OBJECTIVE To develop and evaluate "Families for Health", a new community based family intervention for childhood obesity. DESIGN Programme development, pilot study and evaluation using intention-to-treat analysis. SETTING Coventry, England. PARTICIPANTS 27 overweight or obese children aged 7-13 years (18 girls, 9 boys) and their parents, from 21 families. INTERVENTION Families for Healt...

This paper deals with the problem of optimizing two-stage structure decision making units (DMUs) where the activity and the performance of two-stage DMU in one period effect on its efficiency in the next period. To evaluate such systems the effect of activities in one period on ones in the next term must be considered. To do so, we propose a dynamic DEA approach to measure the performance of su...

I discuss the semantics of statements of minimum and maximum requirement. I show that, on standard assumptions, such statements receive a non-sensical interpretation. I solve this puzzle by pointing out certain semantic features shared by all end-point markers akin to minimum and maximum. 1 First puzzle: Minimum requirements My friend and me are having a bet in which I claim to be able to score...

INTRODUCTION APACHE II (AP2) was developed to allow a systematic examination of intensive care unit outcomes in a risk adjusted manner. AP2 has been widely adopted in clinical trials to assure broad consistency amongst different groups. Although errors in calculating the true AP2 score may not be reducible below 15%, the self-canceling effect of random errors reduces the importance of such erro...

The standard semantics for counterfactuals ensures that any counterfactual with a true antecedent and true consequent is itself true. There have been many recent attempts to amend the standard semantics to avoid this result. I show that these proposals invalidate a number of further principles of the standard logic of counterfactuals. The case against the automatic truth of counterfactuals with...

The standard semantics for counterfactuals ensures that any counterfactual with a true antecedent and true consequent is itself true. There have been many recent attempts to amend the standard semantics to avoid this result. I show that these proposals invalidate a number of further principles of the standard logic of counterfactuals. The case against the automatic truth of counterfactuals with...