Breaks, cuts, and patterns

Wegeneralize the concept of a break by considering pairs of arbitrary rounds.Weshow that a set of homeaway patterns minimizing the number of generalized breaks cannot be found in polynomial time, unless P = NP. When all teams have the same break set, the decision version becomes easy; optimizing remains NP-hard.status: publishe

Audio and video processing for automatic TV advertisement detection

As a partner in the Centre for Digital Video Processing, the Visual Media Processing Group at Dublin City University conducts research and development in the area of digital video management. The current stage of development is demonstrated on our Web-based digital video system called Físchlár [1,2], which provides for efficient recording, analyzing, browsing and viewing of digitally captured television programmes. In order to make the browsing of programme material more efficient, users have requested the option of automatically deleting advertisement breaks. Our initial work on this task focused on locating ad-breaks by detecting patterns of silent black frames which separate individual advertisements and/or complete ad-breaks in most commercial TV stations. However, not all TV stations use silent, black frames to flag ad-breaks. We therefore decided to attempt to detect advertisements using the rate of shot cuts in the digitised TV signal. This paper describes the implementation and performance of both methods of ad-break detection

How much does a year off cost? Estimating the wage effects of employment breaks and part-time periods

Discontinuities in the employment profile are supposed to cause wage cuts since they imply an interruption in the accumulation of human capital as well as a depreciation of the human capital stock built up in the past. In this paper, we estimate the return to effective experience, taking into account both the timing and the duration of non-work and part-time employment spells. Estimation results for German women suggest that deviations from full-time employment are associated with significant wage cuts owing to the depreciation of human capital. Postponing the discontinuity leads to a further fall of the wage rate. Controlling for individual heterogeneity with respect to industry sector and job position decreases the estimated depreciation rates. This we interpret as an indication for segregation in the labor market. We conclude that traditional wage estimations that do not control for depreciation underestimate the return to effective experience. --

Fiscal Policy Report Card on America's Governors: 2008

Revenue poured into state governments as the U.S. economy expanded between 2003 and 2007, prompting the nation's governors to expand state budgets and offer the occasional tax cut. But now that the economy has slowed and revenue growth is down, governors are taking various actions to close rising budget deficits. This ninth biennial fiscal report card examines the tax and spending decisions made by the governors since 2003. It uses statistical data to grade the governors on their taxing and spending records -- governors who have cut taxes and spending the most receive the highest grades, while those who have increased taxes and spending the most receive the lowest grades. Three governors were awarded an "A" in this report card -- Charlie Crist of Florida, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Eight governors were awarded an "F" -- Martin O'Malley of Maryland, Ted Kulongoski of Oregon, Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, Chet Culver of Iowa, Jon Corzine of New Jersey, Bob Riley of Alabama, Jodi Rell of Connecticut, and C. L. "Butch" Otter of Idaho. Republican governors, on average, received slightly higher grades than Democratic governors. More importantly, there has been a disappointing lack of major spending reforms among governors of both parties in recent years. State tax policies have also been uninspiring. Most tax cuts pursued by the governors have been small and targeted breaks, not broad-based rate cuts that can foster economic growth. Fiscal policies need to be improved if the states are to meet the huge challenges ahead. Medicaid costs continue to rise, state debt is soaring, and the pension and health care plans of state workers have huge funding gaps. At the same time, rising international tax competition makes it imperative that states cut tax rates to attract jobs and investment. Governors don't have an easy job, but they do need to pursue more aggressive fiscal reforms to meet the challenges of an increasingly competitive economy

Pushing Higgs Effective Theory over the Edge

Based on a vector triplet model we study a possible failure of dimension-6 operators in describing LHC Higgs kinematics. First, we illustrate that including dimension-6 contributions squared can significantly improve the agreement between the full model and the dimension-6 approximation, both in associated Higgs production and in weak-boson-fusion Higgs production. Second, we test how a simplified model with an additional heavy scalar could improve the agreement in critical LHC observables. In weak boson fusion we find an improvement for virtuality-related observables at large energies, but at the cost of sizeable deviations in interference patterns and angular correlations.Comment: 19 pages. v2: references added. v3: minor corrections, more references added, matches published versio

Assessing the Distracting Viewing Environment for Televised Sports and its Relationship to Advertising Recall

The viewing of televised sports, like other television viewing situations, is often accompanied by many audience distractions. These distractions, which are particularly acute in the viewing of televised sports, include group viewing, wagering, and food and beverage consumption. All these activities may influence the impact of advertising placed within sports programs, which totals almost $3 billion annually. This study uses reports of the activities listed above by individuals while viewing pro football\u27s Super Bowl and gathered through a day-after national coincidental sample, to assess the relationship of these distractions to advertising recall. Regression results show that the consumption of certain foods and beverages, as well as conditions common to viewing televised sports, are related to recall of commercials. Growing use of database marketing, linking product purchases with viewing habits, broadens the implications of these findings for future media planning

Wage Penalties for Career Interruptions: An Empirical Analysis for West Germany

This paper examines the wage effects of different types of career interruptions. We consider the timing and duration of non-employment spells by exploiting an administrative data set of German social security accounts (IAB employment sample) supplemented with information on the employees? entire working lives (IAB supplement sample I). These data allow us to distinguish between employment breaks due to registered unemployment, formal parental leave, training or other reasons – a distinction which can only be approximated using just the IAB employment sample. Our IV fixed effects estimation results suggest that women?s labor supply is endogenously determined, whereas men?s employment histories can be treated as exogenous. Career interruptions reduce the wage rates of both men and women. Moreover, the wage cuts resulting from unemployment, parental leave and additional home time are larger than the pure human capital effects of missing experience, hinting at a possible stigmatization of workers with discontinuous employment histories. --career interruptions,returns to experience,wage differentials,panel estimation

Size-Dependent Tile Self-Assembly: Constant-Height Rectangles and Stability

We introduce a new model of algorithmic tile self-assembly called size-dependent assembly. In previous models, supertiles are stable when the total strength of the bonds between any two halves exceeds some constant temperature. In this model, this constant temperature requirement is replaced by an nondecreasing temperature function $\tau : \mathbb{N} \rightarrow \mathbb{N}$ that depends on the size of the smaller of the two halves. This generalization allows supertiles to become unstable and break apart, and captures the increased forces that large structures may place on the bonds holding them together. We demonstrate the power of this model in two ways. First, we give fixed tile sets that assemble constant-height rectangles and squares of arbitrary input size given an appropriate temperature function. Second, we prove that deciding whether a supertile is stable is coNP-complete. Both results contrast with known results for fixed temperature.Comment: In proceedings of ISAAC 201