Fair referee assignments for professional football leagues

Assignment of referees to football games is an important problem faced in professional football leagues. Despite its importance, the problem has received limited academic attention. This paper presents a model and analysis of the problem for fair referee assignments, and develops a constructive heuristic and a local search procedure for its solution. Results from an extensive computational study show that the methods are effective in solving the problem in a second of computation time and yielding an excellent solution quality.     

Qualitative Differences Between Conscious and Nonconscious Processing? On Inverse Priming Induced by Masked Arrows.

In general, both consciously and unconsciously perceived stimuli facilitate responses to following similar stimuli. However, masked arrows delay responses to following arrows. This inverse priming has been ascribed to inhibition of premature motor activation, more recently even to special processing of nonconsciously perceived material. Here, inverse priming depended on particular masks, was insensitive to contextual requirements for increased inhibition, and was constant across response speeds. Putative signs of motor inhibition in the electroencephalogram may as well reflect activation of the opposite response. Consequently, rather than profiting from inhibition of primed responses, the alternative response is directly primed by perceptual interactions of primes and masks. Thus there is no need to assume separate pathways for nonconscious and conscious processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Standardization problem of author affiliations in citation indexes

Academic effectiveness of universities is measured with the number of publications and citations. However, accessing all the publications of a university reveals a challenge related to the mistakes and standardization problems in citation indexes. The main aim of this study is to seek a solution for the unstandardized addresses and publication loss of universities with regard to this problem. To achieve this, all Turkey-addressed publications published between 1928 and 2009 were analyzed and evaluated deeply. The results show that the main mistakes are based on character or spelling, indexing and translation errors. Mentioned errors effect international visibility of universities negatively, make bibliometric studies based on affiliations unreliable and reveal incorrect university rankings. To inhibit these negative effects, an algorithm was created with finite state technique by using Nooj Transducer. Frequently used 47 different affiliation variations for Hacettepe University apart from “Hacettepe Univ” and “Univ Hacettepe” were determined by the help of finite state grammar graphs. In conclusion, this study presents some reasons of the inconsistencies for university rankings. It is suggested that, mistakes and standardization issues should be considered by librarians, authors, editors, policy makers and managers to be able to solve these problems.     

Martensitic phase transformations in Ni–Ti-based shape memory alloys: The Landau theory

We present a simple Landau free energy functional for cubic-to-orthorhombic and cubic-to-monoclinic martensitic phase transformations. The functional is derived following group–subgroup relations between different martensitic phases – tetragonal, trigonal, orthorhombic and monoclinic – in order to fully capture the symmetry properties of the free energy of the austenite and martensite phases. The derived free energy functional is fitted to the elastic and thermodynamic properties of NiTi and NiTiCu shape memory alloys which exhibit cubic-to-monoclinic and cubic-to-orthorhombic martensitic phase transformations, respectively.     

Characterization of nanocrystalline Ni–Cu thin films electrodeposited onto ITO coated glass substrates: effect of pretreatment current density

In this work, Ni–Cu films were grown onto indium tin oxide coated glass substrates without and with galvanostatic pretreatment process at different current densities. In all cases, Ni–Cu films were electrodeposited at a constant deposition potential of ?1,800 mV versus saturated calomel electrode. After that, the surface morphology and structural properties of electrodeposited Ni–Cu films in dependence of pretreatment current density were studied. X-ray diffraction analysis showed that all films have face-centered cubic structure and consist of segregated two Ni-rich and Cu-rich phases regardless of pretreatment current density. The compositional analysis carried out by energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy revealed that all films contain almost 90 wt% Ni and 10 wt% Cu. The average crystallite size decreased with decreasing pretreatment current density towards more negative values without inducing significant changes in the composition of the films. It was found that the preferred orientation of all films is in the [111] direction regardless of pretreatment current density. The effect of galvanostatic pretreatment process on the surface morphology investigated using a scanning electron microscopy and an atomic force microcopy were also discussed by means of obtained results.     

Poly(ε‐caprolactone) composites containing gentamicin‐loaded β‐tricalcium phosphate/gelatin microspheres as bone tissue supports

In this work, novel antibacterial composites were prepared by using poly(ε‐caprolactone) (PCL) as the main matrix material, and gentamicin‐loaded microspheres composed of β‐tricalcium phosphate (β‐TCP) and gelatin. The purpose is to use this biodegradable material as a support for bone tissue. This composite system is expected to enhance bone regeneration by the presence of β‐TCP and prevent a possible infection that might occur around the defected bone region by the release of gentamicin. The effects of the ratio of the β‐TCP/gelatin microspheres on the morphological, mechanical, and degradation properties of composite films as well as in vitro antibiotic release and antibacterial activities against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus were investigated. The results showed that the composites of PCL and β‐TCP/gelatin microspheres had antibacterial activities for both bacteria. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci., 2013     

Synthesis of hydroxyapatite crystals using carboxymethyl inulin for use as a delivery of ibuprofen

In the present study biodegradable, environmentally friendly polysaccharide-based polycarboxylate, carboxymethyl inulin (CMI), was used to produce hydroxyapatite (HAP) particles by wet chemical synthesis under controlled temperature, pH, and atmospheric conditions. The morphology and microstructure of the HAP nanoparticles were investigated by XRD, SEM, DTA–TGA and FTIR. CMI affects morphology, surface area, dimension and particle size distribution of the crystals. The reduction in size is greater in the direction of the c-axis. The increase in the polymer concentration to 7.5 g/L resulted in the mixture of nanoparticles with particle sizes of less than 100 nm. The SEM micrograph shows the formation of well-crystallized, agglomerated small particles of HAP. X-ray analysis has shown that the resulting particles have high thermal stability.The obtained crystals were used to produce tablets by direct compression of HAP. The influence of sample's CMI concentration on drug release profiles was investigated by using ibuprofen (C₁₃H₁₈O₂) as a model drug. The model was used to determine the effective diffusion coefficient of the drug from the tablets. A good agreement between experimental data and model predictions was obtained as calculated in the present work. The values of the diffusion coefficients range from 1.62 × 10^? 7 to 4.72 × 10^? 7 m² h^? 1.     

Quinoxaline derivatives as long wavelength photosensitizers in photoinitiated cationic polymerization of diaryliodonium salts

The present paper is focused on visible light initiated cationic polymerizations. Photoinitiated polymerization of representative vinyl ether and oxirane monomers using two quinoxaline derivatives; namely (2-(2,3-dihydrobenzo [b][1,4]dioxin-6-yl)-3-(2,3-dihydrobenzo[b]-[1,4]dioxin-7-yl)-5-(2,3-dihydrothieno[3,4-b][1,4]dioxin-5-yl)-8-(2,3-dihydrothieno[3,4-b][1,4]dioxin-7yl) quinoxaline) (DBQEd) and 2,3,5,8-tetra(thiophen-2-yl)quinoxaline (TTQ) are studied. Novel dyes based on the quinoxaline skeleton are employed as efficient photosensitizers in cationic photopolymerizations. Polymerizations were initiated at room temperature upon irradiation with long-wavelength UV and visible lights in the presence of diphenyliodonium hexafluorophosphate (Ph₂I⁺PF₆^?). The progress of the polymerizations was monitored by optical pyrometry (OP). Solar irradiation is also employed to carry out the cationic polymerization of a diepoxide monomer in the presence of air.     

The Data Locality of Work Stealing

This paper studies the data locality of the work-stealing scheduling algorithm on hardware-controlled shared-memory machines, where movement of data to and from the cache is solely controlled by the hardware. We present lower and upper bounds on the number of cache misses when using work stealing, and introduce a locality-guided work-stealing algorithm and its experimental validation. {As a lower bound, we show that a work-stealing application that exhibits good data locality on a uniprocessor may exhibit poor data locality on a multiprocessor. In particular, we show a family of multithreaded computations G _n whose members perform Θ(n) operations (work) and incur a constant number of cache misses on a uniprocessor, while even on two processors the total number of cache misses soars to Ω(n) . On the other hand, we show a tight upper bound on the number of cache misses that nested-parallel computations, a large, important class of computations, incur due to multiprocessing. In particular, for nested-parallel computations, we show that on P processors a multiprocessor execution incurs an expected

Perturbation-Based Eigenvector Updates for On-Line Principal Components Analysis and Canonical Correlation Analysis

Principal components analysis is an important and well-studied subject in statistics and signal processing. Several algorithms for solving this problem exist, and could be mostly grouped into one of the following three approaches: adaptation based on Hebbian updates and deflation, optimization of a second order statistical criterion (like reconstruction error or output variance), and fixed point update rules with deflation. In this study, we propose an alternate approach that avoids deflation and gradient-search techniques. The proposed method is an on-line procedure based on recursively updating the eigenvector and eigenvalue matrices with every new sample such that the estimates approximately track their true values as would be calculated analytically from the current sample estimate of the data covariance matrix. The perturbation technique is theoretically shown to be applicable for recursive canonical correlation analysis, as well. The performance of this algorithm is compared with that of a structurally similar matrix perturbation-based method and also with a few other traditional methods like Sanger’s rule and APEX.

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