359 research outputs found

    THE EFFECT OF QUALIFICATION LEVEL ON SOCCER MATCH COACH BEHAVIOUR: A MIXED METHODS STUDY

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    The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of English Football Association (FA) qualification level on coaches’ behaviours during soccer matches using a mixed methods approach. Coaches qualified by the FA at level 1 (n=5), level 2 (n=5), Union of European Football Associations B (UEFA B) (n=5) and UEFA A (n=5) agreed to participate. A grand total of 57,384 behaviours were recorded using the coach analysis intervention system and subsequently each coach was interviewed for a mean duration of 29±11 minutes. Level 1 and level 2 qualified coaches used convergent questions at a higher percentage of total behaviours in comparison to UEFA B and UEFA A licenced coaches (p<.05). UEFA A licenced coaches used scolds at a higher percentage of total behaviours when compared to level 1 qualified coaches (p<.05). Qualification level had no effect on coaches’ rationale for using the behaviours they did. Collectively, these results may indicate that coaches with higher qualifications have higher expectations of player’s performance. However, this effect could be attributed to performance standard differences, as highly qualified coaches tend to work with players who compete for teams of higher performance standard.   Article visualizations

    Russian Wolves In Folktales And Literature Of The Plains A Question Of Origins

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    F or the past several years, my research associate, Robert Buchheit, and I have collected recordings of German dialects spoken by people advanced in years who immigrated to the United States and settled in the Great Plains region decades ago. Our purpose has been to acquire aural records of folk languages, to study the linguistic transformations that have occurred in them, and to preserve permanently languages that will soon disappear. In the course of our research, we have encouraged our informants to speak freely of their personal experiences, family histories, customs, and culture. The numerous recordings that we have made also include many folktales\u27 from Europe. A large proportion of our informants, most of whom reside on farms or in small towns in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas, are Germans from Russia. The ancestors of these people emigrated originally from Germany to Russia beginning in 1764 during the reign of Catherine the Great, who was herself a princess of German birth. Thousands of Germans were encouraged by the Russian government to form virtually autonomous colonies in the then sparsely populated districts north of the Black Sea and in the region of the Volga River. The migration to Russia continued into the nineteenth century until approximately 1860. Meanwhile the German colonies in Russia grew and prospered until the 1870s, when the government undertook a program of Russianization aimed at breaking down the cultural exclusiveness of the German colonies and integrating the people into Russian society. Objecting strongly to this cultural imperialism, more than one hundred thousand Russian Germans chose to emigrate to the United States, where they settled chiefly in the Great Plains region. RUSSIAN-GERMAN FOLKTALES Among the folktales that these Germans brought ·to the Great Plains are wolf stories, dozens of which Buchheit and I have recorded in recent years. They fall into two distinct groups: folktales with happy, often humorous, endings and those that end tragically as packs of famished wolves ferociously attack and devour human beings. A typical example of the first type is the story of Fritz and the wolf, told to me in German dialect by an informant in Henderson, Nebraska: On the way home Fritz encountered a wolf. What to do? He had been told that wolves do not attack dead people. And so he lay down absolutely still. The wolf stood over him, and its saliva dropped down on his head. He grabbed the wolf\u27s front paws and held them so that the wolf could not bite him, and so he walked home, carrying the wolf on his back. When he came home, he banged the wolf against the door and called out: Father, open up, I\u27ve got a live wolf on my back! Then they turned the wolf and the dogs loose, and they chased the wolf away

    Unlocking Electric Cooking on Nepali Micro-Hydropower Mini-Grids

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    Electric cooking has the potential to improve quality of life for people who cook using biomass, both by improving health by eradicating harmful emissions and by removing the need to collect fuelwood, thus freeing up time for other activities. This paper reports on a study that introduced electric cooking as an alternative to biomass-based cooking in 10 households in Simli, a rural Western Nepali community, to assess its feasibility in rural off-grid contexts. Quantitative and qualitative data from a cooking diary study and electrical mini-grid data were collected, assessing the compatibility with micro-hydropower grids and Nepali cooking practices. Datasets of Nepali cooking practices and meal energy requirements were generated, revealing that generally two meals are cooked per day and that, on average, electric cooking consumes 0.25 kWh/day and 0.14 kWh/meal. Participants simplified their cooking practices and found chapati hard to cook on the induction hobs due to inexperience with the cookers. Conversely, dal and rice were found to be easy and fast to cook in pressure cookers on the hobs, leading to a switch from cooking chapati-vegetables based meals to dal-rice based meals. Fuel stacking was common, with participants reverting to their biomass stoves to cook chapati, and due to a lack of reliable electricity supply. Participants found that the transition to electric cooking provided more time for households, due to the reduction in length of time to cook a meal and less time required to collect firewood, and enjoyed cooking on the stoves due to elimination of indoor air pollution. The electrical data analysis showed that control issues, voltage instability, and limited micro-hydropower plant capacity provide obstacles for electric cooking, especially as it becomes more widely practiced. Nepali people typically cook at the same time as peak demand for electricity, exacerbating the problem of limited capacity in villages like Simli. Only three households continued to use their electric stoves regularly due to a lack of reliable electricity supply, showing that widespread adoption of electric cooking is currently unfeasible. The running costs of electric cooking were lower than the effective labour time costs of fuelwood collection, but initial capital expenses for the electric cooking system and monthly electricity costs are a further barrier to adoption in rural Nepal

    Enhancing creativity by training metacognitive skills in mental imagery

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    In a three year longitudinal study, 240 undergraduate dance students were recruited to assess the effectiveness of a series of workshops designed to develop metacognitive skills in use of mental imagery to support choreographic creativity. The workshops were based upon a theoretical model of mental representations and cognition. The students also completed a creativity test before the workshops, and a newly designed test of flexible thinking before and after the workshops, and a year later. Five forms of the flexible thinking test were created to allow for repeated administration over time, and the forms were shown to be equivalent and to correlate with the creativity test. Students who had taken part in the imagery workshops showed a greater improvement in flexible thinking a year after the training, compared to the scores of students who had not received the training. Evaluations of choreographic assessments by the students’ teachers were rated for positive and negative mentions of imagery and creativity, and the imagery group scored worse than the control group on use of imagery immediately after the training, but better than the control group on creativity and use of imagery four months after the workshop. The findings show that domain specific creativity can be enhanced through developing skills in the use of mental imagery to produce novel ideas, and that this also improves domain general flexible thinking

    Histological and molecular characterisation of feline humeral condylar osteoarthritis

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    <p>Background: Osteoarthritis (OA) is a clinically important and common disease of older cats. The pathological changes and molecular mechanisms which underpin the disease have yet to be described. In this study we evaluated selected histological and transcriptomic measures in the articular cartilage and subchondral bone (SCB) of the humeral condyle of cats with or without OA.</p> <p>Results: The histomorphometric changes in humeral condyle were concentrated in the medial aspect of the condyle. Cats with OA had a reduction in articular chondrocyte density, an increase in the histopathological score of the articular cartilage and a decrease in the SCB porosity of the medial part of the humeral condyle. An increase in LUM gene expression was observed in OA cartilage from the medial part of the humeral condyle.</p> <p>Conclusions: Histopathological changes identified in OA of the feline humeral condyle appear to primarily affect the medial aspect of the joint. Histological changes suggest that SCB is involved in the OA process in cats. Differentiating which changes represent OA rather than the aging process, or the effects of obesity and or bodyweight requires further investigation.</p&gt

    Moyo Vol. VII N 2

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    Durica, Paul. Editor\u27s Letter . 4. Spears, Amy L. As If Lipstick Was A Sign of My Declining Mind (How ChickRock Happened) . 5. Frey, Randall. Portrait of the Cartoonist as a Young Man . 6. Clements, Nina. Grease Me Up: One Woman\u27s Descent into the Depths of Pittsburgh Dinner Culture . 7. Levine, Robert. Under the Needle\u27s Point (The Healing Power of Acupuncture) . 8. Durica, Paul. The Glory that was/is Greek: Denison Three Years After the Decision . 12. Lamont, Jean. Smokin\u27 Joe Lights Up . 13. Durica, Paul. Ode on a Second Grecian Turn: An Interview with President Michele T. Myers . 14. Fisher, Dan. Lenane on the Social Scene . 19. Combe, Kirk. Intellectual Bio-Diversity: A Faculty Perspective on the Greek Residential Issue . 20. Williams, Adam. Elephants on the Floor Above and Brats in the Basement: Life on the North Quad . 22. Pfleeger, Jon. New Kid on the Block (Sigma Phi Epsilon\u27s President Speaks) . 23. Werne, Kirsten. Coffee Talk at the Bandersnatch (An Interview with Kevin Clay and Adam) . 29

    Strengthening the impact of plant genetic resources through collaborative collection, conservation, characterisation, and evaluation: a tribute to the legacy of Dr Clive Francis

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    This paper is a tribute to the legacy of Dr Clive Francis, who directly and indirectly collected >14 000 accessions across 60 genera of pasture, forage, and crop species and their wild relatives around the Mediterranean basin, Eastern Africa, and Central and South Asia from 1973 to 2005. This was achieved by a collaborative approach that built strong interactions between disparate organisations (ICARDA, VIR, CLIMA, and Australian genebanks) based on germplasm exchange, conservation and documentation, capacity building, and joint collection. These activities greatly strengthened Australian pasture, forage, and crop genebanks, and led to widespread germplasm utilisation that has waned in the last 5 years, reflecting changing priorities among industry funding bodies and research providers. This situation must be reversed, given the pivotal role genetic resource collections must play to broaden the genetic and adaptive base of plant breeding, to meet the challenge of feeding an increasing population in a depleting resource base. Because the use of germplasm subsets that facilitate phenotyping will stimulate wider utilisation of genetic resources, we discuss the application of core collection and germplasm selection through habitat characterisation/filtering in Australian collections. Both are valid entry points into large collections, but the latter has the advantage of enabling both trait discovery and investigation of plant adaptation, and because it is based on a priori hypothesis testing, it increases understanding even when the trait of interest is not identified
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