Qualitative perspectives on how Manchester United Football Club developed and sustained serial winning

Talent development in sport is well represented in scientific literature. Yet, the drive to protect ‘trade secrets’ often means that access to these high performing groups is rare, especially as these high level performances are being delivered. This leaves the details of high-end working practices absent from current academic commentary. As a result, clubs interested in developing excellent practice are left to build on personal initiative and insight and/or custom-and-practice, which is unlikely to yield successful outcomes. To address this shortfall the current study reports on prolonged engagement with a single high performing club, considering how their practice corresponds with existing sport talent development models. The paper ends by proposing an evidence-based, football-specific model for talent development, maintained high level performance and serial winning. This model emphasises four dominant features: culture, behavioral characteristics, practice engagement and the managing and guiding of performance ‘potential’. The study provides insights into the visceral reality of daily experiences across the life course of professional soccer, while advancing the evidence-base for understanding how Manchester United achieved their serial success

Indoor allergens in settled dust from kindergartens in city of Łódź, Poland

Objectives: The main objective of the study was to determine the levels of house dust mite (Der p1), dog (Can f1), cat (Fel d1) and cockroach (Bla g2) allergens in kindergartens localized in an urban agglomeration. Material and Methods: A quantitative analysis of allergens was carried out in settled dust samples collected by vacuuming the floor surface in three kindergartens (N = 84) and children's clothing (N = 36). The samples were collected in springsummer and autumn-winter periods as well as at the beginning and end of the week. The allergen dust concentration was determined by enzyme-linked immunoenzymatic assay (ELISA). Results: The mean geometric concentrations (±geometric standard deviations) of allergens Der p1, Can f1, Fel d1 and Bla g2 determined in kindergartens were: 0.02±3.21 μg/g of dust; 0.97±4.49 μg/g of dust; 0.30±4.43 μg/g of dust and 0.01±3.08 μg/g of dust, respectively. Younger classrooms (children aged from 3 to 4 years) were characterized by almost twice higher mean concentration of allergen Fel d1, as compared to older classrooms (children aged from 5 to 6 years) (p < 0.05). A significant impact of seasonality on the level of dog allergen Can f1 was found (p < 0.05). No significant weekly variation was found in average concentrations of the allergens. Children who had a dog and/or cat at home were characterized by high concentrations of allergens Can f1 and Fel d1 on their clothes (59.2±5.39 μg Can f1/g of dust; 3.63±1.47 μg Fel d1/g of dust), significantly higher than concentrations of allergens in children who did not have any pets (p < 0.001). Conclusions: Special attention should be paid to keeping the kindergarten rooms tidy and clean and to an appropriate choice of furnishings and fittings which would prevent the proliferation of the house dust mite and accumulation of allergens

Cole–Cole Parameter Characterization of Urea and Potassium for Improving Dialysis Treatment Assessment

In this letter, we investigate the characteristics of the dielectric properties of urea and ions such as potassium and sodium, which are the principal molecules studied during dialysis treatment. The method involves measuring the electrical properties of varying concentrations of the constituent solutions over a broad frequency range and estimating the associated Cole–Cole parameters. We utilized concentrations above those expected in vivo to achieve a more accurate characterization. In these studies, we found that the conductivity was essentially constant with respect to urea concentration but had a strong, nearly linear correlation with potassium. In addition, the alpha factor had a distinct, monotonically varying relationship for both urea and potassium with significantly different initial slopes. Utilizing these two curves, simple inversion algorithms are possible to compute the solute concentrations given the Cole–Cole parameters. This concentration monitoring technique would be performed directly on the dialysate eliminating contamination from blood, which could substantially obscure the data. We expect that, using the Maxwell–Fricke mixture law, we will be able to compute the constituent concentrations even in the presence of trace amounts of competing molecules

GROUPS THAT DO AND DO NOT HAVE GROWING CONTEXT-SENSITIVE WORD PROBLEM

We prove that a group has word problem that is a growing context-sensitive language precisely if its word problem can be solved using a non-deterministic Cannon's algorithm (the deterministic algorithms being defined by Goodman and Shapiro in [6]). We generalize results of [6] to find many examples of groups not admitting non-deterministic Cannon's algorithms. This adds to the examples of Kambites and Otto in [7] of groups separating context-sensitive and growing context-sensitive word problems, and provides a new language-theoretic separation result