Body Composition of Olympic Speed Skating Candidates

Abstract

The purpose of this investigation was to quantify the body composition of speed skaters who were candidates for the 1980 United States Olympic Team. Subjects were 19 males between 16 and 27 years of age. Most subjects had just completed three months of intensive dry-land training. Seven skinfold fat, 11 circumference, and seven diameter sites were measured. Body density was determined by underwater weighing. Study of the speed skaters (mean ± standard deviation) gave the following results: height, 176 ± 8 cm; body weight, 69.6 ± 7.0 kg; body density, 1.081 ± 0.006 g/ml; and relative fat, 7.6 ± 2.6%. The eight speed skaters who were selected for the Olympic Team were significantly older, taller, and heavier in total body weight and fat free weight (FFW) than the non-Olympians. Thus, years of training and greater FFW may help differentiate international caliber male speed skaters. Data on Olympic speed skating candidates from 1968 showed them to be of similar age (20.1 yr) and height (176 cm), but greater in body weight (73.9 kg). Relative fat was not determined but the body mass index (Wt/ht²) showed that the present speed skaters may be leaner (24.0 vs 22.2). These differences in body composition were thought to be, in part, a result of the more rigorous training program currently used by speed skaters. The body composition of the speed skaters was also compared to that of other athletic groups.     

The use of trigram analysis for spelling error detection

Work performed under the SPElling Error Detection COrrection Project (SPEEDCOP) supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) at Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) to devise effective automatic methods of detecting and correcting misspellings in scholarly and scientific text is described. The investigation was applied to 50,000 word/misspelling pairs collected from six datasets (Chemical Industry Notes (CIN), Biological Abstracts (BA). Chemical Abstracts (CA), Americal Chemical Society primary journal keyboarding (ACS), Information Science Abstracts (ISA), and Distributed On-Line Editing (DOLE) (a CAS internal dataset especially suited to spelling error studies). The purpose of this study was to determine the utility of trigram analysis in the automatic detection and/or correction of misspellings. Computer programs were developed to collect data on trigram distribution in each dataset and to explore the potential of trigram analysis for detecting spelling errors, verifying correctly-spelled words, locating the error site within a misspelling, and distinguishing between the basic kinds of spelling errors. The results of the trigram analysis were largely independent of the dataset to which it was applied but trigram compositions varied with the dataset. The trigram analysis technique developed determined the error site within a misspelling accurately, but did not distinguish effectively between different error types or between valid words and misspellings. However, methods for increasing its accuracy are suggested.