Resources for sports engineering education

This paper serves as a resource guide for Sports Engineering educators. The paper covers key topics in Sports Engineering, including ball impact, friction, safety and materials. A variety of resource types are presented to reflect modern methods of learning and searching for information, including textbooks, research and review papers, websites and videos. The field could benefit from more resources specifically designated for teaching Sports Engineering, particularly textbooks

A new rapid method for shale oil and shale gas assessment

AbstractUnconventional hydrocarbons represent the future of fossil fuel supply. Arguably the most exciting unconventional deposits are those provided by shale gas and shale oil, hydrocarbons generated and retained by fine grained sedimentary rocks. Effective exploration for shale gas and shale oil requires screening of large numbers of samples in a time and cost effective manner. The most promising samples are then selected for more sophisticated and time consuming procedures. We have examined a new screening technique for shale gas and shale oil. Pyrolysis-FTIR provides a substantial amount of information related to shale quality in a single analysis including the types of gases present (including methane) and the nature of any liquid hydrocarbons released. Construction of calibration curves allows the rapid determination of gas quantities and the average chain length of aliphatic hydrocarbons present. Application of pyrolysis-FTIR to Carboniferous oil shales from the Midland Valley of Scotland reveal percentage levels of methane. Following pyrolysis at 600°C, immature Type III kerogen containing shale has relative gas abundances in the order water>carbon dioxide>methane, mature Type I kerogen containing shales have gas abundances that follow the order water>methane>carbon dioxide and post mature Type I kerogen containing shales have relative abundances in the order carbon dioxide>water>methane. Multistep pyrolysis-FTIR reveals carbon speciation and the relative responses at low and high temperatures reflect sample maturity. The new pyrolysis-FTIR technique can provide a relatively simple and labour saving, but information-rich, technique for the assessment of shale oil and shale gas targets

Parental education and lung function of children in the PATY study

Studies of the relationships between low socio-economic status and impaired lung function were conducted mainly in Western European countries and North America. East–West differences remain unexplored. Associations between parental education and lung function were explored using data on 24,010 school-children from eight cross-sectional studies conducted in North America, Western and Eastern Europe. Parental education was defined as low and high using country-specific classifications. Country-specific estimates of effects of low parental education on volume and flow parameters were obtained using linear and logistic regression, controlling for early life and other individual risk factors. Meta-regressions were used for assessment of heterogeneity between country-specific estimates. The association between low parental education and lung function was not consistent across the countries, but showed a more pronounced inverse gradient in the Western countries. The most consistent decrease associated with low parental education was found for peak expiratory flow (PEF), ranging from −2.80 to −1.14%, with statistically significant associations in five out of eight countries. The mean odds ratio for low PEF (<75% of predicted) was 1.34 (95% CI 1.06–1.70) after all adjustments. Although social gradients were attenuated after adjusting for known risk factors, these risk factors could not completely explain the social gradient in lung function