ARE BASKETBALL ARENAS CATALYSTS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT?

ABSTRACT: Academic researchers continue to challenge the popular perception that new or renovated stadiums are catalysts of economic development. Despite basketball arenas generally having lower construction costs and being more multipurpose, past studies have disproportionately examined professional baseball and football stadiums. Using the most recent data, this study investigates the economic impact of professional basketball arenas. After controlling for a range of covariates past research has identified as possible predictors, I find little evidence that basketball arenas are primary catalysts of development. I conclude that the context of the city, not the facility, is what drives the economic development capacity of basketball arenas.     

Structural equivalence and model reduction

Within the framework of structural analysis, techniques are developed for obtaining reduced-order structural models in which all structural information is preserved. The reduced models are valid for any input and output sets guaranteeing that, from the structural controllability test, the same set of feasible input-output pairings are obtained from the low-order model as would be obtained from the high-order model. New insight into the practical significance of the generic rank test for structural controllability is provided, and an algorithm for the development of low-order models for staged systems is presented.     

Segmentation of digitized histological sections for quantification of the muscularized vasculature in the mouse hind limb

Immunohistochemical tissue staining enhances microvasculature characteristics, including the smooth muscle in the medial layer of the vessel walls that is responsible for regulation of blood flow. The vasculature can be imaged in a comprehensive fashion using whole‐slide scanning. However, since each such image potentially contains hundreds of small vessels, manual vessel delineation and quantification is not practically feasible. In this work, we present a fully automatic segmentation and vasculature quantification algorithm for whole‐slide images. We evaluated its performance on tissue samples drawn from the hind limbs of wild‐type mice, stained for smooth muscle using 3,3'‐Diaminobenzidine (DAB) immunostain. The algorithm was designed to be robust to vessel fragmentation due to staining irregularity, and artefactual staining of nonvessel objects. Colour deconvolution was used to isolate the DAB stain for detection of vessel wall fragments. Complete vessels were reconstructed from the fragments by joining endpoints of topological skeletons. Automatic measures of vessel density, perimeter, wall area and local wall thickness were taken. The segmentation algorithm was validated against manual measures, resulting in a Dice similarity coefficient of 89%. The relationships observed between these measures were as expected from a biological standpoint, providing further reinforcement of the accuracy of this system. This system provides a fully automated and accurate means of measuring the arteriolar and venular morphology of vascular smooth muscle.