178,988 research outputs found
Out of Service: Does Service Time Manipulation Violate Major League Baseballâs Collective Bargaining Agreement?
Under the current Major League Baseball Collective Bargaining Agreement (âCBAâ), professional players are eligible to file for salary arbitration or free agency once they reach certain thresholds of service time in the league. In recent years, however, Major League Baseball teams have taken advantage of the construction of service time rules in order to artificially keep players under their control at lower salaries for one year longer than the rules appear to contemplate. The controversy surrounding service time manipulation hit its apex in 2015, when Chicago Cubs prospect Kris Bryant was kept in the minor league system just long enough to ensure that his team would gain an additional year of control over his contract before he would be eligible to file for free agency. This Note discusses the potential for players like Bryant to allege violations of the current CBA for service time manipulation, and argues that the service time manipulation debate should set the stage for a reformed service time system in negotiations for the next CBA
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TERMES: An Autonomous Robotic System for Three-Dimensional Collective Construction
Collective construction is the research area in which autonomous multi-robot systems build structures according to user specifications. Here we present a hardware system and high-level control scheme for autonomous construction of 3D structures under conditions of gravity. The hardware comprises a mobile robot and specialized passive blocks; the robot is able to manipulate blocks to build desired structures, and can maneuver on these structures as well as in unstructured environments. We describe and evaluate the robot's key capabilities of climbing, navigation, and manipulation, and demonstrate its ability to perform complex tasks that combine these capabilities by having it autonomously build a ten-block staircase taller than itself. In addition, we outline a simple decentralized control algorithm by which multiple simultaneously active robots could autonomously build user-specified structures, working from a high-level description as input.Engineering and Applied Science
Casimir Invariants for Systems Undergoing Collective Motion
Dicke states are states of a collection of particles which have been under
active investigation for several reasons. One reason is that the decay rates of
these states can be quite different from a set of independently evolving
particles. Another reason is that a particular class of these states are
decoherence-free or noiseless with respect to a set of errors. These noiseless
states, or more generally subsystems, can avoid certain types of errors in
quantum information processing devices. Here we provide a method for
calculating invariants of systems of particles undergoing collective motions.
These invariants can be used to determine a complete set of commuting
observables for a class of Dicke states as well as identify possible logical
operations for decoherence-free/noiseless subsystems. Our method is quite
general and provides results for cases where the constituent particles have
more than two internal states.Comment: 5 page
The Meaning of Collective Terrorist Threat: Understanding the Subjective Causes of Terrorism Reduces Its Negative Psychological Impact
This article hypothesized that the possibility to construct intellectual meaning of a terrorist attack (i.e., whether participants can cognitively understand why the perpetrators did their crime) reduces the negative psychological consequences typically associated with increased terrorist threat. Concretely, the authors investigated the effect of intellectual meaning (induced by providing additional information about potential economic, cultural, and historical reasons for the terrorist attack) on perceived terrorist threat and associated emotional well-being. Study 1 revealed that pictures of terrorist attacks elicited less experienced terrorist threat when they were presented with background information about the terroristsâ motives (meaning provided) rather than without additional background information (no meaning provided). Study 2 replicated this effect with a different manipulation of terrorist threat (i.e., newspaper article) and clarified the underlying psychological process: Participants in the high terror salience condition with meaning provided experienced less terrorist threat and thus more emotional well-being in the face of crisis than participants in the high terror salience condition without meaning provided. Theoretical and practical implications in the context of psychological health and mass media effects are discussed
Historical Consciousness and Ethnicity: How Signifying the Past Influences the Fluctuations in Ethnic Boundary Maintenance
Theorists tend to limit \u27history\u27s\u27 role in the dynamics of ethnicity to that generally played by collective memory. By bringing the notion of historical consciousness to the fore, new possibilities may, however, emerge for discerning how history, as one cultural mode of remembering among many others, impacts both ethnicity delineations and fluctuations in boundary maintenance. In encapsulating the many forms of commemoration as well as the different dimensions of historical thinking, the contribution of historical consciousness accordingly lies on how group members historicize temporal change for moral orientation in time. By likewise signifying past events for negotiating their ethnicity and agency toward the \u27significant Other\u27, social actors gate-keep group boundaries. And, depending on their capacity and willingness to recognize the \u27significant Other\u27s\u27 moral and historical agency in the flow of time, they can transform group delineations and render ethnic boundaries more porous. Key Words: Historical Consciousness; Ethnicity; Group Boundaries; Boundary Maintenance; Boundary Fluctuations; Collective Memory; Disciplinary History; Moral and Historical Agency
The Lessons of TPP and the Future of Labor Chapters in Trade Agreements
The agenda to link labor standards to trade agreements, in the hopes of improving working conditions in developing countries and preventing unfair labor competition for workers in rich countries, reached its culmination in TPP. Beginning with NAFTA and over a span of twenty-five years, labor standards became fully included in trade agreements and their violation subject to trade sanctions as means of enforcement. Thus, proponents of TPP offered it as the âgold standardâ of globalization. This chapter argues that the debate about TPP, and the US labor movementâs opposition to it, made clear that this was not a story of success but of disenchantment. Unions in the US criticized TPPâs labor chapter for not going far enough, substantially and procedurally. But they also turned the focus to other chapters of TPP that may be just as or more important to workers in the US than the labor chapter: investment, rules of origin, procurement and currency manipulation. These areas have become the new frontier for labor advocates in trade agreements and they highlight the need to rebalance the treatment of capital and labor.
The chapter argues that a significant, though overlooked achievement of TPP, was to encourage several TPP parties to enact domestic labor reforms using labor side agreements and US pressure. More than any ideal labor chapter, it was these domestic reforms that held the most promise for improving working conditions in Vietnam and Mexico. The US withdrawal of TPP has set those reforms back. Opposition to TPP has also made clear that the expected losses from trade in the form of job loss and wage decline will not be made palatable in the absence of effective safety nets and compensatory mechanisms at the domestic level. In fact, international trade reputation will continue to suffer and opposition to it harden without them. To the extent that the debate about TPP was a referendum about liberal globalization as we know it, opposition to TPP in the US has given a resounding no. A pressing question is whether there is an alternative to the nationalist retrenchment embraced by the Trump administration. The revival of TPP without the US, unfortunately, does not seem to chart a different path
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