Moving on up: The Rooney rule and minority hiring in the NFL

Abstract Detecting and quantifying racial discrimination in the labor market is difficult. The sports industry offers a wealth of data and specific hiring practices which mitigates this difficulty. The Rooney Rule requires National Football League teams to interview at least one minority candidate when hiring a head coach. We examine a unique data set of high-level assistant coaches (offensive and defensive coordinators) from the beginning of the 1970 season through the beginning of the 2009 season to determine whether race is a factor in NFL teams' decisions to promote these assistants to head coach. Using logit and hazard models that control for age, experience and performance, we conclude that conditional on a coach reaching coordinator status, there is no evidence that race influences head coach hiring decisions. We also find no evidence that the Rooney Rule has increased the number of minority head coaches

Sagittal jaw position in relation to body posture in adult humans – a rasterstereographic study

BACKGROUND: The correlations between the sagittal jaw position and the cranio – cervical inclination are described in literature. Only few studies focus on the sagittal jaw position and the body posture using valid and objective orthopaedic examination methods. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that patients with malocclusions reveal significant differences in body posture compared to those without (upper thoracic inclination, kyphotic angle, lordotic angle and lower lumbar inclination). METHODS: Eighty-four healthy adult patients (with a mean age = 25.6 years and ranging from 16.1 to 55.8 years) were examined with informed consent. The orthodontic examination horizontal overjet (distance between upper and lower incisors) was determined by using an orthodontic digital sliding calliper. The subjects were subdivided in respect of the overjet with the following results: 18 revealed a normal overjet (Class I), 38 had an increased overjet (Class II) and 28 had an reversed overjet (Class III). Rasterstereography was used to carry out a three – dimensional back shape analysis. This method is based on photogrammetry. A three-dimensional shape was produced by analysing the distortion of parallel horizontal white light lines projected on the patient's back, followed by mathematical modelling. On the basis of the sagittal profile the upper thoracic inclination, the thoracic angle, the lordotic angle and the pelvic inclination were determined with a reported accuracy of 2.8° and the correlations to the sagittal jaw position were calculated by means of ANOVA, Scheffé and Kruskal-Wallis procedures. RESULTS: Between the different overjet groups, no statistically significant differences or correlations regarding the analysed back shape parameters could be obtained. However, comparing males and females there were statistically significant differences in view of the parameters 'lordotic angle' and 'pelvic inclination'. CONCLUSION: No correlations between overjet and variables of the thoracic, lordotic or the pelvic inclination could be observed

Coral reef species assemblages are associated with ambient soundscapes

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2015. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Inter-Research for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Marine Ecology Progress Series 533 (2015): 93-107, doi:10.3354/meps11382.Coral reefs provide a wide array of ecosystem services and harbor some of the highest levels of biodiversity on the planet, but many reefs are in decline worldwide. Tracking changes is necessary for effective resource management. Biological sounds have been suggested as a means to quantify ecosystem health and biodiversity, but this requires an understanding of natural bioacoustic variability and relationships to the taxa present. This investigation sought to characterize spatial and temporal variation in biological sound production within and among reefs that varied in their benthic and fish diversity. Multiple acoustic recorders were deployed for intensive 24-hour periods and longer term (~4-month) duty-cycled deployments on three reefs that varied in coral cover and fish density. Short-term results suggest that while there were statistically significant acoustic differences among recorders on a given reef, these differences were relatively small, indicating that a single sensor may be suitable for acoustic characterization of reefs. Analyses of sounds recorded over ~4 months indicated that the strength of diel trends in a low frequency fish band (100-1000 Hz) was correlated with coral cover and fish density but the strength of high-frequency snapping-shrimp (2-20 kHz) trends was not, suggesting that low-frequency recordings may be better indicators of the species assemblages present. Power spectra varied within reefs over the deployment periods, underscoring the need for long-duration recordings to characterize these trends. These findings suggest that, in spite of considerable spatial and temporal variability within reef soundscapes, diel trends in low-frequency sound production correlate with reef species assemblages.This research was funded by the Mitsubishi Corporation Foundation for the Americas and WHOI’s Access to the Sea program

Identification of New Drug Candidates Against \u3cem\u3eBorrelia burgdorferi\u3c/em\u3e Using High-Throughput Screening

Lyme disease is the most common zoonotic bacterial disease in North America. It is estimated that .300,000 cases per annum are reported in USA alone. A total of 10%–20% of patients who have been treated with antibiotic therapy report the recrudescence of symptoms, such as muscle and joint pain, psychosocial and cognitive difficulties, and generalized fatigue. This condition is referred to as posttreatment Lyme disease syndrome. While there is no evidence for the presence of viable infectious organisms in individuals with posttreatment Lyme disease syndrome, some researchers found surviving Borrelia burgdorferi population in rodents and primates even after antibiotic treatment. Although such observations need more ratification, there is unmet need for developing the therapeutic agents that focus on removing the persisting bacterial form of B. burgdorferi in rodent and nonhuman primates. For this purpose, high-throughput screening was done using BacTiter-Glo assay for four compound libraries to identify candidates that stop the growth of B. burgdorferi in vitro. The four chemical libraries containing 4,366 compounds (80% Food and Drug Administration [FDA] approved) that were screened are Library of Pharmacologically Active Compounds (LOPAC1280), the National Institutes of Health Clinical Collection, the Microsource Spectrum, and the Biomol FDA. We subsequently identified 150 unique compounds, which inhibited .90% of B. burgdorferi growth at a concentration of ,25 µM. These 150 unique compounds comprise many safe antibiotics, chemical compounds, and also small molecules from plant sources. Of the 150 unique compounds, 101 compounds are FDA approved. We selected the top 20 FDA-approved molecules based on safety and potency and studied their minimum inhibitory concentration and minimum bactericidal concentration. The promising safe FDA-approved candidates that show low minimum inhibitory concentration and minimum bactericidal concentration values can be chosen as lead molecules for further advanced studies

In the Works: Planning for Water Quality in the Coastal Zone; Opening Closed Doors: Worker-Ownership Initiatives

Includes two short reports: PLANNING FOR WATER QUALITY IN THE COASTAL ZONE: Water quality management regulations in the State of North Carolina have traditionally been administered by various state agencies including the Department of Environmental Management (DEM permits for surface water discharges and groundwater regulations), the Division of Health Services (large sewage disposal systems), and by local governments (local health department permits for septic systems and land use planning regulations that address watershed protection). In North Carolina's coastal zone, land use planning for the protection of water quality has been addressed at the state level since 1979. Sedimentation controls and limitations on impervious surfaces along estuarine shorelines were imposed by the Coastal Area Management Act (CAMA). A broader initiative was needed, however. In response the Division of Coastal Management (DCM) and the Coastal Resources Commission (CRC) agreed that coastal water quality and, in particular, the impact of non-point source pollution on coastal waters should be the priority issue for the 1985 agency work program. OPENING CLOSED DOORS: WORKER-OWNERSHIP INITIATIVES: Planners in states and regions where plant closings have had a devastating impact on the economic and social health of their communities are struggling to develop viable long-term job creation and retention strategies. Worker-ownership is one strategy that has gained recognition as an effective economic development program for some communities. Successful models for regional economic cooperatives remain, however, relatively undeveloped. An exemplary and potentially replicable model for economic development planners is the worker-ownership support agency network in North Carolina

Women's Advocates Shelter: An Evaluation.

Prepared by the School of Architecture and Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, for the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency

Strong anonymity and infinite streams.

The extended rank-discounted utilitarian social welfare order introduced and axiomatized by Stéphane Zuber and Geir B. Asheim satisfies strong anonymity (J. Econ. Theory (2011), doi:10.1016/j.jet.2011.08.001). We question the appropriateness of strong anonymity in the context of a countably infinite sequence of subsequent generations. A modified criterion that is incomplete and satisfies finite anonymity is presented.

Boolean Dynamics with Random Couplings

This paper reviews a class of generic dissipative dynamical systems called N-K models. In these models, the dynamics of N elements, defined as Boolean variables, develop step by step, clocked by a discrete time variable. Each of the N Boolean elements at a given time is given a value which depends upon K elements in the previous time step. We review the work of many authors on the behavior of the models, looking particularly at the structure and lengths of their cycles, the sizes of their basins of attraction, and the flow of information through the systems. In the limit of infinite N, there is a phase transition between a chaotic and an ordered phase, with a critical phase in between. We argue that the behavior of this system depends significantly on the topology of the network connections. If the elements are placed upon a lattice with dimension d, the system shows correlations related to the standard percolation or directed percolation phase transition on such a lattice. On the other hand, a very different behavior is seen in the Kauffman net in which all spins are equally likely to be coupled to a given spin. In this situation, coupling loops are mostly suppressed, and the behavior of the system is much more like that of a mean field theory. We also describe possible applications of the models to, for example, genetic networks, cell differentiation, evolution, democracy in social systems and neural networks.Comment: 69 pages, 16 figures, Submitted to Springer Applied Mathematical Sciences Serie