University sport and public policy: implications for future research

Editoria

Making sense of the lack of evidence discourse, power and knowledge in the field of sport for development

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyse the power dynamics and vested interest groups that shape the lack of evidence discourse, which is critical of the way evidence is produced within and for the sport for development (SFD) field. This examination recognises that an understanding of the dominant neoliberal context within which SFD is located is critical. Design/methodology/approach: Using a Foucauldian conceptual framework, power, knowledge and discourse relating to political actors in SFD - funders, policy makers, academics and sport development practitioners (SDPs) - are assessed. This paper addresses two key questions: How is the lack of evidence discourse constructed, and what is its impact? And whose interests are served in the interpretation, generation and reporting of evidence? Findings: This paper concludes that although in a Foucauldian sense power surrounding evidence is everywhere, the neo liberal context, which situates SFD, favours the privileging of evidence discourses associated with and derived from funding organisations, political and academic interest groups to the detriment of evidence discourses associated with SDPs. Clearly then there is a major tension concerning knowledge transfer, power and process, and the way that evidence can be used to inform practice. Originality/value: The paper attempts to highlight the power dynamics influencing the way evidence is produced within SFD and that much is needed to move the field forward in a more united approach for what counts as evidence for all political actors. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Optimal strategies for learning multi-ancestry polygenic scores vary across traits

Polygenic scores (PGSs) are individual-level measures that aggregate the genome-wide genetic predisposition to a given trait. As PGS have predominantly been developed using European-ancestry samples, trait prediction using such European ancestry-derived PGS is less accurate in non-European ancestry individuals. Although there has been recent progress in combining multiple PGS trained on distinct populations, the problem of how to maximize performance given a multiple-ancestry cohort is largely unexplored. Here, we investigate the effect of sample size and ancestry composition on PGS performance for fifteen traits in UK Biobank. For some traits, PGS estimated using a relatively small African-ancestry training set outperformed, on an African-ancestry test set, PGS estimated using a much larger European-ancestry only training set. We observe similar, but not identical, results when considering other minority-ancestry groups within UK Biobank. Our results emphasise the importance of targeted data collection from underrepresented groups in order to address existing disparities in PGS performance

Golf: girls who golf

Academic research conducted in north America and the UK over the past 15 years has tended to characterise golf as a male-dominated sport in which women experience chauvinism and constraints on participation. Within our own research we occasionally see evidence of this, however, while instances of poor female experience may still exist, it’s important not to tar an entire sport with the same brush. In England, there are just under 2,000 golf clubs and our own research has shown that there is considerable variety in culture and practice. Most golf clubs are now working hard to attract more women into the sport

Trapping and Wiggling: Elastohydrodynamics of Driven Microfilaments

We present a general theoretical analysis of semiflexible filaments subject to viscous drag or point forcing. These are the relevant forces in dynamic experiments designed to measure biopolymer bending moduli. By analogy with the ``Stokes problems" in hydrodynamics (fluid motion induced by that of a wall bounding a viscous fluid), we consider the motion of a polymer one end of which is moved in an impulsive or oscillatory way. Analytical solutions for the time-dependent shapes of such moving polymers are obtained within an analysis applicable to small-amplitude deformations. In the case of oscillatory driving, particular attention is paid to a characteristic length determined by the frequency of oscillation, the polymer persistence length, and the viscous drag coefficient. Experiments on actin filaments manipulated with optical traps confirm the scaling law predicted by the analysis and provide a new technique for measuring the elastic bending modulus. A re-analysis of several published experiments on microtubules is also presented.Comment: RevTex, 24 pages, 15 eps figs, uses cite.sty, Biophysical