Criminal Athletes: The Expanding Necessity To Create Uniform Punishments In Professional Sports

On February 19, 2014, Ray Rice, star running back for the Baltimore Ravens, assaulted his then-fiancée, Janay Palmer, in a hotel elevator in Atlantic City, New Jersey. This incident brought an increased level of scrutiny towards professional athletes and their organizations by shining a spotlight on egregious personal indiscretions that had previously been overlooked. The four major North American professional sport organizations (Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, and the National Hockey League) have all have dealt with incidents of violence and criminal activity on and off the field, yet there have not been any substantial changes to the policies within the leagues’ respective Collective Bargaining Agreements (“CBAs”). It is undeniable that over the past several decades professional sports has been plagued with high profile athletes committing or allegedly committing violent, and occasionally severe crimes—a severe example would be former New England Patriot tight end, Aaron Hernandez, who is awaiting trial in Massachusetts on three separate charges of first-degree murder. While violence off the field has remained consistent, these organizations have not taken any initiatives to find a solution to this endemic problem. This post was originally published on the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal website on March 9, 2015. The original post can be accessed via the Archived Link button above

‘Healthmania’ Diet, Supplements and the Pursuit of Health in America and Britain c. 1945-1980.

This thesis explores the history of healthy eating in the mid-to-late twentieth century, providing insight into the roots of contemporary anxieties about healthy lifestyles, dieting, and the prevention of chronic disease in the UK and the US. This thesis argues that during the post-war decades, British and American societies experienced a fundamental shift that enabled new forms of cultural preoccupations about health and diet to flourish. This shift created an obsession within the media, science and society about safeguarding good health, youth and vitality, especially through dieting, specific foods, and the ingestion of supplements. This shift was enabled by the simultaneous promotion and representation of healthy eating as a solution to chronic diseases, by neoromantic notions of health, by anxieties about modern living, but also by the growth of ideas around individual agency and responsibility for health. Drawing on a rich source base of self-help books, newspapers and magazines, advertisements, medical journals and comic books, chapters of this thesis explore the ways in which contemporary obsessions about diet and health were promoted, reported on and experienced in everyday life. Examining health obsessions in relation to gendered approaches to food and broader post-war concerns about the impact of modernity on health and lifestyle, on the valorisation of slim bodies and youth, and on chronic disease prevention and productivity, this thesis offers new perspectives on the multifaceted interactions between self-help advice literature, newspapers and magazines, mainstream medical thought, and comic books during the postwar decades.Wellcome TrustWellcome Trus

Modelling of Multi-Agent Systems: Experiences with Membrane Computing and Future Challenges

Formal modelling of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is a challenging task due to high complexity, interaction, parallelism and continuous change of roles and organisation between agents. In this paper we record our research experience on formal modelling of MAS. We review our research throughout the last decade, by describing the problems we have encountered and the decisions we have made towards resolving them and providing solutions. Much of this work involved membrane computing and classes of P Systems, such as Tissue and Population P Systems, targeted to the modelling of MAS whose dynamic structure is a prominent characteristic. More particularly, social insects (such as colonies of ants, bees, etc.), biology inspired swarms and systems with emergent behaviour are indicative examples for which we developed formal MAS models. Here, we aim to review our work and disseminate our findings to fellow researchers who might face similar challenges and, furthermore, to discuss important issues for advancing research on the application of membrane computing in MAS modelling.Comment: In Proceedings AMCA-POP 2010, arXiv:1008.314

An innovative web application for managing academic documents

Archiving versions of academic documents in consideration of green thinking was the motivation to develop an innovative tool that could organize academic documents in a centralized database. This paper presents a new web application, which aims to move towards a paperless University model for managing academic documents that are used within an educational institution, such as proposal courses, syllabuses etc. AcaDocMan, the developed application can be used by academic staff and quality assurance officers of institutions who are able not only to manage their course syllabuses but also to generate different consistent document formats for various purposes