Participating in high-impact sports may help boost bone mineral density in older persons, according to a new study of male and female athletes.

The findings stem from a study of athletes aged 50 to 93 who took part in the 2005 National Senior Games, including 560 who competed in high-impact sports like basketball, road racing, track and field, and volleyball.

Ultrasound scans found those who participated in high-impact sports had better bone mineral density than people who participated in low-impact sports.

“Our study represents the largest sample of bone mineral density data in mature athletes to date,” said Dr. Vonda Wright of the University of Pittsburg Medical Center. “My colleagues and I were surprised to see that active adult participation in the high-impact sports had such a positive influence on bone health, even in the oldest athletes.”

A HealthDay report notes that osteoarthritis and other factors will keep some people from taking part in high-impact sports.

“With a multi-part approach and the appropriate use of high-impact exercises, individuals may be able to make greater strides against bone loss than the current treatment strategies imply,” Wright said.

Clearly, able-bodied senior citizens participating in these higher-impact activities can produce great results; the only thing lacking may be the motivation to do so. People who will give them that extra push can be found at companies like Home Instead Senior Care. Home Instead hires outgoing and energetic individuals who will not only present the best home care to our clients, but promote healthy living and will motivate your loved ones to get back in the game.
Home Instead Senior Care will provide outstanding caregivers to help your loved one with personal care, incidental travel, companionship, medication reminders, light housekeeping, and even meal preparation. To learn more, call 248-203-2273 or visit www.homeinstead.com. Home Instead Senior Care is the world’s trusted source of in-home non-commercial personal care and companionship for seniors. Each franchise is independently owned and operated. And remember, to us, it’s personal.

Participating in high-impact sports may help boost bone mineral density in older persons, according to a new study of male and female athletes.

The findings stem from a study of athletes aged 50 to 93 who took part in the 2005 National Senior Games, including 560 who competed in high-impact sports like basketball, road racing, track and field, and volleyball.

Ultrasound scans found those who participated in high-impact sports had better bone mineral density than people who participated in low-impact sports.

“Our study represents the largest sample of bone mineral density data in mature athletes to date,” said Dr. Vonda Wright of the University of Pittsburg Medical Center. “My colleagues and I were surprised to see that active adult participation in the high-impact sports had such a positive influence on bone health, even in the oldest athletes.”

A HealthDay report notes that osteoarthritis and other factors will keep some people from taking part in high-impact sports.

“With a multi-part approach and the appropriate use of high-impact exercises, individuals may be able to make greater strides against bone loss than the current treatment strategies imply,” Wright said.

Clearly, able-bodied senior citizens participating in these higher-impact activities can produce great results; the only thing lacking may be the motivation to do so. People who will give them that extra push can be found at companies like Home Instead Senior Care. Home Instead hires outgoing and energetic individuals who will not only present the best home care to our clients, but promote healthy living and will motivate your loved ones to get back in the game.
Home Instead Senior Care will provide outstanding caregivers to help your loved one with personal care, incidental travel, companionship, medication reminders, light housekeeping, and even meal preparation. To learn more, call 248-203-2273 or visit www.homeinstead.com. Home Instead Senior Care is the world’s trusted source of in-home non-commercial personal care and companionship for seniors. Each franchise is independently owned and operated. And remember, to us, it’s personal.

   Tonight I just finished a training session on the island of Mindanao, Philippines.  There are over 100 new students and about 75 students who are nearing graduation from our 10 level training program.  I wanted to start with testimonies so that everyone could be encouraged about what God is doing.  My first question was, “How many of you have a testimony about starting churches since August (a period of four months).  Nearly everyone’s hands went up. 

   That is a normal response for our trainings.  Obviously I couldn’t have all 175 people give a testimony, so I had to narrow it down.  I said, “How many of you have started more than five churches in the last four months?” Three hands went up.   I called on one young man to share.

   He came up to the front and shared, with his head looking toward the ground, “I don’t like to talk much, but I wouldn’t stand up here if I wasn’t faithful in what God called me to do.” He explained that after the August training session he went back to his area determined to reach 9 more villages around him with a new church.   So he and his wife got permission from the nine villages to show the gospel.  Each of the villages were named after the nine planets, from Mercury all the way to Pluto. 

  After showing a gospel film they made contacts for people who wanted to know more about Jesus in each village.  They go each week to each of the nine villages where they are now discipling new believers and forming them into groups of believers (churches).  I wanted to confirm how many group he had started since August and he replied, matter-of-factly, “nine, one for each village we went to.”  He also noted that some have already built small buildings to meet in as well. 

  That is absolutely fantastic.  That is an average of one church start every 10 days! 

   We all rejoiced in amazing fruit in ministry.  As he was about to step down he added one more additional comment.  He said, we went to our local elementary school and asked them if we could teach the section on “values education” (Values education is a part of all Philippine education).  They agreed and he said right now he is teaching all the 4^th through 6^th graders every day our discipleship training program for their “values education” course in school.  

   I only had one more leading question for him.  So I asked, “How much money did you have to do this project?”  His response was exactly what I expected, for it is a focus of our training.  He said, “We have no money at all do to this, we only have faith in God.”  Everyone cheered!  Nine churches started in four months, buildings built, hundreds of people come to Christ, voluntary teaching hundreds of kids about Jesus on a total budget of $0.00. 

   Faith:  It is a higher standard.  It has much more impressive results!

Friday after Thanksgiving was a better day for me and my diet and exercise.

I did 12 km on my exercise bike.  Two hours of water volleyball.  About  1.25 miles on my regular bike.  Also about 30 minutes of shopping.  I kept my intake to around 2000 calories.

My log book was helpful.  I make the exercise bike easier by playing handheld games and by taking breaks every 3 or 4 km.

Today, I will have fish for my main meal.

Lundi 30 novembre, Orentis rencontre Éric Woerth, ministre du Budget, des comptes publics et de la fonction publique et Edouard Courtial Député de la 7ème circonscription de l’Oise et Maire d’Agnetz pour une réunion départementale sur les thèmes de la réforme des collectivités territoriales et celle de la taxe professionnelle et à ce titre Orentis souhaite interroger et informer ses interlocuteurs sur la mise en œuvre de la CET et de son impact négatif sur les entreprises de service.

I find that my log book is my best tool for keeping on track.

Yesterday Thanksgiving I only ate 200 calories more than I burned.  Most of that is because I logged everything.

I would have done even better, but I had some holiday wine.  The wine affected my willpower so I ate stuff at night that I would have passed up on other days.  Also the wine has calories of its own.  I was told that the formula to figure out how many calories  an ounce of wine contains is:

%alcohol X 1.6     so wine with 10% alcohol would be 10 X 1.6 or 16 calories per ounce.    A 5 ounce glass of 10% alcohol wine contains about 80 calories.

Some wines flavored with fruit juice may contain more calories.

Today I get back on my health plan.

Children love games. I use them wherever I can because it gets them to study/review material without feeling like “work” and it gives them a chance to interact about the conent. I love games too!

I thought I would share a few resources that make incorporating board games in class easy and inexpensive.

First, I create my own games using file folders and beautiful templates that you can find here:

http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/gameboard.htm

The PowerPoint template prints on two pages and fills both sides of the file folder. You can also explore different Microsoft Word tempates on this site. Download, print, attach to file folder, a quick trip through the laminator and voila! a durable board game. You can use the template “as is” or you can modify it to make it your own. I started with a few generic boards that I could use with any content, and the children liked it so much I started designing boards that were specific to each unit. I’m now teaching a different content, so that is back on my todo list again.

They have a business card template that you can use for questions, but I just set up a two column table in word. I like my rows set at about an 1.25 to 1.5 inches and at least 14 point font. I use vocabulary words and questions from my test bank for each unit to create the questions. Print them out, use a paper cutter to make the job go quicker, and store the cards in a business envelope attached to the board or stored separately. These could be laminated, but its so easy to print a duplicate set if necessary that I don’t.

Dice from the dollar store and water bottle caps complete this resource.

Other things you can do with the templates:

I like to use these on my Promethean board to play whole class games. I make a few shapes that are colored for pieces, and let the students compete in teams using the Eggspert.

The Eggspert runs between $60 and $99 and is totally worth it. It allows you to know which child “rings in” first. These very photogenic children are not mine, this picture is from the Eggspert site: www.eggspert.com

I like to put students in teams in rows, and they rotate every turn so that every child gets the chance to ring in. It also provides movement for all the students.

You can also have students make their own gameboards. Read Write Think has come up with a terrific lesson plan using gameboards as project for novels, but is easily adaptable to any content. I wrote a post about my recent adaptation of this here.

Game board projects, adapted from this lesson plan on Read Write Think:

My students just finished making gameboards for Westward Expansion. It was a learning experience for all of us! I want to share the details, handouts, and my reflections here.

Students took on the role of gameboard designers whose task it was to create a learning/review game for Westward Expansion. Each child was assigned a partner and they used their textbooks, Joy Hakim’s Reconstructing America to write 25 questions each. They were not allowed to duplicate questions. They were asked to write 10 easy, 10 medium, and 5 hard questions on this template:

Question Writing Sheet

The original idea is that they would write questions as they thought of them, and then evaluate the difficulty level. Next year we want to redesign this sheet with 10 spaces for EASY, 10 for MEDIUM with examples right above the appropriate spaces to provide additional support.

The dialogue about the content was amazing – the children really gave themselves a great review of the content. So much so that my partner teacher and I have decided this part of the project should come prior to the unit test. Another modification for next year will be to provide a list of key terms/people/concepts to provide additional support for question writers.

Once the questions were written, the teams worked together to design their gameboard using a file folder, markers, and their imaginations. The game’s purpose was to reflect the theme of Westward Expansion (earn your homestead by _____, complete the transcontinental railroad, etc) as well as the design of the board itself. Rules were to be written that would incorporate their questions into play. Each partner was responsible for half of the gameboard (the file folder crease made this simple).

Rubric

I have done a similar project in years past, and with some tweaking I know we will implement this again next year. It takes two days to design the board, write the rules and have some time to play them. The question writing will be introduced as test review, and what isn’t finished in one class period becomes homework. The dialogue about the content – what was important, and how could they make it fun was well worth the time.

  A few months ago we got a request from Cotabato, Philippines to please come and start Antioch Institute training in their area. This is in the Muslim area of Mindanao and is usually unsafe with bombings and kidnappings common.  Finally in October, Pastor Ben Embaan had a chance to go.  The churches had been praying because they had not seen any growth in many years.  The different churches did not like each other either because of their different “doctrinal” backgrounds.   Finally, they saw the light.  They are all people from the Manobo tribe, but were divided by artificial “doctrinal” positions.  The non-believers in the area were not about to join that mess!  

  In October the churches agreed to unify under the love of Christ and so Pastor Ben came into start an Antioch extension.  One church in Magpit, Cotabato prided itself for being so “large”.  There were about ninety people in the church on a good Sunday. 

   In Antioch Institute our key verse is 2 Timothy 2:2 which says, “And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others”.  We don’t just train teachers or pastors, but anyone who is willing to teach others in the ways of God.  So Pastor Ben started teaching.  Today we got a report from one of the pastors in Magpit.  He said, since last month’s training, they started discipling their own people and then those people started discipling others in the village.  People started coming to Christ rapidly.  The church has now grown to more than 400 people in one month!  Praise the Lord!

   Following Jesus is not that complicated, it only requires courage and hard work on behalf of everyone.  Once everyone is working together, it is amazing what God allows to happen.

If only we had thought of Noveller!

oh well, better luck next year. I propose we try to do little writing things throughout the year as a warm up for next year. Who’s with me?

Volatility (variance) estimation is probably one of the most difficult areas of research in finance.   As mentioned in previous posts, recent research has been largely focused on duration based models for variance estimation.

I’ve done some experimentation with duration-based models, but have yet to find a satisfactory approach, but feel I am now beginning to understand what a satisfactory model might look like.    I don’t have the luxury of time to make it a full study, but hope to come up with an approach, however heuristic, that meets my needs.

There is a view that volatility (quadratic variation) can be separated into at least 2 distinct components:

• integrated variance (IV)
  This is the primary return variation generated by the diffusive process component in our price process
• squared jump term
  Jumps due to news or other behavior, not modeled by the diffusive process.

Together these explain what we call quadratic variance (QV):

The fundamental that underlies both “jumps” and “local volatility” is the notion of expected squared returns over a given time interval (in the continuous case infinitesimal, in real markets, discretely).   A pdf for the probability of a “jump” of size J at time t can be constructed as:

Where f(I) is the indicator of the “jump” event pdf and f(Δr|I,F) is the conditional distribution of jump size Δr given the event.  Together provide a posterior representing the probability of a price movement of Δr.   Variance can then be estimated with either the continuous or discrete form:

Thinking about “jumps” versus diffusion based volatility (as in the local vol estimates σ^2), the processes of the 2 differ in terms of intensity.   However we can still estimate both with the above expectation.   Both jumps and local vol can be estimated with the same approach, only the parameterization of the probability distribution need differ for different price jump levels (Δt).

One of the “hangups” in my recent attempts to model variance was in trying to model the timing and size of jumps as one process.   Now, what if we split this out:

1. model the duration (or intensity) of events in jump level range
   Use an exponential-ACD model calibrated for duration between events in the range.
2. model the size of events within the range
   Consider an autoregressive self-exciting process.  The AR component will model the reversion to the mean.

I can model variance as a set of self-exciting intensity processes, one for each range of price (return) levels.   I can the use the specialization of the f(I) and  f(Δr|I,F) conditional distributions for each price range to compute expected squared returns:

The indicator process
The indicator (or intensity) process can be modeled with an ACD model such as the Burr-ACD (which has shown to fit well empirically).   This can be calibrated for 2 sets of durations, one for “local vol” and one for “jump vol”.   Potentially we could consider sub-dividing into more levels.

The ACD process as developed by Engle and Russell specifies the duration as a mixing process:

The conditional density of Di is is then:

The ultimate form is subject to the choice of hazard function.   The general form of the ACD update equation is reminiscent of GARCH:

Where g(D) is an analog of our hazard function for the distribution. In our case we will use the Burr distribution as proposed by Grammig and Maurer (2000).  The Burr distribution density, survival and hazard functions are given by:

We use the Burr density as the distribution ξ[i] for the indicator component ε[i] in Di = ψ[i]ε[i].  We choose a density for the distribution of ψ[i] as a gamma mixture (from Guirreri 2009):

And the distribution of the indicator process ε[i] as the Burr distribution from above.   To determine the probability of duration D[i] given ψ[i], as we have  ε[i] = D[i] / ψ[i]:

Addendum: having done more exploration on this, looks like the Stochastic Volatility Duration model proposed by Ghysels,  Gourieroux, Jasiak, and Joann (2004), would offer a much better prediction capability.

The level process
The jump level process can be relatively simple.   We observe autoregressive decay across returns, both for diffusion related and jump returns.   There are gaps in between return events in both scenarios, but our mixture with the indicator process will allow us to model this.

A relatively simple autoregressive process can be used to model the event size decay from a self-exciting jump level for each range.   Given that observations will be made at non-uniform times, an exponential time-dependent AR model is probably best.   The distribution will need to be estimated.

Conclusion
Model volatility with two processes:

1. intensity process to represent periodicity / gapping behavior
2. magnitude process representing self-exciting AR behavior

Addendum: discovered that others are thinking along the same lines.   There are a couple of papers circa 2008/2009 proposing models similar to what I have outlined.

La complexité croissante des technologies auxquelles un consultant est confronté ne lui laisse que deux choix pour faire son métier : utiliser Google comme outil palliatif à son besoin d’information ou bien rejoindre une communauté d’experts.

A quoi peut-il servir pour un consultant de rejoindre une communauté technique ?

Cette démarche que beaucoup qualifieraient aujourd’hui d’iconoclaste représente pourtant la seule solution permettant à un consultant de trouver les réponses dont il a besoin dans un contexte qui évolue très vite.

Rares sont les sociétés de services qui jouissent d’effectifs suffisants pour permettre un réel échange d’informations entre consultants travaillant dans un même domaine technique. D’une façon générale, le consultant est disponible pour les clients, pas pour l’interne. Si on interroge un consultant, comme j’ai été amené à le faire dans une société [...]

Découvrez la suite de mon interview, réalisée par Hugo Lunardelli, très prochainement dans les colonnes d’ITR Manager.