Humility & Humiliation: The Transformation of Franciscan Humour,c.1210–1310

Humiliation and self-ridicule worked as surprisingly important tools of evangelical outreach in the first decades of the Franciscan Order (c.1210–50). According to early Franciscan texts such as the Assisi Compilation (c.1240s) and Jordan of Giano’s Chronica (c.1260), St Francis and his earliest followers sought to win supporters by stripping naked in public, mocking learned preachers and ludicrously imitating animals. Yet within a few decades of the founder’s death this type of humour had been erased from Franciscan texts. Chronicles now omitted references to Francis’s laughter, while humiliating behaviour came to be condemned by Franciscan preachers, chroniclers and theologians alike. From being a means of undermining dignity and reason, joking was now instead celebrated as a tool of upholding these very same values. Describing the nature of this shift, and contextualising it within the evolving institutional priorities of the Franciscans under the leadership of Bonaventure (d.1274), this article will complicate debates about the development of medieval humour, while also reflecting on laughter’s role as a means of resistance to the significant social and cultural upheavals of the 1200s.     

‘Just don’t tell them what’s in it’: Ethics,edible insects and sustainable food choice in schools

Supporting young people with global crises mitigation strategies is essential, yet loaded with ethical dilemmas for the educator. This study explores whether young people will make ethical decisions regarding the sustainability of food choice in schools, and based on the processes identified, what educators’ needs are in supporting transformative learning. This study is the first of its kind, where young people under the age of 14 have been tasting edible insects and discussing their role in a more sustainable diet. The article draws on mixed-method research with over 180 young people and their teachers in three schools in Wales and examines responses to a possible introduction of edible insects into school canteens. Highlighted is the complexity of sustainable food choices—likely to be identifiable with other young people and educators in western countries. The article considers how educators and policy makers may need to frame routes to positive sustainable action and the associated impacts these may have on personal, social, political and environmental spheres.     

Body composition differences by age and playing standard in male rugby union and rugby league: A systematic review and meta-analysis

ABSTRACT

This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to determine differences in body compositionn between playing standard and age in male rugby union and rugby league athletes. The MOOSE (Meta-analysis of Observational Studies in Epidemiology) guidelines for design, implementation, and reporting were followed. Studies were required to be in male rugby union or league and have body composition as the primary or secondary outcome. Data was required to be presented separately for positional groups and body composition presented as whole-body. A systematic search was performed in PubMed, Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, SPORTDiscus, and CINHAHL via EBSCOhost. 57 studies were included for meta-analysis. Results highlighted significantly higher fat-free mass in senior elite than senior sub-elite or junior elite athletes for all RU and RL forwards. Small and non-significant differences were found in fat mass between rugby union playing standards and age categories. Rugby league senior elite forwards had less fat mass than junior elite forwards. Practitioners should prioritise training and nutritional strategies that maximise fat-free mass development, especially in junior elite cohorts.     

Maximal lactate steady state in trained adolescent runners

The aims of this study were: (1) to identify the exercise intensity that corresponds to the maximal lactate steady state in adolescent endurance-trained runners; (2) to identify any differences between the sexes; and (3) to compare the maximal lactate steady state with commonly cited fixed blood lactate reference parameters. Sixteen boys and nine girls volunteered to participate in the study. They were first tested using a stepwise incremental treadmill protocol to establish the blood lactate profile and peak oxygen uptake ([Vdot]O₂). Running speeds corresponding to fixed whole blood lactate concentrations of 2.0, 2.5 and 4.0?mmol?·?l^?1 were calculated using linear interpolation. The maximal lactate steady state was determined from four separate 20-min constant-speed treadmill runs. The maximal lactate steady state was defined as the fastest running speed, to the nearest 0.5?km?·?h^?1, where the change in blood lactate concentration between 10 and 20?min was?<0.5?mmol?·?l^?1. Although the boys had to run faster than the girls to elicit the maximal lactate steady state (15.7 vs 14.3?km?·?h^?1, P?<0.01), once the data were expressed relative to percent peak [Vdot]O₂ (85 and 85%, respectively) and percent peak heart rate (92 and 94%, respectively), there were no differences between the sexes (P?>0.05). The running speed and percent peak [Vdot]O₂ at the maximal lactate steady state were not different to those corresponding to the fixed blood lactate concentrations of 2.0 and 2.5?mmol?·?l^?1 (P?>0.05), but were both lower than those at the 4.0?mmol?·?l^?1 concentration (P?<0.05). In conclusion, the maximal lactate steady state corresponded to a similar relative exercise intensity as that reported in adult athletes. The running speed, percent peak [Vdot]O₂ and percent peak heart rate at the maximal lactate steady state are approximated by the fixed blood lactate concentration of 2.5?mmol?·?l^?1 measured during an incremental treadmill test in boys and girls.     

The neural correlates of working memory training in typically developing children

Working memory training improves children's cognitive performance on untrained tasks; however, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms. This was investigated in 32 typically developing children aged 10–14 years (19 girls and 13 boys) using a randomized controlled design and multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (Devon, UK; 2015–2016). Training improved working memory performance and increased intrinsic functional connectivity between the bilateral intraparietal sulci. Furthermore, improvements in working memory were associated with greater recruitment of the left middle frontal gyrus on a complex span task. Repeated engagement of fronto-parietal regions during training may increase their activity and functional connectivity over time, affording greater working memory performance. The plausibility of generalizable cognitive benefits from a neurobiological perspective and implications for neurodevelopmental theory are discussed.     

Child forensic interviewing in Children's Advocacy Centers: empirical data on a practice model

OBJECTIVE: Children's Advocacy Centers (CACs) aim to improve child forensic interviewing following allegations of child abuse by coordinating multiple investigations, providing child-friendly interviewing locations, and limiting redundant interviewing. This analysis presents one of the first rigorous evaluations of CACs' implementation of these methods. METHODS: This analysis is part of a quasi-experimental study, the Multi-Site Evaluation of Children's Advocacy Centers, which evaluated four CACs relative to within-state non-CAC comparison communities. Case abstractors collected data on investigation methods in 1,069 child sexual abuse cases with forensic interviews by reviewing case records from multiple agencies. RESULTS: CAC cases were more likely than comparison cases to feature police involvement in CPS cases (41% vs. 15%), multidisciplinary team (MDT) interviews (28% vs. 6%), case reviews (56% vs. 7%), joint police/child protective services (CPS) investigations (81% vs. 52%) and video/audiotaping of interviews (52% vs. 17%, all these comparisons p<.001). CACs varied in which coordination methods they used, and some comparison communities also used certain coordination methods more than the CAC with which they were paired. Eighty-five percent of CAC interviews took place in child-friendly CAC facilities, while notable proportions of comparison interviews took place at CPS offices (22%), police facilities (18%), home (16%), or school (19%). Ninety-five percent of children had no more than two forensic interviews, and CAC and comparison differences on number of interviews were mostly non-significant. CONCLUSIONS: Relative to the comparison communities, these CACs appear to have increased coordination on investigations and child forensic interviewing. The CAC setting was the location for the vast majority of CAC child interviews, while comparison communities often used settings that many consider undesirable. CACs showed no advantage on reducing the number of forensic interviews, which was consistently small across the sample.     

Retrieving and classifying instances of source code plagiarism

Automatic detection of source code plagiarism is an important research field for both the commercial software industry and within the research community. Existing methods of plagiarism detection primarily involve exhaustive pairwise document comparison, which does not scale well for large software collections. To achieve scalability, we approach the problem from an information retrieval (IR) perspective. We retrieve a ranked list of candidate documents in response to a pseudo-query representation constructed from each source code document in the collection. The challenge in source code document retrieval is that the standard bag-of-words (BoW) representation model for such documents is likely to result in many false positives being retrieved, because of the use of identical programming language specific constructs and keywords. To address this problem, we make use of an abstract syntax tree (AST) representation of the source code documents. While the IR approach is efficient, it is essentially unsupervised in nature. To further improve its effectiveness, we apply a supervised classifier (pre-trained with features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs) on the top ranked retrieved documents. We report experiments on the SOCO-2014 dataset comprising 12K Java source files with almost 1M lines of code. Our experiments confirm that the AST based approach produces significantly better retrieval effectiveness than a standard BoW representation, i.e., the AST based approach is able to identify a higher number of plagiarized source code documents at top ranks in response to a query source code document. The supervised classifier, trained on features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs, is shown to effectively filter and thus further improve the ranked list of retrieved candidate plagiarized documents.