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Trunk stability functions play an important role in sport and everyday movements. The aim of this study was to analyze trunk strength, trunk muscles onset of activity, and rate of electromyographic rise (RER) in the case of self-inflicted and unexpected trunk loading. Thirty-two healthy young adults (16 elite kayakers/canoeists and 16 non-athletes) were measured with a multi-purpose diagnostic machine. Trunk strength was assessed in standing position. Trunk muscles onset of activity and RER were assessed through unexpected loading over the hands and rapid shoulder flexion, respectively. In comparison with non-athletes, kayakers/canoeists did not significantly differ in trunk strength and showed lower trunk extension/flexion strength ratio (p = 0.008). In general, trunk muscles onset of activity did not significantly differ between the groups. On the contrary, kayakers/canoeists showed higher RER mean values in all the observed muscles (p < 0.041), except in multifidus muscle during self-inflicted movements. Similarly, higher RER variability was observed in the majority of the observed muscles among kayakers/canoeists. Higher RER among kayakers/canoeists could represent a protective mechanism that ensures spine stability and prevents low back pain.

This paper analyses two key aspects of Manggarai hospitality: the making of 'liveliness' and the making of guests. Liveliness is an affect produced at crowded and noisy events where stimulants and food are consumed. However, being lively is also an interpersonal quality demonstrated in everyday visiting. Having outlined the significance of liveliness, I examine the transformative role of hospitality substances and sounds in three key event‐types: those for affines, for wage labourers, and for spirits. I show how 'making guests' involves the entanglement of food, bodily substance, money, and speech, and allows important but potentially difficult exchanges to take place.RésuméLe présent article analyse deux aspects essentiels de l'hospitalité chez les Manggarai : faire de la « vivacité » et faire des invités. La vivacité est un affect produit lors d'événements bruyants, regroupant de nombreux participants, où l'on consomme des stimulants et de la nourriture. Mais être vivace, c'est aussi une qualité interpersonnelle qui se manifeste par des visites quotidiennes. Après avoir souligné l'importance de la vivacité, l'auteure examine le rôle transformatif des substances et des sons de l'hospitalité dans trois grands types d'événements : pour les proches, pour les employés et pour les esprits. Elle montre comment « faire des invités » suppose une imbrication de la nourriture, de la substance corporelle, de l'argent et de la parole et permet à des échanges importants mais potentiellement difficiles d'avoir lieu.

Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and automation, this article considers the interrelation of those two terms through readings of relevant work in film studies and science and technology studies (STS), inflected through recent scholarship on the body. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples, we trace how movement is taken as a sign of life, while living bodies are translated through the mechanisms of artifice. Whereas film studies has drawn upon work ranging from production history to semiotics and psychoanalysis to conceptualize the ways in which the appearance of life on the cinema screen materializes subjectivities beyond it, STS has developed a corpus of theoretical and empirical scholarship that works to refigure material-semiotic entanglements of subjects and objects. In approaching animation and automation through insights developed within these two fields we hope to bring them into closer dialogue with each other and with studies of the body, given the convergence of their shared concerns with affective materializations of life. More specifically, an interest in the moving capacities of animation, and in what gets rendered invisible in discourses of automation, is central to debates regarding the interdependencies of bodies and machines. Animation is always in the end a relational effect, it seems, while automation implies the continuing presence of hidden labour and care.

In her 2007 monograph Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad introduces her reader to a world of movement and flux, where bodies ceaselessly participate in their own material configuration, where bodily integrity and identity is entangled in the dynamic materialisation of its social and political significance, and where processes of understanding and meaning making are bound up in 'an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility' (2007: 149). Through her reading of Niels Bohr's 'philosophy-physics', Barad introduces us to a quantum universe that poses some counterintuitive challenges to the modernist worldview which understands matter to be determinate and measurable, or that may quietly preserve something of matter's evidence against culture's symbolic dexterity. In advancing her agential realist account, Baradmoves beyond anthropocentric constraints to conceive of the world in its 'extraordinary liveliness' (2007: 91), an enlarged and productive scene of agency engaged in an ongoing performance of its own intelligibility, articulating itself differently. With the suggestion that agency is extended beyond the framework that assigns it to the intentions and accountability of the human subject, Barad offers a powerful rethinking of the politics and ethics of identity in her claim that the ethical call is 'embodied in the very worlding of the world' (2007: 160). In this paper I undertake a close reading of Barad's argument to consider its implications for how we might conceive a corporeal ethics that accounts for the production of inequalities and exclusions within the very becoming of the world, and becoming embodied. In the process, I argue that through asomatechnical unfolding of matter, the experimental apparatus, and concept, Barad prompts some challenging considerations for feminist approaches to what 'the ethical' constitutes or should achieve.

Empirical urban design research emphasizes the support in vitality of public space use. We examine the extent to which a public space intervention promoted liveliness and three key behaviors that enhance well-being ("connect," "be active," and "take notice"). The exploratory study combined directly observed behaviors with self-reported, before and after community-led physical improvements to a public space in central Manchester (the United Kingdom). Observation data ( n = 22,956) and surveys (subsample = 212) were collected over two 3-week periods. The intervention brought significant and substantial increases in liveliness of the space and well-being activities. None of these activities showed increases in a control space during the same periods. The findings demonstrate the feasibility of the research methods, and the impact of improved quality of outdoor neighborhood space on liveliness and well-being activities. The local community also played a key role in conceiving of and delivering an effective and affordable intervention. The findings have implications for researchers, policy makers, and communities alike.

A particular problematic style of social-drinking control, characterized by considerable effortful restraint alternating with overconsumption, provides a promising model for prevention efforts. The relationship between effortful consummatory restraint (including both eating and drinking restraint) and several personality-level measures of impulsiveness/self-control was examined. One hundred thirty-two college students completed Drinking Restraint and Eating Restraint scales along with the four-factor Impulsiveness Scale (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1977) and three MMPI scales which measure aspects of self-control (Ego Control, Overcontrolled Hostility, and MacAndrew Alcoholism scales). Consummatory restrainers scored high on three impulsiveness dimensions (narrow impulsiveness, non-planning and liveliness). Restrained drinkers, compared to restrained eaters, scored marginally higher on over-controlled hostility, propensity toward alcoholism, and two impulsiveness dimensions (risk-taking and liveliness). Implications of the restraint model for prevention efforts are discussed.

Research on urban walkability does not always make a clear distinction between design features supporting walkability and those leading to a sense of urban liveliness. Walkability, for this article's purposes, entails the opportunity for continuous movement across some distance and therefore engages both the local and global street networks. Urban liveliness, by contrast, may exist in isolated pockets that provide limited support for physical activity. This case study of a large, urban smart growth development in Atlanta, Georgia, provides an example of a new development with characteristics that suggest a high degree of walkability. However, observational data show pedestrians are clumped on relatively few street segments rather than distributed throughout the site, indicating it is unlikely that the site is hosting much walking between the development and its surrounds. This descriptive case study is intended to contribute to more explicit theory of how environmental design contributes to walking.

This edition contains "pro" and "con" articles that represent the arguments of world leaders, leading political scientists, and commentators on the world political scene. The readings reflect a variety of viewpoints and have been selected for their liveliness and substance and because of their value in a debate framework

This book explores how matter may become a codesigner of our living spaces. The possibility of promoting architectural liveliness by incorporating 'vibrant matter' into the built environment is explored as a new practice in sustainable buildings. The resultant 'vibrant architecture' raises the possibility of environmentally positive spaces that enhance - rather than reduce - the health of our biosphere