Few functional agility tests for water polo take into consideration its specific characteristics. The preliminary objective of this study was to evaluate the reliability of an agility test for water polo players. Fifteen players (16.3 ± 1.8 years old) with a minimum of two years of competitive experience were evaluated. A Functional Test for Agility Performance (FTAP) was designed to represent ...

Based on complex network theory, we propose a computational methodology which addresses the spatial distribution of fuel breaks for the inhibition of the spread of wildland fires on heterogeneous landscapes. This is a two-level approach where the dynamics of fire spread are modeled as a random Markov field process on a directed network whose edge weights are determined by a Cellular Automata mo...

I review T-ray burst optical/multiwavelength afterglow observations since 1997, when the first counterparts to GRBs were discovered. I discuss what we have learned from multiwavelength observations of GRB afterglows in relation to the ‘standard’ fireball plus relativistic blast-wave models. To first order, the ‘standard’ model describes the afterglow observations well, but a wealth of informati...

Several studies have shown that young children who have experienced early caregiving adversity (e.g. previously institutionalization (PI)) exhibit flattened diurnal cortisol slopes; however, less is known about how these patterns might differ between children and adolescents, since the transition between childhood and adolescence is a time of purported plasticity in the hypothalamic-pituitary-a...

Safety is of paramount importance in all transportation systems, but especially in civil aviation. Therefore, in civil aviation, a lot of developments focus on the improvement of safety levels and reducing the risks that critical failures occur. When one analyses recent aircraft accident statistics (Civil Aviation Safety Data 1993-2007 (2008); Smaili et al. (2006)), there are two major categori...

This study is aimed at exploring ideas for the development of Pilates instructor qualification system by identifying a range of difficulties Pilates instructors are experiencing. Open-ended questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data before they were analyzed with inductive content analysis method. In consideration of the difficulties Pilates instructors experie...

In February 1912, the Surgeon General of the United States Army prepared a special preliminary physical examination for candidates who were to receive instruction in the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps. This examination and those devised over the next four years were too demanding and few candidates could pass. In response to the need to revise medical standards for aviators, Colonel Theod...

BACKGROUND Reserves are the principal means to conserve forests and biodiversity, but the question of whether reserves work is still debated. In the Amazon, fires are closely linked to deforestation, and thus can be used as a proxy for reserve effectiveness in protecting forest cover. We ask whether reserves in the Brazilian Amazon provide effective protection against deforestation and conseque...

Disruptions to historic disturbance and herbivory regimes have altered plant assemblages in forests worldwide. An emerging consensus suggests that these disruptions often result in impoverished forest biotas. This is particularly true for eastern U.S. deciduous forests where large gaps and understory fires were once relatively common and browsers were far less abundant. Although much research h...

Wildland fires are expected to become more frequent and severe in many ecosystems, potentially posing a threat to many sensitive species. We evaluated the effects of a large, stand-replacement wildfire on three species of pond-breeding amphibians by estimating changes in occupancy of breeding sites during the three years before and after the fire burned 42 of 83 previously surveyed wetlands. An...