The Physical Fitness Components and Posture Screening of Female Competitive Dancers

The purpose of this research project is to fill the lack of information on the physical components, amount of pain experienced, and past injuries of competitive dancers under the professional level. Little research has been performed in this population. A total of 15 female competitive dancers were tested between the ages of 15-18 years old. Body mass index (BMI), height, weight, muscular endurance, aerobic endurance, flexibility, and alignment were measured, and then a pain rating survey and injury questionnaire were anonymously completed by the subjects. The participants performed a three-minute, twelve-inch step test, push-ups and crunches test, sit-and-reach test, and posture screen test. These measurements were then statistically analyzed and compared. The BMI values were healthy for the participants’ age, except for two dancers, and postural deviations were very small. Aerobic endurance was above the 75th percentile in eight dancers; all dancers except for one scored below the 40th percentile in abdominal endurance, but over half scored above the 60th percentile in pushups/upper body strength. Lastly, flexibility was high with almost every dancer scoring above the 75th percentile. There were no significant correlations found between BMI and aerobic endurance, crunches and pushups, or flexibility and posture. The most pain reported was in the lower back, and most injuries reported were in the ankles and lower back. It was found that there is a need for dancers to improve overall muscular fitness, given the potential to prevent further injuries and pain experienced from dance. More data should be collected in this particular population and comparison groups such as professional dancers

The Ontogeny of Lexical Networks Toddlers Encode the Relationships Among Referents When Learning Novel Words

Although the semantic relationships among words have long been acknowledged as a crucial component of adult lexical knowledge, the ontogeny of lexical networks remains largely unstudied. To determine whether learners encode relationships among novel words, we trained 2-year-olds on four novel words that referred to four novel objects, which were grouped into two visually similar pairs. Participants then listened to repetitions of word pairs (in the absence of visual referents) that referred to objects that were either similar or dissimilar to each other. Toddlers listened significantly longer to word pairs referring to similar objects, which suggests that their representations of the novel words included knowledge about the similarity of the referents. A second experiment confirmed that toddlers can learn all four distinct words from the training regime, which suggests that the results from Experiment 1 reflected the successful encoding of referents. Together, these results show that toddlers encode the similarities among referents from their earliest exposures to new words

Toddlers Encode Similarities Among Novel Words from Meaningful Sentences

Toddlers can learn about the meanings of individual words from the structure and semantics of the sentences in which they are embedded. However, it remains unknown whether toddlers encode similarities among novel words based on their positions within sentences. In three experiments, two-year-olds listened to novel words embedded in familiar sentence frames. Some novel words consistently occurred in the subject position across sentences, and others in the object position across sentences. An auditory semantic task was used to test whether toddlers encoded similarities based on sentential position, for (a) pairs of novel words that occurred within the same sentence, and (b) pairs of novel words that occurred in the same position across sentences. The results suggest that while toddlers readily encoded similarity based on within-sentence occurrences, only toddlers with more advanced grammatical knowledge encoded the positional similarities of novel words across sentences. Moreover, the encoding of these cross-sentential relationships only occurred if the exposure sentences included a familiar verb. These studies suggest that the types of lexical relationships that toddlers learn depend on the child’s current level of language development, as well as the structure and meaning of the sentences surrounding the novel words

Assessment of the visibility impairment caused by the emissions from the proposed power plant at Boron, California

The current atmospheric conditions and visibility were modeled, and the effect of the power plant effluent was then added to determine its influence upon the prevailing visibility; the actual reduction in visibility being a function of meteorological conditions and observer-plume-target geometry. In the cases investigated, the perceptibility of a target was reduced by a minimum of 10 percent and a maximum of 100 percent. This significant visual impact would occur 40 days per year in the Edwards area with meteorological conditions such as to cause some visual impact 80 days per year

Preface: World Literature in an Expanding Digital Space

Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, and Wikidata, the rapidly growing knowledge graph, are not yet widely used in literary studies, but their scale and multilingualism make them particularly suitable as new means for the study of world literature. This is the hypothesis at the heart of this special issue. Our preface provides a research overview of the topic, briefly summarizes the articles that constitute this issue, and focuses on overarching aspects and common challenges

Influence of the proximity and amount of human development and roads on the occurrence of the red imported fire ant in the lower Florida Keys

We examined the influence of both the proximity and extent of human developments and paved roads on the presence of the predatory, non-indigenous, red imported fire ant (Solenopsis invicta). This species was inadvertently introduced into the United States at the port of Mobile, Alabama, around 1930 and rapidly spread to many southeastern states, including Florida. More recently, S. invicta colonized the Florida Keys, an area with a high proportion of rare and endemic vertebrate and invertebrate species. We placed bait transects in transitional salt-marsh, pineland, and hardwood hammocks on 13 of the lower Florida Keys and compared habitat type, the shortest distance of the bait transect to a development or road, and area of development and roads 50, 70, 100, and 150 m around each bait transect for areas with and without red imported fire ants. Red imported fire ants were detected on 21 of the 80 transects and were equally abundant in all habitat types. While all of the development and road variables differed significantly between bait transects with and without red imported fire ants, transects that were closest to roads and that had the largest amount of development within a 150 m radii had the highest probability of presence of red imported fire ants. Recovery efforts for endangered species in areas invaded by red imported fire ants should include analyses of the cumulative impacts of roads and developments in areas near protected lands