La dimensió econòmica dels Jocs Olímpics

La dimensió econòmica dels Jocs Olímpics no és de fàcil mesurament. D'una banda, la globalització ha augmentat els ingressos dels Jocs que constitueixen la font de suport de sistemes esportius a tot el món. D'altra banda, no hi ha tradició de descriure la dimensió econòmica dels Jocs Olímpics. Existeixen Jocs "econòmics", com els de Los Ángeles'84 i Atlanta'96 i Jocs "cars", com els de Barcelona'92, Atenes 2004 o Pequín 2008. Aquests Jocs repercuteixen en l'economia de cada país d'una manera diferent. En primer lloc, es comparen els Jocs Olímpics amb els indicadors econòmics bàsics dels comptes nacionals, per tal de demostrar la seva importància per al país amfitrió, si bé aquesta és trivial. A continuació, es comparen els Jocs amb altres esdeveniments esportius, i es pot comprovar l'enorme dimensió econòmica que els primers adquireixen. Més endavant, en aquesta mateixa lliçó, ens centrarem en les dimensions "espai" i "temps".La dimensión económica de los Juegos Olímpicos no resulta de fácil medición. Por un lado, la globalización ha aumentado los ingresos de los Juegos que constituyen la fuente de apoyo de sistemas deportivos en todo el mundo. Por otro lado, no existe tradición de describir la dimensión económica de los Juegos Olímpicos. Existen Juegos "baratos", como los de Los Ángeles'84 y Atlanta'96 y Juegos "caros", como los de Barcelona'92, Atenas 2004 o Pequín 2008. Estos Juegos repercuten en la economía de cada país de un modo distinto. En primer lugar, se comparan los Juegos Olímpicos con los indicadores económicos básicos de las cuentas nacionales, con el fin de demostrar su importancia para el país anfitrión, si bien ésta es trivial. A continuación, se comparan los Juegos con otros eventos deportivos, y se puede comprobar la enorme dimensión económica que los primeros adquieren. Más adelante, en esta misma lección, nos centraremos en las dimensiones "espacio" y "tiempo".The economic dimension of the Olympic Games is not easy to measure. On the one hand globalisation has increased the revenues of the Games which, vice versa, supports sports systems all over the world. On the other hand there is no tendency to describe the economic dimension of Olympic Games. There are "cheap" Games such as those from Los Angeles 1984 and Atlanta 1996 and "expensive" Games such as Barcelona 1992, Athens 2004 or Beijing 2008. These Games affect the economy of their country differently. First the Olympic Games will be compared with basic economic indicators of national accounts in order to demonstrate their economic importance for the host country, which is not very big. Then the Games are compared with other major sport event which shows their huge economic dimension. Later this lesson will focus on the two dimensions "time" and "space". "Time" is important in order to describe the duration of economic impulses of a single Games

Domestic sport policy development [in China]: Legacies of Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympic Games and 2022 Winter Olympic Games

Domestic sport policy development [in China]: Legacies of Beijing’s 2008 Summer Olympic Games and 2022 Winter Olympic Game

Intelligent group movement and selection in realtime strategy games

Movement of groups in realtime strategy games is often a nuisance: Units travel and battle separately, resulting in huge losses and the AI looking dumb. This applies to computer as well as human commanded factions. We suggest to tackle that by using flocking improved by influence-map based pathfinding which leads to a much more natural and intelligent looking behavior. A similar problem occurs if the computer AI has to select groups to combat a specific target: Assignment of units to groups, especially for multiple enemy groups, is often suboptimal when units have very different attack skills. This can be cured by using offline prepared self-organizing feature maps that use all available information for looking up good matches. We demonstrate that these two approaches work well separately, but also that they go together very naturally, thereby leading to an improved and - via parametrization - very flexible group behavior. Opponent AI may be strenghtened that way as well as player-supportive AI. A thorough experimental analysis supports our claims

Els Jocs Olímpics de Barcelona, 25 anys després (4)

Aquest és el quart article que publica la revista Apunts. Educació Física i Esports amb motiu del 25è aniversari dels Jocs Olímpics del 1992, celebrats a Barcelona. L’objectiu de la sèrie era analitzar l’impacte que han tingut els Jocs a la ciutat i al país, transcorregut un quart de segle des de l’organització d’un dels esdeveniments més importants organitzats per la capital catalana. D’acord amb l’aprenentatge d’aquest període des de les perspectives esportiva, econòmica i social aquest treball suggereix i discuteix sobre alguns elements que poden ser claus per a l’organització de futurs esdeveniments esportius. S’analitzen variables com el lloc i l‘índex de repetició on es duen a terme aquests esdeveniments, així com les tendències de futur. Hi ha altres aspectes que estan directament vinculats a la governança, com l’elecció de les seus candidates i l’origen dels recursos per finançar-los. Amb l’opinió de diversos autors, s’ha intentat apuntar sobre la visió dels esdeveniments esportius en els pròxims anys

Olympic idea nowadays : perceptions and insights

The book Olympic Idea Nowadays : perceptions and insights offers a vision of the Olympic Movement and the Olympic Games in relation to the Olympic values system in the current social context. The book includes the contribution of 23 academics and experts in the field of Olympic studies sharing their reflections on the evolution of the Olympic Movement since Sydney 2000 and the impacts, contributions or changes posed by the London 2012 and Sochi 2014 Olympics

Volkswirtschaftliche Bedeutung Olympische Winterspiele Graubünden 2022

Der Verein Graubünden 2022 beabsichtigte, sich als offizielle Kandidatur der Schweiz für die Olympischen Winterspiele 2022 zu bewerben. Im Hinblick auf die politische Diskussion und das Kandidaturdossier zur Bewerbung wurde das Forschungsnetzwerk Rütter Soceco, Eidgenössische Hochschule für Sport Magglingen EHSM und Institut für Tourismuswirtschaft ITW Hochschule Luzern beauftragt, die potenziellen wirtschaftlichen Wirkungen der Olympischen Winterspiele auf die Austragungsregion und die gesamte Schweiz zu analysieren. Die Studie gliedert sich in zwei Hauptteile und eine Zusammenfassung der Erkenntnisse. Der erste Teil des Berichts, der am 30. Oktober 2012 publiziert wurde, fokussiert auf den wirtschaftlichen Primärimpuls (Budgets und touristische Ausgaben) und die damit verbundenen volkswirtschaftlichen Wirkungen von Graubünden 2022. Er weist die direkten und indirekten Wertschöpfungs- und Beschäftigungswirkungen sowie die Steuerwirkungen im Kanton Graubünden und in der übrigen Schweiz aus, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Wirkungen auf den Tourismus. Für den Gesamtbericht wurden die Wirkungen für die drei Regionen Davos/Kloster, Oberengadin und „“übrige Region““ regionalisiert. Der zweite Teil der Studie zeigt die potenziellen langfristigen Wirkungen (Legacy) von Graubünden 2022 qualitativ auf. Dabei werden acht Themen unterschieden und die wichtigsten mit der Durchführung verbundenen Risiken dargestellt. Wie die Potenziale ausgeschöpft werden, wird wesentlich davon abhängen, dass die Legacyaspekte frühzeitig in die Planung der OWS Graubünden 22 einbezogen werden

Implementing a new rubber plant functional type in the Community Land Model (CLM5) improves accuracy of carbon and water flux estimation

Rubber plantations are an economically viable land-use type that occupies large swathes of land in Southeast Asia that have undergone conversion from native forest to intensive plantation forestry. Such land-use change has a strong impact on carbon, energy, and water fluxes in ecosystems, and uncertainties exist in the modeling of future land-use change impacts on these fluxes due to the scarcity of measured data and poor representation of key biogeochemical processes. In this current modeling effort, we utilized the Community Land Model Version 5 (CLM5) to simulate a rubber plant functional type (PFT) by comparing the baseline parameter values of tropical evergreen PFT and tropical deciduous PFT with a newly developed rubber PFT (focused on the parameterization and modification of phenology and allocation processes) based on site-level observations of a rubber clone in Indonesia. We found that the baseline tropical evergreen and baseline tropical deciduous functions and parameterizations in CLM5 poorly simulate the leaf area index, carbon dynamics, and water fluxes of rubber plantations. The newly developed rubber PFT and parametrizations (CLM-rubber) showed that daylength could be used as a universal trigger for defoliation and refoliation of rubber plantations. CLM-rubber was able to predict seasonal patterns of latex yield reasonably well, despite highly variable tapping periods across Southeast Asia. Further, model comparisons indicated that CLM-rubber can simulate carbon and energy fluxes similar to the existing rubber model simulations available in the literature. Our modeling results indicate that CLM-rubber can be applied in Southeast Asia to examine variations in carbon and water fluxes for rubber plantations and assess how rubber-related land-use changes in the tropics feedback to climate through carbon and water cycling

After Sochi 2014:costs and impacts of Russia’s Olympic Games

This paper assesses the outcomes of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, examining the costs and economic impacts of the event, the prospects for the long-term use of venues and infrastructure, and the attitudes of the global and the Russian population. Total costs were USD 55 billion, having increased 4.5 times from USD 12 billion at the time of the bid. Of this total, about USD 16 billion were sports-related costs. After accounting for inflation, this makes Sochi the second-most expensive Olympics ever in terms of sports-related costs and the most expensive Olympics in terms of cost per event. With a public share of 96.5 percent of funding, the Sochi Games had the highest proportion of public money for any Olympic Games on record. The benefit from this high cost, however, is limited. Extensive construction led to hotel overcapacities, investors defaulted on state-backed loans, and there is no coherent plan for the after use of venues and some of the largest infrastructure projects. As a consequence, the Sochi Olympics will continue to be a burden for the Russian state, with expenses for operation, maintenance, and foregone interest and tax revenue in the order of USD 1.2 billion per year. The event also did not manage to improve the image of Russia in the world. Among the domestic population, support dropped over the seven years of its implementation, most notably among the local population

Target genes, variants, tissues and transcriptional pathways influencing human serum urate levels.

Elevated serum urate levels cause gout and correlate with cardiometabolic diseases via poorly understood mechanisms. We performed a trans-ancestry genome-wide association study of serum urate in 457,690 individuals, identifying 183 loci (147 previously unknown) that improve the prediction of gout in an independent cohort of 334,880 individuals. Serum urate showed significant genetic correlations with many cardiometabolic traits, with genetic causality analyses supporting a substantial role for pleiotropy. Enrichment analysis, fine-mapping of urate-associated loci and colocalization with gene expression in 47 tissues implicated the kidney and liver as the main target organs and prioritized potentially causal genes and variants, including the transcriptional master regulators in the liver and kidney, HNF1A and HNF4A. Experimental validation showed that HNF4A transactivated the promoter of ABCG2, encoding a major urate transporter, in kidney cells, and that HNF4A p.Thr139Ile is a functional variant. Transcriptional coregulation within and across organs may be a general mechanism underlying the observed pleiotropy between urate and cardiometabolic traits.The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) Project was supported by the Common Fund of the Office of the Director of the National Institutes of Health, and by NCI, NHGRI, NHLBI, NIDA, NIMH, and NINDS. Variant annotation was supported by software resources provided via the Caché Campus program of the InterSystems GmbH to Alexander Teumer