“Don’t Be Stupid, Stupid!” Cognitive-Behavioral Techniques to Reduce Irrational Beliefs and Enhance Focus in a Youth Tennis Player

This case reports the intervention approach the first author adopted while working with a youth tennis player. The athlete held irrational beliefs and was struggling to maintain emotional control. The neophyte sport psychology practitioner adopted a cognitive-behavioral approach to practice. The intervention focused on (a) using rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) to replace unhelpful beliefs about unforced errors with a new rational philosophy and (b) using a distraction-control plan to restructure the player’s thoughts and beliefs in relation to opponents’ perceived gamesmanship. Intervention effectiveness was evaluated through qualitative data from the athlete and his parents and the reflections of the practitioner. Feedback suggests that REBT and distraction-control plans can be effective in helping youth athletes manage their thought patterns and improve emotional control during competition. This case also demonstrates the importance of practitioners’ having a flexible and adaptable approach to practice—one that meets individual client needs

Occasional essay: upper motor neuron syndrome in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

The diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) requires recognition of both lower (LMN) and upper motor neuron (UMN) dysfunction.1 However, classical UMN signs are frequently difficult to identify in ALS.2 LMN involvement is sensitively detected by electromyography (EMG)3 but, as yet, there are no generally accepted markers for monitoring UMN abnormalities,4 the neurobiology of ALS itself, and disease spread through the brain and spinal cord,.5 Full clinical assessment is therefore necessary to exclude other diagnoses and to monitor disease progression. In part, this difficulty regarding detection of UMN involvement in ALS derives from the definition of ‘the UMN syndrome’. Abnormalities of motor control in ALS require reformulation within an expanded concept of the UMN, together with the neuropathological, neuro-imaging and neurophysiological abnormalities in ALS. We review these issues here

Shocks near Jamming

Non-linear sound is an extreme phenomenon typically observed in solids after violent explosions. But granular media are different. Right when they jam, these fragile and disordered solids exhibit a vanishing rigidity and sound speed, so that even tiny mechanical perturbations form supersonic shocks. Here, we perform simulations in which two-dimensional jammed granular packings are dynamically compressed, and demonstrate that the elementary excitations are strongly non-linear shocks, rather than ordinary phonons. We capture the full dependence of the shock speed on pressure and impact intensity by a surprisingly simple analytical model.Comment: Revised version. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

Employing Knowledge Transfer to support IS implementation in SMEs

Information systems strategy is an increasingly important component of overall business strategy in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The need for readily available and consistent management information, drawn from integrated systems based on sound and upgradeable technologies, has led many senior company managers to review the business case for root-and-branch systems replacement. However, implementing new information systems (IS) is not easy and many projects fail or fall well short of expected outcomes. Key to successful implementation is getting the strategy right in the first place and then implementing it in a controlled manner to ensure the delivery of benefits. This article discusses three IS projects in different SMEs, where the UK's Knowledge Transfer Partnership scheme has been used to transfer relevant expertise from the university sector to help with strategy development and systems implementation. The experience has led to an outline method for IS strategy development for SMEs and guidelines for the adoption and adaptation of mainstream project management and software package evaluation tools. It is hoped that this will help other SMEs to achieve IS strategy development and implementation more effectively in terms of timescale, cost control and benefits delivery

Inflationary Cosmological Perturbations of Quantum-Mechanical Origin

This review article aims at presenting the theory of inflation. We first describe the background spacetime behavior during the slow-roll phase and analyze how inflation ends and the Universe reheats. Then, we present the theory of cosmological perturbations with special emphasis on their behavior during inflation. In particular, we discuss the quantum-mechanical nature of the fluctuations and show how the uncertainty principle fixes the amplitude of the perturbations. In a next step, we calculate the inflationary power spectra in the slow-roll approximation and compare these theoretical predictions to the recent high accuracy measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMBR) anisotropy. We show how these data already constrain the underlying inflationary high energy physics. Finally, we conclude with some speculations about the trans-Planckian problem, arguing that this issue could allow us to open a window on physical phenomena which have never been probed so far.Comment: Review Article, 47 pages, 3 figures. Lectures given at the 40th Karpacz Winter School on Theoretical Physics (Poland, Feb. 2004), submitted to Lecture Notes in Physic

Fluctuating salience in those living with genetic risk of motor neuron disease : a qualitative interview study.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to thank all the participants who took part in interviews and the advisory panel who supported and advised them over the study. This study was supported by a project grant from the Motor Neurone Disease (MND) Association (Locock/Sept19/941-794), which included funding for healthtalk.org dissemination.Jade Howard's PhD funding was awarded by the Institute of Applied Health Sciences, University of Aberdeen. For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission Funding information Motor Neurone Disease Association, Grant/Award Number: Locock/Sept19/941‐ 794; University of AberdeenPeer reviewe

Non-linear Pattern Matching with Backtracking for Non-free Data Types

Non-free data types are data types whose data have no canonical forms. For example, multisets are non-free data types because the multiset $\{a,b,b\}$ has two other equivalent but literally different forms $\{b,a,b\}$ and $\{b,b,a\}$. Pattern matching is known to provide a handy tool set to treat such data types. Although many studies on pattern matching and implementations for practical programming languages have been proposed so far, we observe that none of these studies satisfy all the criteria of practical pattern matching, which are as follows: i) efficiency of the backtracking algorithm for non-linear patterns, ii) extensibility of matching process, and iii) polymorphism in patterns. This paper aims to design a new pattern-matching-oriented programming language that satisfies all the above three criteria. The proposed language features clean Scheme-like syntax and efficient and extensible pattern matching semantics. This programming language is especially useful for the processing of complex non-free data types that not only include multisets and sets but also graphs and symbolic mathematical expressions. We discuss the importance of our criteria of practical pattern matching and how our language design naturally arises from the criteria. The proposed language has been already implemented and open-sourced as the Egison programming language

Quantifying differences between primary cortical areas in humans based on laminar profiles in in vivo MRI data

This paper presents an approach for mapping the human cortical architecture in vivo based on quantitative MRI indices of myelin. We automatically construct laminar profiles in several primary cortical areas and investigate different sampling strategies. The results demonstrate that our method is able to distinguish these areas at specific cortical depths