Stabilization of heterodimensional cycles

We consider diffeomorphisms $f$ with heteroclinic cycles associated to saddles $P$ and $Q$ of different indices. We say that a cycle of this type can be stabilized if there are diffeomorphisms close to $f$ with a robust cycle associated to hyperbolic sets containing the continuations of $P$ and $Q$. We focus on the case where the indices of these two saddles differ by one. We prove that, excluding one particular case (so-called twisted cycles that additionally satisfy some geometrical restrictions), all such cycles can be stabilized.Comment: 31 pages, 9 figure

“… so what?” Attitudes of the voluntary sector towards child protection in sports clubs

There is both growing concern about ethical standards in sport and also rapid expansion in the number of local and national schemes designed to encourage youth sports development. Child abuse in youth sport has become a ‘moral panic’ in British society but there is evidence of a child protection policy vacuum between national and club level. Sport club child protection schemes are rarely informed by the work of their respective national governing bodies but there is an almost complete absence of empirical data with which to support or challenge claims about child safety in voluntary sector sports clubs. The research reported addresses this knowledge gap. It was designed to explore the extent to which one English midlands county had made provision for child protection and to assess the main issues confronting the county in its efforts to enhance child protection in voluntary sport. Voluntary sector junior sports clubs (N = 396) were sent a postal survey; 129 responded. 19 junior sports focus groups and selected county officers and staff were invited to participate in group or individual interviews during the second half of 1999 (prior to the establishment of the NSPCC/Sport England Child Protection in Sport Unit). This paper reports the survey and interview data from the voluntary clubs. Results show an extremely varied pattern of awareness of the main child protection issues in the various sports clubs. One common theme emerged, however: there was a clear misapprehension that children are safest amongst those whom they know best and most at risk from those currently outside their sports clubs. This view is firmly contradicted by research statistics on sources of child abuse. The paper argues that the unwillingness of club personnel to challenge their own assumptions is causally linked to a culture of complacency about child protection in voluntary sport

Purity and Danger – researching child protection and welfare in youth sport

Drawing on Mary Douglas’ classic social analysis in ‘Purity and Danger’ (1966) I argue that youth sport is a purity system and that pollution of it, through child abuse, breaches the belief system that still attaches to sport. I explore research attitudes and practices in conventional sport science and, in particular, examine the politics of researching a topic that has low perceived performance value. I suggest that the notion of ‘pollution’ has potential for understanding not only the denial of child abuse in sport but also its marginal status as a sport science research topic. One solution to this state of affairs is to recast children and young people in sport as ‘human beings’ first and ‘humans doing’ second. Some implications of such an approach for a youth sport research agenda are drawn out

High energy QCD and hard diffraction at HERA versus Tevatron

We present and discuss two different topics where Tevatron and HERA data can be compared directly. A method allowing for a direct comparison of data with theoretical predictions is proposed for forward jet production at HERA. An application to the determination of the effective Pomeron intercept in the BFKL-LO parametrization from $d\sigma/dx$ data at HERA leads to a good fit with a significantly high effective intercept, $\alpha_P= 1.43 \pm 0.025 (stat.) \pm 0.025 (syst.)$. It is less than the value of the pomeron intercept using dijets with large rapidity intervals obtained at Tevatron. In a second part of this report, we make comparison between diffractive results at HERA and at Tevatron. We first give the parton distributions in the pomeron extracted from HERA data, and compare with hard single diffraction at Tevatron and diffractive dijets with a leading antiproton data.Comment: 10 pages, review talk given at the Workshop on Light-Cone QCD and Nonperturbative Hadron Physics, December 13-22 1999, Adelaide, Australi

The Parents’ Optimum Zone: Measuring and optimising parental engagement in youth sport

Both Sport England, through its Long Term Athlete Development programme, and the NSPCC, through its Child Protection in Sport Unit, have a stake in improving parental behaviour in youth sport in order to optimise the safety and performance potential of young athletes. This paper reports on a commissioned review of parenting research literature and programmes by these two agencies in 2005. The outcome is a new model of parenting termed POZ (Parental Optimum Zone) that draws from previous research, in particular that on Activation States (Brackenridge et al., 2005) and Hanin’s (1995) notion of the Individual Zone of Optimum Function (or IZOF) for athletes. The model seeks to identify the optimum discourses, knowledge, feelings and behaviours that parents should demonstrate in their engagement in their child’s sport. Adopting this framework, and listening to children’s views of it, will allow us to describe when parents are ‘in the zone’ and help them to adopt POZitive voices, knowledge, attitudes and action towards their child’s sport. POZ synthesis several previous models and offers both a method of diagnosing and monitoring parent behaviour and a platform for parent education

Violence and abuse prevention in sport

This chapter sets out a general framework for understanding the nature of abusive violations in sport and situates these within the wider policy landscape of sport. It reviews some of the main research questions facing those who wish to eradicate child abuse in sport, and sexual violations in particular, and weighs the evidence about these from research studies

QCD dipole prediction for DIS and diffractive structure functions

The $F_{2}$, $F_{G}$, $R=F_{L}/F_{T}$ proton structure functions are derived in the QCD dipole picture of BFKL dynamics. We get a three parameter fit describing the 1994 H1 proton structure function $F_{2}$ data in the low $x$, moderate $Q^{2}$ range. Without any additional parameter, the gluon density and the longitudinal structure functions are predicted.The diffractive dissociation processes are also discussed, and a new prediction for the proton diffractive structure function is obtained.Comment: 4 pages, latex file, 2 figures Invited talk given at the 28th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP 96), 25-31 July 1996, Warsaw, Polan