Inclusive sport or institutional discrimination? New FIFA regulations,organized football and migrant youth in Italy

Over the last decade, the international governing body of association football, FIFA, has introduced new regulations for the registration of young players. The regulations are aimed at ‘protecting minors’ at being trafficked from developing countries to clubs based in the majority of cases in Europe. While strengthening control on the status of players as young as ten, the FIFA norms and their intersection with national and European norms have laid the legal basis for forms of institutional discrimination meted out to youth of immigrant background living in Europe. This paper emerges from a study on youth of immigrant background’s participation in Italian football. It uses the theoretical framework of Agamben’s analysis of Western democracies’ citizenship crisis to highlight the contradictions implicit in the Italian FA’s implementation of FIFA regulations in a scenario permeated by nationalistic values, which create different levels of participation according to the legal status of young people.     

Problem length as a structural variable in verbal arithmetic problems

Of five structural variables that in previous studies accounted for a significant amount of the observed variance in the error rate in verbal arthmetic problems, the length variable (number of words in the problem statement) apparently was more important in the upper grades than in the lower grades. In this study three forms of a verbal problem set in which the number of words in the problem statements were systematically varied were administered to classes of students in Grades 4–9. Using regression analysis, the investigator found that although the length variable did not measure a significant amount of variance between two of the forms, with the third it did.This study was begun while the author was a staff member of the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford University. The research was partially supported by National Science Foundation grant G18709.     

A "dry and wet hybrid" lithography technique for multilevel replication templates: Applications to microfluidic neuron culture and two-phase global mixing

A broad range of microfluidic applications, ranging from cell culture to protein crystallization, requires multilevel devices with different heights and feature sizes (from micrometers to millimeters). While state-of-the-art direct-writing techniques have been developed for creating complex three-dimensional shapes, replication molding from a multilevel template is still the preferred method for fast prototyping of microfluidic devices in the laboratory. Here, we report on a "dry and wet hybrid" technique to fabricate multilevel replication molds by combining SU-8 lithography with a dry film resist (Ordyl). We show that the two lithography protocols are chemically compatible with each other. Finally, we demonstrate the hybrid technique in two different microfluidic applications: (1) a neuron culture device with compartmentalization of different elements of a neuron and (2) a two-phase (gas-liquid) global micromixer for fast mixing of a small amount of a viscous liquid into a larger volume of a less viscous liquid.