Dynamic Simulations and Data Mining of Single-Leg Jump Landing: Implications for Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury Prevention

It is estimated that 400,000 anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries occur in the United States each year with the cost of ACL reconstruction surgery and rehabilitation exceeding $1 billion annually. The majority of ACL injuries are non-contact injuries occurring during cutting and jump landing movements. Because the majority of the injuries are non-contact injuries there is the potential to develop programs to reduce the risk of injury. Given our understanding of the joint kinematics and kinetics that place an individual at high risk for ACL, researchers have developed neuromuscular training programs that focus on improving muscle function in order to help the muscles support and stabilize the knee during the dynamic movements that increase the strain on the ACL. Yet, despite the implementation of these neuromuscular-based ACL injury training intervention programs ACL rates continue to rise. Thus the objective of this dissertation is to determine the cause and effect relationship between joint biomechanics and muscle function with respect ACL injury. There are four studies in this dissertation. The first two studies rely heavily on the development of subject-specific musculoskeletal models to analyze muscle contribution during single-leg jump landing. These studies will generate forward dynamic simulations to estimate muscle force production and contribution to movement. The results of these studies will aid in the development of muscle-targeted ACL injury training intervention programs. The last two studies will employ data mining techniques; such as, principal component analysis (PCA) and wavelet analysis along with stability methods from control theory, to evaluate an individual’s risk of ACL injury and determine how muscle function differs for individuals at varying levels of injury risk. The goal will be to use this information to develop a more robust ACL injury prescreening tool. The use of both dynamic simulations and data mining techniques provides a unique approach to investigating the relationship between joint biomechanics and muscle function with respect to ACL injury. And this approach has the potential to gain much needed insight about the underlying mechanism of ACL injury and help progress ACL research forward

Jack Johnson: Reluctant Hero of the Black Community

The difficulties which both White and Black Americans had with Jack Johnson, the first Black man to win the world heavyweight boxing championship, resulted from his status as a reluctant hero. Johnson was hated by White Americans for exhibiting a strong sense of individuality, for excelling in a sport that had previously been closed to men of his race, and for asserting his right to love the three White women whom he married. And although Black Americans admired his courage and felt vindicated by his success in the ring, they were troubled by the ways that Johnson’s uncompromising individuality distanced him from the Black community, and by the fact that White Americans used his behavior as an excuse to seek reprisals against that community. In particular, Black Americans were angered by Johnson’s relationships with White women. That anger was motivated, in part, by the same race prejudice that moved the White community to object to Johnson’s romantic and sexual preference for White women. However, the anger of the Black community was also a product of their fear that Johnson’s objective was to associate himself with those on the upper rungs of the racial hierarchy rather than to dismantle that hierarchy. Just as Albert Memmi warned that “[t]he first ambition of the colonized is to become equal to that splendid model [of the colonizer] and to resemble him to the point of disappearing in him. . . . [and that a] mixed marriage is the extreme expression of this audacious leap,”the Black community suspected that Johnson’s first allegiance was not to the oppressed racial community whose fortunes were significantly impacted by his behavior, but to himself - irrespective of how his individual desires affected that community

FINDING A CONSTITUTIONALLY PERMISSIBLE PATH TO SEX EQUALITY: THE YOUNG WOMEN\u27S LEADERSHIP SCHOOL OF EAST HARLEM

PANEL Two: CONSTITUTIONAL, STATUTORY, AND POLICY ISSUES RAISED BY ALL-FEMALE PUBLIC EDUCATIO

Breaking Into The Academy: The 2000-2002 \u3cem\u3eMichigan Journal of Race & Law\u3c/em\u3e Guide for Aspiring Law Professors

Once you have set your sights upon a career in law teaching you must determine how best to position yourself to obtain a job in the field. The answer is to write, publish, and otherwise bolster your credentials. Write as many papers with as many of your law school professors as you can; write onto a journal and have your article published; work as a research assistant for a professor and write with him or her; work for a judge and write bench memos and draft opinions; work for a public interest organization or a law firm and publish scholarship about the law you practice there. Whatever you do, write. In addition to providing proof of your interest in legal scholarship and supplying material from which you can fashion a job talk (a scholarly presentation that is a common feature of the interview process), writing with professors, judges, and lawyers will allow you to find mentors who will be able to vouch for your abilities when you need recommendations

“This I Believe” About the Teaching of Writing: Secondary Teachers’ Digital Essays About Their Pedagogical Understandings

This case study (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) examines the final projects of two secondary teachers in a graduate course about writing pedagogy. Teachers created digital essays along the lines of the National Public Radio’s “This I Believe” essays, which articulated their beliefs about the teaching of writing. We posed two research questions: a) What pedagogical understandings do teachers identify as their beliefs about writing and how do they represent those ideas in a digital composition? b) What did teachers learn from participating in the process of composing a digital essay? We found that teachers “reimagined” the teaching of writing, were personally drawn to the assignments in ways that surprised them, and realized the power of digital tools to accomplish what words simply cannot fully capture