RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PLAYER PERFORMANCE AND SALARY IN A PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL LEAGUE

This study aimed to investigate whether teams in Taiwan’s Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) are paying their players fairly and equitably based on their performance. Possible performance criteria of professional baseball players are gathered from past literature before subjecting these criteria to regression analysis to obtain criteria that are significant and their corresponding weights. The TOPSIS method is then used to calculate player performance value, and with Quadrant Analysis, relationship between player performance and salary is analyzed. These were used to project salary adjustment for these players for the coming season. Finally, to determine the fairness of salary adjustments, this study employed McNemar test to examine whether adjustments are made based on player performance. This study has found innings pitched (IP), earned run average (ERA) and walks plus hits per inning pitched (WHIP) to be significant abilities in evaluating performance of pitchers, while for fielders, significant abilities for performance evaluation were batting average (BA), slugging average (SLG), hits (H) and on base percentage (OBP) . Based on these derived performance evaluation criteria, more than half of these players gave above average performance, yet their salary adjustments were not made accordingly nor were they made based on the above-mentioned criteria.  Article visualizations

Plasmonic Circular Nanostructure for Enhanced Light Absorption in Organic Solar Cells

This study attempts to enhance broadband absorption in advanced plasmonic circular nanostructures (PCN). Experimental results indicate that the concentric circular metallic gratings can enhance broadband optical absorption, due to the structure geometry and the excitation of surface plasmon mode. The interaction between plasmonic enhancement and the absorption characteristics of the organic materials (P3HT:PCBM and PEDOT:PSS) are also examined. According to those results, the organic material's overall optical absorption can be significantly enhanced by up to ~51% over that of a planar device. Additionally, organic materials are enhanced to a maximum of 65% for PCN grating pitch = 800 nm. As a result of the PCN's enhancement in optical absorption, incorporation of the PCN into P3HT:PCBM-based organic solar cells (OSCs) significantly improved the performance of the solar cells: short-circuit current increased from 10.125 to 12.249 and power conversion efficiency from 3.2% to 4.99%. Furthermore, optimizing the OSCs architectures further improves the performance of the absorption and PCE enhancement

FFTPL: An Analytic Placement Algorithm Using Fast Fourier Transform for Density Equalization

We propose a flat nonlinear placement algorithm FFTPL using fast Fourier transform for density equalization. The placement instance is modeled as an electrostatic system with the analogy of density cost to the potential energy. A well-defined Poisson's equation is proposed for gradient and cost computation. Our placer outperforms state-of-the-art placers with better solution quality and efficiency