Physical education and health: moving forwards or ‘going round in circles’?

Alfrey, Cale and Webb (2012a) conducted research to explore and also try to explain physical education teachers’ experiences, views and understandings of health within physical education, inclusive of their professional development. This article provides a summary of this study and draws on and reports selected findings from this initial paper, as well as wider literature, to debate the role, contribution and effectiveness of physical education and physical education teachers in the delivery of health. A number of observations and issues are highlighted and these are used to address the question: is physical education making progress and moving forwards in this area

Provision for students with learning difficulties in general colleges of further education - have we been going round in circles?

This is a PDF version of an article published in British journal of special education© 2006. The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com.This article discusses the current situation for students with severe learning difficulties in general colleges of further education. Findings are presented from a critical review of the literature and a small-scale preliminary investigation which set out to explore the idea that, despite radical changes to the special school sector and to the structure and organisation of further education, provision in colleges of further education for these students is poorly focused. Students with severe learning difficulties experience provision that is, at best, circuitous and repetitive and that, at worst, leads individuals back into dependence, unemployment and social segregation. Using the outcomes of interviews and the scrutiny of inspection reports, a searching critique of current practice and an interesting set of recommendations for ways in which the situation could be radically reviewed and improved is provided

Going Round in Circles with N -> S Acyl Transfer

It is not highly sophisticated, yet the N→S acyl transfer reaction of a native peptide sequence potentially fills an important technology gap. While several routes to synthetic peptide thioesters exist, only one is routinely applicable for biologically derived samples. Using the naturally occurring amino acid cysteine as the sole activator for N→S acyl transfer we have demonstrated transformation of synthetic and biologically derived precursors into thioesters for use in Native Chemical Ligation, providing a viable alternative for biological samples. Further refinement will be key to realising the full potential of this intriguing process, and increase the number of applications in peptide engineering and therapeutics

Going Round in Circles with a Multisystemic Disease: A Unique Case of Parasitic Aortitis

Aortitis results from aortic inflammation, frequent causes being infections and rheumatological disorders. The authors report the case of a 33-year-old black male with recent arterial hypertension, who presented with recurrent abdominal pain, jaundice, anorexia, weight loss and diarrhoea. Laboratory work-up was compatible with inflammatory anaemia and obstructive jaundice, while abdominal imaging revealed a dilated biliary tract, no visible gallstones, cephalic pancreatic globosity and aortic thickening. Pancreatic aspirate was negative for malignant cells, bacteria and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The jaundice spontaneously subsided and the pancreatic globosity improved over time. Following positive PPD and IGRA, isoniazid was started. However, follow-up investigations revealed a severe bulbar stenosis with intense eosinophilic infiltrate, multiple non-necrotizing granulomas, and thoracic and abdominal aortitis not previously recognized. Immunological profile (ECA, ANCA and IgG4), eggs and parasites in stool samples were negative. The multisystemic disease, with an insidious and migrating behaviour, gastrointestinal and vascular involvement, granulomatous inflammatory response and tissue eosinophilia, raised the suspicion of a parasitic infestation (despite negative screening) or vasculitis. After 7 days of empirical treatment with albendazole and ivermectin, the patient passed a specimen of Ascaris lumbricoides in the stool and improved clinically

Brexit and the voice of the people: but which people? The UACES Blog [weblog article, 5 February 2019]

Brexit has been debated and unpicked to exhaustion. Writing in February 2019, Brexit is beginning to feel like a bad soap opera whose scriptwriter has run out of ideas. The plot is going round in circles. And yet, most discussions revert one way or another to sovereignty, migration and economy – all with clear nationalistic and imperialistic overtones. Debates about people or ‘the people’ seem to be at the core of these discussion, especially when it comes to migration. All such debates are implicitly or explicitly about ‘us’ and ‘them’. This binary(ies) need challenging. What is also needed is a recognition of the multiple further intersections and subgroups within these binaries of groups of people

Why do Unionists want art to be universal?

No abstract available

Lost in hyperspace: Linearity versus exploration in the design of multimedia for independent learners

We are developing multimedia tutorials for independent learners based on a generic software shell. In doing so, one of the pedagogic issues we are addressing relates to navigation. This is a key factor in the effectiveness of multimedia teaching, since it affects how easy students find it to extract and integrate information. Multimedia tutorials tend to be either highly structured, with materials presented in a relatively linear fashion, or an encyclopedia-style explorative resource. The former is restrictive and provides the student with little freedom to study the materials in the order they choose; the latter makes systematic study difficult and students can easily become ‘lost’. Disorientation in explorative-style packages is a particular problem for Field Dependent people (Witkin et al., 1971). We have incorporated the best features of both linear and explorative packages in our shell and our tutorials, with the aim of supporting Field Dependent people as much as possible, while not denying those students who prefer to work in an explorative way the freedom to do so

Long live theory : an interview with Derek Attridge

ANTAE: You seem to like using opening sentences in the form of short questions. For example, in your introduction to Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature, you start by asking ‘what is literature?’1 Why would you say you do this? Would it have anything to do with the fact that the questions you start with can never be answered?peer-reviewe

Magnetic and axial-vector transitions of the baryon antidecuplet

We report the recent results of the magnetic transitions and axial-vector transitions of the baryon antidecuplet within the framework of the chiral quark-soliton model. The dynamical model parameters are fixed by experimental data for the magnetic moments of the baryon octet, for the hyperon semileptonic decay constants, and for the singlet axial-vector constant. The transition magnetic moments $\mu_{\Lambda\Sigma}$ and $\mu_{N\Delta}$ are well reproduced and other octet-decuplet and octet-antidecuplet transitions are predicted. In particular, the present calculation of $\mu_{\Sigma\Sigma^*}$ is found to be below the upper bound $0.82\mu_N$ that the SELEX collaboration measured very recently. The results explains consistently the recent findings of a new $N^*$ resonance from the GRAAL and Tohoku LNS group. We also obtain the transition axial-vector constants for the $\Theta^+\to KN$ from which the decay width of the $\Theta^{+}$ pentaquark baryon is determined as a function of the pion-nucleon sigma term $\Sigma_{\pi N}$. We investigate the dependence of the decay width of the $\Theta^{+}$ on the $g_{A}^{(0)}$, with the $g_{A}^{(0)}$ varied within the range of the experimental uncertainty. We show that a small decay width of the $\Theta^{+}\to KN$, i.e. $\Gamma_{\Theta KN} \leq 1$ MeV, is compatible with the values of all known semileptonic decays with the generally accepted value of $g_{A}^{(0)} \approx 0.3$ for the proton.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, Talk given at the Yukawa International Seminar (YKIS) 2006, "New frontiers in QCD", Kyoto, Japan, 20 Nov. - 8 Dec. 200