CRITICAL SPEED AND CRITICAL STROKE RATE COULD BE USEFUL PHYSIOLOGICAL AND TECHNICAL CRITERIA FOR COACHES TO MONITOR ENDURANCE PERFORMANCE IN COMPETITIVE SWIMMERS

The purposes of this study were to determine whether the concepts of critical swimming speed (CSS) and critical stroke rate (CSR) could be reliable and used by coaches in order to control and monitor endurance performance in competitive swimmers. The results of this study conducted with well-trained swimmers showed that CSS could be determined easily from two common distances and more accurately from 200- and 400-m tests after a correction of minus 1.4 %. Moreover, CSS was well correlated with swimming velocity corresponding to 4 mmol.l-1 of blood lactate concentration and could avoid using lactate testing. Furthermore, the concept of a critical stroke rate defined as ‘the stroke rate value, which can be theoretically maintained continuously indefinitely without exhaustion’ and expressed, as the slope of the regression line between the number of stroke cycles and time seemed to be reliable. Coaches, in order to set not only aerobic training loads but also to control swimming technique, could easily use CSS and CSR

EFFECT OF SWIM PADDLES ON THE INTRA-CYCLIC VELOCITY VARIATIONS AND ON THE ARM COORDINATION OF FRONT CRAWL STROKE

This study analysed the effect of swimming with hand paddles on arm coordination and velocity pattern. Eight competitive swimmers performed two maximal aerobic tests. The maximal aerobic velocity was significantly higher when swimming with paddles but stroke rate, maximal heart rate and blood lactate values did not differ. The index of coordination (IdC) determined according to Chollet et al. (2000) and the intra-cyclic velocity variations were measured in two 25 m tests, one with and one without swim paddles, at a fixed stroke rate. When swimming with paddles, IdC and the duration of the propulsive phase increased significantly (~~0.0a5n)d the velocity signal frequency spectrum showed fewer harmon~cs (

Many-task computing on many-core architectures

Many-Task Computing (MTC) is a common scenario for multiple parallel systems, such as cluster, grids, cloud and supercomputers, but it is not so popular in shared memory parallel processors. In this sense and given the spectacular growth in performance and in number of cores integrated in many-core architectures, the study of MTC on such architectures is becoming more and more relevant. In this paper, authors present what are those programming mechanisms to take advantages of such massively parallel features for the particular target of MTC. Also, the hardware features of the two dominant many-core platforms (NVIDIA's GPUs and Intel Xeon Phi) are also analyzed for our specific framework. Given the important differences in terms of hardware and software in our two many-core platforms, we have considered different strategies based on CUDA (for GPUs) and OpenMP (for Intel Xeon Phi). We carried out several test cases based on an appropriate and widely studied problem for benchmarking as matrix multiplication. Essentially, this study consisted of comparing the time consumed for computing in parallel several tasks one by one (the whole computational resources are used just to compute one task at a time) with the time consumed for computing in parallel the same set of tasks simultaneously (the whole computational resources are used for computing the set of tasks at very same time). Finally, we compared both software-hardware scenarios to identify the most relevant computer features in each of our many-core architectures

Design and Manufacture of a Large-Bore 10 T Superconducting Dipole for the CERN Cable Test Facility

A large-bore 10 T superconducting dipole magnet was designed and fabricated in close cooperation between CERN and HMA Power Systems. The dipole has a length of about 1.7 m and an aperture of 88 mm and is composed of two two-layer poles wound with NbTi cables cooled to 1.9 K to reach magnetic inductions close to 10 T. This dipole will be installed at the CERN cable test facility and used as a background field magnet to test LHC superconducting cables. In its large aperture up to four cable samples can be tested at the same time. The mechanical design of the magnet is such that coil prestress variations between warm and cold conditions are kept within 20 MPa. A short model was also built and cooled down in order to check and confirm with test results the mechanical behavior of the dipole. Magnetic measurements, at room temperature, were performed upon its arrival at CERN prior to installation in the test facility. The dipole was recently cooled down and tested. This paper will discuss the design, the main manufacturing steps and the initial test results

A Bethe lattice representation for sandpiles

Avalanches in sandpiles are represented throughout a process of percolation in a Bethe lattice with a feedback mechanism. The results indicate that the frequency spectrum and probability distribution of avalanches resemble more to experimental results than other models using cellular automata simulations. Apparent discrepancies between experiments are reconciled. Critical behavior is here expressed troughout the critical properties of percolation phenomena.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, submitted for publicatio

On the Metric Dimension of Cartesian Products of Graphs

A set S of vertices in a graph G resolves G if every vertex is uniquely determined by its vector of distances to the vertices in S. The metric dimension of G is the minimum cardinality of a resolving set of G. This paper studies the metric dimension of cartesian products G*H. We prove that the metric dimension of G*G is tied in a strong sense to the minimum order of a so-called doubly resolving set in G. Using bounds on the order of doubly resolving sets, we establish bounds on G*H for many examples of G and H. One of our main results is a family of graphs G with bounded metric dimension for which the metric dimension of G*G is unbounded

Critical and Near-Critical Branching Processes

Scale-free dynamics in physical and biological systems can arise from a variety of causes. Here, we explore a branching process which leads to such dynamics. We find conditions for the appearance of power laws and study quantitatively what happens to these power laws when such conditions are violated. From a branching process model, we predict the behavior of two systems which seem to exhibit near scale-free behavior--rank-frequency distributions of number of subtaxa in biology, and abundance distributions of genotypes in an artificial life system. In the light of these, we discuss distributions of avalanche sizes in the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld sandpile model.Comment: 9 pages LaTex with 10 PS figures. v.1 of this paper contains results from non-critical sandpile simulations that were excised from the published versio

Self-Organized Branching Processes: A Mean-Field Theory for Avalanches

We discuss mean-field theories for self-organized criticality and the connection with the general theory of branching processes. We point out that the nature of the self-organization is not addressed properly by the previously proposed mean-field theories. We introduce a new mean-field model that explicitly takes the boundary conditions into account; in this way, the local dynamical rules are coupled to a global equation that drives the control parameter to its critical value. We study the model numerically, and analytically we compute the avalanche distributions.Comment: 4 pages + 4 ps figure

Trajectories of Symptom Dimensions in Short-Term Response to Antipsychotic Treatment in Patients with a First Episode of Non-Affective Psychosis

Background Trajectory patterns of positive, disorganized and negative dimension symptoms during antipsychotic treatment in drug-naive patients with first-episode psychosis have yet to be examined by using naturalistic data. Method This pragmatic clinical trial randomized 161 drug-naive patients with a first episode of psychosis to olanzapine, risperidone or haloperidol. Patients were assessed with the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) and Positive Symptoms (SAPS) at baseline and at the end of weeks 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 of antipsychotic treatment. Censored normal models of response trajectories were developed with three dimensions of the SAPS-SANS scores (positive, disorganized and negative) in order to identify the different response trajectories. Diagnosis, cannabis use, duration of untreated psychosis (DUP), smoking and antipsychotic class were examined as possible predictive variables. Results Patients were classified in five groups according to the positive dimension, three groups according to the disorganized dimension and five groups according to the negative dimension. Longer DUPs and cannabis use were associated with higher scores and poorer responses in the positive dimension. Cannabis use was associated with higher scores and poorer responses in the disorganized dimension. Only schizophrenia diagnosis was associated with higher scores and poorer responses in the negative dimension. Conclusions Our results illustrate the heterogeneity of short-term response to antipsychotics in patients with a first episode of psychosis and highlight markedly different patterns of response in the positive, disorganized and negative dimensions. DUP, cannabis use and diagnosis appeared to have a prognostic value in predicting treatment response with different implications for each dimension

Proteomic Characterization of Host-Pathogen Interactions during Bovine Trophoblast Cell Line Infection by

Despite the importance of bovine neosporosis, relevant knowledge gaps remain concerning the pathogenic mechanisms of . Infection of the placenta is a crucial event in the pathogenesis of the disease; however, very little is known about the relation of the parasite with this target organ. Recent studies have shown that isolates with important variations in virulence also show different interactions with the bovine trophoblast cell line F3 in terms of proliferative capacity and transcriptome host cell modulation. Herein, we used the same model of infection to study the interaction of with these target cells at the proteomic level using LC-MS/MS over the course of the parasite lytic cycle. We also analysed the proteome differences between high- (Nc-Spain7) and low-virulence (Nc-Spain1H) isolates. The results showed that mitochondrial processes and metabolism were the main points of -host interactions. Interestingly, Nc-Spain1H infection showed a higher level of influence on the host cell proteome than Nc-Spain7 infection