Sports Injury Prevention in Danbury, CT

Sports Injuries, especially overuse injuries, cause a significant amount of morbidity and public health cost, especially for young athletes. Importantly, many of these injuries can be prevented with proper training and some novel approaches to warm-up and training. To address this concern, I worked with Orthopedic Specialists of CT and the athletic trainers at Danbury High School to come up with some educational materials for patients on effective ways to prevent sports medicine injuries.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1353/thumbnail.jp

Book review: smartphones as locative media

How do location-based services impact social life and reconfigure interpretations of physical spaces? In Smartphones as Locative Media, the author maintains that physical spaces are differentially experienced by people if digital information is accessed through locative media, such as the smartphone, writes Vyacheslav Polonski. This information acts not only as an exterior informational layer that augments the space, but also as a technology that mediates mobility, altering their environmental awareness and sense of place

The next decade of data science: rethinking key challenges faced by big data researchers

The vast availability of digital traces of unprecedented form and scale has led many to believe that we are entering a new data revolution. Will these new data sources and tools allow us to improve business processes in transformative ways? Vyacheslav Polonski argues that the more data is available, the more theory is needed to know what to look for and how to interpret what we have found

How can businesses measure social media influence to createvalue?

Only a carefully seeded stimulus can generate new demand for a product or service, argues Vyacheslav Polonski

What heavy quanta bounds could be inferred from a Higgs discovery?

The Higgs couplings can receive non-decoupling corrections due to heavy quanta, and deviations from the SM can be used to test its presence. The possible Higgs signal recently reported at LEP, with mh=115 GeV, severely constrains the presence of heavy quanta, such as a heavy fourth family. At Tevatron, the Higgs production by gluon fusion, followed by the decay h -> WW*, can also be used to probe the existence of heavy colored particles, including additional families, chiral sextet and octet quarks. Within the MSSM, we also find that gluon fusion is a sensitive probe for the squark spectrum.Comment: 12 pages, 3 tables, 1 figure. Accepted in Mod. Phys. Lett. A (2001

Willingness To Donate Blood During the Summer

Introduction. Each year donation rates fall in the summer months straining blood banks’ capacities to meet local demands. In hopes of identifying factors to increase summer donations, our study investigated donor reported barriers which influence summer donations habits.Methods. An anonymous 16 question survey investigating various donation factors was administered across multiple American Red Cross (ARC) donation centers in Vermont. Questions addressed donor demographics, frequency of blood donation, preference in appointment making modalities including smartphone app use, summer travel habits, willingness to donate during vacation, and factors that deter donors from donating on vacation.Results. A total of 292 surveys were received. Survey respondents across multiple demographic groups cited similar barriers to summer donation, namely “Too busy” (27.5 %) and “Traveling is a time for me to relax.” (30.6 %). Of the respondents who travel in the summer, very few reported donating while traveling (3.4 %). Summer donation rates between summertime travelers (36.5 %) and non-travelers (36.4 %) were essentially equivalent. The most preferred methods of scheduling appointments were via ARC website (45.6 %) and phone (28.4%). Willingness to use the ARC app was highest among respondents ages of 18 to 34 (45-55%) and lowest among ages 55 and older (13-15%). Of respondents with no prior knowledge of summer seasonal shortages (22 %), 2/3rds indicated newfound motivation to donate.Conclusion. Regardless of travel, increasing awareness of summer shortages may increase summer donations. Use of donor websites and smartphone apps may be instrumented as part of recruitment efforts.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1239/thumbnail.jp

Development of a controlled environment near-field optical microscope for organic thin film studies

The requirements of a microscope differ greatly from field to field and with the sample being studied Organic thin films are highly sensitive to environmental conditions being rapidly photobleached in the presence of oxygen In this paper we introduce the design of a low cost near field optical microscope suitable for environmentally controlled studies. We demonstrate that reducing ambient pressure to similar to 10 mTorr (1 3 Pa) of nitrogen (a pressure accessible with a mechanical pump) significantly reduces photo-bleaching on a typical experimental timescale. In addition, we introduce a novel non-optical feedback control mechanism combining a piezoelectric diaphragm with a tuning fork. The morphology of thin films of MEH-PPV spin cast from the polymer dissolved in chlorobenzene is investigated These films are shown to be featureless on a 100 nm length scale in terms of topology, PL intensity and PL spectrum both before and during photo-bleaching. As far as we are aware these are the first reported thin films of MEH-PPV grown in which similar to 100 nm sized domains arc absent. We believe that the ability to control environment will not only allow better optical characterization of thin films but also opens up the possibility of the production of novel two dimensional organic photonic crystals through a combination of mechanical disruption, photo-bleaching and photo-conjugation of polymers

Flavour changing neutral currents and CP violating processes in generalized supersymmetric theories

We consider supersymmetric extensions of the standard model with general non-universal soft breaking terms. We analyse in a model-independent way the constraints on these terms at the electroweak energy scale coming from gluino mediated flavour (F) changing neutral current and CP-violating processes. We have computed the complete $\Delta F=1$ and $\Delta F=2$ effective hamiltonian for gluino mediated processes, including for the first time the effect of box diagrams in the evaluation of $\epsilon^{\prime}/\epsilon$. We present numerical results for the constraints on these non-universal soft breaking terms for different values of the parameters, extending the analysis also to the leptonic sector. A comparison with previous results in the literature is given.Comment: LaTeX, 17 pages, 3 uuencoded figure

Commitment issues: toward an understanding of young people's social media choices in the multi-platform era

Social network sites (SNSs) have become a common part of everyday life for billions of people worldwide. Not everyone uses the same sites, nor are sites functionally equivalent in the eyes of users. Both established platforms and new upstarts may provide novel features or access to new audiences, yet users tend to remain on a few dominant platforms, especially Facebook, the world’s reigning social network site. The goal of the present study is to understand why people are committed to specific social network sites, given that no site encompasses either all of a person’s social connections or all possible gratifications available from online participation. Further, individuals do not always wish to have a single real-name identity for all online interactions, thus implying the necessary use of multiple accounts or sites. To understand SNS commitment, this study employs a mixed-methods research design by combining findings from a survey of 800 respondents with 50 semi-structured interviews. The research focuses on young adults in the UK and their use of four popular SNSs: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Findings indicate that network size has only a marginal effect on commitment, whereas the effect of identity performance is more pronounced, albeit in different ways on different sites. Social and informational gratifications have the strongest effect across all four SNSs, suggesting that commitment is primarily driven by repeated habit-forming experiences. To further help explain SNS commitment, this thesis employs a typology of social media users based on attitudes towards digital technology. It is evident that attitudes explain more variation in commitment than either demographic factors or personality. Qualitative analysis reinforces this finding by showing how users employ specific gratification-based repertoires to determine which sites to use and when. These findings help advance research on affordances, self-presentation and SNS use, while also making practical recommendations for social media platforms

Measurements of double-polarized compton scattering asymmetries and extraction of the proton spin polarizabilities

The spin polarizabilities of the nucleon describe how the spin of the nucleon responds to an incident polarized photon. The most model-independent way to extract the nucleon spin polarizabilities is through polarized Compton scattering. Double-polarized Compton scattering asymmetries on the proton were measured in the Δ(1232) region using circularly polarized incident photons and a transversely polarized proton target at the Mainz Microtron. Fits to asymmetry data were performed using a dispersion model calculation and a baryon chiral perturbation theory calculation, and a separation of all four proton spin polarizabilities in the multipole basis was achieved. The analysis based on a dispersion model calculation yields γE1E1=−3.5±1.2, γM1M1=3.16±0.85, γE1M2=−0.7±1.2, and γM1E2=1.99±0.29, in units of 10−4  fm4