Entire Race Research Articles

The influence of health status on the changes of gut microbiota and performance of racing pigeons

During the race season of racing pigeons, the demands on their care, zoohygienic conditions, balanced feeding and maintaining an optimal state of health increase. Any deviation in the mentioned factors causes a stressful situation associated with the changes in the bacterial representation in the digestive tract, weakens the individual´s state of health and thus reduces his performance. The work aimed to monitor the health status of racing pigeons and evaluate their performance during one racing season. From 60 pigeons, swabs from the cloaca and crop were taken at regular intervals at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the race season with a focus on monitoring the representation of the intestinal microflora and the most common diseases. The pigeons were also clinically examined with subsequent sampling for monitoring coccidiosis, trichomonosis and respiratory syndrom during the individual phases of the race season. The total count of bacteria (TCB) in both the cloaca and the crop did not show any significant variation in their abundance throughout the entire racing season. On the other hand, with increasing stress and the occurrence of diseases, the coliform bacteria (CB) in the cloaca and crop was increased in the end of the racing season. Of the identified bacteria Ent. columbae, E. coli, Ent. faecium, Ent. gallinarum a S. intermedius were most frequently represented in swabs from the cloaca. As in the cloaca, the swabs from the crop were most frequently represented by Ent. columbae a E. coli together with lactobacilli and Ent. gallinarum. At the end of race season, E. coli, Ent. faecium, Ent. columbae and staphylococci were significantly represented in the cloaca and in the crop Ent. columbae, E. coli, Ent. gallinarum together with staphylococci again. By comparing the prevalence of Eimeria spp. and Trichomonas spp. before, during and at the end of the race season were noticed their increased occurrence at the end of the season. From the race placements, we found that in pigeons in which the prevalence of opportunistic pathogens Staphylococcus spp. a Ent. gallinarum from swabs of the cloaca and crop at the lowest level together with the occurrence of Eimeria spp., they achieved constant results the entire race season and also achieved the best points position.

Pro-cycling team cyclist assignment for an upcoming race.

Professional bicycle racing is a popular sport that has attracted significant attention in recent years. The evolution and ubiquitous use of sensors allow cyclists to measure many metrics including power, heart rate, speed, cadence, and more in training and racing. In this paper we explore for the first time assignment of a subset of a team's cyclists to an upcoming race. We introduce RaceFit, a model that recommends, based on recent workouts and past assignments, cyclists for participation in an upcoming race. RaceFit consists of binary classifiers that are trained on pairs of a cyclist and a race, described by their relevant properties (features) such as the cyclist's demographic properties, as well as features extracted from his workout data from recent weeks; as well additional properties of the race, such as its distance, elevation gain, and more. Two main approaches are introduced in recommending on each stage in a race and aggregate from it to the race, or on the entire race. The model training is based on binary label which represent participation of cyclist in a race (or in a stage) in past events. We evaluated RaceFit rigorously on a large dataset of three pro-cycling teams' cyclists and race data achieving up to 80% precision@i. The first experiment had shown that using TP or STRAVA data performs the same. Then the best-performing parameters of the framework are using 5 weeks time window, imputation was effective, and the CatBoost classifier performed best. However, the model with any of the parameters performed always better than the baselines, in which the cyclists are assigned based on their popularity in historical data. Additionally, we present the top-ranked predictive features.

Multicomponent Velocity Measurement for Linear Sprinting: Usain Bolt's 100 m World-Record Analysis.

The purpose of this report is to provide additional analysis and commentary on the men's 100 m world record of 9.58 s, set by Usain Bolt in the 2009 Berlin World Championships in Athletics. In addition, the entire race underwent a unique kinematic analysis, particularly emphasizing the maximum running velocity and its related factors. It was possible due the application of the new Stuhec software. The data were provided by LAVEG'S advanced laser measurement technology based on positional data with a high spatiotemporal resolution. The maximum velocity phase is the most critical determinant of the final race time. Bolt completed two phases in this world-record 100 m sprint: acceleration and top velocity. The borderline between these phases reached the highest velocity of 12.32 m/s on a 52 m run. He could keep the maximum velocity in five 10 m sections (50-100 m). The occurrence of functional asymmetry-the difference in step length between the left and right legs-was also noticed. Longer steps were taken with the left leg, almost over 80 m. From a practical point of view, new technologies (e.g., software) allow coaches and athletes to analyze the kinematic parameters of sprinting even more precisely and in detail. They must take into account precise changes in the course of maximum speed and the parameters determining it which are step length and frequency. Based on such an analysis, it is possible to modify the training process aimed at increasing the potential, both maximum speed and the supporting factors of strength and power. This must be conditioned by the appropriate selection of training measures shaping the abovementioned motor skills and parameters describing the optimal sprinting technique.

Effective training to improve DeepPilot

We present an approach to autonomous drone racing inspired by how a human pilot learns a race track. Human pilots drive around the track multiple times to familiarise themselves with the track and find key points that allow them to complete the track without the risk of collision. This paper proposes a three-stage approach: exploration, navigation, and refinement. Our approach does not require prior knowledge about the race track, such as the number of gates, their positions, and their orientations. Instead, we use a trained neural pilot called DeepPilot to return basic flight commands from camera images where a gate is visible to navigate an unknown race track and a Single Shot Detector to visually detect the gates during the exploration stage to identify points of interest. These points are then used in the navigation stage as waypoints in a flight controller to enable faster flight and navigate the entire race track. Finally, in the refinement stage, we use the methodology developed in stages 1 and 2, to generate novel data to re-train DeepPilot, which produces more realistic manoeuvres for when the drone has to cross a gate. In this sense, similar to the original work, rather than generating examples by flying in a full track, we use small tracks of three gates to discover effective waypoints to be followed by the waypoint controller. This produces novel training data for DeepPilot without human intervention. By training with this new data, DeepPilot significantly improves its performance by increasing its flight speed twice w.r.t. its original version. Also, for this stage 3, we required 66 % less training data than in the original DeepPilot without compromising the effectiveness of DeepPilot to enable a drone to autonomously fly in a racetrack.

Minimum-Race-Time Energy Allocation Strategies for the Hybrid-Electric Formula 1 Power Unit

The hybrid-electric powertrain currently used in Formula 1 race cars draws its energy from the car's fuel tank and battery. The usable battery size is limited, and refueling during a race is forbidden by the regulations of the Formula 1 race series. From a strategic point of view, lap-by-lap targets for the fuel and battery consumption must be chosen and imposed on the energy management controller of the car. This task is non-trivial due to the influence of the on-board fuel mass on the achievable lap time, as well as the cross-couplings between the electric and the combustion part of the powertrain. A systematic approach is thus required to compute the energy allocation strategy that minimizes the total race time. In this paper, we devise an optimization framework in the form of a non-linear program, yielding the optimal battery and fuel consumption targets for each lap of the race. The approach is based on maps that capture the achievable lap time as a function of car mass and allocated battery and fuel energy. These maps are generated beforehand with a model-based single-lap optimization framework and fitted using artificial neural network techniques. To showcase the approach, we present three case studies: First, we compare the optimal strategy to a heuristic method. The improvement of 2s over the entire race is substantial, given that the difference only lies in the energy allocation, but not in the overall consumption. It underlines the importance of optimizing the energy allocation. Second, we leverage the framework to compute the optimal fuel load at the beginning of the race. Finally, we apply the developed non-linear program in a shrinking-horizon fashion. Our simulation results show that the resulting model predictive controller correctly reacts to disturbances that frequently occur during a race.

Optimally controlling nutrition and propulsion force in a long distance running race.

Runners competing in races are looking to optimize their performance. In this paper, a runner's performance in a race, such as a marathon, is formulated as an optimal control problem where the controls are: the nutrition intake throughout the race and the propulsion force of the runner. As nutrition is an integral part of successfully running long distance races, it needs to be included in models of running strategies. We formulate a system of ordinary differential equations to represent the velocity, fat energy, glycogen energy, and nutrition for a runner competing in a long-distance race. The energy compartments represent the energy sources available in the runner's body. We allocate the energy source from which the runner draws, based on how fast the runner is moving. The food consumed during the race is a source term for the nutrition differential equation. With our model, we are investigating strategies to manage the nutrition and propulsion force in order to minimize the running time in a fixed distance race. This requires the solution of a nontrivial singular control problem. As the goal of an optimal control model is to determine the optimal strategy, comparing our results against real data presents a challenge; however, in comparing our results to the world record for the marathon, our results differed by 0.4%, 31 seconds. Per each additional gel consumed, the runner is able to run 0.5 to 0.7 kilometers further in the same amount of time, resulting in a 7.75% increase in taking five 100 calorie gels vs no nutrition. Our results confirm the belief that the most effective way to run a race is to run approximately the same pace the entire race without letting one's energies hit zero, by consuming in-race nutrition. While this model does not take all factors into account, we consider it a building block for future models, considering our novel energy representation, and in-race nutrition.

Optimization-based path planning and collision avoidance for autonomous racing

This paper presents a hierarchical motion planner for autonomous racing. The long-term motion planner functions offline and formulates the optimal motion plan for the entire race track. The short-term collision avoidance planner functions online and formulates a motion plan for a limited horizon ahead of the autonomous car when an obstacle is detected in the path of the vehicle. The motion planners formulate the planning problems as optimal control problems and solve the resulting optimizations using an interior point optimizer (IPOPT). Simulation experiments show that an autonomous vehicle using the motion planner is able to race around the track with minimum lap time while avoiding unexpected obstacles.

Consistency of pacing profile according to performance level in three different editions of the Chicago, London, and Tokyo marathons

Running pacing has become a focus of interest over recent years due to its relationship with performance, however, it is still unknown the consistency of each race in different editions. The aim of this study is to analyze the consistency of pacing profile in three consecutive editions of three marathon races. A database of 282,808 runners, compiled from three different races (Chicago, London, and Tokyo Marathon) and three editions (2017, 2018, and 2019) was analyzed. Participants were categorized according to their time performance in the marathon, every 30 min from 2:30 h to sub-6 h. The relative speed of each section for each runner was calculated as a percentage of the average speed for the entire race. The intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) of relative speed at the different pacing section, taking into account the runner time categories, was excellent over the three marathon editions (ICC > 0.93). The artificial intelligence model showed an accuracy of 86.8% to classify the runners' data in three marathons, suggesting a consistency between editions with identifiable differences between races. In conclusion, although some differences have been observed between editions in certain sections and marathon runner categories, excellent consistency of the pacing profile was observed. The study of pacing profile in a specific marathon can, therefore, be helpful for runners, coaches and marathon organizers for planning the race and improving its organization.

Native Hawaiians: The Forgotten in Legal Education

Law school admission data results demonstrate significant continuing education and professional barriers encountered by Native Hawaiians. Heavy reliance on standardized admission testing and formulaic admissions standards regrettably deny legal education to an entire race and culture. Institutions vested with the obligation and opportunity to educate are urged to recognize the failings of current admission standards and to move towards a fair and just process to enable Native Hawaiians to pursue higher learning in the face of the historic disparities and disenfranchisement that they've suffered.

Native Hawaiians: The Forgotten in Legal Education

Law school admission data results demonstrate significant continuing education and professional barriers encountered by Native Hawaiians. Heavy reliance on standardized admission testing and formulaic admissions standards regrettably deny legal education to an entire race and culture. Institutions vested with the obligation and opportunity to educate are urged to recognize the failings of current admission standards and to move towards a fair and just process to enable Native Hawaiians to pursue higher learning in the face of the historic disparities and disenfranchisement that they've suffered.

Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls

Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls

Validation of a global positioning system with accelerometer for canoe/kayak sprint kinematic analysis

ABSTRACT This study aimed to validate the use of a Global Positioning System with an accelerometer (GPS-Acc) unit to quantify canoeing kinematic variables. Eight canoe and kayak (200 and 500 m) sprint races were analysed. All the races were recorded sideways by a digital camera that followed the kayak or canoe bow and simultaneously using a GPS-Acc unit recorded the data concerning boat position, velocity, and acceleration. In 200 m races, 50 m splits were established over the entire race distance. In 500 m races, 100 m splits were used, excepting the race start and end, where the splits were divided into two sections of 50 m. The data of the GPS-Acc unit were analysed using a self-developed routine. The agreement between the video and the GPS-Acc analysis was measured regarding all the variables by a Bland-Altman analysis. No differences were found between both methodologies, except for time and velocity at the first 50 m, suggesting thus an agreement between the analysis methods. The GPS-Acc unit is valid for measuring quickly and accurately kinematic variables, mainly boat velocity and stroke rate. However, video analyses may be necessary when a more detailed analysis of the paddling technique is of interest.

Analysis of the Cooling Concept of the Braking System of a Formula Student Racing Car Using CFD Simulation and 1D Simulation

In order to guarantee the performant operation of the braking system of a racing car under high load an optimized thermal design of the braking system is an important factor. Especially in motorsports, a lot of braking energy is converted into heat due to short and intense braking events. Therefore, a suitable cooling concept is a crucial point to ensure a reliable thermal management of the braking system to dissipate the generated heat. In this work, the braking system of the formula student racing car of the UAS Esslingen is analysed using the racing car of the season 2019. A transient 1D simulation model of the heat balance of the braking system is created. For the determination of the heat transfer coefficients a steady 3D Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT) simulation model is set up. The logging data of a real race are used for the validation of the presented model (s). The heat balance of the braking system, its entire heat flows as well as the time-dependent temperature evaluation of the brake disc are analysed and compared. The results of this analysis are used to create a cooling concept for the racing car’s braking system, to ensure an optimized braking performance over the entire race. Several different (geometrical) variants of the thermal design of the braking system are investigated using the above mentioned numerical models and the results are presented. Furthermore, the implementation of a cooling duct for the braking system is studied.

Sensitivity of Racing Tire Sliding Energy to Major Setup Changes: An Estimate Based on Standard Sensors

Understanding the amount of energy a tire is subjected to is one of the key elements to perform in motorsport competitions, especially in Formula 1 feeder categories, where the number of tires is limited over the race weekend to contain costs. This forces teams to use worn tires towards the end of the event. Therefore, tires are usually chosen only relying on their external shape or based on the kilometers traveled. Moreover, being aware of how a setup change impacts tires can be a breakthrough in tire management, especially in tracks where tire wear is limiting the overall performance. This paper provides a scientific method aimed at helping race engineers in tire management to maintain a high performance level through the entire race weekend.

Community and Communitarianism in Toni Morrison: Restoring the Self and Relating with the Other

Toni Morrison discusses the rebirth of the entire Black race through self-recovery. However, her novels are not limited to the identity of Black women and people but are linked to a wider community. Morrison might have tried to imagine a community in which Black identity can be socially constituted. In this paper, we discuss the concept of community by examining communitarianism, which is the basis of justice and human rights. Although community is an ambiguous notion in the context of communitarianism, communitarians criticize the abstract conceptualization of human rights by liberal individualists, but also see that human rights are universally applicable to a community as a shared conception of social good. Communitarianism emphasizes the role and importance of community in personal life, self-formation, and identity. Morrison highlights the importance of self-worth within the boundary of community, reclaiming the development of Black identity. In the Nancian sense, a community is not a work of art to be produced. It is communicated through sharing the finitude of others—that is, “relation” itself is the fundamental structure of existence. In this regard, considering Toni Morrison’s novels alongside communitarianism and Nancy’s analysis of community may enable us to obtain a sense of the complex aspects of self and community. For Morrison, community may be the need for harmony and combination, acknowledging the differences and diversity of each other, not the opposition between the self and the other, the center and periphery, men and women. This societal communitarianism is the theme covered in this paper, which deals with the problem of identity loss in Morrison’s representative novels Sula and Beloved and examines how Black individuals and community are formed. Therefore, this study aims to examine a more complex understanding of community, in which the self and relations with others can be formed, in the context of Toni Morrison’s works.

Racism in Pain Medicine: We Can and Should Do More

Racism in Pain Medicine: We Can and Should Do More

Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading by Leona Toker

Reviewed by: Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading by Leona Toker Benjamin Paloff Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading. By Leona Toker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 281 pages. $40.00 (paper). The ways in which we read the literature that emerged from the experience of concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, on the one hand, and the texts that arose from the Soviet Gulag system, on the other, will be markedly different in the twenty-first century from what they were in the twentieth. So broad a generalization is justified by its actualization already in progress: those who have known the spaces to which these texts refer are passing quickly from this life, and those who are currently being born into it will be more likely to respond to the similarities between a Gulag novel and a Holocaust novel than to default immediately to the theoretical and political arguments that have long striven to treat these bodies of work as separate. Those of us who teach this material to undergraduates know that doing so requires an ever-increasing amount of contextualization that just a few years ago might have been assumed to be common knowledge. At the same time, the separation we have carefully maintained between the stories of survival in Nazi camps and Soviet penal colonies are starting to seem more and more trivial to readers encountering them for the first time. [End Page 204] This is because the insistence that these phenomena—and, indeed, any experience of collective and forced detention, confinement, depravation, labor, and torture—are irreconcilably distinct from each other is driven more by ideological exceptionalism than by fundamental differences in institutions or their representation. On the contrary, the institution of the concentration camp is broadly comparable across the Nazi and Soviet contexts (and a great many others besides, both historical and contemporary), and the texts that have emerged from these places are generically so similar that insisting on their strict separation risks a kind of interpretive malpractice. This is not to reject the argument that the Nazi genocide perpetrated against European Jewry created a special inflection of the camp experience, since one inevitably experiences the camp differently, and the reader reads that experience differently in turn, when one's entire race or ethnic group has been marked for extinction. Nor is it to assume that the peculiarities of the Soviet penal system are not significant in themselves, from the system's endurance across generations to its eagerness to absorb those who, even in their internment, viewed themselves as true believers in the system that was persecuting them. But the sequestration that had separated "Gulag literature" from "the literature of Nazi camps" while scholars working on these corpuses were still defining their respective subfields in the 1960s and 1970s has long since calcified into a taboo, one that refuses an otherwise self-evident comparative field at the outset. The handful of more expansive treatments that Leona Toker mentions in a footnote to Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Concentration Camps—most notable among them, Terrence Des Pres's The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (1976) and Tzvetan Todorov's Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (1991; English translation, 2000)—are the exceptions that prove the rule. The cumbersome title of Toker's new study is symptomatic of this circumstance. And, in the interest of laying a strong foundation for future comparison, Toker is at pains to avoid weighing in on the exceptionalist position by stating, for instance, that concentration camp literature can or should be treated as a unified genre. Instead, [End Page 205] she emphasizes that her method is "intercontextual." In this way, she effectively does an end-run around the exceptionalism dilemma simply by treating the Nazi and Soviet systems as parallels of each other that are likewise mirrored in literary artifacts, focusing "on those cases where the two bodies of literature about concentration camps provide helpful contexts for each other—where what is clear in one literary corpus sheds light on what is obscure in the other" (9). By presenting Nazi concentration camps and...

The Universal Right to Breathe

Mbembe focuses on the aspects of the aspects of the universal right to breath Already some people are talking about post-COVID-19 Even if, for most of us, especially those in parts of the world where health care systems have been devastated by years of organized neglect, the worst is yet to come With no hospital beds, no respirators, no mass testing, no masks nor disinfectants nor arrangements for placing those who are infected in quarantine, unfortunately, many will not pass through the eye of the needle

Body and Boat: Significance of Morphology on Elite Rowing Performance.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine and weigh the anthropometric indicators that were associated with pacing performances for each Olympic rowing category.Methods: Between 2010 and 2015, 1,148 rowers (650 men and 498 women) participated in the finals of World Championships in each heavyweight Olympic event. They were categorized into four morphological clusters according to their height and body mass index (BMI): tall and thin (TT), tall and robust (TR), small and thin (ST), and small and robust (SR). Time and speed, were collected every 50 m for all boats in each competition. Non-parametric inferential methods were used to understand the differences in performance between morphological clusters over the entire race. After, we calculated a new indicator to determine the differences between these morphotypes within the race.Results: In this article, we determined which morphologies had a significant effect on speed for both men and women. For example, the biggest rowers were the fastest in skiff. Analysis of each 50 m demonstrated that between the four morphological categories that the TR male athletes were significantly faster than their ST counterparts between the 800 and 2,000 m of the race by 1.76% of mean speed. Furthermore, the SR were the fastest in female coxless pairs over the majority of the race. These differences in speed by morphological cluster are summarized, by race segment, for all categories and sex.Conclusion: Anthropometric factors impact pacing among rowers' categories. Coupling anthropometry and race pacing is not only helpful to understand which factors work where, but is also helpful in improving training and performance. This can help both in the recruiting of rowers for specific boats and adapting the race strategy. In future, the method used can be adapted for factors other than anthropometry. It can also be individualized to enable athletes to prepare for their race according to future competitors.

Effect of marathon characteristics and runners’ time category on pacing profile

ABSTRACT This study aimed to analyse differences in pacing profiles in four marathon competitions and to explore that pacing per time category. A database of 91,493 runners gathered from 4 different races was analysed (Valencia, Chicago, London and Tokyo Marathon). Participants were categorized in accordance with their completion time. The relative speed of each section for each runner was calculated as a percentage of the average speed for the entire race. In the four marathons studied, the first 5 km differed widely, presenting London the highest relative speeds (5 km: CI95% London vs. Valencia [12.1, 13.6%], p < 0.001 and ES = 2.1; London vs. Chicago [5.5, 7.1%], p < 0.001 and ES = 1.1; London vs. Tokyo [15.2, 16.8%], p < 0.001 and ES = 2.3). Races did not differ at each section for high-performance runners (sub-2:30), but differences between races increased as the time category increases (e.g. 35 km and sub-3:00: CI95% London vs. Tokyo [−3.1, −1.8%], p < 0.001 and ES = 0.7; 35 km and sub-5:00: London vs. Tokyo [−9.8, −9.2%], p < 0.001 and ES = 1.3). The difference in relative speed between the first and second half of the marathon was higher in London than in the other marathons (e.g. CI95% London vs. Valencia [10.3, 10.8%], p < 0.001 and ES = 1.3). In conclusion, although race characteristics affect pacing, this effect was higher as the category time increases. Race pacing characteristics should be taken into consideration for runners and coaches choosing the race and working on pacing strategies, for researches to extrapolate or interpret results, or for race organizations to improve its pacing characteristics.