A crucible of competition and cooperation: Where do the concepts fit in recreation activity delivery?

The prevailing use of competitive activities in leisure, sport and recreation continues to inspire debate as people question the value, influence and outcomes of competitive behaviour for participants. In some forums it has been suggested that competition builds character, brings out the best performance in an individual and develops a positive sense of sportsmanship (Butler, 2000; Coakley, 1990). By comparison, others critique the anti-social role of competition, claiming it can simultaneously lead to dissonance, hostility and a divisive desire to win at all costs (Sobel, 1983; Thomson, 2000). Within the general leisure and physical activity field, cooperative games are sometimes presented as the antithesis to this dilemma as it is proposed that cooperation leads to the development of respect, challenge and cohesion (Orlick, 1978; Sutcl if & Patterson, 2001). This study reports on the perceived value and use of competition and cooperation from the perspectives of 20 recreation activity leaders drawn from the fields of sport, outdoor recreation, fitness and community recreation. The findings suggest that both competition and cooperation are valid techniques for achieving positive outcomes if they are used with applied intent, but that many leaders have an under-developed understanding of the use of cooperation as an instructional tool. For many, cooperation is identified purely in a behavioural manner, composed of an observed outcome of client's working together. For others, a more complex approach is evident as cooperation is viewed as a combination of actions and attitudes reflecting empathy, open communication and equity

Method of making pressure tight seal for super alloy

A procedure for forming a pressure tight seal along two edges of super alloy sheets is presented. The procedure consists of flame spraying a powdered aluminum-nickel composition on the joint. The use of frozen carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide gas to maintain a low temperature environment during the flame spraying is described

Teleoperators for remote operations in space

The primary objective of the remote nuclear teleoperator study program was to define in detail a program plan which would provide a qualified operational space teleoperator system by about 1980. The concept and philosophy presented provides a product considered to be an advanced teleoperator when compared to today's state-of-the-art. The teleoperator concept is formulated to meet NERVA requirements

Multiple path prediction for traffic scenes using LSTMs and mixture density models

This work presents an analysis of predicting multiple future paths of moving objects in traffic scenes by leveraging Long Short-Term Memory architectures (LSTMs) and Mixture Density Networks (MDNs) in a single-shot manner. Path prediction allows estimating the future positions of objects. This is useful in important applications such as security monitoring systems, Autonomous Driver Assistance Systems and assistive technologies. Normal approaches use observed positions (tracklets) of objects in video frames to predict their future paths as a sequence of position values. This can be treated as a time series. LSTMs have achieved good performance when dealing with time series. However, LSTMs have the limitation of only predicting a single path per tracklet. Path prediction is not a deterministic task and requires predicting with a level of uncertainty. Predicting multiple paths instead of a single one is therefore a more realistic manner of approaching this task. In this work, predicting a set of future paths with associated uncertainty was archived by combining LSTMs and MDNs. The evaluation was made on the KITTI and the CityFlow datasets on three type of objects, four prediction horizons and two different points of view (image coordinates and birds-eye vie

Impaired limb shortening following stroke: what's in a name?

BackgroundDifficulty advancing the paretic limb during the swing phase of gait is a prominent manifestation of walking dysfunction following stroke. This clinically observable sign, frequently referred to as 'foot drop', ostensibly results from dorsiflexor weakness.ObjectiveHere we investigated the extent to which hip, knee, and ankle motions contribute to impaired paretic limb advancement. We hypothesized that neither: 1) minimal toe clearance and maximal limb shortening during swing nor, 2) the pattern of multiple joint contributions to toe clearance and limb shortening would differ between post-stroke and non-disabled control groups.MethodsWe studied 16 individuals post-stroke during overground walking at self-selected speed and nine non-disabled controls who walked at matched speeds using 3D motion analysis.ResultsNo differences were detected with respect to the ankle dorsiflexion contribution to toe clearance post-stroke. Rather, hip flexion had a greater relative influence, while the knee flexion influence on producing toe clearance was reduced.ConclusionsSimilarity in the ankle dorsiflexion, but differences in the hip and knee, contributions to toe clearance between groups argues strongly against dorsiflexion dysfunction as the fundamental impairment of limb advancement post-stroke. Marked reversal in the roles of hip and knee flexion indicates disruption of inter-joint coordination, which most likely results from impairment of the dynamic contribution to knee flexion by the gastrocnemius muscle in preparation for swing. These findings suggest the need to reconsider the notion of foot drop in persons post-stroke. Redirecting the focus of rehabilitation and restoration of hemiparetic walking dysfunction appropriately, towards contributory neuromechanical impairments, will improve outcomes and reduce disability

People, Penguins and Petri Dishes: Adapting Object Counting Models To New Visual Domains And Object Types Without Forgetting

In this paper we propose a technique to adapt a convolutional neural network (CNN) based object counter to additional visual domains and object types while still preserving the original counting function. Domain-specific normalisation and scaling operators are trained to allow the model to adjust to the statistical distributions of the various visual domains. The developed adaptation technique is used to produce a singular patch-based counting regressor capable of counting various object types including people, vehicles, cell nuclei and wildlife. As part of this study a challenging new cell counting dataset in the context of tissue culture and patient diagnosis is constructed. This new collection, referred to as the Dublin Cell Counting (DCC) dataset, is the first of its kind to be made available to the wider computer vision community. State-of-the-art object counting performance is achieved in both the Shanghaitech (parts A and B) and Penguins datasets while competitive performance is observed on the TRANCOS and Modified Bone Marrow (MBM) datasets, all using a shared counting model.Comment: 10 page

A map on the space of rational functions

We describe dynamical properties of a map $\mathfrak{F}$ defined on the space of rational functions. The fixed points of $\mathfrak{F}$ are classified and the long time behavior of a subclass is described in terms of Eulerian polynomials

Plum varieties

A decade has now elapsed since this Station issued the last formal report on plums in its Bulletin 46. During this period many varieties have been received for testing on the Station grounds and a good opportunity has been offered for studying their records together with the older varieties which were previously established at the Station. This bulletin is offered as a report of progress, in the testing of varieties at this Station. Since Bulletin 46 is no longer available for distribution, somewhat fuller treatment has been given than would otherwise be necessary. Varieties of plums which are generally cultivated in Iowa belong chiefly to American native species. Those of the Japanese type, Prunus triflora, together with those of the European species, Prunus domestica, are seldom grown here with any satisfactory degree of success, either on account of lack of hardiness or because the crop is very apt to be destroyed by fruit rot