The NBA and the Single Entity Defense: A Better Case?

This Article will explore the relationship between the National Basketball Association, its independently-owned teams, and associated corporate entities, including the Women’s NBA, NBA Properties, NBA Developmental League, NBA China, and single entity analysis under section 1 of the Sherman Act. Section 1 chiefly aims to prevent competitors from combining their economic power in ways that unduly impair competition or harm consumers, be it in terms of raised prices, diminished quality, or limited choices. Single entities are exempt from section 1 because they are considered “one,” rather than competitors, and thus their collaboration does not implicate anticompetitive concerns. In American Needle v. NFL, the Supreme Court will decide whether the National Football League, its teams, and associated corporate entities, constitute a single entity. Other leagues, including the NBA, may be impacted by the Court’s decision. If the NBA were a single entity, it could potentially execute exclusive contracts with video game companies and apparel companies, restrain players’ salaries and employment autonomy, and impose heightened age restrictions on amateur players who seek employment in the NBA, all without concern for section 1 scrutiny. In a recent feature in the Yale Law Journal, I discourage the Court from recognizing the NFL as a single entity but recommend that Congress consider targeted, sports league-related exemptions from section 1. In this Article, I survey whether the NBA’s globalized business agenda and the league’s exposure to competition from foreign professional basketball leagues necessitate that NBA teams act in unison and with a “shared consciousness.” The necessity of cooperation, at least for certain international endeavors, may distinguish NBA teams from teams in NFL, which remain more anchored to domestic operations. To the extent Congress considers legislative exemptions for professional sports leagues, the experience of the NBA, a trailblazer in promoting a league product abroad, may lend insight on how antitrust law should regulate leagues in the years ahead

An Immersive Telepresence System using RGB-D Sensors and Head Mounted Display

We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to ef- fectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The highly interactive and flexible environment can capture and sustain more student attention than the traditional classroom setting and, thus, delivers a compelling experience to the students. Our main focus here is to investigate possible solutions for the system design and implementation and devise strategies for fast, efficient computation suitable for visual data processing and network transmission. We describe the technique and experiments in details and provide quantitative performance results, demonstrating our system can be run comfortably and reliably for different application scenarios. Our preliminary results are promising and demonstrate the potential for more compelling directions in cyberlearning.Comment: IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 201

British Geological Survey Annual Science Review 2012-13

The British Geological Survey (BGS) is part of the Natural Environment Research Council and is its principal supplier of national capability in geoscience. We advance understanding of the structure, properties and processes of the solid Earth system through interdisciplinary surveys, monitoring, modelling and research for the benefit of society. We are the UK’s premier provider of objective and authoritative geoscientific data, information and knowledge for creating wealth, using natural resources sustainably, reducing risk and living with the impacts of environmental change. Our vision To be the world’s leading centre for geoscience impact

Augmented reality meeting table: a novel multi-user interface for architectural design

Immersive virtual environments have received widespread attention as providing possible replacements for the media and systems that designers traditionally use, as well as, more generally, in providing support for collaborative work. Relatively little attention has been given to date however to the problem of how to merge immersive virtual environments into real world work settings, and so to add to the media at the disposal of the designer and the design team, rather than to replace it. In this paper we report on a research project in which optical see-through augmented reality displays have been developed together with prototype decision support software for architectural and urban design. We suggest that a critical characteristic of multi user augmented reality is its ability to generate visualisations from a first person perspective in which the scale of rendition of the design model follows many of the conventions that designers are used to. Different scales of model appear to allow designers to focus on different aspects of the design under consideration. Augmenting the scene with simulations of pedestrian movement appears to assist both in scale recognition, and in moving from a first person to a third person understanding of the design. This research project is funded by the European Commission IST program (IST-2000-28559)

The role of human ventral visual cortex in motion perception.

Visual motion perception is fundamental to many aspects of visual perception. Visual motion perception has long been associated with the dorsal (parietal) pathway and the involvement of the ventral 'form' (temporal) visual pathway has not been considered critical for normal motion perception. Here, we evaluated this view by examining whether circumscribed damage to ventral visual cortex impaired motion perception. The perception of motion in basic, non-form tasks (motion coherence and motion detection) and complex structure-from-motion, for a wide range of motion speeds, all centrally displayed, was assessed in five patients with a circumscribed lesion to either the right or left ventral visual pathway. Patients with a right, but not with a left, ventral visual lesion displayed widespread impairments in central motion perception even for non-form motion, for both slow and for fast speeds, and this held true independent of the integrity of areas MT/V5, V3A or parietal regions. In contrast with the traditional view in which only the dorsal visual stream is critical for motion perception, these novel findings implicate a more distributed circuit in which the integrity of the right ventral visual pathway is also necessary even for the perception of non-form motion

The upgraded Pixel detector and the commissioning of the Inner Detector tracking of the ATLAS experiment for Run-2 at the Large Hadron Collider

Run-2 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will provide new challenges to track and vertex reconstruction with higher energies, denser jets and higher rates. Therefore the ATLAS experiment has constructed the first 4-layer Pixel Detector in HEP, installing a new pixel layer, also called Insertable B-Layer (IBL). The IBL is a fourth layer of pixel detectors, and has been installed in May 2014 at a radius of 3.3 cm between the existing Pixel Detector and a new smaller radius beam-pipe. The new detector, built to cope with the high radiation and expected occupancy, is the first large scale application of 3D sensors and CMOS 130~nm readout electronics. In addition, the Pixel Detector was improved with a new service quarter panel to recover about 3\% of defective modules lost during Run-1 and a new optical readout system to readout the data at higher speed while reducing the occupancy when running with increased luminosity. Complementing detector improvements, many improvements to Inner Detector track and vertex reconstruction were developed during the two-year shutdown of the LHC. These include novel techniques developed to improve the performance in the dense cores of jets, optimisation for the expected conditions, and a software campaign which lead to a factor of three decrease in the CPU time needed to process each recorded event.Comment: 15 pages, EPS-HEP 2015 Proceeding