BACKGROUND A socioeconomic gradient in childhood obesity is known to be present by the age of school entry in the UK. The origin of this gradient is unclear at present, but must lie in socioeconomic differences in habitual physical activity, sedentary behaviour, or dietary intake. AIMS To test the hypothesis that habitual physical activity and/or sedentary behaviour are associated with socioe...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To assess the association between physical activity and health related quality of life (HRQOL) among persons with arthritis or chronic joint symptoms (CJS). DESIGN Cross sectional survey investigating the relation between physical activity level and HRQOL. HRQOL was estimated using the number of physically or mentally unhealthy days during the past 30 days. Physical activity w...

We find the greatest values $alpha_{1} $ and $alpha_{2} $, and the least values $beta_{1} $ and $beta_{2} $ such that the inequalities $alpha_{1} C(a,b)+(1-alpha_{1} )H(a,b)

The conformal factor of the spacetime metric becomes dynamical due to the trace anomaly of matter fields. Its dynamics is described by an effective action which we quantize by canonical methods on the Einstein universeR×S3. We find an infinite tower of discrete states which satisfy the constraints of quantum diffeomorphism invariance. These physical states are in one-to-one correspondence with ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS To translate and test the reliability and validity of the Multiple Sclerosis Quality of Life Questionnaire (MSQoL-54) in Iranian MS patients. SETTING AND DESIGN Using a standard "forward-backward" translation, cognitive debriefing and cultural adaptation procedure, the English version of the MSQoL-54 was translated to Persian which is the Iranian official language. MATER...

A factor analysis-based approach for estimating high dimensional covariancematrix is proposed and is applied to solve themean–variance portfolio optimization problem in finance. The consistency of the proposed estimator is established by imposing a factor model structure with a relative weak assumption on the relationship between the dimension and the sample size. Numerical results indicate tha...

Fuel diversification implies the selection of a mix of generation technologies for long-term electricity generation. The goal is to strike a good balance between reduced costs and reduced risk. The method of analysis that has been advocated and adopted for such studies is the mean-variance portfolio analysis pioneered by Markowitz (1959). However the standard mean-variance methodology, does not...

In this paper I propose an alternative factor model whose common factor follows a mean-plus-noise process. While the existing methods for factor models should be valid for this model, their performance may be misleading in small samples. Because the likelihood function of this model is not tractable, I estimate this model by Bayesian methods. When applied to U.S. macroeconomic time series, we f...