Soccer schedules in Europe: an overview

In this paper, we give an overview of the competition formats and the schedules used in 25 European soccer competitions for the season 2008?C2009. We discuss how competitions decide the league champion, qualification for European tournaments, and relegation. Following Griggs and Rosa (Bull. ICA 18:65?C68, 1996), we examine the popularity of the so-called canonical schedule. We investigate the presence of a number of properties related to successive home or successive away matches (breaks) and of symmetry between the various parts of the competition. We introduce the concept of ranking-balancedness, which is particularly useful to decide whether a fair ranking can be made. We also determine how the schedules manage the carry-over effect. We conclude by observing that there is quite some diversity in European soccer schedules, and that current schedules leave room for further optimizing.     

Analysis and synthesis of feedback control systems for the automatic balancing of rotating shaft systems

Automatic balancing is considered as a true feedback control problem, rather than as an automated sequence of separate operations. An adjustable correction mass must be positioned relative to a rectangular coordinate system rotating with the shaft such as to counterbalance the inherent system unbalance. This approach widens the scope of automatic balancing to include systems of which the unbalance conditions may change with time, for example, the rotor of a pump handling a fluid with some abrasive material.

Transfer functions with complex coefficients provide a natural basis for the analysis of this type of system, and should be useful also for the study of rotating fields in general. The root-locus technique is applied for system synthesis, using these “complex transfer functions”.

The control system is multivariable because the rotating system consists of a light flexible shaft, with more than one mass with unbalance fixed along its length. Neither the system inputs (the inherent unbalances) nor the errors (the resulting unbalances) are accessible for direct measurement, and the control tends to be quite sensitive to errors in the mathematical model. Diagonalization in terms of the orthogonal modes is proposed as a basis for synthesis in order to overcome these restrictions, and to obtain relatively simple subsystems.     

All normalized anti-monotonic overlap graph measures are bounded

In graph mining, a frequency measure for graphs is anti-monotonic if the frequency of a pattern never exceeds the frequency of a subpattern. The efficiency and correctness of most graph pattern miners relies critically on this property. We study the case where frequent subgraphs have to be found in one graph. Vanetik et al. (Data Min Knowl Disc 13(2):243?C260, 2006) already gave sufficient and necessary conditions for anti-monotonicity of graph measures depending only on the edge-overlaps between the instances of the pattern in a labeled graph. We extend these results to homomorphisms, isomorphisms and homeomorphisms on both labeled and unlabeled, directed and undirected graphs, for vertex- and edge-overlap. We show a set of reductions between the different morphisms that preserve overlap. As a secondary contribution, we prove that the popular maximum independent set measure assigns the minimal possible normalized frequency and we introduce a new measure based on the minimum clique partition that assigns the maximum possible normalized frequency. In that way, we obtain that all normalized anti-monotonic overlap graph measures are bounded from above and below. We also introduce a new measure sandwiched between the former two based on the polynomial time computable Lovász ??-function.     

Fast computation of minimal elementary decompositions of metabolic flux vectors

The concept of elementary flux vector is valuable in a number of applications of metabolic engineering. For instance, in metabolic flux analysis, each admissible flux vector can be expressed as a non-negative linear combination of a small number of elementary flux vectors. However a critical issue concerns the total number of elementary flux vectors which may be huge because it combinatorially increases with the size of the metabolic network. In this paper we present a fast algorithm that randomly computes a decomposition of admissible flux vectors in a minimal number of elementary flux vectors without explicitly enumerating all of them.     

News & notes.

Presents information about the Society for the History of Psychology. Members may obtain the latest information on the Division's web site, or subscribe to the electronic mailing list. The column specifically summarizes the History of Psychology sessions at Southeastern Regional meetings. It also reports on the 23rd Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences, Salzburg, Austria, July 20–24, 2004. The death of a Division member is also announced. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

News & notes.

This article gives the latest information about the Society for the History of Psychology. It announces that David B. Baker will become News & Notes Editor for History of Psychology in 2006. It covers statements from the candidates for the presidential elections in Division 26, the candidate for secretary-treasurer, and the candidates for representative to council. It also discusses the 2005 meeting of the council of representatives and provides the Society for the History of Psychology's 2005 Convention Program. There is also personal news, as well as a notice of death. The article concludes by summarizing the History of Psychology Around the World: Philemon Foundation Lectures, C. G. Jung Center, Houston, Texas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

News & notes.

This column contains information of interest to members of APA's Division 26. Included are information about the Society for the History of Psychology's web site; Division 26 news items (call for officer nominations and the past president's letter); minutes of the 2004 business meeting; a report from the 36th annual meeting of Cheiron, along with a call for papers for the 37th annual meeting; a report from the Wellcome Trust; and information about APA Federal Policy Fellowship deadlines. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)