ANALYSIS OF TABLE TENNIS INNOVATIONS RESULTING FROM THE COVID-2019 PANDEMIC

The COVID-2019 pandemic forced many people to take a different look at the world around them, to reconsider their attitude to their social circle, to optimize costs, to make adjustments to the foundations of life, to discover new activities. All areas of activity suffered losses both in the field of economy and in the field of resources. While the business was looking for new solutions to survive, the sport survived clinical death. The losses of athletes and organizations were estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The number of children in sports sections has decreased. Table tennis is one of the most popular sports around the world, both in terms of the number of people involved and the number of countries where it develops. The International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) has more than 200 countries and is one of the three leading world federations in this indicator. This article will describe the problems and solutions that have arisen in table tennis as a result of the emergence of a new virus.

Habits Do Not Die Easily: The Economics of Table Soccer

We attempt to test the importance of rules and cultural sedimentation on performance by analyzing what occurs in a niche sport, table soccer and inferring by extension the weight of habit formation in a more general productivity setting. This matters since firms increasingly employ workers of different cultural backgrounds, whose interplay may have an impact on performance. Our idea is to examine the differences that exist between local and international rules in a country such as Italy and find out whether athletes’ performance is affected when they compete at international level. Adapting models adopted by the literature to forecast the success in soccer and Olympic games, we study the performances of Italians and Non-Italians athletes in the International Table Soccer World Cup. We also apply an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to account for explained and un-explained gaps in mean values. The results seem to confirm that globalization does not affect cultural sedimentation: local habits persist and hamper the performance of top players. Local habits matter, and habits do not die easily, even in the twenty-first century.

Stakeholders in International Heritage Law

This chapter looks at the actors and stakeholders in the field of international heritage law. It focuses a significant amount of energy on the roles of states and experts, who are the key actors with a seat at the international table, before moving to look at museums, collectors, and other private (corporate) actors, and the elusive ‘community’, which is at the centre of this book’s project. The chapter argues that community, while ambiguous and laden with colonial legacies, is still a concept worth trying to define.

Glycaemic index and glycaemic load values of commonly consumed foods in the United Arab Emirates

Glycaemic index (GI) and glycaemic load (GL) values of some commonly consumed foods in the United Arab Emirates were determined with an aim of adding these values to the existing international table of GI and GL values. In all, eighteen test foods categorised into breads (n5), entrée dishes (n3), main dishes (n5) and sweet dishes (n5) were tested. For each test food, at least fifteen healthy participants consumed 25 or 50 g available carbohydrate portions of a reference food (glucose), which was tested three times, and a test food after an overnight fast, was tested once, on separate occasions. Capillary blood samples were obtained by finger-prick and blood glucose was measured using clinical chemistry analyser. A fasting blood sample was obtained at baseline and before consumption of test foods. Additional blood samples were obtained at 15, 30, 45, 60, 90 and 120 min after the consumption of each test food. The GI value of each test food was calculated as the percentage of the incremental area under the blood glucose curve (IAUC) for the test food of each participant divided by the average IAUC for the reference food of the same participant. The GI values of tested foods ranged from low (55 or less) to high (70 or more). The GI values of various breads and rice-containing dishes were comparable with previously published values. This study provides GI and GL values of previously untested traditional Emirati foods which could provide a useful guide on dietary recommendations for the Emirati population.