Pathway to health: Cluster-randomized trail to increase fruit and vegetable consumption among smokers in public housing.

Objectives: Examine the effectiveness of an intervention to increase fruits and vegetables (FV) consumption among smokers. Design: Cluster-randomized trial of 20 public housing developments; 10 randomly assigned to an FV intervention and 10 to a smoking cessation intervention. Main outcome measures: Usual (past 7 days) and past 30 days change in daily FV intake at 8 weeks and 6 months postbaseline. Results: Greater increases were seen in the FV group. At Week 8 and Month 6, the FV group had consumed 1.58 (p = .001) and 0.78 (p = .04), respectively, more daily FV servings in the past 7 days than the cessation group. At the same time points, the FV group had consumed 3.61 (p = .01) and 3.93 (p = .01), respectively, more FV servings in the past 30 days than the cessation group. Completing more motivational interviewing sessions (p = .02) and trying more recipes (p = .02) led to significantly greater increases at Month 6 among FV participants. Conclusions: Motivational interviewing counseling and lifestyle modification through trying out healthy recipes may be effective in helping a high-risk population increase their FV intake. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of case libraries on problem solving

Abstract The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of providing access to a case library of related stories while undergraduates solved ill-structured problems. While solving complex food product development problems, the experimental group accessed experts' stories of similar, previously solved problems; the comparable group accessed fact sheets (expository representation of stories' content); and the control group accessed text selected at random from a textbook dealing with issues unrelated to the stories. On multiple-choice questions assessing processes related to problem solving (prediction, inferences, explanations, etc.), experimental students out-performed the comparable and control groups. Performance on short-answer questions also assessing problem-related skills was not significantly different, in part because of test fatigue. Analysis of interviews identified a number of factors that students used in deciding how to apply their study strategies, including causal factors, grounding phenomenon, grounding in context, and outcomes.     

Glomerular tip lesions--a newly described glomerular change

Glomerular tip lesion is a newly described histopathological lesion characterized by a focal and segmental widening of the mesangial matrix without hypercellularity together with capillary dilatation, hyaline exudation on the inside of capillary walls and occurrence of vacuolized cells, localized to the peripheral segments of the glomerular tuft. Clinically, these patients have a pronounced nephrotic syndrome with slightly reduced renal function, but terminal renal failure is seldom seen, even after many years of disorder. Two characteristic case histories are presented. The classification of this lesion among the glomerular disorders is at present uncertain. It may represent a transitional form between minor lesion nephritis and focal segmental sclerosis, a separate disorder, or a functional lesion associated with high proteinuria.     

Synthesis of dissipative systems using quadratic differentialforms: part II

For pt.1 see ibid., p.53-69 (2002). The authors discuss several important special cases of the problem solved in Part I. These are: disturbance attenuation and passivation, the full information case, the filtering problem, and the case that the to-be-controlled plant is given in input-state-output representation. An interesting aspect is the notion of full information, which we define in terms of the observability of the to-be-controlled variables from the control variables. When the system is given in state space form, we obtain conditions for the existence of a controller that renders a system dissipative in terms of two coupled algebraic Riccati inequalities. The controller turns out to be a feedback system with a transfer function that is proper, but, in general, not strictly proper. Another issue that we study in this paper is feedback implementability. We find conditions under which, in the context of synthesis of dissipative systems, a controlled behavior can implemented by a feedback controller     

Limit of validity of the moisture diffusivity for the study of moisture transfer inside terracotta

In order to know the limit of validity of the concept of hydrical diffusivity, D_W, we tried to validate the Boltzmann's method used to identify it. We show that for a medium strictly satisfying the equation of diffusion, the method gives quite good results with nevertheless some inaccuracies for the extreme values of water contents. For the real studied material, a backed clay, its identification becomes more difficult because of the dispersion of the wetting phenomenon observed for different specimens of the same material. We are showing that the mean behaviour of one sample is near to be the same as the more probable behaviour of all the samples. Otherwise the values of D_W determined for a wetting cannot be used to describe a drying process. It practical interest is then considerably reduced. In order to test the influence of the gas phase pressure effects on the behaviour of the material, we have determined all the parameters necessary to describe, numerically, wetting and drying processes without to resort to D_W. We noticed an overpressure of the gas phase inside the material due to drying. If the gas pressure effects are, numerically, switched off, we cannot notice any influence on water content profiles for this type of material.     

An integrated modelling environment for the embodiment of mechanical systems

The efficient, economical and often elegant transformation from a design schema to an embodied design solution containing real components is essential for the commercial success of a product. More often the ability of the designer to explore an optimum solution is severely frustrated by the analytically intensive and time-consuming aspects of embodying a concept. This paper presents a computer based system-modelling tool that is to be used by designers during the transformation of a concept to an embodied solution particularly to deal with standard components. This environment provides for the representation of conceptual schemas and subsequent embodiment from computer based component selection modules. These selection modules encompass the full range of electronic representations for standard mechanical components. The strategy for representing a mechanical system, its included components and their associated representations is discussed. The process of constructing a system model, specifying the desired performance characteristics and system resolution are also described.     

Coulomb functions for attractive and repulsive potentials and for positive and negative energies

The paper gives a review of the mathematical properties of the Coulomb radial wave functions, for attractive and repulsive potentials and for positive and negative energies, together with recommendations on best methods for their computation. It includes discussions of analytic continuations (complex energies, radial co-ordinates and angular momenta) and of relativistic Coulomb functions.     

Assessment of Shear Forces on Bridge Abutments: Simplified Method

The conventional application of reduction factors to response spectrum analysis results is inappropriate for the abutment shear forces, which are based on elastic action. On the other hand, adopting the unreduced values from the elastic dynamic analysis does not achieve equilibrium among the abutment shear forces, deck inertia forces, and reduced pier forces. A simplified method is here proposed for the assessment of the shear on the abutments, documented by comparison with response spectrum and time history nonlinear analyses for several bridge configurations. For the analyzed configuration of the bridge with an internal movement joint, the response spectrum analysis underestimates the shear on the abutment for low values of the abutment flexibility and overestimates it when the stiffness of the abutments becomes higher than that of the piers. In all the case studies analyzed, the proposed method approximates the time history results better than the response spectrum.