An Autoethnography of Becoming an NCAA Basketball Official

Officiating has become one of the best-kept secrets in sports and many former athletes have developed interest in becoming game officials. The purpose of this study is to provide information and insight to aspiring former athletes who wish to pursue an alternative career path related to athletics. This project uses auto ethnography and incorporates literature about the process of becoming an official, experiences of veteran officials, and how I began my officiating career. In writing about my experiences as a novice basketball referee, I have kept a journal/log in which I document my experiences and reflect upon officiating. In the process of recording and reflecting upon my personal experiences, I have discovered that becoming an official may not be for everyone. As a new referee, it is important to know one’s mechanics, including the rules and regulations of the conference for which you officiate. Conference and referee associations will not choose anyone who is not polished in those areas. When one officiates at the NCAA level, one must adjust to the travel demands of a full-time Division I official. The literature and my experiences suggest it has been difficult to identify and retain qualified women officials. Thus, the NCAA is seeking former women players who wish to officiate basketball games. Most officials who appear on TV tend to be older white males who may or may not have played the game. Many officials end their officiating careers due to disrespect and stress they encounter. Some fans, coaches, and players make it difficult for officials to continue to officiate because of the hostility during and after games. This study is important for those who are interested in becoming officials and will hopefully spark an interest in former college women players who wish to continue a career in sport

Physics in the Real Universe: Time and Spacetime

The Block Universe idea, representing spacetime as a fixed whole, suggests the flow of time is an illusion: the entire universe just is, with no special meaning attached to the present time. This view is however based on time-reversible microphysical laws and does not represent macro-physical behaviour and the development of emergent complex systems, including life, which do indeed exist in the real universe. When these are taken into account, the unchanging block universe view of spacetime is best replaced by an evolving block universe which extends as time evolves, with the potential of the future continually becoming the certainty of the past. However this time evolution is not related to any preferred surfaces in spacetime; rather it is associated with the evolution of proper time along families of world linesComment: 28 pages, including 9 Figures. Major revision in response to referee comment

Double Beta Decay, Majorana Neutrinos, and Neutrino Mass

The theoretical and experimental issues relevant to neutrinoless double-beta decay are reviewed. The impact that a direct observation of this exotic process would have on elementary particle physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics and cosmology is profound. Now that neutrinos are known to have mass and experiments are becoming more sensitive, even the non-observation of neutrinoless double-beta decay will be useful. If the process is actually observed, we will immediately learn much about the neutrino. The status and discovery potential of proposed experiments are reviewed in this context, with significant emphasis on proposals favored by recent panel reviews. The importance of and challenges in the calculation of nuclear matrix elements that govern the decay are considered in detail. The increasing sensitivity of experiments and improvements in nuclear theory make the future exciting for this field at the interface of nuclear and particle physics.Comment: invited submission to Reviews of Modern Physics, higher resolution figures available upon request from authors, Version 2 has fixed typos and some changes after referee report

Evolution of Winning Solutions in the 2021 Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge

Mobile and embedded devices are becoming ubiquitous. Applications such as rescue with autonomous robots and event analysis on traffic cameras rely on devices with limited power supply and computational sources. Thus, the demand for efficient computer vision algorithms increases. Since 2015, we have organized the IEEE Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge to advance the state of the art in low-power computer vision. We describe the competition organizing details including the challenge design, the reference solution, the dataset, the referee system, and the evolution of the solutions from two winning teams. We examine the winning teams’ development patterns and design decisions, focusing on their techniques to balance power consumption and accuracy. We conclude that a successful competition needs a well-designed reference solution and automated referee system, and a solution with modularized components is more likely to win. We hope this paper provides guidelines for future organizers and contestants of computer vision competitions

Circumbinary Planet Formation in the Kepler-16 System. II. A Toy Model for In-situ Planet Formation within a Debris Belt

Recent simulations have shown that the formation of planets in circumbinary configurations (such as those recently discovered by Kepler) is dramatically hindered at the planetesimal accretion stage. The combined action of the binary and the protoplanetary disk acts to raise impact velocities between km-sized planetesimals beyond their destruction threshold, halting planet formation within at least 10 AU from the binary. It has been proposed that a primordial population of "large" planetesimals (100 km or more in size), as produced by turbulent concentration mechanisms, would be able to bypass this bottleneck; however, it is not clear whether these processes are viable in the highly perturbed circumbinary environments. We perform two-dimensional hydrodynamical and N-body simulations to show that km-sized planetesimals and collisional debris can drift and be trapped in a belt close to the central binary. Within this belt, planetesimals could initially grow by accreting debris, ultimately becoming "indestructible" seeds that can accrete other planetesimals in-situ despite the large impact speeds. We find that large, indestructible planetesimals can be formed close to the central binary within $10^5$ years, therefore showing that even a primordial population of "small" planetesimals can feasibly form a planet.Comment: 3rd version, addressing referee report, typos & references fixed. 15 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap

Transients in sheared granular matter

As dense granular materials are sheared, a shear band and an anisotropic force network form. The approach to steady state behavior depends on the history of the packing and the existing force and contact network. We present experiments on shearing of dense granular matter in a 2D Couette geometry in which we probe the history and evolution of shear bands by measuring particle trajectories and stresses during transients. We find that when shearing is stopped and restarted in the same direction, steady state behavior is immediately reached, in agreement with the typical assumption that the system is quasistatic. Although some relaxation of the force network is observed when shearing is stopped, quasistatic behavior is maintained because the contact network remains essentially unchanged. When the direction of shear is reversed, a transient occurs in which stresses initially decrease, changes in the force network reach further into the bulk, and particles far from the wheel become more mobile. This occurs because the force network is fragile to changes transverse to the force network established under previous shear; particles must rearrange before becoming jammed again, thereby providing resistance to shear in the reversed direction. The strong force network is reestablished after displacing the shearing surface $\approx 3d$, where $d$ is the mean grain diameter. Steady state velocity profiles are reached after a shear of $\leq 30d$. Particles immediately outside of the shear band move on average less than 1 diameter before becoming jammed again. We also examine particle rotation during this transient and find that mean particle spin decreases during the transient, which is related to the fact that grains are not interlocked as strongly.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figures, accepted to Eur. Phys. J. E, revised version based on referee suggestion

More than a Match: The Role of Football in Britain’s Deaf Community

The University of Central Lancashire has undertaken a major research project into the role of football within the deaf community in Britain. As well as reconstructing the long history of deaf involvement in football for the first time, the project has also focused on the way in which football has provided deaf people with a means of developing and maintaining social contacts within the community, and of expressing the community’s cultural values. This article will draw on primary data gathered from interviews conducted with people involved in deaf football in a variety of capacities. During the course of these interviews, a number of themes and issues emerged relating to the values and benefits those involved with deaf football place on the game, and it is these which are explored here