“Building the Roots”: A Delphi Study Examining the Aims of a Multicultural Competency Graduate Course in Sport and Exercise Psychology

Historically, opportunities to develop cultural competency in sport and exercise psychology graduate programs have been limited (Lee, 2015). Recently, major sport psychology organizations across the world have started to require cultural competency in their credentialing requirements. While this represents progress, these requirements can be met with a single course, which falls below the ideal of integrated cultural competency education (Martens et al., 2000). The present study investigated how to maximize the quality of a single course by coming to agreement on a proposed set of impactful and feasible learning outcomes and assessments in that proposed single course related to cultural competency. Eleven sport and exercise psychology professionals with significant expertise in teaching and/or researching cultural competency development completed a three-round Delphi study which resulted in 71 learning outcomes and 33 learning assessments. Of those, the panel fully agreed on the impact and feasibility of 11 learning outcomes and 3 assessments. Further, these professionals provided critical feedback on how to continue to enhance cultural competency in sport and exercise psychology graduate education

A Qualitative Analysis of a Team\u27s Experience of Coping with Bereavement After the Death of a Head Coach

The consequences of coping with death as an athlete have been documented in the literature by a variety of studies. However, these studies have remained largely focused on coping with the death of a teammate. This study examined the inter- and intrapersonal impact of experiencing the death of a head coach. Experiencing the death of a head coach during the season may have profound and varied psychosocial consequences for all members of a team. A collegiate team was identified as having experienced the death of its head coach during his tenure and from that team five participants (four players and one assistant coach) shared their stories during semi-structured interviews which were thematically analyzed. Major emergent themes from the interviews suggested that: members of the team experience bereavement differently which may have interpersonal consequences during a shared tragedy; memorials and tributes play a significant role in the process of individual and collective bereavement; and members of the team will make an effort to continue the presence of the deceased individual as well as perpetuate their memory in various ways. These results add breadth to the slowly growing literature that documents the effect that a death has on athletes. These findings and the findings of other similar studies have significant implications for informing the holistic design of service provision of athletes by applied sport psychology or mental health professionals

A Dense Reference Network for Mass-Market Centimeter-Accurate Positioning

The quality of atmospheric corrections provided by a dense reference network for centimeter-accurate carrierphase differential GNSS (CDGNSS) positioning is investigated. A dense reference network (less than 20 km inter-station distance) offers significant benefits for mass-market users, enabling lowcost (including single-frequency) CDGNSS positioning with rapid integer ambiguity resolution. Precise positioning on a massmarket platform would significantly influence the world economy, ushering in a host of consumer-focused applications such as globally-registered augmented and virtual reality and improved all-weather safety and efficiency for intelligent transportation systems, applications which have so far been hampered by the several-meter-level errors in standard GNSS positioning. This contribution examines CDGNSS integer ambiguity resolution performance in terms of network correction uncertainty, and network correction uncertainty, in turn, in terms of network density. It considers the total error in network corrections: a sum of ionospheric, tropospheric, and reference station multipath components. The paper’s primary goal is to identify the network density beyond which mass-market users would see no further significant improvement in ambiguity resolution performance. It finishes by describing development and deployment of a low-cost dense reference network in Austin, Texas.Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanic

Winning versus losing during gambling and its neural correlates

Humans often make decisions which maximize an internal utility function. For example, humans often maximize their expected reward when gambling and this is considered as a "rational" decision. However, humans tend to change their betting strategies depending on how they "feel". If someone has experienced a losing streak, they may "feel" that they are more likely to win on the next hand even though the odds of the game have not changed. That is, their decisions are driven by their emotional state. In this paper, we investigate how the human brain responds to wins and losses during gambling. Using a combination of local field potential recordings in human subjects performing a financial decision-making task, spectral analyses, and non-parametric cluster statistics, we investigated whether neural responses in different cognitive and limbic brain areas differ between wins and losses after decisions are made. In eleven subjects, the neural activity modulated significantly between win and loss trials in one brain region: the anterior insula ($p=0.01$). In particular, gamma activity (30-70 Hz) increased in the anterior insula when subjects just realized that they won. Modulation of metabolic activity in the anterior insula has been observed previously in functional magnetic resonance imaging studies during decision making and when emotions are elicited. However, our study is able to characterize temporal dynamics of electrical activity in this brain region at the millisecond resolution while decisions are made and after outcomes are revealed

A continuous Mott transition between a metal and a quantum spin liquid

More than half a century after first being proposed by Sir Nevill Mott, the deceptively simple question of whether the interaction-driven electronic metal-insulator transition may be continuous remains enigmatic. Recent experiments on two-dimensional materials suggest that when the insulator is a quantum spin liquid, lack of magnetic long-range order on the insulating side may cause the transition to be continuous, or only very weakly first order. Motivated by this, we study a half-filled extended Hubbard model on a triangular lattice strip geometry. We argue, through use of large-scale numerical simulations and analytical bosonization, that this model harbors a continuous (Kosterlitz-Thouless-like) quantum phase transition between a metal and a gapless spin liquid characterized by a spinon Fermi surface, i.e., a "spinon metal." These results may provide a rare insight into the development of Mott criticality in strongly interacting two-dimensional materials and represent one of the first numerical demonstrations of a Mott insulating quantum spin liquid phase in a genuinely electronic microscopic model.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figure

Subways and urban growth: evidence from earth

We investigate the relationship between the extent of a city’s subway network, its population and its spatial configuration. To accomplish this investigation, for the 632 largest cities in the world, we construct panel data describing the extent of each of the 138 subway systems in these cities, their population, and measures of centralization calculated from lights at night data. These data indicate that large cities are more likely to have subways, but that subways have an economically insignificant effect on urban population growth. Consistent with economic theory and with other studies of the effects of transportation improvements on cities, our data also indicate that subways cause cities to be more decentralized. For a subset of subway cities we also observe panel data describing subway and bus ridership. We find that a 10% increase in subway extent causes about a 6% increase in subway ridership and has no effect on bus ridership. Consistent with the available literature describing the effect of roads on cities, our results are consistent with subways having a larger effect on the configuration of cities than on their sizes, and with subways having a larger effect on discretionary than commute travel