13251 research outputs found
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Color-Coded Activity Charts and Beachbody: “Momming” in COVID-19
No full textThis piece is an invitation. Our work consists of poetry by three moms, writing in the middle of a global pandemic about the realities of “momming” in these times. Why poems? We want the article to be short and digestible while also expressing the complexity and individuality of our lived experiences. Also, through poetry, we can invite you to bring your own story as you make meaning. In the poems, we struggle with ideas including discipline, “being enough,” and the fact that things are fucked up. We are also left with the nagging question, “What leisure can we have on a regular day, much less in the midst of a pandemic?”
Pandemic Motherhood and the Academy: A Critical Examination of the Leisure-Work Dichotomy
No full textIn late 2017, a critical investigation of the impact of motherhood on perceptions of success in academia, specific to leisure scholars in the United States, was undertaken by the authors of this critical review. Results from this study indicated that leisure scholars who are also mothers experience a great deal of pressure to be productive educators and researchers. This stems from unrealistic work expectations, unsupportive colleagues, and workplace policies that are difficult to navigate. The impacts of these are exacerbated by the pandemic conditions caused by COVID-19 due to existing patriarchal structures in academia. Community mitigation efforts result in working mothers balancing multiple full-time responsibilities, including providing childcare and education for their children while struggling to complete their paid work. We asked our previous research participants to share how their work and family experiences have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic conditions, specifically as it relates to performing simultaneously as both primary childcare providers and faculty members at their institutions. While necessary to address a global health emergency, transitioning to remote work has increased employment expectations for mothers employed in higher education. Leisure scientists reported that telecommuting has led to an unideal merger of their personal and professional spaces, disrupting any harmony that these mothers were working so tirelessly to achieve. Leaders in higher education must address this misguided “hurry up model” and lack of concern for their employees as both scholars and human beings that need leisure to ensure quality of life and wellbeing
Acute Effect of Popular High-Intensity Functional Training Exercise on Physiologic Markers of Growth
No full textConstantly evolving, high-intensity functional training (HIFT) exercise consists of various modalities, orders, weights, and repetition schemes. High-intensity functional training has gained popularity among the general population, but lacks empirical evidence regarding acute adaptive responses. The purpose of this study was to describe the acute effects of 2 representative bouts of HIFT on physiologic markers of growth. For convenience, the bouts are designated short (\u3c5 minutes) and long (∼15 minutes), although duration was not the only difference between bouts. Ten apparently healthy men (28.1 ± 5 years) performed 2 HIFT bouts in a randomized crossover design. Blood was collected at 5 time points (Pre, Post, 1, 3, and 6 hours) to examine growth hormone (GH), insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1), insulin-like growth factor binding proteins 1 and 2 (IGFBP-1 and IGFBP-2), and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). Blood lactate concentration ([La]) was analyzed at the Pre and Post time points. A repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed no trial differences among the markers (IGF-1, IGFBP-1, IGFBP-2, and VEGF) except GH at Post, where the long bout produced a greater effect (p = 0.005). Mean GH levels (pg·ml-1) in the short bout increased from 68.4 to 106.5, and in the long bout, mean GH levels increased from 38.5 to 286.4. The repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a main time effect in GH (p = 0.037), while a post hoc t-test demonstrated elevated GH at 1 hour (p = 0.018) when compared with Pre. No time-dependent change (p \u3e 0.05) was observed in IGF-1, IGFBP-1, IGFBP-2, or VEGF. Mean blood [lactate] increased more than tenfold in both bouts. The findings of this descriptive study suggest that, other than GH, there are no acute differences in markers of skeletal muscle or vascular growth between these 2 specific HIFT bouts
Intergenerational National Service by, with, and for All Ages
No full textIntergenerational national service builds community ownership by connecting people of different ages around a common purpose addressing social problems. Federal policies have encouraged older and younger people to meet challenges facing the other’s generation, and bring the generations together to serve with each other. Although implementation has fallen short of the laws enacted, experience with intergenerational service confirms its benefits for participants, individuals who are served, and communities. In addition to making progress on pressing social challenges, engaging community members across the age spectrum to serve together increases understanding and empathy across generational divides. Bridging this as well as other divides that separate Americans, is an essential step to unify our country. The imperative to rebuild social cohesion among generations gives new impetus to develop the intergenerational service frontie
How to Get Community Engagement When Creating a Strategic Vision
No full textLocal government leaders want to engage their residents and stakeholders as they are making plans for the future. However, they often struggle to find ways to elicit positive and helpful information. Many times they fear that open meetings will be a platform for negative-minded people to voice their unhappiness. This article shares a way to engage the community in helping to develop a strategic vision for the future that guards against this kind of negativity. It provides a way for stakeholders to have civil discussions about strategic decisions that face the city. While providing for large numbers of people to give input, it does so in a way that provides the governing body ingredients they can use in crafting a shared vision for the future
Bounds on Point Configurations Determined by Distances and Dot Products
No full textWe study a family of variants of Erdő’s unit distance problem, concerning distances and dot products between pairs of points chosen from a large finite point set. Specifically, given a large finite set of n points E, we look for bounds on how many subsets of k points satisfy a set of relationships between point pairs based on distances or dot products. We survey some of the recent work in the area and present several new, more general families of bounds
Blood biomarkers for mild traumatic brain injury: a selective review of unresolved issues
No full textBackground: The use of blood biomarkers after mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) has been widely studied. We have identified eight unresolved issues related to the use of five commonly investigated blood biomarkers: neurofilament light chain, ubiquitin carboxy-terminal hydrolase-L1, tau, S100B, and glial acidic fibrillary protein. We conducted a focused literature review of unresolved issues in three areas: mode of entry into and exit from the blood, kinetics of blood biomarkers in the blood, and predictive capacity of the blood biomarkers after mTBI.
Findings: Although a disruption of the blood brain barrier has been demonstrated in mild and severe traumatic brain injury, biomarkers can enter the blood through pathways that do not require a breach in this barrier. A definitive accounting for the pathways that biomarkers follow from the brain to the blood after mTBI has not been performed. Although preliminary investigations of blood biomarkers kinetics after TBI are available, our current knowledge is incomplete and definitive studies are needed. Optimal sampling times for biomarkers after mTBI have not been established. Kinetic models of blood biomarkers can be informative, but more precise estimates of kinetic parameters are needed. Confounding factors for blood biomarker levels have been identified, but corrections for these factors are not routinely made. Little evidence has emerged to date to suggest that blood biomarker levels correlate with clinical measures of mTBI severity. The significance of elevated biomarker levels thirty or more days following mTBI is uncertain. Blood biomarkers have shown a modest but not definitive ability to distinguish concussed from non-concussed subjects, to detect sub-concussive hits to the head, and to predict recovery from mTBI. Blood biomarkers have performed best at distinguishing CT scan positive from CT scan negative subjects after mTBI
Towards a template matching approach for human fall detection
No full textThe technology and products related to fall detection has always been in high demand within the security and healthcare industries. A fall detection system must provide a reliable notification mechanism to significantly reduce the risk and medical care costs associated with falls. The rapid developments in Smart Environments and the Internet of Things paradigms, together with the increasing number of low-cost cameras, form a favorable setup for vision-based fall detection systems. In this paper, we propose a novel vision-based fall detection technique that uses fall templates. Fall templates represent human shape variations in case of a fall. We implemented different template matching techniques to evaluate the performance of our proposed template-based approach. Performance evaluation shows encouraging results for single camera-based live deployments
Fast quantile regression in reproducing kernel Hilbert space
No full textIn literature, the idea of kernel machine was introduced to quantile regression, resulting kernel quantile regression (KQR) model, which is capable to fit nonlinear models with flexibility. However, the formulation of KQR leads to a quadratic programming which is computationally expensive to solve. This paper proposes a fast training algorithm for KQR based on majorization-minimization approach, in which an upper bound for the objective function is derived in each iteration which is easier to be minimized. The proposed approach is easy to implement, without requiring any special computing package other than basic linear algebra operations. Numerical studies on simulated and real-world datasets show that, compared to the original quadratic programming based KQR, the proposed approach can achieve essentially the same prediction accuracy with substantially higher time efficiency in training
On the number of discrete chains
No full textWe study a generalization of the Erdos unit distance problem to chains of k distances. Given P, a set of n points, and a sequence of distances (δ1, . . . , δk), we study the maximum possible number of tuples of distinct points (p1, . . . , pk+1) ϵ Pk+1 satisfying |pjpj+1| = δj for every 1 ≤ j ≤ k. We study the problem in R2 and in R3, and derive upper and lower bounds for this family of problems