The validity of the GENEActiv wrist-worn accelerometer for measuring adult sedentary time in free living

OBJECTIVES Based on self-reported measures, sedentary time has been associated with chronic disease and mortality. This study examined the validity of the wrist-worn GENEactiv accelerometer for measuring sedentary time (i.e. sitting and lying) by posture classification, during waking hours in free living adults. DESIGN Fifty-seven participants (age=18-55 years 52% male) were recruited using convenience sampling from a large metropolitan Australian university. METHODS Participants wore a GENEActiv accelerometer on their non-dominant wrist and an activPAL device attached to their right thigh for 24-h (00:00 to 23:59:59). Pearson's Correlation Coefficient was used to examine the convergent validity of the GENEActiv and the activPAL for estimating total sedentary time during waking hours. Agreement was illustrated using Bland and Altman plots, and intra-individual agreement for posture was assessed with the Kappa statistic. RESULTS Estimates of average total sedentary time over 24-h were 623 (SD 103) min/day from the GENEActiv, and 626 (SD 123) min/day from the activPAL, with an Intraclass Correlation Coefficient of 0.80 (95% confidence intervals 0.68-0.88). Bland and Altman plots showed slight underestimation of mean total sedentary time for GENEActiv relative to activPAL (mean difference: -3.44min/day), with moderate limits of agreement (-144 to 137min/day). Mean Kappa for posture was 0.53 (SD 0.12), indicating moderate agreement for this sample at the individual level. CONCLUSIONS The estimation of sedentary time by posture classification of the wrist-worn GENEActiv accelerometer was comparable to the activPAL. The GENEActiv may provide an alternative, easy to wear device based measure for descriptive estimates of sedentary time in population samples

Infrared studies on the conformation of synthetic alamethicin fragments and model peptides containing .alpha.-aminoisobutyric acid

ABSTRACT: Infrared studies of synthetic alamethicin fragments and model peptides containing a-aminoisobutyric acid (Aib) have been carried out in solution. Tripeptides and larger fragments exhibit a strong tendency to form /3 turns, stabilized by 4 - 1 10-atom hydrogen bonds. Dipeptides show less well-defined structures, though C5 and C7 conformations are detectable. Conformational restrictions imposed by Aib residues result in these peptides populating a limited range of states. Integrated intensities of the hydrogen-bonded N-H stretching band can be used to quantitate the number of intramolecular hydrogen bonds. Predictions made from infrared data are in excellent agreement with nuclear magnetic resonance and X-ray diffraction studies. Assignments of the urethane and tertiary amide carbonyl groups in the free state have been made in model peptides. Shifts to lower frequency on hydrogen bonding are observed for the carbonyl groups. The 1-6 segment of alamethicin is shown to adopt a 310 helical structure stabilized by four intramolecular hydrogen bonds. The fragments Boc-Leu-Aib-Pro-Val-Aib-OMe (1 2-1 6) and Boc-Gly-Leu-Aib-Pro-Val-Aib-OMe (1 1-1 6) possess structures involving 4 - 1 and 5 - 1 hydrogen bonds. Supporting evidence for these structures is obtained from proton nuclear magnetic resonance studies.

Solutions of Boundary Layer Equations Governing Free Convective and Magnetohydrodynamic Flows through Parametric Differentiation

In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird die Methode der parametrischen Differentiation angewendet, um ein System nichtlinearer Gleichungen zu lösen, das zwei- und dreidimensionale freie, konvektive Grenzschichströmungen bzw. eine zweidimensionale magnetohydrodynamische Grenzschichtströmung beherrscht. Der Hauptvorteil dieser Methode besteht darin, daß die nichlinearen Gleichungen auf lineare reduziert werden und die Nichtlinearität auf ein System von Gleichungen erster Ordnung beschränkt wird, das, verglichen mit den ursprünglichen Nichtlinearen Gleichungen, viel leichter gelöst werden kann. Ein anderer Vorzug der Methode ist, daß sie es ermöglicht, die Lösung von einer bekannten, zu einem bestimmten Parameterwert gehörigen Lösung aus durch schrittweises Vorgehen die Lösung für den gesamten Parameterbereich zu erhalten. Die mit dieser Methode gewonnenen Ergebnisse stimmen gut mit den entsprechenden, mit anderen numerischen Verfahren erzielten überein.

The kinetics and reactivity of several polyatomic free radicals in reactions with NO2, O2, Cl2, and HCl

In this thesis, the kinetics of several alkyl, halogenated alkyl, and alkenyl free radical reactions with NO2, O2, Cl2, and HCl reactants were studied over a wide temperature range in time resolved conditions. Laser photolysis photoionisation mass spectrometer coupled to a flow reactor was the experimental method employed and this thesis present the first measurements performed with the experimental system constructed. During this thesis a great amount of work was devoted to the designing, building, testing, and improving the experimental apparatus. Carbon-centred free radicals were generated by the pulsed 193 or 248 nm photolysis of suitable precursors along the tubular reactor. The kinetics was studied under pseudo-first-order conditions using either He or N2 buffer gas. The temperature and pressure ranges employed were between 190 and 500 K, and 0.5 45 torr, respectively. The possible role of heterogeneous wall reactions was investigated employing reactor tubes with different sizes, i.e. to significantly vary the surface to volume ratio. In this thesis, significant new contributions to the kinetics of carbon-centred free radical reactions with nitrogen dioxide were obtained. Altogether eight substituted alkyl (CH2Cl, CHCl2, CCl3, CH2I, CH2Br, CHBr2, CHBrCl, and CHBrCH3) and two alkenyl (C2H3, C3H3) free radical reactions with NO2 were investigated as a function of temperature. The bimolecular rate coefficients of all these reactions were observed to possess negative temperature dependencies, while pressure dependencies were not noticed for any of these reactions. Halogen substitution was observed to moderately reduce the reactivity of substituted alkyl radicals in the reaction with NO2, while the resonance stabilisation of the alkenyl radical lowers its reactivity with respect to NO2 only slightly. Two reactions relevant to atmospheric chemistry, CH2Br + O2 and CH2I + O2, were also investigated. It was noticed that while CH2Br + O2 reaction shows pronounced pressure dependence, characteristic of peroxy radical formation, no such dependence was observed for the CH2I + O2 reaction. Observed primary products of the CH2I + O2 reaction were the I-atom and the IO radical. Kinetics of CH3 + HCl, CD3 + HCl, CH3 + DCl, and CD3 + DCl reactions were also studied. While all these reactions possess positive activation energies, in contrast to the other systems investigated in this thesis, the CH3 + HCl and CD3 + HCl reactions show a non-linear temperature dependency on the Arrhenius plot. The reactivity of substituted methyl radicals toward NO2 was observed to increase with decreasing electron affinity of the radical. The same trend was observed for the reactions of substituted methyl radicals with Cl2. It is proposed that interactions of frontier orbitals are responsible to these observations and Frontier Orbital Theory could be used to explain the observed reactivity trends of these highly exothermic reactions having reactant-like transition states.

Traditionally Protected Forests and Sacred Forests of Zigua and Gweno Ethnic Groups in Tanzania

In Tanzania, indigenous forests can still be found whose existence is based on the management systems of precolonial society. This study covers material from over 900 forests. There are similar types of forests elsewhere in Africa, and similar forests can also be found in indigenous cultures on every continent. In this study they are called traditionally protected forests (TPFs). They have a high level of endemism and a rich biodiversity. The field study was carried out during the years 1997-2003 using participatory methods. An active debate is going on concerning the capacity of local communities to manage their environment. The role of indigenous people and their institutions in the development of the physical environment is a central issue in the debate. This study discusses the opportunities that the local people have had to decide on how to conserve, maintain, utilise, and manage their environment during different political periods. The study explains what kinds of changes have taken place in these forests and institutions in northeastern Tanzania among the matrilinear Zigua and patrilinear Gweno ethnic groups. About 2% of the land area of the communities was still protected by the precolonial structures. The communities have established their protection systems for different reasons, not only because of their beliefs but also because of different secular and clearly environmentally motivated reasons. There are different TPF types. Less than half of them are directly related to spirituality, and more than half are not. In earlier research elsewhere, it has been commonly understood that spiritual reasons played the main role in the protection of these environments. This study is also part of the postcolonial geographical discussion on the precolonial landscape and environmental management which was started by Carl Sauer. In the Zigua case study villages, only two out of five first comer clans have performed rain rituals in the past 30 years. Many of the most respected sacred sites do not have a ritual maker or even a person who knows how to perform rituals any longer. The same is happening with male initiation rites. In all case study villages there have been illegal cuts in the TPFs, but variations can be seen between the communities. The number of those who neither respect indigenous regulations nor accept indigenous penalties is growing. Positive developments have also taken place. Nowadays, the Forest Act of 2002 is in effect, which works as a cornerstone of community-based land ownership and also allows elders to protect TPFs, and by-laws are created with the support of different projects. Moreover, during the field study it was found that many young people are ignorant about their village's TPF sites, but interested in learning about their history and values.

Using UHF proximity loggers to quantify male–female interactions: A scoping study of estrous activity in cattle

Reproductive efficiency is an important determinant of profitable cattle breeding systems and the success of assisted reproductive techniques (ART) in wildlife conservation programs. Methods of estrous detection used in intensive beef and dairy cattle systems lack accuracy and remain the single biggest issue for improvement of reproductive rates and such methods are not practical for either large-scale extensive beef cattle enterprises or free-living mammalian species. Recent developments in UHF (ultra high frequency) proximity logger telemetry devices have been used to provide a continuous pair-wise measure of associations between individual animals for both livestock and wildlife. The objective of this study was to explore the potential of using UHF telemetry to identify the reproductive cycle phenotype in terms of intensity and duration of estrus. The study was conducted using Belmont Red (interbred Africander Brahman Hereford–Shorthorn) cattle grazing irrigated pasture on Belmont Research Station, northeastern Australia. The cow-bull associations from three groups of cows each with one bull were recorded over a 7-week breeding season and the stage of estrus was identified using ultrasonography. Telemetry data from bull and cows, collected over 4 8-day logger deployments, were log transformed and analyzed by ANOVA. Both the number and duration of bull-cow affiliations were significantly (P < 0.001) greater in estrous cows compared to anestrus cows. These results support the development of the UHF technology as a hands-off and noninvasive means of gathering socio-sexual information on both wildlife and livestock for reproductive management.

Material processing and surface reaction studies in free piston driven shock tube

Recently established moderate size free piston driven hypersonic shock tunnel HST3 along with its calibration is described here. The extreme thermodynamic conditions prevalent behind the reflected shock wave have been utilized to study the catalytic and non-catalytic reactions of shock heated test gases like Ar, N2 or O2 with different material like C60 carbon, zirconia and ceria substituted zirconia. The exposed test samples are investigated using different experimental methods. These studies show the formation of carbon nitride due to the non-catalytic interaction of shock heated nitrogen gas with C60 carbon film. On the other hand, the ZrO2 undergoes only phase transformation from cubic to monoclinic structure and Ce0.5Zr0.5O2 in fluorite cubic phase changes to pyrochlore (Ce2Zr2O7±δ) phase by releasing oxygen from the lattice due to heterogeneous catalytic surface reaction.

A new type of high-order elements based on the mesh-free interpolations

We propose a new type of high-order elements that incorporates the mesh-free Galerkin formulations into the framework of finite element method. Traditional polynomial interpolation is replaced by mesh-free interpolations in the present high-order elements, and the strain smoothing technique is used for integration of the governing equations based on smoothing cells. The properties of high-order elements, which are influenced by the basis function of mesh-free interpolations and boundary nodes, are discussed through numerical examples. It can be found that the basis function has significant influence on the computational accuracy and upper-lower bounds of energy norm, when the strain smoothing technique retains the softening phenomenon. This new type of high-order elements shows good performance when quadratic basis functions are used in the mesh-free interpolations and present elements prove advantageous in adaptive mesh and nodes refinement schemes. Furthermore, it shows less sensitive to the quality of element because it uses the mesh-free interpolations and obeys the Weakened Weak (W2) formulation as introduced in [3, 5].

FreeS: A fast algorithm to discover frequent free subtrees using a novel canonical form

Web data can often be represented in free tree form; however, free tree mining methods seldom exist. In this paper, a computationally fast algorithm FreeS is presented to discover all frequently occurring free subtrees in a database of labelled free trees. FreeS is designed using an optimal canonical form, BOCF that can uniquely represent free trees even during the presence of isomorphism. To avoid enumeration of false positive candidates, it utilises the enumeration approach based on a tree-structure guided scheme. This paper presents lemmas that introduce conditions to conform the generation of free tree candidates during enumeration. Empirical study using both real and synthetic datasets shows that FreeS is scalable and significantly outperforms (i.e. few orders of magnitude faster than) the state-of-the-art frequent free tree mining algorithms, HybridTreeMiner and FreeTreeMiner.

Measuring and tracking quality factors in Free and Open Source Software projects

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has gained increased interest in the computer software industry, but assessing its quality remains a challenge. FOSS development is frequently carried out by globally distributed development teams, and all stages of development are publicly visible. Several product and process-level quality factors can be measured using the public data. This thesis presents a theoretical background for software quality and metrics and their application in a FOSS environment. Information available from FOSS projects in three information spaces are presented, and a quality model suitable for use in a FOSS context is constructed. The model includes both process and product quality metrics, and takes into account the tools and working methods commonly used in FOSS projects. A subset of the constructed quality model is applied to three FOSS projects, highlighting both theoretical and practical concerns in implementing automatic metric collection and analysis. The experiment shows that useful quality information can be extracted from the vast amount of data available. In particular, projects vary in their growth rate, complexity, modularity and team structure.

Measuring free ellagic acid: influence of extraction conditions on recovery by studying solubility and UV-Visible spectra

Recent investigations into plant tissues have indicated that the free form of the natural polyphenolic antioxidant, ellagic acid (EA), is much more plentiful than first envisaged; consequently a re-assessment of solvent systems for the extraction of this water-insoluble form is needed. As EA solubility and its UV-Vis spectrum, commonly used for detection and quantification, are both governed by pH, an understanding of this dependence is vital if accurate EA measurements are to be achieved. After evaluating the pH effects on the solubility and UV-Vis spectra of commercial EA, an extraction protocol was devised that promoted similar pH conditions for both standard solutions and plant tissue extracts. The extraction so devised followed by HPLC with photodiode-array detection (DAD) provided a simple, sensitive and validated methodology that determined free EA in a variety of plant extracts. The use of 100 % methanol or a triethanolamine-based mixture as the standard dissolving solvents were the best choices, while these higher pH-generating solvents were more efficient in extracting EA from the plants tested with the final choice allied to the plants’ natural acidity. Two of the native Australian plants anise myrtle (Syzygium anisatum) and Kakadu plum (Terminalia ferdinandiana) exhibited high concentrations of free EA. Furthermore, the dual approach to measuring EA UV-Vis spectra made possible an assessment of the effect of acidified eluent on EA spectra when the DAD was employed.

Free/Open Source Software Development : Results and Research Methods

Free and open source software development is an alternative to traditional software engineering as an approach to the development of complex software systems. It is a way of developing software based on geographically distributed teams of volunteers without apparent central plan or traditional mechanisms of coordination. The purpose of this thesis is to summarize the current knowledge about free and open source software development and explore the ways on which further understanding on it could be gained. The results of research on the field as well as the research methods are introduced and discussed. Also adapting software process metrics to the context of free and open source software development is illustrated and the possibilities to utilize them as tools to validate other research are discussed.

Posted Workers and Free Movement of Services in the European Union – the Impact on National Employment and Immigration Law

This thesis examines posting of workers within the free movement of services in the European Union. The emphasis is on the case law of the European Court of Justice and in the role it has played in the liberalisation of the service sector in respect of posting of workers. The case law is examined from two different viewpoints: firstly, that of employment law and secondly, immigration law. The aim is to find out how active a role the Court has taken with regard these two fields of law and what are the implications of the Court’s judgments for the regulation on a national level. The first part of the thesis provides a general review of the Community law principles governing the freedom to provide services in the EU. The second part presents the Posted Workers’ Directive and the case law of the European Court of Justice before and after the enactment of the Directive from the viewpoint of employment law. Special attention is paid to a recent judgment in which the Court has taken a restrictive position with regard to a trade union’s right to take collective action against a service provider established in another Member State. The third part of the thesis concentrates, firstly, on the legal status of non-EU nationals lawfully resident in the EU. Secondly, it looks into the question of how the Court’s case law has affected the possibilities to use non-EU nationals as posted workers within the freedom to provide services. The final chapter includes a critical analysis of the Court’s case law on posted workers. The judgments of the European Court of Justice are the principal source of law for this thesis. In the primary legislation the focus is on Articles 49 EC and 50 EC that lay down the rules concerning the free movement of services. Within the secondary legislation, the present work principally concentrates on the Posted Workers’ Directive. It also examines proposals of the European Commission and directives that have been adopted in the field of immigration. The conclusions of the case study are twofold: while in the field of employment law, the European Court of Justice has based its judgments on a very literal interpretation of the Posted Workers’ Directive, in the field of immigration its conclusions have been much more innovative. In both fields of regulation the Court’s judgments have far-reaching implications for the rules concerning posting of workers leaving very little discretion for the Member States’ authorities.

Petition to legislature regarding religion in free schools

Digital image