2,983 research outputs found
The Impact of State Physical Education Requirements on Youth Physical Activity and Overweight
To combat childhood overweight, which has risen dramatically in the past three decades, many medical and public health organizations have called for students to spend more time in physical education (PE) classes. This paper is the first to exploit state PE requirements as quasi-natural experiments in order to estimate the causal impact of PE on student activity and weight. We study nationwide data from the YRBSS for 1999, 2001, and 2003 merged with data on state minimum PE requirements from the 1994 and 2000 School Health Policies and Programs Study and the 2001 Shape of the Nation Report. We find that certain state regulations are effective in raising the number of minutes during which students are active in PE. Our results also indicate that additional PE time raises the number of days per week that students report having exercised or engaged in strength-building activities, but lowers the number of days in which students report light physical activity. PE time has no detectable impact on youth BMI or the probability that a student is overweight. We conclude that while raising PE requirements may make students more active by some (but not all) measures, there is not yet the scientific base to declare raising PE requirements an anti-obesity initiative.
Use of remote sensing in agriculture
Remote sensing studies in Virginia and Chesapeake Bay areas to investigate soil and plant conditions via remote sensing technology are reported ant the results given. Remote sensing techniques and interactions are also discussed. Specific studies on the effects of soil moisture and organic matter on energy reflection of extensively occurring Sassafras soils are discussed. Greenhouse and field studies investigating the effects of chlorophyll content of Irish potatoes on infrared reflection are presented. Selected ground truth and environmental monitoring data are shown in summary form. Practical demonstrations of remote sensing technology in agriculture are depicted and future use areas are delineated
Absence of kinetic effects in reaction-diffusion processes in scale-free networks
We show that the chemical reactions of the model systems of A+A->0 and A+B->0
when performed on scale-free networks exhibit drastically different behavior as
compared to the same reactions in normal spaces. The exponents characterizing
the density evolution as a function of time are considerably higher than 1,
implying that both reactions occur at a much faster rate. This is due to the
fact that the discerning effects of the generation of a depletion zone (A+A)
and the segregation of the reactants (A+B) do not occur at all as in normal
spaces. Instead we observe the formation of clusters of A (A+A reaction) and of
mixed A and B (A+B reaction) around the hubs of the network. Only at the limit
of very sparse networks is the usual behavior recovered.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, to be published in Physical Review Letter
Infinitely Many Stochastically Stable Attractors
Let f be a diffeomorphism of a compact finite dimensional boundaryless
manifold M exhibiting infinitely many coexisting attractors. Assume that each
attractor supports a stochastically stable probability measure and that the
union of the basins of attraction of each attractor covers Lebesgue almost all
points of M. We prove that the time averages of almost all orbits under random
perturbations are given by a finite number of probability measures. Moreover
these probability measures are close to the probability measures supported by
the attractors when the perturbations are close to the original map f.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figure
Trends and Issues in Educational Psychology
The review of issues in educational psychology looks at areas of innovation as well as areas of stagnation. The authors challenge researchers to find meaningful information which has utility in the development and improvement of teaching
Homoclinic Bifurcations for the Henon Map
Chaotic dynamics can be effectively studied by continuation from an
anti-integrable limit. We use this limit to assign global symbols to orbits and
use continuation from the limit to study their bifurcations. We find a bound on
the parameter range for which the Henon map exhibits a complete binary
horseshoe as well as a subshift of finite type. We classify homoclinic
bifurcations, and study those for the area preserving case in detail. Simple
forcing relations between homoclinic orbits are established. We show that a
symmetry of the map gives rise to constraints on certain sequences of
homoclinic bifurcations. Our numerical studies also identify the bifurcations
that bound intervals on which the topological entropy is apparently constant.Comment: To appear in PhysicaD: 43 Pages, 14 figure
Working Towards a Blood-Derived Gene Expression Biomarker Specific for Alzheimer's Disease
BACKGROUND:
The typical approach to identify blood-derived gene expression signatures as a biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have relied on training classification models using AD and healthy controls only. This may inadvertently result in the identification of markers for general illness rather than being disease-specific.
OBJECTIVE:
Investigate whether incorporating additional related disorders in the classification model development process can lead to the discovery of an AD-specific gene expression signature.
METHODS:
Two types of XGBoost classification models were developed. The first used 160 AD and 127 healthy controls and the second used the same 160 AD with 6,318 upsampled mixed controls consisting of Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, coronary artery disease, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and cognitively healthy subjects. Both classification models were evaluated in an independent cohort consisting of 127 AD and 687 mixed controls.
RESULTS:
The AD versus healthy control models resulted in an average 48.7% sensitivity (95% CI = 34.7–64.6), 41.9% specificity (95% CI = 26.8–54.3), 13.6% PPV (95% CI = 9.9–18.5), and 81.1% NPV (95% CI = 73.3–87.7). In contrast, the mixed control models resulted in an average of 40.8% sensitivity (95% CI = 27.5–52.0), 95.3% specificity (95% CI = 93.3–97.1), 61.4% PPV (95% CI = 53.8–69.6), and 89.7% NPV (95% CI = 87.8–91.4).
CONCLUSIONS:
This early work demonstrates the value of incorporating additional related disorders into the classification model developmental process, which can result in models with improved ability to distinguish AD from a heterogeneous aging population. However, further improvement to the sensitivity of the test is still required
On stochastic sea of the standard map
Consider a generic one-parameter unfolding of a homoclinic tangency of an
area preserving surface diffeomorphism. We show that for many parameters
(residual subset in an open set approaching the critical value) the
corresponding diffeomorphism has a transitive invariant set of full
Hausdorff dimension. The set is a topological limit of hyperbolic sets
and is accumulated by elliptic islands.
As an application we prove that stochastic sea of the standard map has full
Hausdorff dimension for sufficiently large topologically generic parameters.Comment: 36 pages, 5 figure
The Lagrange and Markov spectra from the dynamical point of view
This text grew out of my lecture notes for a 4-hours minicourse delivered on
October 17 \& 19, 2016 during the research school "Applications of Ergodic
Theory in Number Theory" -- an activity related to the Jean-Molet Chair project
of Mariusz Lema\'nczyk and S\'ebastien Ferenczi -- realized at CIRM, Marseille,
France. The subject of this text is the same of my minicourse, namely, the
structure of the so-called Lagrange and Markov spectra (with an special
emphasis on a recent theorem of C. G. Moreira).Comment: 27 pages, 6 figures. Survey articl
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