The impact of law changes on match loads in university rugby union players during the FNB Varsity Cup

Abstract: Rugby union is played at a high intensity making it an appealing sport for spectators to watch. Law changes have been implemented to make the sport more competitive, to create continuity in the sport and to improve the enjoyment factor for the players and spectators. First National Bank (FNB) Varsity Cup Rugby have strived to be innovative by introducing new law variations and strives to make a difference in sport. The aim of this study was to determine the effect that the law changes implemented and match situational variables in the FNB Varsity Cup Rugby during 2016 until 2018 had affected the players’ external load during match play. This study followed a longitudinal retrospective quantitative research design using secondary data from a university rugby union team. A total of 61 players’ external match load was captured on the Catapult Optimeye X4 micro-technology devices. The data was analysed and compared to each season’s data with reference to the law changes implemented during each season and match influencing factors such as match outcome, match location and quality of opponent. The tests done for the results of this research include independent t-tests, ANOVA, two-way ANOVA and Tukey HSD post-hoc analysis. The players’ total distances, high-speed running distances and PlayerLoad were more affected compared to other variables during the three seasons. The front row forwards covered the most distances in 2016 (4317±2017m) when compared to the other seasons, while the back-row forwards and inside backs had higher running distances in 2017 (4554±1787m; 5566±1852m). Whereas, the outside backs ran larger distances in the 2018 season (6337±737m). The backline players ran larger total distances than the forwards did during match play. Additionally, when separating the players into position specific groups, they differed in which year they ran more. It is evident that the running metrics of the players varied between each season analysed. This may indicate there is a difference between the seasons because of law variations introduced or amended. The match location and the iv match outcome also increased the external load when these situational variables change to playing at home and winning matches, respectively.M.Phil. (Sport Sciences

Smooth, Low-Resistance, Pinhole-free, Conformal Ruthenium Films by Pulsed Chemical Vapor Deposition

Ruthenium (Ru) thin films were deposited by pulsed chemical vapor deposition with precursors bis(N,N′-di-tert-butylacetamidinato)ruthenium(II)dicarbonyl, ammonia and hydrogen. Low-resistance polycrystalline Ru films with bulk density were obtained. Good adhesion to $SiO_2$ substrates was achieved by introducing a thin layer of WN in between the Ru and the $SiO_2$. Ru films only $\sim 2$ nm thick fully covered the WN layer without any pinholes. Deposition of Ru inside narrow holes showed that good conformality was obtained by lowering the deposition temperature. The film surface was smooth, and the rms roughness value did not increase too much after rapid thermal annealing at 700°C.Chemistry and Chemical Biolog

The chromatic number and rank of the complements of the Kasami graphs

AbstractWe determine the rank and chromatic number of the complements of all Kasami graphs, some of which form an infinite family of counterexamples to the now disproven rank-coloring conjecture

First Experimental Demonstration of Gate-all-around III-V MOSFET by Top-down Approach

The first inversion-mode gate-all-around (GAA) III-V MOSFETs are experimentally demonstrated with a high mobility In0.53Ga0.47As channel and atomic-layer-deposited (ALD) Al2O3/WN gate stacks by a top-down approach. A well-controlled InGaAs nanowire release process and a novel ALD high-k/metal gate process has been developed to enable the fabrication of III-V GAA MOSFETs. Well-behaved on-state and off-state performance has been achieved with channel length (Lch) down to 50nm. A detailed scaling metrics study (S.S., DIBL, VT) with Lch of 50nm - 110nm and fin width (WFin) of 30nm - 50nm are carried out, showing the immunity to short channel effects with the advanced 3D structure. The GAA structure has provided a viable path towards ultimate scaling of III-V MOSFETs.Comment: IEEE IEDM 2011 pp. 769-772; Structures are valuable for low-dimensional physics stud

Evaluation of containers as a virtualisation alternative for HEP workloads

In this paper the emerging technology of Linux containers is examined and evaluated for use in the High Energy Physics (HEP) community. Key technologies required to enable containerisation will be discussed along with emerging technologies used to manage container images. An evaluation of the requirements for containers within HEP will be made and benchmarking will be carried out to asses performance over a range of HEP workflows. The use of containers will be placed in a broader context and recommendations on future work will be given

Finding Approximate POMDP solutions Through Belief Compression

Standard value function approaches to finding policies for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are generally considered to be intractable for large models. The intractability of these algorithms is to a large extent a consequence of computing an exact, optimal policy over the entire belief space. However, in real-world POMDP problems, computing the optimal policy for the full belief space is often unnecessary for good control even for problems with complicated policy classes. The beliefs experienced by the controller often lie near a structured, low-dimensional subspace embedded in the high-dimensional belief space. Finding a good approximation to the optimal value function for only this subspace can be much easier than computing the full value function. We introduce a new method for solving large-scale POMDPs by reducing the dimensionality of the belief space. We use Exponential family Principal Components Analysis (Collins, Dasgupta and Schapire, 2002) to represent sparse, high-dimensional belief spaces using small sets of learned features of the belief state. We then plan only in terms of the low-dimensional belief features. By planning in this low-dimensional space, we can find policies for POMDP models that are orders of magnitude larger than models that can be handled by conventional techniques. We demonstrate the use of this algorithm on a synthetic problem and on mobile robot navigation tasks