Man & machine: Adaptive tools for the contemporary performance analyst

ABSTRACT

Sport, like many industries, is experiencing growth in resources, professionalism and data generation. An understanding of how humans can effectively and efficiently interact with technology, computers and other machines to improve sports performance is still being developed. As a consequence, the landscape in which the performance analyst now finds themselves has fundamentally changed. New, improved and different skill sets are now required in order to be impactful and experience sustained success. However, this growth also presents new opportunities to address difficult problems, including many that were previously considered intractable. This article lists ten essential adaptive tools for the contemporary performance analyst, many of which are useful in both research and applied sporting environments. A rationale for each is proposed, with an emphasis on ensuring that the performance analyst will be equipped to thrive in both current and future sport environments     

World-class higher education (for whom?)

The slogan ??world-class education?? is ubiquitous in education circles. This essay looks closely at who is advancing this idea, why, and where, and the kind of work it is asked to do. Though instruments for determining the world-class status of education institutions were first launched in the 1980s, they have grown exponentially in the past decade, for three main reasons. First, they offer opportunities for new players to enter the education sector and generate a profit from gathering and selling information. Second, they provide a way to generate competition within the sector, between component organizations. Finally, their global reach gives them tremendous power. A key concern with this concept, and the technologies associated with advancing it, is that they have not been sufficiently and critically engaged with in ways that show how central they are to orchestrating shifts in power and control over the education sectors they aim to govern, and that the interests involved operate in spaces with little public accountability.     

Evaluation of Criteria Associated with Abdominal Fitness Testing

Abstract

The continued use of the timed sit-up as a measure of abdominal fitness has been challenged. This study complements earlier work by evaluating a new modified curl-up test (CUT) against a standardized modified sit-up test (SUT). Results show that there is almost 60% unexplained variance between SUT and CUT scores for young, active adults. The lack of association between SUT and CUT is attributed to predetermined differences in dynamic abdominal and hip flexor muscle activity and active range of motion differences in trunk flexion between each test. In addition, angular displacement of the trunk is greater for women than men in CUT. Evidence from this study provides further support for the use of CUT as an alternative to SUT in abdominal fitness testing.     

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Applying concepts of Hugh Dalziel Duncan and Kenneth Burke to the rhetoric of Erik H. Erikson reveals that Erikson's thesis supports a social hierarchy that is based upon sex roles and supported by the mysteries of sex and science.     

Career guidance and public mental health

Career guidance may have the potential to promote public health by contributing positively to both the prevention of mental health conditions and to population level well-being. The policy implications of this possibility have received little attention. Career guidance agencies are well placed to reach key target groups. Producing persuasive evidence to support claims of health outcomes from guidance is problematic. Although rare, there are some studies of health impacts from employment related interventions, suggesting it is not impossible to generate such evidence. There is a need to develop an evidence base addressing well-being outcomes which may require adopting health-style research methods. There is also a need to open a dialogue with policy makers concerning the potential for career guidance to contribute to public mental health.     

Using a games console in the primary classroom: Effects of ‘Brain Training’ programme on computation and self‐esteem

It is known that computer games are motivating for children, but there is limited direct evidence of their effects on classroom learning. The aim of this exploratory study was to investigate the effects of a commercial off‐the‐shelf computer game on children's mental computation skills and on aspects of self‐perceptions. A pre–post design was employed. The participants were 71 primary school children (10–11 years old) from three classes. In School 1, a class of 21 children used a games console for 20 minutes each day, running a ‘brain training’ game. Two comparison groups were used. In School 2, 31 children used ‘Brain Gym’ techniques in their class over the treatment period. In school three, a class of 19 children acted as no‐treatment controls. The treatment period was 10 weeks. Significant pre–post gains were found in the games console group for both accuracy and speed of calculations, while results for the two comparison groups were mixed. The games console group showed significant gains in global self‐esteem, but not in other aspects of self‐concept. The comparison groups showed no significant gains in any area of self‐perceptions. There is a need now for upscaling to investigate generalisability.