VO₂max: the gold standard for measuring fitness explained

First paragraph: If you could pick one measure to evaluate your health, what would you pick? Blood pressure? Cholesterol? These are commonly measured by your GP, but there is something that is more informative: maximal aerobic capacity, otherwise known as VO₂max. This measure tells you your maximum (max) rate (V) of oxygen (O₂) uptake and use during exercise. The greater this is, the better your health. In fact, VO₂max is the best predictor of your risk, at a given point in time, of getting chronic diseases like heart disease, type 2 diabetes or certain cancers, and the best predictor of your chances of living a long and healthy life. Intuitively, this does not make much sense: most people go through life without ever needing to reach their VO₂max.https://theconversation.com/vo-max-the-gold-standard-for-measuring-fitness-explained-10948

Is sperm quality deteriorating worldwide? Find out what the experts say

Do you know how good the quality of your semen is? Is it as good today as it was 10 years ago? Unless you are getting it tested regularly by a reputable lab, or are fathering babies on a regular basis, you will have no real way of knowing. In fact it’s a complex issue for several reasons. For a start, to measure sperm quality you need to take various things into consideration. It’s not just by the number of sperm, but how effectively they swim, whether they look like typical sperm, etc. But even among fertile men there is a lot of variation in sperm characteristics, so it isn’t straightforward to identify what is abnormal for any particular man. This is unfortunate, because sperm quality is generally considered be a good overall measure of health, so it’s in men’s interests to know whether our sperm is in good condition or not. Sperm quality is not only important to the individual man, but because it has been suggested that men worldwide are experiencing poor sperm quality, this issue has implications for the future of the human race

Surveying Citizens: A Handbook for Municipal Officials Who Want to Know What Their Citizens Think

This handbook describes the process getting valid and reliable information from a citizen survey. It\u27s intended for readers who don\u27t have a substantial background in survey research or statistics. The basic premise is simple: Do it right or don\u27t bother to do it at all. The necessary steps to do it right allow for few shortcuts in planning, designing and implementing a high-quality citizen survey or in analyzing responses. Following the procedures and suggestions described here should yield questions that are valid (measures what you want to measure), reliable (consistent), and useful (results that relate to the survey objectives

Spooked

There’s always something a bit scary about a ghost story. Somehow, though, when you read a collection of them you’re expecting to meet a spook or two. It takes a little more effort to frighten the reader. We hope we’ve managed to do just that with this bunch of tales and our striking cover. We hope as well you’ll find the stories as different from each other as they are from the normal ghost story. You’ll come across some old friends amongst the authors in this volume. Bridge House is beginning to es-tablish a brand and we have several writers now who have the measure of what we’re looking for. You’ll also meet some new names and writing styles. We’re sure both will please. And now to the ghosts…. They too have a life of their own … precisely drawn by our authors. It’s that time of year isn’t it? When the nights are getting longer, the days are getting shorter, when strange shadows lurk and you begin to hear noises you don’t understand. We have traditional ghosts, more subtle ghosts, naughty ghosts, nice ghost, nasty ghost and in one or two of our stories it’s a little difficult to work out who is haunting whom. Stoke up the fire, sit back, enjoy and prepare to be: Spooked

Letter from John Muir to Louis [S. Muir], 1901 Jul 20.

Sierra ClubTuolumne CampJuly 20./01Dear Louie -I wish you were here. The air is so perfectly delicious Warm during the day in the open, cool in the shade, & just a trace of frost at night. It would surely do you good - make you feel young again But Ye Gods what a jolting we got getting here in our six mule & horse chariot from Crockers to this mountain paradise!!! Only the girls endured it unscathed laughed at it giggled at it & enjoyed it Wanda & Helen take to this life in the rocks & woods like ducks to water as if born to it. No one could guess that this was their first mountaineering my miserable cold has gone with the frost & wind & I am well again Every breath is pure pleasure. Keith too is much better. The Club outing is a grand success. God\u27s ozone sparkles in every eye, I never before saw so big & merry a camp circle, a huge fire blazing in the centre. I had of course to make a little speech though I had eaten two huge trouts which seemed to fill me as if I had devoured something equal to both Jonah & Whale - I suppose I\u27ll have to descend in three weeks so as to be in time for Wanda\u27s entrance02877 to the University & I suppose I ought as President of the Club to be present at the Le Cont[e?] excesses. I wish you would order a broadcloth suit for me Cohen - You will find his address in my desk - the upper right hand drawer. He ahs my measure. The coat should be a Prince Albert I think, medium length All three of you should be here You Sarah & Maggie, but only wings or abloons could answer for getting you over the rocks, & a cold storage attachment would be indispensable for the San Joaquin portion of the trip or rather translation. Love to allEver Your no longer coughing mountaineer John Mui

Evaluating Innovation

In their pursuit of the public good, foundations face two competing forces -- the pressure to do something new and the pressure to do something proven. The epigraph to this paper, "Give me something new and prove that it works," is my own summary of what foundations often seek. These pressures come from within the foundations -- their staff or boards demand them, not the public. The aspiration to fund things that work can be traced to the desire to be careful, effective stewards of resources. Foundations' recognition of the growing complexity of our shared challenges drives the increased emphasis on innovation. Issues such as climate change, political corruption, and digital learning andwork environments have enticed new players into the social problem-solving sphere and have con-vinced more funders of the need to find new solutions. The seemingly mutually exclusive desires for doing something new and doing something proven are not new, but as foundations have grown in number and size the visibility of the paradox has risen accordingly.Even as foundations seek to fund innovation, they are also seeking measurements of those investments success. Many people's first response to the challenge of measuring innovation is to declare the intention oxymoronic. Innovation is by definition amorphous, full of unintended consequences, and a creative, unpredictable process -- much like art. Measurements, assessments, evaluation are -- also by most definitions -- about quantifying activities and products. There is always the danger of counting what you can count, even if what you can count doesn't matter.For all our awareness of the inherent irony of trying to measure something that we intend to be unpredictable, many foundations (and others) continue to try to evaluate their innovation efforts. They are, as John Westley, Brenda Zimmerman, and Michael Quinn Patton put it in "Getting to Maybe", grappling with "....intentionality and complexity -- (which) meet in tension." It is important to see the struggles to measure for what they are -- attempts to evaluate the success of the process of innovation, not necessarily the success of the individual innovations themselves. This is not a semantic difference.What foundations are trying to understand is how to go about funding innovation so that more of it can happenExamples in this report were chosen because they offer a look at innovation within the broader scope of a foundation's work. This paper is the fifth in a series focused on field building. In this context I am interested in where evaluation fits within an innovation strategy and where these strategies fit within a foundation's broader funding goals. I will present a typology of innovation drawn from the OECD that can be useful inother areas. I lay the decisions about evaluation made by Knight, MacArthur, and the Jewish NewMedia Innovation Funders against their program-matic goals. Finally, I consider how evaluating innovation may improve our overall use of evaluation methods in philanthropy

Volume 45, Number 06 (June 1927)

Staccato, the Spice of Music Keeping Up One\u27s Music What Effect Has Jazz Upon Present Day Music and Composers? Magical Symbols of Notation Glimpse of Jenny Lind Association of Teacher and Pupil Power of Accidentals Outside the Measure Perfection of the Pianist Polka Timepiece of Music Problem of Mixed Time How the Musician Should Deal with Nerves Listening In Musical Vacation Slow Scale Practice Can You Tell?—Quiz How to Give a Delightful Summer Musicale Phonograph Master Class Romance of the Scales Charles Wakefield Cadman All-American Composer Lucy Learns the Art of Dancing: A Humorous Recitation Too Big for Him How They Forged Ahead: Stories of Great Singers of the Past Who Broke Down All Obstacles to Success Accuracy in Chord Playing Getting Your Hand In Time for the Doxologyhttps://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/etude/1745/thumbnail.jp

Hearing the voices of children: self-reported information on children's experiences during research procedures

__Introduction:__ In paediatric research, there is a tension between what you can ask from a child and what is needed for the development of evidence-based treatments. To find an optimal balance in conducting clinical research and protecting the child, it is necessary to have empirical data on children's experiences. Until now, there are scarce empirical data on the experiences from the perspective of the child. In this manuscript, we describe the protocol of a twophase study measuring children's self-reported experiences during research procedures. __Methods and analysis:__ In the first phase of our study, we aim to interview approximately 40 children (6-18 years) about their self-reported experiences during research procedures. In the second phase, we will develop a questionnaire to measure children's experiences during research procedures in a quantitative way. We will use the interview outcomes for the development of this questionnaire. Next, we will measure the experiences of children during seven research procedures with this questionnaire. A one-month followup is conducted to investigate the emotional impact of the research procedures on the children. Children will be recruited from different research studies in three academic children's hospitals in the Netherlands. __Ethics and dissemination:__ The ethics committee of the VU University medical center evaluated both studies and indicated that there was no risk/discomfort associated, stating that both phases are exempt from getting

The Role of Social Media in World as a Key Instrument

It’s no secret that “word of mouth” has always been considered one of the most powerful forms of marketing for a business.   Social media today is the ultimate word-of-mouth marketing.  Getting people to connect with you online in the social space helps spread the word about who your company is and your products and services. Social media has changed the way the world communicates, creating real time interconnectivity between people, businesses, and geographies. As social media continues to grow in popularity, brands are looking for ways to increase their fan base and leverage their social presence to increase sales and brand affinity. Social media is a powerful tool for engaging your customers and fans in a conversation.   So there are really two functions of social media for business:  1) Are you participating in the conversation and sharing, and 2) Are you listening and monitoring what is being said about you. Social media takes work, there’s no doubt about it. Any business that has tried running their own Facebook and Twitter profiles knows that gaining new customers is more difficult than it seems.  What role should social media play in your marketing?  At the end of the day, with right tools and strategy in place, social media marketing can be scary and should/will play a large part in your overall digital strategy. Social media’s role in your overall digital strategy comes down to four main things: 1) Building a fan base 2) Reputation monitoring 3) Conducting customer service 4) Generating leads Social media mining is a process of representing, analyzing, and extracting actionable patterns from social media data. Social media mining introduces basic concepts and principal algorithms suitable for investigating massive social media data; it discusses theories and methodologies from different disciplines such as computer science, data mining, machine learning, social network analysis, network science, sociology, ethnography, statistics, optimization, and mathematics. It encompasses the tools to formally represent, measure, model, and mine meaningful patterns from large-scale social media data.   Keywords : Internet, Social networking media, Social media,Communication etc