Ahead of the Curve : A History of the National Baseball Congress Tournament in Wichita, Kansas,1935-2005

This thesis provides a history of the National Baseball Congress (NBC) tournament in Wichita, Kansas, from its founding in 1935 to 2005. The NBC tournament, since its inception, has had an impact culturally, economically, and socially on the city of Wichita, and to a lesser degree, an impact on Major League Baseball and other facets of organized baseball. By using a decade-by-decade over view of the history of the NBC tournament, one finds how social and cultural events have played a role in the success of the NBC tournament, and how the tournament influenced the baseball world. Raymond Hap” Dumont, the founder and master promoter of the NBC tournament, created an environment that would push his tournament to the forefront of the minds of Americans. He did this by using the mass media and by instituting unique promotions to enhance the game of baseball. Dumont also created opportunities for minorities, military baseball teams, and eventually college baseball players to participate in his semipro tournament. This thesis, based on newspaper articles, Raymond Dumont\u27s biography, and other assorted histories of baseball in the twentieth century, argues that the success of the NBC tournament was due to Dumont\u27s ingenuity and desire to succeed. When Dumont passed away, the tournament went through a series of ownership changes that initially weakened the overall economic effectiveness of the tournament. However, the originality and tradition of the tournament endured because of the dedicated employees that Dumont hired to help run the event. When the Rich family from Buffalo, New York, bought the National Baseball Congress in 1985, they also purchased a Wichita institution, a tradition that has endured into the twenty-first century

From Carlisle to Bradford: the Media , Stereotypes, Football, and American Indians

Racial stereotypes were a prominent issue in the media's coverage of American Indians throughout the twentieth century. In this study, it is football, both collegiate and professional, that the media used to base their racial attitudes. By using the examples of well-known American Indian football players such as Jim Thorpe, Wahoo McDaniel, Sonny Sixkiller, and Sam Bradford one can ascertain the evolution of racial stereotypes in the media's coverage, and how those individuals reacted to that exposure. American Indian football players throughout the years dealt with stereotypes that portrayed them as warriors, savages, and, sometimes, as control drunkards. For many of these players, they also had to contend with the shadow of the great Jim Thorpe, as many members of the media drew comparisons between all of these Native American football players in their stories.Histor

Foothill High School Wind Symphony and UNLV Symphonic Winds

Program listing performers and works performe

Human health risk assessment: A case study involving heavy metal soil contamination after the flooding of the river Meuse during the winter of 1993-1994.

At the end of December 1993 and also at the end of January 1995, the river Meuse, one of the major rivers in Europe, flooded and river banks were inundated. We investigated the possible health risks of exposure to heavy metal concentrations in river bank soils resulting from the flooding of the river Meuse at the end of 1993. Soil and deposit samples and corresponding aerable and fodder crops were collected and analyzed for heavy metals. Although the soils of the floodplain of the river Meuse appeared severely polluted mainly by Cd and Zn, the heavy metal concentrations in the crops grown on these soils were within background ranges. Incidentally, the legal standard for Cd as endorsed by the Commodities Act was exceeded in wheat crops. The main exposure pathways for the general population were through the consumption of food crops grown on the river banks and through the direct ingestion of contaminated soils. For estimating potential human exposure in relation to soil pollution, we used a multiple pathway exposure model. For estimating the actual risk, we determined metal contents of vegetables grown in six experimental gardens. From this study, it can be concluded that there is a potential health risk for the river bank inhabitants as a consequence of Pb and Cd contaminations of the floodplain soils of the river Meuse, which are frequently inundated (averaged flooding frequency once every 2 years)

Disentangling the effects of evolutionary, demographic, and environmental factors influencing genetic structure of natural populations: Atlantic herring as a case study

The spatial structuring of intraspecific genetic diversity is the result of random genetic drift, natural selection, migration, mutation, and their interaction with historical processes. The contribution of each has been typically difficult to estimate, but recent advances in statistical genetics have provided valuable new investigative tools to tackle such complexity. Using a combination of such methods, we examined the roles of environment (i.e., natural selection), random genetic processes (i.e., drift), and demography and life histories (e. g., feeding migrations) on population structure of a widely distributed and abundant marine pelagic fish of economic importance, Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus). Individuals were collected during peak spawning time from 19 spawning locations spanning the region from the western North Sea to the eastern Baltic Sea (N = 1859, eight microsatellite loci). We carried out separate analyses of neutral and selected genetic variation, which allowed us to establish that the two most important factors affecting population structure were selection due to salinity at spawning sites and feeding migrations. The genetic signal left by the demographic history of herring, on the other hand, seems to have been largely eroded, which is not surprising given the large reproductive potential and presumed enormous local effective population sizes of pelagic fish that constrain the effect of stochastic processes. The approach we used can in principle be applied to any abundant and widely distributed aquatic or terrestrial species.</p

Data S1: Data

We present the evaluation of two well-known, low-cost consumer-grade EEG devices: the Emotiv EPOC and the Neurosky MindWave. Problems with using the consumer-grade EEG devices (BCI illiteracy, poor technical characteristics, and adverse EEG artefacts) are discussed. The experimental evaluation of the devices, performed with 10 subjects asked to perform concentration/relaxation and blinking recognition tasks, is given. The results of statistical analysis show that both devices exhibit high variability and non-normality of attention and meditation data, which makes each of them difficult to use as an input to control tasks. BCI illiteracy may be a significant problem, as well as setting up of the proper environment of the experiment. The results of blinking recognition show that using the Neurosky device means recognition accuracy is less than 50%, while the Emotiv device has achieved a recognition accuracy of more than 75%; for tasks that require concentration and relaxation of subjects, the Emotiv EPOC device has performed better (as measured by the recognition accuracy) by ∼9%. Therefore, the Emotiv EPOC device may be more suitable for control tasks using the attention/meditation level or eye blinking than the Neurosky MindWave device