4,219 research outputs found
EFFECT OF BALLET-EXPERIENCE OF 12-YEAR-OLD FEMALE CHILDREN ON THE LEARNING OF DYNAMIC BALANCE CONTROL
The purpose of this study was to examine whether previous regular experience in ballet enhance the learning balance task on the balance testing board. Eighteen healthy female children aged twelve including eight with more than three years ballet-experience and eight without the ballet-experience participated. Dynamic balance learning consisting of 3 sessions, which were pre-training and post-training with practices, and retention with no practice, were performed on the balance testing board. The interval between each session was one week. The stability was measured while the subject performed balance task on the same balance testing board placed on an AMTI force platform. The stability was defined as the sum of center of pressure (COP) and center of body mass (COM) mono directional displacements; and the variance of the end tip of the balance board displacement in vertical direction. Two way ANOVA for repeated-measures (2 groups 3 sessions) revealed statistically significant increases in postural stability for the test immediately following training and the retention test in both groups. Although interaction effect indicated greater improvement in non-experienced group, the stability of the group with experience in ballet far exceeded that of the group without experience, about all the variables of each session. Our results suggest that experience in ballet up to being twelve year old have positive influence on the learning dynamic balance control task
Synchrotron X-Ray Studies of Surface Disordering
Contains an introduction and reports on three research projects.Joint Services Electronics Program Contract DAAL03-92-C-000
Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) Balloon Flight Data Handling Overview
The GLAST Balloon Flight Engineering Model (BFEM) represents one of 16 towers
that constitute the Large Area Telescope (LAT), a high-energy (>20 MeV)
gamma-ray pair-production telescope being built by an international partnership
of astrophysicists and particle physicists for a satellite launch in 2006. The
prototype tower consists of a Pb/Si pair-conversion tracker (TKR), a CsI
hodoscopic calorimeter (CAL), an anti-coincidence detector (ACD) and an
autonomous data acquisition system (DAQ). The self-triggering capabilities and
performance of the detector elements have been previously characterized using
positron, photon and hadron beams. External target scintillators were placed
above the instrument to act as sources of hadronic showers. This paper provides
a comprehensive description of the BFEM data-reduction process, from receipt of
the flight data from telemetry through event reconstruction and background
rejection cuts. The goals of the ground analysis presented here are to verify
the functioning of the instrument and to validate the reconstruction software
and the background-rejection scheme.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to be published in IEEE Transacations on Nuclear
Science, August 200
X-Ray Diffuse Scattering
Contains introduction and reports on three research projects.Joint Services Electronics Program DAAL03-89-C-000
When tropical and subtropical congeners met:Multiple ancient hybridization events within Eriobotrya were detected in the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, a tropical-subtropical transition area in China
Induction of humoral immune response to multiple recombinant Rhipicephalus appendiculatus antigens and their effect on tick feeding success and pathogen transmission
BACKGROUND: Rhipicephalus appendiculatus is the primary vector of Theileria parva, the etiological agent of East Coast fever (ECF), a devastating disease of cattle in sub-Saharan Africa. We hypothesized that a vaccine targeting tick proteins that are involved in attachment and feeding might affect feeding success and possibly reduce tick-borne transmission of T. parva. Here we report the evaluation of a multivalent vaccine cocktail of tick antigens for their ability to reduce R. appendiculatus feeding success and possibly reduce tick-transmission of T. parva in a natural host-tick-parasite challenge model.
METHODS: Cattle were inoculated with a multivalent antigen cocktail containing recombinant tick protective antigen subolesin as well as two additional R. appendiculatus saliva antigens: the cement protein TRP64, and three different histamine binding proteins. The cocktail also contained the T. parva sporozoite antigen p67C. The effect of vaccination on the feeding success of nymphal and adult R. appendiculatus ticks was evaluated together with the effect on transmission of T. parva using a tick challenge model.
RESULTS: To our knowledge, this is the first evaluation of the anti-tick effects of these antigens in the natural host-tick-parasite combination. In spite of evidence of strong immune responses to all of the antigens in the cocktail, vaccination with this combination of tick and parasite antigens did not appear to effect tick feeding success or reduce transmission of T. parva.
CONCLUSION: The results of this study highlight the importance of early evaluation of anti-tick vaccine candidates in biologically relevant challenge systems using the natural tick-host-parasite combination
Global Directional Control of a Slender Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/77142/1/AIAA-20475-500.pd
Warped Riemannian metrics for location-scale models
The present paper shows that warped Riemannian metrics, a class of Riemannian
metrics which play a prominent role in Riemannian geometry, are also of
fundamental importance in information geometry. Precisely, the paper features a
new theorem, which states that the Rao-Fisher information metric of any
location-scale model, defined on a Riemannian manifold, is a warped Riemannian
metric, whenever this model is invariant under the action of some Lie group.
This theorem is a valuable tool in finding the expression of the Rao-Fisher
information metric of location-scale models defined on high-dimensional
Riemannian manifolds. Indeed, a warped Riemannian metric is fully determined by
only two functions of a single variable, irrespective of the dimension of the
underlying Riemannian manifold. Starting from this theorem, several original
contributions are made. The expression of the Rao-Fisher information metric of
the Riemannian Gaussian model is provided, for the first time in the
literature. A generalised definition of the Mahalanobis distance is introduced,
which is applicable to any location-scale model defined on a Riemannian
manifold. The solution of the geodesic equation is obtained, for any Rao-Fisher
information metric defined in terms of warped Riemannian metrics. Finally,
using a mixture of analytical and numerical computations, it is shown that the
parameter space of the von Mises-Fisher model of -dimensional directional
data, when equipped with its Rao-Fisher information metric, becomes a Hadamard
manifold, a simply-connected complete Riemannian manifold of negative sectional
curvature, for . Hopefully, in upcoming work, this will be
proved for any value of .Comment: first version, before submissio
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