NLA University College (Norwegian: NLA Høgskolen is a private Norwegian Christian college accredited by the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education. The school has about 2,000 students and 200 employees distributed across three institutions: Bergen NLA College, Gimlekollen NLA College in Kristiansand, and Staffeldtsgate NLA College in Oslo. The institution in Bergen is the largest and hosts the college's head office. NLA University College acquired its institutions in Oslo and Kristiansand after the colleges there merged with NLA University College on January 1, 2013.NLA University College is the only private college in Norway offering primary school teacher education. This program is offered in Bergen, where preschool teacher education is also offered together with bachelor's and master's degrees in education, intercultural understanding, and theology / practical theology and management. In Oslo, bachelor's degrees in economics are offered through the Hauge School of Management, as well as bachelor's degrees in music performance and practical theology. The Gimlekollen NLA College site offers a bachelor's and master's degree in journalism, as well as bachelor's degrees and one-year programs in intercultural communication, communication and life orientation, and information and communication work.
Background/Objectives: Melatonin (MEL) promotes sleep and recovery, while caffeine (CAF) enhances alertness and performance. Despite their common use among athletes, their potential interaction remains underexplored. This study examined the effects of MEL and CAF, administered separately or in combination, on sleep, physical performance, physiological, biochemical, and perceptual responses in trained males. Methods: In a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled crossover study, fourteen trained males (22.4 ± 2.9 years) underwent four conditions, designed to isolate the effects of each substance and their interaction: (1) PLA + PLA: placebo before sleep and placebo in the morning; (2) PLA + CAF: placebo before sleep and caffeine (3 mg·kg-1) in the morning; (3) MEL + PLA: melatonin (6 mg) before sleep and placebo in the morning; and (4) MEL + CAF: melatonin before sleep followed by caffeine in the morning. One hour after the morning ingestion, participants performed the 5 m shuttle run test (5mSRT). Blood samples were collected pre- and post-exercise to assess markers of muscle damage (creatine kinase, lactate dehydrogenase, aspartate aminotransferase, and alanine aminotransferase) and inflammation (C-reactive protein). Peak heart rate (HRpeak) and rating of perceived exertion (RPE) were recorded throughout the test. Sleep was assessed only during the night following melatonin or placebo ingestion. Results: No differences were observed in sleep parameters between conditions (p > 0.05). Total distance in the 5mSRT increased following MEL + CAF and PLA + CAF conditions compared with PLA + PLA. Moreover, MEL + CAF reduced muscle damage and inflammation markers compared with PLA + PLA, MEL + PLA, and PLA + CAF conditions (p < 0.05). Conclusions: The ingestion of nocturnal MEL and next-day CAF was associated with improvements in certain high-intensity exercise performance outcomes, along with changes in muscle damage and inflammation.
This study investigated the acute effects of different protein sources consumed at sahur on anaerobic power and strength performances in trained male combat sport athletes during Ramadan fasting. Using a single blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, counterbalanced crossover study design, 24 male combat sports' athletes (mean age: 27.3 ± 3.8 years, Tier 3 national level) completed four experimental conditions: (1) non-fasting control, (2) fasting + placebo (maltodextrin), (3) fasting + whey protein isolate (WPI), and (4) fasting + micellar casein (MC). In each condition, a standardized sahur meal (6.3-7.7 kcal/kg body weight) and supplementation (0.4 g/kg for WPI/MC and 0.4 g/kg for Placebo) were administered. Physical Performances was assessed 11-13 hours post-sahur (or 3-5 hours post-lunch for control) including the Wingate anaerobic test, bench press, leg press, and countermovement jump (CMJ), and handgrip strength tests. Ramadan fasting significantly lowered Wingate peak power, mean power, and bench press strength compared to the non-fasting control. MC supplementation reduced these declines, outperforming WPI and the placebo in peak power and mean power, and surpassing the placebo in bench press strength, although not WPI. Leg press, countermovement jump, and handgrip strength showed no significant differences across conditions. MC supplementation at sahur provides partial protection against fasting-induced declines in anaerobic power and upper body endurance, but does not fully restore performance to non-fasting levels. These findings emphasize the importance of protein timing and selection in mitigating performance decrements during Ramadan fasting, highlighting the need for further research on optimal nutritional strategies for athletes training and competing under fasting conditions.
A population-based cross-sectional study was conducted among school-aged children and adolescents aged 9–17 years in 62 schools using multistage random cluster sampling, involving 4108 students and 3371 parents. Overweight and obesity were assessed according to WHO standards. The prevalence of overweight and obesity was 19.4% and 10.7%, respectively. Only 24.8% of urban children achieved the recommended ≥ 60 minutes of daily moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. More favorable parental perceptions of children's dietary practices were significantly associated with lower child weight status (p = 0.003), while adequate physical activity was linked to a reduced risk of obesity (p = 0.001). Sufficient sleep also significantly decreased the likelihood of overweight (OR = 0.67, p < 0.001). The findings emphasize the potential importance of parental perceptions of children's health behaviors, healthy lifestyle practices, regular physical activity, and adequate sleep in preventing overweight and obesity among Pakistani children and adolescents.
This article examines a central ethical transformation in contemporary regimes of algorithmic safety: the disappearance of discrete sites where responsibility can appear. While current governance frameworks emphasize oversight, monitoring, and auditability, the architectures through which large language models are trained and deployed reorganize decision-making into continuous processes of probabilistic optimization. As a result, responsibility becomes increasingly difficult to locate, even though human actors remain present within training and evaluation pipelines. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s account of judgment, action, and the public appearance of responsibility, the article develops a theoretical framework for understanding this transformation. Arendt’s distinction between discrete acts of judgment and the statistical administration of behavior provides a lens through which contemporary safety infrastructures can be analyzed. The article introduces the concept of post-agential governance to describe systems in which power operates without requiring actors who publicly appear as the authors of specific decisions. Three symptomatic indicators of this condition are examined: the absence of named signatories in safety releases, the displacement of normative reasoning by engineering vocabularies of tuning and drift, and the reliance on aggregate metrics to address representational harms. Finally, the article proposes institutional mechanisms that could restore identifiable moments of responsibility in algorithmic governance, including authorization tokens attached to model deployment events.
Research on personality and behaviour has established that individuals exhibit relatively stable patterns of conduct across time, commonly described in terms of trait dimensions such as conscientiousness. At the same time, self-regulation and habit research have identified mechanisms involved in behavioural initiation, persistence, and automatization. Despite these advances, existing frameworks do not adequately specify the intermediate processes through which behavioural continuity is maintained across everyday contexts. This article introduces the concept of micro-discipline to address this gap. Micro-discipline refers to recurrent low-level acts of behavioural regulation that preserve continuity between intention and action under ordinary conditions of friction, including returning attention to a task, sustaining effort despite resistance, modulating minor impulses, and completing small obligations that might otherwise be deferred. The central claim is that these repeated regulatory acts constitute a distinct and temporally cumulative process through which behavioural patterns are stabilised and, over time, modified. Drawing on personality theory, self-regulation research, and related process-based approaches, the article develops a conceptual model explaining how such micro-regulatory processes bias the recurrence, persistence, and interruption of behavioural states, thereby contributing to trait stabilisation and trait change. By clarifying this intermediate process layer, the framework provides a more precise account of how local regulatory acts scale into durable patterns of behaviour. It further offers implications for understanding personality development, the maintenance of goal-directed behaviour, and the conditions under which intentional behavioural change succeeds or fails.
