422 research outputs found
The holy blood and the holy grail: Myths of scientific racism and the pursuit of excellence in sport
Despite the continuing publication of research that suggests there is no scientific basis to 'race' as a biological category, theories of racial difference continue to be invoked within sport to explain the perceived dominance of black athletes. In the case of John Entine's controversial 'Taboo: why black athletes dominate sports and why we are afraid to talk about it' or undergraduate textbooks that suggest 'racial differences' in physique may significantly affect athletic performance, scientific racism is normalised in sport. In this article, the relationship between scientific racism and sport will be examined. Qualitative research with current sport scientists is used to investigate the socio-ethical tensions within the subject field of sport science between professionalism, scientism and the demand from external interests to produce results that help people in sport win medals. It will be shown that these tensions, combined with the history of race as a category in sport science, combine to create the discourse of scientific knowledge that reflects, rather than challenges, folk genetics of black athletic physicality
D-branes in Nongeometric Backgrounds
"T-fold" backgrounds are generically-nongeometric compactifications of string
theory, described by T^n fibrations over a base N with transition functions in
the perturbative T-duality group. We review Hull's doubled torus formalism,
which geometrizes these backgrounds, and use the formalism to constrain the
D-brane spectrum (to leading order in g_s and alpha') on T^n fibrations over
S^1 with O(n,n;Z) monodromy. We also discuss the (approximate) moduli space of
such branes and argue that it is always geometric. For a D-brane located at a
point on the base N, the classical ``D-geometry'' is a T^n fibration over a
multiple cover of N.Comment: 29 pages; uses harvmac.tex; v2: substantial revision throughou
An Integrated TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource to Drive High-Quality Survival Outcome Analytics
For a decade, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) program collected clinicopathologic annotation data along with multi-platform molecular profiles of more than 11,000 human tumors across 33 different cancer types. TCGA clinical data contain key features representing the democratized nature of the data collection process. To ensure proper use of this large clinical dataset associated with genomic features, we developed a standardized dataset named the TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource (TCGA-CDR), which includes four major clinical outcome endpoints. In addition to detailing major challenges and statistical limitations encountered during the effort of integrating the acquired clinical data, we present a summary that includes endpoint usage recommendations for each cancer type. These TCGA-CDR findings appear to be consistent with cancer genomics studies independent of the TCGA effort and provide opportunities for investigating cancer biology using clinical correlates at an unprecedented scale. Analysis of clinicopathologic annotations for over 11,000 cancer patients in the TCGA program leads to the generation of TCGA Clinical Data Resource, which provides recommendations of clinical outcome endpoint usage for 33 cancer types
Dense Stellar Populations: Initial Conditions
This chapter is based on four lectures given at the Cambridge N-body school
"Cambody". The material covered includes the IMF, the 6D structure of dense
clusters, residual gas expulsion and the initial binary population. It is aimed
at those needing to initialise stellar populations for a variety of purposes
(N-body experiments, stellar population synthesis).Comment: 85 pages. To appear in The Cambridge N-body Lectures, Sverre Aarseth,
Christopher Tout, Rosemary Mardling (eds), Lecture Notes in Physics Series,
Springer Verla
The boomerang effect of radicalism in Discursive Psychology: A critical overview of the controversy with the Social Representations Theory.
This article provides a critical overview of the controversy between the Radical approach to Discursive Psychology (RDP) and the Social Representations Theory (SRT) and aims: a)?to show what is potentially complementary and contradictory in Discursive Psychology (DP) and the Social Representations Theory, when and why they are incompatible, and whether and how it is possible and/or desirable to integrate these two approaches. b)?to describe how the radicalism of the socio-constructionist thesis upheld by Discourse Analysis can give rise to several hard-to-solve problems, which may then be translated into a boomerang effect. In the final section, it highlights interest in dialog and “cross-fertilization” between researchers inspired by the less radical approach to discursive psychology and those inspired by the Social Representations Theory, pointing out the effect of methodological implications that would ensue
A search for the decay
We search for the rare flavor-changing neutral-current decay in a data sample of 82 fb collected with the {\sl BABAR}
detector at the PEP-II B-factory. Signal events are selected by examining the
properties of the system recoiling against either a reconstructed hadronic or
semileptonic charged-B decay. Using these two independent samples we obtain a
combined limit of
at the 90% confidence level. In addition, by selecting for pions rather than
kaons, we obtain a limit of using only the hadronic B reconstruction method.Comment: 7 pages, 8 postscript figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let
High-reflectivity broadband distributed Bragg reflector lattice matched to ZnTe
We report on the realization of a high quality distributed Bragg reflector
with both high and low refractive index layers lattice matched to ZnTe. Our
structure is grown by molecular beam epitaxy and is based on binary compounds
only. The high refractive index layer is made of ZnTe, while the low index
material is made of a short period triple superlattice containing MgSe, MgTe,
and ZnTe. The high refractive index step of Delta_n=0.5 in the structure
results in a broad stopband and the reflectivity coefficient exceeding 99% for
only 15 Bragg pairs.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
EuFeAs under high pressure: an antiferromagnetic bulk superconductor
We report the ac magnetic susceptibility and resistivity
measurements of EuFeAs under high pressure . By observing nearly
100% superconducting shielding and zero resistivity at = 28 kbar, we
establish that -induced superconductivity occurs at ~30 K in
EuFeAs. shows an anomalous nearly linear temperature dependence
from room temperature down to at the same . indicates that
an antiferromagnetic order of Eu moments with ~20 K persists
in the superconducting phase. The temperature dependence of the upper critical
field is also determined.Comment: To appear in J. Phys. Soc. Jpn., Vol. 78 No.
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