This review provides a classification of public policies to promote healthier eating as well as a structured mapping of existing measures in Europe. Complete coverage of alternative policy types was ensured by complementing the review with a selection of major interventions from outside Europe. Under the auspices of the Seventh Framework Programme's Eatwell Project, funded by the European Commission, researchers from five countries reviewed a representative selection of policy actions based on scientific papers, policy documents, grey literature, government websites, other policy reviews, and interviews with policy-makers. This work resulted in a list of 129 policy interventions, 121 of which were in Europe. For each type of policy, a critical review of its effectiveness was conducted, based on the evidence currently available. The results of this review indicate a need exists for a more systematic and accurate evaluation of government-level interventions as well as for a stronger focus on actual behavioral change rather than changes in attitude or intentions alone. The currently available evidence is very heterogeneous across policy types and is often incomplete.
Although in several EU Member States many public interventions have been running for the prevention and/or management of obesity and other nutrition-related health conditions, few have yet been formally evaluated. The multidisciplinary team of the EATWELL project will gather benchmark data on healthy eating interventions in EU Member States and review existing information on the effectiveness of interventions using a three-stage procedure (i) Assessment of the intervention's impact on consumer attitudes, consumer behaviour and diets; (ii) The impact of the change in diets on obesity and health and (iii) The value attached by society to these changes, measured in life years gained, cost savings and quality-adjusted life years. Where evaluations have been inadequate, EATWELL will gather secondary data and analyse them with a multidisciplinary approach incorporating models from the psychology and economics disciplines. Particular attention will be paid to lessons that can be learned from private sector that are transferable to the healthy eating campaigns in the public sector. Through consumer surveys and workshops with other stakeholders, EATWELL will assess the acceptability of the range of potential interventions. Armed with scientific quantitative evaluations of policy interventions and their acceptability to stakeholders, EATWELL expects to recommend more appropriate interventions for Member States and the EU, providing a one-stop guide to methods and measures in interventions evaluation, and outline data collection priorities for the future.
Abstract.The rocking oscillator has drawn the attention of many researchers since the publication of Housner's [1] seminal paper. As the response of the rocking oscillator is highly non-linear and exhibits negative sti↵ness [2] many researchers have suggested treating the rocking oscillator as a chaotic system, in the sense that small perturbations of its governing parameters result to widely diverging outcomes. Researchers that have tried to experimentally validate Housner's model have shown that, given the modelling uncertainty, it is hard to confidently predict the time history response of a rocking block to a specific ground motion. This makes practicing engineers hesitant to adopt rocking as an earthquake response modification strategy.However, accurately predicting the response to a single ground motion would be ideal but it is not a necessary condition to trust a model: there is so much uncertainty in the expected ground motion that could overshadow the modelling uncertainty. To take the former uncertainty into account, in common practice, engineers use an ensemble of ground motions when they perform a time history analysis. Therefore, it is reasonable to try to compare numerical experimental testing results in terms of their statistics. If the numerical model is capable of capturing the statistics of the experimental testing, then, in terms of civil engineering design, the model is trustworthy. The first ones to adopt a probabilistic approach were Yim, Chopra and Penzien [3] who as early as in 1980 observed some order in rocking motion when they studied it from a probabilistic point of view. They observed specific trends in their numerical results when, instead of using only one, they used 10 synthetic ground motions. This paper compares the numerical and experimental response of a rigid rocking block when excited by an ensemble of 100 ground motions that share the statistical properties of original ground motion.
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