Track and Field Athlete\u27s Barriers Evolving with the Postponement of the Olympics

Due to the global Coronavirus pandemic the International Olympic Committee, IOC, rescheduled the Summer Olympics to a date beyond 2020, but not later than summer 2021, to safeguard the health of everyone involved in the Games. As the Olympics have been postponed, this could consequently affect track and field athletes. The only other time in the history of the Olympics that there has been a postponing or canceling has been in the case of a war. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to study Olympic athlete’s psychological, physiological, and physical barriers encountered due to the pandemic and subsequently the postponement of the Summer 2020 Olympics. A phenomenological research study was conducted to identify themes if athletes were and are affected each day of the postponement and pandemic. METHODS: The researcher interviewed 10 Olympic qualifying track and field athletes asking them open-ended questions about how they originally got involved with the Olympics, how they found out about the postponement of the Summer 2020 Olympic Games along with their initial reactions and emotions, the training stage these participants were in, their physical reactions to the pandemic and the postponement, how they plan to prolong their seasons, their mental and psychological effects as well as conversations they had regarding mental and emotional states, perceived anxiety, and how they felt in general months later into the postponement and the pandemic. The participant\u27s data was recorded and transcribed with the aid of NVIVO. The researcher coded the interviews for common themes. RESULTS: The data showed the themes of fear of the unknown and an optimistic outlook. These athletes physically had to stop in the middle of their season leading into the Olympics, bringing fear of the unknown. However, athletes adapted, athletes were creative, and athletes were innovative. Psychologically, athletes were able to control their emotions and mental state while addressing the ambiguity of the pandemic and postponement. Athletes know their coaches, their selves, and their support groups, and how they can communicate with them to stay in a positive threshold of a mental state. Physiologically, athletes were able to also be creative to keep up their physicality throughout the pandemic. As these Olympic athletes were faced with a phenomenological event, they strived to reach optimism in every aspect of their lives as athletes. CONCLUSION: In conclusion, the study can be used for future studies on track and field athletes, cancellations of worldwide mega-events, and/or worldwide pandemics and their effects on major events. This qualitative phenomenological study concluded optimism, even throughout a global pandemic

Tobacco still a major killer-will we achieve the end game?

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Karyomorphological study of Houttuynia cordata Thunb.: an ethnobotanical species of Manipuri community of Tripura, India

Houttuynia cordata Thunb. (Saururaceae), has the chromosome number of 2n = 112 with karyotype formula A2+B98+C12. The size of the chromosomal complement was found to range from 1.52 µm to 3.00 µm with one pair of chromosomes bearing secondary constrictions. The detailed karyotype analysis revealed that chromosomes fall under the Stebbins category of 1A, which indicating slightly asymmetric nature of chromosome. The chromosome tally and conformity of the karyotype in the present study corroborated as a new cytotype being adapted in this area, the north-eastern region of India

Vashantor: A Large-scale Multilingual Benchmark Dataset for Automated Translation of Bangla Regional Dialects to Bangla Language

The Bangla linguistic variety is a fascinating mix of regional dialects that adds to the cultural diversity of the Bangla-speaking community. Despite extensive study into translating Bangla to English, English to Bangla, and Banglish to Bangla in the past, there has been a noticeable gap in translating Bangla regional dialects into standard Bangla. In this study, we set out to fill this gap by creating a collection of 32,500 sentences, encompassing Bangla, Banglish, and English, representing five regional Bangla dialects. Our aim is to translate these regional dialects into standard Bangla and detect regions accurately. To achieve this, we proposed models known as mT5 and BanglaT5 for translating regional dialects into standard Bangla. Additionally, we employed mBERT and Bangla-bert-base to determine the specific regions from where these dialects originated. Our experimental results showed the highest BLEU score of 69.06 for Mymensingh regional dialects and the lowest BLEU score of 36.75 for Chittagong regional dialects. We also observed the lowest average word error rate of 0.1548 for Mymensingh regional dialects and the highest of 0.3385 for Chittagong regional dialects. For region detection, we achieved an accuracy of 85.86% for Bangla-bert-base and 84.36% for mBERT. This is the first large-scale investigation of Bangla regional dialects to Bangla machine translation. We believe our findings will not only pave the way for future work on Bangla regional dialects to Bangla machine translation, but will also be useful in solving similar language-related challenges in low-resource language conditions

Effect of foil thickness and cell size of honeycomb on energy absorption of aluminium honeycomb sandwich composite (Charpy Test)

28-35Sandwich composites are special class of materials because of peculiar properties such as lightweight, high energy absorbing capacity, and high damping, etc. These properties make them suitable for their use in aerospace and marine industry. Generally, metal or FRP sheets are used as skin/face sheet and honeycomb, foam and balsa wood, etc. are used as core materials. The elastic properties of the honeycomb are the function of foil thickness and cell size. In the present study, the effect of parameters (Foil thickness and Cell size) of the honeycomb on the energy absorption capacity of the sandwich composite was investigated through experimental and numerical studies. Experiments were carried out on four sandwich composites having a variable combination of foil thickness, and cell size by using the Charpy ASTM E-23 machine. Further, numerical analyses were carried out using finite element (FE) software Abaqus. The experimental and numerical results were found to be in good agreement. The results show that energy absorption to mass ratio increases with the increase in foil thickness and with the decrease in cell size. For the improvement of energy absorption to mass ratio, the effect of change in the foil thickness is significant compared to that of change in cell size. Failure mechanism was discussed through numerical study. The impact force resisted by the sandwich composites was presented by using the impulse-momentum equation

Effect of foil thickness and cell size of honeycomb on energy absorption of aluminium honeycomb sandwich composite (Charpy Test)

Sandwich composites are special class of materials because of peculiar properties such as lightweight, high energy absorbing capacity, and high damping, etc. These properties make them suitable for their use in aerospace and marine industry. Generally, metal or FRP sheets are used as skin/face sheet and honeycomb, foam and balsa wood, etc. are used as core materials. The elastic properties of the honeycomb are the function of foil thickness and cell size. In the present study, the effect of parameters (Foil thickness and Cell size) of the honeycomb on the energy absorption capacity of the sandwich composite was investigated through experimental and numerical studies. Experiments were carried out on four sandwich composites having a variable combination of foil thickness, and cell size by using the Charpy ASTM E-23 machine. Further, numerical analyses were carried out using finite element (FE) software Abaqus. The experimental and numerical results were found to be in good agreement. The results show that energy absorption to mass ratio increases with the increase in foil thickness and with the decrease in cell size. For the improvement of energy absorption to mass ratio, the effect of change in the foil thickness is significant compared to that of change in cell size. Failure mechanism was discussed through numerical study. The impact force resisted by the sandwich composites was presented by using the impulse-momentum equation

Employing the Gini coefficient to measure participation inequality in treatment-focused Digital Health Social Networks

Digital Health Social Networks (DHSNs) are common; however, there are few metrics that can be used to identify participation inequality. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the Gini coefficient, an economic measure of statistical dispersion traditionally used to measure income inequality, could be employed to measure DHSN inequality. Quarterly Gini coefficients were derived from four long-standing DHSNs. The combined data set included 625,736 posts that were generated from 15,181 actors over 18,671 days. The range of actors (8–2323), posts (29–28,684), and Gini coefficients (0.15–0.37) varied. Pearson correlations indicated statistically significant associations between number of actors and number of posts (0.527–0.835, p < .001), and Gini coefficients and number of posts (0.342–0.725, p < .001). However, the association between Gini coefficient and number of actors was only statistically significant for the addiction networks (0.619 and 0.276, p < .036). Linear regression models had positive but mixed R2 results (0.333–0.527). In all four regression models, the association between Gini coefficient and posts was statistically significant (t = 3.346–7.381, p < .002). However, unlike the Pearson correlations, the association between Gini coefficient and number of actors was only statistically significant in the two mental health networks (t = −4.305 and −5.934, p < .000). The Gini coefficient is helpful in measuring shifts in DHSN inequality. However, as a standalone metric, the Gini coefficient does not indicate optimal numbers or ratios of actors to posts, or effective network engagement. Further, mixed-methods research investigating quantitative performance metrics is required

Integrating Positive and Clinical Psychology: Viewing Human Functioning as Continua from Positive to Negative Can Benefit Clinical Assessment, Interventions and Understandings of Resilience

In this review we argue in favour of further integration between the disciplines of positive and clinical psychology. We argue that most of the constructs studied by both positive and clinical psychology exist on continua ranging from positive to negative (e.g., gratitude to ingratitude, anxiety to calmness) and so it is meaningless to speak of one or other field studying the “positive” or the “negative”. However, we highlight historical and cultural factors which have led positive and clinical psychologies to focus on different constructs; thus the difference between the fields is more due to the constructs of study rather than their being inherently “positive” or “negative”. We argue that there is much benefit to clinical psychology of considering positive psychology constructs because; (a) constructs studied by positive psychology researchers can independently predict wellbeing when accounting for traditional clinical factors, both cross-sectionally and prospectively, (2) the constructs studied by positive psychologists can interact with risk factors to predict outcomes, thereby conferring resilience, (3) interventions that aim to increase movement towards the positive pole of well-being can be used encourage movement away from the negative pole, either in isolation or alongside traditional clinical interventions, and (4) research from positive psychology can support clinical psychology as it seeks to adapt therapies developed in Western nations to other cultures