Study of optimal training protocols and devices for developing and maintaining physical fitness in females prior to and during space flight

Pedalling a bicycle at least ten minutes a day at 85% of maximum pulse rate, three days a week for ten weeks will produce moderate increases in overall strength and physical work capacity in college-age females. The longer the training session, up to thirty minutes per session, the greater are the increases in physical work capacity that result when college-age females are trained three days a week for ten weeks at 85% of their maximum heart rate

Special Orders, No. 129: Headquarters of the Army, Adjutant General\u27s Office

Notice of Captain Henry D. Styer being detailed to Utah Agricultural College

Isokinetic exercise: A review of the literature

Isokinetic muscle training has all the advantages of isometrics and isotonics while minimizing their deficiencies. By holding the speed of movement constant throughout the full range of motion, isokinetic training devices respond with increased resistance rather than acceleration when the power output of the muscle is increased. Isokinetic training is superior to isometric and isotonic training with respect to increases in strength, specificity of training, desirable changes in motor performance tasks, lack of muscle soreness, and decreases in relative body fat

Influential factors of aligning Spotify squads in mission-critical and offshore projects – a longitudinal embedded case study

Changing the development process of an organization is one of the toughest and riskiest decisions. This is particularly true if the known experiences and practices of the new considered ways of working are relative and subject to contextual assumptions. Spotify engineering culture is deemed as a new agile software development method which increasingly attracts large-scale organizations. The method relies on several small cross-functional self-organized teams (i.e., squads). The squad autonomy is a key driver in Spotify method, where a squad decides what to do and how to do it. To enable effective squad autonomy, each squad shall be aligned with a mission, strategy, short-term goals and other squads. Since a little known about Spotify method, there is a need to answer the question of: How can organizations work out and maintain the alignment to enable loosely coupled and tightly aligned squads? In this paper, we identify factors to support the alignment that is actually performed in practice but have never been discussed before in terms of Spotify method. We also present Spotify Tailoring by highlighting the modified and newly introduced processes to the method. Our work is based on a longitudinal embedded case study which was conducted in a real-world large-scale offshore software intensive organization that maintains mission-critical systems. According to the confidentiality agreement by the organization in question, we are not allowed to reveal a detailed description of the features of the explored project

BMI as a Modifiable Risk Factor for Type 2 Diabetes: Refining and Understanding Causal Estimates Using Mendelian Randomization.

This study focused on resolving the relationship between BMI and type 2 diabetes. The availability of multiple variants associated with BMI offers a new chance to resolve the true causal effect of BMI on type 2 diabetes; however, the properties of these associations and their validity as genetic instruments need to be considered alongside established and new methods for undertaking Mendelian randomization (MR). We explore the potential for pleiotropic genetic variants to generate bias, revise existing estimates, and illustrate value in new analysis methods. A two-sample MR approach with 96 genetic variants was used with three different analysis methods, two of which (MR-Egger and the weighted median) have been developed specifically to address problems of invalid instrumental variables. We estimate an odds ratio for type 2 diabetes per unit increase in BMI (kg/m(2)) of between 1.19 and 1.38, with the most stable estimate using all instruments and a weighted median approach (1.26 [95% CI 1.17, 1.34]). TCF7L2(rs7903146) was identified as a complex effect or pleiotropic instrument, and removal of this variant resulted in convergence of causal effect estimates from different causal analysis methods. This indicated the potential for pleiotropy to affect estimates and differences in performance of alternative analytical methods. In a real type 2 diabetes-focused example, this study demonstrates the potential impact of invalid instruments on causal effect estimates and the potential for new approaches to mitigate the bias caused.Medical Research Council (Grant IDs: MC_UU_12013/1, MC_UU_12013/2, MC_UU_12013/3); University of Bristol; Wellcome Trust (Grant ID: 100114); Medical Research Council (Methodology Research Fellowship, Grant ID: MR/N501906/1); Cancer Research UK (C18281/A19169).This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from American Diabetes Association via http://dx.doi.org/10.2337/db16-041

Exploring the concept of 'ideal' university student

This paper contributes to our understanding of the ‘ideal’ university student – a working concept that promotes a more transparent conversation about the explicit, implicit and idealistic expectations of students in higher education. Drawing on Weber’s theory of ideal types, we explore university staff and students’ conceptualisation of the ‘ideal’ student. Informed by 20 focus groups with 75 university staff and students, we focus on how the concept of ‘ideal’ student is perceived, challenged and negotiated. We argue that the ‘ideal’ student has important conceptual and practical implications for higher education, especially the importance of explicitness and the dangers of presumptions. The concept has the potential to bridge differences and manage expectations between lecturers and students, which have been stretched due to consumerism, by offering a platform where expectations of university students are elaborated. We present a working definition of ‘ideal’ university student, which, we argue, encompasses desirability, imperfection and realism

The Digital Life of Walkable Streets

Walkability has many health, environmental, and economic benefits. That is why web and mobile services have been offering ways of computing walkability scores of individual street segments. Those scores are generally computed from survey data and manual counting (of even trees). However, that is costly, owing to the high time, effort, and financial costs. To partly automate the computation of those scores, we explore the possibility of using the social media data of Flickr and Foursquare to automatically identify safe and walkable streets. We find that unsafe streets tend to be photographed during the day, while walkable streets are tagged with walkability-related keywords. These results open up practical opportunities (for, e.g., room booking services, urban route recommenders, and real-estate sites) and have theoretical implications for researchers who might resort to the use social media data to tackle previously unanswered questions in the area of walkability.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings of International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2015

A sample of radio-loud QSOs at redshift ~ 4

We obtained spectra of 60 red, starlike objects (E< 18.8) identified with FIRST radio sources, S_{1.4GHz} > 1 mJy. Eight are QSOs with redshift z> 3.6.Combined with our pilot search (Benn et al 2002), our sample of 121 candidates yields a total of 18 z > 3.6 QSOs (10 of these with z > 4.0). 8% of candidates with S_{1.4GHz} 10 mJy are QSOs with z > 3.6. The surface density of E 1mJy, z> 4 QSOs is 0.003 deg^{-2}. This is currently the only well-defined sample of radio-loud QSOs at z ~ 4 selected independently of radio spectral index. The QSOs are highly luminous in the optical (8 have M_B < -28, q_0 = 0.5, H_0 = 50 kms^{-1}Mpc^{-1}). The SEDs are as varied as those seen in optical searches for high-redshift QSOs, but the fraction of objects with weak (strongly self-absorbed) Ly alpha emission is marginally higher (3 out of 18) than for high-redshift QSOs from SDSS (5 out of 96).Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 9 pages, Latex, 5 postscript figures, 1 landscape table (postscript

Surface Brightness Profiles of Composite Images of Compact Galaxies at z~4-6 in the HUDF

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) contains a significant number of B, V and i'-band dropout objects, many of which were recently confirmed to be young star-forming galaxies at z~4-6. These galaxies are too faint individually to accurately measure their radial surface brightness profiles. Their average light profiles are potentially of great interest, since they may contain clues to the time since the onset of significant galaxy assembly. We separately co-add V, i' and z'-band HUDF images of sets of z~4,5 and 6 objects, pre-selected to have nearly identical compact sizes and the roundest shapes. From these stacked images, we are able to study the averaged radial structure of these objects at much higher signal-to-noise ratio than possible for an individual faint object. Here we explore the reliability and usefulness of a stacking technique of compact objects at z~4-6 in the HUDF. Our results are: (1) image stacking provides reliable and reproducible average surface brightness profiles; (2) the shape of the average surface brightness profiles show that even the faintest z~4-6 objects are resolved; and (3) if late-type galaxies dominate the population of galaxies at z~4-6, as previous HST studies have shown, then limits to dynamical age estimates for these galaxies from their profile shapes are comparable with the SED ages obtained from the broadband colors. We also present accurate measurements of the sky-background in the HUDF and its associated 1-sigma uncertainties.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, emulateapj; Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journa

Elucidating determinants of aerosol composition through particle-type-based receptor modeling

An aerosol time-of-flight mass spectrometer (ATOFMS) was deployed at a semi-rural site in southern Ontario to characterize the size and chemical composition of individual particles. Particle-type-based receptor modelling of these data was used to investigate the determinants of aerosol chemical composition in this region. Individual particles were classified into particle-types and positive matrix factorization (PMF) was applied to their temporal trends to separate and cross-apportion particle-types to factors. The extent of chemical processing for each factor was assessed by evaluating the internal and external mixing state of the characteristic particle-types. The nine factors identified helped to elucidate the coupled interactions of these determinants. Nitrate-laden dust was found to be the dominant type of locally emitted particles measured by ATOFMS. Several factors associated with aerosol transported to the site from intermediate local-to-regional distances were identified: the Organic factor was associated with a combustion source to the north-west; the ECOC Day factor was characterized by nearby local-to-regional carbonaceous emissions transported from the south-west during the daytime; and the Fireworks factor consisted of pyrotechnic particles from the Detroit region following holiday fireworks displays. Regional aerosol from farther emissions sources was reflected through three factors: two Biomass Burning factors and a highly chemically processed Long Range Transport factor. The Biomass Burning factors were separated by PMF due to differences in chemical processing which were in part elucidated by the passage of two thunderstorm gust fronts with different air mass histories. The remaining two factors, ECOC Night and Nitrate Background, represented the night-time partitioning of nitrate to pre-existing particles of different origins. The distinct meteorological conditions observed during this month-long study in the summer of 2007 provided a unique range of temporal variability, enabling the elucidation of the determinants of aerosol chemical composition, including source emissions, chemical processing, and transport, at the Canada-US border. This paper presents the first study to elucidate the coupled influences of these determinants on temporal variability in aerosol chemical composition using single particle-type-based receptor modelling