The Crossroads of U.S. Environmental History and Migration History

An Overview of the Fiel

Improving the Aggregation and Evaluation of NBA Mock Drafts

Many enthusiasts and experts publish forecasts of the order players are drafted into professional sports leagues, known as mock drafts. Using a novel dataset of mock drafts for the National Basketball Association (NBA), we analyze authors' mock draft accuracy over time and ask how we can reasonably use information from multiple authors. To measure how accurate mock drafts are, we assume that both mock drafts and the actual draft are ranked lists, and we propose that rank-biased distance (RBD) of Webber et al. (2010) is the appropriate error metric for mock draft accuracy. This is because RBD allows mock drafts to have a different length than the actual draft, accounts for players not appearing in both lists, and weights errors early in the draft more than errors later on. We validate that mock drafts, as expected, improve in accuracy over the course of a season, and that accuracy of the mock drafts produced right before their drafts is fairly stable across seasons. To be able to combine information from multiple mock drafts into a single consensus mock draft, we also propose a ranked-list combination method based on the ideas of ranked-choice voting. We show that our method provides improved forecasts over the standard Borda count combination method used for most similar analyses in sports, and that either combination method provides a more accurate forecast over time than any single author.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure

Botrytis in wine grapes in Western Australia

Botrytis, causal agent Botrytis cinerea, is a fungal disease of grapevines that is commonly referred to as Botrytis bunch rot or grey mould. Botrytis is most prevalent where warm, wet conditions are frequent, but symptoms can occur in cool, wet weather and high humidity. All grape varieties are susceptible. Varieties most at risk are those with berries that are thin-skinned and/or have tight bunches. Some white wine grape varieties infected with Botrytis may decay, in certain conditions to produce noble rot . Wine produced from these infected bunches produce unique aromatic characters with high residual sugar and are usually sold as dessert wines.https://researchlibrary.agric.wa.gov.au/bulletins/1092/thumbnail.jp

Negotiation Processes As Sources of (And Solutions To) Interorganizational Conflict

We investigate how structural features of negotiations can affect interaction processes and how negotiations can be not only a solution to, but also a source of, inter-organizational conflict. Principals, agents, and teams face different sets of constraints and opportunities in negotiations. We develop grounded theory detailing how the micro-interactions comprising a negotiation are shaped by the representation structure (principals, agents, or teams) of the parties. In qualitative and quantitative analyses of negotiations carried out by principals, agents, and teams in a laboratory experiment, we find that negotiators’ efforts to manage the constraints and opportunities of their representation structure are reflected in the micro-interactions, the broad improvisations, and the resulting substantive and relational outcomes

Leading Teams When the Time is Right: Finding the Best Moments to Act

Psycholog