Local Government Actions to Prevent Childhood Obesity

Offers guidance on policy and programmatic actions local governments can take, with community input, to promote healthy eating and physical activity and to ensure equal opportunities for healthy living in low-income neighborhoods. Profiles best practices

Improving Livability Using Green and Active Modes: A Traffic Stress Level Analysis of Transit, Bicycle, and Pedestrian Access and Mobility

Understanding the relative attractiveness of alternatives to driving is vitally important toward lowering driving rates and, by extension, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), traffic congestion, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, etc. The relative effectiveness of automobile alternatives (i.e., buses, bicycling, and walking) depends on how well streets are designed to work for these respective modes in terms of safety, comfort and cost, which can sometimes pit their relative effectiveness against each other. In this report, the level of traffic stress (LTS) criteria previously developed by two of the authors was used to determine how the streets functioned for these auto alternative modes. The quality and extent of the transit service area was measured using a total travel time metric over the LTS network. The model developed in this study was applied to two transit routes in Oakland, California, and Denver, Colorado

Polygon Exploration with Time-Discrete Vision

With the advent of autonomous robots with two- and three-dimensional scanning capabilities, classical visibility-based exploration methods from computational geometry have gained in practical importance. However, real-life laser scanning of useful accuracy does not allow the robot to scan continuously while in motion; instead, it has to stop each time it surveys its environment. This requirement was studied by Fekete, Klein and Nuechter for the subproblem of looking around a corner, but until now has not been considered in an online setting for whole polygonal regions. We give the first algorithmic results for this important algorithmic problem that combines stationary art gallery-type aspects with watchman-type issues in an online scenario: We demonstrate that even for orthoconvex polygons, a competitive strategy can be achieved only for limited aspect ratio A (the ratio of the maximum and minimum edge length of the polygon), i.e., for a given lower bound on the size of an edge; we give a matching upper bound by providing an O(log A)-competitive strategy for simple rectilinear polygons, using the assumption that each edge of the polygon has to be fully visible from some scan point.Comment: 28 pages, 17 figures, 2 photographs, 3 tables, Latex. Updated some details (title, figures and text) for final journal revision, including explicit assumption of full edge visibilit

Design of evacuation plans for densely urbanised city centres

The high population density and tightly packed nature of some city centres make emergency planning for these urban spaces especially important, given the potential for human loss in case of disaster. Historic and recent events have made emergency service planners particularly conscious of the need for preparing evacuation plans in advance. This paper discusses a methodological approach for assisting decision-makers in designing urban evacuation plans. The approach aims at quickly and safely moving the population away from the danger zone into shelters. The plans include determining the number and location of rescue facilities, as well as the paths that people should take from their building to their assigned shelter in case of an occurrence requiring evacuation. The approach is thus of the location–allocation–routing type, through the existing streets network, and takes into account the trade-offs among different aspects of evacuation actions that inevitably come up during the planning stage. All the steps of the procedure are discussed and systematised, along with computational and practical implementation issues, in the context of a case study – the design of evacuation plans for the historical centre of an old European city

Promoting Healthy Communities and Reducing Childhood Obesity: Legislative Options

Summarizes legislation proposed or enacted in 2007-08 in the areas of healthy eating and physical activity such as nutrition, physical education, and obesity prevention and treatment, as well as healthy community design and access to healthy food

F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America's Future 2011

Outlines 2008-10 national and state obesity rates, health indicators, and policies to address the epidemic; regional, economic, and social barriers to healthy choices; impact of the 2010 healthcare reform and Let's Move initiative; and recommendations

Parallel searching on m rays☆☆This research is supported by the DFG-Project “Diskrete Probleme”, No. Ot 64/8-3.

AbstractWe investigate parallel searching on m concurrent rays. We assume that a target t is located somewhere on one of the rays; we are given a group of m point robots each of which has to reach t. Furthermore, we assume that the robots have no way of communicating over distance. Given a strategy S we are interested in the competitive ratio defined as the ratio of the time needed by the robots to reach t using S and the time needed to reach t if the location of t is known in advance.If a lower bound on the distance to the target is known, then there is a simple strategy which achieves a competitive ratio of 9—independent of m. We show that 9 is a lower bound on the competitive ratio for two large classes of strategies if m⩾2.If the minimum distance to the target is not known in advance, we show a lower bound on the competitive ratio of 1+2(k+1)k+1/kk where k=⌈logm⌉ where log is used to denote the base-2 logarithm. We also give a strategy that obtains this ratio