494 research outputs found
Drugs In Sport, The Straight Dope: A Philosophical Analysis Of The Justification For Banning Performance-enhancing Substances And Practices In The Olympic Games
Many believe that doping has no place in sport, especially no place in the Olympic Games. Yet despite, or indeed perhaps because of, this belief remarkably little has been done in the way of attempting to justify those bans.;The arguments that are offered in support of bans fall into four categories: (i) that doping is cheating or unfair, (ii) that it is harmful, (iii) that it perverts the nature of sport, and (iv) that is is dehumanizing or unnatural.;I examine each of these categories of argument in turn. The cheating or unfairness argument is readily dismissed as question-begging. The substances or practices concerned are only cheating or unfair after they have been banned. This argument is therefore unavailable to justify a ban.;The argument from harm is inconsistent. Many sports, and many practices within sport, are more harmful and more risky, than the majority of the banned practices or substances. It is inconsistent to paternalistically ban some practices, claiming concern for athlete well-being as the justification, and then to permit other, equally harmful, activities.;The dehumanization argument in general looks promising. Unfortunately, however, it is not clear why substances such as anabolic steroids should be considered dehumanizing. This is partly so because we do not have a clear and uncontroversial picture of what it is to be human to start with.;There is a similar lack of clarity in the arguments that claim that doping perverts the nature of sport. While this may be so for some future possible performance-enhancing practice and sport, there are not extant arguments to show why, e.g., anabolic steroid use would pervert the nature of the 100 metre dash.;I offer a two-tiered approach to justifying bans on doping. The first tier examines the internal goods of sport and shows why athletes would rationally want to avoid doping. The second tier works from the community level and shows why those concerned about sport, especially those concerned about Olympic sport would rationally seek to promote doping-free sport
Comparing Practical Theology across Religions and Denominations
This is an Author’s Original Manuscript of an article submitted for consideration to the Review of Religious Research [copyright Springer]. The final publication is available at http://link.springer.com.While significant research and practice has examined congregational involvement in providing for those in need, few have looked at the denominational theology that informs these initiatives or influences the non-profit systems created to provide them. Drawing on ethnographic research from the Faith and Organizations project, a national research/practice initiative designed to explore the relationship between religions and faith based organizations, this paper compares the practical theology behind stewardship of social welfare and educational programs for Catholics, Mainline Protestants, Evangelicals, Jews, Quakers and African American Christians. The paper returns to older, expanded definitions of stewardship and provides identifies three stewardship systems based on religious practical theology. It observes strengths and weaknesses of each system and offers practical suggestions for strengthening connections between faith communities and FBOs in each syste
Editorial : Women in anti-doping sciences & integrity in sport : 2021/22
No abstract available.https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sports-and-active-livingam2024PhysiologySDG-05:Gender equalit
The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III
The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the
scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a
larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys
of large scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as
i=19.9 over 10,000 square degrees to measure BAO to redshifts z<0.7.
Observations of neutral hydrogen in the Lyman alpha forest in more than 150,000
quasar spectra (g<22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15<z<3.5.
Early results from BOSS include the first detection of the large-scale
three-dimensional clustering of the Lyman alpha forest and a strong detection
from the Data Release 9 data set of the BAO in the clustering of massive
galaxies at an effective redshift z = 0.57. We project that BOSS will yield
measurements of the angular diameter distance D_A to an accuracy of 1.0% at
redshifts z=0.3 and z=0.57 and measurements of H(z) to 1.8% and 1.7% at the
same redshifts. Forecasts for Lyman alpha forest constraints predict a
measurement of an overall dilation factor that scales the highly degenerate
D_A(z) and H^{-1}(z) parameters to an accuracy of 1.9% at z~2.5 when the survey
is complete. Here, we provide an overview of the selection of spectroscopic
targets, planning of observations, and analysis of data and data quality of
BOSS.Comment: 49 pages, 16 figures, accepted by A
The Eighth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Data from SDSS-III
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) started a new phase in August 2008, with
new instrumentation and new surveys focused on Galactic structure and chemical
evolution, measurements of the baryon oscillation feature in the clustering of
galaxies and the quasar Ly alpha forest, and a radial velocity search for
planets around ~8000 stars. This paper describes the first data release of
SDSS-III (and the eighth counting from the beginning of the SDSS). The release
includes five-band imaging of roughly 5200 deg^2 in the Southern Galactic Cap,
bringing the total footprint of the SDSS imaging to 14,555 deg^2, or over a
third of the Celestial Sphere. All the imaging data have been reprocessed with
an improved sky-subtraction algorithm and a final, self-consistent photometric
recalibration and flat-field determination. This release also includes all data
from the second phase of the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and
Evolution (SEGUE-2), consisting of spectroscopy of approximately 118,000 stars
at both high and low Galactic latitudes. All the more than half a million
stellar spectra obtained with the SDSS spectrograph have been reprocessed
through an improved stellar parameters pipeline, which has better determination
of metallicity for high metallicity stars.Comment: Astrophysical Journal Supplements, in press (minor updates from
submitted version
The Ninth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) presents the first spectroscopic
data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). This ninth data
release (DR9) of the SDSS project includes 535,995 new galaxy spectra (median
z=0.52), 102,100 new quasar spectra (median z=2.32), and 90,897 new stellar
spectra, along with the data presented in previous data releases. These spectra
were obtained with the new BOSS spectrograph and were taken between 2009
December and 2011 July. In addition, the stellar parameters pipeline, which
determines radial velocities, surface temperatures, surface gravities, and
metallicities of stars, has been updated and refined with improvements in
temperature estimates for stars with T_eff<5000 K and in metallicity estimates
for stars with [Fe/H]>-0.5. DR9 includes new stellar parameters for all stars
presented in DR8, including stars from SDSS-I and II, as well as those observed
as part of the SDSS-III Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and
Exploration-2 (SEGUE-2).
The astrometry error introduced in the DR8 imaging catalogs has been
corrected in the DR9 data products. The next data release for SDSS-III will be
in Summer 2013, which will present the first data from the Apache Point
Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) along with another year of
data from BOSS, followed by the final SDSS-III data release in December 2014.Comment: 9 figures; 2 tables. Submitted to ApJS. DR9 is available at
http://www.sdss3.org/dr
The Fourteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey and from the second phase of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment
The fourth generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV) has been in
operation since July 2014. This paper describes the second data release from
this phase, and the fourteenth from SDSS overall (making this, Data Release
Fourteen or DR14). This release makes public data taken by SDSS-IV in its first
two years of operation (July 2014-2016). Like all previous SDSS releases, DR14
is cumulative, including the most recent reductions and calibrations of all
data taken by SDSS since the first phase began operations in 2000. New in DR14
is the first public release of data from the extended Baryon Oscillation
Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS); the first data from the second phase of the
Apache Point Observatory (APO) Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE-2),
including stellar parameter estimates from an innovative data driven machine
learning algorithm known as "The Cannon"; and almost twice as many data cubes
from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA) survey as were in the previous
release (N = 2812 in total). This paper describes the location and format of
the publicly available data from SDSS-IV surveys. We provide references to the
important technical papers describing how these data have been taken (both
targeting and observation details) and processed for scientific use. The SDSS
website (www.sdss.org) has been updated for this release, and provides links to
data downloads, as well as tutorials and examples of data use. SDSS-IV is
planning to continue to collect astronomical data until 2020, and will be
followed by SDSS-V.Comment: SDSS-IV collaboration alphabetical author data release paper. DR14
happened on 31st July 2017. 19 pages, 5 figures. Accepted by ApJS on 28th Nov
2017 (this is the "post-print" and "post-proofs" version; minor corrections
only from v1, and most of errors found in proofs corrected
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