More than a Match: The Role of Football in Britain’s Deaf Community

The University of Central Lancashire has undertaken a major research project into the role of football within the deaf community in Britain. As well as reconstructing the long history of deaf involvement in football for the first time, the project has also focused on the way in which football has provided deaf people with a means of developing and maintaining social contacts within the community, and of expressing the community’s cultural values. This article will draw on primary data gathered from interviews conducted with people involved in deaf football in a variety of capacities. During the course of these interviews, a number of themes and issues emerged relating to the values and benefits those involved with deaf football place on the game, and it is these which are explored here

Exact counting of Euler Tours for Graphs of Bounded Treewidth

In this paper we give a simple polynomial-time algorithm to exactly count the number of Euler Tours (ETs) of any Eulerian graph of bounded treewidth. The problems of counting ETs are known to be #P-complete for general graphs (Brightwell and Winkler, (Brightwell and Winkler, 2005). To date, no polynomial-time algorithm for counting Euler tours of any class of graphs is known except for the very special case of series-parallel graphs (which have treewidth 2).Comment: 16 pages, draf

The effectiveness of orally applied L-menthol on exercise performance in the heat

During exercise in the heat, increasing thermal load leads to thermo-behavioural adjustments in exercise performance, due to greater perceptual and physiological strain. Behavioural reductions in exercise intensity in the heat are initially mediated via rises in skin temperature, which alter thermal perception (comfort and sensation) and later by rises in core temperature, which increase cardiovascular strain and perceived exertion. Therefore, thermoregulation may be ordered and dependant on the magnitude, timing and/or prioritisation of afferent signals. Non-thermal cooling via L-menthol has been shown to enhance exercise performance in the early and latter stages when delivered orally at a concentration of 0.01%. Indeed, during periods of progressive thermal stress, imposed by the combination of maximal exercise and environmental heat and humidity, L-menthol has been shown to offer an immediate cooling stimulus thus extending exercise capacity. However, repeated administration of L-menthol during exercise in the heat, as thermal load increases, is unable to recover a decline in work rate. Therefore, it is unclear whether the potency of L-menthol is sustained upon frequent application and what strategies are needed in both sporting and occupational settings to optimise its effectiveness. In this part of the symposium we will consider oral delivery of L-menthol and its potential for reducing an individual’s perception of heat stress with associated effects on exercise tolerance in the heat. We will also examine the frequency of use, optimal concentration, timing and novelty of L-menthol in a sporting and occupational context

Speech Recognition on an FPGA Using Discrete and Continuous Hidden Markov Models

Speech recognition is a computationally demanding task, particularly the stage which uses Viterbi decoding for converting pre-processed speech data into words or sub-word units. Any device that can reduce the load on, for example, a PC’s processor, is advantageous. Hence we present FPGA implementations of the decoder based alternately on discrete and continuous hidden Markov models (HMMs) representing monophones, and demonstrate that the discrete version can process speech nearly 5,000 times real time, using just 12% of the slices of a Xilinx Virtex XCV1000, but with a lower recognition rate than the continuous implementation, which is 75 times faster than real time, and occupies 45% of the same device

Implementing a simple continuous speech recognition system on an FPGA

Speech recognition is a computationally demanding task, particularly the stage which uses Viterbi decoding for converting pre-processed speech data into words or sub-word units. We present an FPGA implementations of the decoder based on continuous hidden Markov models (HMMs) representing monophones, and demonstrate that it can process speech 75 times real time, using 45% of the slices of a Xilinx Virtex XCV100

Oral application of L-menthol in the heat: From pleasure to performance

When menthol is applied to the oral cavity it presents with a familiar refreshing sensation and cooling mint flavour. This may be deemed hedonic in some individuals, but may cause irritation in others. This variation in response is likely dependent upon trigeminal sensitivity toward cold stimuli, suggesting a need for a menthol solution that can be easily personalised. Menthol’s characteristics can also be enhanced by matching colour to qualitative outcomes; a factor which can easily be manipulated by practitioners working in athletic or occupational settings to potentially enhance intervention efficacy. This presentation will outline the efficacy of oral menthol application for improving time trial performance to date, either via swilling or via co-ingestion with other cooling strategies, with an emphasis upon how menthol can be applied in ecologically valid scenarios. Situations in which performance is not expected to be enhanced will also be discussed. An updated model by which menthol may prove hedonic, satiate thirst and affect ventilation will also be presented, with the potential performance implications of these findings discussed and modelled. Qualitative reflections from athletes that have implemented menthol mouth swilling in competition, training and maximal exercise will also be included

High resolution images of P/Tempel 1 and P/Tempel 2 constructed from IRAS survey data

Infrared images of P/Tempel 1 and P/Tempel 2 were constructed from IRAS survey data using a computer algorithm based on the Maximum Correlation Method for Image Construction (Aumann et al, 1990). The resulting images are of sufficiently high quality and resolution to delineate coma and tail morphology, and permit accurate photometry of the total dust complex. Comparisons of the infrared colors and photometric profiles of Tempel 1 and Tempel 2 at similar heliocentric distances show that the grains produced by the two comets are quite similar in radiometric and dynamic properties. Tempel 1 is found to produce about 30 percent more dust in its coma and tail than Tempel 2. The comae of Tempel 1 and Tempel 2 are expanding with mean velocities of 5.8 plus or minus 0.07 and 6.1 plus or minus 0.17 m/sec respectively, indicative of the ejection of large grains. The IRAS cataloged infrared fluxes (Walker, 1986) are found to be underestimated by as much as a factor of three for the comets. Therefore, it is essential to create images of the comets to obtain meaningful IRAS photometry

Markov chain comparison

This is an expository paper, focussing on the following scenario. We have two Markov chains, $\mathcal {M}$ and $\mathcal {M}'$. By some means, we have obtained a bound on the mixing time of $\mathcal {M}'$. We wish to compare $\mathcal {M}$ with $\mathcal {M}'$ in order to derive a corresponding bound on the mixing time of $\mathcal {M}$. We investigate the application of the comparison method of Diaconis and Saloff-Coste to this scenario, giving a number of theorems which characterize the applicability of the method. We focus particularly on the case in which the chains are not reversible. The purpose of the paper is to provide a catalogue of theorems which can be easily applied to bound mixing times.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/154957806000000041 in the Probability Surveys (http://www.i-journals.org/ps/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org