Capturing the realities of sports programmes: systematic ‘messiness’?

Early workings based on traditional methods (Schuman, 1967, as cited in Clarke and Dawson, 1999) have given way to more pragmatic, social paradigms with scientific realism (Pawson and Tilley, 1997) and evaluation utility (Patton, 2002) establishing evaluation research as a specialist area of applied social research. There has been more pressure for those who work in community sport to deliver with evaluation in mind. This can be interpreted as the government demanding greater accountability for its investment, but it is more than that. Community sport needs to modernise. It needs to be able to fully explain not just what works but why it works. Given the current economic and political instabilities, sport needs to work harder than ever to establish itself as a mainstream function of our communities needs and development (Coalter, 2007). Evaluation may not be a panacea but it will provide support in terms of evidence based decisions and stronger rationales for community sport’s existence. Evaluation is not an exact science and draws on a number of disciplines, using an eclectic repertoire of concepts and methods (Rossi, et al. 2004). To this end, this positional paper will reflect on the processes of a six-year community sport and physical activity strategy evaluation. Recommendations based on the reflection will be acknowledged. The strategy and the evaluation (Daniels, 2016) were developed by the Community Sport Network for this region and involved expertise from the Manchester Metropolitan University, public sector sport development and third sector sports clubs whose projects where supported by Sport England’s Community Investment Fund. The paper will present outcome patterns for the strategy and explain the methods that helped build them

Youth Development through sport: A case study of a disability gymnastics programme.

The British government’s newly published sports strategy (DCMS, 2015) has recognised the recent decline in participation in all physical activity and sport (Sport England, 2015) and has once again targeted those in underrepresented groups – namely, women, black and minority ethnic groups and disabled people. Moreover, the Government have focussed on outcomes relating to mental health, employability and education. In the face of more spending cuts, it is the underrepresented groups that get hit the hardest (Collins and Haudenhuyse, 2015). Ironically, it is in these groups where sport is ‘believed’ to make the greatest gains, particularly in tackling inequality and for improving mental and social health. However, government investment and support can no longer rely on beliefs and anecdote – particularly in times of austerity. National sports programmes are tasked with explaining outcomes and providing a rich and reliable evidence base upon which progress can be made. Community sports programmes, particularly those targeting participants that are ‘hard to reach’ are no different. The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of a disability sports programme and identify the mechanisms and context influencing its sustainability using Pawson and Tilley’s (1997) realistic evaluation framework. The findings suggest that observations of improved physical and motor capabilities and sustained engagement with the programme could be explained through a number of mechanisms. These included allowing parents to be involved with initial programme activities and the timely inclusion of mini competitions. These mechanisms required important contexts such as coaches that were able to cope with the rapid changes in the physical abilities of the participants and having a programme that was developed with the ‘family’ in mind (Daniels, 2016)

A realist perspective of a disability sports programme in south Cheshire: a case study.

The British government’s newly published sports strategy (DCMS, 2015) has recognised the recent decline in participation in all physical activity and sport (Sport England, 2015) and has once again targeted those in underrepresented groups – namely, women, black and minority ethnic groups and disabled people. Moreover, the Government have focussed on outcomes relating to mental health, employability and education. In the face of more spending cuts, it is the underrepresented groups that get hit the hardest (Collins and Haudenhuyse, 2015). Ironically, it is in these groups where sport is ‘believed’ to make the greatest gains, particularly in tackling inequality and for improving mental and social health. However, government investment and support can no longer rely on beliefs and anecdote – particularly in times of austerity. National sports programmes are tasked with explaining outcomes and providing a rich and reliable evidence base upon which progress can be made. Community sports programmes, particularly those targeting participants that are ‘hard to reach’ are no different. The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of a disability sports programme and identify the mechanisms and context influencing its sustainability using Pawson and Tilley’s (1997) realistic evaluation framework. The findings suggest that observations of improved physical and motor capabilities and sustained engagement with the programme could be explained through a number of mechanisms. These included allowing parents to be involved with initial programme activities and the timely inclusion of mini competitions. These mechanisms required important contexts such as coaches that were able to cope with the rapid changes in the physical abilities of the participants and having a programme that was developed with the ‘family’ in mind

Evaluation of the efficacy and safety of high dose short duration enrofloxacin treatment regimen for uncomplicated urinary tract infections in dogs.

BackgroundUncomplicated urinary tract infections (UTI) in dogs usually are treated with antimicrobial drugs for 10-14 days. Shorter duration antimicrobial regimens have been evaluated in human patients.HypothesisA high dose short duration (HDSD) enrofloxacin protocol administered to dogs with uncomplicated UTI will not be inferior to a 14-day treatment regimen with amoxicillin-clavulanic acid.AnimalsClient-owned adult, otherwise healthy dogs with aerobic bacterial urine culture yielding ≥ 10(3) CFU/mL of bacteria after cystocentesis.MethodsProspective, multicenter, controlled, randomized blinded clinical trial. Enrolled dogs were randomized to group 1 (enrofloxacin 18-20 mg/kg PO q24h for 3 days) or group 2 (amoxicillin-clavulanic acid 13.75-25 mg/kg PO q12h for 14 days). Urine cultures were obtained at days 0, 10, and 21. Microbiologic and clinical cure rates were evaluated 7 days after antimicrobial treatment was discontinued. Lower urinary tract signs and adverse events also were recorded.ResultsThere were 35 dogs in group 1 and 33 in group 2. The microbiologic cure rate was 77.1 and 81.2% for groups 1 and 2, respectively. The clinical cure rate was 88.6 and 87.9% for groups 1 and 2, respectively. Cure rates between groups did not differ according to the selected margin of noninferiority.Conclusions and clinical importanceHDSD enrofloxacin treatment was not inferior to a conventional amoxicillin-clavulanic acid protocol for the treatment of uncomplicated bacterial UTI in dogs. Further research is warranted to determine if this protocol will positively impact owner compliance and decrease the emergence of antimicrobial resistance

Redesign of Industrial Apparatus using Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimisation

This is the author accepted manuscriptIntroduction. Design optimisation using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) often requires extremising multiple (and often conflicting) objectives simultaneously. For instance, a heat exchanger design will require maximising the heat transfer across the media, while minimising the pressure drop across the apparatus. In such cases, usually there is no unique solution, but a range of solutions trading off between the objectives. The set of solutions optimally trading off the objectives are known as the Pareto set, and in practice only an approximation of the set may be achieved. Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) are known to perform well in estimating the optimal Pareto set. However, they require thousands of function evaluations, which is impractical with computationally expensive simulations. An alternative is to use Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimisation (MOBO) method that has been proved to be an effective approach with limited budget on function evaluations [1]. In this work, we illustrate a newly developed MOBO framework in [1] with OpenFOAM 2.3.1 to locate a good estimation of the optimal Pareto set for a range of industrial cases.This work was supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant (reference number: EP/M017915/1) for the CEMPS, University of Exeter, UK

Application of multi-objective Bayesian shape optimisation to a sharp-heeled Kaplan draft tube

The draft tube of a hydraulic turbine plays an important role for the efficiency and power characteristics of the overall system. The shape of the draft tube affects its performance, resulting in an increasing need for data-driven optimisation for its design. In this paper, shape optimisation of an elbow-type draft tube is undertaken, combining Computational Fluid Dynamics and a multi-objective Bayesian methodology. The chosen design objectives were to maximise pressure recovery, and minimise wall-frictional losses along the geometry. The design variables were chosen to explore potential new designs, using a series of subdivision-curves and splines on the inflow cone, outer-heel, and diffuser. The optimisation run was performed under part-load for the Kaplan turbine. The design with the lowest energy-loss identified on the Pareto-front was found to have a straight tapered diffuser, chamfered heel, and a convex inflow cone. Analysis of the performance quantities showed the typically used energy-loss factor and pressure recovery were highly correlated in cases of constant outflow cross-sections, and therefore unsuitable for use of multi-objective optimisation. Finally, a number of designs were tested over a range of discharges. From this it was found that reducing the heel size increased the efficiency over a wider operating range

Electromechanical Response of Polycrystalline Barium Titanate Resolved at the Grain Scale

Ferroic materials are critical components in many modern devices. Polycrystalline states of these materials dominate the market due to their cost effectiveness and ease of production. Studying the coupling of ferroic properties across grain boundaries and within clusters of grains is therefore critical for understanding bulk polycrystalline ferroic behavior. Here, three-dimensional X-ray diffraction is used to reconstruct a 3D grain map (grain orientations and neighborhoods) of a polycrystalline barium titanate sample and track the grain-scale non-180° ferroelectric domain switching strains of 139 individual grains in situ under an applied electric field. The map shows that each grain is located in a very unique local environment in terms of intergranular misorientations, leading to local strain heterogeneity in the as-processed state of the sample. While primarily dependent on the crystallographic orientation relative to the field directions, the response of individual grains is also heterogeneous. These unique experimental results are of critical importance both when building the starting conditions and considering the validity of grain-scale modeling efforts, and provide additional considerations in the design of novel ferroic materials

Heterogeneous grain-scale response in ferroic polycrystals under electric field

Understanding coupling of ferroic properties over grain boundaries and within clusters of grains in polycrystalline materials is hindered due to a lack of direct experimental methods to probe the behaviour of individual grains in the bulk of a material. Here, a variant of three-dimensional X-ray diffraction (3D-XRD) is used to resolve the non-180?? ferroelectric domain switching strain components of 191 grains from the bulk of a polycrystalline electro-ceramic that has undergone an electric-field-induced phase transformation. It is found that while the orientation of a given grain relative to the field direction has a significant influence on the phase and resultant domain texture, there are large deviations from the average behaviour at the grain scale. It is suggested that these deviations arise from local strain and electric field neighbourhoods being highly heterogeneous within the bulk polycrystal. Additionally, the minimisation of electrostatic potentials at the grain boundaries due to interacting ferroelectric domains must also be considered. It is found that the local grain-scale deviations average out over approximately 10-20 grains. These results provide unique insight into the grain-scale interactions of ferroic materials and will be of value for future efforts to comprehensively model these and related materials at that length-scaleopen

Cytoplasmic p53 couples oncogene-driven glucose metabolism to apoptosis and is a therapeutic target in glioblastoma.

Cross-talk among oncogenic signaling and metabolic pathways may create opportunities for new therapeutic strategies in cancer. Here we show that although acute inhibition of EGFR-driven glucose metabolism induces only minimal cell death, it lowers the apoptotic threshold in a subset of patient-derived glioblastoma (GBM) cells. Mechanistic studies revealed that after attenuated glucose consumption, Bcl-xL blocks cytoplasmic p53 from triggering intrinsic apoptosis. Consequently, targeting of EGFR-driven glucose metabolism in combination with pharmacological stabilization of p53 with the brain-penetrant small molecule idasanutlin resulted in synthetic lethality in orthotopic glioblastoma xenograft models. Notably, neither the degree of EGFR-signaling inhibition nor genetic analysis of EGFR was sufficient to predict sensitivity to this therapeutic combination. However, detection of rapid inhibitory effects on [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose uptake, assessed through noninvasive positron emission tomography, was an effective predictive biomarker of response in vivo. Together, these studies identify a crucial link among oncogene signaling, glucose metabolism, and cytoplasmic p53, which may potentially be exploited for combination therapy in GBM and possibly other malignancies