The aim of this summary is, first, to outline the normal pattern of bone mineral accrual during childhood. From that foundation I review some intervention trials including those conducted at the University of British Columbia that evaluate the role of childhood physical activity on bone mass and bone structure. The normal pattern of bone mineral accrual was demonstrated in a 7-year longitudinal...

Human activities, from resource extraction to recreation, are increasing global connectivity, especially to less-disturbed and previously inaccessible places. Such activities necessitate road networks and vehicles. Vehicles can transport reproductive plant propagules long distances, thereby increasing the risk of invasive plant species transport and dispersal. Subsequent invasions by less desir...

OBJECTIVE Phase 1 clinical trials are the first stage of clinical development of an investigational agent. Because the trials often take place at several geographically dispersed sites, safety teleconferences are held to update investigators and the drug sponsor on safety information and other pertinent business related to the trial conduct. Here we examine associations between the frequency of...

We consider the problem of scheduling dependent real-time tasks for overloads on a multiprocessor system, yielding best-effort timing assurance. The application/scheduling model includes tasks with time/utility function time constraints, mutual exclusion constraints, and arbitrary arrival, execution-time and resource access behaviors, with the timeliness optimization objective of maximizing the...

The biosynthetic costs of phenylpropanoid-derived condensed tannins (CTs) and phenolic glycosides (PGs) are substantial. However, despite reports of negative correlations between leaf phenolic content and growth of Populus, it remains unclear whether or how foliar biosynthesis of CT/PG interferes with tree growth. A comparison was made of carbon partitioning and N content in developmentally sta...

Ensuring fast and accurate failure detection is a fundamental issue for building efficient fault-tolerant distributed systems. In an effort to make fault-tolerant applications easier to implement, we are trying to provide failure detection as a generic Internet service, similar to what was done very successfully with NTP (network time protocol) for clock synchronization. To do so, we must revis...

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is associated with an increase in inflammatory cytokines and can result in cachexia with loss of muscle and fat stores. We previously demonstrated the efficacy of treating a model of cancer cachexia with ghrelin and a ghrelin receptor agonist. Currently, we examine a surgical model of CKD in rats, resulting in uremia and decreased accrual of lean body mass. Treatmen...

Bone mass accrual is a major determinant of skeletal mass, governed by bone remodeling, which consists of bone resorption by osteoclasts and bone formation by osteoblasts. Bone mass accrual is inhibited by sympathetic signaling centrally regulated through activation of receptors for serotonin, leptin, and ACh. However, skeletal activity of the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) has not been ...

Late-onset (LO) toxicities are a serious concern in many phase I trials. Since most dose-limiting toxicities occur soon after therapy begins, most dose-finding methods use a binary indicator of toxicity occurring within a short initial time period. If an agent causes LO toxicities, however, an undesirably large number of patients may be treated at toxic doses before any toxicities are observed....

Graceful performance degradation during overload conditions is the primary objective of soft real-time systems. Utility accrual soft real-time scheduling algorithms allow speci cation of highly customized temporal system behavior during overload. Such algorithms are typically found in realtime supervisory systems where signi cant run-time uncertainty exists. This paper outlines an investigation...