Ethnic group differences in overweight and obese children and young people in England: cross sectional survey

Aims: To determine the percentage of children and young adults who are obese or overweight within different ethnic and socioeconomic groups.Methods: Secondary analysis of data on 5689 children and young adults aged 2 - 20 years from the 1999 Health Survey for England.Results: Twenty three per cent of children (n = 1311) were overweight, of whom 6% ( n = 358) were obese. More girls than boys were overweight ( 24% v 22%). Afro-Caribbean girls were more likely to be overweight ( odds ratio 1.73, 95% CI 1.29 to 2.33), and Afro-Caribbean and Pakistani girls were more likely to be obese than girls in the general population ( odds ratios 2.74 ( 95% CI 1.74 to 4.31) and 1.71 ( 95% CI 1.06 to 2.76), respectively). Indian and Pakistani boys were more likely to be overweight ( odds ratios 1.55 ( 95% CI 1.12 to 2.17) and 1.36 ( 95% CI 1.01 to 1.83), respectively). There were no significant differences in the prevalence of obese and overweight children from different social classes.Conclusion: The percentage of children and young adults who are obese and overweight differs by ethnic group and sex, but not by social class. British Afro-Caribbean and Pakistani girls have an increased risk of being obese and Indian and Pakistani boys have an increased risk of being overweight than the general population. These individuals may be at greater combined cumulative risk of morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular disease and so may be a priority for initiatives to target groups of children at particular risk of obesity

Keyboardless Visual Programming Using Voice, Handwriting, and Gesture

Visual programming languages have facilitated the application development process, improving our ability to express programs, as well as our ability to view, edit and interact with them. Yet even in programming environments, productivity is restricted by the primary input sources: the mouse and the keyboard. As an alternative, we investigate a program development interface which responds to the most natural human communication technologies: voice, handwriting and gesture. Speech- and pen-based systems have yet to find broad acceptance in everyday life because they are insufficiently advantageous to overcome problems with reliability. However, we believe that a visual programming environment with a multimodal user interface properly constrained so as not to exceed the limits of the current technology has the potential to increase programming productivity for not only those people who are manually or visually impaired, but for the general population as well. In this paper we report on such a system

A User Interface for the Visualization and Manipulation of Arrays

The success of spreadsheets has shown that a visual representation of a 2D array greatly facilitates solving certain problems. However, spreadsheets are not general-purpose programming environments and are not suited to many problems that might naturally be solved using multi-dimensional arrays. Furthermore, spreadsheets employ a textual notation for cell references in formulas. This notation, which adds to the programmer\u27\u27s burden by distinguishing between relative and absolute addressing, can be difficult to understand and is error-prone even for the most experienced users. In this paper, we present a user interface for multi-dimensional arrays within Formulate, a form-based visual programming language. This implementation avoids textual array notation and supports the application of formulas to logical regions of an array, rather than just to individual elements

Copper-Catalyzed Decarboxylative Trifluoromethylation of Allylic Bromodifluoroacetates

The development of new synthetic fluorination reactions has important implications in medicinal, agricultural and materials chemistries. Given the prevalence and accessibility of alcohols, methods to convert alcohols to trifluoromethanes are desirable. However, this transformation typically requires four-step processes, specialty chemicals, and/or stoichiometric metals to access the trifluoromethyl-containing product. A two-step copper-catalyzed decarboxylative protocol for converting allylic alcohols to trifluoromethanes is reported. Preliminary mechanistic studies distinguish this reaction from previously reported Cu-mediated reactions

The spreadsheet paradigm: a basis for powerful and accessible programming

This paper takes a cognition-centric approach for programming languages. It promotes the spreadsheet paradigm, with two concrete goals. First, it calls for the design and implementation of several language features to enhance the expressiveness of spreadsheet programming. Second, it describes a plan for rigorous empirical studies to retain the learnability of spreadsheet programming

A Visual Query System for the Specification and Scientific Analysis of Continual Queries

The lack of a facility that would allow nonprogrammers to easily formulate temporal ad hoc analyses over a network of heterogeneous, constantly-updated data sources has been a significant impediment to research, particularly in the scientific community. In this paper we describe WebFormulate, an Internet-based system which facilitates the development of analyses using information obtained from databases on the Internet. The main distinction between this system and existing Internet facilities to retrieve information and assimilate it into computations is that WebFormulate provides the necessary facilities to perform continual queries, developing and maintaining dynamic links such that computations and reports automatically maintain themselves. A further distinction is that this system is specifically designed for users of spreadsheet-level ability, rather than professional programmers

Copper-Catalyzed Decarboxylative Trifluoromethylation of Propargyl Bromodifluoroacetates

The development of efficient methods for accessing fluorinated functional groups is desirable. Herein, we report a two-step method that utilizes catalytic Cu for the decarboxylative trifluoromethylation of propargyl bromodifluoroacetates. This protocol affords a mixture of propargyl trifluoromethanes and trifluoromethyl allenes

Neurons in the Dorsomedial Hypothalamus Promote, Prolong, and Deepen Torpor in the Mouse

Torpor is a naturally occurring, hypometabolic, hypothermic state engaged by a wide range of animals in response to imbalance between the supply and demand for nutrients. Recent work has identified some of the key neuronal populations involved in daily torpor induction in mice, in particular, projections from the preoptic area of the hypothalamus to the dorsomedial hypothalamus (DMH). The DMH plays a role in thermoregulation, control of energy expenditure, and circadian rhythms, making it well positioned to contribute to the expression of torpor. We used activity-dependent genetic TRAPing techniques to target DMH neurons that were active during natural torpor bouts in female mice. Chemogenetic reactivation of torpor-TRAPed DMH neurons in calorie-restricted mice promoted torpor, resulting in longer and deeper torpor bouts. Chemogenetic inhibition of torpor-TRAPed DMH neurons did not block torpor entry, suggesting a modulatory role for the DMH in the control of torpor. This work adds to the evidence that the preoptic area of the hypothalamus and the DMH form part of a circuit within the mouse hypothalamus that controls entry into daily torpor

Nuclear Spin Relaxation for Higher Spin

We study the relaxation of a spin I that is weakly coupled to a quantum mechanical environment. Starting from the microscopic description, we derive a system of coupled relaxation equations within the adiabatic approximation. These are valid for arbitrary I and also for a general stationary non--equilibrium state of the environment. In the case of equilibrium, the stationary solution of the equations becomes the correct Boltzmannian equilibrium distribution for given spin I. The relaxation towards the stationary solution is characterized by a set of relaxation times, the longest of which can be shorter, by a factor of up to 2I, than the relaxation time in the corresponding Bloch equations calculated in the standard perturbative way.Comment: 4 pages, Latex, 2 figure