Four Scottish indulgences at Sens

English interest in the great Cistercian abbey of Pontigny was stimulated by the exiles there of two archbishops of Canterbury, Thomas Becket and Stephen Langton.1 As archbishops of Canterbury, Langton and Edmund of Abingdon made gifts to Pontigny abbey in consideration of the welcome given to Becket.2 Edmund did not die at Pontigny, but was a confrater of the community, and the abbot claimed the body, asserting that Edmund had expressed a wish to be buried there. The process of canonisation was rapid.3 After Edmund's canonisation, Henry III sent a chasuble and a chalice for the first celebration of the feast, and granted money to maintain four candles round the saint's shrine.4 In 1254, en route from Gascony to meet Louis IX in Chartres and Paris,5 Henry visited Pontigny, as his brother Richard of Cornwall, who seems to have pressed for canonisation, had done in 1247.6 Archbishop Boniface of Canterbury ordered the celebration of the feast to be observed throughout his province.7 Pope Alexander IV granted a dispensation to allow Englishwomen to enter the precinct of Pontigny abbey on the feast of the translation of the relics of St Edmund8 (women were normally forbidden to enter a Cistercian monastery). Matthew Paris, the greatest English chronicler of the age, wrote a life of the saint.9 English interest continued into the fourteenth century. In 1331 an English priest was given a licence to visit the shrine,10 but it seems likely that the Hundred Years’ War made pilgrimage to Pontigny difficult.11 The indulgences preserved by the abbey reveal an interest in the shrine throughout the Western Church, granted as they were by prelates from Tortosa to Livonia and Estonia, and from Messina to Lübeck.1

Whole body cryotherapy, cold water immersion, or a placebo following resistance exercise: a case of mind over matter?

PURPOSE: The use of cryotherapy as a recovery intervention is prevalent amongst athletes. Performance of high volume, heavy load resistance exercise is known to result in disturbances of muscle function, perceptual responses and blood borne parameters. Therefore, this study investigated the influence of cold water immersion (CWI), whole body cryotherapy (WBC) or a placebo (PL) intervention on markers of recovery following an acute resistance training session. METHODS: 24 resistance trained males were matched into a CWI (10 min at 10 °C), WBC (3- and 4 min at - 85 °C) or PL group before completing a lower body resistance training session. Perceptions of soreness and training stress, markers of muscle function, inflammation and efflux of intracellular proteins were assessed before, and up to 72 h post exercise. RESULTS: The training session resulted in increased soreness, disturbances of muscle function, and increased inflammation and efflux of intracellular proteins. Although WBC attenuated soreness at 24 h, and positively influenced peak force at 48 h compared to CWI and PL, many of the remaining outcomes were trivial, unclear or favoured the PL condition. With the exception of CRP at 24 h, neither cryotherapy intervention attenuated the inflammatory response compared to PL. CONCLUSION: There was some evidence to suggest that WBC is more effective than CWI at attenuating select perceptual and functional responses following resistance training. However, neither cryotherapy intervention was more effective than the placebo treatment at accelerating recovery. The implications of these findings should be carefully considered by individuals employing cryotherapy as a recovery strategy following heavy load resistance training

Filter-Based Fading Channel Modeling

A channel simulator is an essential component in the development and accurate performance evaluation of wireless systems. A key technique for producing statistically accurate fading variates is to shape the flat spectrum of Gaussian variates using digital filters. This paper addresses various challenges when designing real and complex spectrum shaping filters with quantized coefficients for efficient realization of both isotropic and nonisotropic fading channels. An iterative algorithm for designing stable complex infinite impulse response (IIR) filters with fixed-point coefficients is presented. The performance of the proposed filter design algorithm is verified with 16-bit fixed-point simulations of two example fading filters

The effect of milk on recovery from repeat-sprint cycling in female team-sport athletes

The consumption of milk post-eccentric exercise attenuates the effects of muscle damage in team-sport athletes. However, participation in team sport involves both concentric-eccentric loading and metabolic stress. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the effects of post-exercise milk consumption on recovery from a cycling protocol designed to simulate the metabolic demands of team sport. Ten female team-sport athletes participated in a randomised cross-over investigation. Upon completion of the protocol participants consumed 500ml of milk (MILK) or 500ml of an energy-matched carbohydrate (CHO) drink. Muscle function (peak torque, rate of force development (RFD), countermovement jump (CMJ), 20m sprint, muscle soreness and tiredness, serum creatine kinase (CK), (high-sensitivity C reactive protein (hsCRP) and measures of oxidative stress (protein carbonyls (PC) and GSH:GSSG (oxidized glutathione:reduced glutathione) ratio) were determined pre-, 24h, 48h and 72h post-exercise. MILK had a possible beneficial effect in attenuating losses in peak torque (180 s) from baseline to 24h (3.2±7.8% v -6.2±7.5%, MILK v CHO) and a possible beneficial effect in minimising soreness (baseline-48h; baseline-72h) and tiredness (baseline-24h; baseline-72h). There was no change in oxidative stress following the exercise protocol, though a likely benefit of milk was observed for GSH:GSSH ratio at baseline-24h (0.369 x/÷ 1.89, 1.103 x/÷ 3.96, MILK v CHO). MILK had an unclear effect on all other variables. Consumption of 500ml milk post-repeat sprint cycling had little to no benefit in minimising losses in peak torque, or minimising increases in soreness and tiredness and had no effect on serum markers of muscle damage and inflammation

A posteriori error analysis and adaptive non-intrusive numerical schemes for systems of random conservation laws

In this article we consider one-dimensional random systems of hyperbolic conservation laws. We first establish existence and uniqueness of random entropy admissible solutions for initial value problems of conservation laws which involve random initial data and random flux functions. Based on these results we present an a posteriori error analysis for a numerical approximation of the random entropy admissible solution. For the stochastic discretization, we consider a non-intrusive approach, the Stochastic Collocation method. The spatio-temporal discretization relies on the Runge--Kutta Discontinuous Galerkin method. We derive the a posteriori estimator using continuous reconstructions of the discrete solution. Combined with the relative entropy stability framework this yields computable error bounds for the entire space-stochastic discretization error. The estimator admits a splitting into a stochastic and a deterministic (space-time) part, allowing for a novel residual-based space-stochastic adaptive mesh refinement algorithm. We conclude with various numerical examples investigating the scaling properties of the residuals and illustrating the efficiency of the proposed adaptive algorithm

The Unfulfilled Potential of Data-Driven Decision Making in Agile Software Development

With the general trend towards data-driven decision making (DDDM), organizations are looking for ways to use DDDM to improve their decisions. However, few studies have looked into the practitioners view of DDDM, in particular for agile organizations. In this paper we investigated the experiences of using DDDM, and how data can improve decision making. An emailed questionnaire was sent out to 124 industry practitioners in agile software developing companies, of which 84 answered. The results show that few practitioners indicated a widespread use of DDDM in their current decision making practices. The practitioners were more positive to its future use for higher-level and more general decision making, fairly positive to its use for requirements elicitation and prioritization decisions, while being less positive to its future use at the team level. The practitioners do see a lot of potential for DDDM in an agile context; however, currently unfulfilled

Distributed-Pair Programming can work well and is not just Distributed Pair-Programming

Background: Distributed Pair Programming can be performed via screensharing or via a distributed IDE. The latter offers the freedom of concurrent editing (which may be helpful or damaging) and has even more awareness deficits than screen sharing. Objective: Characterize how competent distributed pair programmers may handle this additional freedom and these additional awareness deficits and characterize the impacts on the pair programming process. Method: A revelatory case study, based on direct observation of a single, highly competent distributed pair of industrial software developers during a 3-day collaboration. We use recordings of these sessions and conceptualize the phenomena seen. Results: 1. Skilled pairs may bridge the awareness deficits without visible obstruction of the overall process. 2. Skilled pairs may use the additional editing freedom in a useful limited fashion, resulting in potentially better fluency of the process than local pair programming. Conclusion: When applied skillfully in an appropriate context, distributed-pair programming can (not will!) work at least as well as local pair programming