Motivating masters

Motivation is the powerful inner force that drives all of our thoughts, feelings and actions. One of the critical differences between a champion athlete and an also-ran entails how they are able to maintain intensity of effort over time. Elite athletes such as 45-year-old sprinter Merlene Ottey, who competed in her 7th Olympics in Athens 2004, have the propensity to direct their energies extremely effectively. We will be examining how motivation contributes to success for masters athletes and suggest some motivational techniques which you can tailor to your athletes’ needs

Rating the Special Masters

After the 85th General Assembly adjourned in April 2005, the Rogers School District, along with 48 other districts, filed a motion to the state Supreme Court to reopen the landmark Lake View school funding case, accusing the legislature of failing to increase school funding for the 2005-06 school year (see Policy Brief 17). The Supreme Court agreed and on June 9, 2005, reappointed former Justices Bradley D. Jesson and David Newbern as Special Masters to assess the plaintiffs’ claims. The Masters issued their report on October 3, 2005, concluding that “the state has not lived up to the promise made by the 84th General Assembly Regular and Extraordinary Sessions of 2003 to make education the state’s first priority.

Mapping Mass in the Local Universe

We only see a small fraction of the matter in the universe, but the rest gives itself away by the impact of its gravity. Peculiar velocities have the potential to be a powerful tool to trace this matter however previous peculiar velocity surveys have struggled to meet their potential because of the large errors on individual measurements, poor statistics and uneven sky coverage. The 2MASS Tully-Fisher (2MTF) survey will make use of existing high quality rotations widths, new HI widths and 2MASS (2 Micron All-Sky Survey) photometry to measure Tully-Fisher distances/peculiar velocities for all bright inclined spirals in the 2MASS redshift survey (2MRS). This survey based on the 2MASS galaxy catalog will provide a qualitatively better sample. It will provide significant improvements in sky coverage especially near the plane of our Galaxy which crosses the poorly understood "great attractor" region. I will give a progress report on the 2MTF survey including a look at over 300 hours of HI observations from the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and a report on ongoing southern hemisphere observations with the Parke s Radio Telescope. The new spiral I-band field (SFI++) sample is currently the best available peculiar velocity survey for use in the local universe. I will also report on some preliminary results from this sample.Comment: To appear in ASP Conference Series as proceedings of NRAO 50th Anniversary Symposium, "Frontiers of Astrophysics", June 18-21, 2007, A. Bridle, J. Condon and G. Hunt eds. 10 pages including 4 figure

Money in a Model of Prior Production and Imperfectly Directed Search

This paper considers the effect of monetary policy and inflation on retail markets. It analyzes a model in which: goods are dated and produced prior to being retailed, buyers direct their search on the basis of price and general quality and, buyers' match specific tastes are their private information. Sellers set the same price for all buyers but some do not value the good highly enough to purchase it. The market economy is typically inefficient as a social planner would have the good consumed. The Friedman rule represents optimal policy as long as there is free-entry of sellers. When the upper bound on the number of participating sellers binds sufficiently, moderate levels of inflation can be welfare improving.