When Can the Baseball Writers For the Hall of Fame Consider Cheating Through PED Use, Or Not?

When the 2013 MLB Hall of Fame Ballot was released this past November, the heated discussion began about which controversial candidates, if any at all, would be inducted into Cooperstown (HOF). while isolated athletes have come up in previous years, this year represents a first real tension between the modern ear of baseball - the steroid era - and traditional standards for admission into the Hall. The 537 baseball writers are, and should be, entrusted to weigh cheating and use of PEDs against the HOF\u27s criteria of character, sportsmanship and upholding the integrity of the game. These writers each will struggle, however, with a preliminary question that falls outside of their expertise: under which circumstances may a HOF voter consider, at all, a candidate\u27s connection to cheating and performance-enhancing drugs

When Can the Baseball Writers For the Hall of Fame Consider Cheating Through PED Use, Or Not?

When the 2013 MLB Hall of Fame Ballot was released this past November, the heated discussion began about which controversial candidates, if any at all, would be inducted into Cooperstown (HOF). while isolated athletes have come up in previous years, this year represents a first real tension between the modern ear of baseball - the steroid era - and traditional standards for admission into the Hall. The 537 baseball writers are, and should be, entrusted to weigh cheating and use of PEDs against the HOF\u27s criteria of character, sportsmanship and upholding the integrity of the game. These writers each will struggle, however, with a preliminary question that falls outside of their expertise: under which circumstances may a HOF voter consider, at all, a candidate\u27s connection to cheating and performance-enhancing drugs

Making the most of Information from Environmental Monitoring Systems

2010 S.C. Water Resources Conferences - Science and Policy Challenges for a Sustainable Futur

Vibration Isolation Design for the Micro-X Rocket Payload

Micro-X is a NASA-funded, sounding rocket-borne X-ray imaging spectrometer that will allow high precision measurements of velocity structure, ionization state and elemental composition of extended astrophysical systems. One of the biggest challenges in payload design is to maintain the temperature of the detectors during launch. There are several vibration damping stages to prevent energy transmission from the rocket skin to the detector stage, which causes heating during launch. Each stage should be more rigid than the outer stages to achieve vibrational isolation. We describe a major design effort to tune the resonance frequencies of these vibration isolation stages to reduce heating problems prior to the projected launch in the summer of 2014.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, LTD15 Conference Proceeding

Study of the Science, Economics, and Perceptions Related to Implementation of Traditional and Innovative Stormwater Best Management Practices in Coastal South Carolina

2008 S.C. Water Resources Conference - Addressing Water Challenges Facing the State and Regio

Stash in a Flash

Encryption is a useful tool to protect data confidentiality. Yet it is still challenging to hide the very presence of encrypted, secret data from a powerful adversary. This paper presents a new technique to hide data in flash by manipulating the voltage level of pseudo-randomlyselected flash cells to encode two bits (rather than one) in the cell. In this model, we have one “public” bit interpreted using an SLC-style encoding, and extract a private bit using an MLC-style encoding. The locations of cells that encode hidden data is based on a secret key known only to the hiding user. Intuitively, this technique requires that the voltage level in a cell encoding data must be (1) not statistically distinguishable from a cell only storing public data, and (2) the user must be able to reliably read the hidden data from this cell. Our key insight is that there is a wide enough variation in the range of voltage levels in a typical flash device to obscure the presence of fine-grained changes to a small fraction of the cells, and that the variation is wide enough to support reliably re-reading hidden data. We demonstrate that our hidden data and underlying voltage manipulations go undetected by support vector machine based supervised learning which performs similarly to a random guess. The error rates of our scheme are low enough that the data is recoverable months after being stored. Compared to prior work, our technique provides 24x and 50x higher encoding and decoding throughput and doubles the capacity, while being 37x more power efficient

The Long-Term Outcomes after Radical Prostatectomy of Patients with Pathologic Gleason 8–10 Disease

Background. We explored the long-term clinical outcomes including metastases-free survival and prostate cancer-specific survival (PCSS) in patients with pathologic Gleason 8–10 disease after radical prostatectomy (RP). Methods. We report on 91 patients with PCSS data with a median followup of 8.2 years after RP performed between 1988 and 1997. Cox regression and Kaplan-Meier analysis were used to evaluate year of surgery, pathologic stage, and surgical margin status as predictors of PCSM. Results. Median age was 65 years (IQR: 61–9), and median PSA was 9.7 ng/ml (IQR: 6.1–13.4). Of all patients, 62 (68.9%) had stage T3 disease or higher, and 48 (52.7%) had a positive surgical margin. On multivariate analysis, none of the predictors were statistically significant. Of all patients, the predicted 10-year BCR-free survival, mets-free survival, and PCSS were 59% (CI: 53%–65%), 88% (CI: 84%–92%), and 94% (CI: 91%–97%), respectively. Conclusions. We have demonstrated that cancer control is durable even 10 years after RP in those with pathologic Gleason 8–10 disease. Although 40% will succumb to BCR, only 6% of patients died of their disease. These results support the use of RP for patients with high-risk localized prostate cancer

Physical playlist:bringing back the mix-tape

To those of a certain age the concept of the mix-tape holds fond memories, and generally not of the musical content they contained, but rather the emotional and physical connection they represented with either its creator or recipient. They provided an embodiment of the time and effort it its creation and thus presented the same qualities of other handmade gifts. The advent of digital content, and particularly the mp3, for storage and streaming meant that audio content could be shared more quickly and easily than ever before. However, the creation of a digital playlist does not embody the same qualities present in a mix-tape and thus has not gained the same cultural significance. This research re-imagines the mix-tape for digital content as physical customizable jewellery that can once again embody values not generally attributed to digital content. Through a discussion of the design process and the results of preliminary evaluation, the potential benefits on the user experience of sharing digital content through physical objects have been highlighted

Directional persistence & the optimality of run-and-tumble chemotaxis

E. coli does chemotaxis by performing a biased random walk composed of alternating periods of swimming (runs) and reorientations (tumbles). Tumbles are typically modelled as complete directional randomisations but it is known that in wild type E. coli, successive run directions are actually weakly correlated, with a mean directional difference of not, vert, similar63°. We recently presented a model of the evolution of chemotactic swimming strategies in bacteria which is able to quantitatively reproduce the emergence of this correlation. The agreement between model and experiments suggests that directional persistence may serve some function, a hypothesis supported by the results of an earlier model. Here we investigate the effect of persistence on chemotactic efficiency, using a spatial Monte Carlo model of bacterial swimming in a gradient, combined with simulations of natural selection based on chemotactic efficiency. A direct search of the parameter space reveals two attractant gradient regimes, (a) a low-gradient regime, in which efficiency is unaffected by directional persistence and (b) a high-gradient regime, in which persistence can improve chemotactic efficiency. The value of the persistence parameter that maximises this effect corresponds very closely with the value observed experimentally. This result is matched by independent simulations of the evolution of directional memory in a population of model bacteria, which also predict the emergence of persistence in high-gradient conditions. The relationship between optimality and persistence in different environments may reflect a universal property of random-walk foraging algorithms, which must strike a compromise between two competing aims: exploration and exploitation. We also present a new graphical way to generally illustrate the evolution of a particular trait in a population, in terms of variations in an evolvable parameter