The Incentive Effects of Tournaments: The PGA Australasian Tour 1991

This paper examines the relationship betlveen the structure of tournament incentives and individual performance. Although it follows recent research on Professional Golf Association tournaments in the United States and Europe, it concentrates on the PGA Australasian Tour in 1991 for which financial incentives on average are much less attractive than for tourna1nents in the northern hemisphere. The results strongly confirm that tournan1ents do have an incentive effect. The incentive effects that such tournament-type reward structures are clearly shown to have may be applicable not only to professional sport hut also to industrial wage structures. Tournament models can offer a different perspective on the extent to which pay influences performance at the firm level

Secure equality testing protocols in the two-party setting

Protocols for securely testing the equality of two encrypted integers are common building blocks for a number of proposals in the literature that aim for privacy preservation. Being used repeatedly in many cryptographic protocols, designing efficient equality testing protocols is important in terms of computation and communication overhead. In this work, we consider a scenario with two parties where party A has two integers encrypted using an additively homomorphic scheme and party B has the decryption key. Party A would like to obtain an encrypted bit that shows whether the integers are equal or not but nothing more. We propose three secure equality testing protocols, which are more efficient in terms of communication, computation or both compared to the existing work. To support our claims, we present experimental results, which show that our protocols achieve up to 99% computation-wise improvement compared to the state-of-the-art protocols in a fair experimental set-up

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE THE BRAND PREFERENCES OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS STUDYING SPORTS IN TURKEY AND PORTUGAL

The purpose of this study is to find out and compare the factors effective in brand preferences of the students of Ondokuz Mayıs University Yaşar Doğu Faculty of Sport Sciences in Turkey and Instituto Politecnico da Guarda Faculty of Sports in Portugal in terms of sports products. 266 students (170 male, 96 female) attending sports faculties in Turkey and Portugal participated in this study. A questionnaire about the sports products preferences developed by Tozoğlu (2009) was used in order to find out the brand preferences of students. Student t-test was used to determine whether there is a significant difference between sport faculty students in Portugal and in Turkey. Chi square analysis was used to find out whether the students’ reasons for preferring a brand differed in terms of the schools, they were attending. Differences were found between the factors that affected the brand preferences of the students of Ondokuz Mayıs University (OMU) Yaşar Doğu Faculty of Sport Sciences and Instituto Politecnico da Guarda (IPG) Faculty of Sports in sports products. It was found that when compared with the students of IPG, students of OMU preferred brands since they provided quality guarantee, they were indicators of status and they gave a sense of security. It was found that students of OMU and IPG paid attention to the price while buying a brand product. Turkish students were found to be more dependent on brands when compared with Portuguese students. In addition, the price factor in the purchase of branded products is becoming a common element of the students of both countries. The tendency towards branded sporting products can manifest itself in increasing or decreasing proportions relative to advertising and promotional activities. The management of this orientation as a healthy process can be achieved by the effects of planned school education on the cultural structure.  Article visualizations

An association between TRP64ARG polymorphism of the B3 adrenoreceptor gene and some metabolic disturbances

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Backgrounds</p> <p>B3 adrenoreceptors (ADRB3) are abundant in adipose tissue and play the role in its metabolism and lipolysis. Some variants of the ADRB3 gene may predispose subjects for the development obesity and metabolic abnormalities in the setting of modern sedentary lifestyle. ADRB3 gene polymorphism association with metabolic disturbances has never been studied before in the ethnic Kyrgyz population.</p> <p>Aim</p> <p>To study an association between Trp64Arg polymorphism of the ADRB3 and metabolic syndrome (MS) components in an ethnic Kyrgyz group.</p> <p>Materials and methods</p> <p>213 Ethnic Kyrgyz volunteers over the age of 30 were enrolled in the study. The assessment plan for each individual comprised of general physical and anthropometric exams as well as laboratory tests (glucose, lipid panel, insulin) and genotyping by Trp64Arg polymorphism of the ADRB3. MS diagnosis was consistent with modified ATP III criteria (2005). Logistic regression analysis was performed to test the potential independent association between Arg64 allele with obesity, abdominal obesity (AO) and arterial hypertension (AH).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Trp64Arg polymorphism of the ADRB3 was assessed in 213 individuals (145 men, 68 women) aged 30-73 (mean age 50.7 ± 7.6). Arg64 allele frequency was 0.239; ADRB3 genotype distribution among participants was: Trp64 homozygotes 54.5%, Trp64Arg 43.2% and Arg64 homozygotes 2.3%. There was an association between Trp64Arg и Arg64Arg genotypes and higher BMI, WC and obesity frequency (p < 0.00009), AO (p < 0.01), type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) (p < 0.005) and lower high density cholesterol (HDL-C) level (p < 0.03). The logistic regression analysis showed the correlation of the Arg64 allele with obesity (OR 3.159; 95% CI 1.789-5.577) and AO (OR 1.973; 95% CI 1.118-3.481). The association between Arg64 allele and AH lost its significance after adjustment for obesity.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Arg64 allele of the ADRB3 gene in the studied group has an association with MS components such as obesity, AO and decreased HDL-C level.</p

Efficient Verifiable Computation of XOR for Biometric Authentication

This work addresses the security and privacy issues in remotebiometric authentication by proposing an efficient mechanism to verifythe correctness of the outsourced computation in such protocols.In particular, we propose an efficient verifiable computation of XORingencrypted messages using an XOR linear message authenticationcode (MAC) and we employ the proposed scheme to build a biometricauthentication protocol. The proposed authentication protocol is bothsecure and privacy-preserving against malicious (as opposed to honest-but-curious) adversaries. Specifically, the use of the verifiable computation scheme together with an homomorphic encryption protects the privacy of biometric templates against malicious adversaries. Furthermore, in order to achieve unlinkability of authentication attempts, while keeping a low communication overhead, we show how to apply Oblivious RAM and biohashing to our protocol. We also provide a proof of security for the proposed solution. Our simulation results show that the proposed authentication protocol is efficient

Alcohol consumption patterns across Europe and adherence to the European guidelines in coronary patients : findings from the ESC-EORP EUROASPIRE V survey

Background and aims: Alcohol consumption is an important risk factor for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality worldwide. The highest levels of alcohol consumption are observed in Europe, where alcohol as contributing cause of coronary heart disease (CHD) is also most significant. We aimed to describe alcohol consumption patterns across European regions and adherence to the current guidelines in patients with a recent CHD event. Methods: The ESC-EORP survey (EUROASPIRE V) has been conducted in 2016-2017 at 131 centers in 27 Eu-ropean countries in 7350 patients with a recent CHD. Median alcohol consumption, as well as the proportion of abstainers and excessive drinkers (i.e. >70 g/week for women and >140 for men, as recommended by the European guidelines on cardiovascular prevention), was calculated for each region. To assess adherence to guidelines, proportions of participants who were advised to reduce excessive alcohol consumption and participants who were incorrectly not advised were calculated per region. Results: Mean age was 64 years (SD: 9.5), 75% were male. Abstention rates were 53% in males and 77% in females, whereas excessive drinking was reported by 9% and 5% of them, respectively. Overall, 57% of the participants were advised to reduce alcohol consumption. In the total population, 3% were incorrectly not advised, however, this percentage differed per region (range: 1%-9%). In regions where alcohol consumption was highest, participants were less often advised to reduce their consumption. Conclusion: In this EUROASPIRE V survey, the majority of CHD patients adhere to the current drinking guidelines, but substantial heterogeneity exists between European regions