Description:
Cricket was the first sport to publish recommended methods for injury surveillance in 2005. Since then, there have been changes to the nature of both cricket and injury surveillance. Researchers representing the major cricket playing nations met to propose changes to the previous recommendations, with an agreed voting block of 14. It was decided that 10 of 14 votes (70%) were required to add a new definition element and 11 of 14 (80%) were required to amend a previous definition. In addition to the previously agreed 'Match time-loss' injury, definitions of 'General time-loss', 'Medical presentation', 'Player-reported' and 'Imaging-abnormality' injuries are now provided. Further, new injury incidence units of match injuries per 1000 player days, and annual injuries per 100 players per year are recommended. There was a shift towards recommending a greater number of possible definitions, due to differing contexts and foci of cricket research (eg, professional vs amateur; injury surveillance systems vs specific injury category studies). It is recommended that researchers use and report as many of the definitions as possible to assist both comparisons between studies within cricket and with those from other sports.
Description:
Human arm movements need 'online' corrections due to noise in perception and action. A Step-Perturbation paradigm explored online corrections in control children and children with DCD aged between 7 and 13 years. Control children found the task straightforward: a distracter had no effect and they managed to stop relatively quickly. Children with DCD found the task difficult and the apparatus was modified accordingly (decreased postural and force production demands). The distracter affected some children with DCD and some found it difficult to stop. All of the DCD population showed poorer performance in both the perturbation and non-perturbation condition. Nevertheless, there was no interaction between group and condition. Thus, this study found no evidence for specific deficits in online correction mechanisms in DCD. We suggest that: (i) fundamental problems in generating basic movements can account for the documented difficulties in correcting on-going movements, and (ii) such fundamental difficulties make it very difficult to pinpoint specific mechanism deficits.
Description:
Given the escalating drought conditions in Australia, synthetic surfaces have recently been explored as a viable surface option for community-level Australian football-cricket ovals. The vast majority of Australian football ovals are transformed into cricket pitches during the football off-season and hence the characteristics of both sports had to be duly considered in the development of standards that could be tested in a laboratory setting, for a synthetic turf surface. This paper describes the data collection and test methods undertaken in the development of the standards for synthetic surface use in Australian football and cricket. The paper also discusses the issues and challenges encountered during the development of standards for multi-sport synthetic surfaces to ensure player safety while maintaining the performance characteristics of both sports. Surface property and ball interaction tests were undertaken on natural playing surfaces, both in situ and in the laboratory to determine the properties of the current playing surface for each sport. This paper highlights the importance of careful consideration of the characteristics of both games and the use of equipment from both sports in the testing methods. The standards described in this paper have now been accepted by the Australian Football League and Cricket Australia and the product approval process and use of synthetic surfaces for Australian football and cricket is imminent.
Description:
To ensure customer satisfaction and greater market acceptance, voice over Wi-Fi networks must ensure voice quality under various network parameters, configurations and traffic conditions, and other practical effects, e.g., channel noise, and capturing effects. An accurate voice capacity estimation model considering these factors can greatly assist network designers. In the current work, we propose an analytical model to estimate voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) capacity over Wi-Fi networks addressing these issues. We employ widely used ITU-T E-model to assess voice quality and VoIP call capacity is presented in the form of an optimization problem with voice quality requirement as a constraint. In particular, we analyze delay and loss in channel access and queue, and their impacts on voice quality. The proposed capacity model is first developed for a single hop wireless local area network (WLAN) and then extended for multihop scenarios. To model real network scenario closely, we also consider channel noise and capture effect, and analyze the impacts of transmission range, interference range, and WLAN radius. In absence of any existing call capacity model that considers all the above factors concomitantly, our proposed model will be extremely useful to network designers and voice capacity planners.
Description:
In addition to the traditional spark ignition (S1), premixed, gasoline-like and compression ignition (CI), diffusion, Diesel-like operation of internal combustion engines, premixed, homogeneous charge, compression ignition (HCCI) operation has also been proposed to improve the fuel conversion efficiency and reduce the pollutant formation. To be attractive, the operation in HCCI mode has to be coupled with the other traditional operations, being HCCI in general difficult to be controlled and limited to values of the air-to-fuel equivalence ratio
Description:
There is a strong political consensus in a number of countries that occupational safety and health regulation is stifling industrial innovation and development and is feeding a culture of damaging risk aversion and petty bureaucracy. In a number of countries this has led to proposals to repeal regulations and reduce the regulatory burden. The authors were commissioned to prepare a discussion paper on this issue by the Mercatus Center of George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, aimed particularly at an American audience. This paper is based on that report (Hale et al., 2011). The paper is based on previous work of the first two authors, developing a framework of occupational safety rule management at the workplace level (Hale and Borys, 2012a,b). Based on a literature study, this paper analyses the similarities and differences between rules at the workplace level and the development, use and enforcement of regulations at the national level to influence and control organisational behavior. It traces the forces encouraging the growth of regulatory detail and hence the bureaucratic burden of compliance and the options open to reduce that burden without loosening control so much that the level of safety declines. The analysis uses the hierarchy of rules from goals, through process (risk management) rules to detailed action rules as framework for predicting the level of ownership and responsibility felt by the regulated.