Agility Measures Related to Game Performance of NCAA Baseball Pitchers

Like most kinetic chains in athletic performance, the baseball pitching motion begins with the muscles of the legs and continues progressively through the torso, shoulders, and arms. Similarities are noted between the baseball pitching motion and the kinetic chain employed in agility tests that involve acceleration, deceleration, and change of direction measures of agility. Purpose: The purpose of this investigation was to determine pre-season agility in NCAA pitchers and to relate these measures to regular season pitching performance. Methods: NCAA Division II pitchers (n=10, age 20.2 ± 1.9 yrs., weight 83.8 ± 10.3 kg, height 1.85 ± 0.48 m) volunteered as study subjects. A previously described laser-timed 60-yd shuttle run (“JJ Shuttle”) provided average speeds for four contiguous agility segments (S1, S2, S3, and S4 of 10, 10, 20, and 20 yds., respectively), as well as Total Shuttle Run (TSR). Statistical measures obtained from regular season games (n=48), including Runs (R), Hits (H), Earned Runs (ER), Base-on-Balls (BB), and Strikeouts (SO), each normalized for innings pitched, provided evidence of game pitching performance. Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient determined the relationship of average agility speeds to pitching performance. Results: Analysis identified significant correlations (p\u3c.05) between S1, S2, and TSR and normalized SO (r=0.77, r=0.73, and r=0.87, respectively); S3 and S4 were insignificant (r=0.42 and r=0.59, respectively). Additionally, a significant correlation (p\u3c.05) was identified between S3 and BB (r=0.67). Conclusion: Results of this study suggest that better agility may lead to selected improvements in game performance in NCAA Division II baseball pitchers

HardBound: Architectural Support for Spatial Safety of the C Programming Language

The C programming language is at least as well known for its absence of spatial memory safety guarantees (i.e., lack of bounds checking) as it is for its high performance. C\u27s unchecked pointer arithmetic and array indexing allow simple programming mistakes to lead to erroneous executions, silent data corruption, and security vulnerabilities. Many prior proposals have tackled enforcing spatial safety in C programs by checking pointer and array accesses. However, existing software-only proposals have significant drawbacks that may prevent wide adoption, including: unacceptably high runtime overheads, lack of completeness, incompatible pointer representations, or need for non-trivial changes to existing C source code and compiler infrastructure. Inspired by the promise of these software-only approaches, this paper proposes a hardware bounded pointer architectural primitive that supports cooperative hardware/software enforcement of spatial memory safety for C programs. This bounded pointer is a new hardware primitive datatype for pointers that leaves the standard C pointer representation intact, but augments it with bounds information maintained separately and invisibly by the hardware. The bounds are initialized by the software, and they are then propagated and enforced transparently by the hardware, which automatically checks a pointer\u27s bounds before it is dereferenced. One mode of use requires instrumenting only malloc, which enables enforcement of per-allocation spatial safety for heap-allocated objects for existing binaries. When combined with simple intra-procedural compiler instrumentation, hardware bounded pointers enable a low-overhead approach for enforcing complete spatial memory safety in unmodified C programs

Research Notes : Inheritance of fatty acid composition in soybean seed oil

While it has been demonstrated that the fatty acid composition of soybean oil can be changed by recurrent selection (Wilson et al., 1981), there is little information about the genetic control of oil biosynthesis in soybean seeds. In some species, such as rape (Downey and Harvey, 1963), safflower (Yermanos et al., 1967), and flax (Yermanos and Knowles, 1962), the male parent has a significant effect on the fatty acid composition of oil from F1 hybrid seeds. In corn (Jellum, 1966) and soybeans (Brim et al., 1968), the male parent has almost no effect on oil composition of F1 hybrid seeds

Research Notes : Seed set on G. falcata and a proposal to use ms2 male-sterility in its hybridization with G. max

Seed set: Limited seed supply has severely curtailed research on G. falcata. Seed supply is limited primarily because G. falcata sets few seed in the greenhouse, even though flower production is rather profuse. We noticed this past summer that seed set is quite high when we grow this species out-of-doors near a honeybee hive