Seeking Excellence: Improving Objectivity in Player Analysis in Professional Basketball

This thesis details the creation and testing of an original statistical metric for analyzing individual basketball players in the National Basketball Association (NBA) by both their commonly measured statistics and their so-called “intangibles.” By using existing methods as both guides and a caution against potential shortcomings, an inclusive statistic with multiple layers of data can be built to best reflect an individual player’s overall value to his team. This metric will be adjusted to account for the differences across multiple eras of NBA play and the levels of talent with which a player played in order to avoid penalizing a player for the unique aspects of his career

An Investigation of the Effectiveness of Persuasive Mechanics in Social Network Registrations

This study involved 40 participants from the community of varying ages and genders filling out various versions of a social network registration that utilized no persuasive mechanics, a praise persuasive mechanic, a social-pressure persuasive mechanic, and both mechanics combined in an effort to determine the effectiveness of each by measuring the amount of data supplied during registration, as well as self-reported scores on a persuasiveness scale. Attitudes towards risk as well as gender were factors also considered. The results were not statistically significant with the exception of the final, self-reported, most-persuasive design. Participants felt overall that no-mechanics was the most persuasive. Possible effects, causes, and implications for future research are discussed

The Journey from a Farm in Shandong Province China to Ames Iowa

As is typical of many Midwesterners, Wendong Zhang grew up with family ties to agriculture. In some way s, his grandfather’s farm in Shandong province in Northeastern China would be similar to an Iowa farm. Located in the western portion of the province most of the family-run farms rotated crops between wheat and corn. The farming methods in the province, where, Wendong says, economic development lagged behind the rest of the country, lagged far behind the United States. “Back then, machinery was not widely adopted as it was cost-prohibitive for farmers,” he said. “I remember as a kid riding a very small tractor and grinding wheat because there was no large machinery that could do both.

Benefits of Onsite Health Programs in the Corporate Setting

Worksite health care clinics and corporate wellness programs are becoming a staple of companies at all levels. Companies are finding that having onsite healthcare clinics as well as comprehensive wellness programs are not only good incentives for employees but actually able to save large amounts of money with injury prevention, decrease in lost productivity and a number of other factors. A 2010 meta- analysis looking at the Return-Of Investment (ROI) found that there was an average of $3.27 per dollar spent on wellness initiatives ROI. Yearly savings can be upwards of$225,000 in some cases as the Sygenta Crop Production Company have found. Some companies, depending on the industry also offer specific injury prevention programs utilizing different medical professionals. For example, Boeing offers an industrial athlete program that is ran primarily by certified athletic trainers (AT). For this program they measure success based on pain and discomfort reduction as well as number of lost workdays due to injuries. For pain and discomfort Boeing reported that there was typically a decrease of pain by 2.33 and they found that patients who saw the AT staff only missed approximately 0.2 days of work on average. This presentation will look at why every company small and large can benefit by utilizing on site health care or a wellness plan and how AT’s can play an integral role in that development

The Confluence of Psychopathic Traits, Violence, and Mental Health Needs in Adolescent Females: Theoretical and Treatment Implications

The relation among psychopathic traits, violence, and mental health needs was investigated in a sample of male and female juvenile offenders to test for the presence of gender differences. Demographic, offense, and mental health information was gathered from 100 youth offenders, 50 female and 50 male, committed to a state juvenile justice agency. Case file information was used to score the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version and additional archival data was used to code offense and mental health variables. Female and male juvenile offenders differed on PCL:YV scores as a function of proactive violence and mental health needs. The results are discussed in terms of the assessment of psychopathy in adolescence, the differential manifestation of psychopathic traits in adolescent females, and relevant treatment implications

Treatment Interventions for Medial Tibial Stress Syndrome

Medial Tibial Stress Syndrome (MTSS) or more commonly referred to as “shin splints” is characterized as an overuse or repetitive stress injury that causes vague pain over and around the tibia. Researchers are yet to determine a definitive cause though numerous risk factors have been noted. They are as follows; over training,type of surface, poor footwear, muscular imbalances at the ankle, over tight or weak triceps surae muscles, imbalances at the thoracolumbar complex, other muscular imbalances and BMI above 30. Rehabilitation and treatment interventions often call for a pause in training entirely or at the very least an immediate scaling back of running or training. Most other interventions call for either a change in running or playing surfaces and a change or upgrade in footwear. For athletes competing at high levels, ceasing or lessening the workload can be detrimental to their seasons. Treatment interventions that call for rehabilitation plans that address the muscular imbalances are better suited for the competitive athlete. With this paper we intend to look at the rehabilitation plans for MTSS that address as many of the risk factors as possible. Once an ideal rehabilitation plan is drafted it would then be put it in to a preventative exercise plan that would hopefully minimize the risk of athletes and active people getting MTSS

Deep Learning in the Automotive Industry: Applications and Tools

Deep Learning refers to a set of machine learning techniques that utilize neural networks with many hidden layers for tasks, such as image classification, speech recognition, language understanding. Deep learning has been proven to be very effective in these domains and is pervasively used by many Internet services. In this paper, we describe different automotive uses cases for deep learning in particular in the domain of computer vision. We surveys the current state-of-the-art in libraries, tools and infrastructures (e.\,g.\ GPUs and clouds) for implementing, training and deploying deep neural networks. We particularly focus on convolutional neural networks and computer vision use cases, such as the visual inspection process in manufacturing plants and the analysis of social media data. To train neural networks, curated and labeled datasets are essential. In particular, both the availability and scope of such datasets is typically very limited. A main contribution of this paper is the creation of an automotive dataset, that allows us to learn and automatically recognize different vehicle properties. We describe an end-to-end deep learning application utilizing a mobile app for data collection and process support, and an Amazon-based cloud backend for storage and training. For training we evaluate the use of cloud and on-premises infrastructures (including multiple GPUs) in conjunction with different neural network architectures and frameworks. We assess both the training times as well as the accuracy of the classifier. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the trained classifier in a real world setting during manufacturing process.Comment: 10 page

Atypical Results from Improperly Sized & Charged Pulsation Dampeners

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