A moderate TC intervention can impact favorably on defined biomedical and psychosocial indices of frailty. This intervention can also have favorable effects upon the occurrence of falls. Tai Chi warrants further study as an exercise treatment to improve the health of older people.

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Older persons who are willing to begin exercise programs are often not willing to continue them. At the Atlanta FICSIT (Frailty and Injuries: Cooperative Studies of Intervention Techniques) site, individuals aged 70+ were randomized to Tai Chi (TC), individualized balance training (BT), and exercise control education (ED) groups for 15 weeks. In a follow-up assessment 4 months post-intervention, 130 subjects responded to exit interview questions asking about perceived benefits of participation. Both TC and BT subjects reported increased confidence in balance and movement, but only TC subjects reported that their daily activities and their overall life had been affected; many of these subjects had changed their normal physical activity to incorporate ongoing TC practice. The data suggest that when mental as well as physical control is perceived to be enhanced, with a generalized sense of improvement in overall well-being, older persons' motivation to continue exercising also increases.

A moderate TC intervention can impact favorably on defined biomedical and psychosocial indices of frailty. This intervention can also have favorable effects upon the occurrence of falls. TC warrants further study as an exercise treatment to improve the health of older people.

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To encourage and support innovation, synthetic electric grids are fictional, designed systems that mimic the complexity of actual electric grids but contain no confidential information. Synthetic grid design is driven by the requirement to match wide variety of metrics derived from statistics of actual grids. In order to scale these systems to 10,000 buses or more, robust reactive power planning is needed, accounting for power flow convergence issues. This paper addresses reactive power planning and power flow convergence in the context of large synthetic power grids. The iterative algorithm presented by this paper supplements a synthetic transmission network that has been validated by a dc power flow with a realistic set of voltage control devices to meet a specified voltage profile, even with the constraints of difficult power flow convergence for large systems. The algorithm is illustrated with an example new synthetic 10,000 bus system, geographically situated in the western United States, which is publicly available and useful for a variety of research studies. An analysis is shown validating the synthetic system with actual grid characteristics.