Evaluating the Effectiveness of Game-based Training in the ADF

Research Paper Title Evaluating the Effectiveness of Game-Based Training: A Controlled Study with Dismounted Infantry Teams. Executive Summary Computer games are increasingly being used by armed forces to supplement traditional methods of military training. While the potential benefits of these games are well documented; there is little objective evidence to support their perceived training benefits,… Read More

Prejudices, Stereotypes & Discrimination: Individual, Group & Social Foundations

I recently read an article by David Amodio (2015), a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, in the New Scientist writing about prejudices which made for fascinating reading. Although the ‘case study’ material is not immediately relevant to the world of recruitment and training (white US police officers shooting black US… Read More

US Army: Enlisted Soldiers, Mental Health & Suicide Risk

Enlisted soldiers in their first tour of duty are the most likely to attempt suicide, says an analysis of US Army data published in JAMA Psychiatry (Ursano et al., 2015). The risk was particularly high among soldiers with a recent mental health diagnosis, the longitudinal retrospective cohort study found. In recent years the rate of… Read More

Diet, Reductionism & Desire

I thought these two replies by Rosemary Sharples and Jan Horton, writing in the New Scientist, about diet and weight loss were interesting and quite apt: Rosemary writes: Once again, scientists working on ways to make it easier for people to lose weight are concentrating entirely on appetite (20 June, p.14) as though this and… Read More

Are Diet & Exercise Effective in Prevention?

Programmes that promote dietary change and physical activity are effective in reducing the likelihood that people at risk of developing type 2 diabetes will do so, say new recommendations from the US Community Preventive Services Task Force (Pronk & Remington, 2015). The task force arrived at its recommendations after a systematic review of 53 studies… Read More

A Third of Overweight Teenagers Don’t Think They Are!

A study, reported in the British Medical Journal (BMJ, 2015), that asked 4,979 adolescents aged 13-15 if they thought they were too heavy, about right, or too light found that almost half of overweight or obese boys (47%) and a third (32%) of overweight or obese girls identified themselves as ‘about the right weight’ or… Read More

Obesity: TV Watching Up & Blood Pressure Down!

A study of BMI-defined obesity among children and adolescents in the general English population did its best to measure activity levels by questionnaire and, where it could, by acceleromtery (Coombs & Stamatakis, 2015). The study found that television viewing, and not other forms of objectively measured or questionnaire-based sedentary time, was associated with obesity in… Read More