BACKGROUND Food environment studies have focused on ethnic and income disparities in food access. Few studies have investigated distance travelled for food and did not aim to inform the geographic scales at which to study the relationship between food environments and obesity. Further, studies have not considered neighborhood design as a predictor of food purchasing behavior. METHODS Atlanta ...

Sequence variation at the equine myostatin gene (MSTN) locus has previously been shown to have a singular genomic influence on optimum race distance in Thoroughbred racehorses. Myostatin, encoded by the MSTN gene, is a member of the TGF-β superfamily that regulates skeletal muscle development in a range of mammalian species including the horse. In the Thoroughbred, the C-allele at the g.6649373...

OBJECTIVE To examine trends in road death rates for child pedestrians, cyclists and car occupants. DESIGN Analysis of road traffic injury death rates per 100 000 children and death rates per 10 million passenger miles travelled. SETTING England and Wales between 1985 and 2003. PARTICIPANTS Children aged 0-14 years. INTERVENTIONS None. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Death rates per 100,000 chil...

In the ever more competitive arena of biological research, there is a widespread perception that, if you haven’t got a firm foothold on the ladder by your late twenties, you’ll never make it. It’s tempting to believe this. Indeed, working at Cold Spring Harbor’s Watson School of Biological Sciences brings me into daily contact with biologists of all ages and stages, who are nothing if not highl...

The e€ect of food resources on behavior has been dicult to measure. Here we use animals themselves to describe ``e€ective'' food abundance and distribution by comparing, relative to where individuals stopped to eat, movements of (1) adult females living in a small group of vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) with those living in a large group and (2) vervets and patas monkeys (Erythrocebus...

Applications that require a robot to cover an area can be described as complete coverage navigation tasks. Examples of this type of navigation are vacuuming, surface coating, and systematic foraging. Performance measures are often neglected in this area of research. This paper presents two metrics for measuring performance of robot coverage tasks and applied them to a real robot coverage experi...

Home is a special location for many animals, offering shelter from the elements, protection from predation, and a common place for gathering of the same species. Not surprisingly, many species have evolved efficient, robust homing strategies, which are used as part of each and every foraging journey. A basic strategy used by most animals is to take the shortest possible route home by accruing t...

This paper presents a new genetic algorithm methodology to solve the trajectory planning problem. This methodology can obtain smooth trajectories for industrial robots in complex environments using a direct method. The algorithm simultaneously creates a collision-free trajectory between initial and final configurations as the robot moves. The presented method deals with the uncertainties associ...

We show how data collected from a GPS device can be incorporated in motor insurance ratemaking. The calculation of premium rates based upon driver behaviour represents an opportunity for the insurance sector. Our approach is based on count data regression models for frequency, where exposure is driven by the distance travelled and additional parameters that capture characteristics of automobile...

Autonomous navigation for a mobile robot still remains as a challenging area to be explored. In an indoor environment, while GPS is unavailable and wheel encoder suffer from error accumulation due to wheel slips, vision-based travelled distance estimation can be considered as an alternative approach for more accurate measurements. This study presents a new algorithm to estimate travelled distan...