All Shook Up: A Review of Sport-related Concussions in High School Athletes

Background: Concussions comprise 24.8% of the total injuries in high school athletes, putting developing brains at risk for neurocognitive dysfunction. Recent research has been geared towards finding the most effective process for (a) diagnosing, (b) treating and (c) preventing concussions. The most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that 329,290 children were diagnosed with a sports related concussion or traumatic brain injury (TBI) in 2012. Methods: A systematic review of current literature was performed using the Long Island University online library database and Google Scholar. Search terms included: (a) concussion, (b) sports, (c) high school; (d) screening; (e) risk factors; (f) symptoms; (g) complications, and (h) pathophysiology, including the years 2011 to 2018 and in the English language. Results: A concussion is a form of traumatic brain injury resulting in transient neurologic impairment that can resolve spontaneously or have lingering symptoms without structural changes on routine neuroimaging studies. Concussions are the most common injury among high school student-athletes, rising from 9.1% of all injuries in the 2005-2006 school year to 24.8% in the 2016-2017 school year. The overall prevalence is 2.5 concussions per 10,000 athletic exposures (competition or practice). Football has the highest overall rate of concussion with 6.4 per 10,000 athletic exposures, while soccer has the highest rate among girls’ sports with 3.4 per 10,000 athletic exposures. In gender comparable sports, girls have a higher rate of concussion than boys. In general, concussion rates are higher in competition than in practice. Current protocols center around early recognition of symptoms and removal from the field of play. Several screening tools have been developed, including the Sport Concussion Assessment Tool (SCAT-5) to aid in identifying potential concussions on the sideline and initiating proper treatment. Gradual return-to-school and return-to-play criteria have been developed to allow adequate healing time and prevent re-injury. Concussions, especially repetitive, may have long term effects such as (a) post-concussive syndrome, (b) post-traumatic seizures, (c) chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and (d) decreased neurocognitive function. The CDC offers recommendations for concussion prevention based on each sport, but in general, strict enforcement of the rules and proper protective equipment are key. Conclusions and Recommendations: Prevention and early recognition of symptoms can help reduce the number of concussions as well as long term effects. Athletes should wear all required protective equipment and the equipment should be fully functional. For contact sports, emphasis should be placed on proper form and safe techniques, as well as a limit on the number of full-contact practices per season. These measures can help to prevent concussions from occurring. In addition, officials should be trained to look for concussion symptoms and not hesitate to remove a player from action if they suspect a concussion. Athletes should not be permitted to return to play unless they are cleared by a medical practitioner and there should be stiff penalties for coaches who pressure players into returning prematurely

Brevity, Speed, and Deference: An Account from the Williams Chambers

One of the leading books on administrative law advocates judicial review for “sound governance.”Reviewing the book while sitting on the D.C. Circuit, Judge Williams posited that, even if “judges are smarter than agency heads, or have more time on their hands, or have cleverer clerks,” the proper institutional role requires more deference. Divining “sound governance” is not for courts. The Judge concluded by quoting Milton’s poem about the role of the blind: “They also serve who only stand and waite.

Religious education in Irish Catholic primary schools: recent developments, challenges and opportunities

Catholic schools in the Republic of Ireland, historically the principal education provider in that country, are coming under increasing pressure. This article outlines five recent developments which put pressure on primary Catholic education, in particular Religious Education in Catholic schools. Some of these are state driven, such as new curricular proposals and policy changes. Other pressures include changing popular attitudes and the need for school divestment. Cumulatively these developments pose challenges but also opportunities for the Catholic sector. The concluding section of the article offers a brief discussion of those challenges and opportunities

Psychologische Ansätze zur Erforschung des Lachens

Der folgende Aufsatz gibt eine selektive Zusammenfassung der mehr als 130-jährigen Geschichte und des gegenwärtigen Forschungsstandes zu Definition, Arten und Funktionen des vokalen Lachens von Erwachsenen aus psychologischer Perspektive. Der Überblick zeigt, dass das Lachen bisher zwar nur sporadisch untersucht wurde, zugleich aber als vielversprechendes Thema betrachtet wird. Im Laufe der Zeit ist in empirischen Untersuchungen die kommunikative Funktion des Lachens in gesprochenem Dialog in den Mittelpunkt gerückt. Methodologisch ist dieser Forschungsansatz interdisziplinär mit Phonetik, Linguistik und Konversationsanalyse verknüpft. In unserer eigenen Feldforschung haben wir das Lachen speziell als ein rhetorisches Mittel konzeptualisiert, das von ExpertInnen (Hannah Arendt) und PolitikerInnen (Hillary und Bill Clinton) in Medieninterviews sowie von SchauspielerInnen in dem Film The Third Man und in der BBC Mini-Serie Pride and Prejudice verwendet wird, um individuelle Einstellungen mit Hilfe von paralinguistischen Mitteln indirekt auszudrücken. Die Ergebnisse weisen darauf hin, dass HA-HA-Lachen und suprasegmentales Lachen unterschiedliche kommunikative Funktionen haben können, dass das soziale Geschlecht wesentlich die Art, die Häufigkeit und die Funktion des Lachens bestimmen kann, dass Lachen nicht notwendig im Kontext humorvoller Äußerungen auftritt und dass HA-HA-Lachen funktionale Ähnlichkeiten mit Interjektionen aufweist.The following article provides a selective review of more than 130 years of research on the definition, types, and functions of adult vocal laughter from the point of view of psychology. The review shows that laughter has not been extensively researched, although it has been claimed to be a promising topic for psychologists. Empirical approaches have, in the course of time, focused increasingly on the communicative functions of laughter in spoken dialogue. Methodologically, this approach has included the interdisciplinary efforts of phonetics, linguistics, and conversation analysis. The field-observational research of the present authors, presented in summary fashion, has conceptualized laughter as a paralinguistic, nuanced rhetorical tool in the hands of experts (Hannah Arendt) and politicians (Hillary and Bill Clinton) in media interviews, and actors in the movie The Third Man and in the BBC mini-series Pride and Prejudice. The findings indicate that the two types of laughter (HA-HA laughter and suprasegmental laughter) may have different communicative functions, that gender may be an important variable in determining type, amount, duration, and function of laughter, that vocal laughter is not necessarily related to humorous content, and that HA-HA laughter may be functionally similar to interjections

Processing carbon nanotubes with holographic optical tweezers

We report the first demonstration that carbon nanotubes can be trapped and manipulated by optical tweezers. This observation is surprising because individual nanotubes are substantially smaller than the wavelength of light, and thus should not be amenable to optical trapping. Even so, nanotube bundles, and perhaps even individual nanotubes, can be transported at high speeds, deposited onto substrates, untangled, and selectively ablated, all with visible light. The use of holographic optical tweezers, capable of creating hundreds of independent traps simultaneously, suggests opportunities for highly parallel nanotube processing with light.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figur

Reduced phase error through optimized control of a superconducting qubit

Minimizing phase and other errors in experimental quantum gates allows higher fidelity quantum processing. To quantify and correct for phase errors in particular, we have developed a new experimental metrology --- amplified phase error (APE) pulses --- that amplifies and helps identify phase errors in general multi-level qubit architectures. In order to correct for both phase and amplitude errors specific to virtual transitions and leakage outside of the qubit manifold, we implement "half derivative" an experimental simplification of derivative reduction by adiabatic gate (DRAG) control theory. The phase errors are lowered by about a factor of five using this method to $\sim 1.6^{\circ}$ per gate, and can be tuned to zero. Leakage outside the qubit manifold, to the qubit $|2\rangle$ state, is also reduced to $\sim 10^{-4}$ for $20\%$ faster gates.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures with 2 page supplementa

Unraveling the basic biology and clinical significance of the chlamydial plasmid

New evidence indicates that the conserved plasmid shared among Chlamydial species may be key for understanding and vaccinating against these pathogenic bacteria

Reciprocal Interactions of Pit1 and GATA2 Mediate Signaling Gradient–Induced Determination of Pituitary Cell Types

AbstractThe mechanisms by which transient gradients of signaling molecules lead to emergence of specific cell types remain a central question in mammalian organogenesis. Here, we demonstrate that the appearance of four ventral pituitary cell types is mediated via the reciprocal interactions of two transcription factors, Pit1 and GATA2, which are epistatic to the remainder of the cell type–specific transcription programs and serve as the molecular memory of the transient signaling events. Unexpectedly, this program includes a DNA binding–independent function of Pit1, suppressing the ventral GATA2-dependent gonadotrope program by inhibiting GATA2 binding to gonadotrope- but not thyrotrope-specific genes, indicating that both DNA binding–dependent and –independent actions of abundant determining factors contribute to generate distinct cell phenotypes