Developing Para-hockey for athletes with intellectual disabilities: Barriers and facilitators

Purpose: Identify the challenges and opportunities to develop Para-hockey for participants with intellectual disabilities (ID), and to make recommendations about next steps. Methodology: Interviews with stakeholders known to be engaged in, and advocating for, ID para-hockey classification, representing Pakistan, New Zealand, the UK, Belgium, Portugal, Argentina and Chile. Findings and practical implications: There is support and commitment for the development of ID Para-hockey. A collaboration plan should be developed by the International Hockey Federation (FIH) to a) ensure key stakeholders are aware of FIH’s commitment to this endeavour; b) link with other stakeholders who have an interest in developing ID sport; c) learn about good practice in other sports, d) identify a series of steps to progress a developmental plan. We also see evidence for the need to audit current ID Para-hockey activity internationally. Research Contribution: This is the first study directly addressing the development of ID Para-hockey. ID Para-hockey is at the start of this developmental journey, and little is known about stakeholder perspectives on the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Originality/Value: It is important, at the outset, to be able to identify what capacities for development exist, and then to consider how these may be built upon

How are children and young people engaged in research on paediatric obesity and which issues do they report?:A scoping review

The importance of engaging children and adolescents in research is increasingly acknowledged. The aim of this scoping review is to explore how children and young people have been engaged in research on paediatric obesity and which issues they have reported, in order to highlight areas that require further inquiry or action by researchers and health care professionals. There were 13 papers eligible for this review. Methods used included in-depth interviews, structured or semi-structured interviews, and focus groups, as well as more creative qualitative research methods. Half of the studies included young people with their parents; parents were always present when the interviewees were young children. Personal and sensitive themes, such as bullying, a desire to “fit in”, strong negative emotions about oneself (e.g., low self-esteem, low self-efficacy), and not feeling supported by family, peers, and professionals, were more often shared if parents were not present. An additional issue, wanting to be independent versus being under parental control was found in studies with adolescents. Engaging children and adolescents in multiple phases of research on paediatric obesity is beneficial in allowing better insight into their perspectives and providing recommendations that are more in line with their personal needs and life circumstances; such studies are still scarce in this field, however

A Parallel SSOR Preconditioner for Lattice QCD

A parallelizable SSOR preconditioning scheme for Krylov subspace iterative solvers in lattice QCD applications involving Wilson fermions is presented. In actual Hybrid Monte Carlo and quark propagator calculations it helps to reduce the number of iterations by a factor of 2 compared to conventional odd-even preconditioning. This corresponds to a gain in cpu-time of 30\% - 70\% over odd-even preconditioning.Comment: Talk presented at LATTICE96(algorithms), 3 pages, LaTeX file, 3 epsf-files include

Asymptotic behaviour of a semilinear elliptic system with a large exponent

Consider the problem \begin{eqnarray*} -\Delta u &=& v^{\frac 2{N-2}},\quad v>0\quad {in}\quad \Omega, -\Delta v &=& u^{p},\:\:\:\quad u>0\quad {in}\quad \Omega, u&=&v\:\:=\:\:0 \quad {on}\quad \partial \Omega, \end{eqnarray*} where $\Omega$ is a bounded convex domain in $\R^N,$ $N>2,$ with smooth boundary $\partial \Omega.$ We study the asymptotic behaviour of the least energy solutions of this system as $p\to \infty.$ We show that the solution remain bounded for $p$ large and have one or two peaks away form the boundary. When one peak occurs we characterize its location.Comment: 16 pages, submmited for publicatio

Optimization of cw sodium laser guide star efficiency

Context: Sodium laser guide stars (LGS) are about to enter a new range of laser powers. Previous theoretical and numerical methods are inadequate for accurate computations of the return flux and hence for the design of the next-generation LGS systems. Aims: We numerically optimize the cw (continuous wave) laser format, in particular the light polarization and spectrum. Methods: Using Bloch equations, we simulate the mesospheric sodium atoms, including Doppler broadening, saturation, collisional relaxation, Larmor precession, and recoil, taking into account all 24 sodium hyperfine states and on the order of 100 velocity groups. Results: LGS return flux is limited by "three evils": Larmor precession due to the geomagnetic field, atomic recoil due to radiation pressure, and transition saturation. We study their impacts and show that the return flux can be boosted by repumping (simultaneous excitation of the sodium D2a and D2b lines with 10-20% of the laser power in the latter). Conclusions: We strongly recommend the use of circularly polarized lasers and repumping. As a rule of thumb, the bandwidth of laser radiation in MHz (at each line) should approximately equal the launched laser power in Watts divided by six, assuming a diffraction-limited spot size.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, AA/2009/1310

A global method for coupling transport with chemistry in heterogeneous porous media

Modeling reactive transport in porous media, using a local chemical equilibrium assumption, leads to a system of advection-diffusion PDE's coupled with algebraic equations. When solving this coupled system, the algebraic equations have to be solved at each grid point for each chemical species and at each time step. This leads to a coupled non-linear system. In this paper a global solution approach that enables to keep the software codes for transport and chemistry distinct is proposed. The method applies the Newton-Krylov framework to the formulation for reactive transport used in operator splitting. The method is formulated in terms of total mobile and total fixed concentrations and uses the chemical solver as a black box, as it only requires that on be able to solve chemical equilibrium problems (and compute derivatives), without having to know the solution method. An additional advantage of the Newton-Krylov method is that the Jacobian is only needed as an operator in a Jacobian matrix times vector product. The proposed method is tested on the MoMaS reactive transport benchmark.Comment: Computational Geosciences (2009) http://www.springerlink.com/content/933p55085742m203/?p=db14bb8c399b49979ba8389a3cae1b0f&pi=1