Ground reaction forces, asymmetries and performance of change of direction tasks in youth elite female basketball players

The magnitude and direction of inter-limb asymmetries in a change of direction (COD) have increased interest in scientific research in recent years. This present study aimed to investigate the magnitude of asymmetries in an elite youth female basketball sample (n = 18, age = 17.79 ± 0.67 y) and determine its directionality using force platform technology. Participants performed 70◦ and 180◦ COD tests analyzing the following variables: time, ground contact time (GCT) and ground reaction forces (GRF) along the anterior–posterior, mediolateral, and vertical axes. Inter-limb asymmetries were evident in both COD tests, with substantial differences observed between limbs (p < 0.01). The asymmetry values ranged from 3.02% to 24.31% in COD 180◦ and from 1.99% to 21.70% in COD 70◦, with anterior–posterior GRF consistently exhibiting the highest asymmetry magnitude. Additionally, the directionality exhibited variability between the tests, indicating poor agreement and suggesting the independent directionality of asymmetries across tasks. Moreover, players required more time to complete the COD 180◦, the GCT was noticeably longer for the COD 180◦ than for the COD 70◦, and GRF varied across the axis, suggesting that players adapt uniquely to the specific demands of each task. The utilization of force platforms presents a comprehensive approach to assess asymmetries and COD variables performance variables which are “angle-dependent”, which could have important implications for COD screening and effective training interventions

Nest/ing: an emergent (un)methodology for becoming otherwise

A dense, pungent, brown-green, intricately woven, itchy-silky, moss-strewn, twig-ridden ball brought us together. Since then, nest(ing) has become a shared methodology - nest/ing has offered a praxis of getting to know each other, getting to know nests (better) and it has become a capacious writing methodology. Taking nest(ing) seriously has drawn into sharp focus the perils of human exceptionalism. Nesting has gifted opportunities to wallow in porous boundaries and to luxuriate in modes of liminal reading/writing/experimenting, informed by a feminist politics to imagine the world differently (Despret, 2016). It is through lively storytelling, involving passing patterns back and forth that this piece, this assemblage of words (and memories, sensations and more) has nested into being - robust yet fragile, unruly yet hospitable, unknowable yet knowing. Storying the everyday is nesting. Nest/ing has become an emergent (un)methodology for becoming otherwise; something of an affective ecology that felts together guilt, awkwardness, vulnerability and inseparability. Nest/ing has taken us to places we could not have anticipated in advance and it has persisted in keeping our curiosity provoked as we dwell upon and amongst ordinary affects (Stewart, 2007) as they are encountered through minor gestures (Manning, 2016)

Legal change and the role of the scholar: scratching beneath the surface of comparative taxonomies

Both the classical theory of legal families and its more modern articulations place East European jurisdictions in the same box because they give precedence to their common socialist experience. Not only they serve as distorting mirrors propelling stereotypes, but also they close off promising avenues of comparative research because of the politically tainted pre-understanding(s) of legal systems which they impose. This article argues that legal change is frequently facilitated by small groups of individuals who are often scholars. By paying closer attention to their role and incentives as well as the networks to which they belonged, we may see traditional categories realign and gain a more in-depth understanding of the patterns of legal change—namely, the intricate ways in which law evolves—and uncover little-known but important relationships between legal systems which comparative taxonomies either ignore or fail to explain. The article illustrates its argument by zooming in onto the role of three scholars—Lyuben Dikov, Filippo Vassalli, and Karl Llewellyn—who may hold the key to explaining interesting, but unexpected similarities between Bulgarian, Italian, and US law

On conducting ethically-sound psychological science in the metaverse

As the next generation of the internet, the metaverse is an immersive three-dimensional (3D) world that incorporates both physical and virtual environments. The metaverse affords numerous advantages for advancing our theoretical and practical understanding of human cognition, emotion, and behavior, as well as shaping our methodological approach to conducting psychological science. However, undertaking research in a world which merges the physical and virtual, also presents new and unique ethical challenges that are not addressed by current ethical guidelines such as the Belmont Report, the American Psychology Association Code of Ethics, and the Association of Internet Researchers Internet Research Ethical Guidelines. We discuss the different domains of the metaverse relevant to psychological research, and consider how three categories of ethical challenges (i.e., ‘respect for persons’, ‘beneficence’, and ‘justice’) may arise when conducting research in the metaverse. We also provide recommendations for addressing these challenges which include reconfiguring existing ethical guidelines as well as creating new ones. Together, these can inform and assist researchers and institutional review boards in making decisions about conducting ethically-sound psychological science in the metaverse

Content moderator mental health, secondary trauma, and well-being: a cross-sectional study

Content moderators (CMs) analyze and remove offensive or harmful user generated content that has been uploaded to the internet. Jobs which involve exposure to other people's suffering are associated with raised rates of secondary traumatic stress and mental health problems. However, research establishing psychological baseline symptoms in CMs is lacking. This study used an online survey to explore rates of psychological distress, secondary trauma, and well-being in a sample of CMs. Regression analysis explored how various features of the work affected mental health. There was a dose–response effect between frequency of exposure to distressing content and psychological distress and secondary trauma, but not well-being. The results suggested supportive colleagues and feedback about the importance of their role ameliorated this relationship. Implications for CM working conditions are discussed

Promotional cultures

If, as Raymond Williams (1980) argued, culture is to be viewed as a 'whole way of life', then the term promotional culture has become a shorthand for conveying the extent to which the symbolic machinery of consumer capitalism has come to dominate our lives. To speak of promotional cultures, however, is to acknowledge that not all cultures have been impacted by or articulate the logic of promotion in the same ways. This article begins with a comprehensive overview of how this concept emerged in the work of Andrew Wernick (1991) and other Marxist critical theorists in the 1980s and 90s. Key examples from advertising and popular culture are used to illustrate the semiological focus of this tradition. In Pop Art, for example, we witness not just the radical democratisation of art but also its radical marketisation, presaging the rise of neoliberalism and the cult of the self toward the end of the century. The rise of digital networks and globalisation in the 2000s has seen the logic of promotion extend across cultures and societies. In the work of Davis (2013), Powell (2013), Edwards (2016) and Cronin (2018) we witness the seemingly unilinear role played by particular promotional industries and intermediaries in advancing this logic, while the more complex story of promotion within specific visual domains is told by the likes of Banet-Weiser (2012, 2018), Grainge and Johnson (2015), Sobande (2020), Poel et al. (2021). These and other studies reveal how promotional cultures are typically shot through with ambivalence: they afford agency, especially to people who would otherwise be socially marginalised, yet do so through processes of subjectification which all too often entrench material inequalities

No longer a boy's club

This chapter discusses the important strides women have made in business and financial news over the past several decades as well as the challenges that remain. It draws on in-depth interviews with 20 women in the United States and the United Kingdom who have spent their careers in business and financial journalism. Some important trends emerge from the interviews. For instance, movements like #Metoo have shifted what is described as a men’s club newsroom culture of the 1970 and 1980s, and there are many positive reasons women cite for joining the sector. But issues remain, such as pay disparities and the need for financial and business sectors to change their cultures. Their insights, along with available data and relevant research, paint a picture of the current status of women in business journalism and make the case for full participation of women in the field

A rank-one optimization framework and its applications to transmit beamforming

This paper proposes an elegant optimization framework consisting of a mix of linear-matrix-inequality and second-order-cone constraints. The proposed framework generalizes the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) enabled solution to the typical transmit beamforming problems presented in the form of quadratically constrained quadratic programs (QCQPs) in the literature. It is proved that the optimization problems subsumed under the framework always admit a rank-one optimal solution when they are feasible and their optimal solutions are not trivial. This finding indicates that the relaxation is tight as the optimal solution of the original beamforming QCQP can be straightforwardly obtained from that of the SDR counterpart without any loss of optimality. Four representative examples of transmit beamforming, i.e., transmit beamforming with perfect channel state information (CSI), transmit beamforming with imperfect CSI, chance-constraint approach for imperfect CSI, and reconfigurable-intelligent-surface (RIS) aided beamforming, are shown to demonstrate how the proposed optimization framework can be realized in deriving the SDR counterparts for different beamforming designs