Gamification of sports media coverage: an infotainment approach to Olympics and Football World Cups

Sports media coverage of mega-events is partly oriented to gamification, the use of game elements and game design techniques in non-gaming contexts. This infotainment approach to events has been developed by media outlets as an original and effective way to capture wider audience attention and to place events in context before a competition starts. This article examines 28 gamified sports pieces developed by media outlets from seven countries during the last two Olympics (2016 Summer Olympics in Rio and 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang) and Football World Cups (2014 in Brazil and 2018 in Russia). This sample comprises two categories following Ferrer-Conill (2015): “gamified pieces” (game like elements that are part of a bigger interactive feature) and “newsgames” (more sophisticated pieces often included in complex graphics or multimedia content). The results show that, despite its entertaining formula, gamification serves mainly informational purposes and adds value to sports coverage. Especially in the Summer and Winter Olympics, gamified sports pieces tend to be explanatory and data-driven in order to inform the audience about nonmainstream sports

Professional Forecasters: How to Understand and Exploit Them Through a DSGE Model

This paper derives a link between the forecasts of professional forecasters and a DSGE model. I show that the forecasts of a professional forecaster can be incorporated to the state space representation of the model by allowing the measurement error of the forecast and the structural shocks to be correlated. The parameters capturing this correlation are reduced form parameters that allow to address two issues i) How the forecasts of the professional forecaster can be exploited as a source of information for the estimation of the model and ii) How to characterize the deviations of the professional forecaster from an ideal complete information forecaster in terms of the shocks and the structure of the economy.Mercado laboral, VAR estructural, DSGE, Economía abierta, Política monetaria. Classification JEL:Professional Forecasters, DSGE models.

On the Chow rings of classifying spaces for classical groups

We show how the stratification method, introduced by Vezzosi in his study of PGL_3, provides a unified approach to the known computations of the Chow rings of the classifying spaces of GL_n, SL_n, Sp_n, O_n and SO_n.Comment: 24 page

Quantum localized states in photonic flat-band lattices

The localization of light in flat-band lattices has been recently proposed and experimentally demonstrated in several configurations, assuming a classical description of light. Here, we study the problem of light localization in the quantum regime. We focus on quasi one-dimensional and two-dimensional lattices which exhibit a perfect flat-band inside their linear spectrum. Localized quantum states are constructed as eigenstates of the interaction Hamiltonian with a vanishing eigenvalue and a well defined total photon number. These are superpositions of Fock states with probability amplitudes given by positive as well as negative square roots of multinomial coefficients. The classical picture can be recovered by considering poissonian superpositions of localized quantum states with different total photon number. We also study the separability properties of flat band quantum states and apply them to the transmission of information via multi-core fibers, where these states allow for the total passive suppression of photon crosstalk and exhibit robustness against photon losses. At the end, we propose a novel on-chip setup for the experimental preparation of localized quantum states of light for any number of photons.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

Economic Implications of an Association Agreement between the European Union and Central America

Using a global CGE model, we assess the potential macro-economic effects of a future European Union - Central American Association Agreement (EU-CAAA). Currently, many agricultural products from Central America (CA) enter duty-free to the European Union (EU); with two notable exceptions: bananas and sugar. We find that liberalizing the access to both products will bring significant gains to CA, while excluding them from the negotiations will bring no static gains. If trade facilitation mechanisms are implemented and we allow for the expected increase in FDI inflows to CA, welfare gains improve for all scenarios but are conditions on the level of EU agricultural liberalization.EU-CAAA FTA, trade policy, free trade agreement, CGE models, bananas, sugar

Collisional parton energy loss in a finite size QCD medium revisited: Off mass-shell effects

We study the collisional energy loss mechanism for particles produced off mass-shell in a finite size QCD medium. The off mass-shell effects introduced are to consider particles produced in wave packets instead of plane waves and the length scale associated to an in-medium particles' life-time. We show that these effects reduce the energy loss as compared to the case when the particles are described as freely propagating from the source. The reduction of the energy loss is stronger as this scale becomes of the order or smaller than the medium size. We discuss possible consequences of the result on the description of the energy loss process in the parton recombination scenario.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. Enlarged discussion. References added. Version to appear in Phys. Rev.