Determining Human Development Competency Training Needs of FCS Extension Professionals

Extension agents with Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) programmatic responsibilities come from a variety of backgrounds but are expected to implement educational programs across FCS knowledge areas. This study examined [state] University Extension personnel’s perceived importance of and perceived ability related to human development competencies. There was a significant difference between how specialists (state-level) and agents (county-level) perceived the importance of three of the five human development concepts. Most agents’ perceived their ability across the human development competencies to be average or just above average. Using the perceived importance and perceived ability data from the agents, next steps include piloting a novel rank-order method which will yield data concerning the relative need for training and the percent of agents needing training in each competency. This information can be used to provide targeted professional development to agents

Salmonellosis Outbreak Traced to Playground Sand, Australia, 2007–2009

A community outbreak of gastroenteritis in Australia during 2007–2009 was caused by ingestion of playground sand contaminated with Salmonella enterica Paratyphi B, variant Java. The bacterium was also isolated from local wildlife. Findings support consideration of nonfood sources during salmonellosis outbreak investigations and indicate transmission through the animal–human interface

Fame and fortune in elite tennis

Previous research bas suggested that prize money serves as an incentive for player performance, whereas rankings are considered more useful for administrative purposes such as tournament selection, seeding, handicapping and for predicting match outcomes. However, for top players it may be that it is their ranking which serves as their incentive to perform, because extraneous income and reputation is tied to rankings rather than to prize money per se. There is of course a relationship between rankings and prize money, but the intricacies of the ATP ranking system means that this relationship is perhaps not as predictable as one might expect. This paper investigates the relationship between rankings and prize money and performance using data for the top 108 ATP singles players in 2011. Performance is measured in tenns of the proportion of matches won and the number of matches played in the years 2004 to 2010. Generalized linear models and more accurate multi-level models, with binomial and Poisson response distributions, are used for this purpose. Differing results for these two models indicate that it is essential to take account of the repeated measures nature of the data as is done in the multi-level analysis. However, marked differences in the results obtained for the two performance measures suggest that more work is needed in order to reach a deeper understanding of the factors motivating elite tennis players

An overview of operations research in tennis

For nearly 100 years, the equipment and the rules of tennis hardly changed. But since the opening of the game to professionals as well as amateurs in 1968, and the expansion of the game worldwide and in the media, scientific and technological developments have created both problems and opportunities for tennis. This article looks at the use and opportunities for operations research and management science methods to analyze the unique tennis scoring system and the optimal strategies and techniques players might employ. It also considers the use of these methods for the optimization of tennis equipment, including court surface and line calling, and coaching while minimizing medical risk. Efficient tournament management and the accuracy of player ranking are also addressed. This article describes how modern developments allow a scientific approach to measuring and categorizing while suggesting that it may be necessary to limit developments in order to maintain the character of the game

Some aspects of ordering, ranking and seeding 2

This is the second of two papers on ordering, ranking and seeding players and teams in sport. Such orderings may be used for player selection, seeding, handicapping, player progress evaluation and for predicting match and tournament outcomes. KAN-Soft data for eight of the top male tennis players is used in a simulation study to explore various ranking systems. These ranking systems rely on historical relative frequencies for pairwise performance in the context of two scoring systems and three tournament structures. Of special interest is the sensitivity of the rankings to individual cases

Measuring the relative efficiency of tournaments

The efficiency of various tournament structures such as knock-outs and round robins has been considered by several authors, and it has been noted that the round robin structure has a higher probability that the best player wins than do the other structures, but it is at the cost of playing a larger number of matches. On the other hand the knock-out tournament requires relatively few matches, but has a smaller value for the probability that the best player wins. Thus, the compromise between the number of matches played in a tournament and the probability that the best player wins that tournament has remained to some extent an unsolved problem. The Masters Tennis tournament, being a combination of two round robins and a knock-out, is one attempt at such a compromise. In this paper the balance between the number of matches played and the probability that the best player wins is addressed, and the efficiency of several different tournament structures is evaluated. It is noted that although the efficiency has been evaluated for just some of the commonly used tournament structures, the approach outlined in this paper can be used for a wide range of other structures

New CCP13 software and the strategy behind further developments: stripping and modelling of fibre diffraction data

The aim of the CCP13 project is to provide easily usable software programs for those doing fibre diffraction or solution scattering studies; in fact any studies using diffraction from non-crystalline materials. Over the last ten years CCP13 project scientists have developed a set of programs for stripping and analysing fibre diffraction patterns and also patterns from solution scattering and other low-angle diffraction methods. The suite is now being updated to keep in step with new developments in beamlines, in detectors and in computing power and, in addition, new programs are being developed to allow for systematic modelling of different kinds of structures. The present report discusses the strategy behind the approach, it describes what has been implemented so far and it outlines new developments that are in the pipeline

Inhibition of the cytolytic protein perforin prevents rejection of transplanted bone marrow stem cells in vivo

Perforin is a key effector protein in the vertebrate immune system and is secreted by cytotoxic T lymphocytes and natural killer cells to help eliminate virus-infected and transformed target cells. The ability to modulate perforin activity in vivo could be extremely useful, especially in the context of bone marrow stem cell transplantation where early rejection of immunologically-mismatched grafts is driven by the recipient's natural killer cells, which overwhelmingly use perforin to kill their targets. Bone marrow stem cell transplantation is a potentially curative treatment for both malignant and non-malignant disorders, but when the body recognises the graft as foreign it is rejected by this process, often with fatal consequences. Here we report optimization of a previously identified series of benzenesulfonamide-based perforin inhibitors for their physicochemical and pharmacokinetic properties, resulting in the identification of 16; the first reported small molecule able to prevent rejection of transplanted bone marrow stem cells in vivo by blocking perforin function