3,709 research outputs found
The Advantage of Playing Home in NBA: Microscopic, Team-Specific and Evolving Features
The idea that the success rate of a team increases when playing home is
broadly accepted and documented for a wide variety of sports. Investigations on
the so-called home advantage phenomenon date back to the 70's and every since
has attracted the attention of scholars and sport enthusiasts. These studies
have been mainly focused on identifying the phenomenon and trying to correlate
it with external factors such as crowd noise and referee bias. Much less is
known about the effects of home advantage in the microscopic dynamics of the
game (within the game) or possible team-specific and evolving features of this
phenomenon. Here we present a detailed study of these previous features in the
National Basketball Association (NBA). By analyzing play-by-play events of more
than sixteen thousand games that span thirteen NBA seasons, we have found that
home advantage affects the microscopic dynamics of the game by increasing the
scoring rates and decreasing the time intervals between scores of teams playing
home. We verified that these two features are different among the NBA teams,
for instance, the scoring rate of the Cleveland Cavaliers team is increased
0.16 points per minute (on average the seasons 2004-05 to 2013-14) when playing
home, whereas for the New Jersey Nets (now the Brooklyn Nets) this rate
increases in only 0.04 points per minute. We further observed that these
microscopic features have evolved over time in a non-trivial manner when
analyzing the results team-by-team. However, after averaging over all teams
some regularities emerge; in particular, we noticed that the average
differences in the scoring rates and in the characteristic times (related to
the time intervals between scores) have slightly decreased over time,
suggesting a weakening of the phenomenon.Comment: Accepted for publication in PLoS ON
The Distribution of the Asymptotic Number of Citations to Sets of Publications by a Researcher or From an Academic Department Are Consistent With a Discrete Lognormal Model
How to quantify the impact of a researcher's or an institution's body of work
is a matter of increasing importance to scientists, funding agencies, and
hiring committees. The use of bibliometric indicators, such as the h-index or
the Journal Impact Factor, have become widespread despite their known
limitations. We argue that most existing bibliometric indicators are
inconsistent, biased, and, worst of all, susceptible to manipulation. Here, we
pursue a principled approach to the development of an indicator to quantify the
scientific impact of both individual researchers and research institutions
grounded on the functional form of the distribution of the asymptotic number of
citations. We validate our approach using the publication records of 1,283
researchers from seven scientific and engineering disciplines and the chemistry
departments at the 106 U.S. research institutions classified as "very high
research activity". Our approach has three distinct advantages. First, it
accurately captures the overall scientific impact of researchers at all career
stages, as measured by asymptotic citation counts. Second, unlike other
measures, our indicator is resistant to manipulation and rewards publication
quality over quantity. Third, our approach captures the time-evolution of the
scientific impact of research institutions.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, 3 table
The Possible Role of Resource Requirements and Academic Career-Choice Risk on Gender Differences in Publication Rate and Impact
Many studies demonstrate that there is still a significant gender bias,
especially at higher career levels, in many areas including science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). We investigated
field-dependent, gender-specific effects of the selective pressures individuals
experience as they pursue a career in academia within seven STEM disciplines.
We built a unique database that comprises 437,787 publications authored by
4,292 faculty members at top United States research universities. Our analyses
reveal that gender differences in publication rate and impact are
discipline-specific. Our results also support two hypotheses. First, the
widely-reported lower publication rates of female faculty are correlated with
the amount of research resources typically needed in the discipline considered,
and thus may be explained by the lower level of institutional support
historically received by females. Second, in disciplines where pursuing an
academic position incurs greater career risk, female faculty tend to have a
greater fraction of higher impact publications than males. Our findings have
significant, field-specific, policy implications for achieving diversity at the
faculty level within the STEM disciplines.Comment: 9 figures and 3 table
Anomalous Diffusion and Long-range Correlations in the Score Evolution of the Game of Cricket
We investigate the time evolution of the scores of the second most popular
sport in world: the game of cricket. By analyzing the scores event-by-event of
more than two thousand matches, we point out that the score dynamics is an
anomalous diffusive process. Our analysis reveals that the variance of the
process is described by a power-law dependence with a super-diffusive exponent,
that the scores are statistically self-similar following a universal Gaussian
distribution, and that there are long-range correlations in the score
evolution. We employ a generalized Langevin equation with a power-law
correlated noise that describe all the empirical findings very well. These
observations suggest that competition among agents may be a mechanism leading
to anomalous diffusion and long-range correlation.Comment: Accepted for Publication in Physical Review
Anomaly analysis of Hawking radiation from Kaluza-Klein black hole with squashed horizon
Considering gravitational and gauge anomalies at the horizon, a new method
that to derive Hawking radiations from black holes has been developed by
Wilczek et al. In this paper, we apply this method to non-rotating and rotating
Kaluza-Klein black holes with squashed horizon, respectively. For the rotating
case, we found that, after the dimensional reduction, an effective U(1) gauge
field is generated by an angular isometry. The results show that the gauge
current and energy-momentum tensor fluxes are exactly equivalent to Hawking
radiation from the event horizon.Comment: 15 pages, no figures, the improved version, accepted by Eur. Phys. J.
Virologic and clinical characteristics of HBV genotypes/subgenotypes in 487 Chinese pediatric patients with CHB
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The association of hepatitis B virus (HBV) genotypes/subgenotypes with clinical characteristics is increasingly recognized. However, the virologic and clinical features of HBV genotypes/subgenotypes in pediatric patients remain largely unknown.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Four hundred and eighty-seven pediatric inpatients with CHB were investigated, including 217 nucleos(t)ide analog-experienced patients. HBV genotypes/subgenotypes and reverse transcriptase (RT) mutations were determined by direct sequencing. The stage of fibrosis and degree of inflammatory activity were evaluated by the Metavir score system.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Among 487 enrolled pediatric patients, HBV genotype C2 and B2 were the most two prevalent (73.7% and 21.1%). Comparing with HBV/B2 infected patients, no significant difference was observed in the incidence rate and mutant patterns of lamivudine- or adefovir-resistant mutations in HBV/C2 infected patients (<it>P </it>> 0.05). Importantly, we found that the degree of hepatic inflammation degree, fibrosis stage and ALT level were significantly higher in HBV/C2-infected HBeAg positive patients than it was in HBV/B2-infected ones.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The pediatric patients with HBV/C2 infection might be more susceptible to develop severe liver pathogenesis.</p
Search for the decay
We search for radiative decays into a weakly interacting neutral
particle, namely an invisible particle, using the produced through the
process in a data sample of
decays collected by the BESIII detector
at BEPCII. No significant signal is observed. Using a modified frequentist
method, upper limits on the branching fractions are set under different
assumptions of invisible particle masses up to 1.2 . The upper limit corresponding to an invisible particle with zero mass
is 7.0 at the 90\% confidence level
JUNO Conceptual Design Report
The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is proposed to determine
the neutrino mass hierarchy using an underground liquid scintillator detector.
It is located 53 km away from both Yangjiang and Taishan Nuclear Power Plants
in Guangdong, China. The experimental hall, spanning more than 50 meters, is
under a granite mountain of over 700 m overburden. Within six years of running,
the detection of reactor antineutrinos can resolve the neutrino mass hierarchy
at a confidence level of 3-4, and determine neutrino oscillation
parameters , , and to
an accuracy of better than 1%. The JUNO detector can be also used to study
terrestrial and extra-terrestrial neutrinos and new physics beyond the Standard
Model. The central detector contains 20,000 tons liquid scintillator with an
acrylic sphere of 35 m in diameter. 17,000 508-mm diameter PMTs with high
quantum efficiency provide 75% optical coverage. The current choice of
the liquid scintillator is: linear alkyl benzene (LAB) as the solvent, plus PPO
as the scintillation fluor and a wavelength-shifter (Bis-MSB). The number of
detected photoelectrons per MeV is larger than 1,100 and the energy resolution
is expected to be 3% at 1 MeV. The calibration system is designed to deploy
multiple sources to cover the entire energy range of reactor antineutrinos, and
to achieve a full-volume position coverage inside the detector. The veto system
is used for muon detection, muon induced background study and reduction. It
consists of a Water Cherenkov detector and a Top Tracker system. The readout
system, the detector control system and the offline system insure efficient and
stable data acquisition and processing.Comment: 328 pages, 211 figure
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