The Effect of Standing-Desks on Productivity in Obese Populations

This study was designed to understand how the use of a standing desk would affect the cognitive function and motor skills of obese subjects.https://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/exercise-science-research-proposal-posters/1067/thumbnail.jp

Classifying textual fast food restaurant reviews quantitatively using text mining and supervised machine learning algorithms

Companies continually seek to improve their business model through feedback and customer satisfaction surveys. Social media provides additional opportunities for this advanced exploration into the mind of the customer. By extracting customer feedback from social media platforms, companies may increase the sample size of their feedback and remove bias often found in questionnaires, resulting in better informed decision making. However, simply using personnel to analyze the thousands of relative social media content is financially expensive and time consuming. Thus, our study aims to establish a method to extract business intelligence from social media content by structuralizing opinionated textual data using text mining and classifying these reviews by the degree of customer satisfaction. By quantifying textual reviews, companies may perform statistical analysis to extract insight from the data as well as effectively address concerns. Specifically, we analyzed a subset of 56,000 Yelp reviews on fast food restaurants and attempt to predict a quantitative value reflecting the overall opinion of each review. We compare the use of two different predictive modeling techniques, bagged Decision Trees and Random Forest Classifiers. In order to simplify the problem, we train our model to accurately classify strongly negative and strongly positive reviews (1 and 5 stars) reviews. In addition, we identify drivers behind strongly positive or negative reviews allowing businesses to understand their strengths and weaknesses. This method provides companies an efficient and cost-effective method to process and understand customer satisfaction as it is discussed on social media

21. Self-reference Effect on Metacognition

Several studies have found that self-reference leads to improved memory (e.g., Klein & Loftus, 1986). However, the impact of self-reference on metamemory is not well understood. The purpose of this study was to test whether the use of self-reference influences students’ judgments of learning (JOLs) and what effect this has on their ability to retrieve information and their confidence during retrieval. We also examined whether effects of self-reference on memory and metamemory are moderated by need for cognition. Participants (184) were recruited from the undergraduate psychology research pool at our university. Each participant answered eighteen questions from the Need for Cognition Scale (NFC) (Cacioppo, Petty, & Kao, 1984). The control group received instruction on analogical reasoning tasks. The experimental group received instruction on self-referential learning. Participants were then presented with 60 trivia facts to study and made a JOL for each fact. Next, participants were given a cued recall test over the same trivia questions and gave confidence ratings. There was not a significant difference in the accuracy, confidence, or judgments of learning of people who received self-referential training and those who did not. However, we found a positive correlation between participants training scores in the experimental group and accuracy. This suggests that those who exhibited high levels of understanding of self-reference were more accurate than those who did not. NFC scores were positively correlated with accuracy in the experimental group and therefore acts as a moderator between self-reference and accuracy. NFC scores were positively correlated with confidence ratings in the experimental group and therefore acts as a moderator between self-reference and confidence

Uncertainty and Human Capital Decisions: Traditional Valuation Methods and Real Options Logic

As the importance of human capital increases in organizations, so does the need to develop more sophisticated financial valuation models. This paper reviews some of the major traditional financial decision making models used in costing employment mode choices. It then introduces the real options valuation approach for costing such choices. The advantage of the real options model is demonstrated to build flexibility into employment decisions

Lifetime Adherence to Physical Activity Recommendations and Fall Occurrence in Community-dwelling Older Adults: a Retrospective Cohort Study

Falling is a major health concern for community-dwelling older adults. Regular physical activity has been proposed to prevent falls. The aim of this study was to assess whether the achievement of the 2004 UK Department of Health physical activity recommendations over a lifetime had a protective effect against falling in older people. 313 community-dwelling older adults completed a questionnaire about lifetime physical activity and fall occurrence. There were significantly fewer falls in those who had led an active lifestyle compared to those who had not (χ2Yates=4.568, p=0.033), with a lower relative risk of fall occurrence for the active respondents (RR=0.671) compared to the inactive (RR=1.210). Of those who were sufficiently active in their early adulthood, the decade where there was the biggest decrease in remaining active enough was in the 60s. It is concluded that an active lifestyle may have decreased the likelihood of having a fall in older ag

Biomechanical Analysis of Streamline and the Breakout of a Butterfly Stroke

The butterfly stroke can be broken down into five main components: the initial glide phase, kicking phase, catch phase, front and back sweep phase, and recovery phase. The subject is a 20-year-old female collegiate swimmer. The purpose of this analysis is to differentiate the various stages streamline and the initiation of the butterfly stroke, and evaluate each step using kinematics.https://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/exercise-science-research-proposal-posters/1028/thumbnail.jp

Body sway during quiet standing post-stroke: effects of individual and interpersonal light touch

Lightly touching an external reference, whether a fixed point or another person, reliably improves postural stability. In hemiparetic stroke patients, however, the effect of fixed point light touch (LT) on balance is uncertain. Moreover, it is not clear whether stroke patients respond in the same manner as healthy controls to light interpersonal touch (IPT). In the present study, therefore, the effects of LT and IPT on balance were contrasted in older adults with and without chronic hemiparetic stroke. Participants stood with open eyes in comfortable, normal bipedal quiet stance and performed 4 contact conditions in random order: no contact, fingertip LT, active fingertip IPT and passive elbow IPT. Body sway varied in response to the contact condition in both groups. The hemiparetic patients, whose impairment was relatively mild, showed responsiveness to LT and IPT similar to the non-hemiparetic group in terms of proportional sway reduction in the anteroposterior but not in the mediolateral sway direction. This indicates that light touch effects are robust but cannot be generalized from healthy older adults to hemiparetic stroke patients without consideration of moderating functional constraints of the individual and the specific postural context. Future research should include hemiparetic individuals with moderate to severe postural deficits to determine possible limitations of light touch balance support in stroke

A Correlational Study of Resting Metabolic Rate

In this experiment, four young adults with various anthropometric measurements completed RMR tests. The purpose of this experiment is to find to what extent RMR increases in relation to FFM, BMI, height and weight. It is hypothesized that a higher RMR is associated with a higher FFM, and RMR will not indicate a strong correlation with the other variables.https://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/exercise-science-research-proposal-posters/1021/thumbnail.jp