The influence of barefoot and shod running on Triceps-surae muscle strain characteristics

The aim of the current investigation was to determine the effects of barefoot and shod running on the kinematics of the Triceps-Surae muscle group. Twelve male participants ran at 4.0 m.s-1 (± 5%) in both barefoot and shod conditions. Kinematics were measured using an eight-camera motion analysis system. Muscle kinematics from the lateral Gastrocnemius, medial Gastrocnemius and Soleus were obtained using musculoskeletal modelling software (Opensim v3.2). The results showed that muscle strain for the lateral Gastrocnemius (barefoot = 1.10 & shod = 0.33 %), medial Gastrocnemius (barefoot = 1.07 & shod = 0.32 %) and Soleus (barefoot = 3.43 & shod = 2.18 %) were significantly larger for the barefoot condition. Given the proposed association between the extent of muscle strain and the etiology of chronic muscle strain pathologies, the current investigation shows that running barefoot may place runners at greater risk from Triceps-Surae strain injuries

"Moments to Talk About": Designing for the Eudaimonic Gameplay Experience

This thesis investigates the mixed-affect emotional experience of playing videogames. Its contribution is by way of a set of grounded theories that help us understand the game players' mixed-affect emotional experience, and that support analysts and designers in seeking to broaden and deepen emotional engagement in videogames. This was the product of three studies: First — An analysis of magazine reviews for a selection of videogames suggested there were two kinds of challenge being presented. Functional challenge — the commonly accepted notion of challenge, where dexterity and skill with the controls or strategy is used to overcome challenges, and emotional challenge — where resolution of tension within the narrative, emotional exploration of ambiguities within the diegesis, or identification with characters is overcome with cognitive and affective effort. Second — further investigation into the notion of emotional challenge become a reflection on the nature and definition of agency. A new theory of agency was constructed — comprising of Interpretive, Actual, Mechanical, and Fictional Agency. Interpretive Fictional Agency was highlighted as particularly important in facilitating a mixed-affect gameplay experience. Third — further interviews led to a core concept of `emotional exploration' — an analogy that is useful in helping explain how to design for emotional challenge, why players would be interested in seeking it out, and how the mixed-affect emotional experience is constituted during gameplay. These three theories are integrated and the mixed-affect emotional experience of interest resulting from gameplay is defined as the ‘Eudaimonic Gameplay Experience’. It is hoped that this will help developers and researchers better understand how to analyse and design single-player videogames that increase the chances for a deep, reflective and more varied emotional experience to take place, and take advantage of the latent expressive and artistic potential that still remains under-explored in videogames

More than a bit of coding: (un-)Grounded (non-)Theory in HCI

Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) is a powerful way to develop theories where there is little existing research using a flexible but rigorous empirically-based approach. Although it originates from the fields of social and health sciences, it is a field-agnostic methodology that can be used in any discipline. However, it tends to be misunderstood by researchers within HCI. This paper sets out to explain what GTM is, how it can be useful to HCI researchers, and examples of how it has been misapplied. There is an overview of the decades of methodological debate that surrounds GTM, why it’s important to be aware of this debate, and how GTM differs from other, better understood, qualitative methodologies. It is hoped the reader is left with a greater understanding of GTM, and better able to judge the results of research which claims to use GTM, but often does not

The tragedy of betrayal: how the design of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus elicits emotion

Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are two games of high critical acclaim that are well known for their emotional affect -particularly because some of those emotions are unusual amongst digital games. Analysis of emotion in video games often focuses on narrative and representative elements, and emotions regularly experienced by gamers such as frustration, victory, joy of discovery etc. This paper uses close textual analysis with support from cognitive theories of emotion to analyse the ludic and mechanical, in addition to representative and narrative, qualities of these games. By doing so it is shown how guilt, grief and loneliness have more chance of being elicited from the player, with emphasis on the use of ambiguity and violation of player expectations. It is hoped that this approach will encourage further work of this type in an area so that both theoretical work and future development might benefit

The Tragedy of Betraya: How the design of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus elicits emotion

Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are two games of high critical acclaim that are well known for their emotional affect – particularly because some of those emotions are unusual amongst digital games. Analysis of emotion in video games often focuses on narrative and representative elements, and emotions regularly experienced by gamers such as frustration, victory, joy of discovery etc. This paper uses close textual analysis with support from cognitive theories of emotion to analyse the ludic and mechanical, in addition to representative and narrative, qualities of these games. By doing so it is shown how guilt, grief and loneliness have more chance of being elicited from the player, with emphasis on the use of ambiguity and violation of player expectations. It is hoped that this approach will encourage further work of this type in an area so that both theoretical work and future development might benefit

NAIL: Lexical Retrieval Indices with Efficient Non-Autoregressive Decoders

Neural document rerankers are extremely effective in terms of accuracy. However, the best models require dedicated hardware for serving, which is costly and often not feasible. To avoid this serving-time requirement, we present a method of capturing up to 86% of the gains of a Transformer cross-attention model with a lexicalized scoring function that only requires 10-6% of the Transformer's FLOPs per document and can be served using commodity CPUs. When combined with a BM25 retriever, this approach matches the quality of a state-of-the art dual encoder retriever, that still requires an accelerator for query encoding. We introduce NAIL (Non-Autoregressive Indexing with Language models) as a model architecture that is compatible with recent encoder-decoder and decoder-only large language models, such as T5, GPT-3 and PaLM. This model architecture can leverage existing pre-trained checkpoints and can be fine-tuned for efficiently constructing document representations that do not require neural processing of queries.Comment: To appear at EMNLP 202

Pacing during an ultramarathon running event in hilly terrain

PURPOSE: The dynamics of speed selection as a function of distance, or pacing, are used in recreational, competitive, and scientific research situations as an indirect measure of the psycho-physiological status of an individual. The purpose of this study was to determine pacing on level, uphill and downhill sections of participants in a long (>80 km) ultramarathon performed on trails in hilly terrain. METHODS: Fifteen ultramarathon runners competed in a 173 km event (five finished at 103 km) carrying a Global-Positioning System (GPS) device. Using the GPS data, we determined the speed, relative to average total speed, in level (LEV), uphill (UH) and downhill (DH) gradient categories as a function of total distance, as well as the correlation between overall performance and speed variability, speed loss, and total time stopped. RESULTS: There were no significant differences in normality, variances or means in the relative speed in 173-km and 103-km participants. Relative speed decreased in LEV, UH and DH. The main component of speed loss occurred between 5% and 50% of the event distance in LEV, and between 5% and 95% in UH and DH. There were no significant correlations between overall performance and speed loss, the variability of speed, or total time stopped. CONCLUSIONS: Positive pacing was observed at all gradients, with the main component of speed loss occurring earlier (mixed pacing) in LEV compared to UH and DH. A speed reserve (increased speed in the last section) was observed in LEV and UH. The decrease in speed and variability of speed were more important in LEV and DH than in UH. The absence of a significant correlation between overall performance and descriptors of pacing is novel and indicates that pacing in ultramarathons in trails and hilly terrain differs to other types of running events

The financialisation of housing production: exploring capital flows and value extraction among major housebuilders in the UK

© 2021, The Author(s). This paper examines trends in the operation and financial performance of major UK housebuilders shortly before, during and after the global financial crisis (GFC) in 2008. It outlines two contrasting explanations of what has happened in the sector over this period. The first is described as an ‘institutional recovery’ perspective, in which a period of initial retrenchment after the crash was followed by steady reinvestment, and then a cautious move back to growth by the major housebuilding companies. This is set against what we describe as a ‘financialised recovery’ perspective. This explanation stems from our own analysis of the annual accounts of major UK housebuilders since 2005. It reveals the impact of the intensive financialisation of a sector initially weakened by the GFC, but where the strategic primacy of maximising shareholder value has been asserted more strongly than before. Our analysis of dividend payments post-GFC reveals this in the starkest of terms. We suggest that the sector has been in more robust financial health than implied by the ‘institutional recovery’ narrative, but that significant value is being extracted out of these companies, and indeed the sector overall, by institutional investors. The analysis provides unique insights into the financialisation of housing production, an issue which to date has received only limited attention. We reflect on the implications of identified trends for housing supply in the UK. We also sketch future research possibilities to examine the ongoing impact of intensive financialisation and the capital flows into, and out of, major housebuilders

Irradiance modelling for individual cells of shaded solar photovoltaic arrays

Developments in Photovoltaic (PV) design software have progressed to modelling the string or even the module as the smallest system unit but current methods lack computational efficiency to fully consider cell mismatch effects due to partial shading. This paper presents a more efficient shading loss algorithm which generates an irradiance map of the array for each time step for individual cells or cell portions. Irradiance losses are calculated from both near and far obstructions which might cause shading of both beam and diffuse irradiance in a three-dimensional reference field. The irradiance map output from this model could be used to calculate the performance of each solar cell individually as part of an overarching energy yield model. A validation demonstrates the calculation of shading losses due to a chimney with less than one percent error when compared with measured values