13,153 research outputs found
The Advantage of Playing Home in NBA: Microscopic, Team-Specific and Evolving Features
The idea that the success rate of a team increases when playing home is
broadly accepted and documented for a wide variety of sports. Investigations on
the so-called home advantage phenomenon date back to the 70's and every since
has attracted the attention of scholars and sport enthusiasts. These studies
have been mainly focused on identifying the phenomenon and trying to correlate
it with external factors such as crowd noise and referee bias. Much less is
known about the effects of home advantage in the microscopic dynamics of the
game (within the game) or possible team-specific and evolving features of this
phenomenon. Here we present a detailed study of these previous features in the
National Basketball Association (NBA). By analyzing play-by-play events of more
than sixteen thousand games that span thirteen NBA seasons, we have found that
home advantage affects the microscopic dynamics of the game by increasing the
scoring rates and decreasing the time intervals between scores of teams playing
home. We verified that these two features are different among the NBA teams,
for instance, the scoring rate of the Cleveland Cavaliers team is increased
0.16 points per minute (on average the seasons 2004-05 to 2013-14) when playing
home, whereas for the New Jersey Nets (now the Brooklyn Nets) this rate
increases in only 0.04 points per minute. We further observed that these
microscopic features have evolved over time in a non-trivial manner when
analyzing the results team-by-team. However, after averaging over all teams
some regularities emerge; in particular, we noticed that the average
differences in the scoring rates and in the characteristic times (related to
the time intervals between scores) have slightly decreased over time,
suggesting a weakening of the phenomenon.Comment: Accepted for publication in PLoS ON
Extremely low-income households, housing affordability and the Great Recession.
The effects of the Great Recession on housing equity and homeownership have been well-documented. However, we know little about how rental households fared and the efficacy of housing subsidies in addressing affordability gaps. This paper examines the extent to which rental housing became less affordable for Extremely Low-Income (ELI) households - those earning less than 30% of the Area Median Income (AMI). I then run regression models to determine the local characteristics most strongly associated with larger affordability gaps, with a focus on whether housing subsidies are effective at combating such gaps. Rental affordability gaps became more pronounced during the Great Recession. In nearly 70% of the counties in my sample, there was an increase from 2007 to 2010 in the number of ELI households per affordable rental unit. Across the country, the increase was 17%, a dramatic increase in only three years. There is considerable variation across the country, with acute affordability crises often concentrated in the South, particularly Florida. Regression models provide compelling evidence that housing vouchers, public housing, and project-based Section 8 subsidies play an important role in limiting the extent to which large numbers of ELI households are competing for a shortage of low-cost rental units. However, these programmes do not respond quickly to local needs - such as those brought about by the Great Recession. A pilot study where local housing authorities had funding to be more agile and responsive would be an important step toward crafting better policy
Zika virus infection in pregnant women in Honduras: study protocol
Background: Although there is increasing evidence for a relationship between symptomatic Zika virus (ZIKV) maternal infection, and microcephaly, a firm causal relation has yet to be established by epidemiologic studies. Studies also need to be conducted in recently infected settings. Our objectives are to assess the frequency of ZIKV infection during pregnancy in Honduras and the association of microcephaly with ZIKV infection. Methods/Design: We will perform a prospective study enrolling pregnant women at their first antenatal visit and following them up until delivery. At the time of enrollment, women will be interviewed to collect socio-demographic data, data needed to locate them for potential additional follow-up, and data about ZIKV symptoms during pregnancy. We will also collect maternal blood as soon as possible after enrollment. A probable maternal ZIKV infection will be defined as positive for maternal ZIKV IgM. A confirmed maternal ZIKV infection will be defined as positive for ZIKV IgM confirmed by plaque reduction neutralization test. Microcephaly at birth will be defined as an occipito-frontal circumference <2SD for sex and gestational age. Our objective is to enroll 2000 pregnant women. In a first step, we will follow a case cohort design and only analyze blood samples for cases and a sub-cohort of 200 women randomly selected. Blood samples for the entire population will be analyzed at a later stage if funds are available. Discussion: This protocol was designed to be implemented with minimal resources. It allows a cohort to be built, which could be a foundation for future in-depth and follow-up studies.Fil: Buekens, Pierre. University of Tulane; Estados UnidosFil: Alger, Jackeline. Universidad Nacional AutĂłnoma de Honduras; HondurasFil: Althabe, Fernando. Instituto de Efectividad ClĂnica y Sanitaria; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientĂficas y TĂ©cnicas; ArgentinaFil: Bergel, Eduardo. Instituto de Efectividad ClĂnica y Sanitaria; ArgentinaFil: Berrueta, Amanda Mabel. Instituto de Efectividad ClĂnica y Sanitaria; ArgentinaFil: Bustillo, Carolina. Hospital Escuela. Departamento de GinecologĂa y Obstetricia; HondurasFil: Cafferata, Maria Luisa. Hospital de ClĂnicas. Unidad de InvestigaciĂłn ClĂnica y EpidemiolĂłgica Montevideo; UruguayFil: Harville, Emily. University of Tulane; Estados UnidosFil: Rosales, Karla. RegiĂłn Sanitaria Metropolitana Distrito Central de Francisco Morazán; HondurasFil: Wesson, Dawn M.. University of Tulane; Estados UnidosFil: Zuniga, Concepcion. Hospital Escuela Universitario. Instituto de Enfermedades Infecciosas y ParasitologĂa Antonio Vidal; Hondura
Learning to Learn to Disambiguate: Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Word Sense Disambiguation
The success of deep learning methods hinges on the availability of large
training datasets annotated for the task of interest. In contrast to human
intelligence, these methods lack versatility and struggle to learn and adapt
quickly to new tasks, where labeled data is scarce. Meta-learning aims to solve
this problem by training a model on a large number of few-shot tasks, with an
objective to learn new tasks quickly from a small number of examples. In this
paper, we propose a meta-learning framework for few-shot word sense
disambiguation (WSD), where the goal is to learn to disambiguate unseen words
from only a few labeled instances. Meta-learning approaches have so far been
typically tested in an -way, -shot classification setting where each task
has classes with examples per class. Owing to its nature, WSD deviates
from this controlled setup and requires the models to handle a large number of
highly unbalanced classes. We extend several popular meta-learning approaches
to this scenario, and analyze their strengths and weaknesses in this new
challenging setting.Comment: Added additional experiment
Climate change exacerbates hurricane flood hazards along US Atlantic and Gulf Coasts in spatially varying patterns
One of the most destructive natural hazards, tropical cyclone (TC)–induced coastal flooding, will worsen under climate change. Here we conduct climatology–hydrodynamic modeling to quantify the effects of sea level rise (SLR) and TC climatology change (under RCP 8.5) on late 21st century flood hazards at the county level along the US Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. We find that, under the compound effects of SLR and TC climatology change, the historical 100-year flood level would occur annually in New England and mid-Atlantic regions and every 1–30 years in southeast Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico regions in the late 21st century. The relative effect of TC climatology change increases continuously from New England, mid-Atlantic, southeast Atlantic, to the Gulf of Mexico, and the effect of TC climatology change is likely to be larger than the effect of SLR for over 40% of coastal counties in the Gulf of Mexico.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant EAR-1520683
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