Determinants of zero-car and car-owning apartment households

While much research has explored the determinants of car ownership, there is little understanding of these factors in the context of apartment households, where off-street car parking provision is frequently stipulated by planning requirements and zero-car households are more evident. Drawing on a survey of apartment residents (n = 1316) in three Australian cities, this study aimed to understand the determinants of zero-car and car-owning apartment households. The data was analysed using binary and multinominal logistic regression, including random parameter modelling. A joint model of car ownership and off-street car parking supply was also developed to account for potential endogeneity between these two variables. The results highlight the significant association between car ownership and off-street car parking supply, alongside a range of socio-demographics, attitudes, perceptions, built environment and transport characteristics. An additional off-street car parking space, on average, was found to increase the odds of having 2+ cars, compared with zero cars, by around 10 times. The findings imply that reducing off-street residential car parking requirements can play a significant role in supporting lower car ownership levels among apartment households

Measurement of the B0-anti-B0-Oscillation Frequency with Inclusive Dilepton Events

The $B^0$-$\bar B^0$ oscillation frequency has been measured with a sample of 23 million \B\bar B pairs collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric B Factory at SLAC. In this sample, we select events in which both B mesons decay semileptonically and use the charge of the leptons to identify the flavor of each B meson. A simultaneous fit to the decay time difference distributions for opposite- and same-sign dilepton events gives $\Delta m_d = 0.493 \pm 0.012{(stat)}\pm 0.009{(syst)}$ ps$^{-1}$.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Physical Review Letter

Constraints on anomalous QGC's in e+e−e^{+}e^{-} interactions from 183 to 209 GeV

The acoplanar photon pairs produced in the reaction e(+) e(-) - → vvyy are analysed in the 700 pb(-1) of data collected by the ALEPH detector at centre-of-mass energies between 183 and 209 GeV. No deviation from the Standard Model predictions is seen in any of the distributions examined. The resulting 95% C.L. limits set on anomalous QGCs, a(0)(Z), a(c)(Z), a(0)(W) and a(c)(W), are -0.012 lt a(0)(Z)/Lambda(2) lt +0.019 GeV-2, -0.041 lt a(c)(Z)/Lambda(2) lt +0.044 GeV-2, -0.060 lt a(0)(W)/Lambda(2) lt +0.055 GeV-2, -0.099 lt a(c)(W)/Lambda(2) lt +0.093 GeV-2, where Lambda is the energy scale of the new physics responsible for the anomalous couplings

Comprehensive analysis of epigenetic clocks reveals associations between disproportionate biological ageing and hippocampal volume

The concept of age acceleration, the difference between biological age and chronological age, is of growing interest, particularly with respect to age-related disorders, such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Whilst studies have reported associations with AD risk and related phenotypes, there remains a lack of consensus on these associations. Here we aimed to comprehensively investigate the relationship between five recognised measures of age acceleration, based on DNA methylation patterns (DNAm age), and cross-sectional and longitudinal cognition and AD-related neuroimaging phenotypes (volumetric MRI and Amyloid-β PET) in the Australian Imaging, Biomarkers and Lifestyle (AIBL) and the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). Significant associations were observed between age acceleration using the Hannum epigenetic clock and cross-sectional hippocampal volume in AIBL and replicated in ADNI. In AIBL, several other findings were observed cross-sectionally, including a significant association between hippocampal volume and the Hannum and Phenoage epigenetic clocks. Further, significant associations were also observed between hippocampal volume and the Zhang and Phenoage epigenetic clocks within Amyloid-β positive individuals. However, these were not validated within the ADNI cohort. No associations between age acceleration and other Alzheimer’s disease-related phenotypes, including measures of cognition or brain Amyloid-β burden, were observed, and there was no association with longitudinal change in any phenotype. This study presents a link between age acceleration, as determined using DNA methylation, and hippocampal volume that was statistically significant across two highly characterised cohorts. The results presented in this study contribute to a growing literature that supports the role of epigenetic modifications in ageing and AD-related phenotypes

Gender Classification in Human Gait Using Support Vector Machine

Abstract. We describe an automated system that classifies gender by utilising a set of human gait data. The gender classification system consists of three stages: i) detection and extraction of the moving human body and its contour from im-age sequences; ii) extraction of human gait signature by the joint angles and body points; and iii) motion analysis and feature extraction for classifying gen-der in the gait patterns. A sequential set of 2D stick figures is used to represent the gait signature that is primitive data for the feature generation based on mo-tion parameters. Then, an SVM classifier is used to classify gender in the gait patterns. In experiments, higher gender classification performances, which are 96 % for 100 subjects, have been achieved on a considerably larger database.