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Purpose: Previous research investigating the impact of induced mental fatigue in football (soccer) has demonstrated associated performance decrements in physical, technical, tactical and decision-making performance. A common limitation amongst this research is the protocols used to induce mental fatigue which provides low ecological validity, and the inclusion of recreational or sub-elite players. Therefore, understanding the presence of mental fatigue in elite football can provide insight into protocols with greater ecological validity. Methods: The current study used focus groups with 10 elite female football players, focusing on five topics (travel, fixture congestion, receiving tactical information, pre-match routine and pressure to win) related to the perceived causes of mental fatigue in elite football (directed by anecdotal quotes in elite football and research-based theories). Results: Several themes emerged from the data; travel fatigue, inability to switch off from football, fatigue experienced following team meetings, use of pre-match music and internal pressure to succeed. Conclusion: These findings present practical recommendations to reduce mental fatigue in elite football settings, such as considering the timing, content and duration of team meetings, providing players with free time/rest where possible, and considering the modality of coaching instructions during matches.

A distinctive feature of game-based learning environments is their capacity for enabling stealth assessment. Stealth assessment analyzes a stream of fine-grained student interaction data from a game-based learning environment to dynamically draw inferences about students’ competencies through evidence-centered design. In evidence-centered design, evidence models have been traditionally designed using statistical rules authored by domain experts that are encoded using Bayesian networks. This article presents DeepStealth , a deep learning-based stealth assessment framework, that yields significant reductions in the feature engineering labor that has previously been required to create stealth assessments. DeepStealth utilizes end-to-end trainable deep neural network-based evidence models. Using this framework, evidence models are devised using a set of predictive features captured from raw, low-level interaction data to infer evidence for competencies. We investigate two deep learning-based evidence models, long short-term memory networks (LSTMs) and n -gram encoded feedforward neural networks (FFNNs). We compare these models’ predictive performance for inferring students’ knowledge to linear-chain conditional random fields (CRFs) and naive Bayes models. We perform feature set-level analyses of game trace logs and external pre-learning measures, and we examine the models’ early prediction capacity. The framework is evaluated using data collected from 182 middle school students interacting with a game-based learning environment for middle grade computational thinking. Results indicate that LSTM-based stealth assessors outperform competitive baseline approaches with respect to predictive accuracy and early prediction capacity. We find that LSTMs, FFNNs, and CRFs all benefit from combined feature sets derived from both game trace logs and external pre-learning measures.

CONTEXT There are limited data on the nature of environmental lead hazards identified during residential inspections for child blood lead levels (BLLs) of less than 10 μg/dL. We compare inspection findings for child BLLs of 5 to 9 μg/dL versus 10 μg/dL or more. DESIGN We reviewed inspection reports in Maine from September 2016 to March 2018. We used continuity-adjusted or Fisher's exact test for categorical variables and Wilcoxon rank-sum tests for continuous variables to compare differences in child, family, household, and lead hazard characteristics between BLL categories (5-9 μg/dL vs ≥10 μg/dL). We used Spearman correlation coefficients to assess relationships between home surface lead dust measurements and BLLs. RESULTS Of 351 residential inspections, 272 (77%) were for children with BLLs of 5 to 9 μg/dL. Children with BLLs of 5 to 9 μg/dL as compared with children with BLLs of 10 μg/dL or more were less likely to chew window sills and door frames (8% vs 21%; P = .01), but otherwise were similar with respect to other established risk factors for lead poisoning. Children with BLLs of 5 to 9 μg/dL tended to have fewer paint hazards inside their homes (64% vs 78%; P = .03), and they were more likely to have dust-only hazards (8% vs 3%) or no identified lead paint hazards (23% vs 15%), though these differences were not statistically significant. For children with BLLs of 5 to 9 μg/dL, BLL was weakly correlated with average window sill dust level (Spearman r = 0.16; P = .01) and average floor dust level (r = 0.13; P = .03), but these correlations were not observed for children with BLLs of 10 μg/dL and higher. CONCLUSIONS We have found that inspections of homes of children with BLLs of 5 to 9 μg/dL are nearly as likely to identify lead hazards that require abatement as inspections of homes of children with BLLs of 10 μg/dL.

The food enzyme endo‐1,3(4)‐β‐glucanase (3(or 4)‐β‐d‐glucan 3(4)‐glucanohydrolase; EC 3.2.1.6) is produced with a genetically modified Bacillus subtilis strain DP‐Ezm28 by Danisco US Inc. The genetic modifications do not give rise to safety concerns. The production strain of the food enzyme contains multiple copies of a known antimicrobial resistance gene. However, based on the absence of viable cells and DNA from the production organism in the food enzyme, this is not considered to be a risk. The food enzyme is intended to be used in distilled alcohol production and brewing processes. Since residual amounts of total organic solids (TOS) are removed by distillation, dietary exposure was only calculated for brewing processes. Based on the maximum use levels recommended for brewing processes and individual data from the EFSA Comprehensive European Food Database, dietary exposure to the food enzyme–total organic solids was estimated to be up to 0.183 mg TOS/kg body weight (bw) per day in European populations. Genotoxicity tests did not indicate a safety concern. The systemic toxicity was assessed by means of a repeated dose 90‐day oral toxicity study in rats. The Panel identified a no observed adverse effect level of 1,000 mg TOS/kg bw per day, the highest dose tested, which when compared with the estimated dietary exposure, results in a margin of exposure of at least 5464. Similarity of the amino acid sequence to those of known allergens was searched and two matches were found. The Panel considered that, under the intended conditions of use, the risk of allergic sensitisation and elicitation reactions upon dietary exposure to this food enzyme cannot be excluded, but the likelihood is considered low. Based on the data provided, the Panel concluded that this food enzyme does not give rise to safety concerns under the intended conditions of use.

There is growing international concern about the mental health of those who work in sport, including coaches. However, we currently know little about the prevalence of mental illness and the experience of mental health among coaches, and their perceptions and use of workplace mental health support services. Little is also known about coaches&rsquo, disclosure of mental illness to, and seeking help from, work colleagues. We explore these issues using data from 202 coaches who responded to the first United Kingdom survey of mental health in the sport and physical activity workforce. In total, 55% of coaches reported having ever experienced a mental illness, and 44% currently did, with coaches in grassroots/community settings being most likely to experience mental illness. Depression and anxiety were the most commonly reported conditions and many coaches preferred to access mental health support outside of the organisation for whom they worked or volunteered, with decisions to seek help from others in the workplace being shaped by complex organisational and personal considerations. The findings suggest there is an important public health challenge which needs to be met among coaches, so that we can better address a question of fundamental importance: &lsquo, who is looking after the people looking after the people&rsquo

Recent years have seen a growing interest in block-based programming environments for computer science education. Although block-based programming offers a gentle introduction to coding for novice programmers, introductory computer science still presents significant challenges, so there is a great need for block-based programming environments to provide students with adaptive support. Predictive student modeling holds significant potential for adaptive support in block-based programming environments because it can identify early on when a student is struggling. However, predictive student models often make a number of simplifying assumptions, such as assuming a normal response distribution or homogeneous student characteristics, which can limit the predictive performance of models. These assumptions, when invalid, can significantly reduce the predictive accuracy of student models. To address these issues, we introduce an approach to predictive student modeling that utilizes Bayesian hierarchical linear models. This approach explicitly accounts for individual student differences and programming activity differences by analyzing block-based programs created by students in a series of introductory programming activities. Evaluation results reveal that predictive student models that account for both the distributional and hierarchical factors outperform baseline models. These findings suggest that predictive student models based on Bayesian hierarchical modeling and representing individual differences in students can substantially improve models' accuracy for predicting student performance on post-tests. By improving the predictive performance of student models, this work holds substantial potential for improving adaptive support in block-based programming environments.

In 2011, pioglitazone was withdrawn from the French market owing to a potential risk of bladder cancer. This study aimed at assessing the impact of this pioglitazone withdrawal (PW) considering (i) trends in antidiabetic uses and (ii) changes in hospitalization/death rates in diabetic patients following PW. We first considered the general population of the Echantillon Generaliste des Beneficiaires (EGB), a 1/97th representative sample of the French healthcare insurance system beneficiaries, for the 2010–2014 period. In this, for each non-insulinic antidiabetic drug class, changes within the numbers of monthly supplied drug units for 1000 subjects were studied through times series and Unobserved Component Models. Second, we identified from the EGB a cohort of patients who were delivered a non-insulinic antidiabetic between 01 April 2011 and 01 August 2011 (date of PW). In this, post-withdrawal incidences of all-cause hospitalization and death were compared amongst pioglitazone users and non-users using proportional subdistribution hazards models. PW was accompanied by an increase in metformin (+ 11.7; 95% CI 1.1–22.3) and glinide (+ 11.0; 95% CI 1.2–20.8) numbers of monthly supplied units for 1000 subjects. No significant change was found for GLP-1 agonists, DPP-4 inhibitors, sulphonylureas or alpha-glucosidase inhibitors. In the cohort of non-insulinic antidiabetic users at the time of PW (1093 pioglitazone users, 17,900 non-users), being a pioglitazone user at PW was not associated with a subsequently higher rate of hospitalization. If PW was accompanied with significant changes in the use of some antidiabetics, no adverse impact of PW on hospitalization or death rates of diabetic type 2 patients was found.

According to Turner and Stets (2007), emotions are an inextricable feature of human experience, behaviour, and interaction. Emotions are, for them, the glue that can bind people together and, equal...

The consequences of the withdrawal of marketing authorisation of drugs have mostly been studied considering drug prescription patterns for the therapeutic alternatives of the withdrawn drugs. The potential concomitant changes in the reporting of adverse reactions concerning these alternatives have been studied less often. The objective of this study was to analyse the changes in the reporting of adverse events (AEs) for therapeutic alternatives after the withdrawal of three medicines (dextropropoxyphene, pioglitazone and tetrazepam) from the market for safety reasons. This study was performed using both the French pharmacovigilance database and the Echantillon Generaliste des Beneficiaires (a random sample of French health insurance affiliates). For dextropropoxyphene, pioglitazone and tetrazepam alternatives, the number and types of case reports were studied for both the year preceding the first official safety warning and the year following the withdrawal. Reporting rates expressed per 10,000 reimbursements (RRReimb) and per 10,000 treated patients (RRPat) were also compared for the two periods. After dextropropoxyphene withdrawal, case reports and reimbursements increased for tramadol (case reports: +23%, reimbursements: +13%) and codeine (case reports: +74%, reimbursements: +47%), RRPat being significantly increased for tramadol (0.92 vs. 1.06, p = 0.02). After pioglitazone withdrawal, case reports increased for dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitors, glinides, and glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) analogues (+84%, +22% and +5%, respectively) and reimbursements (+55, +11 and +50%, respectively); both decreased for sulfonylureas (case reports: −6%, reimbursements: −2%). RRPat increased for DPP-4 inhibitors (1.63 vs. 2.26, p = 0.008). After tetrazepam withdrawal, case reports increased for diazepam, methocarbamol and thiocolchicoside (+110, +86 and +157%, respectively), as lesser did reimbursements. RRPat increased for diazepam (1.78 vs. 2.41, p = 0.054) and thiocolchicoside (0.14 vs. 0.24, p = 0.013). For the three drug withdrawals investigated, the number of case reports involving alternatives increased to a larger extent than the numbers of prescriptions. This could relate to a higher occurrence of AEs in new users of alternatives who switched from the withdrawn medicines or to an increased awareness of possible AEs.

The food enzyme pullulanase (pullulan 6‐α‐glucanohydrolase; EC 3.2.1.41) is produced with a genetically modified Bacillus licheniformis (strain DP‐Dzp39) by Danisco US Inc. The genetic modifications do not give rise to safety concerns. The food enzyme is free from viable cells of the production organism and its recombinant DNA. This pullulanase is intended to be used in brewing processes, starch processing for glucose syrups production and distilled alcohol production. Residual amounts of total organic solids (TOS) are removed by distillation and by the purification steps applied during the production of glucose syrups, consequently, dietary exposure was not calculated for these food processes. For brewery products, based on the maximum use level recommended for the brewing processes and individual data from the EFSA Comprehensive European Food Consumption Database, dietary exposure to the food enzyme–TOS was estimated to be up to 0.053 mg TOS/kg body weight (bw) per day in European populations. Genotoxicity tests with the food enzyme did not raise concern. The systemic toxicity was assessed by means of a repeated dose 90‐day oral toxicity study in rats. The Panel identified a no‐observed‐adverse‐effect level at the highest dose of 500 mg TOS/kg bw per day that, compared to the estimated dietary exposure, results in sufficiently high margin of exposure (at least 9,400). The amino acid sequence of the food enzyme did not match those of known allergens. The Panel considered that, under the intended condition of use, the risk of allergic sensitisation and elicitation reactions upon dietary exposure to this food enzyme cannot be excluded, but the likelihood is considered low. Based on the data provided, the Panel concluded that this food enzyme does not raise safety concerns under the intended conditions of use.

BACKGROUND Esophagitis with eosinophilia, inflammation, and fibrosis represent a chronic condition in humans with food allergies. OBJECTIVE In this investigation, we asked whether esophagitis with an eosinophilic component is observed in young pigs rendered allergic to hen egg white protein (HEWP). METHODS Food allergy was induced in young pigs using two protocols. In one protocol, sensitized pigs were challenged by gavage with a single dose of HEWP. Clinical signs were monitored for 24 hours, and then, gastrointestinal (GI) tissues were collected for histological examination. The phenotype of circulating, ovalbumin (OVA)-specific T cells also was examined in HEWP challenged animals. In the second protocol, sensitized animals were fed HEWP for 28 days. Animals were then examined by endoscopy and gastrointestinal tissues collected for histological examination. RESULTS In pigs challenged by gavage with HEWP, clinical signs were noted in 5/6 pigs including diarrhoea, emesis, and skin rash. Clinical signs were not seen in any control group. Histological analysis revealed significant levels of oesophageal eosinophilic infiltration (P

Purpose This paper responds to the question, is exercise medicine? It does so using a qualitative case study that proposes that exercise is recreation. The study (1) describes and reflects upon an exercise is recreation metaphor, (2) establishes the principles and processes used to develop a sport park within which exercise is recreation, and (3) presents a comparative analysis of the exercise is recreation approach with a UK quality framework for “exercise referrals”. Methods Four years of documentation were collated and placed into 14 categories: (1) university strategies, (2) plans of the site, (3) policy documents, (4) minutes of a steering group, (5) contemporary documents, (6) organisational charts, (7) responses to local government policies on sport, (8) consultation documents, (9) operational procedures, (10) facility specifications, (11) partnership agreements, (12) material relating to the university's work on events, (13) notes on the universities sport department, and (14) timetables. These data were analysed through a 4-stage process which used recreation as the analytical theme for a comparative analysis. Results The characteristics of the exercise is recreation metaphor in this case are (1) a focus on the experience of the user, (2) the promotion of well-being, (3) the importance of community, (4) embracing inclusivity, (5) sport, (6) aesthetics, and (7) leisure time. The principles and processes used to develop the sport park were (1) custodianship, (2) partnerships, (3) values, (4) inter-professional working, (5) local heritage, (6) change, (7) the natural park environment, and (8) “riding the bike as you build it”. The comparative analysis with a UK quality framework for “exercise referrals” clearly shows a difference from an exercise is recreation approach. Conclusion Exercise is recreation and may enable individuals and communities to reach a state of well-being.

Background The prime focus of research on sports injury has been on physical factors. This is despite our understanding that when an athlete sustains an injury it has psychosocial as well as physical impacts. Psychosocial factors have been suggested as prognostic influences on the outcomes of rehabilitation. The aim of this work was to address the question: are psychosocial factors associated with sports injury rehabilitation outcomes in competitive athletes?Study design Mixed studies systematic review (PROSPERO reg.CRD42014008667).Method Electronic database and bibliographic searching was undertaken from the earliest entry until 1 June 2015. Studies that included injured competitive athletes, psychosocial factors and a sports injury rehabilitation outcome were reviewed by the authors. A quality appraisal of the studies was undertaken to establish the risk of reporting bias.Results 25 studies were evaluated that included 942 injured competitive athletes were appraised and synthesised. Twenty studies had not been included in previous reviews. The mean methodological quality of the studies was 59% (moderate risk of reporting bias). Convergent thematic analysis uncovered three core themes across the studies: (1) emotion associated with rehabilitation outcomes; (2) cognitions associated with rehabilitation outcomes; and (3) behaviours associated with rehabilitation outcomes. Injury and performance-related fears, anxiety and confidence were associated with rehabilitation outcomes. There is gender-related, age-related and injury-related bias in the reviewed literature.Conclusions Psychosocial factors were associated with a range of sports injury rehabilitation outcomes. Practitioners need to recognise that an injured athlete's thoughts, feelings and actions may influence the outcome of rehabilitation.

Formative assessment strategies are used to direct instruction by establishing where learners’ understanding is, how it is developing, informing teachers and students alike as to how they might get to their next set of goals of conceptual understanding. For the science classroom, one rich source of formative assessment data about scientific thinking and practice is in notebooks used during inquiry-oriented activities. In this study, the goal was to better understand how student knowledge was distributed between student drawings and writings about magnetism in notebooks, and how these findings might inform formative assessment strategies. Here, drawing and writing samples were extracted and evaluated from our digital science notebook, with embedded content and laboratories. Three drawings and five writing samples from 309 participants were analyzed using a common ten-dimensional rubric. Descriptive and inferential statistics revealed that fourth-grade student understanding of magnetism was distributed unevenly between writing and drawing. Case studies were then presented for two exemplar students. Based on the rubric we developed, students were able to articulate more of their knowledge through the drawing activities than through written word, but the combination of the two mediums provided the richest understanding of student conceptions and how they changed over the course of their investigations.

Recent years have seen a growing recognition of the role that affect plays in learning. Because game-based learning environments elicit a wide range of student affective states, affect-enhanced student modeling for game-based learning holds considerable promise. This paper introduces an affect-enhanced student modeling framework that leverages facial expression tracking for game-based learning. The affect-enhanced student modeling framework was used to generate predictive models of student learning and student engagement for students who interacted with CRYSTAL ISLAND, a game-based learning environment for microbiology education. Findings from the study reveal that the affect-enhanced student models significantly outperform baseline predictive student models that utilize the same gameplay traces but do not use facial expression tracking. The study also found that models based on individual facial action coding units are more effective than composite emotion models. The findings suggest that introducing facial expression tracking can improve the accuracy of student models, both for predicting student learning gains and also for predicting student engagement.

The central object of this introductory essay, and of this Special Issue more broadly, is to explore relations between the study of work and the continuing evolution of the sociology of sport with a particular focus on the mental health of sports workers. In particular, we argue that revitalizing the study of sports work, and eschewing the highly individualized and reductionist approaches most often demonstrated by dominating quantitative and psychological approaches, is essential if we are to understand more adequately the complex interdependencies which characterize the lives of sports workers and have often profound impacts on health and wellbeing. We also argue that there has been a relative neglect – until recently – among sociologists of sport to systematically research the benefits and costs to mental health of sports work, and that there is much to be gained from broader sociological investigations of work in pursuing this research agenda. In doing so, we examine: (i) social trends in work and employment; (ii) work and labour as key areas of sociological investigation; and (iii) the implications of work and sport for mental health.

Conducting research with participants in closed social worlds is notoriously difficult and many researchers refrain from even attempting to invest their time in such work. This is particularly the case in contexts such as professional football (soccer), which has for many years been characterized by a traditionally close-knit, male-dominated subculture characterized by rather unequal power relations between managers and coaches and players, and in which there is a deeply institutionalized suspicion of ‘outsiders’. Notwithstanding these difficulties, in this chapter we discuss our successful experience of undertaking focus groups on education and welfare with 303 young footballers (16–18 years old) who attended 21 professional football Academies and Centres of Excellence in England and Wales in 2009. We focus on the practical lessons we learnt, and the methodological difficulties we encountered, as a result of the diverse scenarios with which we had to deal once we had been granted permission to undertake research in clubs. Consideration will be given to the ways in which we negotiated access with key stakeholders, the ways in which we sought to reassure players of the anonymity of their responses, and the serious methodological challenges we experienced when conducting focus groups in diverse settings in clubs that were accessible by other club staff.

Few biomarkers progress from discovery to become validated tools or diagnostics. To bridge this gap, three European biomedical research infrastructures — EATRIS-ERIC (focused on translational medicine), BBMRI-ERIC (focused on biobanking) and ELIXIR (focused on data sharing) — are paving the way to developing and sharing best practices for biomarker validation. Few biomarkers progress from discovery to become validated tools or diagnostics. To bridge this gap, three European biomedical research infrastructures — EATRIS-ERIC (focused on translational medicine), BBMRI-ERIC (focused on biobanking) and ELIXIR (focused on data sharing) — are paving the way to developing and sharing best practices for biomarker validation.

Drawing on interview data from a study of one School Sport Partnership (SSP) in north-west England, this paper examines (from the perspective of teachers): (1) some of the ways in which the SSP programme facilitated the increasing use of sports coaches to deliver aspects of physical education (PE) in state primary schools in England and (2) how coaches were accommodated within existing curricular arrangements. The use of coaches was found to be widespread and normalized, especially in extra-curricular PE which was often a coach-only zone. In some schools, coaches delivered all aspects of PE provision without the presence of teachers regardless of when the subject was delivered, and in other schools teachers were present but often acted in a supervisory capacity. This raised questions about the degree to which teachers were meaningfully involved in the planning and delivery of sessions and whether the use of coaches was likely to enhance teachers' confidence in, and specialist knowledge of, PE. Grounded in...

This chapter examines some of the links that exist between families, the growth of extra-curricular activity as a formal and informal pedagogic practice, and young people's sport participation. Family life, relationships between parents and their offspring, and the social process of parenting have long been of concern to government, policy-makers and academics. In the context of physical education (PE) and school sport (PESS), the growth of extra-curricular options and activity has been facilitated by the increased outsourcing of activity in schools, in the UK and elsewhere including Australia and New Zealand. An Ipsos MORI survey of 309 parents of 5- to 16-year-olds also revealed that three-quarters of respondents reported that their child had regularly participated in extra-curricular activity in the last 12 months. Engagement in extra-curricular activities is not an exclusively middle-class phenomenon, although middle-class families often make more and different kinds of use of them.

The aim of this systematic review is to summarise the results of cohort studies that examined the incidence of SCD in marathons and to assess the quality of the methods used. A search of the PROSPERO international database revealed no prospective or published systematic reviews investigating SCD in marathons. The review was conducted using studies that reported and characterised the incidence of SCD in people participating in marathons. Studies were identified via electronic database searches (Medline, CINAHL, SPORTDiscus and Google Scholar) from January 1, 1966 to October 1, 2014 and through manual literature searches. 7 studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in this review. 6 of the studies were conducted in the USA and 1 in the UK. These studies covered a 34-year period involving between 215,413 and 3,949,000 runners. The SCD of between 4 and 28 people are recorded in the papers and the reported estimates of the incidence of SCD in marathons ranged widely from 0.6 to 1.9 per 100,000 runners. The proportion of those suffering SCD who were male ranged from 57.1% to 100% and the mean age reported in the papers, ranged from 37 to 48. This review raises 4 methodological concerns over i) collating reports of SCD in marathons; ii) time of death in relation to the marathon; iii) the use of registrants rather than runners in the estimates of sample size and iv) limited detail on runners exercise history. These four concerns all threaten the reliability and interpretation of any estimate of SCD incidence rates in marathons. This review recommends that the methods used to collect data on SCD in marathons be improved and that a central reporting system be established.

This article re-examines some of the complex policy issues and politics associated with two key features of the contemporary Paralympic sport movement: the inclusion in mainstream sports competitions of disabled athletes and the sports in which they complete, and the use by disabled athletes of various technologies to assist their performance. It is argued that, at least at an ideological level, there is a strong link between the inclusion of disabled athletes, the sports they play, and the events in which they compete in mainstream settings, and the idea that inclusion helps change social attitudes towards disabled people and enhance their sporting experiences is one which is frequently stressed by many people involved in both Olympic and Paralympic sport. An examination of certain aspects of the organization of Paralympic sport, and of sport more broadly, however, casts some doubt on the assumed benefits of inclusion and the promotion of more favourable attitudes and experiences among disabled people and other members of the wider society. In particular, it is argued that it is churlish to expect that hosting a single one-off sporting event such as the London 2012 Paralympic Games will have the effect of reversing the deep-seated inequalities and complex social problems that have long beset the lives of many disabled people, and which are likely to be hardened by controversial changes in social welfare policy in Britain and elsewhere.

It is now well recognized that the global spread of modern achievement sport has occurred in the context of wider social processes, including the growing social significance of sport, the medicaliz...

We have investigated ion beam assisted crystallization as a possible method for the creation of crystalline Si layers on amorphous substrates. Ion beam assisted crystallization has previously been characterised with pulsed and modest continuous beam current densities, but not at the high densities that would be required for high throughput processes. In this study, amorphous Si layers were implanted with Ga using a focused ion beam (FIB) tool and with Ga, Ar, Ge and As using beamline implanters. Crystallization was only observed for Ga, implying Ga alone was acting to reduce the activation energy. The observed rates of crystallization also implied that the relaxation state of the a-Si, influenced by the beam conditions, was an important driver for the phase transformation.

This paper examines teachers’ perceptions of their working relationships with learning support assistants (LSAs) when seeking to incorporate young disabled people and pupils with special educational needs (SEN) within mainstream physical education (PE), an area that has been a largely neglected aspect of research in inclusive education. The findings indicate that teachers spoke positively of these relationships when LSAs were perceived as making a positive contribution to the development of pupils’ learning and when they supported teachers as they did in other school subjects. Conversely, when LSAs and other support staff failed to provide teachers with information that was related to pupils’ needs in PE, and when LSAs did not possess the required skills, knowledge and expertise of the subject, teachers were rather critical of their relationships with them. In this regard, LSAs were seen as placing a particularly significant constraint on teachers’ ability to meet the needs of pupils in PE lessons. It is ...

Writing over a decade ago, Penney and Harris examined extra-curricular physical education (ECPE) provision in state schools in England and Wales and focused, in particular, on issues of inclusion, equality and equity. They concluded, among other things, that ECPE provision was highly gendered, characterised by a disproportionate emphasis on traditional team games and competitive sport and provided a limited number of opportunities to only a minority of pupils. Although Penney and Harris were less concerned with reflecting upon how the content, organisation and delivery of ECPE may come to impact the involvement and experiences of young disabled people and those with special educational needs (SEN), their analysis nevertheless has important implications for understanding this largely under-explored and neglected aspect of research. In this paper, therefore, we draw upon some key aspects of Penney and Harris's analysis to examine the extent and ways in which physical education (PE) teachers have endeavoured...

Based upon focus groups with 12 secondary school physical education (PE) teachers working in north-west England, this paper examines: (i) how young disabled people and pupils with special educational needs (SEN) were assessed in National Curriculum Physical Education (NCPE) 2000; and (ii) how teachers managed the constraints on them to assess these pupils in the same manner as other young people. The findings indicate that the NCPE assessment criteria were often perceived as inappropriate, inadequate and attainable by only a few pupils. Although teachers were constrained to use these criteria because of their statutory nature, the assessment of pupils was very much a matter of personal judgement and guess work that resulted in pupils being awarded grades that were not necessarily accurate or sufficiently indicative of their abilities. It is concluded that the competing pressures on teachers to include young disabled people and those with SEN in mainstream lessons resulted in a series of unplanned outcomes that were not intended nor desired by government, and which came to limit the extent to which pupils’ abilities could be assessed, in any meaningful way, within the NCPE 2000 statutory assessment arrangements.

This paper is a reflective account of a work-based learning programme designed for patients within a forensic learning disability service. The literature review indicated a shortage of published work in this field and reference is made to developments in mental health settings. A commentary is provided of the three partners involved and the working relationship between the hospital, the workplace and the further education college. As a specific vocational rehabilitation programme, it was important to consider the context of a work placement and the process of introducing an award-bearing course. The paper provides a description of the current developments in the qualification structure at entry level and the progress of a pilot group. Views were sought from the patient group about their involvement in the programme and the advantages of collaborative work are stated, with the joint delivery by an occupational therapy student, a teacher and the nursing team. It is suggested that the narrative of this paper could be built on, with the application of an assessment tool to provide a quantitative analysis of the impact of the programme. It is the intention that the descriptive elements of the paper will inform other practitioners and contribute to a model of good practice.

There has been, over the past two or three decades, a growing concern over the emergence of what has been described as a financial ‘crisis’ in English professional football. In the context of the growing commercialization of the game, this ‘crisis’ has typically been explained in terms of a series of economic developments that have occurred since the 1980s, and especially since the formation of the Premier League. In this article we argue that, contrary to popular belief, these processes have longer term historical roots that can be traced back to the early nineteenth century, and to the immediate post‐1945 period in particular. We also argue that while economic processes have made a central, though largely unplanned, contribution to the widening financial differentials in English football between the late nineteenth century and the 1970s, these processes cannot be explained adequately if considered in isolation from other, yet equally significant, social processes resulting from the changing power differentials that characterized the dynamic, increasingly complex, English football figuration.

One key aspect of the growing policy emphasis on educational inclusion in England has been the tendency for physical education (PE) to be used as an important vehicle of social policy targeted at promoting the inclusion of young disabled people and those with special educational needs in mainstream schools. Drawing on aspects of figurational sociology, the central objective of this study is to examine the extent to which PE teachers have been able to achieve the government’s inclusion policy goals articulated in the 2000 National Curriculum for Physical Education (NCPE) for England. The findings indicate that using the NCPE as a means to pursue the government’s educational inclusion policy goals has had unplanned outcomes that have the effect of undermining the extent to which the government is able to use inclusion to make a greater contribution to the promotion of young people’s experiences of PE. It is also argued that these outcomes that no‐one had planned or intended may, for some of the groups invol...

The central objectives of this paper are: i) to explore some of the implications of three issues that are to be found within the White Paper on Sport, namely, the protection of minors, free movement of players and the education and welfare of young athletes; and ii) to reflect upon the ways in which, and extent to which, the recommendations the European Commission makes in these areas may come to impact on the future welfare and employment and human rights of young people working in professional football Academies and Centres of Excellence (CoE) in England. In this regard, it is argued that, insofar as the Commission retains a commitment to ensuring the free movement of players and abolishing discrimination on the basis of nationality, this may do more to limit, than encourage, the willingness of professional football clubs to develop more young talented English players in their Academies and CoE. It is also suggested that while the White Paper places particular importance on implementing a range of strategies to tackle the abuse of young athletes and to protect the welfare of young people by, amongst other things, enhancing their education and training, in the context of professional football the efficacy of those strategies in bringing about desired change in young people's lives may be significantly constrained by the prevailing subcultures and values that surround the sport.

Pedometers have been identified as a tool for health professionals to promote physical activity. This study, which aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of wearing a pedometer on general practitioners' attitudes to promoting physical activity, was a pragmatic, multi-centred, randomized controlled trial within a primary care trust in England. The participants were 102 general practitioners (GPs). Eighty-five (48 males, 37 females) of the GPs completed pre and post questionnaires, 43 of whom were in the intervention group. Statistical analysis revealed no significant changes between the control and intervention groups for attitude to engage in physical activity (t(83) = 1.13, CI -0.362 to 0.099) or attitude to promote physical activity in their patients (t(83) = 1.7, CI -0.593 to 0.045). A higher volume of walking was significantly correlated with a more positive attitude to engage in physical activity (r = 0.58, P0.01) but not with a more positive attitude to promoting physical activity. Wearing a pedometer had no significant effect on GPs' attitudes to engaging in physical activity or promoting physical activity in their patients.

Welcome to the first issue of the International Journal of Sport Policy. The rationale for a new social science journal is twofold: first, it is argued that there is a need to provide an outlet for...

Drawing upon aspects of figurational sociology, this paper examines the practice of sports development at a time of rapidly changing social and political policy. In particular, the paper examines how sports development officers (SDOs) experience and attempt to manage organizational change. The study was based on semi-structured interviews with sixteen SDOs in the West Midlands and North West of England. The kinds of organizational change experienced by SDOs were associated with a perceived bureaucratization of their role, and increased pressure to develop partnerships with a variety of sporting and non-sports organizations. These developments, which were also related to concerns over the availability of resources and the increasing accountability and “target-hitting” culture within sports development, can only be understood adequately as resulting from the largely unintended outcomes of government policy, which prioritizes the development of non-sports objectives, rather than those related to the...

A method is developed that allows automated lower bound analyses of concrete slabs to be carried out, with the specific aim of producing a technique that can be applied to existing structures which are being assessed after many years in use and for which the original calculations, and hence the assumed methods of load distribution, have been lost. It is shown that any load distribution within the slab can be expressed in terms of an equilibrium state and a set of states of self-stress. Optimisation techniques are developed that allow the highest lower bound to be found. It is shown that an analysis based on the original Hillerborg two-strip model fails to find a reasonable lower bound when the slab is subjected to point loads and in the corners of slabs but a refinement using four sets of strips at 45° to each other can give very good agreement with both exact analytical solutions and upper bound methods.

This paper sets out the safety and traffic management arrangements for one of the most prestigious events in the sports calendar, the PGA World Golf Championship, held for the first time in the UK in 2006. Hertfordshire Highways was responsible for ensuring that safety was maintained and gridlock avoided during the six-day event. This paper describes the meticulous planning arrangements prior to the event, as well as the coordination between the many organisations responsible for ensuring that traffic could enter and exit the various car parks and that plans were in place in the event of an emergency on site. The paper ends with lessons learned and considers what actions taken might be different if an event of this scale were to be held in Hertfordshire in the future.

The article describes the Five Dimensions of Person‐Centredness, an evaluation tool developed specifically to explore supported living and inclusion‐orientated organisations. It explores some of the learning gained from using the evaluation process with four organisations in Scotland, and includes identification of common themes that make the difference when personalising support.

We are beginning to see the emergence of advanced automated assessment techniques that evaluate expressive student artifacts such as free-form written responses and sketches. These approaches have largely operated individually, each considering only a single mode. We hypothesize that there are synergies to be leveraged in multimodal assessments that can integrate multiple modalities of student responses to create a more complete and accurate picture of a student’s knowledge. In this paper, we introduce a novel multimodal assessment framework that integrates two techniques for automatically analyzing student artifacts: a deep learning-based model for assessing student writing, and a topology-based model for assessing student drawing. An evaluation of the framework with elementary students’ writing and drawing assessments demonstrate that 1) each of the framework’s two modalities provides an independent and complementary measure of student science learning, and 2) together, the multimodal framework significantly outperforms either uni-modal approach individually, demonstrating the potential synergistic benefits of multimodal assessment.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the role that student drawing can play in learning. Because drawing has been shown to contribute to students’ learning and increase their engagement, developing student models to dynamically support drawing holds significant promise. To this end, we introduce diagrammatic student models, which reason about students’ drawing trajectories to generate a series of predictions about their conceptual knowledge based on their evolving sketches. The diagrammatic student modeling framework utilizes deep learning, a family of machine learning methods based on a deep neural network architecture, to reason about sequences of student drawing actions encoded with temporal and topological features. An evaluation of the deep-learning-based diagrammatic student models suggests that it can predict student performance more accurately and earlier than competitive baseline approaches.

This paper describes how a rig was constructed to demonstrate to students on a sports injury module the forces involved in breaking bones. This enabled the students to meet a learning outcome related to the identification of the pathophysiological processes of acute damage in relation to specific sites and sports injury. The rig was built from angle iron, which was attached to a force plate and associated software, into which could be viced pig and turkey bones. Reflection on the demonstration raised a number of issues including the limitations of virtual reality and do we want technicians or animators?

The XVII 2002 Commonwealth Games held in Manchester, England, was the first major international multi-sport event to include elite athletes with disabilities (EADs) in its main sports programme and medal table. In this exploratory article we seek to examine some of the complex issues surrounding the inclusion of EADs in the Manchester Games by analysing the coverage afforded those athletes by six national British newspapers. The results suggest that: (1) there was a tendency by the British media to discuss the performances of EADs in terms more-or-less consistent with a medicalized understanding of disability; (2) the inclusion of EADs in the Games signalled the ‘end of a sporting apartheid’ between ‘able-bodied’ athletes and EADs; and (3) that the participation of EADs in the Games was said to reflect the alleged growing ‘inclusion’ of people with disabilities in the wider society more broadly. The paper concludes by discussing some of the unintended consequences of including EADs in the Games, including...

Based on a detailed reading of the six preceding papers, in conjunction with a reflection on the socio-political forces shaping lifestyles in the UK at the turn of the millennium, we come to four interrelated conclusions. First, sport and exercise science needs to move beyond evidence-based practice to evidence-based policy. Second, sport and exercise science needs to make health-enhancing physical activity a political issue at both national and local level. Third, transport, not health policy, may be the key to promoting health-enhancing physical activity. And, fourth, young people deserve our special attention. In reaching these four interrelated conclusions, we attempt both to shape evidence based policy and future research agendas in exercise science. To achieve an international perspective, we also present a short case note from Australia.