Vernacular theories of everyday (in)security : the disruptive potential of non-elite knowledge

Citizens increasingly occupy a central role in the policy rhetoric of British National Security Strategies (NSS) and yet the technocratic methods by which risks and threats are assessed and prioritised do not consider the views and experiences of diverse publics. Equally, security studies in both ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ guises has privileged analysis of elites over the political subject of threat and (in)security. Contributing to the recent ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ turns, this article draws on extensive critical focus group research carried out in 2012 across six British cities in order to investigate: 1) which issues citizens find threatening and how they know, construct, and narrate 'security threats'; and 2) the extent to which citizens are aware of, engage with, and/or refuse government efforts to foster vigilance and suspicion in public spaces. Instead of making generalisations about what particular ‘types’ of citizens think, however, we develop a ‘disruptive’ approach inspired by the work of Jacques Rancière. While many of the views, anecdotes, and stories reproduce the police order in Rancière’s terms, it is also possible to identify political discourses that disrupt dominant understandings of threat and (in)security, repoliticise the grounds on which national security agendas are authorised, and reveal actually existing alternatives to cultures of suspicion and unease

Was the UK public prepared for a pandemic? Fear and awareness before COVID-19

Using public opinion data, Dan Stevens and Nick Vaughan-Williams explain that a pandemic was simply not seen as a major threat by the British public prior to 2020, despite its prominence in government security strategy. Going forward, and given pandemics will continue to be a major threat, public knowledge needs to remain close to where it is now as opposed to where it seems to have been before COVID-19

A department of methodology can coordinate transdisciplinary sport science support

In the current sporting landscape, it is not uncommon for professional sport teams and organizations to employ multidisciplinary sport science support teams. In these teams and organizations, a “head of performance” may manage a number of sub-discipline specialists with the aim of enhancing athlete performance. Despite the best intentions of multidisciplinary sport science support teams, difficulties associated with integrating sub-disciplines to enhance performance preparation have become apparent. It has been suggested that the problem of integration is embedded in the traditional reductionist method of applied sport science, leading to the eagerness of individual specialists to quantify progress in isolated components. This can lead to “silo” working and decontextualized learning environments that can hinder athlete preparation. To address this challenge, we suggest that ecological dynamics is one theoretical framework that can inform common principles and language to guide the integration of sport science sub-disciplines in a Department of Methodology. The aim of a Department of Methodology would be for group members to work within a unified conceptual framework to (1) coordinate activity through shared principles and language, (2) communicate coherent ideas, and (3) collaboratively design practice landscapes rich in information (i.e., visual, acoustic, proprioceptive and haptic) and guide emergence of multi-dimensional behaviors in athlete performance

Proposing a New Algorithm for Premanipulative Testing in Physical Therapy Practice

In the field of physical therapy, there is debate as to the clinical utility of premanipulative vascular assessments. Cervical artery dysfunction (CAD) risk assessment involves a multi-system approach to differentiate between spontaneous versus mechanical events. The purposes of this inductive analysis of the literature are to discuss the link between cervical spine manipulation (CSM) and CAD, to examine the literature on premanipulative vascular tests, and to suggest an optimal sequence of premanipulative testing based on the differentiation of a spontaneous versus mechanical vascular event. Knowing what premanipulative vascular tests assess and the associated clinical application facilitates an evidence-informed decision for clinical application of vascular assessment before CSM

The dark triad in male and female athletes and non-athletes: Group differences and psychometric properties of the short dark triad (SD3)

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd Objectives: The Short Dark Triad (SD3) is a popular, brief measure of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, which are known as the Dark Triad. The present study adopted this measure and had two aims. First, to assess the psychometric properties of the SD3 with a focus on measurement invariance across gender, athletic expertise, and sport type. Second, to examine mean differences in Dark Triad scores across these groups. Design: Cross-sectional. Method: In total, 1258 participants (625 women; mean age 23.47 years) with a range of athletic experience (non-athletes, N = 408; amateur, N = 557; elite, N = 293) from team (N = 577) and individual (N = 273) sports completed the SD3. Factorial validity was assessed using exploratory structural equation modelling. Results: Analyses indicated that the three-factor model provided adequate fit, however, a bifactor model incorporating the three specific factors and a general factor, provided superior fit to the data. Moreover, invariance testing suggested some inconsistency in the observed factor structures across groups. In addition, findings indicated group differences with men scoring higher than women, athletes with greater expertise scoring higher than those with less expertise, and individual athletes scoring higher than team athletes across all factors. Conclusions: We suggest that researchers continue to use the SD3 using both composite and subscale scores, but recommend caution when interpreting subscale scores among women and team athletes until further psychometric work has been conducted within these populations. Our findings also suggest that the Dark Triad may be worth examining in future studies in sport

Variability of Annual Iowa Precipitation During the Past 95 Years

With increased consumption of fossil fuels has come warnings that the global atmosphere could be overtaxed with carbon dioxide and other combustion byproducts. The most popular scenario suggests a warming of the subpolar area with an extension of the grain belt. This warming could place the present grain belt in a warmer and drier climate. Each time a portion of the grain belt experiences a temperature or precipitation anomaly, the suggestion of a climatic change is raised. The present paper addresses the question of medium-term, 95-year change in Iowa annual precipitation as well as linkage between precipitation and temperature anomalies. Similar studies in Europe and the United Kingdom, where unbroken precipitation records extend back almost 300 years, show periods up to 50 or 75 years where a jump in the annual mean has occurred. The fact that such anomalies extend back before the industrial revolution suggests other factors may cause such changes. With only about 100 years of climatological records here in the grain belt, it may not be possible to identify long-term, natural oscillations or a true, long-term trend. Records at four sites, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Dubuque, and Storm Lake, were analyzed in search of true jumps or trends in the climatic record. There was no question that the record had dry and wet periods, some extending over a period of ten or fifteen years. The conclusions were that, although extended periods seemed to be above or below the long-term mean, these anomalies had tenuous linkage between sites across the state. Possibly because of the sample size, no statistically significant trends were observed between sites through the years 1890-1984. Several poorly defined single site jumps were observed in the precipitation record, however, these were not clearly linked to companion temperature perturbations