How access to contraception affects fertility and contraceptive use in Tunisia

To a great extent, fertility decline in Tunisia can be explained by the rise in the age at which women marry, probably because they are better educated and because social legislation has given them more rights. A second major factor in fertility decline was the increased use of contraception. The main focus of this paper is what determines the practice of contraception. The general increase in the use of contraception was the result of a strong family planning program as well as increases in education over time. The family planning program in Tunisia is considered one of the best in the world. There has been a substantial program to improve the access of the rural, poor, and least educated population groups to family planning. Although in the last 10 years contraceptive use increased the most among the least educated women, these groups are still served less well than the more privileged. The results of this paper show the central role of mortality decline and access to contraception. Health facilities, especially clinics, and good water are important in reducing mortality, which in turn increases the motivation to restrict fertility and the likelihood that people will act on that motivation. The structural model used is designed to distinguish such community variables as access to family planning from the channels through which they operate.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Adolescent Health,Reproductive Health,Early Child and Children's Health,Statistical&Mathematical Sciences

EXERCISE PROGRAM AT SEACOAST YOUTH ACADEMY

Worldwide the prevalence of child obesity is increasing, this affects many aspect of their daily lives, including their overall health and quality of life. The purpose of this study was to discuss different options to prevent and combat adolescent obesity in children at an impatient health facility. This study included children living in an inpatient health facility, The Seacoast Youth center. A majority of these patients are on atypical medications for various reasons including psychiatric illnesses. An unfortunate side effect from atypical medications is weight gain. This study used a variety of different methods including muscular endurance and cardiovascular training in order to fight weight gain in the patients staying at the Seacoast center. Overall it was found that the exercise has a positive impact on the children’s mental and physical health. The study itself was difficult in task, due to insufficient materials, but overall a success. Based on feedback from children and staff at Seacoast, they were sleeping better, less moody, and had more energy all due to the exercise provided in this study

The Impact of High Intensity Training on the Fitness of Middle School Students

Obesity and lack of physical activity (PA) pose a risk to an individual’s physical health through both short-term and long-term effects. A decline in PA occurs between 5th and 8th grades, with the greatest decreases in activity being seen between the ages of 13-19. Further, many students in that grade range are unable to reach the healthy fitness zones (HFZ) on the Fitnessgram, the assessment used in physical education classes to gauge health status. Many interventions have been tried in schools to increase fitness but few have been successful. High intensity training (HIT) has been shown to be an effective, quick, and an enjoyable fitness intervention that has not yet been used in a physical education setting to improve Fitnessgram scores. This will allow for more repetitions and time on task for the traditional physical education class while improving fitness for each student as they are pulled out to do the HIT intervention. In order to examine the effects of HIT on fitness scores, Coastal Carolina University students implemented 4-minute HIT sessions at least 2 days per week at a local middle school reaching approximately 5-8 groups of students each day. Results will be discussed

Examination and analysis of implementation choices within the material point method (MPM)

Journal ArticleThe Material Point Method (MPM) has shown itself to be a powerful tool in the simulation of large deformation problems, especially those involving complex geometries and contact where typical finite element type methods frequently fail. While these large complex problems lead to some impressive simulations and solutions, there has been a lack of basic analysis characterizing the errors present in the method, even on the simplest of problems

Improved contact algorithm for the material point method and application to stress propagation in granular material

Journal ArticleContact between deformable bodies is a difficult problem in the analysis of engineering systems. A new approach to contact has been implemented using the Material Point Method for solid mechanics, Bardenhagen, Brackbill, and Sulsky (2000a). Here two improvements to the algorithm are described. The first is to include the normal traction in the contact logic to more appropriately determine the free separation criterion. The second is to provide numerical stability by scaling the contact impulse when computational grid information is suspect, a condition which can be expected to occur occasionally as material bodies move through the computational grid. The modifications described preserve important properties of the original algorithm, namely conservation of momentum, and the use of global quantities which obviate the need for neighbor searches and result in the computational cost scaling linearly with the number of contacting bodies. The algorithm is demonstrated on several examples. Deformable body solutions compare favorably with several problems which, for rigid bodies, have analytical solutions. A much more demanding simulation of stress propagation through idealized granular material, for which high fidelity data has been obtained, is examined in detail. Excellent qualitative agreement is found for a variety of contact conditions. Important material parameters needed for more quantitative comparisons are identified

The Effects of Moderate versus Variable High Intensity Cycling on Metabolic Responses during Recovery

PURPOSE: Examine oxygen consumption (VO2), energy expenditure and respiratory exchange ratio (RER) during recovery following moderate-intensity exercise (MIE) and variable high intensity exercise (VIE) in healthy adults. METHODS: The two conditions were randomized and performed on separate days fasted. Both protocols commenced after 15-min seated rest. MIE protocol was at 40% of maximal work rate (WRmax). VIE consisted of sixteen 10-sec supramaximal sprints (120% WRmax), sixteen 20-sec high intensity bouts (60% WRmax) and low-intensity recovery (20% WRmax) interspersed throughout the exercise. Total duration and work were matched. There was 75 minutes of seated recovery. VO2 and RER were recorded during exercise and every 15-minutes of recovery. Energy expenditure (EE) and fat oxidation were calculated. Significance if p≤0.05. RESULTS: During recovery, NET VO2 decreased in both conditions from exercise to 75 minutes. There were no differences in NET VO2 between conditions during recovery. Net EE during recovery was lower in MIE than VIE. During VIE and MIE, RER was 1.02 ± 0.4 and 0.96 ± 0.06, respectively (P=0.06). During recovery, RER was lower in VIE compared to MIE at 30 and 45 minutes but was similar at 15 and 60 minutes. At the end of recovery, RER for VIE and MIE were 0.89 ± 0.08 and 0.95 ± 0.09, respectively (p = 0.08). Fat oxidation at the end of recovery was significantly greater in VIE than MIE. CONCLUSION: Although, NetVO2 and EE were similar during recovery, VIE appears to alter fuel utilization patterns during recovery towards a lower RER and greater fat oxidation

The effects of education and family planning programs on fertility in Indonesia

Numerous studies indicate that female education is a major determinant of fertility and that the estimated effects are large relative to other variables, including family planning program variables. There are, however, two serious deficiencies in the research relating educational attainment to fertility that could give rise to invalid inferences. First, many public programs, including health and family planning programs, may influence a woman’s decisions about education, and these indirect programmatic effects might be large. Second, nearly all existing studies of the impacts of education on fertility assume that a woman's educational attainment is exogenous. Education could be serving as a proxy for such unobservable determinants as ability, motivation, and parental background, as these factors most likely are important determinants of a woman's educational attainment. We use the 1993 Indonesian Family Life Survey to compare the estimated impacts of education on fertility from a simple model that assumes the exogeneity of education and an unobserved factor model that allows for endogeneity of schooling. The model imposing questionable exogeneity assumptions appears to overpredict the fertility‐reducing effects of female education, better schools, and higher government health expenditures and to underpredict the importance of family planning programs for reducing fertility and for inducing young women to remain in school

Improved velocity projection for the Material Point Method

Journal ArticleThe standard velocity projection scheme for the Material Point Method (MPM) and a typical form of the GIMP Method are examined. It is demonstrated that the fidelity of information transfer from a particle representation to the computational grid is strongly dependent on particle density and location. In addition, use of non-uniform grids and even non-uniform particle sizes are shown to introduce error