The Bottom Line: Accounting for Revenues and Expenditures in Intercollegiate Athletics

This paper examines the profitability of Division I athletic programs at colleges and universities in the United States under a variety of accounting definitions of profit. The data identify several broad themes. First, a majority of athletic departments rely heavily on direct and indirect subsidization of their programs by the student body, the institution itself, and state governments in order to balance their books. Without such funding, less than a third of BCS athletic departments and no non-BCS departments are in the black. Second, athletic programs rely heavily on contributions to balance their books. Donations to athletic departments may serve as a substitute for donations to the rest of the university, lowering giving to other programs. Third, football and men’s basketball programs are generally highly profitable at BCS schools, but below this top tier, fewer than 10% of football programs and 15% of men’s basketball programs show a profit by any reasonable accounting measures.Athletics, higher education, sports

The Bottom Line: Accounting for Revenues and Expenditures in Intercollegiate Athletics

This paper examines the profitability of Division I athletic programs at colleges and universities in the United States under a variety of accounting definitions of profit. The data identify several broad themes. First, a majority of athletic departments rely heavily on direct and indirect subsidization of their programs by the student body, the institution itself, and state governments in order to balance their books. Without such funding, less than a third of BCS athletic departments and no non-BCS departments are in the black. Second, athletic programs rely heavily on contributions to balance their books. Donations to athletic departments may serve as a substitute for donations to the rest of the university, lowering giving to other programs. Third, football and men’s basketball programs are generally highly profitable at BCS schools, but below this top tier, fewer than 10% of football programs and 15% of men’s basketball programs show a profit by any reasonable accounting measures.Athletics, higher education, sports

Projections onto translation—Invariant subspaces of L1(G)

AbstractLet G be a locally compact abelian group. A translation-invariant subspace in L1(G) may or may not be complemented depending on the structure of its hull in Ĝ. Techniques for deciding this complementation problem in a variety of situations are developed and illustrated with examples. A complete characterization is obtained for those ideals with a discrete hull

Spectroscopy of High-Redshift Supernovae from the ESSENCE Project: The First Four Years

We present the results of spectroscopic observations from the ESSENCE high-redshift supernova (SN) survey during its first four years of operation. This sample includes spectra of all SNe Ia whose light curves were presented by Miknaitis et al. (2007) and used in the cosmological analyses of Davis et al. (2007) and Wood-Vasey et al. (2007). The sample represents 273 hours of spectroscopic observations with 6.5 - 10-m-class telescopes of objects detected and selected for spectroscopy by the ESSENCE team. We present 174 spectra of 156 objects. Combining this sample with that of Matheson et al. (2005), we have a total sample of 329 spectra of 274 objects. From this, we are able to spectroscopically classify 118 Type Ia SNe. As the survey has matured, the efficiency of classifying SNe Ia has remained constant while we have observed both higher-redshift SNe Ia and SNe Ia farther from maximum brightness. Examining the subsample of SNe Ia with host-galaxy redshifts shows that redshifts derived from only the SN Ia spectra are consistent with redshifts found from host-galaxy spectra. Moreover, the phases derived from only the SN Ia spectra are consistent with those derived from light-curve fits. By comparing our spectra to local templates, we find that the rate of objects similar to the overluminous SN 1991T and the underluminous SN 1991bg in our sample are consistent with that of the local sample. We do note, however, that we detect no object spectroscopically or photometrically similar to SN 1991bg. Although systematic effects could reduce the high-redshift rate we expect based on the low-redshift surveys, it is possible that SN 1991bg-like SNe Ia are less prevalent at high redshift.Comment: 21 pages, 17 figures, accepted to A

Reducing drug related deaths : a pre-implementation assessment of knowledge,barriers and enablers for naloxone distribution through general practice

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Exploring the Structure of Distant Galaxies with Adaptive Optics on the Keck-II Telescope

We report on the first observation of cosmologically distant field galaxies with an high order Adaptive Optics (AO) system on an 8-10 meter class telescope. Two galaxies were observed at 1.6 microns at an angular resolution as high as 50 milliarcsec using the AO system on the Keck-II telescope. Radial profiles of both objects are consistent with those of local spiral galaxies and are decomposed into a classic exponential disk and a central bulge. A star-forming cluster or companion galaxy as well as a compact core are detected in one of the galaxies at a redshift of 0.37+/-0.05. We discuss possible explanations for the core including a small bulge, a nuclear starburst, or an active nucleus. The same galaxy shows a peak disk surface brightness that is brighter than local disks of comparable size. These observations demonstrate the power of AO to reveal details of the morphology of distant faint galaxies and to explore galaxy evolution.Comment: 5 pages, Latex, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in P.A.S.

Photometry and spectroscopy of faint candidate spectrophotometric standard DA white dwarfs

We present precise photometry and spectroscopy for 23 candidate spectrophotometric standard white dwarfs. The selected stars are distributed in the Northern hemisphere and around the celestial equators and are all fainter than r ~ 16.5 mag. This network of stars, when established as standards, together with the three Hubble Space Telescope primary CALSPEC white dwarfs, will provide a set of spectrophotometric standards to directly calibrate data products to better than 1%. These new faint standard white dwarfs will have enough signal-to-noise ratio in future deep photometric surveys and facilities to be measured accurately while still avoiding saturation in such surveys. They will also fall within the dynamic range of large telescopes and their instruments for the foreseeable future. This paper discusses the provenance of the observational data for our candidate standard stars. The comparison with models, reconciliation with reddening, and the consequent derivation of the full spectral energy density distributions for each of them is reserved for a subsequent paper.Comment: 31 pages, 17 figures, 10 tables, ApJ in press (accepted on December 23rd, 2018

Protein folding rates correlate with heterogeneity of folding mechanism

By observing trends in the folding kinetics of experimental 2-state proteins at their transition midpoints, and by observing trends in the barrier heights of numerous simulations of coarse grained, C-alpha model, Go proteins, we show that folding rates correlate with the degree of heterogeneity in the formation of native contacts. Statistically significant correlations are observed between folding rates and measures of heterogeneity inherent in the native topology, as well as between rates and the variance in the distribution of either experimentally measured or simulated phi-values.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl