Children\u27s Consumption of Fruits and Vegetables: Do School Environment and Policies Affect Choices at School and Away from School?

School environment and policies may affect children\u27s ability to make healthy food choices both at and away from school. Using data from the third School Nutrition Dietary Assessment Study conducted in 2005 we estimate the effect of environment and policies on children\u27s fruit and vegetable intakes. We use an instrumental variable approach to control for the endogeneity of participation in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). On an average school day, school lunch participants consume more fruits and vegetables, including relatively more at school and less away from school compared to nonparticipants. Meal policies had little effect on NSLP participation itself. Policies that restrict high fat milks or desserts and restrict the sale of competitive foods are associated with greater fruit and/or vegetable intake at school; some policies affected consumption at home as well

Prospects for e+e- physics at Frascati between the phi and the psi

We present a detailed study, done in the framework of the INFN 2006 Roadmap, of the prospects for e+e- physics at the Frascati National Laboratories. The physics case for an e+e- collider running at high luminosity at the phi resonance energy and also reaching a maximum center of mass energy of 2.5 GeV is discussed, together with the specific aspects of a very high luminosity tau-charm factory. Subjects connected to Kaon decay physics are not discussed here, being part of another INFN Roadmap working group. The significance of the project and the impact on INFN are also discussed. All the documentation related to the activities of the working group can be found in http://www.roma1.infn.it/people/bini/roadmap.html.Comment: INFN Roadmap Report: 86 pages, 25 figures, 9 table

Interactive design of bonsai tree models

Because of their complexity, plant models used in computer graphics are commonly created with procedural methods. A difficult problem is the user control of these models: a small number of parameters is insufficient to specify plant characteristics in detail, while large numbers of parameters are tedious to manipulate and difficult to comprehend. To address this problem, we propose a method for managing parameters involved in plant model manipulation. Specifically, we introduce decomposition graphs as multiscale representations of plant structures and present interactive tools for designing trees that operate on decomposition graphs. The supported operations include browsing of the parameter space, editing of generailized parameters (scalars, functions, and branching system silhouettes), and the definition of dependencies between parameters. We illustrate our method by creating models of bonsai trees. (Résumé d'auteur