The new transfer fee system in professional soccer: An interdisciplinary study

First paragraph: As the new millennium starts to unfold few would dispute the proposition that professional sport in general and soccer in particular is experiencing a rapid process of commercialisation which is so profound that the description “ big business” is far from an exaggeration. Sport now accounts for approximately 3 per cent of global trade and, of more direct relevance for the purposes of this article, the latest authoritative survey on the finances of English soccer clubs reveals that in season 1999-2000 they collectively generated in excess of £1billion in total revenues with a confident projection that the top 20 Premiership clubs may well, largely on the back of a lucrative new TV rights deal, generate total revenues of around £1.5 billion by season 2002-2003. While it will almost certainly be the case that an increasing proportion of these revenues will be accounted for by TV revenues, merchandising and sponsorship, transfer fee income and spending will doubtless continue to figure prominently in the world of soccer finance. First, despite Bosman and the further liberalisation of the transfer fee system which the ruling triggered, transfer fee spending spirals inexorably upwards: a total of £340 million during season 1999-2000 . Secondly, for the smaller clubs transfer fee receipts from Premier League clubs can be vital for financial survival in the context of a business environment where profits are rare and the bleak reality for many clubs is continual struggle to limit losses to tolerable levels

Facial Feature Extraction Using a 4D Stereo Camera System

Facial feature recognition has received much attention among the researchers in computer vision. This paper presents a new approach for facial feature extraction. The work can be broadly classified into two stages, face acquisition and feature extraction. Face acquisition is done by a 4D stereo camera system from Dimensional Imaging and the data is available in ‘obj’ files generated by the camera system. The second stage illustrates extraction of important facial features. The algorithm developed for this purpose is inspired from the natural biological shape and structure of human face. The accuracy of identifying the facial points has been shown using simulation results. The algorithm is able to identify the tip of the nose, the point where nose meets the forehead, and near corners of both the eyes from the faces acquired by the camera system

Breast Density Classification Using Local Quinary Patterns with Various Neighbourhood Topologies

This paper presents an extension of work from our previous study by investigating the use of Local Quinary Patterns (LQP) for breast density classification in mammograms on various neighbourhood topologies. The LQP operators are used to capture the texture characteristics of the fibro-glandular disk region ( F G D r o i ) instead of the whole breast area as the majority of current studies have done. We take a multiresolution and multi-orientation approach, investigate the effects of various neighbourhood topologies and select dominant patterns to maximise texture information. Subsequently, the Support Vector Machine classifier is used to perform the classification, and a stratified ten-fold cross-validation scheme is employed to evaluate the performance of the method. The proposed method produced competitive results up to 86.13 % and 82.02 % accuracy based on 322 and 206 mammograms taken from the Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) and InBreast datasets, which is comparable with the state-of-the-art in the literature

An Efficient Rerouting Approach in Software Defined Networks

This paper illustrates an efficient traffic rerouting solution in Software-Defined Networks (SDN) by monitoring the network status periodically. The proposed approach provides a rerouting solution by first calculating the link utilization for available paths and then rerouting the flow to the least delay path among the available paths. The traffic rerouting solution is considering the network condition to prevent the switch overutilization and congestion while any new flow arrives. The proposed method is implemented by using ONOS controller and Mininet emulator. The proposed algorithm in the controller predicts the utilization and delay on the link to calculate how much load to be rerouted if the average link utilization exceeds the threshold level. Hence, this method will proactively avoid congestion by adding flows, monitoring the parameters and prevent the unbalanced distribution after rerouting as our experimental results show