Examination of birthplace and birthdate in World Junior ice hockey players

The present study investigated birthdate (known as the Relative Age Effect; RAE) and birthplace as determinants of expertise in an international sample of elite ice hockey players. The sample included 566 World Junior (WJR) ice hockey players from four countries (Canada, n = 153; USA, n = 136; Sweden, n = 140; Finland, n = 137). Participants competed in the International Ice Hockey Federation World U20 Championship between 2001 and 2009. A series of Poisson regression models were conducted to examine the consistency of direct then interactive relationships between both birthdate and birthplace and WJR membership across the four countries (Canada, USA, Sweden, and Finland). Findings revealed a consistent RAE across the four countries for World Junior participation from 2000 to 2009. WJR players from the four countries were also less likely to be from major cities. In addition, there was no evidence in any of the four countries of an interaction between RAE and birthplace. Future research should explore the contextual and cultural factors that influence elite athlete development in smaller towns, cities and communities.     

Original characteristics of a new cycle ergometer

The aim of this study was to describe and validate a new cycling ergometer with original characteristics that allow the measurement of biomechanical variables with position and crank inertial load used by the cyclist in field condition. The braking pedalling force, that permitted the simulation of the resistance to the cyclist in the field, is performed with a brushless electric motor. The validity and the reproducibility of the power output measurements were compared with the widely accepted SRM powermeter. The results indicate that taking into account a systematic error, the measurements are valid compared with the SRM, and the reproducibility of the power output measurements is similar to the SRM. In conclusion, this ergometer is the only one that allows at the same time for (1) valid and reproducible power output measurements at submaximal intensity, (2) utilisation of the personal bicycle of the cyclist, and (3) simulation of the inertial characteristics of the road cycling.     

Political aesthetics: activism,everyday life,and art’s object in 1960s’ Japan

Abstract

Around 1960, revolutionary forms of activism and critique emerged to challenge administrative forms of politics and daily life. In Japan, despite massive strikes and widespread protest, the ruling party used a Diet majority and riot police to renew the USA–Japan Security Treaty. After this display of force, this party’s new administration sought a new legitimacy, and a means to assuage and co‐opt the defeated opposition, through promoting a depoliticized everyday world of high growth and consumption, and a dehistoricized national image in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Among those activists who emerged to contest this new cultural politics, a diverse group of young artists worked to repoliticize daily life through an interventionist art practice. Their practices arose out of a particular local, playful art practice, whose focus on the material debris and spaces of the economic expansion led to an engagement with the transformations of daily life. Focusing on the art practices connected with the yearly exhibition, the Yomiuri Indépendant, I examine the advent of a critical art examining the everyday world of Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reflecting on its complex relation with an internationalized art world and domestic art scene, mass culture, and domestic protest movements. Examining the history of this art illuminates the state’s investments in a normative cultural order, and a particular configuration of the politics of culture in the early 1960s.     

Grease and Sweat: Race and Smell in Eighteenth-Century English Culture

From 1690 to 1800 texts printed in England linked racial difference and foul odour through understandings of occupation, food, cosmetics and sweat. Even by the end of the eighteenth-century racial odour was represented as a labile, culturally and environmentally determined characteristic. This article traces how the social ‘use’ of olfactory stereotypes, particularly their links with cosmetics, food, and odorous spaces, determined the mobilization of explanations for and attitudes to racial scent. It argues that ideas of race should not be considered monolithic or described in terms of narratives that posit a divide between the body/culture, but that racial stereotypes should be understood as collections of traits, of which smell was one, with distinctive histories.