What Is the Prevalence of Overweight and Obesity and its Relationship to Physical Activity in Children

The purpose of this research project is to see if there is a relationship between the amount of physical activity a child gets during the week and their BMI. Previous studies have revealed an increase in the occurrence of childhood and adolescent overweight and obesity, and associations have been identified between physical activity, sedentary behaviors, dietary patterns and students perceptions of overweight and obesity (Tremblay, 2003). This research study was a casual comparative validation study due to the secondary data that was collected by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Overweight and obesity are determined by the BMI that is calculated by using an individual\u27s height and weight and yields a reliable manner of determining body fatness(U.S. Department, 2007).. Physical activity was measured in the number of hours per week, no physical activity, one to three hours, three to five, five to ten, and greater than ten hours per week. The methodology used the Chi-square test to determine if there is an association between BMI and the categorized amount of time. The analysis of the data indicated that a relationship exist between physical activity and BMI. The results show that the time children spend hourly in physical activity on a weekly basis is associated with their BMI of underweight, healthy-weight, overweight, or obese. The focus for Healthcare Service Administrators should be on future strategies of treatment and prevention and to educate physicians, parents, and their children about the direct and indirect effects of overweight and obesity

Gravity to Galaxies — N-body Simulations for the DESI Survey

Simulations of the evolution of the universe under gravity are essential to our understanding of modern cosmology. These $N$-body simulations can contain trillions of particles and are run on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. $N$-body simulations are necessary to understand the data from large galaxy surveys that are mapping the universe in higher detail than ever before. This thesis explores the accuracy of $N$-body simulation methods and their applications towards the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Survey. Firstly, the accuracy of the gravity scheme in the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics With Inter-dependent Fine-grained Tasking (\SWIFT) simulation code is tested. These tests inform us on the limitations of running \SWIFT with high values of the opening angle parameter $\theta$. Additionally, an error in the large-scale clustering in \SWIFT simulations was found and fixed. Next, a comparison between several simulation codes is presented. In this comparison, simulations were run from identical initial conditions and the level of discrepancy caused by choice of simulation code is measured. The systematic errors caused by choice of code are compared to the statistical errors in a DESI Survey volume. We find that the matter power spectra from independent codes agree to within 1\% for $k<10h$Mpc$^{-1}$. The halo mass functions agree to within 1\% between mass limits of $10^{11.5} - 10^{14}$~$h^{-1}$M$_{\odot}$. Halo clustering measurements are within the DESI year 5 uncertainty at scales greater than $20h^{-1}$Mpc. The results justified the choice of resolution adopted in the AbacusSummit suite of simulations that are used to create mock galaxy catalogues for DESI. To connect simulated dark matter halos to observed galaxies, we use a halo occupation distribution (HOD). We have produced a novel HOD fitting procedure that simultaneously fits HOD curves describing samples with varying absolute magnitude limits. This allows us to produce mock catalogues that reproduce a target luminosity- and colour-dependent galaxy clustering correlation function, and a target galaxy luminosity function. Finally, mock galaxy catalogues are created from the AbacusSummit suite of simulations for the DESI Bright Galaxy Survey (BGS). These mock catalogues will aid with measuring systematic effects in DESI BGS data and testing the unbiased recovery of cosmological parameters

A light-cone catalogue from the Millennium-XXL simulation: improved spatial interpolation and colour distributions for the DESI BGS

The use of realistic mock galaxy catalogues is essential in the preparation of large galaxy surveys, in order to test and validate theoretical models and to assess systematics. We present an updated version of the mock catalogue constructed from the Millennium-XXL simulation, which uses a halo occupation distribution method to assign galaxies r-band magnitudes and g − r colours. We have made several modifications to the mock to improve the agreement with measurements from the SDSS and GAMA surveys. We find that cubic interpolation, which was used to build the original halo light cone, produces extreme velocities between snapshots. Using linear interpolation improves the correlation function quadrupole measurements on small scales. We also update the g − r colour distributions so that the observed colours better agree with measurements from GAMA data, particularly for faint galaxies. As an example of the science that can be done with the mock, we investigate how the luminosity function depends on environment and colour, and find good agreement with measurements from the GAMA survey. This full-sky mock catalogue is designed for the ongoing Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Bright Galaxy Survey, and is complete to a magnitude limit r = 20.2

Operation and performance of the OSSE instrument

The Oriented Scintillation Spectrometer Experiment (OSSE) on the Arthur Holly Compton Gamma Ray Observatory is described. An overview of the operation and control of the instrument is given, together with a discussion of typical observing strategies used with OSSE and basic data types produced by the instrument. Some performance measures for the instrument are presented that were obtained from pre-launch and in-flight data. These include observing statistics, continuum and line sensitivity, and detector effective area and gain stability

Critical path-based thread placement for NUMA systems

Multicore multiprocessors use a Non Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA) to improve their scalability. However, NUMA introduces performance penalties due to remote memory accesses. Without efficiently managing data layout and thread mapping to cores, scientific applications, even if they are optimized for NUMA, may suffer performance loss. In this paper, we present algorithms and a runtime system that optimize the execution of OpenMP applications on NUMA architectures. By collecting information from hardware counters, the runtime system directs thread placement and reduces performance penalties by minimizing the critical path of OpenMP parallel regions. The runtime system uses a scalable algorithm that derives placement decisions with negligible overhead. We evaluate our algorithms and runtime system with four NPB applications implemented in OpenMP. On average the algorithms achieve between 8.13% and 25.68% performance improvement compared to the default Linux thread placement scheme. The algorithms miss the optimal thread placement in only 8.9% of the cases

OSSE observations of the Crab pulsar

Preliminary results are presented of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory Oriented Scintillation Spectrometer Experiment (OSSE) observations of the Crab pulsar. The pulsar energy spectra and light curves are in general agreement with previous observations, validating the OSSE pulsar data acquisition modes and data analysis algorithms. The data suggest that the spectrum of the pulsar varies throughout the light curve. The 'interpulse' region has a slightly flatter spectrum in the approx. 60 to 250 keV region and a slightly steeper spectrum at higher energies than the two main pulses. No evidence was found for any lines in the spectra with a typical sensitivity of about 10(exp -4) photons/sq cm/s

Identification of rare-disease genes using blood transcriptome sequencing and large control cohorts.

It is estimated that 350 million individuals worldwide suffer from rare diseases, which are predominantly caused by mutation in a single gene1. The current molecular diagnostic rate is estimated at 50%, with whole-exome sequencing (WES) among the most successful approaches2-5. For patients in whom WES is uninformative, RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) has shown diagnostic utility in specific tissues and diseases6-8. This includes muscle biopsies from patients with undiagnosed rare muscle disorders6,9, and cultured fibroblasts from patients with mitochondrial disorders7. However, for many individuals, biopsies are not performed for clinical care, and tissues are difficult to access. We sought to assess the utility of RNA-seq from blood as a diagnostic tool for rare diseases of different pathophysiologies. We generated whole-blood RNA-seq from 94 individuals with undiagnosed rare diseases spanning 16 diverse disease categories. We developed a robust approach to compare data from these individuals with large sets of RNA-seq data for controls (n = 1,594 unrelated controls and n = 49 family members) and demonstrated the impacts of expression, splicing, gene and variant filtering strategies on disease gene identification. Across our cohort, we observed that RNA-seq yields a 7.5% diagnostic rate, and an additional 16.7% with improved candidate gene resolution

The DESI N-body simulation project – I. Testing the robustness of simulations for the DESI dark time survey

Analysis of large galaxy surveys requires confidence in the robustness of numerical simulation methods. The simulations are used to construct mock galaxy catalogues to validate data analysis pipelines and identify potential systematics. We compare three N-body simulation codes, ABACUS, GADGET-2, and SWIFT, to investigate the regimes in which their results agree. We run N-body simulations at three different mass resolutions, 6.25 × 108, 2.11 × 109, and 5.00 × 109 h−1 M, matching phases to reduce the noise within the comparisons. We find systematic errors in the halo clustering between different codes are smaller than the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) statistical error for s > 20 h−1 Mpc in the correlation function in redshift space. Through the resolution comparison we find that simulations run with a mass resolution of 2.1 × 109 h−1 M are sufficiently converged for systematic effects in the halo clustering to be smaller than the DESI statistical error at scales larger than 20 h−1 Mpc. These findings show that the simulations are robust for extracting cosmological information from large scales which is the key goal of the DESI survey. Comparing matter power spectra, we find the codes agree to within 1 per cent for k ≤ 10 h Mpc−1. We also run a comparison of three initial condition generation codes and find good agreement. In addition, we include a quasi-N-body code, FastPM, since we plan use it for certain DESI analyses. The impact of the halo definition and galaxy–halo relation will be presented in a follow-up study

Does Bank Institutional Setting Affect Board Effectiveness? Evidence from Cooperative and Joint-Stock Banks

Research Question/Issue Do cooperative banks suffer from board deficiencies less frequently and severely than joint-stock banks? To answer this question, we analyze banks operating in Italy during the period 2006–2012 to examine whether the governing bodies of cooperative banks are less effective in carrying out their duties than those of joint-stock banks. Deficiencies in the governing body are measured by sanctions imposed by the supervisory authority. Research Findings/Insights Findings revealed that the boards of directors of cooperative banks were sanctioned more often than board of directors of joint-stock banks. Furthermore, board turnover mediates the relationship between the cooperative status and board deficiencies. Theoretical/Academic Implications This study provides empirical evidence in support of the weakness of corporate governance in cooperative banks. Methodologically, our approach is novel in that we adopt a measure of board effectiveness/deficiency based on an independent third-party perspective (supervisory authority) that is not biased by the different objective function of the two types of banks. Practitioner/Policy Implications The findings have several policy and managerial implications. We contribute to the ongoing debate on the proposal for flexible regulation of corporate governance for cooperative banks and emphasize that policy-makers and regulators should rethink the corporate governance structures of cooperative banks. In particular, the study reveals how board turnover should be carefully monitored to reduce board deficiencies at the bank level