‘I don't think I can catch it’: women, confidence and responsibility in football coach education

Whilst women’s participation in sport continues to increase, their presence remains ideologically challenging given the significance of sport for the construction of gendered identities. As a hegmonically masculine institution, leadership roles across sport remain male-dominated and the entry of women into positions of authority (such as coaching) routinely contested. But in powerful male-typed sports, like football, women’s participation remains particularly challenging. Consequently, constructions of gender inequity in coaching were explored at a regional division of the English Football Association through unstructured interviews and coaching course observation. Using critical discourse analysis we identified the consistent re/production of women as unconfident in their own skills and abilities, and the framing of women themselves as responsible for the gendered inequities in football coaching. Women were thereby strategically positioned as deservedly on the periphery of the football category,whilst the organization was positioned as progressive and liberal

Some observations on statnamic pile testing

Limited guidance on usage and methodology is currently available to engineers for the most common rapid load pile test, known as Statnamic. In order to improve the analysis of Statnamic testing in clay soils a full-scale instrumented auger bored pile was installed and tested in glacial lodgement till. As a result, improvements have been suggested in the test methodology and analysis. The inclusion of an accelerometer at the pile head would allow direct measurement of acceleration and verification of displacement measurements and velocity calculations. High-precision optical levelling of the pile before and after test cycles would allow multiple loading cycles to be considered cumulatively with greater confidence. The separation of the laser reference source from the test pile should be sufficient to avoid surface wave disturbance.Permission is granted by ICE Publishing to print one copy for personal use. Any other use of these PDF files is subject to reprint fees.http://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/content/journal

Impacts of household sources on air pollution at village and regional scales in India

Approximately 3 billion people worldwide cook with solid fuels, such as wood, charcoal, and agricultural residues. These fuels, also used for residential heating, are often combusted in inefficient devices, producing carbonaceous emissions. Between 2.6 and 3.8 million premature deaths occur as a result of exposure to fine particulate matter from the resulting household air pollution (Health Effects Institute, 2018a; World Health Organization, 2018). Household air pollution also contributes to ambient air pollution; the magnitude of this contribution is uncertain. Here, we simulate the distribution of the two major health-damaging outdoor air pollutants (PM2:5 and O3) using state-of-thescience emissions databases and atmospheric chemical transport models to estimate the impact of household combustion on ambient air quality in India. The present study focuses on New Delhi and the SOMAARTH Demographic, Development, and Environmental Surveillance Site (DDESS) in the Palwal District of Haryana, located about 80 km south of New Delhi. The DDESS covers an approximate population of 200 000 within 52 villages. The emissions inventory used in the present study was prepared based on a national inventory in India (Sharma et al., 2015, 2016), an updated residential sector inventory prepared at the University of Illinois, updated cookstove emissions factors from Fleming et al. (2018b), and PM2:5 speciation from cooking fires from Jayarathne et al. (2018). Simulation of regional air quality was carried out using the US Environmental Protection Agency Community Multiscale Air Quality modeling system (CMAQ) in conjunction with the Weather Research and Forecasting modeling system (WRF) to simulate the meteorological inputs for CMAQ, and the global chemical transport model GEOS-Chem to generate concentrations on the boundary of the computational domain. Comparisons between observed and simulated O3 and PM2:5 levels are carried out to assess overall airborne levels and to estimate the contribution of household cooking emissions

Women training to coach a male sport : managing gendered identities and masculinist discourses

Despite increasing female participation in English football (aka soccer), the sport remains rooted in the values and discursive practices of orthodox masculinity. This is exemplified by the English Football Association (FA), which has been criticized for its ineffective responses to addressing the inclusion and progression of women as players and workers within the organization. Female membership in male-dominated organizations is not readily achieved, given the dominance of masculinist discourses and the risks of overtly challenging these. In this study, we explored the discursive management of gendered and/or footballing identities from interviews with participants in an English regional FA’s women-only football coach education program. All of the participants described the peripheral positioning of women in English football. Analysis identified evidence of both collaboration with and resistance to the dominant masculinist discourses in the accounts of their experiences in football, while also reproducing the most valued footballing identities and knowledge as male. We connect this to the complexities of negotiating and managing gendered identities for women in male-dominated organizations. All of the participants described the value and benefits of women-only coach education and the majority noted they would prefer women-only coach education in future

Lectures on Cosmic Inflation and its Potential Stringy Realizations

These notes present a brief introduction to Hot Big Bang cosmology and Cosmic Inflation, together with a selection of some recent attempts to embed inflation into string theory. They provide a partial description of lectures presented in courses at Dubrovnik in August 2006, at CERN in January 2007 and at Cargese in August 2007. They are aimed at graduate students with a working knowledge of quantum field theory, but who are unfamiliar with the details of cosmology or of string theory.Comment: 68 pages, lectures given at Dubrovnik, Aug 2006; CERN, January 2007; and Cargese, Aug 200

Duality Cascade in Brane Inflation

We show that brane inflation is very sensitive to tiny sharp features in extra dimensions, including those in the potential and in the warp factor. This can show up as observational signatures in the power spectrum and/or non-Gaussianities of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). One general example of such sharp features is a succession of small steps in a warped throat, caused by Seiberg duality cascade using gauge/gravity duality. We study the cosmological observational consequences of these steps in brane inflation. Since the steps come in a series, the prediction of other steps and their properties can be tested by future data and analysis. It is also possible that the steps are too close to be resolved in the power spectrum, in which case they may show up only in the non-Gaussianity of the CMB temperature fluctuations and/or EE polarization. We study two cases. In the slow-roll scenario where steps appear in the inflaton potential, the sensitivity of brane inflation to the height and width of the steps is increased by several orders of magnitude comparing to that in previously studied large field models. In the IR DBI scenario where steps appear in the warp factor, we find that the glitches in the power spectrum caused by these sharp features are generally small or even unobservable, but associated distinctive non-Gaussianity can be large. Together with its large negative running of the power spectrum index, this scenario clearly illustrates how rich and different a brane inflationary scenario can be when compared to generic slow-roll inflation. Such distinctive stringy features may provide a powerful probe of superstring theory.Comment: Corrections in Eq.(5.47), Eq (5.48), Eq(5.49) and Fig