Balls, Strikes, and Norms: Rule Violations and Normative Rules Among Baseball Umpires

This study investigated the use of normative rules by baseball umpires. Normative rules are informal standards of conduct that deviate from the official rules of sport. Sixteen umpires, 25 coaches, and 27 baseball players defined the official upper and lower boundaries of the strike zone, marked these official boundaries on a Strike Zone Form, and marked where they actually call, or believe umpires call, the boundaries. Umpires were significantly more knowledgeable about rules than players were. Umpires reported setting the upper boundary of the strike zone significantly lower (an average of 2.64 inches) than the official rule specifies. Coaches and players reported that umpires lower the boundaries, but players overestimated how much umpires deviate from the rule-book boundaries. Results suggest that umpires consciously violate official rules. The ethical implications of these findings are discussed

Judgment Bias in Baseball Umpires First Base Calls: A Computer Simulation

Tested 39 baseball umpires and 39 undergraduates, using a computer simulation of 1st-base calls to determine the role of the prior entry phenomenon in close plays. Because umpires are directed to focus their attention on an auditory stimulus (ball hitting the glove), they may experience prior entry of the auditory stimulus, resulting in safe runners being called out. There were more errors when runners were just safe and safe because of a tie than when runners were just out, indicating that prior entry occurred in the simulations. This was more pronounced among umpires than controls

Development of Athletes Conceptions of Sport Officials Authority

This study examined baseball players\u27 conceptions of umpires\u27 authority. Eighty male players, ages 6-22 years, completed an abbreviated Inventory of Piaget\u27s Developmental Tasks (Furth, 1970), which was used to measure cognitive development. They then heard recorded scenarios describing conflicts with an umpire and a parent. Players indicated if they would argue with the authorities, why they obey the authorities (obedience), and why the authorities get to make decisions (legitimacy). Obedience and legitimacy responses were categorized into Damon\u27s (1977) three levels. Measures of arguing, obedience, and legitimacy were analyzed for four age levels and three levels of cognitive development. Older and more cognitively developed players were more likely to argue with authorities. Conceptions of obedience and legitimacy were positively associated with age, though they were not related to scores of cognitive development. The positive relationship between age and authority conceptions and the absence of a relationship between cognitive development and authority conceptions are both consistent with Damon\u27s position

The Essence of an Image: Image as Memory

Modernist painters such as Picasso, Ernst and Matisse were among others who incorporated what was then considered "primitive" art, mostly from Africa and Oceania, into their works. Prior to this, European artists had appropriated Greco-Roman themes and characters. These appropriated elements were consequently recreated without their cultural context and content, altered to reflect more current themes. In most cases, attention was directed toward the recreator, the author of the new work of art, not the creator of the artifact. In contrast, Post-Modern artists, including myself, have reproduced appropriated elements virtually unaltered as a way of denying authorship and emphasizing a more conceptual format. Appropriated imagery has been a tool for me in my work. Additionally, both figurative and abstract elements play significant roles since I consider juxtaposition of elements to be a strength. The challenge of fitting these elements together has enabled me to develop a style of painting that seems uniquely mine. The formal issues of style and content figure heavily in my endeavor to capture a moment in time; something lost forever except for its persistence in memory. These reflections are often imbued with personal icons, arcane text and symbolic drawing that weave in and out of the landscape. Endemic to my work are the following: (1) abrasion/erosion of surface areas of the canvas; (2) partial imagery broken or skewed; (3) appropriation of historic subject matter or archaic brand images; (4) symbolic drawing; ie. hats as containers or landscapes, ravens that infer vigilance; and (5) a palette of complex colors resulting from overpainting with other colors to the point of becoming almost undecipherable. Subject matter is based on my own personal history and life experiences as well as my reaction to current happenings

Project Exodus

A design for a manned Mars mission, PROJECT EXODUS is presented. PROJECT EXODUS incorporates the design of a hypersonic waverider, cargo ship and NIMF (nuclear rocket using indigenous Martian fuel) shuttle lander to safely carry out a three to five month mission on the surface of Mars. The cargo ship transports return fuel, return engine, surface life support, NIMF shuttle, and the Mars base to low Mars orbit (LMO). The cargo ship is powered by a nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) system which allows the cargo ship to execute a spiral trajectory to Mars. The waverider transports ten astronauts to Mars and back. It is launched from the Space Station with propulsion provided by a chemical engine and a delta velocity of 9 km/sec. The waverider performs an aero-gravity assist maneuver through the atmosphere of Venus to obtain a deflection angle and increase in delta velocity. Once the waverider and cargo ship have docked the astronauts will detach the landing cargo capsules and nuclear electric power plant and remotely pilot them to the surface. They will then descend to the surface aboard the NIMF shuttle. A dome base will be quickly constructed on the surface and the astronauts will conduct an exploratory mission for three to five months. They will return to Earth and dock with the Space Station using the waverider

Learning to live: The role of education policy for improving the quality of primary and preventative healthcare in the United States

From a policy standpoint, education and healthcare are often discussed separately in the United States. A review of the current literature reveals that education can be a strong predictor of individual health outcomes, indicating that these two spheres are most interrelated than currently recognized. The ways in which education influence health outcomes are complex and varied, and no single theory can explain the entire interaction. However, with this evidence, one can argue that US policymakers in search of healthcare interventions that improve outcomes without unbearable costs should work within education policy, recognizing that teachers in the US are also some of the country’s most cost effective preventative care providers. Potential policy targets include universal Pre-K access and improved high school graduation rates

Type‐I interferons suppress microglial production of the lymphoid chemokine, CXCL13

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108063/1/glia22692.pd

Contention in Structured Concurrency: Provably Efficient Dynamic Non-Zero Indicators for Nested Parallelism

International audienceOver the past two decades, many concurrent data structures have been designed and implemented. Nearly all such work analyzes concurrent data structures empirically, omitting asymptotic bounds on their efficiency, partly because of the complexity of the analysis needed, and partly because of the difficulty of obtaining relevant asymptotic bounds: when the analysis takes into account important practical factors, such as contention, it is difficult or even impossible to prove desirable bounds. In this paper, we show that considering structured concurrency or relaxed concurrency models can enable establishing strong bounds, also for contention. To this end, we first present a dynamic relaxed counter data structure that indicates the non-zero status of the counter. Our data structure extends a recently proposed data structure, called SNZI, allowing our structure to grow dynamically in response to the increasing degree of concurrency in the system. Using the dynamic SNZI data structure, we then present a concurrent data structure for series-parallel directed acyclic graphs (sp-dags), a key data structure widely used in the implementation of modern parallel programming languages. The key component of sp-dags is an in-counter data structure that is an instance of our dynamic SNZI. We analyze the efficiency of our concurrent sp-dags and in-counter data structures under nested-parallel computing paradigm. This paradigm offers a structured model for concurrency. Under this model, we prove that our data structures require amortized O(1) shared memory steps, including contention. We present an implementation and an experimental evaluation that suggests that the sp-dags data structure is practical and can perform well in practice