The RoboFlag SURF competition: results, analysis, and future work

The culmination of the 2002 RoboFlag Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program, jointly operated between California Institute of Technology and Cornell University, was a final competition between two teams of three undergraduate researchers. After ten weeks of preparation, Team Pasadena defeated Team Ithaca in two of the three final games. This paper provides the detailed results of the competition, an analysis of the competition, and reviews the future work

Trends in Olympic and Commonwealth games records for throwing events

Throwing events have been an integral part of the track and field program in both Olympic and Commonwealth Games since their inception. Most scientific studies of these events have concentrated on biomechanical analysis or the physical capacity requirements of the athletes. This paper examines and compares the trends over time of the gold medal results of three throwing events in the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games for male competitors. Data was collected from the ‘Athletic’s Almanac’ web-site, for the period since inception of these games until the present day. The data was examined to identify the linear trends that exist for all three events. Similarities between results in the shot-put and hammer of a steady increase in distances thrown over time were evident. Whereas, the discus records showed a steeper positive relationship over time. In addition, critical world-wide incidents, trends in social expectations and increase in sports science and technical knowledge were concluded to have an effect on the results of these athletic pursuits in terms of acceleration periods and plateaus of results. In summary, trends in general for records in these throwing events showed a steady rise from the outset of competition until the late 1960s to early 1970s. Since this period, there has been considerable tapering off of improvements in distances achieved. These trends were seen in both the Olympic Games and the Commonwealth Games

Aggregate Representations of Aggregate Games

An aggregate game is a normal-form game with the property that each player’s payoff is a function only of his own strategy and an aggregate function of the strategy profile of all players. Aggregate games possess a set of purely algebraic properties that can often provide simple characterizations of equilibrium aggregates without first requiring that one solves for the equilibrium strategy profile. The defining nature of payoffs in an aggregate game allows one to project the n-player strategic analysis of a normal form game onto a lower-dimension aggregate-strategy space, thereby converting an n-player game to a simpler object – a self-generating single-person maximization program. We apply these techniques to a number of economic settings including competition in supply functions and multi-principal common agency games with nonlinear transfer functions.Aggregate games, common agency, asymmetric informa- tion, menu auctions

Multireference Alignment using Semidefinite Programming

The multireference alignment problem consists of estimating a signal from multiple noisy shifted observations. Inspired by existing Unique-Games approximation algorithms, we provide a semidefinite program (SDP) based relaxation which approximates the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for the multireference alignment problem. Although we show that the MLE problem is Unique-Games hard to approximate within any constant, we observe that our poly-time approximation algorithm for the MLE appears to perform quite well in typical instances, outperforming existing methods. In an attempt to explain this behavior we provide stability guarantees for our SDP under a random noise model on the observations. This case is more challenging to analyze than traditional semi-random instances of Unique-Games: the noise model is on vertices of a graph and translates into dependent noise on the edges. Interestingly, we show that if certain positivity constraints in the SDP are dropped, its solution becomes equivalent to performing phase correlation, a popular method used for pairwise alignment in imaging applications. Finally, we show how symmetry reduction techniques from matrix representation theory can simplify the analysis and computation of the SDP, greatly decreasing its computational cost

Slot Games for Detecting Timing Leaks of Programs

In this paper we describe a method for verifying secure information flow of programs, where apart from direct and indirect flows a secret information can be leaked through covert timing channels. That is, no two computations of a program that differ only on high-security inputs can be distinguished by low-security outputs and timing differences. We attack this problem by using slot-game semantics for a quantitative analysis of programs. We show how slot-games model can be used for performing a precise security analysis of programs, that takes into account both extensional and intensional properties of programs. The practicality of this approach for automated verification is also shown.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2013, arXiv:1307.416

Big Men on Campus: Estimating the Economic Impact of College Sports on Local Economies

College football and men’s basketball are the largest revenue generators in college athletics. Studies funded by athletic boosters tout the economic benefits of a college athletic program as an incentive for host cities to construct new stadiums or arenas at considerable public expense. Our analysis of the economic impact of home football and men’s basketball games on Tallahassee (home of Florida State University) and Gainesville (home of the University of Florida) between 1980 to early-2007 fails to support these claims. Men’s basketball games at these universities have no statistically significant impact on taxable sales, while football yields a modest gain of $2 to$3 million per home game. While this positive finding is one of the first in the academic literature of the impact of sports, these gains pale in comparison to the figures in many of the studies funded by athletic boosters.sports, basketball, football, college sports, impact analysis, mega-event

Big Men on Campus: Estimating the Economic Impact of College Sports on Local Economies

College football and men’s basketball are the largest revenue generators in college athletics. Studies funded by athletic boosters tout the economic benefits of a college athletic program as an incentive for host cities to construct new stadiums or arenas at considerable public expense. Our analysis of the economic impact of home football and men’s basketball games on Tallahassee (home of Florida State University) and Gainesville (home of the University of Florida) between 1980 to early-2007 fails to support these claims. Men’s basketball games at these universities have no statistically significant impact on taxable sales, while football yields a modest gain of $2 to$3 million per home game. While this positive finding is one of the first in the academic literature of the impact of sports, these gains pale in comparison to the figures in many of the studies funded by athletic boosters.sports, basketball, football, college sports, impact analysis, mega-event

HUBUNGAN INTENSITAS BERMAIN GAME ONLINE DENGAN KECERDASAN EMOSIONAL PADA MAHASISWA PROGRAM STUDI S1 PENJAS KESREK

One of the causes of low emotional intelligence is playing online games. Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize emotions. The intensity of playing online games is the length of time a person spends playing online games. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between the intensity of playing online games and emotional intelligence in undergraduate students of Physical Education Program at Pahlawan Tuanku Tambusai University in 2020. The design of this study was correlative with cross-sectional design with random sampling method. This research was conducted on May 17-31 in 2020. The population in this study were all male students of the Physical Education Study Program at Pahlawan Tuanku Tambusai University, totaling 139 people with a total sample of 58 people. The measuring instrument used is a questionnaire. The analysis used was univariate and bivariate using the chi-square test. The results showed that there was a relationship between the intensity of playing online games and emotional intelligence in the Undergraduate Program of Physical Education, Kesrek, with a p-value of 0.000 (