Development and Usability Assessment of a Connected Resistance Exercise Band Application for Strength-Monitoring

Resistance exercise bands are a core component of any physical activity strengthening program. Strength training can mitigate the development of sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass or strength and function with aging. Yet, the adherence of such behavioral exercise strategies in a home-based setting are fraught with issues of monitoring and compliance. Our group developed a Bluetooth-enabled resistance exercise band capable of transmitting data to an open-source platform. In this work, we developed an application to capture this information in real-time, and conducted three usability studies in two mixed-aged groups of participants (n=6 each) and a group of older adults with obesity participating in a weight-loss intervention (n=20). The system was favorable, acceptable and provided iterative information that could assist in future deployment on ubiquitous platforms. Our formative work provides the foundation to deliver home-based monitoring interventions in a high-risk, older adult population

Fabrication of Mullite Body Using Superplastic Transient Phase

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65799/1/j.1151-2916.1992.tb05542.x.pd

CHAMPION: Chalmers Hierarchical Atomic, Molecular, Polymeric & Ionic Analysis Toolkit

We present CHAMPION: a software developed to automatically detect time-dependent bonds between atoms based on their dynamics, classify the local graph topology around them, and analyze the physicochemical properties of these topologies by statistical physics. In stark contrast to methodologies where bonds are detected based on static conditions such as cut-off distances, CHAMPION considers pairs of atoms to be bound only if they move together and act as a bound pair over time. Furthermore, the time-dependent global bond graph is possible to split into dynamically shifting connected components or subgraphs around a certain chemical motif and thereby allow the physicochemical properties of each such topology to be analyzed by statistical physics. Applicable to condensed matter and liquids in general, and electrolytes in particular, this allows both quantitative and qualitative descriptions of local structure, as well as dynamical processes such as speciation and diffusion. We present here a detailed overview of CHAMPION, including its underlying methodology, implementation and capabilities.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

What Broke First? Characterizing Sources of Structural Change Prior to the Great Recession

This paper identifies and characterizes episodes of structural change in the 27 years that preceded the Great Recession. This is done by performing Bai-Perron (2003a, 2003b) tests on 61,843 time series that span 34 countries, which collectively accounted for 81% of Gross World Product in 2013. Three major stylized facts are established. First, the rate of structural change increased throughout the early 1990s, stabilized in 2003, and then decreased slowly until 2007. Second, there were three large spikes in the pace of structural change after the 1990-1991 recession: 1993-1994, 2001-2003, and 2007-2009. The latter two overlap with recessions in the U.S. and many other major economies, but the first does not. This spike is associated with structural change in residential investment, consumption, exchange rates, and real estate. Across countries, the degree of structural change is highest in China during this episode. Third, the periods 1993-1994 and 1997-2000 contain heavy structural change in real estate and lending; however, the rate of structural change in house price and construction series was more pronounced in and after 2001

Career Resourcing and the Process of Professional Emergence

We theorize a career resourcing process that explains how individuals can create a new profession. Using historical archives, we trace the emergence of health services research as a new research profession through the career actions of early practitioners. We find that career resourcing can lead to the institutionalization of a new profession by: 1) a process of accretion, where people pursuing fulfilling careers generate resources that contribute to institutionalization, or 2) institutional work to deliberately build the professional community and infrastructure. We contribute to research on institutional change by specifying career actions that can lead to the institutionalization of a new profession, and by developing theory that accounts for the motivations and the means of individuals to act in ways that result in the institutionalization of a new profession

Research strategies for organizational history:a dialogue between historical theory and organization theory

If history matters for organization theory, then we need greater reflexivity regarding the epistemological problem of representing the past; otherwise, history might be seen as merely a repository of ready-made data. To facilitate this reflexivity, we set out three epistemological dualisms derived from historical theory to explain the relationship between history and organization theory: (1) in the dualism of explanation, historians are preoccupied with narrative construction, whereas organization theorists subordinate narrative to analysis; (2) in the dualism of evidence, historians use verifiable documentary sources, whereas organization theorists prefer constructed data; and (3) in the dualism of temporality, historians construct their own periodization, whereas organization theorists treat time as constant for chronology. These three dualisms underpin our explication of four alternative research strategies for organizational history: corporate history, consisting of a holistic, objectivist narrative of a corporate entity; analytically structured history, narrating theoretically conceptualized structures and events; serial history, using replicable techniques to analyze repeatable facts; and ethnographic history, reading documentary sources "against the grain." Ultimately, we argue that our epistemological dualisms will enable organization theorists to justify their theoretical stance in relation to a range of strategies in organizational history, including narratives constructed from documentary sources found in organizational archives. Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved