The ‘physiologization’ of skiing: the lab as an obligatory passage point for elite athletes?

Abstract

In The Pasteurization of France, Bruno Latour argued that the rise of hygiene was dependent on collaboration between Pasteur, the hygiene movement, scientists and others. He also pointed at the importance of obligatory passage points such as the Pasteurian laboratory, to ensure the scientization and rationalization of hygiene. This article argues that there has been a similar process in elite sports, a ‘physiologization’ where scientists, sport organizations and specialized coaches have transformed training from a deeply personal and experiential matter to something universal and scientific. Physiologists made the test lab an obligatory passage point for athletes who wanted to compete on the highest level. Through theories of sportification and science and technology studies this paper analyses the scientization of endurance sports.     

The effect of technology-assisted and project-based learning approaches on students’ attitudes towards mathematics and their academic achievement

Education and Information Technologies - The aim of the present study was to examine the effects of Technology-Assisted Learning (TAL) and Project-Based Learning (PjBL) approaches upon...     

Contextualising Craft: Pedagogical Models for Craft Education

Craft education in Finland is, in many aspects, in a state of change. This concerns the independent position of craft as a school subject, the content of the compulsory craft courses containing textiles and technical work, the implementation of the new concept of a holistic craft process in the National Core Curriculum and so on. This bears relevance to the question of how craft should be taught at school. This article explores the ways in which teachers can strengthen the relevance and meaningfulness of craft education at school. Teachers are challenged to provide more authentic instructional contexts and activities beyond the traditional curriculum in order to address successful living in today's society. One solution is to contextualise this teaching with the help of pedagogical models that realise the concept of holistic craft. The pedagogical models discussed in this article are based on curriculum publications, materials in print and research by other scholars.     

Visual conceptualizations and models of science

This is the Guest Editor's introduction to the Special Issue on “Science of Science: Conceptualizations and Models of Science”, Journal of Informetrics. The introduction discusses challenges towards a theoretically grounded and practically useful science of science. It provides a brief chronological review of relevant work and argues for (1) the development of common frameworks for the comparison and combination of existing approaches, theories, laws, and measurements, (2) the combination of quantitative and qualitative studies of science, and (3) the operationalization of theoretical concepts in terms of measurement and empirical evidence. Next, three visual conceptualizations of science are discussed and compared. Each of them provides a framework for the comparison and combination of existing works, means to combine quantitative and qualitative data, and helps to operationalize and communicate theoretical concepts using empirical data. Last but not least, the contributions of and interlinkages among the papers included in this issue are discussed.     

Vimentin networks at tunable ion-concentration in microfluidic drops

The structure and function of biological systems, for example, cells and proteins, depend strongly on their chemical environment. To investigate such dependence, we design a polydimethylsiloxane-based microfluidic device to encapsulate biological systems in picoliter-sized drops. The content of each individual drop is tuned in a defined manner. As a key feature of our method, the individual chemical composition is determined and related to the drop content. In our case, the drop content is imaged using microscopy methods, while the drops are immobilized to allow for long-time studies. As an application of our device, we study the influence of divalent ions on vimentin intermediate filament networks in a quantitative way by tuning the magnesium concentration from drop to drop. This way we are able to directly image the effect of magnesium on the fluorescently tagged protein in a few hundreds of drops. Our study shows that with increasing magnesium concentration in the drops, the compaction of the networks becomes more pronounced. The degree of compaction is characterized by different morphologies; freely fluctuating networks are observed at comparatively low magnesium concentrations of 5–10 mM, while with increasing magnesium concentration reaching 16 mM they develop into fully aggregated networks. Our approach demonstrates how a systematic study of interactions in biological systems can benefit from the exceptional controllability of microfluidic methods.