The Effects of Offseason Training on Special Olympics Athletes

The Effects of Offseason Training on Special Olympics Athletes Tayler Holder, Alex White Department of Health and Human Performance PURPOSE: Many Special Olympics athletes focus on sport specific preseason training and have no fitness programs in the offseason. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of individualized fitness programs on fitness levels of Special Olympics athletes. METHODS: Participants were 3 Special Olympics athletes recruited from specialized exercise programs at the YMCA. Athletes were given an Athlete Pre-Program Survey and participated in field testing to assess their baseline needs. In the field we tested flexibility, strength, balance, and aerobic fitness levels by using the following tests: Back Saver Sit and Reach Test, Apley’s Test, Timed Sit-Stand Test, Partial Sit-up Test, Seated Push-up Test, Eyes Open and Eyes Closed Single Leg Stance, Multidirectional Functional Reach and the Three Minute Walk-Run Test. Based on the baseline assessment athletes were given an individualized exercise program and were retested after six weeks. RESULTS: Our specific intervention focused on balance and aerobic fitness. We measured the greatest post-intervention improvement in these areas. We used the Cohen statistic to calculate the effect size, which measures the strength of the correlation between the intervention program and the recorded improvements. Effect Size is represented as Small (0.1-0.3), Medium (0.3-0.5), or Large (\u3e0.5). A Large Effect Size was calculated for the following tests: Eyes Open Single Leg Stance (L/R), Eyes Closed Single Leg Stance (R), and the Three-Minute Walk/Run Distance. CONCLUSION: From the improvements shown in the brief six week intervention, we found the program to be effective at increasing the fitness levels of our Special Olympic Athletes. We anticipate that there would be more significant improvements in balance, flexibility, strength and aerobic fitness in a longer program

RELIABILITY OF A NOVEL PRINTED PIEZORESISTIVE PRESSURE SENSOR

Printed pressure sensors have the potential to be useful for measuring pressure in a multitude of sports biomechanics applications. This study was a proof of concept of a novel printed piezoresistive pressure sensor array with the aim of assessing the reliability of the sensor. The relationship between the force applied to the sensor and resistance was well described by an exponential equation (r2 \u3e 0.962), which provides confidence in the piezoresistive nature of the response. This demonstrates that, with further refinement and development, the currently-designed pressure sensor array has the potential to measure pressure during field-based sporting movements. Further research and development are required to improve reliability and to test sensor performance under dynamic loading conditions similar to those typically experienced in sport

Submission of Written Evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group Inquiry into the Use of Armed Drones: Drone Strikes, Legal Reasoning and the Need for Transparency

As researchers involved in studying the specific ways in which drone strikes are conducted in real-time, in this submission we suggest there are two areas where the APPG might conclude much greater information is needed on the use of armed drones. First, more information is needed on the role that legal considerations actually play in decisions around targeting in the context of drone strikes. Legal frameworks do not interpret themselves and it is important, therefore, to investigate how they are being interpreted as part of the work of conducting drone operations. Second, in order to properly understand how legal frameworks are being interpreted during missions, much more information is needed on the operational context than is currently publicly available. In the case of the UK’s drone operations, there is a great deal that simply is not known. Greater disclosure in both of the above areas – i.e., in relation to interpretations of legality in combat situations and the wider operational context such interpretations are undertaken within – would enhance accountability and transparency around those operations and begin to address concerns around the secrecy and erosion of democratic oversight that have been raised with respect to them. At a minimum, this would require the release of all data relating to at least a sample of successful and unsuccessful strikes including audio, video, imagery, digital communications and available intelligence alongside much more extensive information about the operational infrastructures including legal governance arrangements that those drone strikes were enabled by. If the UK’s drone programme is to become more publicly accountable, we believe these are areas the Inquiry should treat as priorities

Reconfigurable Training and Reservoir Computing in an Artificial Spin-Vortex Ice via Spin-Wave Fingerprinting

Strongly-interacting artificial spin systems are moving beyond mimicking naturally-occurring materials to emerge as versatile functional platforms, from reconfigurable magnonics to neuromorphic computing. Typically artificial spin systems comprise nanomagnets with a single magnetisation texture: collinear macrospins or chiral vortices. By tuning nanoarray dimensions we achieve macrospin/vortex bistability and demonstrate a four-state metamaterial spin-system 'Artificial Spin-Vortex Ice' (ASVI). ASVI can host Ising-like macrospins with strong ice-like vertex interactions, and weakly-coupled vortices with low stray dipolar-field. Vortices and macrospins exhibit starkly-differing spin-wave spectra with analogue-style mode-amplitude control and mode-frequency shifts of df = 3.8 GHz. The enhanced bi-textural microstate space gives rise to emergent physical memory phenomena, with ratchet-like vortex training and history-dependent nonlinear fading memory when driven through global field cycles. We employ spin-wave microstate fingerprinting for rapid, scaleable readout of vortex and macrospin populations and leverage this for spin-wave reservoir computation. ASVI performs linear and non-linear mapping transformations of diverse input signals as well as chaotic time-series forecasting. Energy costs of machine learning are spiralling unsustainably, developing low-energy neuromorphic computation hardware such as ASVI is crucial to achieving a zero-carbon computational future

Two-bands superconductivity with intra- and interband pairing for synthetic superlattices

We consider a model for superconductivity in a two-band superconductor, having an anisotropic electronic structure made of two partially overlapping bands with a first hole-like and a second electron-like fermi surface. In this pairing scenario, driven by the interplay between interband $V_{i,j}$ and intraband $V_{i,i}$ pairing terms, we have solved the two gap equations at the critical temperature $T = T_c$ and calculate $T_c$ and the chemical potential $\mu$ as a function of the number of carriers $n$ for various values of pairing interactions, $V_{1,1}$, $V_{2,2}$, and $V_{1,2}$. The results show the complexity of the physics of condensates with multiple order parameters with the chemical potential near band edges.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure