286 research outputs found

    Health and fitness benefits using a heart rate intensity-based group fitness exercise regimen

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    Inactivity leads to morbidity and mortality, while novel and engaging approaches to fitness improve health outcomes. The current study examined an 8-week commercial group exercise regimen for high intensity interval training (HIIT) in order to examine comprehensive metrics of health and fitness. Aerobic fitness, body composition, resting metabolic rate, blood cholesterol and glucose, in addition to resting blood pressure were quantified in a laboratory setting independent of the training facilities. Exercise training utilized multimodal HIIT-based exercises and work intensity was gauged by real-time heart rate feedback. All participants completed the required two sessions per week. Pre-Post analyses indicate aerobic fitness (Pre VO2max = 36.8 ml•kg-1•min-1; Post VO2max = 40.8 ml•kg-1•min-1), % fat (Pre = 28.1%; Post = 27.0%), resting metabolic rate (Pre = 1557 kcals; Post = 1664 kcals), resting blood pressure (Pre = 128.8/78.1 mmHg; Post = 116.7/75.4 mmHg), and circulating triacylglycerol (Pre = 100.0 mg/dl; Post = 78.7 mg/dl) were significantly altered. This study quantified improvements in aerobic fitness, body composition, resting metabolic rate, resting blood pressure, and triacylglycerol after an 8-week HIIT regimen. The implications of heart rate (HR) monitoring within franchised group exercise with wearable technology serves as an unexplored scientific approach to understand novel exercise prescriptions on health-fitness outcomes. Future research should investigate sociological aspects of program adherence, while biological applications should examine the adaptive stimuli of HIIT training on health and fitness improvements.This work was supported by the Ultimate Fitness Group, LLC dba Orange Theory Fitness

    Disagreeable Privacy Policies: Mismatches between Meaning and Users’ Understanding

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    Privacy policies are verbose, difficult to understand, take too long to read, and may be the least-read items on most websites even as users express growing concerns about information collection practices. For all their faults, though, privacy policies remain the single most important source of information for users to attempt to learn how companies collect, use, and share data. Likewise, these policies form the basis for the self-regulatory notice and choice framework that is designed and promoted as a replacement for regulation. The underlying value and legitimacy of notice and choice depends, however, on the ability of users to understand privacy policies. This paper investigates the differences in interpretation among expert, knowledgeable, and typical users and explores whether those groups can understand the practices described in privacy policies at a level sufficient to support rational decision-making. The paper seeks to fill an important gap in the understanding of privacy policies through primary research on user interpretation and to inform the development of technologies combining natural language processing, machine learning and crowdsourcing for policy interpretation and summarization. For this research, we recruited a group of law and public policy graduate students at Fordham University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh (“knowledgeable users”) and presented these law and policy researchers with a set of privacy policies from companies in the e-commerce and news & entertainment industries. We asked them nine basic questions about the policies’ statements regarding data collection, data use, and retention. We then presented the same set of policies to a group of privacy experts and to a group of non-expert users. The findings show areas of common understanding across all groups for certain data collection and deletion practices, but also demonstrate very important discrepancies in the interpretation of privacy policy language, particularly with respect to data sharing. The discordant interpretations arose both within groups and between the experts and the two other groups. The presence of these significant discrepancies has critical implications. First, the common understandings of some attributes of described data practices mean that semi-automated extraction of meaning from website privacy policies may be able to assist typical users and improve the effectiveness of notice by conveying the true meaning to users. However, the disagreements among experts and disagreement between experts and the other groups reflect that ambiguous wording in typical privacy policies undermines the ability of privacy policies to effectively convey notice of data practices to the general public. The results of this research will, consequently, have significant policy implications for the construction of the notice and choice framework and for the US reliance on this approach. The gap in interpretation indicates that privacy policies may be misleading the general public and that those policies could be considered legally unfair and deceptive. And, where websites are not effectively conveying privacy policies to consumers in a way that a “reasonable person” could, in fact, understand the policies, “notice and choice” fails as a framework. Such a failure has broad international implications since websites extend their reach beyond the United States

    The Second Conference on Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century, volume 1

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    These papers comprise a peer-review selection of presentations by authors from NASA, LPI industry, and academia at the Second Conference (April 1988) on Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century, sponsored by the NASA Office of Exploration and the Lunar Planetary Institute. These papers go into more technical depth than did those published from the first NASA-sponsored symposium on the topic, held in 1984. Session topics covered by this volume include (1) design and operation of transportation systems to, in orbit around, and on the Moon, (2) lunar base site selection, (3) design, architecture, construction, and operation of lunar bases and human habitats, and (4) lunar-based scientific research and experimentation in astronomy, exobiology, and lunar geology

    The Second Conference on Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century, volume 2

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    These 92 papers comprise a peer-reviewed selection of presentations by authors from NASA, the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), industry, and academia at the Second Conference on Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century. These papers go into more technical depth than did those published from the first NASA-sponsored symposium on the topic, held in 1984. Session topics included the following: (1) design and operation of transportation systems to, in orbit around, and on the Moon; (2) lunar base site selection; (3) design, architecture, construction, and operation of lunar bases and human habitats; (4) lunar-based scientific research and experimentation in astronomy, exobiology, and lunar geology; (5) recovery and use of lunar resources; (6) environmental and human factors of and life support technology for human presence on the Moon; and (7) program management of human exploration of the Moon and space

    Exercise does not increase cyclooxygenase-2 myocardial levels in young or senescent hearts

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    Increased myocardial cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) activity is essential for late phase ischemic preconditioning (IPC). Currently unknown is whether cardioprotection elicited by exercise also involves elevated myocardial COX-2 activity. This investigation tested whether aerobic exercise elevates myocardial COX-2 protein content or enzyme activity in young and senescent male Fisher 344 rats assigned to sedentary or cardioprotective endurance exercise treatments (3 consecutive days of treadmill exercise, 60 min/day @~70% VO2max). Assay of cardiac COX-2 protein content, catalytic activity, and inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) protein content reveal that exercise did not alter COX-2 activity (PGE2, p = 0.866; PGF1α, p = 0.796) or protein levels (p = 0.397) within young or senescent hearts. In contrast, myocardial iNOS, an up-stream mediator of COX-2 expression, was over-expressed by an average of 37% in aged hearts (p = 0.005), though iNOS was not influenced by exercise. Findings reveal exercise does not elevate cardiac COX-2 activity and suggests that mechanisms responsible for cardioprotection differ between IPC and aerobic exercise

    Spatial monitoring of groundwater drawdown and rebound associated with quarry dewatering using automated time-lapse electrical resistivity tomography and distribution guided clustering

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    Dewatering systems used for mining and quarrying operations often result in highly artificial and complex groundwater conditions, which can be difficult to characterise and monitor using borehole point sampling approaches. Here automated time-lapse electrical resistivity tomography (ALERT) is considered as a means of monitoring subsurface groundwater dynamics associated with changes in the dewatering regime in an operational sand and gravel quarry. We considered two scenarios: the first was unplanned interruption to dewatering due to a pump failure for a period of several days, which involved comparing ALERT monitoring results before and after groundwater rebound; the second involved a planned interruption to pumping over a period of 6 h, for which near-continuous ALERT monitoring of groundwater rebound and drawdown was undertaken. The results of the second test were analysed using distribution guided clustering (DGC) to provide a more quantitative and objective assessment of changes in the subsurface over time. ALERT successfully identified groundwater level changes during both monitoring scenarios. It provided a more useful indication of the rate of water level rise and maximum water levels than piezometer monitoring results. This was due to the piezometers rapidly responding to pressure changes at depth, whilst ALERT/DGC provided information of slower changes associated with the storage and delayed drainage of water within the sediment. By applying DGC we were able to automatically and quantitatively define changes in the resistivity sections, which correlated well with the direct observations of groundwater at site. For ERT monitoring applications that generate numerous time series, the use of DGC could significantly enhance the efficiency of data interpretation, and provide a means of automating groundwater monitoring through assigning alarm thresholds associated with rapid changes in groundwater conditions

    Learning and Long-Term Retention of Large-Scale Artificial Languages

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    Recovering discrete words from continuous speech is one of the first challenges facing language learners. Infants and adults can make use of the statistical structure of utterances to learn the forms of words from unsegmented input, suggesting that this ability may be useful for bootstrapping language-specific cues to segmentation. It is unknown, however, whether performance shown in small-scale laboratory demonstrations of “statistical learning” can scale up to allow learning of the lexicons of natural languages, which are orders of magnitude larger. Artificial language experiments with adults can be used to test whether the mechanisms of statistical learning are in principle scalable to larger lexicons. We report data from a large-scale learning experiment that demonstrates that adults can learn words from unsegmented input in much larger languages than previously documented and that they retain the words they learn for years. These results suggest that statistical word segmentation could be scalable to the challenges of lexical acquisition in natural language learning.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF DDRIG #0746251
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