Marketing Stadiums as Event Venues: Modified Balanced Scorecard (mBSC) Evaluation of Minor League Baseball Websites as an eMarketing Tool

Maximizing and gaining access to stadium related revenue streams, including non-game day social and corporate event rentals, is a critical factor for the financial viability of professional sports teams. Minor League Baseball (MiLB) teams and Independent baseball league (Indy) teams are no exception and franchise owners strive to maximize ancillary business opportunities, including stadium usage year-round. Currently, teams are marketing their venues through various mediums, including their websites. Considering the implications of eMarketing on MiLB and Indy teams’ ability to target and solicit social and corporate event customers it is critical to evaluate current eMarketing efforts. This study employs the Modified Balanced Scorecard (mBSC) approach to website evaluation and aims to a) evaluate the contents and design of minor league (MiLB and Indy) baseball teams’ websites as a marketing tool for their stadiums and b) to identify trends of minor league baseball stadium use as social and corporate event venues. Research findings provide researchers and industry professionals with empirical evidence of the current positioning of minor league baseball stadiums as social and corporate event venues. The authors also discuss how teams can improve their eMarketing strategy to better engage social and corporate event clients

Geodatabase Development to Support Hyperspectral Imagery Exploitation

Geodatabase development for coastal studies conducted by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is essential to support the exploitation of hyperspectral imagery (HSI). NRL has found that the remote sensing and mapping science community benefits from coastal classifications that group coastal types based on similar features. Selected features in project geodatabases relate to significant biological and physical forces that shape the coast. The project geodatabases help researchers understand factors that are necessary for imagery post processing, especially those features having a high degree of temporal and spatial variability. NRL project geodatabases include a hierarchy of environmental factors that extend from shallow water bottom types and beach composition to inland soil and vegetation characteristics. These geodatabases developed by NRL allow researchers to compare features among coast types. The project geodatabases may also be used to enhance littoral data archives that are sparse. This paper highlights geodatabase development for recent remote sensing experiments in barrier island, coral, and mangrove coast types

Very Shallow Water Bathymetry Retrieval from Hyperspectral Imagery at the Virginia Coast Reserve (VCR\u2707) Multi-Sensor Campaign

A number of institutions, including the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), have developed look up tables for remote retrieval of bathymetry and in-water optical properties from hyperspectral imagery (HSI) [6]. For bathymetry retrieval, the lower limit is the very shallow water case (here defined as \u3c 2m), a depth zone which is not well resolved by many existing bathymetric LIDAR sensors, such as SHOALS [4]. The ability to rapidly model these shallow water depths from HSI directly has potential benefits for combined HSI/LIDAR systems such as the Compact Hydrographic Airborne Rapid Total Survey (CHARTS) [10]. In this study, we focused on the validation of a near infra-red feature, corresponding to a local minimum in absorption (and therefore a local peak in reflectance), which can be correlated directly to bathymetry with a high degree of confidence. Compared to other VNIR wavelengths, this particular near-IR feature corresponds to a peak in the correlation with depth in this very shallow water regime, and this is a spectral range where reflectance depends primarily on water depth (water absorption) and bottom type, with suspended constituents playing a secondary role

Whole exome sequencing in patients with Williams-Beuren syndrome followed by disease modeling in mice points to four novel pathways that may modify stenosis risk

Supravalvular aortic stenosis (SVAS) is a narrowing of the aorta caused by elastin (ELN) haploinsufficiency. SVAS severity varies among patients with Williams-Beuren syndrome (WBS), a rare disorder that removes one copy of ELN and 25-27 other genes. Twenty percent of children with WBS require one or more invasive and often risky procedures to correct the defect while 30% have no appreciable stenosis, despite sharing the same basic genetic lesion. There is no known medical therapy. Consequently, identifying genes that modify SVAS offers the potential for novel modifier-based therapeutics. To improve statistical power in our rare-disease cohort (N = 104 exomes), we utilized extreme-phenotype cohorting, functional variant filtration and pathway-based analysis. Gene set enrichment analysis of exome-wide association data identified increased adaptive immune system variant burden among genes associated with SVAS severity. Additional enrichment, using only potentially pathogenic variants known to differ in frequency between the extreme phenotype subsets, identified significant association of SVAS severity with not only immune pathway genes, but also genes involved with the extracellular matrix, G protein-coupled receptor signaling and lipid metabolism using both SKAT-O and RQTest. Complementary studies in Eln+/-; Rag1-/- mice, which lack a functional adaptive immune system, showed improvement in cardiovascular features of ELN insufficiency. Similarly, studies in mixed background Eln+/- mice confirmed that variations in genes that increase elastic fiber deposition also had positive impact on aortic caliber. By using tools to improve statistical power in combination with orthogonal analyses in mice, we detected four main pathways that contribute to SVAS risk

Linking goniometer measurements to hyperspectral and multi-sensor imagery for retrieval of beach properties and coastal characterization

In June 2011, a multi-sensor airborne remote sensing campaign was flown at the Virginia Coast Reserve Long Term Ecological Research site with coordinated ground and water calibration and validation (cal/val) measurements. Remote sensing imagery acquired during the ten day exercise included hyperspectral imagery (CASI-1500), topographic LiDAR, and thermal infra-red imagery, all simultaneously from the same aircraft. Airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data acquisition for a smaller subset of sites occurred in September 2011 (VCR\u2711). Focus areas for VCR\u2711 were properties of beaches and tidal flats and barrier island vegetation and, in the water column, shallow water bathymetry. On land, cal/val emphasized tidal flat and beach grain size distributions, density, moisture content, and other geotechnical properties such as shear and bearing strength (dynamic deflection modulus), which were related to hyperspectral BRDF measurements taken with the new NRL Goniometer for Outdoor Portable Hyperspectral Earth Reflectance (GOPHER). This builds on our earlier work at this site in 2007 related to beach properties and shallow water bathymetry. A priority for VCR\u2711 was to collect and model relationships between hyperspectral imagery, acquired from the aircraft at a variety of different phase angles, and geotechnical properties of beaches and tidal flats. One aspect of this effort was a demonstration that sand density differences are observable and consistent in reflectance spectra from GOPHER data, in CASI hyperspectral imagery, as well as in hyperspectral goniometer measurements conducted in our laboratory after VCR\u2711

Planet Hunters VII. Discovery of a New Low-Mass, Low-Density Planet (PH3 c) Orbiting Kepler-289 with Mass Measurements of Two Additional Planets (PH3 b and d)

We report the discovery of one newly confirmed planet ($P=66.06$ days, $R_{\rm{P}}=2.68\pm0.17R_\oplus$) and mass determinations of two previously validated Kepler planets, Kepler-289 b ($P=34.55$ days, $R_{\rm{P}}=2.15\pm0.10R_\oplus$) and Kepler-289-c ($P=125.85$ days, $R_{\rm{P}}=11.59\pm0.10R_\oplus$), through their transit timing variations (TTVs). We also exclude the possibility that these three planets reside in a $1:2:4$ Laplace resonance. The outer planet has very deep ($\sim1.3$), high signal-to-noise transits, which puts extremely tight constraints on its host star's stellar properties via Kepler's Third Law. The star PH3 is a young ($\sim1$ Gyr as determined by isochrones and gyrochronology), Sun-like star with $M_*=1.08\pm0.02M_\odot$, $R_*=1.00\pm0.02R_\odot$, and $T_{\rm{eff}}=5990\pm38$ K. The middle planet's large TTV amplitude ($\sim5$ hours) resulted either in non-detections or inaccurate detections in previous searches. A strong chopping signal, a shorter period sinusoid in the TTVs, allows us to break the mass-eccentricity degeneracy and uniquely determine the masses of the inner, middle, and outer planets to be $M=7.3\pm6.8M_\oplus$, $4.0\pm0.9M_\oplus$, and $M=132\pm17M_\oplus$, which we designate PH3 b, c, and d, respectively. Furthermore, the middle planet, PH3 c, has a relatively low density, $\rho=1.2\pm0.3$ g/cm$^3$ for a planet of its mass, requiring a substantial H/He atmosphere of $2.1^{+0.8}_{-0.3}$ by mass, and joins a growing population of low-mass, low-density planets.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables, accepted into Ap

Patterns of genomic testing for epithelial ovarian cancer across a large community-based health care network- a real world experience

Background: NCCN guidelines recommend germline and somatic tumor testing for all women with invasive epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC). Despite this recommendation, testing rates remain low and an optimal strategy to achieve the recommended testing has not been defined. Purpose: We elected to review the patterns of germline and somatic tumor testing for patients with EOC across a large health care network to identify barriers to testing. Methods: Clinical, pathologic, demographic and genomic testing (GT) information including involvement of a genetic counselor, specific test(s) ordered, test vendor, test turn-around time, and test results were obtained from the diverse dataset within the Providence St. Joseph Health (PSJH) Electronic Medical Records and the system-wide cancer registry data mart. PSJH is the third largest non-profit health care system in the US and treats roughly 43,000 cancer patients annually across a 7 state region. Patients with a diagnosis of EOC (ICD C56.x) who had at least a single in-person visit to a PSJH oncology department or a PSJH oncologist for EOC during the period between January 2015 and January 2020 were identified. GT data was manually abstracted, where structured data was un-available; data were analyzed in aggregate and to evaluate for trends over time in patterns of testing. Results: Within this EOC cohort (n=3,007), 1,1027 (34%) had GT results available in the EMR.  Germline testing (GMT) was the initial testing approach in 728 (71%) of women tested, and 210 (29%) of the 728 women who had GMT first went on to have tumor tissue testing (TTT). Of the 300 patients who had TTT first, 79 (26%) went on to have GMT. A BRCA1/2 mutation was identified in 153 (14.9%) patients on GMT and/or TTT. Mutation results were discordant in 7 of 289 (2.4%) who had both GMT and TTT. GT rates increased over time but remained low (46% in 2019). Involvement of a genetic counselor (GC) increased uptake of GT, however, only 62% of patients completed recommended GC referral. GT was ordered from 17 different vendors (12 GMT; 11 TTT). Median time from initial diagnosis to GT order date decreased over time and was 8 weeks and 12 weeks in 2019 for GMT and TTT, respectively. The median time interval between GMT and TTT in patients who had both tests decreased from 130 weeks in 2015 to 6 weeks in 2019. Despite improvement in median time to testing, multiple outliers were observed. Conclusion: The uptake of GT for EOC patients has increased over time but remains low. There is substantial heterogeneity in testing approach including the timing, sequencing, and ordering of tests. Genetic counseling for patients with EOC increases uptake of testing. Significance: These findings highlight the challenges of developing a standardized testing approach across a diverse health care system. There is a need to develop a comprehensive network wide testing strategy that can be effective in multiple settings