1,082 research outputs found
Can clinicians and scientists explain and prevent unexplained underperformance syndrome in elite athletes: an interdisciplinary perspective and 2016 update
The coach and interdisciplinary sports science and medicine team strive to continually progress the athlete's performance year on year. In structuring training programmes, coaches and scientists plan distinct periods of progressive overload coupled with recovery for anticipated performances to be delivered on fixed dates of competition in the calendar year. Peaking at major championships is a challenge, and training capacity highly individualised, with fine margins between the training dose necessary for adaptation and that which elicits maladaptation at the elite level. As such, optimising adaptation is key to effective preparation. Notably, however, many factors (eg, health, nutrition, sleep, training experience, psychosocial factors) play an essential part in moderating the processes of adaptation to exercise and environmental stressors, for example, heat, altitude; processes which can often fail or be limited. In the UK, the term unexplained underperformance syndrome (UUPS) has been adopted, in contrast to the more commonly referenced term overtraining syndrome, to describe a significant episode of underperformance with persistent fatigue, that is, maladaptation. This construct, UUPS, reflects the complexity of the syndrome, the multifactorial aetiology, and that ‘overtraining’ or an imbalance between training load and recovery may not be the primary cause for underperformance. UUPS draws on the distinction that a decline in performance represents the universal feature. In our review, we provide a practitioner-focused perspective, proposing that causative factors can be identified and UUPS explained, through an interdisciplinary approach (ie, medicine, nutrition, physiology, psychology) to sports science and medicine delivery, monitoring, and data interpretation and analysis
Wave Effect Neutron Radiographic Imaging Origins in WCNR and Prospects for Low Cost Systems
AbstractThe origins of wave effect neutron test methods for advanced neutron radiography as published in World Conference on Neutron Radiography (WCNR) series has been reviewed. They include Neutron Holography demonstrated at the Dido reactor, Harwell, UK; Neutron Refraction and Small Angle Scattering demonstrated at the IR-8 reactor, Kurchatov Institute, Moscow, Russia; and Neutron Interferometry demonstrated at the ILL reactor, Grenoble, France. Each case presents encouraging evidence that the advanced techniques currently practiced at the most advanced shared-user facilities could be built upon at some lower cost, single-user facilities if the lessons of the original low cost experiments are studied
Autonomous clothes manipulation using a hierarchical vision architecture
This paper presents a novel robot vision architecture for perceiving generic 3-D clothes configurations. Our architecture is hierarchically structured, starting from low-level curvature features to mid-level geometric shapes and topology descriptions, and finally, high-level semantic surface descriptions. We demonstrate our robot vision architecture in a customized dual-arm industrial robot with our inhouse developed stereo vision system, carrying out autonomous grasping and dual-arm flattening. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed dual-arm flattening using the stereo vision system compared with the single-arm flattening using the widely cited Kinect-like sensor as the baseline. In addition, the proposed grasping approach achieves satisfactory performance when grasping various kind of garments, verifying the capability of the proposed visual perception architecture to be adapted to more than one clothing manipulation tasks
Risk factors for transport-related problem behaviors in horses: A New Zealand survey
Transport-related problem behaviors (TRPBs) are common in horses and can cause injury to both the horses and their handlers. This study aimed to identify possible risk factors for TRPBs to inform approaches to mitigate TRPBs incidence and enhance horse welfare. An online cross-sectional survey was conducted to explore the prevalence of TRPBs and their association with human-, training-and transport management-related factors in New Zealand. The survey generated 1124 valid responses that were analyzed using descriptive statistics, and logistic regression analyses. Having at least one horse with TRPB was reported by 249/1124 (22.2%) respondents during the two previous years. Of these, 21/249 (8.4%) occurred during pre-loading, 78/249 (31.3%) during loading, 132/249 (53.0%) while travelling, and 18/249 (7.3%) during unloading. Our findings indicate that the use of negative reinforcement and positive punishment as training methods, using a whip or food for loading, and travelling in a straight load trailer/float while offering food were associated with a higher likelihood of TRPBs. Cross-sectional studies cannot determine causality and findings should be interpreted with caution, and evaluated in further experimental studies. The authors suggest that education on appropriate training methods for transport, and vehicle selection may mitigate the risk for TRPBs in horses
Hard-core Yukawa model for two-dimensional charge stabilized colloids
The hyper-netted chain (HNC) and Percus-Yevick (PY) approximations are used
to study the phase diagram of a simple hard-core Yukawa model of
charge-stabilized colloidal particles in a two-dimensional system. We calculate
the static structure factor and the pair distribution function over a wide
range of parameters. Using the statics correlation functions we present an
estimate for the liquid-solid phase diagram for the wide range of the
parameters.Comment: 7 pages, 9figure
Spatial correlations in vote statistics: a diffusive field model for decision-making
We study the statistics of turnout rates and results of the French elections
since 1992. We find that the distribution of turnout rates across towns is
surprisingly stable over time. The spatial correlation of the turnout rates, or
of the fraction of winning votes, is found to decay logarithmically with the
distance between towns. Based on these empirical observations and on the
analogy with a two-dimensional random diffusion equation, we propose that
individual decisions can be rationalised in terms of an underlying "cultural"
field, that locally biases the decision of the population of a given region, on
top of an idiosyncratic, town-dependent field, with short range correlations.
Using symmetry considerations and a set of plausible assumptions, we suggest
that this cultural field obeys a random diffusion equation.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures; added sociophysics references
Cloud microphysical effects of turbulent mixing and entrainment
Turbulent mixing and entrainment at the boundary of a cloud is studied by
means of direct numerical simulations that couple the Eulerian description of
the turbulent velocity and water vapor fields with a Lagrangian ensemble of
cloud water droplets that can grow and shrink by condensation and evaporation,
respectively. The focus is on detailed analysis of the relaxation process of
the droplet ensemble during the entrainment of subsaturated air, in particular
the dependence on turbulence time scales, droplet number density, initial
droplet radius and particle inertia. We find that the droplet evolution during
the entrainment process is captured best by a phase relaxation time that is
based on the droplet number density with respect to the entire simulation
domain and the initial droplet radius. Even under conditions favoring
homogeneous mixing, the probability density function of supersaturation at
droplet locations exhibits initially strong negative skewness, consistent with
droplets near the cloud boundary being suddenly mixed into clear air, but
rapidly approaches a narrower, symmetric shape. The droplet size distribution,
which is initialized as perfectly monodisperse, broadens and also becomes
somewhat negatively skewed. Particle inertia and gravitational settling lead to
a more rapid initial evaporation, but ultimately only to slight depletion of
both tails of the droplet size distribution. The Reynolds number dependence of
the mixing process remained weak over the parameter range studied, most
probably due to the fact that the inhomogeneous mixing regime could not be
fully accessed when phase relaxation times based on global number density are
considered.Comment: 17 pages, 10 Postscript figures (figures 3,4,6,7,8 and 10 are in
reduced quality), to appear in Theoretical Computational Fluid Dynamic
Supersymmetric solutions of PT-/non-PT-symmetric and non-Hermitian Screened Coulomb potential via Hamiltonian hierarchy inspired variational method
The supersymmetric solutions of PT-symmetric and Hermitian/non-Hermitian
forms of quantum systems are obtained by solving the Schrodinger equation for
the Exponential-Cosine Screened Coulomb potential. The Hamiltonian hierarchy
inspired variational method is used to obtain the approximate energy
eigenvalues and corresponding wave functions.Comment: 13 page
Simple Fluids with Complex Phase Behavior
We find that a system of particles interacting through a simple isotropic
potential with a softened core is able to exhibit a rich phase behavior
including: a liquid-liquid phase transition in the supercooled phase, as has
been suggested for water; a gas-liquid-liquid triple point; a freezing line
with anomalous reentrant behavior. The essential ingredient leading to these
features resides in that the potential investigated gives origin to two
effective core radii.Comment: 7 pages including 3 eps figures + 1 jpeg figur
Wilson Lines off the Light-cone in TMD PDFs
Transverse Momentum Dependent (TMD) parton distribution functions (PDFs) also
take into account the transverse momentum () of the partons. The
-integrated analogues can be linked directly to quark and gluon matrix
elements using the operator product expansion in QCD, involving operators of
definite twist. TMDs also involve operators of higher twist, which are not
suppressed by powers of the hard scale, however. Taking into account gauge
links that no longer are along the light-cone, one finds that new distribution
functions arise. They appear at leading order in the description of azimuthal
asymmetries in high-energy scattering processes. In analogy to the collinear
operator expansion, we define a universal set of TMDs of definite rank and
point out the importance for phenomenology.Comment: 12 pages, presented by the first author at the Light-Cone Conference
2013, May 20-24, 2013, Skiathos, Greece. To be published in Few Body System
- …