Effect of a pedometer-based intervention on daily step counts of community-dwelling older adults

This study investigated the effect of a 12-week pedometer-based intervention on daily step counts of 147 older adults randomly assigned to an intervention or wait-list control group (M age = 72.9 years, SD = 8.8). The intervention group significantly increased their daily step counts after 12 weeks (M=639, SD=2239) and continued to significantly increase during a 12-week maintenance period (M=680, SD=1721). The control group exhibited no change during the control period (M = -393, SD=2050) but had a significant increase in daily step counts (M=1580, SD=2305) when enrolled in the intervention. The pedometer-based intervention was effective in increasing participants' daily step counts.     

Effect of different recovery patterns on repeated-sprint ability and neuromuscular responses

We examined the effect of recovery pattern on mechanical and neuromuscular responses in active men during three repeated-sprint ability tests consisting of ten 6-s cycling sprints. Within each test, the recovery duration was manipulated: constant, increasing, and decreasing recovery pattern. Maximal voluntary contractions of the knee extensors were performed before and after the repeated-sprint ability tests to assess strength and electromyographic activity [root mean square (RMS)] of the quadriceps muscle. We observed different fatigue patterns for peak and mean power output between recovery patterns, with earlier decrements recorded during the increasing recovery pattern. Total work performed over the ten sprints was also lower in the increasing recovery pattern (43.8 +/- 5.4 kJ; P < 0.05). However, the decreasing recovery pattern induced a greater overall power output decrement across the sprints (-15.8%; P < 0.05), compared with the increasing recovery pattern (-5.1%) but not the constant recovery pattern (-10.1%). The decreasing recovery pattern was also associated with higher post-sprint RMS values (+16.2%; P < 0.05). Therefore, the recovery pattern within successive short sprints may influence repeated-sprint ability, and may lead to greater post-sprint neuromuscular adjustments when recovery intervals decrease between sprints. We conclude that peripheral impairments caused the major differences in repeated-sprint ability between recovery patterns.     

Ball launch conditions for skilled golfers using drivers of different lengths in an indoor testing facility

The displacement of the golf ball struck by a driving club is affected by several player characteristics and equipment parameters and their interrelationships. Some modelling and simulation studies have shown a relationship between shaft length and clubhead speed, supported by a few experimental studies. The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between driver length and ball launch conditions in an indoor test facility using a ball launch monitor. Nine males considered to be skilled golfers participated in the study. Four driving clubs of total length 117, 119, 124, and 132 cm were assembled from commercially available components and were used to strike golf shots while initial ball velocity, backspin rate, and launch angles were measured. Statistical analysis identified a significant difference in initial launch speed due to club length, a significant difference between participants, but no difference between the trials for a given golfer. A positive trend was noted between backspin and launch angle for all four clubs, and significant inverse associations between initial launch speed and backspin rate and launch angle. However, the combined launch conditions associated with increasing length were not considered optimal, with uncontrolled swingweight and moment of inertia effects considered to be limiting factors.     

English Proficiency,Identity, Anxiety,and Intergroup Attitudes: US Americans’ Perceptions of Chinese

Guided by the Common Ingroup Identity Model and Berry’s acculturation framework, this study examined the roles that perceptions of language proficiency, cultural identity, and communication anxiety had on intergroup attitudes and stereotypes in the American–Chinese contact context. Serial mediation analyses with 10,000 bootstrap samples revealed that perceived English proficiency of a Chinese contact had significant indirect effects on affective and behavioral attitudes toward Chinese through American participants’ perceptions of their contact’s host and home culture identification and communication anxiety. Perceived English proficiency had an indirect effect only on positive stereotypes through the Chinese contact’s perceived identification with home culture.     

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.     

A Policy Entrepreneur in the Information Society: Shaping the Interdisciplinarity of Brain Research in Korea

This paper aims to show the historical contingency of policy entrepreneurship in science by analyzing the case of brain research in South Korea during the last decade of the 20th century. This decade saw an increasing emphasis placed upon the development of information technology and its use for societal changes. The rise of the “Information Society” in Korea was an important context for shaping the field of brain research as an amalgam of multiple disciplines which led to the passage of the Brain Research Promotion Act; the first law in the world enacted to promote brain research. This paper, through focusing on in what context someone takes up an entrepreneurial role, shows how the concept of interdisciplinarity has been shaped by, and how it has influenced the development of brain research and its related policy measures in Korea. It ultimately reveals the contingent and transient aspect of a policy entrepreneur and his effect on building a new field.     

The Grand Challenges Discourse: Transforming Identity Work in Science and Science Policy

This article analyzes the concept of “grand challenges” as part of a shift in how scientists and policymakers frame and communicate their respective agendas. The history of the grand challenges discourse helps to understand how identity work in science and science policy has been transformed in recent decades. Furthermore, the question is raised whether this discourse is only an indicator, or also a factor in this transformation. Building on conceptual history and historical semantics, the two parts of the article reconstruct two discursive shifts. First, the observation that in scientific communication references to “problems” are increasingly substituted by references to “challenges” indicates a broader cultural trend of how attitudes towards what is problematic have shifted in the last decades. Second, as the grand challenges discourse is rooted in the sphere of sports and competition, it introduces a specific new set of societal values and practices into the spheres of science and technology. The article concludes that this process can be characterized as the sportification of science, which contributes to self-mobilization and, ultimately, to self-optimization of the participating scientists, engineers, and policymakers.     

From a Means to an End: Patenting in the 1999 Danish ‘Act on Inventions’ and its Effect on Research Practice

This paper examines the potential pitfalls for academic research associated with goal displacements in the implementation of goals and indicators of research commercialization. We ask why patenting has come to serve as the key policy indicator of innovative capacity and what consequences this has for the organization of academic research. To address these questions, the paper presents a case study from Denmark on, firstly, why and how the 1999 Danish ‘Act on Inventions’ introduced patenting as a central instrument to Danish science policy and, secondly, the effects the Act has had on Danish university organization and research practices. We trace why and how commercialization was introduced as an important objective in Danish science policy since the 1980s. The increased focus on patents is explained as an isomorphic adjustment to an international ‘science policy field,’ manifested in particular through OECD statistics, where patenting has come to serve as a key metric in international rankings. In a second step, we examine what effects the patenting requirements have had on organization and research practice at a Danish university. We show that in practice ‘number of patents’ changed from serving as an indicator of innovative capacity to being a policy goal in itself, thus in effect producing a goal displacement that is potentially damaging for both academic research and innovation capacity of the surrounding society. As a consequence of this goal displacement, active scientists now increasingly engage in patenting primarily as a means to fulfill organizational targets and to increase their ‘fundability,’ rather than to promote commercial applications of their research. In conclusion, we discuss how these unfulfilled policy ambitions have led to a retrospective redefinition of policy goals rather than an adjustment of the actual policy tools.