Psychophysical Load During the Multistage Marathon des Sables: A Case Study

Introduction: This study investigated the impact of the multistage ultra-marathon event ‘‘Marathon des Sables’’ (MdS) performed in the Sahara Desert on the psychophysical capacity of an athlete. Methods: We collected and analyzed environmental, physiological, and behavioral data from a 39-year-old athlete who participated in the MdS. Specifically, we collected environmental temperature (Tenv), upper inguinal skin temperature (Tsk), heart rate, and running speed data. Also, we recorded blood glucose and lactate, thermal comfort, total body water, perceived exertion, and cognitive function at the start, middle, and the end of each race stage. Results: We found significant detrimental impacts on the health and wellbeing of the monitored athlete. The monitored athlete suffered a multi-toe injury during the 3rd stage of MdS. Furthermore, the Tsk (32.6 ¡ 2.6°C) fluctuated considerably between day and night, as the lowest value presented was 29.8°C while the highest was 40.4°C. The Tsk tended to be higher both when the Tenv was higher and when daily running distance was longer. Finally, the athlete’s cognitive and athletic performances tended to be higher when his blood glucose (118.33 ± 19.20mg/dl) levels were higher. Conclusion: The health and wellbeing parameters of the monitored athlete were significantly impacted during the MdS

Using Provenance for Quality Assessment and Repair in Linked Open Data

As the number of data sources publishing their data on the Web of Data is growing, we are experiencing an immense growth of the Linked Open Data cloud. The lack of control on the published sources, which could be untrustworthy or unreliable, along with their dynamic nature that often invalidates links and causes conflicts or other discrepancies, could lead to poor quality data. In order to judge data quality, a number of quality indicators have been proposed, coupled with quality metrics that quantify the “quality level” of a dataset. In addition to the above, some approaches address how to improve the quality of the datasets through a repair process that focuses on how to correct invalidities caused by constraint violations by either removing or adding triples. In this paper we argue that provenance is a critical factor that should be taken into account during repairs to ensure that the most reliable data is kept. Based on this idea, we propose quality metrics that take into account provenance and evaluate their applicability as repair guidelines in a particular data fusion setting

Habitual Heat Exposure and Acclimatization Associated with Athletic Performance in the Multistage Marathon des Sables

Introduction The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of heat acclimatization on athletic performance during the 7-day Marathon des Sables (MdS) which takes place in the Sahara Desert. Methods Anonymous data for nationality and average running speed (km/h) of all runners who ran the MdS during the period 2000–2015 were collected from the official website of the race and other related websites. Average maximum temperature for each runner’s country during the month preceding the MdS was collected from www.weatherbase.com. Athletes were divided into two Torigin groups as follows: 25 to 15°C (i.e., cold countries) and 15 to 35°C (i.e., warm countries). Results Overall, 12467 (10828 men; 1639 women) athletes from 78 countries (37 cold; 41 warm) participated in the MdS during the 16-year study period. The ambient temperature of these countries one month prior to the MdS ranged from 24.2 to 34.4°C. Athletes’ average running speed during the MdS ranged from 2.9 to 13.4 km/h. Moreover, athletes who originated from warm countries ran the MdS 10.7% faster compared to athletes from cold countries. Conclusion The natural heat acclimatization achieved by living in warmer countries seems to provide an advantage during the MdS

Methinks: Enabling Sophisticated Comment Management in the Social Web

User reviews, comments and votes on the Social Web form the modern version of word-of-mouth communication, which has a huge impact on people’s shopping habits, businesses and the overall market. Despite that, systems have so far limited practical success in helping consumers and businesses analysing, managing and understanding Social Web content. In this paper, we present a new tool that leverages a combination of techniques from Semantic Web, Computational Argumentation and Crowdsourcing to support this activity, through an intuitive and functional user interface

Studies of Bs2∗(5840)0 and Bs1(5830)0 mesons including the observation of the Bs2∗(5840)0→B0KS0 decay in proton-proton collisions at s=8TeV.

Measurements of Bs2∗(5840)0 and Bs1(5830)0 mesons are performed using a data sample of proton-proton collisions corresponding to an integrated luminosity of , collected with the CMS detector at the LHC at a centre-of-mass energy of 8TeV . The analysis studies P-wave Bs0 meson decays into B(∗)+K- and B(∗)0KS0 , where the B+ and B0 mesons are identified using the decays B+→J/ψK+ and B0→J/ψK∗(892)0 . The masses of the P-wave Bs0 meson states are measured and the natural width of the Bs2∗(5840)0 state is determined. The first measurement of the mass difference between the charged and neutral B∗ mesons is also presented. The Bs2∗(5840)0 decay to B0KS0 is observed, together with a measurement of its branching fraction relative to the Bs2∗(5840)0→B+K- decay