Sport, migration, and gender in the neoliberal age

This ethnographic collection explores how neoliberalism has permeated the bodies, subjectivities, and gender of youth around the world as global sport industries have expanded their reach into marginal areas, luring young athletes with the dream of pursuing athletic careers in professional leagues of the Global North. Neoliberalism has reconfigured sport since the 1980s, as sport clubs and federations have become for-profit businesses, in conjunction with television and corporate sponsors. Neoliberal sport has had other important effects, which are rarely the object of attention: as the national economies of the Global South and local economies of marginal areas of the Global North have collapsed under pressure from global capital, many young people dream of pursuing a sport career as an escape from poverty. But this elusive future is often located elsewhere, initially in regional centres, though ultimately in the wealthy centres of the Global North that can support a sport infrastructure. The pursuit of this future has transformed kinship relations, gender relations, and the subjectivities of people. This collection of rich ethnographies from diverse regions of the world, from Ghana to Finland and from China to Fiji, pulls the reader into the lives of men and women in the global sport industries, including aspiring athletes, their families, and the agents, coaches, and academy directors shaping athletes’ dreams. It demonstrates that the ideals of neoliberalism spread in surprising ways, intermingling with categories like gender, religion, indigeneity, and kinship. Athletes’ migrations provide a novel angle on the global workings of neoliberalism. This book will be of key interest to scholars in Gender Studies, Anthropology, Sport Studies, and Migration Studies

Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries

The Role of Human Capital on Family Firm Innovativeness : The Strategic Leadership Role of Family Board Members

Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, this study investigates the relationship between human capital (employees’ experience, knowledge and technical skills, managerial talent) and innovativeness (propensity to innovate) in a sample of 478 family firms taken from a cross-country dataset (STEP Project). Furthermore, we consider the moderating effect of the proportion of family members sitting on the board of directors (family board ratio). The main findings highlight that there is a positive relationship between human capital and family firm innovativeness. Moreover, family board ratio positively moderates the relationship between human capital and innovativeness in such a way that when the family board ratio is high, the relationship between human capital and innovativeness is stronger. This result is weaker when multiple family generations are actively involved in the firm. In summary, family members sitting on the board of directors focus more attention on people and for this reason, play an important strategic leadership role in valorizing human capital that fosters more innovativeness

Lower hybrid current drive at high density in Alcator C-Mod

Experimental observations of lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) at high density on the Alcator C-Mod tokamak are presented in this paper. Bremsstrahlung emission from relativistic fast electrons in the core plasma drops suddenly above line-averaged densities of 10[superscript 20] m[superscript −3] (ω/ω[subscript LH] ~ 3) in single null discharges with large (≥8 mm) inner gaps, well below the density limit previously observed on limited tokamaks (ω/ω[subscript LH] ~ 2). Modelling and experimental evidence suggest that the absence of LHCD driven fast electrons at high density may be due to parasitic collisional absorption in the scrape-off layer (SOL). Experiments show that the population of fast electrons produced by LHCD at high density ([bar over n][subscript e] > 10[superscript 20] m[superscript -3]) can be increased by operating with an inner gap of less than ~5 mm with the strongest non-thermal emission in inner wall limited plasmas. A change in plasma topology from single to double null produces a modest increase in non-thermal emission at high density. Increasing the electron temperature in the periphery of the plasma (0.8 > r/a > 1.0) also results in a modest increase in non-thermal electron emission above the density limit. Ray tracing/Fokker–Planck simulations of these discharges predict the observed sensitivity to plasma position when the effects of collisional absorption in the SOL are included in the model.United States. Dept. of Energy (Award DE-FC02-99ER54512)United States. Dept. of Energy (Award DE-AC02-76CH03073

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press