Impact of a School-Based Obesity Intervention for Minority Female High School Students

This applied dissertation was developed to determine if seven motivational group sessions would improve minority female high school students’ perceptions toward and knowledge of healthy lifestyle behaviors. The target population for this study was 15 female minority students ages 15-18 who attended a large urban high school and had a body mass index greater than 30. Participants completed the Healthy Lifestyle Beliefs Scale for Teens and maintained a personal food journal. Within their personal food journals, participants listed the types and amounts of both foods they ate and beverages they consumed over two three-day periods. Participants also were supposed to answer six open-ended questions during week 1 and week 7 of this study; however, they completed the wrong set of open-ended questions, and the researcher was unable to collect this information. This researcher compared participants’ week 1 and week 7 composite scores on the Healthy Lifestyle Beliefs Scale and determined if their eating habits and food choices improved from the week 3motivational session to the week 7 motivational session. There was a statistically significant improvement in participants’ perceptions of healthy eating behaviors from the preintervention phase to the postintervention phase: t(9) = 5.28, p = 0.001 (two-tailed value); however, they did not demonstrate a statistically significant improvement in their eating habits from week 3 to week 7: t(14) = 0.61, p = 0.55 (two-tailed value). By participating in the intervention, participants increased their knowledge of healthy eating habits but not their ability to apply their knowledge. Future researchers should conduct a similar study and compare participants’ postintervention and preintervention bodymass indexes. Future research should also expand the scope of this study by having participants participate in a moderately rigorous physical activity

Norbert Elias and Modern Sociology

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This book explores the interplay between the making of Elias as a sociologist and the development of his core ideas relating to figurations, interdependence, and civilising processes. Focusing on the relevance of Elias's work for current debates within sociology, the authors centrally consider his contributions to the sociology of knowledge and methodology. Dunning and Hughes locate the work of Elias within a discussion of the crisis of sociology as a subject, and compare his figurational approach with the approaches of three major figures in modern sociology: Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. This highly readable and engaging book will be essential reading for students and scholars of sociological theory and methods

SimpleNMR: An interactive graph network approach to aid constitutional isomer verification using standard 1D and 2D NMR experiments

Despite progress in computer automated solutions, constitutional isomer verification by NMR using one- and two-dimensional data sets is still, in the main, a manual, user-intensive activity that is challenging for a number of reasons. These include the problem of simultaneously keeping track of the information from a number of separate NMR experiments and the difficulty of another researcher subsequently verifying the assignments made without having to independently repeat the whole analysis. This paper describes a graphical interactive approach that overcomes some of these problems. By using concepts used to visualise graph networks, we have been able to represent the NMR data in a manner that highlights directly the link between the different NMR experiments and the molecule of interest. Furthermore, by making the graph networks interactive, a user can easily validate and correct the assignment and understand the decisions made in arriving at the solution. We have developed a usable proof-of-concept computer program, ‘simpleNMR’, written in Python to illustrate the ideas and approach

Norbert Elias and Modern Sociology

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This book explores the interplay between the making of Elias as a sociologist and the development of his core ideas relating to figurations, interdependence, and civilising processes. Focusing on the relevance of Elias's work for current debates within sociology, the authors centrally consider his contributions to the sociology of knowledge and methodology. Dunning and Hughes locate the work of Elias within a discussion of the crisis of sociology as a subject, and compare his figurational approach with the approaches of three major figures in modern sociology: Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. This highly readable and engaging book will be essential reading for students and scholars of sociological theory and methods

Calorimetric evaluation of commercial Ni-MH cells and charges

The test objectives are to evaluate the electrical and thermal performance of commercial Ni-MH cells and to evaluate the effectiveness of commercial charge control circuits. The ultimate design objectives are to determine which cell designs are most suitable for scale-up and to guide the design of future Shuttle and Station based battery chargers

Improving Forecasts of Volcanic Clouds: An Analysis of Observations and Emission Source Term Methods

Volcanic eruptions can occur with little or no warning and explosively inject dense ash and sulfur dioxide (SO2) clouds high into the atmosphere. I investigated different types of observations and analysis methods used to monitor and quantify volcanic ash and SO2 clouds. I begin with an analysis of the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, employing ash cloud transport modeling capabilities I developed for the Goddard Earth Observing System, Version 5 (GEOS-5). The emission source terms describing the initial state of the Eyjafjallajökull ash clouds were estimated using radar observations of the ash cloud’s initial injection altitude. Results of the initial simulations agreed with operational ash forecasts from the time of the eruption and with many other published studies, but showed notable disagreement with satellite observations. The emission source term was estimated using an alternative approach, yielding simulations that better matched satellite observations. I used the result to highlight limitations of radar observations not accounted for in previous studies of the Eyjafjallajökull ash clouds. UV satellite observations are often used to monitor and quantify volcanic clouds of ash and SO2. I tested the limitations of the OMPS SO2 satellite observations using an Observing System Simulation Experiment (OSSE). The framework used GEOS-5 simulations of the atmospheric composition in the wake of a Pinatubo-like volcanic eruption to generate synthetic top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) radiances. The TOA radiances served as input to the OMPS SO2 retrieval. In comparing the OMPS retrieval SO2 to the original GEOS-5 SO2, I found that the sulfate aerosols and ash can cause the OMPS SO2 retrieval to underestimate the total SO2 burden. These effects were amplified at increased satellite viewing angles. I finish my analysis by looking at observations from the satellite-based Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS), where I show that even under the time constraints of an operational forecast, the available CATS observations were able to improve forecasts of volcanic SO2 clouds