Examining the role of mental health and clinical issues within talent development

Although significant research supports the association between physical activity and mental wellbeing, current literature acknowledges that athletes are no less susceptible to mental illness than the general population. Despite welcomed initiatives aimed at improving mental health within elite sport, these programs often fail to target young athletes; an important concern given that the genesis of many mental illnesses are recognized to occur during this critical period. Given the importance of early intervention and effective treatment, and the potentially devastating consequences of clinical issues going undiagnosed, the implications for talent identification and development become obvious. With this in mind, this study sought to examine the range of mental health issues that may impact upon developing athletes and potential consequences for the development process, specific risk and protective factors associated with talent development, along with an examination of current practices concerning the identification of mental health issues in such environments. Qualitative interviews were conducted with purposively sampled clinicians (n = 8) experienced in working with adolescents and/or young athletes. Inductive content analysis was undertaken, identifying four main themes: key behavioral indicators; associated risk factors; associated protective factors; and issues around identification and diagnosis. Key behavioral indicators included behavioral change, along with behaviors associated with eating disorders, anxiety and depression. Risk factors centered on family background, the performance environment, and issues surrounding adolescence. Protective factors were primarily social in nature. Finally, a lack of awareness and understanding of clinical issues, multiple causes of symptoms, non-disclosure and the need for triangulation of assessment were identified. The need for improved identification and intervention strategies was apparent, with coaches identified as well placed to detect general ‘warning signs’ such as behavioral change. Short of integrating trained clinicians into talent development environments, as part of a triangulation process, ecologically validated assessment tools – coupled with appropriate training and signposting – could offer a practical way of flagging potential issues in developing athletes. The need for the development of such an instrument is therefore apparent. Finally, education around the influential role of family is also recommended in order to promote the protective elements and mitigate risk factors

Distinguishing graded & ultrasensitive signalling cascade kinetics by the shape of morphogen gradients in Drosophila

Recently, signalling gradients in cascades of two-state reaction–diffusion systems were described as a model for understanding key biochemical mechanisms that underlie development and differentiation processes in the Drosophila embryo. Diffusion-trapping at the exterior of the cell membrane triggers the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascade to relay an appropriate signal from the membrane to the inner part of the cytosol, whereupon another diffusion-trapping mechanism involving the nucleus reads out this signal to trigger appropriate changes in gene expression. Proposed mathematical models exhibit equilibrium distributions consistent with experimental measurements of key spatial gradients in these processes. A significant property of the formulation is that the signal is assumed to be relayed from one system to the next in a linear fashion. However, the MAPK cascade often exhibits nonlinear dose–response properties and the final remark of Berezhkovskii et al. (2009) is that this assumption remains an important property to be tested experimentally, perhaps via a new quantitative assay across multiple genetic backgrounds. In anticipation of the need to be able to sensibly interpret data from such experiments, here we provide a complementary analysis that recovers existing formulae as a special case but is also capable of handling nonlinear functional forms. Predictions of linear and nonlinear signal relays and, in particular, graded and ultrasensitive MAPK kinetics, are compared

Fractional euler limits and their applications

© 2017 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Generalizations of the classical Euler formula to the setting of fractional calculus are discussed. Compound interest and fractional compound interest serve as motivation. Connections to fractional master equations are highlighted. An application to the Schlögl reactions with Mittag- Leffler waiting times is described

Simulation of bimolecular reactions: Numerical challenges with the graph Laplacian

[EN] An important framework for modelling and simulation of chemical reactions is a Markov process sometimes known as a master equation. Explicit solutions of master equations are rare; in general the explicit solution of the governing master equation for a bimolecular reaction remains an open question. We show that a solution is possible in special cases. One method of solution is diagonalization. The crucial class of matrices that describe this family of models are non-symmetric graph Laplacians. We illustrate how standard numerical algorithms for finding eigenvalues fail for the non-symmetric graph Laplacians that arise in master equations for models of chemical kinetics. We propose a novel way to explore the pseudospectra of the non-symmetric graph Laplacians that arise in this class of applications, and illustrate our proposal by Monte Carlo. Finally, we apply the Magnus expansion, which provides a method of simulation when rates change in time. Again the graph Laplacian structure presents some unique issues: standard numerical methods of more than second-order fail to preserve positivity. We therefore propose a method that achieves fourth-order accuracy, and maintain positivity.We thank the organisers and delegates of the Canberra 2019 EMAC conference for helpful discussions about graph Laplacians. SM thanks the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence fot Mathematical ans Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS). The work of SB was funded by Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Spain) through project MTM2016-77660-P (AEI/FEDER, UE).Macnamara, S.; Blanes Zamora, S.; Iserles, A. (2020). Simulation of bimolecular reactions: Numerical challenges with the graph Laplacian. The ANZIAM Journal. 61:1-16. https://doi.org/10.21914/anziamj.v61i0.15169S1166

From the 1990s climate change has decreased cool season catchment precipitation reducing river heights in Australia’s southern Murray-Darling Basin

The Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) is Australia's major agricultural region. The southern MDB receives most of its annual catchment runoff during the cool season (April-September). Focusing on the Murrumbidgee River measurements at Wagga Wagga and further downstream at Hay, cool season river heights are available year to year. The 27-year period April-September Hay and Wagga Wagga river heights exhibit decreases between 1965 and 1991 and 1992-2018 not matched by declining April-September catchment rainfall. However, permutation tests of means and variances of late autumn (April-May) dam catchment precipitation and net inflows, produced p-values indicating a highly significant decline since the early 1990s. Consequently, dry catchments in late autumn, even with average cool season rainfall, have reduced dam inflows and decreased river heights downstream from Wagga Wagga, before water extraction for irrigation. It is concluded that lower April-September mean river heights at Wagga Wagga and decreased river height variability at Hay, since the mid-1990s, are due to combined lower April-May catchment precipitation and increased mean temperatures. Machine learning attribute detection revealed the southern MDB drivers as the southern annular mode (SAM), inter-decadal Pacific oscillation (IPO), Indian Ocean dipole (IOD) and global sea-surface temperature (GlobalSST). Continued catchment drying and warming will drastically reduce future water availability

Second chances: Investigating athletes’ experiences of talent transfer

Talent transfer initiatives seek to transfer talented, mature individuals from one sport to another. Unfortunately talent transfer initiatives seem to lack an evidence-based direction and a rigorous exploration of the mechanisms underpinning the approach. The purpose of this exploratory study was to identify the factors which successfully transferring athletes cite as facilitative of talent transfer. In contrast to the anthropometric and performance variables that underpin current talent transfer initiatives, participants identified a range of psychobehavioral and environmental factors as key to successful transfer. We argue that further research into the mechanisms of talent transfer is needed in order to provide a strong evidence base for the methodologies employed in these initiatives

Multilingual gendered identities: female undergraduate students in London talk about heritage languages

In this paper I explore how a group of female university students, mostly British Asian and in their late teens and early twenties, perform femininities in talk about heritage languages. I argue that analysis of this talk reveals ways in which the participants enact ‘culturally intelligible’ gendered subject positions. This frequently involves negotiating the norms of ‘heteronormativity’, constituting femininity in terms of marriage, motherhood and maintenance of heritage culture and language, and ‘girl power’, constituting femininity in terms of youth, sassiness, glamour and individualism. For these young women, I ask whether higher education can become a site in which they have the opportunities to explore these identifications and examine other ways of imagining the self and what their stories suggest about ‘doing being’ a young British Asian woman in London

The state of play: how commensurate are BTECs and A-levels in sport and physical education

The somewhat forever-changing landscape of education in England has recently challenged the post-16 sector in new ways, with funding and a knowledge-based curriculum just some of the new initiatives institutions must acclimatise to. Sport provision, a generic term used in this paper to encompass level three sport and physical education programmes, is not in limbo, but certainly faces challenges. This research focused on exploring the current ‘state of play’ of post-16 sport provision. Thirteen semi-structured interviews were carried out on teachers focusing solely on the Advanced (A)-level and Business and Technology Education Council (BTEC) national routes. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The data were analysed using the six phases outlined by Braun and Clarke in the form of a thematic analysis. The main findings were that the content is perceived to be challenging due to the depth and detail of knowledge required on topic areas investigated on the A-level route, in contrast to the breadth, related to the number of units of study on the BTEC national programmes. Practical knowledge also emerged as a key theme, with results indicating a diminished importance of the practical aspects of both programmes, and conflicting views were evident on how practical knowledge should be assessed, with some preferring the grading of practical performance only and others preferring wider aspects of performance to feature in the grade awarded. Finally, post-16 options in sport and PE were perceived to be ‘a positive thing’ but the caveat with this is the concerns regarding programme symmetry and how commensurate respective programmes are

Lexical acquisition through category matching: 12-month-old infants associate words to visual categories

Although it is widely recognized that human infants build a sizeable conceptual repertoire before mastering language, it remains a matter of debate whether and to what extent early conceptual and category knowledge contributes to language development. We addressed this question by investigating whether 12-month-olds used preverbal categories to discover the meanings of new words. We showed that one group of infants (n = 18) readily extended novel labels to previously unseen exemplars of preverbal visual categories after only a single labeling episode, but two other groups struggled to do so when taught labels for unfamiliar categories (those who had been previously exposed, n = 18, or not exposed, n = 18, to category tokens). These results suggest that infants expect labels to denote categories of objects and are equipped with learning mechanisms responsible for matching prelinguistic knowledge structures with linguistic inputs. This ability is consistent with the idea that our conceptual machinery provides building blocks for vocabulary and language acquisition

THE ROLE OF ANXIETY IN GOLF PUTTING PERFORMANCE

Anxiety’s influence on performance continues to be one of the main research interests for sport psychologists (Hanin, 2000). It is apparent, though, that there is a lack of empirical research characterising the multi-disciplinary effect of anxiety on sports performance. The current study aimed to ascertain biomechanical (accuracy, movement variability) and psychological (anxiety) markers to determine how anxiety affects golf putting