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children’s health keep on moving
The link between health and the lifestyle of young people today has been well documented in the media. The decrease in activities that used to be the norm – such as playing in the street – are having a big effect on children and how healthy they’re likely to be in later life.
THE PEACH PROJECT is run through the University’s Centre of Exercise, Nutrition and Health Sciences, and stands for Personal and Environmental Associations with Children’s Health. Te project looks at children’s physical activity and their eating habits to help researchers understand how active young people are and what keeps them healthy. Researchers are working with pupils from across
Bristol, measuring their physical activity patterns to find out when they are most and least active and, importantly, where they are during these times. Data gathered from 1,300 primary school
children in Bristol showed that children who are allowed to go to places without an adult and who
22 pop equations the hit predictor
Research carried out at Bristol’s Intelligent Systems Laboratory has discovered that it’s possible to break songs down into winning components.
SURELY A HIT is simply that – a hit? Not according to the research team led by Dr Tijl De Bie. Tey looked at the official UK top 40 singles over the past 50 years, with the aim of differentiating songs that reached the top five in the chart from less successful ones. Te research looked at a number of
features, including tempo, song duration and the simplicity of chord sequences. Te team selected a list of 23 of these features, and subsequently deployed methods from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to devise a ‘hit potential equation’, able to score any song according to its audio features. Tey then found they could use the score reached using the equation to classify a song a ‘hit’
or ‘not hit’, up to an accuracy of 60 per cent, predicting whether the song reached the top five, or got no higher than 30. Building on previous
research, the equation was also able to account for evolving musical tastes, through the use of the ‘time- shifting ridge regression’ algorithm. “Hit potential
is a time-varying concept – today’s hit could be tomorrow’s flop,” says Dr De Bie. “To account for this we used AI methods that are able to track the changing notion of a hit, and thus the resulting hit potential equation varies
bristol.ac.uk
Lady Gaga knows what it takes to write a hit song.
over time as well. After launching our website many artists expressed an interest in scoring their songs with our equation, so we went one step further and developed a free online
app. Of course
hit potential depends on various other factors unrelated to the audio,
and thus the equation’s accuracy is unavoidably limited. However, we do
hope that it may give aspiring musicians some early feedback on their songs.”
• MORE INFO
www.scoreahit.com
HOW DID THEY TAKE PART? Participating children wore two small activity monitors around their waist for one week. They also filled in two questionnaires, had their height, weight and waists measured, and gave six saliva samples. This is the only project
spend more time outdoors are more physically active than children who don’t do these things. PEACH has also investigated other health issues
in young people. One report found that watching TV or playing computer games for more than two hours a day can lead to psychological difficulties. More recently, the PEACH Project has been
awarded further funding by the World Cancer Research Fund, which will allow for further investigation into mid-adolescence.
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that is combining objective measures of location outdoors (using personal GPS receivers) and physical activity (measured with accelerometers), working with children who are moving from primary to secondary school.
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