Pink and Dude Chefs: Effectiveness of an After-School Nutrition Knowledge and Culinary Skills Program for Middle School Students to Increase Fruit and Vegetable Consumption

The rate of overweight and obesity among adolescents aged 12-19 years has more than tripled since 1980, and disproportionately impacts low-income and marginalized populations. Reduction in adolescent obesity rates may result in decreased health risks, decrease healthcare costs, and increased quality of life. Effective intervention methods for adolescent participants have incorporated nutrition knowledge and culinary skill building into afterschool programs. This study examines whether building knowledge, skills, and confidence through a culinary intervention can improve adolescent participants’ choices of healthful foods through increased fruit and vegetable intake. Pink and Dude Chefs (PDC) is an afterschool nutrition education and culinary skills program for middle-school adolescents aged 11-14 years. This project aimed to improve eating behavior in participants by increasing culinary and nutrition self-efficacy. PDC was implemented in Shandon, California from Spring 2014 to Fall 2014, and in Santa Maria, Guadalupe, and New Cuyama, California from Fall 2015 to Summer 2016. Eighty-three middle school students participated and completed surveys in the 12-lesson program that covered food safety, micro- and macronutrients, meal planning, and USDA MyPlate guidelines. Participant fruit and vegetable consumption improved following participation. Girls’ frequency of overall fruit consumption increased from a mean of 1.8 (SD 0.9) to 2.0 (SD 1.0). Girls’ vegetable consumption increased from 1.2 (SD 0.8) to 1.5 (SD 0.9). Boys’ fruit consumption increased from 1.9 (SD 1.0) to 2.2 (SD 1.0), and boys’ vegetable consumption increased from 1.1 (SD 0.9) to 1.3 (SD 0.8). More research is needed to evaluate the long-term effect of participation in nutrition education and culinary skills programs. If obesity prevention programs that incorporate a skill-based culinary approach continue to show promising outcomes for adolescents, larger scale efforts may contribute to decreasing the public health and economic burdens associated with obesity

Angular Schmidt Modes in Spontaneous Parametric Down-Conversion

We report a proof-of-principle experiment demonstrating that appropriately chosen set of Hermite-Gaussian modes constitutes a Schmidt decomposition for transverse momentum states of biphotons generated in the process of spontaneous parametric down conversion. We experimentally realize projective measurements in Schmidt basis and observe correlations between appropriate pairs of modes. We perform tomographical state reconstruction in the Schmidt basis, by direct measurement of single-photon density matrix eigenvalues.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Constrained control of coexisting attractors in impact oscillator with delay

Peer reviewedPostprin

Edge-guided image gap interpolation using multi-scale transformation

This paper presents improvements in image gap restoration through the incorporation of edge-based directional interpolation within multi-scale pyramid transforms. Two types of image edges are reconstructed: 1) the local edges or textures, inferred from the gradients of the neighboring pixels and 2) the global edges between image objects or segments, inferred using a Canny detector. Through a process of pyramid transformation and downsampling, the image is progressively transformed into a series of reduced size layers until at the pyramid apex the gap size is one sample. At each layer, an edge skeleton image is extracted for edge-guided interpolation. The process is then reversed; from the apex, at each layer, the missing samples are estimated (an iterative method is used in the last stage of upsampling), up-sampled, and combined with the available samples of the next layer. Discrete cosine transform and a family of discrete wavelet transforms are utilized as alternatives for pyramid construction. Evaluations over a range of images, in regular and random loss pattern, at loss rates of up to 40%, demonstrate that the proposed method improves peak-signal-to-noise-ratio by 1–5 dB compared with a range of best-published works