Women\u27s Professional Sports: A Case Study on Practices that Could Increase Their Profitability

Women’s professional sports leagues have often been considered a risky business endeavor. Critics cite low attendance, lack of sponsorships, lack of media rights deals, and numerous other reasons for why women’s professional sports leagues are not profitable. In analyzing the current landscape of women’s professional sport leagues, this paper uses a case study approach to develop a strategy that will highlight lessons learned from past women’s professional sports leagues, current professional sports leagues, sponsorship agreements, fans, social, digital, and mobile marketing strategies, and management practices to show how the business of women’s sports could be made into a more profitable endeavor

Re-thinking livelihood security: Why addressing the democratic deficit in economic policy-making opens up new pathways to prosperity

Citizen-led research in east London identifies livelihood security as a critical determinant of prosperity for local communities (Moore and Woodcraft, 2019; Woodcraft and Anderson, 2019). Livelihood security depends on more than income and work. Households draw on a range of assets including: secure income and good quality work; affordable, secure and good quality housing; access to key public services (healthcare, education, care, transport, digital communication); and inclusion in the social and economic life of the city. These assets display complex inter-dependencies, intersect with class, race, gender and other identities in multiple ways, and cut across sectors and policy domains that are commonly siloed in economic decision-making. In this paper, we conceptualise these assets as an ‘infrastructure’ for secure livelihoods to draw attention to their over-lapping nature and to demonstrate how knowledge based on lived experience generates fundamentally different ways of understanding the economy. We argue there is a democratic deficit in economic policy-making that must be addressed to better account for context-specific interactions between macro and micro-economic factors and generate more effective policy-making. Taking inclusive growth policies as a case in point, we explore how an expanded concept of ‘inclusion’ that incorporates participatory research, problem framing and policy development opens-up new spaces for action on place-based prosperity

DNA transfer: The role of temperature and drying time

It has previously been shown, and reconfirmed here, that biological material on a substrate will transfer readily upon contact with another substrate when wet but hardly when dry. There is however a paucity of data regarding the speed at which body fluids dry and how this may affect its transfer upon contact. Here we conduct transfer experiments at 4 �C, 22 �C and 40 �C at multiple time points during the drying process. The speed at which blood dries is dependent on the temperature, with the drying process complete within 15–60 min. The percentage of deposited DNA transferred upon contact follows an exponential pattern of decline from soon after deposition, decreasing until the sample is dry. There are no differences in transfer rates upon contact among the different temperature conditions within the first 5 min or after 60 min since deposit, but significant variation occurs between these time points. When considering the likelihood of a proposed scenario that incorporates one or more contact situations it is important to consider the timing of the potential transfer event(s) relative to when the biological sample in question was initially deposited. The results of this study will assist the interpretation and evaluation of alternative scenarios involving transfer of biological substances

Preoperative systemic inflammation predicts postoperative infectious complications in patients undergoing curative resection for colorectal cancer

The presence of systemic inflammation before surgery, as evidenced by the glasgow prognostic score (mGPS), predicts poor long-term survival in colorectal cancer. The aim was to examine the relationship between the preoperative mGPS and the development of postoperative complications in patients undergoing potentially curative resection for colorectal cancer. Patients (n=455) who underwent potentially curative resections between 2003 and 2007 were assessed consecutively, and details were recorded in a database. The majority of patients presented for elective surgery (85%) were over the age of 65 years (70%), were male (58%), were deprived (53%), and had TNM stage I/II disease (61%), had preoperative haemoglobin (56%), white cell count (87%) and mGPS 0 (58%) in the normal range. After surgery, 86 (19%) patients developed a postoperative complication; 70 (81%) of which were infectious complications. On multivariate analysis, peritoneal soiling (P<0.01), elevated preoperative white cell count (P<0.05) and mGPS (P<0.01) were independently associated with increased risk of developing a postoperative infection. In elective patients, only the mGPS (OR=1.75, 95% CI=1.17-2.63, P=0.007) was significantly associated with increased risk of developing a postoperative infection. Preoperative elevated mGPS predicts increased postoperative infectious complications in patients undergoing potentially curative resection for colorectal cancer

Relationship between emergency presentation, systemic inflammatory response, and cancer-specific survival in patients undergoing potentially curative surgery for colon cancer

Background Emergency presentation is recognized to be associated with poorer cancer-specific survival following curative resection for colorectal cancer. The present study examined the hypothesis that an enhanced systemic inflammatory response, prior to surgery, might explain the impact of emergency presentation on survival. Methods In all, 188 patients undergoing potentially curative resection for colorectal cancer were studied. Of these, 55 (29%) presented as emergencies. The systemic inflammatory response was assessed using the Glasgow Prognostic Score (mGPS), which is the combination of an elevated C-reactive protein (>10 mg/L) and hypoalbuminemia (<35 g/L). Results In the emergency group, tumor stage was greater (P < 0.01), more patients received adjuvant therapy (P < 0.01) more patients had an elevated mGPS (P < 0.01), and more patients died of their disease (P < 0.05). The minimum follow-up was 12 months; the median follow-up of the survivors was 48 months. Emergency presentation was associated with poorer 3-year cancer-specific survival in those patients aged 65 to 74 years (P < 0.01), in both males and females (P < 0.05), in the deprived (P < 0.01), in patients with tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stage II disease (P < 0.01), in those who received no adjuvant therapy (P < 0.01), and in the mGPS 0 and 1 groups (P < 0.05) groups. On multivariate survival analysis of patients undergoing potentially curative surgery for TNM stage II colon cancer, emergency presentation (P < 0.05) and mGPS (P < 0.05) were independently associated with cancer-specific survival. Conclusions These results suggest that emergency presentation and the presence of systemic inflammatory response prior to surgery are linked and account for poorer cancer-specific survival in patients undergoing potentially curative surgery for colon cancer. Both emergency presentation and an elevated mGPS should be taken into account when assessing the likely outcome of these patients

Gonadotropin-releasing hormone signaling: An information theoretic approach

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record.Gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) is a peptide hormone that mediates central control of reproduction, acting via G-protein coupled receptors that are primarily Gq coupled and mediate GnRH effects on the synthesis and secretion of luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone. A great deal is known about the GnRH receptor signaling network but GnRH is secreted in short pulses and much less is known about how gonadotropes decode this pulsatile signal. Similarly, single cell measures reveal considerable cell-cell heterogeneity in responses to GnRH but the impact of this variability on signaling is largely unknown. Ordinary differential equation-based mathematical models have been used to explore the decoding of pulse dynamics and information theory-derived statistical measures are increasingly used to address the influence of cell-cell variability on the amount of information transferred by signaling pathways. Here, we describe both approaches for GnRH signaling, with emphasis on novel insights gained from the information theoretic approach and on the fundamental question of why GnRH is secreted in pulses.This work was funded Project Grants from MRC (93447) and the BBSRC (J014699). KTA and MV gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the EPSRC via grant EP/N014391/1 and an MRC Biomedical Informatics Fellowship (MR/K021826/1), respectively

Summary of Scale-Model Thrust-Reverser Investigation

An investigation was undertaken to determine the characteristics of several basic types of thrust-reverser. Models of three types, target, tailpipe cascade, and ring cascade, were tested with unheated air. The effects of design variables on reverse-thrust performance, reversed-flow boundaries, and thrust modulation characteristics were determined

The WHO-DAS II: Psychometric Properties in the Measurement of Functional Health Status in Adults With Acquired Hearing Loss

The World Health Organization\u27s (WHO) Disability Assessment Scale II (WHO-DAS II) is a generic health-status instrument firmly grounded in the WHO\u27s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (WHO-ICF). As such, it assesses functioning for six domains: communication, mobility, self-care, interpersonal, life activities, and participation. Domain scores aggregate to a total score. Because the WHO-DAS II contains questions relevant to hearing and communication, it has good face validity for use as an outcome measure for audiologic intervention. The purpose of the present study was to determine the psychometric properties of the WHO-DAS II on a sample of individuals with adult-onset hearing loss, including convergent validity, internal consistency, and test-retest stability. Convergent validity was established by examining correlations between the WHO-DAS II (domain and total scores) and the Abbreviated Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit (APHAB) and the Hearing Aid Handicap for the Elderly (HHIE), two disease-specific measures, as well as with the Short Form-36 for veterans (SF-36V), a second generic measure. Data on all four measures were collected from 380 older individuals with adult-onset hearing loss who were not hearing aid users. The results of the convergent validity analysis revealed that the WHO-DAS II communication domain score was moderately and significantly correlated with scores on the APHAB and the HHIE. WHO-DAS II interpersonal and participation domain scores and the total scores were also moderately and significantly correlated with HHIE scores. These findings support the validity of using the WHO-DAS II for assessing activity limitations and participation restrictions of adult-onset hearing loss. Several WHO-DAS II domain scores and the total score were also significantly and moderately-markedly correlated with scores from the SF-36V. These findings support the validity of the WHO-DAS II as a generic health-status instrument. Internal consistency reliability for all the domain scores was adequate for all but the interpersonal domain. Test-retest stability for all the domain scores was adequate. Critical difference values were calculated for use in clinical application of the WHO-DAS II. From these findings, we concluded that the WHO-DAS II communication, participation, and total scores can be used to examine the effects of adult-onset hearing loss on functional health status. Further work examining the utility of the WHO-DAS II as an outcome measure for hearing aid intervention is warranted