Injury rates in professional soccer players during Ramadan

Many of the socio-cultural lifestyle and dietary changes that take place during Ramadan may affect the risk of injury in athletes, but little evidence is available. The aim of the present study was to examine the effects over two consecutive years of the holy month of Ramadan on injury rates in 42 professional players of a Tunisian top-level professional soccer team. Players were retrospectively organized into fasting and non-fasting groups and monitored for 3 months: 4 weeks before Ramadan, during the month of Ramadan (4 weeks), and 4 weeks after Ramadan each year. During Ramadan, training started at 22.00 h. The circumstances (training/match) and mechanism of injury (traumatic/overuse) were recorded. No significant differences between the three periods were observed for weekly mean training load, training strain, training duration, and Hooper's Index (quality of sleep, and quantities of stress, delayed-onset muscle soreness, and fatigue). Compared with non-fasting players, fasters had a lower (P < 0.05) Hooper's Index and stress during and after Ramadan. No significant difference in injury rates was observed between fasting and non-fasting players. Nevertheless, the rates of non-contact (6.8 vs. 0.6 and 1.1) and training overuse (5.6 vs. 0.6 and 0.5) injuries were significantly higher in fasting players during the month of Ramadan than before or after Ramadan. In conclusion, Ramadan, along with the corresponding changes in nutritional habits, sleeping schedule, and socio-cultural and religious events, significantly increased overuse and non-contact injuries in fasting players despite the fact that the training load, strain, and duration were maintained.     

Invisible and Indispensable: Parttime Teachers in California Community Colleges

Abstract

Although parttime instructors constitute a substantial portion—often a majority—of community college faculties, they are accorded a low status on campus, with less than half the salary and none of the benefits of fulltime faculty members. This study points up a number of misconceptions that administrators have been using to justify discriminatory treatment of parttime teachers.     

General Growth Mixture Analysis of Adolescents' Developmental Trajectories of Anxiety: The Impact of Untested Invariance Assumptions on Substantive Interpretations

Substantively, this study investigates potential heterogeneity in the developmental trajectories of anxiety in adolescence. Methodologically, this study demonstrates the usefulness of general growth mixture analysis (GGMA) in addressing these issues and illustrates the impact of untested invariance assumptions on substantive interpretations. This study relied on data from the Montreal Adolescent Depression Development Project (MADDP), a 4-year follow-up of more than 1,000 adolescents who completed the Beck Anxiety Inventory each year. GGMA models relying on different invariance assumptions were empirically compared. Each of these models converged on a 5-class solution, but yielded different substantive results. The model with class-varying variance–covariance matrices was retained as providing a better fit to the data. These results showed that although elevated levels of anxiety might fluctuate over time, they clearly do not represent a transient phenomenon. This model was then validated in relation to multiple predictors (mostly related to school violence) and outcomes (grade-point average, school dropout, depression, loneliness, and drug-related problems).     

Disentangling Shape from Level Effects in Person-Centered Analyses: An Illustration Based on University Teachers’ Multidimensional Profiles of Effectiveness

This study compares alternative ways of disentangling the effects of level (the tendency for a person to be high, medium, or low across all factors) and shape (the tendency for a person to have a distinct pattern of factors on which they are high, medium, or low) in profile analyses. This issue is particularly relevant to performance appraisals where it is often useful to identify specific strengths and weaknesses over and above a person global performance, but also to person-centered analyses more generally where the observation of qualitative (shape) differences between profiles is often used as justification for the added value of profiles. Substantively, this study illustrates these issues in the identification of profiles of teachers based on multidimensional students’ ratings of their effectiveness, using an archival data set of 31,951 class-average ratings based on the Students’ Evaluations of Educational Quality (SEEQ) instrument collected over a 13-year period. The results show the superiority of a factor mixture operationalization of teaching effectiveness in which a global effectiveness factor was used to control for unnecessary level effects in the profiles.     

Correlation analysis of performance measures for multi-label classification

In many important application domains, such as text categorization, scene classification, biomolecular analysis and medical diagnosis, examples are naturally associated with more than one class label, giving rise to multi-label classification problems. This fact has led, in recent years, to a substantial amount of research in multi-label classification. In order to evaluate and compare multi-label classifiers, researchers have adapted evaluation measures from the single-label paradigm, like Precision and Recall; and also have developed many different measures specifically for the multi-label paradigm, like Hamming Loss and Subset Accuracy. However, these evaluation measures have been used arbitrarily in multi-label classification experiments, without an objective analysis of correlation or bias. This can lead to misleading conclusions, as the experimental results may appear to favor a specific behavior depending on the subset of measures chosen. Also, as different papers in the area currently employ distinct subsets of measures, it is difficult to compare results across papers. In this work, we provide a thorough analysis of multi-label evaluation measures, and we give concrete suggestions for researchers to make an informed decision when choosing evaluation measures for multi-label classification.     

Birthdates of medical school applicants

We determined if the “relative age” effect, wherein older students in an age cohort in early grades do better academically, extends to birthdates of applicants to medical schools, and if birthdates are related to the success of their applications. We examined birthdays of applicants from Michigan to Wayne State University’s School of Medicine, relative to December 1, the cut‐off date for eligibility to enter kindergarten in Michigan. Significantly fewer applicants ≤22 years of age were born in the three‐month period (September, October, November) immediately preceding the December 1 cut‐off date, but there was no statistically significant difference in the probability of their acceptance. We conclude that delayed entry to kindergarten influences applications for medical school acceptance, but does not affect the success of their applications.     

Assessing visibility,legibility and comprehension for interactive whiteboards (IWBs) vs. computers

The usability of interactive whiteboards vs. computers was evaluated on three dimensions (visibility, legibility and comprehension) in the secondary school pupils. The visibility assessment consisted in detecting a visual stimulus varying in luminance using a staircase procedure, legibility was assessed with a target-search task, and we administered narrative and explanatory texts with or without illustrations to evaluate comprehension. The results of the visibility test showed that pupils found the light signal easier to detect on the IWB. For the legibility test, we observed differences in error rates and discriminability according to medium, font size and congruence between target and the distractor letters. Performances in the comprehension test were similar for both explanatory and narrative texts. Moreover, the presence of illustrations does not improve comprehension. These results could be related to the hierarchical structure of the texts, which facilitate comprehension.     

The process of internationalisation of higher education in Brazil: the impact of colonisation on south-south relations

ABSTRACT

This article presents a study that analyses interviews of African students participating in the PEC academic mobility programme, so to gain an understanding of the individual and corporate experience of living and studying in Brazil. However, our analysis also demonstrates a highly significant finding that the historical process of colonisation, experienced for centuries by the Great South, has impinged on the outlook held by individuals from the Great South, who tend to understand that the Great North is the desirable option. Consequently, this attitude has directly affected South-South relations and the cooperation between developing and emerging countries. The work of Franz Fanon, who is a pivotal figure in the process of decolonisation, serves as a framework for our analysis because it both conceptualises and demonstrates the symptoms of psychological violence in a colonised context. As it will become clear, this has ramifications for the process of internationalisation and globalisation of Higher Education.