The Representation of Women in USA Sports, Sports Administrative, and Team Sports Leadership

Woods (2016, p. 311) stated “For centuries, sports participated in assigning a limited role to women by excluding them from participation and resisting efforts to include them.” Women have had to struggle when it comes to sport leadership positions. Women are not usually found in higher level jobs in sport, but they tend to have positions in lower management or lower profile positions. This study is a compilation of research into how people within collegiate athletics in the United States feel about women’s employment status in the field. A pilot interview was created and administered to three women: an athletic director, an athlete, and a professor at Florida A &M University. A surveywas created and administered to 30 subjects that have careers in sport leadership positions. The questions were divided into five categories consisting of representation, coaching, equal pay, and team sports. The survey showed that there are mixed feelings in the profession. Two-thirds of the subjects thought that there was a lack of female leadership within team sports. A little over half of the subjects thought that men were more successful in the areas of leadership, coaching, equal pay, representation, and team sports. By identifying the issues that women are facing when heading into this profession, the researchers identified what actions need to take place in order to resolve the problems discovered. In turn, this would create more opportunities and more qualified female candidates for positions in sports administration and team sports leadership in the United States

Supporting trans employees in the workplace

The research aimed to provide greater insight into managing gender identity at work and its implications for UK workplaces. In particular, it aimed to provide relevant insights for managers and employees using primary research evidence

A Theoretical Analysis of Two-Stage Recommendation for Cold-Start Collaborative Filtering

In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for tackling the cold-start collaborative filtering problem, where unknown targets (items or users) keep coming to the system, and there is a limited number of resources (users or items) that can be allocated and related to them. The solution requires a trade-off between exploitation and exploration as with the limited recommendation opportunities, we need to, on one hand, allocate the most relevant resources right away, but, on the other hand, it is also necessary to allocate resources that are useful for learning the target's properties in order to recommend more relevant ones in the future. In this paper, we study a simple two-stage recommendation combining a sequential and a batch solution together. We first model the problem with the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and provide an exact solution. Then, through an in-depth analysis over the POMDP value iteration solution, we identify that an exact solution can be abstracted as selecting resources that are not only highly relevant to the target according to the initial-stage information, but also highly correlated, either positively or negatively, with other potential resources for the next stage. With this finding, we propose an approximate solution to ease the intractability of the exact solution. Our initial results on synthetic data and the Movie Lens 100K dataset confirm the performance gains of our theoretical development and analysis

Age related differences in anxiety-like behavior and amygdalar CCL2 responsiveness to stress following alcohol withdrawal

Behavioral and neuroimmune vulnerability to withdrawal from chronic alcohol varies with age. The relation of anxiety-like behavior to amygdalar CCL2 responses following stress after withdrawal from chronic intermittent alcohol (CIA) was investigated in adolescent and adult rats

Depletion of brain noradrenaline and dopamine by 6‐hydroxydopamine

Summary 10 After intracisternal administration, 6-hydroxydopamine had a greater effect on brain noradrenaline than on dopamine. 2) Administration of two doses of 6-hydroxydopamine increased the depletion of noradrenaline but not of dopamine. 3) Small doses of 6‐hydroxydopamine decreased the concentration of noradrenaline with little or no effect on dopamine. Tyrosine hydroxylase activity was not reduced with these treatments. 4) While pargyline pretreatment offered no advantage in the depletion of brain noradrenaline after 6-hydroxydopamine, depletion of brain dopamine was greatly potentiated by this treatment. The reduction of striatal tyrosine hydroxylase activity observed after 6-hydroxydopamine was also potentiated by pargyline pretreatment. 5) The amounts of labelled noradrenaline and dopamine formed from 3H-tyrosine were greatly reduced by 6-hydroxydopamine treatment. After 3H-DOPA, formation of noradrenaline was greatly reduced while formation of labelled dopamine was only moderately reduced suggesting that decarboxylation of DOPA can occur in other than catecholamine containing neurones. 6) Desmethylimipramine and imipramine inhibited depletion of noradrenaline produced by 6-hydroxydopamine but did not alter depletion of dopamine. Reserpine did not inhibit depletion of catecholamines produced by 6-hydroxydopamine. 7) Administration of 6-hydroxydopamine to developing rats lowered both noradrenaline and dopamine concentrations as well as the tyrosine hydroxylase activity in the brains of these animals

Effect of 6-hydroxydopamine on brain norepinephrine and dopamine evidence for selective degeneration of catecholamine neurons.

After the intracisternal administration of 6-hydroxydopamine, brain levels of norepinephrine were reduced significantly with or without pargyline pretreatment. Depletion of dopamine in the central nervous system was found to be enhanced markedly by pargyline administration at higher dose levels of 6-hydroxydopamine. Brain serotonin concentrations were not altered. The effects of 6-hydroxydopamine were long-lasting with the depletion of brain amines persisting at 78 days. After norepinephrine-H3 intracisternally to animals treated with 6-hydroxydopamine, labeled norepinephrine uptake was diminished with a corresponding reduction of deaminated catechols and a marked increased in methylated amines. Tyrosine hydroxylase activity was found to be reduced in brainstem, caudate nucleus and whole brain in 6-hydroxydopamine-treated animals. Conversion of tyrosine-H3 to labeled norepinephrine and dopamine was also markedly diminished. The results support the view that 6-hydroxydopamine produces a "central sympathectomy" when introduced into cerebrospinal fluid

GABAergic Modulation of Ethanol-Induced Motor Impairment

Direct or indirect pharmacological manipulation of γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptor activity was examined in relation to the motor incoordinating actions of ethanol in the rat. Ethanol (1.13–3.0 g/kg i.p.) caused a dose-dependent increase in the height of aerial righting. This motor impairment was increased selectively by intracisternal injection of the GABA agonists muscimol (0.10 μg), 4,5,6,7-tetrahydroisoxazole(5,4-c) pyridin(3-ol) (1.0 μg) and GABA (1000 μg). The GABA antagonist, bicuculline (1.0 and 5.0 μg intracisternally), reduced impairment. Thus, direct manipulation of GABA receptor activity modulated motor incoordination caused by ethanol. In addition, indirect-acting GABA-mimetics, such as γ-acetylenic GABA (100 mg/kg i.p.), aminooxyacetic acid (50 mg/kg i.p.), ethanolamine-O-sulfate (250 mg/kg i.p.) and L-2,4-diaminobutyric acid (600 mg/kg i.p.) all potentiated the increase in the height of aerial righting caused by ethanol treatment. Failure of ethanol to modify the binding of [3H]muscimol to cerebral cortical membranes in vitro suggested there was no direct competition for GABA binding sites or facilitation of the binding of GABA to these sites by ethanol. Also, no simple relationship was observed between the degree of motor impairment caused by either ethanol or γ-acetylenic GABA and changes in GABA concentration in three brain areas. Although GABAergic neurons may be involved in the mechanism underlying ethanol-induced depression of motor coordination, the interaction does not involve a direct activation of GABA receptors by ethanol

SCH-23390 antagonism of a D-2 dopamine agonist depends upon catecholaminergic neurons

SCH-23390, a selective D-1 dopamine antagonist, was found to antagonize the locomotor stimulation induced by LY-171555, an action similar to that for haloperidol in control animals. However, this action of SCH-23390 was prevented in rats treated with 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) or with reserpine plus α-methyl-tyrosine pretreatment. These results indicate that the action of SCH-23390 to antagonize D-2 dopamine receptor actions is dependent upon functional catecholamine-containing neurons. In contrast to the lack of action of SCH-23390 to antagonize LY-171555 in 6-OHDA-treated rats, SCH-23390 blocked the locomotor stimulation induced by SKF-39393, a D-1 dopamine agonist, after this treatment. Thus, D-1 dopamine receptors are distinct from D-2 receptor sites and can exhibit a behavior similar to that observed when D-2 receptors are stimulated. These data suggest that D-1 receptor sites modulate D-2 dopamine receptor function through a mechanism dependent upon functionally intact catecholamine-containing neurons