AN INTEGRATED METHOD TO OBTAIN THREE-DIMENSIONAL COORDINATES USING PANNING AND TILTING VIDEO CAMERAS

Kinematic measurements of sports performances have generally been gathered using stationary cameras. Many activities, however, cover dimensions that are much larger than the athlete, resulting in measures that are less accurate than desired. One solution is to increase the resolution of the acquisition equipment. Hardware providing sufficient resolution, if possible to find, may be prohibitively expensive. Another solution is to use rotating cameras to follow the athlete’s movements. Until now, this procedure demanded time-consuming calibrations and expensive, specialized equipment. An efficient, accurate, and inexpensive method was developed to quantify threedimensional motion from rotating video cameras. The procedure uses two 20,000 count/revolution optical encoders embedded in specially machined tripod heads to sense the angular positions of the cameras. One encoder is aligned vertically to measure pan positions, while the other is aligned horizontally to measure tilt. The pan and tilt angles are printed on each video image by an interface unit. The images are then recorded on videotape and imported into a computer using a commercial frame grabber. Locations on the body may be identified manually or automatically if markers are placed on the athlete. As the points are tracked, the pan and tilt angles are decoded and stored with the digitized data. Custom software modules use these data to compute the 3D coordinates via ray-tracing techniques. Calibration, conducted before or after the performance, requires three to nine vertical rods of known length placed near the volume of interest. No on-site measurements or background markers are needed. Furthermore, calibration does not restrict camera positioning; the locations depend upon the focal length of the camera lenses, the resolution of the encoders, the shape of the movement volume, and the speed of the athlete. Dynamic accuracy was measured by moving a 0.900 m long rod through a 2 m x 4 m x 15 m volume while sampling from two 60 Hz video cameras. Nine hundred images were analyzed. The endpoints of the rod were digitized and its length computed for each video image. The mean length of the rod was 0.891 m and the Root Mean Square Error was 0.005 m. These measures compared better than other reported methods. Applications have ranged from multi-stride running in the laboratory or on a track, long jumping, high jumping, gymnastics, pole vaulting, and ski jumping

Monitorial citizens or civic omnivores? Repertoires of civic participation among university students

In present-day societies, the extent to which young people still participate in civic life is an important matter of concern. The claim of a generational "decline" in civic engagement has been contested, and interchanged with the notion of a "replacement" of traditional engagement by new types of participation, and the emergence of the "monitorial citizen" who participates in more individualized ways. Concurrently, this study explored the assumption of a "pluralization" of involvement, advancing a new concept: the "civic omnivore," characterized by an expanded civic repertoire. Drawing data from a sample of 1,493 Belgian and Dutch university students, we identify five repertoires of participation such as, disengaged students, classical volunteers, humanitarian citizens, monitorial citizens, and civic omnivores. Our findings support the pluralization thesis, by showing that young citizens are not exclusively engaged in new monitorial ways, yet also expand their civic repertoire by combining traditional and new forms in more complex ways

Civil Liberties and Volunteering in Six Former Soviet Union Countries

To contribute to the debate as to whether volunteering is an outcome of democratization rather than a driver of it, we analyze how divergent democratization pathways in six countries of the former Soviet Union have led to varied levels of volunteering. Using data from the European Values Study, we find that Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—which followed a Europeanization path—have high and increasing levels of civil liberties and volunteering. In Russia and Belarus, following a pre-emption path, civil liberties have remained low and volunteering has declined. Surprisingly, despite the Orange Revolution and increased civil liberties, volunteering rates in Ukraine have also declined. The case of Ukraine indicates that the freedom to participate is not always taken up by citizens. Our findings suggest it is not volunteering that brings civil liberties, but rather that increased civil liberties lead to higher levels of volunteerin

Social and cultural origins of motivations to volunteer a comparison of university students in six countries

Although participation in volunteering and motivations to volunteer (MTV) have received substantial attention on the national level, particularly in the US, few studies have compared and explained these issues across cultural and political contexts. This study compares how two theoretical perspectives, social origins theory and signalling theory, explain variations in MTV across different countries. The study analyses responses from a sample of 5794 students from six countries representing distinct institutional contexts. The findings provide strong support for signalling theory but less so for social origins theory. The article concludes that volunteering is a personal decision and thus is influenced more at the individual level but is also impacted to some degree by macro-level societal forces

Religiousness and preoperative anxiety: a correlational study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Major life changes are among factors that cause anxiety, and one of these changes is surgery. Emotional reactions to surgery have specific effects on the intensity and velocity as well as the process of physical disease. In addition, they can cause delay in patients recovery. This study is aimed at determining the relationship between religious beliefs and preoperative anxiety.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This survey is a correlational study to assess the relationship between religious beliefs and preoperative anxiety of patients undergoing abdominal, orthopaedic, and gynaecologic surgery in educational hospitals. We used the convenience sampling method. The data collection instruments included a questionnaire containing the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), and another questionnaire formulated by the researcher with queries on religious beliefs and demographic characteristics as well as disease-related information. Analysis of the data was carried out with SPSS software using descriptive and inferential statistics. Results were arranged in three tables.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The findings showed that almost all the subjects had high level of religiosity and moderate level of anxiety. In addition, there was an inverse relationship between religiosity and intensity of anxiety, though this was not statistically significant.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The results of this study can be used as evidence for presenting religious counselling and spiritual interventions for individuals undergoing stress. Finally, based on the results of this study, the researcher suggested some recommendations for applying results and conducting further research.</p

Compensatory Growth of the Sandbar Shark in the Western North Atlantic Including the Gulf of Mexico

The number of Sandbar Sharks Carcharhinus plumbeus in the western North Atlantic Ocean has experienced a drastic decline since the early 1980s, reaching a minimum during the early 1990s. Catch rates in the early 1990s were a mere 25% of those during the 1980s. According to several fishery-independent surveys, the low point in Sandbar Shark abundance followed a period of high exploitation. Growth models fit to age-length data collected from 1980 to 1983 and from 2001 to 2004 were compared to investigate potential changes in parameter estimates that might reveal compensatory responses in the Sandbar Shark population. Statistical differences were found between the model parameters for the two time periods, but the differences in growth rates were minimal. The parameters from the three-parameter von Bertalanffy growth model for female sharks during the 1980-1983 and 2000-2004 time periods were as follows: L = 188.4 and 178.3cm FL; k = 0.084 and 0.106; and t(0) = -4.097 and -3.41. For males the growth parameters were as follows: L = 164.63 and 173.66cm; k = 0.11 and 0.11; and t(0) = -3.62 and -3.33. The estimated age at 50% maturity for female Sandbar Sharks changed from 15years to 12.49years between the two time periods

Fertility, Living Arrangements, Care and Mobility

There are four main interconnecting themes around which the contributions in this book are based. This introductory chapter aims to establish the broad context for the chapters that follow by discussing each of the themes. It does so by setting these themes within the overarching demographic challenge of the twenty-first century – demographic ageing. Each chapter is introduced in the context of the specific theme to which it primarily relates and there is a summary of the data sets used by the contributors to illustrate the wide range of cross-sectional and longitudinal data analysed

Managing maize under pest species competition: is Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) maize the solution?

Transgenic crops that contain Cry genes from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) have been adopted by farmers over the last 17 years. Unlike traditional broad spectrum chemical insecticides, Bt's toxicity spectrum is relatively narrow and selective, which may indirectly benefit secondary insects that may become important pests. The economic damage caused by the rise of secondary pests could offset some or all of the benefits associated with the use of Bt varieties. We develop a bioeconomic model to analyze the interactions between primary and secondary insect populations and the impact of different management options on insecticide use and economic impact over time. Results indicate that some of the benefits associated with the adoption of genetically engineered insect resistant crops may be eroded when taking into account ecological dynamics. It is suggested that secondary pests could easily become key insect pests requiring additional measures - such as insecticide applications or stacked traits – to keep their populations under the economic threshold

A Longitudinal Analysis of Volunteerism Activities for Individuals Educated in Public and Private Schools

Previous studies offer evidence that U.S. public and private high schools differentially influence volunteerism in adolescence. However, these studies are typically cross-sectional and only consider whether the individual volunteered or not. We address patterns of volunteering from adolescence into adulthood and the kind of volunteering activity in which individuals engage. We also theorize that distinctive civic values within public and private schools together with their respective organizational ties to other civic organizations channel students into particular volunteering activities. Relying on a longitudinal, nationally-representative sample of U.S. adolescents, we track volunteering from adolescence into young adulthood and identify the types of volunteering activities in which respondents engage. Results demonstrate that the likelihood of volunteering changes through the life course, and students from different schooling backgrounds systematically sort into specific volunteering activities as our theories predict

The Frequency of Pathogenic Variation in the All of Us Cohort Reveals Ancestry-Driven Disparities

Disparities in data underlying clinical genomic interpretation is an acknowledged problem, but there is a paucity of data demonstrating it. The All of Us Research Program is collecting data including whole-genome sequences, health records, and surveys for at least a million participants with diverse ancestry and access to healthcare, representing one of the largest biomedical research repositories of its kind. Here, we examine pathogenic and likely pathogenic variants that were identified in the All of Us cohort. The European ancestry subgroup showed the highest overall rate of pathogenic variation, with 2.26% of participants having a pathogenic variant. Other ancestry groups had lower rates of pathogenic variation, including 1.62% for the African ancestry group and 1.32% in the Latino/Admixed American ancestry group. Pathogenic variants were most frequently observed in genes related to Breast/Ovarian Cancer or Hypercholesterolemia. Variant frequencies in many genes were consistent with the data from the public gnomAD database, with some notable exceptions resolved using gnomAD subsets. Differences in pathogenic variant frequency observed between ancestral groups generally indicate biases of ascertainment of knowledge about those variants, but some deviations may be indicative of differences in disease prevalence. This work will allow targeted precision medicine efforts at revealed disparities