Impact of Local Wellness Policies on District Level Physical Activities

Local wellness policies (LWPs) are state required documents that outline school districts’ goals for improving the physical activity of their students. In Texas, most districts use a template for developing their LWP, which has seven prespecified goals that districts may include or further expand upon to include additional goals. PURPOSE: Determine if physical activity components of districts’ LWPs were related to practices within the district. METHODS: LWPs published by public school districts in Texas were collected from district websites, analyzed for content related to physical activity, and assessed to determine if the district text matched the template. Then, responses were compared to the respective districts’ responses to the Texas\u27 Student Health Policies and Practices Surveys (SHPPS) for the years 2018-2021. The SHPPS data was requested through the Texas Education Agency, and district IDs were used to match the responses to their LWP. On the SHPPS, districts self-report: whether the Student Health Advisory Committee (SHAC) presented policy recommendations (yes/no), whether the district implemented changes recommended by the SHAC (yes/no), the content of changes (e.g., having off-campus physical activity programs), whether the wellness policy addressed specific factors influencing physical activity (e.g., increased opportunities for students to be physically active), and if the district notified parents about their child\u27s physical fitness assessment results (yes/no). Bivariate analysis using logistic [Odds Ratio (OR) and 95% Confidence Intervals (95% CI)] and linear regression [Unstandardized Beta (B) and 95% CI] models were used to determine relationships between goals included in LWPs and self-reported practices. RESULTS: Overall, 431 districts had LWPs that could be matched with their SHPPS. LWPs which had additional guidelines (reported as Other_PA_Goals) were marginally more likely to receive feedback from the district’s SHAC (2019-2020 [OR: 1.183, 95% CI: (0.988, 1.416), p= .067], 2020-2021 [OR: 1.19, CI: (0.992, 1.427), p=.061]) and implement more changes recommended by their SHAC during the years of 2018-2019 [OR: 1.19, 95% CI: (0.992, 1.427), p=.061]. Districts with LWPs that included the specific goal to “make physical activity enjoyable for students and staff” were also marginally more likely to notify parents that they could request their children’s physical assessment results in all three years 2018-2019 [OR: 1.447, 95% CI: (0.939, 2.229), p=.094], 2019-2020 [OR: 1.458, 95% CI: (0.967, 2.198), p= .072], 2020-2021 [OR: 1.498, 95% CI (0.976, 2.299), p= .064]). CONCLUSION: Districts with LWPs that further expanded on the template presented by the state or had used alternate text compared to the template, were more likely to report positive physical activity practices in their district, including having the SHAC make policy recommendations and the districts implementing changes recommended by the SHAC. These findings may suggest that SHACs play an important role in the development and implementation of a districts’ LWP

Networking in Weak Institutions: When Is It Good for Small Business Investment? The Case of Vietnam

This study investigates the influence of business-specific, bank-specific, and political-specific networks on small firm investments in Vietnam. Also, we aim to explain how these social networks substitute the weaknesses of local institutions. Examining a set of more than 9,800 firm-year observations of small businesses in Vietnam from 2005-2015, we find that social ties with bank officials can boost firm investments; social ties with government officials can help firms overcome institutional voids; whereas social ties with businesspeople appear trivial to investment decisions. More importantly, we propose that networking, especially networks built upon connections with government officials can substitute local institutions by addressing the weaknesses in (1) inefficient legal enforcement, (2) corruption, (3) bureaucratic compliance, and (4) non-transparent governance system

Effect of phosphorylation on the interaction of calcium with leucine‐rich amelogenin peptide

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90185/1/j.1600-0722.2011.00900.x.pd

Growing old in England: economic and social issues

This paper examines the economic and social impact of changes in the duration of working life for the 80 per cent of older adults living in urban England. While some people are experiencing extended retirement because of moving out of paid work in their fifties, a growing minority of those beyond the state retirement age continue in paid employment. This paper highlights the considerable challenges for urban policy makers in addressing the economic and social inclusion of all older adults

Telepresence and the Role of the Senses

The telepresence experience can be evoked in a number of ways. A well-known example is a player of videogames who reports about a telepresence experience, a subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when physically situated in another place. In this paper we set the phenomenon of telepresence into a theoretical framework. As people react subjectively to stimuli from telepresence, empirical studies can give more evidence about the phenomenon. Thus, our contribution is to bridge the theoretical with the empirical. We discuss theories of perception with an emphasis on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gibson, the role of the senses and the Spinozian belief procedure. The aim is to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon. A telepresence-study that included the affordance concept is used to empirically study how players report sense-reactions to virtual sightseeing in two cities. We investigate and explore the interplay of the philosophical and the empirical. The findings indicate that it is not only the visual sense that plays a role in this experience, but all senses

Global Law as Intercontextuality and as Interlegality

Since the 1990s the effects of globalization on law and legal developments has been a central topic of scholarly debate. To date, the debate is however marked by three substantial deficiencies which this chapter seeks to remedy through a reconceptualization of global law as a law of inter-contextuality expressed through inter-legality and materialized through a particular body of legal norms which can be characterized as connectivity norms. The first deficiency is a historical and empirical one. Both critics as well as advocates of ‘non-state law’ share the assumption that ‘law beyond the state’ and related legal norms have gained in centrality when compared with previous historical times. While global law, including both public and private global governance law as well as regional occurrences such as EU law, has undergone profound transformations since the structural transformations which followed the de-colonialization processes of the mid-twentieth century, we do not have more global law relatively to other types of law today than in previous historical times. The second deficiency is a methodological one. The vast majority of scholarship on global law is either of an analytical nature, drawing on insights from philosophy, or empirically observing the existence of global law and the degree of compliance with global legal norms at a given moment in time. While both approaches bring something to the table they remain static approaches incapable of explaining and evaluating the transformation of global law over time. The third deficiency is a conceptual-theoretical one. In most instances, global law is understood as a unitary law producing singular legal norms with a planetary reach, or, alternatively, a radical pluralist perspective is adopted dismissing the existence of singular global norms. Both of these approaches however misapprehend the structural characteristics, function and societal effects of global law. Instead a third positon between unitary and radical pluralist perspectives can be adopted through an understanding of global law and its related legal norms as a de-centred kind of inter-contextual law characterised by inter-legality

Sequencing and Analysis of the Mediterranean Amphioxus (Branchiostoma lanceolatum) Transcriptome

BACKGROUND: The basally divergent phylogenetic position of amphioxus (Cephalochordata), as well as its conserved morphology, development and genetics, make it the best proxy for the chordate ancestor. Particularly, studies using the amphioxus model help our understanding of vertebrate evolution and development. Thus, interest for the amphioxus model led to the characterization of both the transcriptome and complete genome sequence of the American species, Branchiostoma floridae. However, recent technical improvements allowing induction of spawning in the laboratory during the breeding season on a daily basis with the Mediterranean species Branchiostoma lanceolatum have encouraged European Evo-Devo researchers to adopt this species as a model even though no genomic or transcriptomic data have been available. To fill this need we used the pyrosequencing method to characterize the B. lanceolatum transcriptome and then compared our results with the published transcriptome of B. floridae. RESULTS: Starting with total RNA from nine different developmental stages of B. lanceolatum, a normalized cDNA library was constructed and sequenced on Roche GS FLX (Titanium mode). Around 1.4 million of reads were produced and assembled into 70,530 contigs (average length of 490 bp). Overall 37% of the assembled sequences were annotated by BlastX and their Gene Ontology terms were determined. These results were then compared to genomic and transcriptomic data of B. floridae to assess similarities and specificities of each species. CONCLUSION: We obtained a high-quality amphioxus (B. lanceolatum) reference transcriptome using a high throughput sequencing approach. We found that 83% of the predicted genes in the B. floridae complete genome sequence are also found in the B. lanceolatum transcriptome, while only 41% were found in the B. floridae transcriptome obtained with traditional Sanger based sequencing. Therefore, given the high degree of sequence conservation between different amphioxus species, this set of ESTs may now be used as the reference transcriptome for the Branchiostoma genus

The geo-constitution: Understanding the intersection of geography and political institutions

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record.This paper draws on existing work in the discipline of human geography and cognate fields in order to develop the concept of the ‘geo-constitution’. This concept aims to: (1) highlight the importance of intersections between geography and political institutions in the constitution of government; (2) consider the path-dependent development of political institutions and their impact on statecraft and citizenship; (3) explore the implications of this for political reform. The paper provides an overview of current thinking in political geography and applies the concept of the geo-constitution to the example of devolution and localism in the United Kingdom

Validation of a social cohesion theoretical framework: a multiple group SEM strategy

Social cohesion dates back to the end of the nineteenth century. Back then, society experienced epochal transformations, as are also happening nowadays. Whenever there are epochal changes, a social order (cohesion) matter arises. The paper provides a conceptual scheme of social cohesion identifying its constituent dimensions subdivided by three spheres (macro, meso, micro) and two perspectives (objective and subjective). The overarching aim is to test the validity of the operationalization of the social cohesion model provided. Firstly, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis introducing an approach implemented in Mplus named exploratory structural equation modeling that shows several useful characteristics. Afterward, through a structural equation modeling approach, we performed several confirmatory factor analyses adopting a multiple group SEM strategy in order to cross-validate the social cohesion model