Universal scaling in sports ranking

Ranking is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the human society. By clicking the web pages of Forbes, you may find all kinds of rankings, such as world's most powerful people, world's richest people, top-paid tennis stars, and so on and so forth. Herewith, we study a specific kind, sports ranking systems in which players' scores and prize money are calculated based on their performances in attending various tournaments. A typical example is tennis. It is found that the distributions of both scores and prize money follow universal power laws, with exponents nearly identical for most sports fields. In order to understand the origin of this universal scaling we focus on the tennis ranking systems. By checking the data we find that, for any pair of players, the probability that the higher-ranked player will top the lower-ranked opponent is proportional to the rank difference between the pair. Such a dependence can be well fitted to a sigmoidal function. By using this feature, we propose a simple toy model which can simulate the competition of players in different tournaments. The simulations yield results consistent with the empirical findings. Extensive studies indicate the model is robust with respect to the modifications of the minor parts.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Content delivery and challenges in education hybrid students

Traditionally, taught postgraduate programmes placed students in well-defined categories such as 'distance learning' and 'on-campus' or 'part-time' and 'full-time'. The practical reality is that postgraduate students rarely fall into such simple, diametric roles and can be more suitably generalised under the concept of the 'hybrid student'. Hybrid students are dynamic, with changing requirements in relation to their education. They expect flexibility and the ability to make changes relating to module participation level, study mechanism and lecture attendance, in order to suit personal preference and circumstance. This paper briefly introduces the concept of the hybrid student and how the concept has been handled within the School of Electronic Engineering at DCU. Following this, some discussion is provided in relation to a number of the content delivery technologies used in programmes facilitating these students: HTML, PowerPoint, Moodle, DocBook and Wiki. Finally, some of the general challenges, which have been encountered in supporting such diverse students, are briefly discussed

On the testability of WCAG 2.0 for beginners

Web accessibility for people with disabilities is a highly visible area of research in the field of ICT accessibility, including many policy activities across many countries. The commonly accepted guidelines for web accessibility (WCAG 1.0) were published in 1999 and have been extensively used by designers, evaluators and legislators. W3C-WAI published a new version of these guidelines (WCAG 2.0) in December 2008. One of the main goals of WCAG 2.0 was testability, that is, WCAG 2.0 should be either machine testable or reliably human testable. In this paper we present an educational experiment performed during an intensive web accessibility course. The goal of the experiment was to assess the testability of the 25 level-A success criteria of WCAG 2.0 by beginners. To do this, the students had to manually evaluate the accessibility of the same web page. The result was that only eight success criteria could be considered to be reliably human testable when evaluators were beginners. We also compare our experiment with a similar study published recently. Our work is not a conclusive experiment, but it does suggest some parts of WCAG 2.0 to which special attention should be paid when training accessibility evaluator

Sustainability Education and Learning Committee Web Portal

Course Code: ENR/AEDE 4567This project was completed for The Sustainability Education and Learning Committee (SELC) of OSU's Sustainability Institute to provide insight and student perspective on the best way to design an interactive web portal that encompasses and makes easily accessible all sustainability-centric and and sustainability-related majors, minors, and coursework in one platform.Sustainability Education and Learning CommitteeAcademic Major: Environment, Economy, Development, and Sustainabilit

The evaluation of educational service integration in integrated virtual courses

The effectiveness of an integrated virtual course is determined by factors such as the navigability of the system. We argue that in a virtual course, which offers different educational services for different learning activities, the integration of services is a good indicator for the effectiveness of a virtual course infrastructure. We develop a set of metrics to measure the degree of integration of a virtual course. We combine structural metrics and an analysis of the student usage of the system in order to measure integration

Using Wikis to Create Online Communities

A wiki allows anyone the ability to take part in the creation and editing of web content. With its simplified text-formatting rules that anyone can easily learn, it truly puts experienced web designers and web novices on equal footing. In public libraries, where the technological skills of employees can range from high to non-existent, wikis can allow everyone the ability to develop the website. The resulting website would reflect the imagination and good ideas of the entire organization, not just a select few with the requisite "tech-savvy." The possibilities for what libraries can do with wikis are endless. At their least, they are spaces for quick and easy collaborative work. At their best, they can become true community resources that can position the library as an online hub of their local community

Living coal : Robert Boyle, John Holland, and the bodily passages of chimney sweep literature, 1684-1824

This project attends to a body of literature that registers the extraordinary and tragic effects of chimneys infused with living coal upon young chimney sweeps. In so doing, I show how writers, especially John Holland, registered the dynamic interrelationship between chimney sweeps, chimneys and coal as bodily passages. To assist our imagining of these bodily passages, I adapt Edward Casey’s logic of place and Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “transcorporeality” in order to make sense of the material exchange between the child-sweeps and the lively matter of and within the chimneys. Together, place-thinking and transcorporeality help us see the way in which dwelling within toxic places might involve processes of what Rob Nixon has called “slow violence,” a violence often culminating in the spectacular erasure of bodies. In turn, I hope to contribute to a fuller understanding of what it means to live firmly emplaced in the environment in which we dwell.Englis