The Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2009: Positioning Boston in a Post-Crisis World

Presents an annual survey of Greater Boston's market conditions, including economic and demographic trends; housing production; rents; home prices; housing affordability; foreclosures; and public spending in support of housing. Analyzes implications

Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2010

Analyzes 2010 survey results on Greater Boston's housing market conditions, including trends in production, rents, and home prices, with a focus on foreclosures, affordability, differential impact of the recession by type of housing, and student housing

Discover Wellness: A Worksite Wellness Program for Higher Education

Sixty percent of adults in the United States suffer from chronic disease. Worksite wellness programs that target at-risk populations have positive health benefits. Discover Wellness: Find a Healthier You (DW) is a worksite wellness program intended to improve the higher education employee health by providing an opportunity for participants to learn and practice healthy behaviors. The purpose of this study was to evaluate DW program impact on employee behavior change to reduce chronic disease risk. This study employed a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design that assessed self-efficacy and health behaviors of employees of a state university in the northeast United States. Participants experienced significant improvement in stress (t23 = -31.602, p < 0.001), nutrition (t21 = -36.313, p < 0.001), physical activity (t22 = -34.380, p < 0.001), and sleep (t23 = -18.450, p < 0.001). Additionally, anecdotes from participants revealed themes of comradery and reflection on health behaviors

Ankle-Knee Initial Contact Angle and Latency to Maximum Angle are Affected by Prolonged Run

International Journal of Exercise Science 14(1): 33-44, 2021. The initial contact and midstance angles may influence injury risk. Previous literature has not assessed these angles under the influence of new footwear for a non-exhaustive prolonged run or the relationship between the angles. To assess lower extremity kinematic changes and the relationship between kinematic parameters at initial contact and midstance with prolonged running under the influence of different types of footwear. Twelve experienced, recreational runners (6 male; 6 female; 24.8 ± 8.4 years; 70.5 ± 9.3 kg; 174.1 ± 9.7 cm) ran for 31 minutes at a self-selected pace for three testing sessions wearing maximalist, habitual, and minimalist shoes. Sixteen anatomical retroreflective markers and seven tracking clusters were placed on the participants’ lower extremities. Kinematic data were collected every five minutes beginning at minute one. Initial contact angle (IC), maximum angle (MAX) during midstance, and latency (Tmax) between IC and MAX were calculated for the ankle and knee joints in the frontal and sagittal planes. No significant differences were observed between footwear. Rearfoot inversion (F3,33 = 9.72, p \u3c .001) and knee flexion (F6,66 = 5.34, p \u3c .001) at IC increased over time. No significant differences were detected for MAX over time. Tmax for dorsiflexion (F6,66 = 10.26, p \u3c .001), rearfoot eversion, (F6,66 = 7.84, p \u3c .001) and knee flexion (F6,66 = 11.76, p \u3c .001) increased over time. Maximum eversion during midstance is related to the angle at initial contact, and regardless of footwear type, IC and Tmax increased over the duration of the run. No differences in the ankle and knee sagittal or frontal plane kinematics between minimalist, habitual, and maximalist footwear were observed During a self-paced run

Ankle-Knee Initial Contact Angle and Latency to Maximum Angle are Affected by Prolonged Run

The initial contact and midstance angles may influence injury risk. Previous literature has not assessed these angles under the influence of new footwear for a non-exhaustive prolonged run or the relationship between the angles. To assess lower extremity kinematic changes and the relationship between kinematic parameters at initial contact and midstance with prolonged running under the influence of different types of footwear. Twelve experienced, recreational runners (6 male; 6 female; 24.8 ± 8.4 years; 70.5 ± 9.3 kg; 174.1 ± 9.7 cm) ran for 31 minutes at a self-selected pace for three testing sessions wearing maximalist, habitual, and minimalist shoes. Sixteen anatomical retroreflective markers and seven tracking clusters were placed on the participants’ lower extremities. Kinematic data were collected every five minutes beginning at minute one. Initial contact angle (IC), maximum angle (MAX) during midstance, and latency (Tmax) between IC and MAX were calculated for the ankle and knee joints in the frontal and sagittal planes. No significant differences were observed between footwear. Rearfoot inversion (F3,33 = 9.72, p \u3c .001) and knee flexion (F6,66 = 5.34, p \u3c .001) at IC increased over time. No significant differences were detected for MAX over time. Tmax for dorsiflexion (F6,66 = 10.26, p \u3c .001), rearfoot eversion, (F6,66 = 7.84, p \u3c .001) and knee flexion (F6,66 = 11.76, p \u3c .001) increased over time. Maximum eversion during midstance is related to the angle at initial contact, and regardless of footwear type, IC and Tmax increased over the duration of the run. No differences in the ankle and knee sagittal or frontal plane kinematics between minimalist, habitual, and maximalist footwear were observed During a self-paced run

Using Gimlet to Improve Service at the Library

In 2011, Johnson County Community College’s Billington Library first piloted and then implemented a low-cost online reference statistics tool called Gimlet. The system replaced an outmoded and inaccurate pen-and-paper statistics system. This paper details the struggles and advantages of this change. Implementation and training programs are discussed, as well as strategies for generating staff buy-in. Both the expected and unexpected advantages of a Gimlet based online system are explored, and future directions for the system are described. Libraries looking for a very low cost, easy to implement electronic statistics solution should consider Gimlet. The experience of JCCC’s Billington Library can serve as an effective road map

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the development, integration and application of cognitive ontologies

We discuss recent progress in the development of cognitive ontologies and summarize three challenges in the coordinated development and application of these resources. Challenge 1 is to adopt a standardized definition for cognitive processes. We describe three possibilities and recommend one that is consistent with the standard view in cognitive and biomedical sciences. Challenge 2 is harmonization. Gaps and conflicts in representation must be resolved so that these resources can be combined for mark-up and interpretation of multi-modal data. Finally, Challenge 3 is to test the utility of these resources for large-scale annotation of data, search and query, and knowledge discovery and integration. As term definitions are tested and revised, harmonization should enable coordinated updates across ontologies. However, the true test of these definitions will be in their community-wide adoption which will test whether they support valid inferences about psychological and neuroscientific data

A Nonlinear Estimator for Dead Reckoning of Aquatic Surface Vehicles Using an IMU and a Doppler Velocity Log

Aquatic robots require an accurate and reliable localization system to navigate autonomously and perform practical missions. Kalman filters (KFs) and their variants are typically used in aquatic robots to combine sensor data. The two critical drawbacks of KFs are the requirement for skilled tuning of several filter parameters and the fact that changes to how the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) is oriented necessitate modifying the filter. To overcome those problems, this paper presents a novel method of fusing sensor data from a Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) and IMU using an adaptive nonlinear estimator to provide dead reckoning localization for a small autonomous surface vehicle. The proposed method has only one insensitive tuning parameter and is agnostic to the configuration of the IMU. The system was validated using a small ASV in a 2.4$\times$3.6$\times$2.4 m water tank, with a motion capture system as ground truth, and was evaluated against a state-of-the-art method based on KFs. Experiments showed that the average drift error of the nonlinear filter was 0.16 m (s.d. 0.06 m) compared to 0.15 m (s.d. 0.05 m) for the state of the art, meaning that the benefits in terms of tuning and flexible configuration do not come at the expense of performance