirus pandemic did not change the course of information security awareness perception in comparison to pre-pandemic studies. Also, thanks to the subcategorization of ISA to risks and recommendations it was revealed that awareness of teleworking risk is quite higher than awareness of recommendations after the Covid-19 period.

This thesis aims to establish the efficacy of using matrix factorization to predict future purchases. Matrix factorisation is a machine learning method, commonly used to implement the collaborative filtering recommendation system. It finds items that a user may be interested in by comparing items that other similar users have rated, explicitly or implicitly, highly. To fulfill the purpose of the thesis, a qualitative and comparative approach was taken. First, three different implementations of matrix factorisation were created and trained on one year of purchase histories. Two generic methods of predicting future purchases, picking a random item and picking the top selling items, were also created to serve as a point of comparison. The ability to predict future purchases was established as the proportion of correct predictions a method could make. All five methods were then tested using a separate data set and the results compared. The results clearly show that matrix factorisation models are better at predicting future purchases than the generic models. However, the difference between the matrix factorization models was comparatively small. A notable discovery was that there was a decrease in the gap between all methods ability of predicting future purchases, as more predictions are made. The method of predicting a random item fared poorly, correctly predicting cumulatively less than one tenth of any other method. / Denna avhandling syftar till att fastställa matrisfaktoriseringens förmåga att förutsäga framtida köp. Matrisfaktorisering är en maskininlärningsmethod som vanligen används för att implementera rekommendationssystemet för kollaborativ filtrering. Den hittar artiklar som en användare kan vara intresserad av genom att jämföra artiklar som liknande användare har betygsatt högt, uttryckligen eller implicit. För att uppfylla avhandlingens syfte har en kvalitativ och jämförande studie genomförts. Först skapades tre olika matrisfaktoriserings modeler som tränades på ett års köphistorik. Två enkla metoder för att förutsäga framtida köp, att välja ett slumpmässigt föremål och välja de mest sålda föremålen, skapades också för att möjliggöra jämförelser. Möjligheten att förutsäga framtida köp fastställdes som andelen korrekta förutsägelser en metod kunde göra. Alla fem metoderna testades sedan med en separat datamängd och resultaten jämfördes. Resultaten visar tydligt att matrisfaktoriseringsmodeller är bättre på att förutsäga framtida köp än de enkla modellerna. Skillnaden mellan matrisfaktoriseringsmodellerna var dock jämförelsevis liten. En anmärkningsvärd upptäckt var att gapet mellan alla metoders förmåga att förutsäga framtida köp minskade, desto fler förutsägelser som gjordes. Metoden att förutsäga ett slumpmässigt objekt presterade dåligt, då kumulativa andelen korrekta förutsägelser var mindre än en tiondel av någon av de andra metoderna.

Marmara Sea and Black Sea connected with renowned Bosporus surround Istanbul, the city, which owns the privilege of bridging Europe and Asia. Besides such inland seas; forests and wetlands fragmented around and in the city maintain the natural cycle in the region. However, Istanbul as a fast developing urban area witnesses environmental issues like many other urban areas in global scale. Rapid economic and population growth of the city increase the pressure on above mentioned natural resources. Sustainable development of built environment is one of the best solutions in order to mitigate environmental damages of urban areas. The solution comes with green construction projects and systems yet the city and the market itself have barriers to block or slow the process of sustainable development. Identification of such barriers and reviewing international sustainable development practices paves the way for generating recommendations for environmentally friendly urban expansion in Istanbul. Survey targeting market professionals was conducted to identify sustainable development barriers in Istanbul and in order to address such barriers the thesis refers to conducted interviews and international practices presented in the literature review. The thesis draws economic, market and governmental recommendations which are particularly focused on financial incentives, raising awareness and enacting green laws involving all stakeholders of construction and real estate market.

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The purpose of our thesis is to examine the relationship between option implied volatility and analyst consensus recommendation revisions. We offer a Swedish perspective on the growing popularity of equity options and its relationship with different stock market participants and returns. We chose the Swedish options market since it is substantially smaller in relation to the stock market than in countries such as the US, it is also not as studied. First, we conduct an event study using a fixed effects OLS model to determine the effect of analysts’ consensus recommendation revision. Second, we use a probit regression model to determine the probability of a revision given the option implied volatility. We find that there is generally a statistically significant relationship between option implied volatility and analyst consensus recommendation revisions as well as with abnormal returns, providing further discussion on the information sharing between the two markets and its participants.