Keeneland\u27s Ted Bassett: My Life

In the December 30, 1967, edition of the weekly Thoroughbred trade publication, the Blood-Horse, was an announcement that took up one inch of space—James E. “Ted” Bassett III had been named assistant to the president of the Keeneland Association. It was sandwiched between equally short news items about a handicapping seminar at an East Coast racetrack and a California vacation trip by a horse-owning couple. Bassett’s new job, in his own words, “was not earthshaking news.” More than four decades later, Ted Bassett is one of the most respected figures within the global Thoroughbred industry. He has served as Keeneland’s president, chairman of the board, and trustee, playing a critical role in its ascendency as a premier Thoroughbred track and auction house. Bassett was also president of Breeders’ Cup Limited during its greatest period of growth and has been a key architect in the development of the Sport of Kings as we know it today. Written in collaboration with two-time Eclipse Award–winning journalist Bill Mooney, Keeneland’s Ted Bassett: My Life recounts Bassett’s extraordinary journey, including his days at Kent School and Yale University, through his U.S. Marine Corps service in the Pacific theater during World War II, and as director of the Kentucky State Police during the turbulent 1960s. He helped found the College of Justice & Safety at Eastern Kentucky University, and his continuing service to the Marine Corps has gained him the highest honors accorded to a civilian. During his forty-plus years with Keeneland, Bassett has hobnobbed with hot walkers in the track kitchen, hosted the first visit by Queen Elizabeth II to a United States track, and participated in many of the most important events in the modern history of horse racing. With self-effacing humor, characteristic charm, and candor, Bassett describes his association with historic figures such as J. Edgar Hoover and Kentucky governors Albert B. “Happy” Chandler, Edward T. “Ned” Breathitt, and John Y. Brown; and his friendships with racing personalities D. Wayne Lukas, Nick Zito, Ron McAnally, Pat Day, and Joe Hirsch. Bassett shares details about difficult corporate decisions and great racing events that only he can supply, and about the formation of Equibase, the premier data collection agency within the Thoroughbred industry. He tells about his role as an international ambassador for racing, which has made him a highly influential figure on six continents. Bassett often describes his life as a fascinating blur. That “blur” and all its unique components are brought into sharp focus in a book that is as wide-ranging as it is personal, filled with a gold mine of firsthand stories and historical details. In addition to highlighting Keeneland’s reputation as the jewel of the Thoroughbred industry, Bassett chronicles the business of racing and accomplishments of many prominent people in the horse world, and elsewhere, during the twentieth century. James E. “Ted” Bassett III continues to serve as Keeneland’s trustee emeritus, and in this capacity he chairs fund-raising drives throughout the Bluegrass region. Bill Mooney has covered racing for the New York Times, Thoroughbred Record and Blood-Horse, and is currently a contributing editor for Thoroughbred Times. Winner of the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award, presented by Castleton Lyons farm and Thoroughbred Times Perhaps only in Kentucky can one move effortlessly from serving as Commissioner of State Police to managing one of the world’s most unique race tracks and dine with the Queen of England. —Terry Birdwhistell, Associate Dean of Special Collections and Digital Programs, University of Kentucky Libraries “Bassett has been our ambassador for Thoroughbred racing around the world, and has placed his stamp on every aspect of the sport, accomplishing this with the grip of a Marine and the air of a gentleman.” --William S. Farish, former U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain and master of Lane\u27s A valuable portrait of the Sport of Kings for racing aficionados and historians. Documenting the private details that shaped Bassett’s public achievements, the autobiography offers a unique insight into the world of horse racing and the shaping of both Keeneland and an entire industry. —University of Kentucky News [The autobiography] richly details Bassett’s career in the Thoroughbred industry, at Keeneland, as president of Breeders’ Cup Ltd. and through his journeys as an ambassador for racing on six continents. —Blood Horse This is autobiography at its finest – superbly written, entertaining and engaging. —Business Lexington Because of its unique presentation, this book is a gold mine of first-hand stories and historic information not only about the racing industry, but about life in Kentucky. —Paintsville Herald There is something here for everyone who has any affinity at all for horse racing....The book is well recommended. —Bowling Green Daily News A delightful ride with a host full of humor and charm. —Yale Alumni Magazine A book that is as wide-ranging as it is personal, filled with a gold mine of firsthand stories and historical details. —ebook30.com One of those rare racing autobiographies that transcends the sport in which it is largely based. Beautifully written, with humor and endearing self-deprecation, it captured me right out of the gate and kept me riveted around the turn, down the stretch, and across the finish line. With wit, grace, and personal insight, the winning book chronicles [Bassett’s] life from school boy, Yale University graduate, and U.S. Marine, to a stint as a director of the Kentucky State Police, and finally, through his years as one of Thoroughbred racing’s best-known and respected ambassadors. —Thoroughbred Times The book chronicles [Bassett’s] life from school boy, Yale University graduate, and U.S. Marine, to a stint as director of the Kentucky State Police, and finally, through his years as one of Thoroughbred racing’s best-known and respected ambassadors. —Barbara Livingston, Lancaster Farminghttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_business/1007/thumbnail.jp

Reflect and Redefine: Deans’ Perspectives on the Positioning of IS within the Business School

Over the 12 years since the glory days of the dot com and Y2K phenomena at the turn of the last century, IS departments at many colleges and schools of business have suffered significant declines in student enrolments, elimination from core curricula, reduced faculty numbers, and overall a weakened strategic positioning within the business school. Recent AACSB faculty hiring and salary reports indicate that “CIS” is the only discipline which has seen an overall decline in faculty hiring over the past 10 years, in contrast with significant growth in all other disciplines. Many IS departments have been merged with other disciplines, or closed entirely. In contrast, however, a number of IS departments have continued to enjoy significant growth and success. This panel of five current/recent business school deans and members of the IS community will offer their perspectives on the strategic positioning of IS within the business school, and share their recommendations on what IS departments need to do to strengthen their positioning within the business school across the domains of teaching, research and relationships with the broader academic and business communities

Hats off to you, Jim!

Jim’s intellectual curiosity was an inspiration. In addition to those whose comments follow, he clearly touched the careers and lives of many others

Modelling creativity: identifying key components through a corpus-based approach

Creativity is a complex, multi-faceted concept encompassing a variety of related aspects, abilities, properties and behaviours. If we wish to study creativity scientifically, then a tractable and well-articulated model of creativity is required. Such a model would be of great value to researchers investigating the nature of creativity and in particular, those concerned with the evaluation of creative practice. This paper describes a unique approach to developing a suitable model of how creative behaviour emerges that is based on the words people use to describe the concept. Using techniques from the field of statistical natural language processing, we identify a collection of fourteen key components of creativity through an analysis of a corpus of academic papers on the topic. Words are identified which appear significantly often in connection with discussions of the concept. Using a measure of lexical similarity to help cluster these words, a number of distinct themes emerge, which collectively contribute to a comprehensive and multi-perspective model of creativity. The components provide an ontology of creativity: a set of building blocks which can be used to model creative practice in a variety of domains. The components have been employed in two case studies to evaluate the creativity of computational systems and have proven useful in articulating achievements of this work and directions for further research

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

1983-1984: Much Ado About Nothing

From left: Daniel Mooney as Don Pedro, James Pickering as Don John, and Jack Stehlin as ClaudioMuch Ado About Nothing;Grayscal

Marshal Wu (image)

Summer Issuehttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61093/1/3202.pd

Modelling human impacts on the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audaz fleayi)

The wedge-tailed eagle is Australia's largest bird of prey and one of the largest eagles in the world. Aquila audax fleayi is an endemic Tasmanian subspecies isolated for 10,000 years from the nominate subspecies on the Australian mainland. The Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle is classified nationally and at a State level as endangered due to its small number of breeding pairs, low breeding success and high rate of mortality from unnatural causes. The subspecies experiences mortality throughout its range from shooting, poisoning, trapping, road accidents, electrocutions and collisions with wind turbines, aircraft, fences and overhead wires, which we term 'un-natural mortality'. A portion of the subspecies' range is managed for timber production, which can lead to disturbance of nest sites and the loss of nest trees. We use a model of the eagle population from the Bass District in northeast Tasmania to explore the relative importance of different sources of mortality and nesting habitat loss, and the potential for mitigating impacts associated with unnatural mortality, disturbance, nesting habitat loss and human access to forests. We create a habitat map including suitable nest sites and link it to a dynamic landscape population model based on life history traits and disturbance responses. Using the program RAMAS-Landscape, we model alternative forest management scenarios, ranging from no timber harvesting and a natural wildfire regime, to scenarios prescribing native forest harvesting and regeneration and different levels of conversion of native forest to plantation under the same natural wildfire regime