Sport for All Play for Life: A Playbook to Get Every Kid in the Game

Over the past two years, Project Play has convened more than 250 thought leaders in a series of roundtables, identifying strategies that can address barriers limiting access to early sport activity that fosters the development of healthy children and communities. This 50-page report aggregates the eight most promising strategies. Authored by the Sports & Society Program with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Sport for All, Play for Life: A Playbook to Get Every Kid in the Game is a unifying document, collecting in one place the best opportunities for stakeholders -- from sport leaders to mayors, parents to policymakers -- to work together to grow access to an early, positive sport experience

A Comparison of Smokeless Tobacco Usage in Two NCAA Baseball Programs

BACKGROUND: Smokeless tobacco (ST) is commonly associated with baseball. The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare the ST usage patterns on an NCAA Division I baseball team and an NCAA Division III baseball team. The collected data will be compared to patterns of use from similar age groups in a national survey. The health effects of ST will be examined, along with the background of ST and baseball. METHODS: An online survey was used to distribute and administer the questionnaire to willing participants on the two college baseball teams. The survey was open from October 29th, 2013 to February 1st, 2014, at which point the data was collected and analyzed for patterns of use in SPSS. The results were then compared to smokeless tobacco use rates in baseball players and student-athletes on the whole found by the NCAA Student-Athlete Substance Abuse Surveys from 1997, 2001, and 2009. RESULTS: The NCAA Division I baseball team had substantially higher rates of use, both in terms of ever-use and habitual use when compared to the NCAA Division III baseball team. On the Division I team, 75% of players reported ever-use and 62.5% of players reported habitual use. On the Division III team, 35.7% of players reported ever-use, while only 14.3% of players reported habitual use. DISCUSSION: The survey found that the Division I team reported higher rates of use than the Division III team, other NCAA student-athletes generally (75% ST ever-use and 62.5% habitual ST use compared to 17.4% of other student-athletes reporting past 12 month ST use) and higher use than other NCAA baseball players (75% ST ever-use and 62.5% habitual ST use compared to 52.3% of other NCAA baseball players reporting past 12 month ST use),while the Division III team only reported only higher ever-use than NCAA student-athletes on the whole reported use in the last 12 months, (35.7% compared to 17.4%). The Division III team reported quite a bit less use than other NCAA baseball players (35.7% ST ever-use and 14.3% habitual ST use compared to 52.3% past 12 month ST use in other NCAA baseball players). This is an awkward comparison given the difference in definitions of use ever-use and habitual use versus past 12 month use. The major issue with the study was the lack of a large sample size, so the data should be used cautiously. The rates on both teams would likely be closer had more players responded to the survey

Biofuel supply chain challenges and analysis

Thesis (M. Eng. in Logistics)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2010.Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-86).Liquid fuels such as gasoline and diesel are traditionally derived from petroleum. Since petroleum has the potential to be exhausted, there is interest in large scale production of fuels from renewable sources. Currently, ethanol and bio diesel are liquid fuels that are mainly derived from field crops. This paper examines the supply chain challenges and issues that exist for bringing biofuel production up to scale. One major challenge that exists is how to transport the feedstock from a farm to a refinery in the most cost efficient manner. One way to improve transportation efficiency of feedstock is to increase the energy density of the feedstock. However, increasing the density of a feedstock comes with a cost. We use switchgrass as a case study and examine the tradeoff between higher transportation costs in transporting a less energy dense feedstock to processing a feedstock to increase its energy density. We show that creating ethanol from switchgrass in the United States is not competitive in price to gasoline without government subsidies, but as the supply chain matures, efficiencies gained will narrow the gap.by Sooduck Chung [and] Michael Farrey.M.Eng.in Logistic

Development of a Case Study Problem in Engineering Economics Based on a Telephone Replacement Undertaking at UW-Platteville

General Engineering 2820 (GE 2820) is a course offered to all undergraduate students at the College of Engineering, Mathematics, and Science (EMS), University of Wisconsin –Platteville. A constant exercise for the instructors in this course is to update the course material with interesting case study problems which are then solved by students as an assignment. In recent days, the University of Wisconsin –Platteville, is contemplating replacement of its current Voice over IP (VoIP) phone service (catered by the local utility company “Century Link”) with a “Unified Communications” service. Current services cost the university $18,900 per month. With the new system being contemplated and the since the university has necessary infrastructure in place, the cost for the university is estimated to be approximately$7000 per month. Therefore, a breakeven analysis was undertaken for studying the economic feasibility of this undertaking by the students in this course. Part of this case study involved – defining the problem correctly, processing the interest rate data so as to calculate an appropriate effective annual rate, processing the financial data related to the phone services, and finally performing a breakeven study using the annual worth computation. Based on student performances, such case study problems have benefited the students in understanding the concepts of time value of money and various method of analysis in engineering economy

Youth sport during the COVID-19 pandemic: The influence of race and affluence on parents’ perspectives of youth participation

COVID-19 restrictions led to a nearly 50% decline in youth sport participation across the United States (Dorsch et al., 2021). Today, communities and sport organizations have resumed sport. However, research has yet to fully elucidate how COVID-19 restrictions impacted youth participation across different sociodemographic groups during the pandemic. The present study explored the association between race and affluence and their relationship with parents' attitudes toward children's youth sport participation before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Online questionnaires were completed by a nationally representative sample of 3706 parents (Mage = 39.57 ± 9.03 years) who had a child regularly participating in youth sport before COVID-19. Multivariate Analyses of Variance using Tukey post-hoc tests were conducted to examine the main effect differences by race and affluence and the interactive effects of race and affluence. Results suggest that race and affluence -- independently and in combination -- were salient categorical variables of children's weekly hours of sport participation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings highlight that White*high affluent groups had the highest rates of sport participation during the COVID-19 pandemic and that these families desire to invest more time and money at greater rates upon returning. Theoretically, designed intersectionality research is recommended to explore further effects of race and affluence in youth sport

Machine learning for automated quality assurance in radiotherapy: A proof of principle using EPID data description

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149320/1/mp13433_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149320/2/mp13433.pd

Automating linear accelerator quality assurance

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135049/1/mp1415.pd

Lead-free piezoceramics - Where to move on?

Lead-free piezoceramics aiming at replacing the market-dominant lead-based ones have been extensively searched for more than a decade worldwide. Some noteworthy outcomes such as the advent of commercial products for certain applications have been reported, but the goal, i.e., the invention of a lead-free piezocermic, the performance of which is equivalent or even superior to that of PZT-based piezoceramics, does not seem to be fulfilled yet. Nevertheless, the academic effort already seems to be culminated, waiting for a guideline to a future research direction. We believe that a driving force for a restoration of this research field needs to be found elsewhere, for example, intimate collaborations with related industries. For this to be effectively realized, it would be helpful for academic side to understand the interests and demands of the industry side as well as to provide the industry with new scientific insights that would eventually lead to new applications. Therefore, this review covers some of the issues that are to be studied further and deeper, so-to-speak, lessons from the history of piezoceramics, and some technical issues that could be useful in better understanding the industry demands. As well, the efforts made in the industry side will be briefly introduced for the academic people to catch up with the recent trends and to be guided for setting up their future research direction effectively.ope

With or Without You

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/diversefamilies/2504/thumbnail.jp