10,912 research outputs found
American Indian Youth: A Residential Camp Program for Wellness
The American Indian Youth Summer Wellness Camp strives to increase physical activity and healthful eating among at-risk southwest American Indian youth. The Wellness Camp is one week in duration and involves youth, aged 10-15 years. Youth who attend camp are self-selected or referred by local tribal health programs. In any given summer, 35-60 youth attend camp. Approximately 20%-33% of youth return from one year to the next. We describe our program to increase healthy lifestyles among American Indian youth at risk for overweight, obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The Wellness Camp Program includes five primary components: (1) cultural capital, (2) structured education sessions, (3) anthropometric and risk behavior assessments, (4) physical engagement, and (5) health messaging. Within this article, we describe our program to increase healthy lifestyles among American Indian youth at risk for overweight, obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease
APPLICATION OF THE ECONOMIC THRESHOLD FOR INTERSEASONAL PEST CONTROL
We show how an interseasonal pest control problem can be simplified to enable an intraseasonal model to be empirically applied, extending the range of application of the intraseasonal model. Three alternative economic thresholds are compared. The optimal solution requires repeated computations by the farmer to compute the profit maximizing dose, with a corresponding threshold, for each pest infestation. Two alternative decision rules require a single computation by the farmer for the threshold and dosage rate. An empirical illustration shows that, relative to the optimal solution which is computationally burdensome to the farmer, little net revenue is lost by using one of the thresholds based upon a simpler decision rule.Farm Management,
Transformation of two and three-dimensional regions by elliptic systems
Grid smoothing and orthogonalization procedures were developed and implemented in the construction of two and three dimensional grids. The procedures are based on the variational methods of grid generation. The two-dimensional examples were computed using the MSU IRIS Graphics Workstation. It was demonstrated that the elliptic grid generation equations, with arbitrary forcing functions, can be solved, in their variational formulation, using a gradient method. Since gradient methods have a global convergence property, the divergence problems often encountered when using SOR iterative methods can be avoided. It is not to be concluded, however, that SOR methods should be abandoned, since gradient methods tend to converge very slowly. In fact, slow convergence was the major problem encountered in the three-dimensional grids. Further progress was made on the continuing effort to develop conservative interpolation formulas for overlapping grids
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ATTRIBUTES OF BEEF CATTLE RAISED USING ULTRASOUND TECHNOLOGY AND PRICES RECEIVED AT THE PACKERS: A HEDONIC PRICE ANALYSIS
Sluggish growth in per capita consumption and a downward pressure on beef price at the farm level has required producers to raise cattle that precisely target the meat attributes desired by consumers. Ultrasound technology can help farmers to produce a carcass with an optimal mix of marbling and muscling, and external fat. The results of this study show a high level of accuracy of ultrasound technology in predicting carcass attributes. An estimated hedonic regression model shows that the carcass attributes are reflected on the implicit beef price. Ultrasound technology helps producers to produce carcass with the desired attributes, thus obtain a higher price.Demand and Price Analysis,
Privacy-Preserving Shortest Path Computation
Navigation is one of the most popular cloud computing services. But in
virtually all cloud-based navigation systems, the client must reveal her
location and destination to the cloud service provider in order to learn the
fastest route. In this work, we present a cryptographic protocol for navigation
on city streets that provides privacy for both the client's location and the
service provider's routing data. Our key ingredient is a novel method for
compressing the next-hop routing matrices in networks such as city street maps.
Applying our compression method to the map of Los Angeles, for example, we
achieve over tenfold reduction in the representation size. In conjunction with
other cryptographic techniques, this compressed representation results in an
efficient protocol suitable for fully-private real-time navigation on city
streets. We demonstrate the practicality of our protocol by benchmarking it on
real street map data for major cities such as San Francisco and Washington,
D.C.Comment: Extended version of NDSS 2016 pape
The Evolution of the Rationale for Government Involvement in Agriculture
Agricultural and Food Policy, Q18, Q10,
"The fridge door is open" : temporal verification of a robotic assistant's behaviours
Robotic assistants are being designed to help, or work with, humans in a variety of situations from assistance within domestic situations, through medical care, to industrial settings. Whilst robots have been used in industry for some time they are often limited in terms of their range of movement or range of tasks. A new generation of robotic assistants have more freedom to move, and are able to autonomously make decisions and decide between alternatives. For people to adopt such robots they will have to be shown to be both safe and trustworthy. In this paper we focus on formal verification of a set of rules that have been developed to control the Care-O-bot, a robotic assistant located in a typical domestic environment. In particular, we apply model-checking, an automated and exhaustive algorithmic technique, to check whether formal temporal properties are satisfied on all the possible behaviours of the system. We prove a number of properties relating to robot behaviours, their priority and interruptibility, helping to support both safety and trustworthiness of robot behaviours
Network Models
Networks can be combined in various ways, such as overlaying one on top of
another or setting two side by side. We introduce "network models" to encode
these ways of combining networks. Different network models describe different
kinds of networks. We show that each network model gives rise to an operad,
whose operations are ways of assembling a network of the given kind from
smaller parts. Such operads, and their algebras, can serve as tools for
designing networks. Technically, a network model is a lax symmetric monoidal
functor from the free symmetric monoidal category on some set to
, and the construction of the corresponding operad proceeds via a
symmetric monoidal version of the Grothendieck construction.Comment: 46 page
A Survey of Analogs to Weak MgII Absorbers in the Present
We present the results of a survey of the analogs of weak MgII absorbers
(rest frame equivalent width W(2796) < 0.3 A) at 0 < z < 0.3. Our sample
consisted of 25 HST/STIS echelle quasar spectra (R = 45,000) which covered SiII
1260 and CII 1335 over this redshift range. Using those similar transitions as
tracers of MgII facilitates a much larger survey, covering a redshift
pathlength of g(z) = 5.3 for an equivalent width limit of MgII corresponding to
W(2796) > 0.02 A, with 30% completeness for the weakest lines. We find the
number of weak MgII absorber analogs with 0.02 < W(2796) < 0.3 to be dN/dz =
1.00 +/- 0.20 for 0 < z < 0.3. This value is consistent with cosmological
evolution of the population. We consider the expected effect on observability
of weak MgII absorbers of the decreasing intensity of the extragalactic
background radiation eld from z~1 to z~0. Assuming that all the objects that
produce absorption at z~1 are stable on a cosmological timescale, and that no
new objects are created, we would expect dN/dz of 2-3 at z~0. About 30-50% of
this z~0 population would be decendants of the parsec-scale structures that
produce single-cloud, weak MgII absorbers at z~1. The other 50-70% would be
lower density, kiloparsec-scale structures that produce CIV absorption, but not
detectable low ionization absorption, at z~1. We conclude that at least one,
and perhaps some fraction of both, of these populations has evolved away since
z~1, in order to match the z~0 dN/dz measured in our survey. This would follow
naturally for a population of transient structures whose generation is related
to star-forming processes, whose rate has decreased since z~1.Comment: 45 pages, 12 figures, 7 tables ApJ accepte
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