Persisting side-to-side differences in bone mineral content, but not in muscle strength and tendon stiffness after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction

Tendon stiffness may be involved in limiting peak musculoskeletal forces and thus may constitute an upper limit for bone strength. The patellar tendon bone (PTB) graft, which is harvested from the patellar tendon during surgical reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), is an ideal scenario to test this hypothesis. Eleven participants were recruited who had undergone surgical reconstruction of the ACL with a PTB graft 1-10 years prior to study inclusion. As previously reported, there was no side-to-side difference in thigh muscle cross-sectional area, in maximum voluntary knee extension torque, or in patellar tendon stiffness, suggesting full recovery of musculature and tendon. However, in the present study bone mineral content (BMC), assessed by peripheral quantitative computed tomography, was lower on the operated side than on the control side in four regions studied (P = 0·0019). Differences were less pronounced in the two sites directly affected by the operation (patella and tibia epiphysis) when compared to the more remote sites. Moreover, significant side-to-side differences were found in BMC in the trabecular compartment in the femoral and tibial epiphysis (P = 0·004 and P = 0·047, respectively) with reductions on the operated side, but increased in the patella (P = 0·00016). Cortical BMC, by contrast, was lower on the operated side at all sites except the tibia epiphysis (P = 0·09). These findings suggest that impaired recovery of BMC following ACL reconstruction is not because of lack of recovery of knee extensor strength or patellar tendon stiffness. The responsible mechanisms still remain to be determined.

Communication keys: understanding the importance of the early childhood teacher's role in children's language and literacy development within a holistic, integrative approach to child development

Early childhood is a critical period in children’s lives during which experiences and the quality of the interactions lay the foundation for their subsequent learning and behavior, impacting upon the their lives. In response to Early Years research that identifies the positive impact of quality early years education upon children’s future learning, governments worldwide are implementing changes in policy, processes, professional learning and practice and are pouring funds into early childhood education. A range of approaches and multiple strategies are being adopted in an effort to improve children’s health, education and overall well-being, including the holistic and integrative approach such as that undertaken in Indonesia. This paper argues that high quality Early Childhood teachers play an important role within these approaches and this is discussed in light of the research - policy - praxis nexus, with language and literacy development as a focus area.

From nutrients to food literacy

This paper is based on a webinar broadcast by the Home Economics Institute of Australia in 2015. I should make clear at the outset that I will be discussing the academic literature, particularly that relating to nutrition education and foodliteracy that reports studies with measured outcomes. This may seem ‘last century’ to many Australian home economics teachers who long ago moved from teaching about nutrients to education about dietary practices. However, in nutrition science there has long been a fascination with the possible effects of education about nutrition on disease risks and outcomes. There has been an expectation among health researchers and governments that education should reduce disease risks and promote wellbeing among young people. I think this view is too narrow and unrealistic in contrast to more holistic approaches such as those of home economics and the emerging area of food literacy. In this brief overview I will discuss four areas to dowith the emerging area of food literacy education. First, I will discuss the emergence of a broader view of food and dietary patterns in the nutrition sciences and the reasons for this. Secondly, I will explore the competing assumptions behind ‘education’ versus those of ‘health promotion’ and public health, followed by different disciplinary views of the emerging area of food literacy with its emphasis on competencies. Finally, I will explore some interesting new developments in food literacy education.

Graph theory based QoE-driven cooperation stimulation for content dissemination in device-To-device communication

With multimedia dominating the digital contents, Device-To-Device (D2D) communication has been proposed as a promising data offloading solution in the big data area. As the quality of experience (QoE) is a major determining factor in the success of new multimedia applications, we propose a QoEdriven cooperative content dissemination (QeCS) scheme in this work. Specifically, all users predict the QoE of the potential connections characterized by the mean opinion score (MOS), and send the results to the content provider (CP). Then CP formulates a weighted directed graph according to the network topology and MOS of each potential connection. In order to stimulate cooperation among the users, the content dissemination mechanism is designed through seeking 1-factor of the weighted directed graph with the maximum weight thus achieving maximum total user MOS. Additionally, a debt mechanism is adopted to combat the cheat attacks. Furthermore, we extend the proposed QeCS scheme by considering a constrained condition to the optimization problem for fairness improvement. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed QeCS scheme achieves both efficiency and fairness especially in large scale and density networks.