Sport disciplines,types of sports,and waist circumference in young adulthood – a population-based twin study

Purpose: The benefits of physical activity (PA) in preventing abdominal obesity are well recognized, but the role of different sport disciplines remains open. We aimed, therefore, to investigate how participation in different sport disciplines, and the number and types of sports engaged in are associated with waist circumference (WC) in young adulthood. Methods: This population-based cohort study comprised 4027 Finnish twin individuals (1874 men), with a mean age of 34 y (32–37), who answered a survey, including self-measured WC. We extracted the number and identified the types (aerobic, power, and mixed) of the different sport disciplines respondents reported participating in. Results: The number of sport disciplines participated in was inversely associated with WC, the linear decrease averaging 1.38?cm (95% CI 1.10–1.65) per each additional sport discipline. The result persisted after adjustment for the main covariates, such as volume of PA and diet quality. Among dizygotic twin pairs discordant for sports participation (0–2 vs. 5 or more disciplines), the mean within-pair difference in WC was 4.8?cm (95% CI 0.4–9.1) for men and 11.2?cm (95% CI 4.4–18.0) for women; among discordant monozygotic pairs, no differences were observed. In men, all three types of sports were individually associated with smaller WC, while in women, only mixed and power sports showed this association. Conclusions: Participation in several sport disciplines and sport types was associated with smaller WC among young adults in their mid-30s. Shared genetic background may explain some of the associations.     

Could Slackline Training Complement the FIFA 11+ Programme Regarding Training of Neuromuscular Control?

The current study compared changes in neuromuscular control between slackline training and the stabilization training elements of the FIFA 11+ programme. Twenty-five students in 2 groups performed a 12-unit training programme. The slackline training group (n?=?13) exclusively trained with a slackline. The stabilization training group (n?=?12) practised exercises as described in the second part of the FIFA 11+ programme. Improvements in balance were assessed using three tests for dynamic, quasi-static, and perturbed postural control: the star excursion balance test (SEBT), the closed-eye single-leg stance, and the MFT S3-Check. Both groups significantly improved the stability and sensorimotor index of the MFT S3-Check (p?<?.001), their range on the SEBT (p?<?.001), and the duration of closed-eye single-leg stance (p?<?.001). The group?×?training interaction was significant for the MFT S3-Check (stability index: p?=?.042; sensorimotor index: p?=?.004) and the SEBT (dominant leg: p?=?.003; averaged both legs: p?=?.016), with the slackline training group showing a larger training effect than the stabilization training group. The results of the present study suggest that slackline training offers similar – or better – improvements in neuromuscular control as the FIFA 11+ warm-up programme. If compliance with the FIFA 11+ programme is declining, then slacklining might offer an alternative approach to reach the training goals of improved sensorimotor control.     

Practical Applications as a Source of Credibility: A Comparison of Three Fields of Dutch Academic Chemistry

In many Western science systems, funding structures increasingly stimulate academic research to contribute to practical applications, but at the same time the rise of bibliometric performance assessments have strengthened the pressure on academics to conduct excellent basic research that can be published in scholarly literature. We analyze the interplay between these two developments in a set of three case studies of fields of chemistry in the Netherlands. First, we describe how the conditions under which academic chemists work have changed since 1975. Second, we investigate whether practical applications have become a source of credibility for individual researchers. Indeed, this turns out to be the case in catalysis, where connecting with industrial applications helps in many steps of the credibility cycle. Practical applications yield much less credibility in environmental chemistry, where application-oriented research agendas help to acquire funding, but not to publish prestigious papers or to earn peer recognition. In biochemistry practical applications hardly help in gaining credibility, as this field is still strongly oriented at fundamental questions. The differences between the fields can be explained by the presence or absence of powerful upstream end-users, who can afford to invest in academic research with promising long term benefits.     

欧洲数字图书馆与世界文化多样性

尊敬的中国国家图书馆馆长先生 尊敬的各位馆长、同行: 大家好! 我非常高兴而且十分荣幸有这个机会向大家介绍我们欧洲数字图书馆的发展计划.     

Teacher-perceived supportive classroom climate protects against detrimental impact of reading disability risk on peer rejection

This study examined the role of a supportive classroom climate, class size, and length of teaching experience as protective factors against children's peer rejection. A total of 376 children were assessed in kindergarten for risk for reading disabilities (RD) and rated by their teachers on socially withdrawn and disruptive behaviors. The grade 1 measures included sociometric peer assessment and teachers' self-ratings of their supportiveness in the classroom, together with information on class size and teaching experience. The results showed, first, that the studied social and learning risk factors positively predicted peer rejection in grade 1. Moreover, teacher-reported supportive classroom climate in grade 1 protected children against the detrimental impact of RD risk on peer rejection. Smaller class size, in turn, served as a protective factor against the detrimental impact of social withdrawal on peer rejection. Finally, shorter teaching experience protected against both social and learning risk factors.     

Evaluating a monolingual multinational digital library by using usability: An exploratory approach from a developing country

In this paper the authors present a preliminary discussion on some of the results from a survey aimed to explore, describe and explain some of the usability characteristics in digital libraries evaluation in the Mexican context. The study is framed in the evaluation of a multinational and monolingual digital library: the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library, from the University of Alicante in Spain. The evaluators were Mexican “expert” users (i.e. Spanish-speaking professional university librarians specialized in electronic reference services) who were asked to carry on an evaluation instrument based on usability criteria as taken from some models in developed countries. Some questions that might be answered with future research are outlined in this paper.     

Generalized Hamming Distance

Many problems in information retrieval and related fields depend on a reliable measure of the distance or similarity between objects that, most frequently, are represented as vectors. This paper considers vectors of bits. Such data structures implement entities as diverse as bitmaps that indicate the occurrences of terms and bitstrings indicating the presence of edges in images. For such applications, a popular distance measure is the Hamming distance. The value of the Hamming distance for information retrieval applications is limited by the fact that it counts only exact matches, whereas in information retrieval, corresponding bits that are close by can still be considered to be almost identical. We define a Generalized Hamming distance that extends the Hamming concept to give partial credit for near misses, and suggest a dynamic programming algorithm that permits it to be computed efficiently. We envision many uses for such a measure. In this paper we define and prove some basic properties of the Generalized Hamming distance, and illustrate its use in the area of object recognition. We evaluate our implementation in a series of experiments, using autonomous robots to test the measure's effectiveness in relating similar bitstrings.     

The Co-Effects of Query Structure and Expansion on Retrieval Performance in Probabilistic Text Retrieval

The effects of query structures and query expansion (QE) on retrieval performance were tested with a best match retrieval system (InQuery¹). Query structure means the use of operators to express the relations between search keys. Six different structures were tested, representing strong structures (e.g., queries with facets or concepts identified) and weak structures (no concepts identified, a query is a bag of search keys). QE was based on concepts, which were first selected from a searching thesaurus, and then expanded by semantic relationships given in the thesaurus. The expansion levels were (a) no expansion, (b) a synonym expansion, (c) a narrower concept expansion, (d) an associative concept expansion, and (e) a cumulative expansion of all other expansions. With weak structures and Boolean structured queries, QE was not very effective. The best performance was achieved with a combination of a facet structure, where search keys within a facet were treated as instances of one search key (the SYN operator), and the largest expansion.