Shoulder flexibility and strength in elite girl tennis players with and without history of shoulder pain

This study aimed at comparing the glenohumeral (GH) range of motion, and shoulder and scapular muscle strength in elite girl tennis players with (group HoSP; n=15) and without (group H; n=16) history of shoulder pain. The GH joint range of motion in internal (IROM) and external rotation (EROM), as well as the maximal isometric strength of eight shoulder and scapular muscles were bilaterally assessed in 31 girl players. The results showed an increased IROM in HoSP, suggesting a laxity, which may contribute to humeral translation motions in the glenoid cavity at critical tennis positions. The HoSP group also presented a weakness in serratus anterior muscle strength, which may create improper motions of the scapula during the tennis strokes. These findings suggested that stretching and strengthening rehabilitative programs may be specifically developed for the young girl athletes involved in an intensive overhead activity practice

Functional significance of genotoxicity in fish germ cells

The aquatic environment is becoming increasingly contaminated by pollutants having a genotoxic potential towards organisms and in particular in fish. Such genotoxins are prone to affect directly offspring or indirectly through the reproductive process. All this could influence recruitment rate and hence the population dynamics. However, assessment of the ecological risks associated with environmental genotoxic exposure is usually based on individual responses. Thus, there is a need for a better understanding of the long term and population level implications of genotoxic insults in fish. While low levels of DNA damage in somatic cells and oocytes can be efficiently repaired, mature sperm cells, i.e. spermatozoa, are susceptible to accumulate damage due to their lack of repair capacity. The present work aims to track the transfer of toxic effects across generations by studying the link between the level of DNA damage in fish sperm, and the rate of development abnormalities measured in the offspring after parental exposure to the model genotoxicant MMS. Three different fish species were chosen based either on their ecological importance or on their reproduction behavior, respectively brown trout (Salmo trutta), Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus) and threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus). Results show a significant increase in sperm DNA damage measured with the comet assay in exposed organisms. This damage did not impact on fertilization success but led further to a significant increase in embryo abnormality rate at early embryonic and late larval stages, and further delayed growth in exposed group compared to the control

Peer Assessment Based on Ratings in a Social Media Course

Peer assessment is seen as a powerful supporting tool to achieve scalability in the evaluation of complex assignments in large courses, possibly virtual ones, as in the context of massive open online courses (MOOCs). However, the adoption of peer assessment is slow due in part to the lack of ready-to-use systems. Furthermore, the validity of peer assessment is still under discussion. In this paper, in order to tackle some of these issues, we present as a proof-of-concept of a novel extension of Graasp, a social media platform, to setup a peer assessment activity. We then report a case study of peer assessment using Graasp in a Social Media course with 60 master's level university students and analyze the level of agreement between students and instructors in the evaluation of short individual reports. Finally, to see if both instructor and student evaluations were based on appearance of project reports rather than on content, we conducted a study with 40 kids who rated reports solely on their look. Our results convey the fact that unlike the kid evaluation, which shows a low level of agreement with instructors, student assessment is reliable since the level of agreement between instructors and students was high

Rule of Thumb – Effect of Social Button Icons on Interaction

Social buttons are now widespread in social media apps. They are used to assign weight to user content and trigger user engagement. They come in different shapes (e.g., thumb in Facebook, arrows in Reddit or StackOverflow, plus one in Google+) but very little is known about the influence of the shape on user behaviour. This paper addresses this issue by presenting results of a controlled randomized experiment with 173 users. The results suggest that thumbs up / thumbs down icons are significantly more engaging than the plus one / minus one icons. At the same time, the result shows that type of the icon used has no significant influence on the direction of the vote

Towards Mobile Blended Interaction Fostering Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is a fundamental skill that all citizens should have. Unfortunately, while beliefs in unfounded claims are pervasive, teaching critical skill is a strenuous task. Digital mobile interaction could potentially support face-to-face teaching to foster critical thinking skills. In this paper, we present a preliminary version of the BaloneyMeter, a mobile app that provides support for teaching critical thinking skills. We report on a case study in a class of 150 students and present an open research question that we plan to address in subsequent work

Modeling Social-Ecological Feedback Effects in the Implementation of Payments for Environmental Services in Pasture-Woodlands

International audienceAn effective implementation of payment for environmental services (PES) must allow for complex interactions of coupled social-ecological systems. We present an integrative study of the pasture-woodland landscape of the Swiss Jura Mountains combining methods from natural and social sciences to explore feedback between vegetation dynamics on paddock level, farm-based decision making, and policy decisions on the national political level. Our modeling results show that concomitant climatic and socioeconomic changes advance the loss of open grassland in silvopastoral landscapes. This would, in the longer term, deteriorate the historical wooded pastures in the region, which fulfill important functions for biodiversity and are widely considered as landscapes that deserve protection. Payment for environmental services could counteract this development while respecting historical land-use and ecological boundary conditions. The assessed policy feedback process reveals that current policy processes may hinder the implementation of PES, even though a payment for the upkeep of wooded pasture would generally enjoy the backing of the relevant policy network. To effectively support the upkeep of the wooded pastures in the Jura, concomitant policy changes, such as market deregulation, must also be taken into account

Combining Content Analytics and Activity Tracking to Identify User Interests and Enable Knowledge Discovery

Finding relevant content is one of the core activities of users interacting with a content repository, be it knowledge workers using an organizational knowledge management system at a workplace or self-regulated learners collaborating in a learning environment. Due to the number of content items stored in such repositories potentially reaching millions or more, and quickly increasing, for the user it can be challenging to find relevant content by browsing or relying on the available search engine. In this paper, we propose to address the problem by providing content and people recommendations based on user interests, enabling relevant knowledge discovery. To build a user interests profile automatically, we propose an approach combining content analytics and activity tracking. We have implemented the recommender system in Graasp, a knowledge management system employed in educational and humanitarian domains. The conducted preliminary evaluation demonstrated an ability of the approach to identify interests relevant to the user and to recommend relevant content