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\"Since the 1980s the bird life of the Cotswolds has seen significant changes, many of them subtle but some spectacular. This beautifully illustrated and extensively researched book, the product of five years' field work exposes these changes with the aid of simple and clear colour maps which give not only a detailed but easily understood picture of the breeding distributions of bird species in the area today, but also a comparison with 20 years ago. The maps are accompanied by descriptive accounts for each species, often containing fascinating local information. The book discusses the relative difficulties of surveying the different species, which will be of help to others undertaking the same task elsewhere. It is richly illustrated by colour photographs of the birds and their habitats. Its easy style and clarity will make this book of great interest not only to ornithologists, but to everyone with a concern for the natural environment of the Cotswolds, and to anyone planning a visit to this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.\"--Jacket.

Background: Street food vending provides vital employment and nutrition in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), but poor health and safety compliance pose significant public health and business risks. Despite growing policy recognition, the link between hygiene practices and vendor performance remains underexplored. Objective: This integrative review examines the influence of health and safety practices on the business performance of informal street food vendors, with a particular focus on both global and South African contexts. Methods: A total of 76 studies published between 2015 and 2025 were retrieved between June 2024 and May 2025 and analyzed using an integrative review methodology. Sources were identified through five major academic databases and grey literature repositories. Thematic synthesis followed PRISMA logic and was guided by the Health Belief Model (HBM) and Balanced Scorecard (BSC) frameworks. Results: There was a marked increase in publications post-2019, peaking in 2023. Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for the majority of studies, with South Africa (28%) and Ghana (14%) most represented. Among the 76 included studies, the most common designs were quantitative (38%), followed by qualitative (20%), case studies (14%), and mixed-methods (11%), reflecting a predominantly empirical and field-based evidence base. Thematic analysis showed that 26% of studies focused on food safety knowledge and practices, 14% focused on infrastructure gaps, and 13% focused on policy and regulatory challenges. Of the 76 studies included, 73% reported a positive relationship between hygiene compliance and improved business performance (such as customer trust, revenue, and operational resilience), based on vote-counting across qualitatively synthesized results and business outcomes. The review identifies a conceptual synergy between the HBM’s cues to action and the BSC’s customer dimension, highlighting how hygiene compliance simultaneously influences vendor behaviour and consumer trust. Conceptual saturation was observed in themes related to hygiene protocols, consumer trust indicators, and regulatory barriers. Conclusions: Health and safety practices function not only as compliance imperatives but also as strategic assets in the informal food economy. However, widespread adoption is impeded by structural barriers including limited infrastructure, education gaps, and uneven regulatory enforcement. The findings call for context-sensitive policy interventions and public health models that align with vendor realities and support sustainable, safe, and competitive informal food systems.

Salt (sodium chloride) is used in a variety of processed foods. It not only confers its own specific flavour on products, it is also used to enhance and modify the flavour of other ingredients. The reasons for using salt can be divided into three broad categories: processing reasons, sensory (taste) reasons, and preservative reasons. In some cases it performs all three of these functions, and in many situations the distinction between them is not clear-cut.

This thesis describes and evaluates Dense Surface Models (DSMs), a new technique for building point distribution models of surfaces, from raw input data. DSMs can be used on data from a wide range of surface acquisition systems without preprocessing since they do not require that the surfaces be closed or even locally manifold, and can cope well with holes and spikes in the surfaces. This is an advantage over comparable techniques, which impose such constraints on the input. The core of the DSM algorithm is as follows. A dense correspondence is made between the surfaces using thin-plate spline warping guided by means of a small set of hand-placed landmarks. The area of interest is automatically defined by a threshold on a measure of the closeness of the correspondence at each point. A point distribution model is then built using the vertices from the trimmed and densely-corresponded surfaces. The key benefit of using models of the whole surface is illustrated by the large improvement in classification on face shape that is obtained when using DSMs as compared to landmark-based geometric morphometrics. This is demonstrated by testing classification by gender and also by congenital anomaly where facial growth and form is abnormal. The latter is currently the primary application of DSMs. The use of DSMs for automatically fitting to new scans is evaluated for robustness and accuracy. Methods for analyzing continuous and discrete parameters such as age and gender are presented and evaluated. The incorporation of grey-level information with the shape information is also possible, and is explored.

Realtime perceptual and interaction capabilities in mixed reality require a range of 3D tracking problems to be solved at low latency on resource-constrained hardware such as head-mounted devices. Indeed, for devices such as HoloLens 2 where the CPU and GPU are left available for applications, multiple tracking subsystems are required to run on a continuous, real-time basis while sharing a single Digital Signal Processor. To solve model-fitting problems for HoloLens 2 hand tracking, where the computational budget is approximately 100 times smaller than an iPhone 7, we introduce a new surface model: the `Phong surface'. Using ideas from computer graphics, the Phong surface describes the same 3D shape as a triangulated mesh model, but with continuous surface normals which enable the use of lifting-based optimization, providing significant efficiency gains over ICP-based methods. We show that Phong surfaces retain the convergence benefits of smoother surface models, while triangle meshes do not.

The over-consumption of these types of foods, coupled with decreasing levels of physical activity, has contributed to a rapidly growing obesity problem in much of the Western world. Intervention actions, in which lectures were combined with exposure to selected food products, have been found to be more effective in improving children’s eating habits. Researching Preferences and Perceptions A review published by Campden & Chorleywood Food Research Association (CCFRA) (“Issues in Children's Food Choices: Methods for Sensory and Consumer Research—Review No. 53”) highlighted many of the research methods that have been used with children to investigate factors that influence their preferences and eating habits and, most importantly, for the development of new products marketed directly to them. By using images, the researchers avoided the logistical problems of testing with real food products, such as finding test locations with cooking facilities, dealing with food-handling, health and safety issues, etc.

Three years later he developed the tremors, mental degeneration and disability of variant CJD, dying from it in 1999. The recipient of his blood died this autumn and a postmortem revealed that he was also killed by the disease. Neither victim has been identified. Dr [John Reid] said: 'This is the first report from anywhere in the world of the possible transmission of vCJD from person to person via blood.' He also raised the prospect that many more people, including haemophiliacs, may have been exposed to CJD- contaminated blood products through plasma, the liquid component of blood used in numerous procedures. But he said they would have received products derived from large pools of plasma from many thousands of people, where any infection would be heavily diluted. Dr Reid said he was also asking the National Blood Service to seek urgent talks with the Royal Medical Colleges and NHS hospitals about the use of blood and blood products.

\"Food Chemical Composition: Dietary Significance in Food Manufacturing\" by Tim Hutton is reviewed.

She identified five groups - formula-fed only, full breastfeeding for less than one month, full breastfeeding from one to four months, full breastfeeding from four to less than six months, and full breastfeeding for six months or more. 'Specifically, the chance of contracting pneumonia was reduced fivefold, while the risk of recurrent ear infections was minimised twofold.' The study also showed that carrying on breastfeeding beyond the four-month stage made a significant difference to an infant's protection against pneumonia and recurrent ear infections. [Caroline Chantry] adds: 'This finding, coupled with the proven increased protection babies receive against gastrointestinal infections, adds to the mounting evidence that the longer a mother breastfeeds her infant, the greater the health benefits.' Scientists have already indicated-that babies who are breastfed for the first six months are less likely to become obese in later life.