Dramatic increases in childhood obesity necessitate a more complete understanding of neural mechanisms of hunger and satiation in pediatric populations. In this study, normal weight children and adolescents underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning before and after eating a meal. Participants showed increased activation to visual food stimuli in the amygdala, medial frontal/orbitofrontal cortex, and insula in the pre-meal condition; no regions of interest responded in the post-meal condition. These results closely parallel previous findings in adults. In addition, we found evidence for habituation to food stimuli in the amygdala within the pre-meal session. These findings provide evidence that normal patterns of neural activity related to food motivation begin in childhood. Results have implications for obese children and adults, who may have abnormal hunger and satiation mechanisms.

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In this paper we describe our experiences with the design, the deployment, and the initial operation of a distributed system for the remote monitoring and operation of multiple heterogeneous commercial buildings across the Internet from a single control center. Such systems can significantly reduce building energy usage.Our system is distinguished by its ability to interface to multiple heterogeneous legacy building Energy Management Control Systems (EMCSs), its use of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard communication protocols for the former task, development of a standardized naming system for monitoring points in buildings, the use of a relational DBMS to store and process time series data, automatic time and unit conversion, and a scripted time series visualization system. We describe our design choices and our experiences in development and operation. We note requirements for future distributed systems software for interoperability of heterogeneous real-time data acquisition and control systems.