The Glitch That Stole Christmas From The Pac-10

The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) employs a multi-criteria decision model (MCDM) to determine eligibility to play in the most elite college football bowls at the end of the season.  MCDM’s are widely used in business and government to make important decisions, including those with tremendous financial impacts.  The BCS college bowls have the biggest payouts involving several million dollars.  This year, the PAC-10 could have been the first football conference to place two teams in the BCS bowl.  What a Merry Christmas that would have been!  The payout would have been $2.75 million or$275 thousand per team.  Unfortunately, due to the use of a faulty MCDM that distorts the relationship between those football programs considered, a glitch in the BCS formula stole the Rose Bowl prestige and the money from the PAC-10 during the Christmas holidays.  Using appropriate multipliers, the economic impact in PAC-10 communities could have been very significant.   The implication for future competition through enhanced athletic facilities, for example, could have a sustained economic impact for several years in those communities.  It will be demonstrated in this paper that had the BCS employed a valid and consistent algorithm for determining a final score, even with the BCS’s own data, the University of California would have a higher score than the University of Texas and the PAC-10 would have benefited by $2.75 Million, and they would have a much merrier Christmas than they had from playing in the Holiday Bowl

THE USE OF PRIVATE LANDS IN THE U.S. FOR OUTDOOR RECREATION: RESULTS OF A NATIONWIDE SURVEY

Land Economics/Use, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

OUTDOOR RECREATION TRENDS AND MARKET OPPORTUNITIES IN THE UNITED STATES

In 1994 and 1995, the National Survey of Recreation and Environment (NSRE) was accomplished by interviewing approximately 17,000 Americans over age 15 in random-digit-dialing telephone samplings. The primary purpose was to learn about the outdoor recreation activities of people over age 15 in the United States. They were asked about their participation in 62 specific recreation activities.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Electrically insulating high pressure seals for internally heated pressure vessels

The design of an electrically insulating, high pressure seal using neoprene, nylon, Teflon, and alumina washers is presented. The seals are of use with internally heated pressure vessel systems

Direct iminization of PEEK

Semi-crystalline poly(ether ketone)s are important high-temperature engineering thermoplastics, but are difficult to characterize at the molecular level because of their insolubility in conventional organic solvents. Here we report that polymers of this type, including PEEK, react cleanly at high temperatures with low-volatility aralkyl amines to afford stable, noncrystalline poly(ether-imine)s, which are readily soluble in solvents such as chloroform, THF and DMF and so characterizable by conventional size-exclusion chromatography

Article Discovery Working Group Final Report

The University Library conducted a six-month investigation of article discovery tools. As a result of these studies, the Library is pleased to have selected Summon as the article discovery tool for the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses. The library launched our Summon interface as ArticlesPlus on September 27, 2010. The “Article Discovery Working Group,” a task force charged with researching and recommending an article discovery mechanism, completed two reports. 1) The Article Discovery Working Group’s Final Report [PDF, 8.7MB], includes sections on: - Development of personas to help us put our evaluation into user-specific context; - An evaluation of Metalib, Google Scholar, and Summon with regard to these user-specific criteria; - A survey of the campus on article discovery preferences that yielded more than 950 responses; and - Recommendations to select Summon, based on the above inputs. 2) The Article Discovery Working Group's Supplemental Report [PDF, 700KB] exploring two additional areas: - An exploration how much of the University of Michigan’s article content is included in the Summon product; and - User studies exploring how University of Michigan faculty and students might perceive the Summon product were it available.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116831/1/final-report.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116831/2/supplemental-report.pdfDescription of final-report.pdf : Article Discovery Working Group's Final ReportDescription of supplemental-report.pdf : Article Discovery Working Group's Supplemental Repor

Electronic band structure and carrier effective mass in calcium aluminates

First-principles electronic band structure investigations of five compounds of the CaO-Al2O3 family, 3CaO.Al2O3, 12CaO.7Al2O3, CaO.Al2O3, CaO.2Al2O3 and CaO.6Al2O3, as well as CaO and alpha-, theta- and kappa-Al2O3 are performed. We find that the conduction band in the complex oxides is formed from the oxygen antibonding p-states and, although the band gap in Al2O3 is almost twice larger than in CaO, the s-states of both cations. Such a hybrid nature of the conduction band leads to isotropic electron effective masses which are nearly the same for all compounds investigated. This insensitivity of the effective mass to variations in the composition and structure suggests that upon a proper degenerate doping, both amorphous and crystalline phases of the materials will possess mobile extra electrons

Associations between Library Usage and Undergraduate Student GPA, 2016-2019

This paper was presented at the Library Assessment Conference on March 17, 2021.We present the results of a study of the association between online resource use of licensed content provided by the library and short- and long-term student performance. We capture library usage using EZproxy logs, or more precisely whether an individual has at least one EZproxy session in an academic term. We measure student performance using the grade point average (GPA), specifically semester (short-term) and cumulative (long-term) GPA. Relying on models of information behavior, we generate a theoretical framework that suggests that student performance is a function of factors that apply to all students, such as race and gender (the “fixed” effects). But student performance is also impacted by factors such as academic background (e.g., schools, colleges, etc.) that cluster student behaviors and outcomes, and unobserved, time invariant factors at the student-level such as grit and motivation (the “random effects”). We therefore run panel linear mixed effects regression models of the association between library usage and student performance. The results show that library usage, as measured by access to library-licensed content, is significantly associated with both semester and cumulative GPA. The magnitude of the effect is larger for semester GPA, but also varies depending on if a student resides on- or off-campus. The library usage effect on semester GPA is larger for off-campus students compared to their on-campus peers. The reverse is true for the library usage effect on cumulative GPA as it is larger for on-campus students. This study shows how connecting identifiable library data to other institutional can yield shed important insights into how library usage shapes student outcomes.Institute of Museum and Library Studies (IMLS) - LG-96-18-0040-18http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/166998/1/Associations between library usage and undergraduate student GPA, 2016-2019 03242021.pdfDescription of Associations between library usage and undergraduate student GPA, 2016-2019 03242021.pdf : Main articleSEL

Environmental Applications for an Intrinsic Germanium Well Detector

The overall performance of an intrinsic germanium well detector for /sup 125/I measurements was investigated in a program of environmental surveillance. Concentrations of /sup 125/I and /sup 131/I were determined in thyroids of road-killed deer showing the highest activities of /sup 125/I in the animals from the near vicinity of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This demonstrates the utility of road-killed deer as a bioindicator for radioiodine around nuclear facilities. 6 refs., 2 figs., 3 tabs

The mediating effect of task presentation on collaboration and children's acquisition of scientific reasoning

There has been considerable research concerning peer interaction and the acquisition of children's scientific reasoning. This study investigated differences in collaborative activity between pairs of children working around a computer with pairs of children working with physical apparatus and related any differences to the development of children's scientific reasoning. Children aged between 9 and 10 years old (48 boys and 48 girls) were placed into either same ability or mixed ability pairs according to their individual, pre-test performance on a scientific reasoning task. These pairs then worked on either a computer version or a physical version of Inhelder and Piaget's (1958) chemical combination task. Type of presentation was found to mediate the nature and type of collaborative activity. The mixed-ability pairs working around the computer talked proportionally more about the task and management of the task; had proportionally more transactive discussions and used the record more productively than children working with the physical apparatus. Type of presentation was also found to mediated children's learning. Children in same ability pairs who worked with the physical apparatus improved significantly more than same ability pairs who worked around the computer. These findings were partially predicted from a socio-cultural theory and show the importance of tools for mediating collaborative activity and collaborative learning