Maternal obesity has little effect on the immediate offspring but impacts on the next generation

Maternal obesity during pregnancy has been linked to an increased risk of obesity and cardiometabolic disease in the offspring, a phenomenon attributed to developmental programming. Programming effects may be transmissible across generations through both maternal and paternal inheritance, although the mechanisms remain unclear. Using a mouse model, we explored the effects of moderate maternal diet-induced obesity (DIO) on weight gain and glucose-insulin homeostasis in first-generation (F1) and second-generation offspring. DIO was associated with insulin resistance, hyperglycemia and dyslipidemia before pregnancy. Birth weight was reduced in female offspring of DIO mothers (by 6%, P = .039), and DIO offspring were heavier than controls at weaning (males by 47%, females by 27%), however there were no differences in glucose tolerance, plasma lipids, or hepatic gene expression at 6 months. Despite the relative lack of effects in the F1, we found clear fetal growth restriction and persistent metabolic changes in otherwise unmanipulated second-generation offspring with effects on birth weight, insulin levels, and hepatic gene expression that were transmitted through both maternal and paternal lines. This suggests that the consequences of the current dietary obesity epidemic may also have an impact on the descendants of obese individuals, even when the phenotype of the F1 appears largely unaffected

Overview of the University of Pennsylvania CORE System Standard Graphics Package Implementation

The CORE System is a proposed standard for a device-independent graphics system. The concept of a device-independent system was first developed in 1977 by the Graphics Standards Planning Committee (GSPC) of ACM Siggraph and later refined in 1979 [1,2]. The CORE System design has received favorable reviews and has been implemented by various vendors at several universities, and other computing facilities (e.g. [3,7]). The main objectives of the CORE System are to provide uniformity, compatibility, and flexibility in graphics software. Three advantages that the CORE system provides over non-standard graphics systems are device independence, program portability, and functional completeness. A large number of different graphics hardware devices currently exist with a wide range of available functions. The CORE System provides device independence by shielding the applications programmer from specific hardware characteristics. The shielding is at the functional level: the device-independent (DI) system uses internal routines to convert the application programmer\u27s functional commands to specific commands for the selected hardware device driver (DD). The progammer describes a graphical world to the CORE System in device-independent normalized device coordinates. The programmer also specifies the viewport on the logical view surface (output device) where a picture segment is to be placed. As the CORE System becomes the accepted standard graphics package, program portability will become more feasible. Program portability means the ability to transport application programs between two sites without requiring structural modifications. The CORE System was designed for functional completeness so that any graphics function a programmer desires is either included within the system or can be easily built on top of CORE System routines

Disagreeable Privacy Policies: Mismatches between Meaning and Users’ Understanding

Privacy policies are verbose, difficult to understand, take too long to read, and may be the least-read items on most websites even as users express growing concerns about information collection practices. For all their faults, though, privacy policies remain the single most important source of information for users to attempt to learn how companies collect, use, and share data. Likewise, these policies form the basis for the self-regulatory notice and choice framework that is designed and promoted as a replacement for regulation. The underlying value and legitimacy of notice and choice depends, however, on the ability of users to understand privacy policies. This paper investigates the differences in interpretation among expert, knowledgeable, and typical users and explores whether those groups can understand the practices described in privacy policies at a level sufficient to support rational decision-making. The paper seeks to fill an important gap in the understanding of privacy policies through primary research on user interpretation and to inform the development of technologies combining natural language processing, machine learning and crowdsourcing for policy interpretation and summarization. For this research, we recruited a group of law and public policy graduate students at Fordham University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh (“knowledgeable users”) and presented these law and policy researchers with a set of privacy policies from companies in the e-commerce and news & entertainment industries. We asked them nine basic questions about the policies’ statements regarding data collection, data use, and retention. We then presented the same set of policies to a group of privacy experts and to a group of non-expert users. The findings show areas of common understanding across all groups for certain data collection and deletion practices, but also demonstrate very important discrepancies in the interpretation of privacy policy language, particularly with respect to data sharing. The discordant interpretations arose both within groups and between the experts and the two other groups. The presence of these significant discrepancies has critical implications. First, the common understandings of some attributes of described data practices mean that semi-automated extraction of meaning from website privacy policies may be able to assist typical users and improve the effectiveness of notice by conveying the true meaning to users. However, the disagreements among experts and disagreement between experts and the other groups reflect that ambiguous wording in typical privacy policies undermines the ability of privacy policies to effectively convey notice of data practices to the general public. The results of this research will, consequently, have significant policy implications for the construction of the notice and choice framework and for the US reliance on this approach. The gap in interpretation indicates that privacy policies may be misleading the general public and that those policies could be considered legally unfair and deceptive. And, where websites are not effectively conveying privacy policies to consumers in a way that a “reasonable person” could, in fact, understand the policies, “notice and choice” fails as a framework. Such a failure has broad international implications since websites extend their reach beyond the United States

Brief scales to assess physical activity and sedentary equipment in the home

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Sedentary behaviors such as TV viewing are associated with childhood obesity, while physical activity promotes healthy weight. The role of the home environment in shaping these behaviors among youth is poorly understood. The study purpose was to examine the reliability of brief parental proxy-report and adolescent self-report measures of electronic equipment and physical activity equipment in the home and to assess the construct validity of these scales by examining their relationship to physical activity, sedentary behavior, and weight status of children and adolescents.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Participants were adolescents (n = 189; mean age = 14.6), parents of adolescents (n = 171; mean age = 45.0), and parents of younger children (n = 116; parents mean age = 39.6; children's mean age = 8.3) who completed two surveys approximately one month apart. Measures included a 21-item electronic equipment scale (to assess sedentary behavior facilitators in the home, in the child or adolescent's bedroom, and portable electronics) and a 14-item home physical activity equipment scale. Home environment factors were examined as correlates of children's and adolescents' physical activity, sedentary behavior, and weight status after adjusting for child age, sex, race/ethnicity, household income, and number of children in the home.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Most scales had acceptable test-retest reliability (intraclass correlations were .54 - .92). Parent and adolescent reports were correlated. Electronic equipment in adolescents' bedrooms was positively related to sedentary behavior. Activity equipment in the home was inversely associated with television time in adolescents and children, and positively correlated with adolescents' physical activity. Children's BMI z-score was positively associated with having a television in their bedroom.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The measures of home electronic equipment and activity equipment were similarly reliable when reported by parents and by adolescents. Home environment attributes were related to multiple obesity-related behaviors and to child weight status, supporting the construct validity of these scales.</p

Ecofriendly Perovskites with Giant Self-Defocusing Optical Response

[EN] The full optical control of light using sustainable green technologies is one of the incipient challenges of the Photonics community. There are, however, few optical materials able to provide a significant nonlinear refractive index change under small enough intensities (< 1 GW cm(-2)), and, more importantly, allowing the external control of the magnitude and sign of their nonlinear response. This manuscript demonstrates that Cs2SnI6 lead-free nanocrystals (NCs) present an extraordinary self-defocusing response not yet observed up to now in any material. Despite its complex structural form, these NCs are fully characterized here, both experimentally and theoretically, revealing a giant negative refractive change Delta n = -0.05 under proper illumination conditions. The nonlinear response is tuned with the intensity, concentration of NCs in the solvent, and propagation distance leading to a crossover where the media transforms to self-focusing with Delta n = +0.002. These results can provide fascinating opportunities in sensing and light-matter interactions for a future ecofriendly photonic technology.This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 862656 (project DROP-IT) and by the Spanish MICINN through project no. PID2020-120484RB-I00 and by Generalitat Valenciana PROMETEO/2021/082.Suárez, I.; Martinez-Pastor, JP.; Oszajca, MF.; Lüchinger, NA.; Graves, B.; Agouram, S.; Milián Enrique, C.... (2022). Ecofriendly Perovskites with Giant Self-Defocusing Optical Response. Advanced Optical Materials. https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.20220212

Advocating Affordable Housing in New Hampshire: The Amicus Curiae Brief of the American Planning Association in Wayne Britton v. Town of Chester

In June 1990, The American Planning Association, a national Washington, D.C. based non-profit association of 27,000 professional planners, elected and appointed planning officials, and citizens interested in improving urban and rural planning filed this amicus curiae brief with the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The case on appeal is Wayne Britton v. Town of Chester, No. 85-E-342 (N.H. Super. Ct. June 27, 1989), brought by a builder/developer and low-income plaintiffs in need of affordable housing in Chester, New Hampshire

The Effect of FRAND Commitments on Patent Remedies

This chapter addresses a special category of cases in which an asserted patent is, or has been declared to be, essential to the implementation of a collaboratively-developed voluntary consensus standard, and the holder of that patent has agreed to license it to implementers of the standard on terms that are fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND). In this chapter, we explore how the existence of such a FRAND commitment may affect a patent holder’s entitlement to monetary damages and injunctive relief. In addition to issues of patent law, remedies law and contract law, we consider the effect of competition law on this issue

Comparing AMR and SPH Cosmological Simulations: I. Dark Matter & Adiabatic Simulations

We compare two cosmological hydrodynamic simulation codes in the context of hierarchical galaxy formation: The SPH code GADGET, and the Eulerian AMR code ENZO. Both codes represent dark matter with the N-body method, but use different gravity solvers and fundamentally different approaches to hydrodynamics. We compare the GADGET `entropy conserving' SPH formulation with two ENZO methods: The piecewise parabolic method (PPM), and the artificial viscosity-based scheme used in the ZEUS code. In this paper we focus on a comparison of cosmological simulations that follow either only dark matter, or also adiabatic baryonic gas. The dark matter-only runs agree generally quite well, provided ENZO is run with a comparatively fine root grid and a low overdensity threshold for mesh refinement, otherwise the abundance of low-mass halos is suppressed. This is due to the hierarchical particle-mesh method used to compute gravitational forces in ENZO, which tends to deliver lower force resolution than the tree algorithm of GADGET. At comparable force resolution, we find that the latter offers substantially better performance and lower memory consumption than the present gravity solver in ENZO. In simulations that include adiabatic gas dynamics, we find general agreement in the distribution functions of temperature, entropy, and density for gas of moderate to high overdensity, as found inside dark matter halos. However, there are some significant differences at lower overdensities. We argue that these discrepancies are presumably owing to differences in the shock-capturing abilities of the different methods. In particular, ZEUS hydro leads to some unphysical heating at early times in preshock regions. Overall, the GADGET hydro results are bracketed by those for ENZO/ZEUS and ENZO/PPM. (abridged)Comment: 45 pages, 17 figures. ApJ, in press. This paper has been significantly revised after referee comments and several sections have been adde