Exploring the utilisation of stand up paddle boarding in Australia

Stand Up Paddle Boarding (SUP) has grown exponentially in the last few years with unprecedented participation rates globally. Despite some scientific research on physiological and performance variables, minimal information exists regarding participation and utilisation. The purpose of this study was to discover more about how and where people participate in the relatively new sport of SUP. An open-source online survey application was administered internationally to active SUP participants to capture information relevant to both demographics and participation. Of a total of 240 responses, 154 (64.2%) were Australian. The average SUP rider was 42.9 ± 11.7 years, mass 80.4 ± 18.7 kg, 1.75 ± 0.10 m tall with a BMI of 26.1 ± 4.9. More males (69.5%) participate in SUP than females with the majority of participants from the eastern seaboard of Australia. Participants most commonly used SUP for fun and fitness, for around 3 h per week, predominantly at the beach with friends, with around half of the respondents reporting a competitive involvement. This is the first study to date to quantify participation of SUP within Australia. Results revealed SUP is a global activity with a high representation within Australia. Key findings from this study reveal the geographical and demographic distribution of SUP use. Consequently, these findings may inform the industry about its target audience. Additionally, information regarding the ‘typical’ SUP rider may serve to further promote and grow the sport

Plethystic algebra

The notion of a Z-algebra has a non-linear analogue, whose purpose it is to control operations on commutative rings rather than linear operations on abelian groups. These plethories can also be considered non-linear generalizations of cocommutative bialgebras. We establish a number of category-theoretic facts about plethories and their actions, including a Tannaka-Krein-style reconstruction theorem. We show that the classical ring of Witt vectors, with all its concomitant structure, can be understood in a formula-free way in terms of a plethystic version of an affine blow-up applied to the plethory generated by the Frobenius map. We also discuss the linear and infinitesimal structure of plethories and explain how this gives Bloch's Frobenius operator on the de Rham-Witt complex.Comment: 32 pages. To appear in Adv. Mat

A simple technique for combining simplified models and its application to direct stop production

The results of many LHC searches for supersymmetric particles are interpreted using simplified models, in which one fixes the masses and couplings of most sparticles then scans over a few remaining masses of interest. We present a new technique for combining multiple simplified models (that requires no additional simulation) thereby highlighting the utility and limitations of simplified models in general, and demonstrating a simple way of improving LHC search strategies. The technique is used to derive limits on the stop mass that are model independent, modulo some reasonably generic assumptions which are quantified precisely. We find that current ATLAS and CMS results exclude stop masses up to 340 GeV for neutralino masses up to 120 GeV, provided that the total branching ratio into channels other than top-neutralino and bottom-chargino is small, and that there is no mass difference smaller than 10 GeV in the mass spectrum. In deriving these limits we place upper bounds on the branching ratios for complete stop pair decay processes for many values of the stop, neutralino and chargino masses. These are available with this paper.Comment: 25 pages, data included in source. V3: new content added, version accepted for publicatio

The Gold Standard, Deflation, and Financial Crisis in the Great Depression: An International Comparison

Recent research has provided strong circumstantial evidence for the proposition that sustained deflation -- the result of a mismanaged international gold standard -- was a major cause of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Less clear is the mechanism by which deflation led to depression. In this paper we consider several channels, including effects operating through real wages and through interest rates. Our focus, however, is on the disruptive effect of deflation on the financial system, particularly the banking system. Theory suggests that falling prices, by reducing the net worth of banks and borrowers, can affect flows of credit and thus real activity. Using annual data for twenty-four countries, we confirm that countries which (for historical or institutional reasons) were more vulnerable to severe banking panics also suffered much worse depressions, as did countries which remained on the gold standard. We also find that there may have been a feedback loop through which banking panics, particularly those in the United States, intensified the worldwide deflation.

Private experiments in global governance : primary commodity roundtables and the politics of deliberation

Emerging scholarship on global governance offers ever-more detailed analyses of private regulatory regimes. These regimes aim to regulate some area of social activity without a mandate from, or participation of, states or international organizations. While there are numerous empirical studies of these regimes, the normative theoretical literature has arguably struggled to keep pace with such developments. This is unfortunate, as the proliferation of private regulatory regimes raises important issues about legitimacy in global governance. The aim of this paper is to address some of these issues by elaborating a theoretical framework that can orientate normative investigation of these schemes. It does this through turning to the idea of experimentalist governance. It is argued that experimentalism can provide an important and provocative set of insights about the processes and logics of emerging governance schemes. The critical purchase of this theory is illustrated through an application to the case of primary commodities roundtables, part of ongoing attempts by NGOs, producers, and buyers to set sustainability criteria for commodity production across a range of sectors. The idea of experimentalist governance, we argue, can lend much needed theoretical structure to debates about the normative legitimacy of private regulatory regimes

On the Google-Fame of Scientists and Other Populations

We study the fame distribution of scientists and other social groups as measured by the number of Google hits garnered by individuals in the population. Past studies have found that the fame distribution decays either in power-law [arXiv:cond-mat/0310049] or exponential [Europhys. Lett., 67, (4) 511-516 (2004)] fashion, depending on whether individuals in the social group in question enjoy true fame or not. In our present study we examine critically Google counts as well as the methods of data analysis. While the previous findings are corroborated in our present study, we find that, in most situations, the data available does not allow for sharp conclusions.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, to appear in the proceedings of the 8th Granada seminar on Computational Physic