Healthy aging reduces dynamic balance control as measured by the simplified Star Excursion Balance Test.

Background: Detecting and classifying factors that contribute to age-related balance decline are essential for targeted interventions. Dynamic postural tests that challenge neuromuscular balance control are important to detect subtle deficits that affect functional balance in healthy aging.

Research Question: How does healthy aging affect specific components of dynamic postural control as measured by the simplified Star Excursion Balance Test (SEBT)?

Methods: Twenty healthy younger (18-39 years) and twenty healthy older (58-74 years) adults performed the standardized simplified SEBT, which involved standing on one leg and reaching the contralateral leg as far as possible in the anterior, posteromedial, and posterolateral directions.

Prevalence and correlates of prior experimentation with e-cigarettes over conventional cigarettes among adolescents: Findings from the 2015 Korea Youth Risk Behaviour Web-based Survey.

Introduction: As concern is increasing about electronic cigarette use among never-smoking youth, we aimed to examine the prevalence and correlates of prior experimentation of electronic cigarettes (e-cigs) over conventional cigarettes (c-cigs).

Methods: We used the 10th Korea Youth Risk Behavior Web-based Survey in 2015, including 67960 participants as study subjects. This survey was designed as stratified multistage clustered samples from middle schools and high schools.

Fairness in technological design.

This paper addresses an important multi-disciplinary issue of current interest, that is, the implications of technological design for fairness. A visual, graphical methodology centered on the Taylor-Russell diagram is proposed to address this issue. The Taylor-Russell diagram helps to identify and explore ways in which predictions built into designs can pit the interests of different constituencies against one another.

Why test animals to treat humans? On the validity of animal models.

Critics of animal modeling have advanced a variety of arguments against the validity of the practice. The point of one such form of argument is to establish that animal modeling is pointless and therefore immoral. In this article, critical arguments of this form are divided into three types, the pseudoscience argument, the disanalogy argument, and the predictive validity argument.