Sport-specific musculoskeletal growth and postural control in female artistic gymnasts: a 12 month cohort study

Abstract

Female gymnasts have been evidenced to experience sport-specific growth, of which broad shoulders and narrow hips are common characteristics. In addition to being a central component of handstand performance, postural control mechanisms, including whole-body and lumbo-pelvic stability, have been identified as risk factors for overuse spinal pathology. The study aimed to develop a fundamental understanding of musculoskeletal growth and postural control responses of female artistic gymnasts in order to extend longitudinal insights into overuse spinal pathology risk. Whole-body anthropometric measures were collected for 12 competitive female gymnasts (age at recruitment: nine to 15 years) at three time points across a 12 month period. Musculoskeletal growth was partially defined as the rate of bicristal-to-biacromial breadth ratio development, and informed shoulder- and pelvis-dominant growth sub-groups. Kinematic and kinetic indicators of postural control were determined for a total of 700 handstand trials. The shoulder-dominant (gymnastics-specific) growth group was found to have significantly greater biomechanical risk for general stability (p < 0.001) than the pelvis-dominant group. Significantly greater lumbo-pelvic risk was demonstrated for the pelvis-dominant group (p < 0.001). Extended idiosyncratic examination of proportional sport-specific growth measures alongside multi-faceted risk monitoring was advocated for the effective development of future overuse pathology prevention protocols.     

A non-parametric topical relevance model

An information retrieval (IR) system can often fail to retrieve relevant documents due to the incomplete specification of information need in the user’s query. Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) aims to improve IR effectiveness by exploiting potentially relevant aspects of the information need present in the documents retrieved in an initial search. Standard PRF approaches utilize the information contained in these top ranked documents from the initial search with the assumption that documents as a whole are relevant to the information need. However, in practice, documents are often multi-topical where only a portion of the documents may be relevant to the query. In this situation, exploitation of the topical composition of the top ranked documents, estimated with statistical topic modeling based approaches, can potentially be a useful cue to improve PRF effectiveness. The key idea behind our PRF method is to use the term-topic and the document-topic distributions obtained from topic modeling over the set of top ranked documents to re-rank the initially retrieved documents. The objective is to improve the ranks of documents that are primarily composed of the relevant topics expressed in the information need of the query. Our RF model can further be improved by making use of non-parametric topic modeling, where the number of topics can grow according to the document contents, thus giving the RF model the capability to adjust the number of topics based on the content of the top ranked documents. We empirically validate our topic model based RF approach on two document collections of diverse length and topical composition characteristics: (1) ad-hoc retrieval using the TREC 6-8 and the TREC Robust ’04 dataset, and (2) tweet retrieval using the TREC Microblog ’11 dataset. Results indicate that our proposed approach increases MAP by up to 9% in comparison to the results obtained with an LDA based language model (for initial retrieval) coupled with the relevance model (for feedback). Moreover, the non-parametric version of our proposed approach is shown to be more effective than its parametric counterpart due to its advantage of adapting the number of topics, improving results by up to 5.6% of MAP compared to the parametric version.     

Science education in the long shadow of michael polanyi

Conclusion Science teaching in Australia has been dogged by a lack of independence from the top-down pressures of the tertiary institutions and overseas, particularly British, influences. In a future paper we will examine the influence of Professor Harry Messel of Synney University and his Philosophy of Science as exemplified by the Wyndham Science Course for secondary schools in NSW. Science teaching continues to ignore such questions as, whose interests are served by the managers of scientific research? There is an absence of discussion about autonomous technology and growth economics advocated by Australian and other governments. Even the curious juxtaposition of caution and demand for more technology by Barry Jones inSleepers, Wake! (1982) has failed to stimulate discussion.     

Literacy skills of welfare recipients

Illiteracy is considered to be a significant barrier to employment. Programs are being established to require literacy education and work programs of welfare recipients. The purpose of this study was to determine the literacy skills of a random sample of welfare recipients. One-hundred and six welfare subjects were administered theWoodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery and a comprehensive interview form. Using common criteria to separate the sample into the literate and functionally illiterate, the groups were found to differ significantly on intellectual capabilities. It was concluded that illiteracy is associated with subaverage intellectual functioning among persons on welfare. A number of recommendations were made pertaining to policy.     

Possessions theory of persuasion: An examination of its basis and range

Possessions theory claims that individuals learn to relate to their possessions in either an instrumental or symbolic fashion, and that this object orientation transfers to attitudes. Implicit in the theory is the notion that instrumental and symbolic orientations anchor the poles of a single continuum. The results of the first study tested that assumption and found that a bivariate conception was more empirically defensible than a bipolar conception. Study 2 was concerned with the scope of the theory's predictions for persuasion. The possessions orientation of women at‐risk for breast cancer was measured and they were then exposed to either a symbolic or instrumental message both of which asked them to participate in a clinical trial of a breast cancer preventative. Although no effects were observed on attitude toward participation nor on intention to participate, instrumental orientation showed a reliable, positive relationship with judgments of the persuasiveness of the messages.     

Meta-analytic evidence for the persuasive effect of narratives on beliefs,attitudes, intentions,and behaviors

Although narratives are often credited with the capacity to change opinions, empirical tests of this prediction have produced mixed results. To provide a more precise test of narrative's effect on beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors, we performed meta-analyses on studies that evaluated narrative's persuasive influence on these outcomes. Results suggested positive relationships between exposure to a narrative and narrative-consistent beliefs (k?=?37; N?=?7,376; r?=?.17), attitudes (k?=?40; N?=?7,132; r?=?.19), intentions (k?=?28; N?=?5,211; r?=?.17), and behaviors (k?=?5; N?=?978; r?=?.23). Moderator analyses on the effect of fictionality yielded mixed results. Neither medium of presentation nor research design influenced the magnitude of the narrative-persuasion relationship. However, results suggested the presence of unidentified moderators.