Impact of Contact With Grandparents on Children's and Adolescents’ Views on the Elderly

Stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination against the elderly (ageism) may manifest themselves in children at an early age. However, the factors influencing this phenomenon are not well known. Using both explicit and open-ended questions, this study analyzed the influence of personal and familial parameters on the views of 1,151 seven- to sixteen-year-old Belgian children and adolescents on the elderly. Four factors were found to affect these views: gender (girls had slightly more positive views than boys), age (ageism was lowest in 10- to 12-year-old, reminiscent of other forms of stereotypes and cognitive developmental theories), grandparents’ health, and most importantly, quality of contact with grandparents (very good and good contacts correlated with more favorable feelings toward the elderly, especially in children with frequent contacts).     

Robotic automation of droplet microfluidics

Droplet microfluidics enables powerful analytic capabilities but often requires workflows involving macro- and microfluidic processing steps that are cumbersome to perform manually. Here, we demonstrate the automation of droplet microfluidics with commercial fluid-handling robotics. The workflows incorporate common microfluidic devices including droplet generators, mergers, and sorters and utilize the robot''s native capabilities for thermal control, incubation, and plate scanning. The ability to automate microfluidic devices using commercial fluid handling will speed up the integration of these methods into biological workflows.     

Referee bias contributes to home advantage in English Premiership football

Abstract

Officiating bias is thought to contribute to home advantage. Recent research has shown that sports with subjective officiating tend to experience greater home advantage and that referees' decisions can be influenced by crowd noise, but little work has been done to examine whether individual referees vary in their home bias or whether biased decisions contribute to overall home advantage. We develop an ordinal regression model to determine whether various measures of home advantage are affected by the official for the match and by crowd size while controlling for team ability. We examine 5244 English Premier League (EPL) match results involving 50 referees and find that home bias differs between referees. Individual referees give significantly different levels of home advantage, measured as goal differential between the home and away teams, although the significance of this result depends on one referee with a particularly high home advantage (an outlier). Referees vary significantly and robustly in their yellow card and penalty differentials even excluding the outlier. These results confirm that referees are responsible for some of the observed home advantage in the EPL and suggest that home advantage is dependent on the subjective decisions of referees that vary between individuals. We hypothesize that individual referees respond differently to factors such as crowd noise and suggest further research looking at referees' psychological and behavioural responses to biased crowds.     

Exploring athletes’ perceptions of coach stress in elite sport environments

The present study aimed to extend research that has focused on the identification of stressors associated with coaching practice by systematically evaluating how such stressors effect athletes, and more broadly, the coach–athlete relationship. A total of 13 professional- and national-level athletes were interviewed to address the three study aims: how they detect when a coach is encountering stressors, how coach experiences of stress effects them as an athlete, and how effective the coach is when experiencing stress. Following content analysis, the data suggested athletes were able to detect when a coach was experiencing stress and this was typically via a variety of verbal and behavioural cues. Despite some positive effects of the coach experiencing stress, the majority were negative and varied across a range of personal influences on the athlete, and effects on the general coaching environment. It was also the broad view of the athletes that coaches were less effective when stressed, and this was reflected in performance expectations, perceptions of competence, and lack of awareness. The findings are discussed in relation to the existing theory and with reference to their implications for applied practice, future research, and development of the coach–athlete relationship.     

Validation of the Microsoft Kinect® camera system for measurement of lower extremity jump landing and squatting kinematics

Cost effective, quantifiable assessment of lower extremity movement represents potential improvement over standard tools for evaluation of injury risk. Ten healthy participants completed three trials of a drop jump, overhead squat, and single leg squat task. Peak hip and knee kinematics were assessed using an 8 camera BTS Smart 7000DX motion analysis system and the Microsoft Kinect® camera system. The agreement and consistency between both uncorrected and correct Kinect kinematic variables and the BTS camera system were assessed using interclass correlations coefficients. Peak sagittal plane kinematics measured using the Microsoft Kinect® camera system explained a significant amount of variance [Range_hip = 43.5–62.8%; Range_knee = 67.5–89.6%] in peak kinematics measured using the BTS camera system. Across tasks, peak knee flexion angle and peak hip flexion were found to be consistent and in agreement when the Microsoft Kinect® camera system was directly compared to the BTS camera system but these values were improved following application of a corrective factor. The Microsoft Kinect® may not be an appropriate surrogate for traditional motion analysis technology, but it may have potential applications as a real-time feedback tool in pathological or high injury risk populations.