Does Player Performance Increase During the Postseason? A Look at Professional Basketball

This study examines the game logs of professional basketball players to determine whether they exhibit elevated performance during the postseason. In a survey of 10 players who were awarded the Most Valuable Player Award during the NBA Finals for the seasons 2001-02 thru 2010- 11, performance was found to be stable throughout the entire season. Implications for why player performance remains stable and why it believed that player performance increases during the postseason are discussed

Entanglement Energetics in the Ground State

We show how many-body ground state entanglement information may be extracted from sub-system energy measurements at zero temperature. A precise relation between entanglement and energy fluctuations is demonstrated in the weak coupling limit. Examples are given with the two-state system and the harmonic oscillator, and energy probability distributions are calculated. Comparisons made with recent qubit experiments show this type of measurement provides another method to quantify entanglement with the environment.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, Conference proceeding for the Physics of Quantum Electronics; Utah, USA, January 200

Snapshot of Recreational Users in the Adirondacks 2020

With a marked increase in recreation in popular wilderness areas and user motivations diversifying, management practices can no longer be reactionary and based on narratives and so-called anecdotal evidence. The High Peaks Wilderness Area of the Adirondacks, considered a hot spot for hiking, is faced with heavy use that threatens trail and ecosystem health. For managers to effectively protect fragile ecosystems and provide positive recreational experiences to users, a baseline of empirical data is needed. This pilot study starts that process by characterizing recreational users of the High Peaks, exploring their intent and preparation, and gaining their perspective on management actions that address capacity issues but also raise access concerns. The study surveyed 592 recreationists at 12 trailheads in the summer of 2020. There were fewer first-time visitors than expected, and most respondents engaged in preparation for their visit, accessing authoritative material. Almost all reported familiarity with Leave No Trace principles and about 75% sought a wilderness experience. Management actions that address capacity through controlling access (e.g. shuttles, closures, permits) received lukewarm support, and the participants were not as polarized as expected, some feeling unsure. These data are essential for understanding and establishing Limits of Acceptable Change, as well as providing criteria for management goals, not only for the High Peaks region but also for other parks experiencing similar issues

Synchronous vs. asynchronous dynamics of diffusion-controlled reactions

An analytical method based on the classical ruin problem is developed to compute the mean reaction time between two walkers undergoing a generalized random walk on a 1d lattice. At each time step, either both walkers diffuse simultaneously with probability $p$ (synchronous event) or one of them diffuses while the other remains immobile with complementary probability (asynchronous event). Reaction takes place through same site occupation or position exchange. We study the influence of the degree of synchronicity $p$ of the walkers and the lattice size $N$ on the global reaction's efficiency. For odd $N$, the purely synchronous case ($p=1$) is always the most effective one, while for even $N$, the encounter time is minimized by a combination of synchronous and asynchronous events. This new parity effect is fully confirmed by Monte Carlo simulations on 1d lattices as well as for 2d and 3d lattices. In contrast, the 1d continuum approximation valid for sufficiently large lattices predicts a monotonic increase of the efficiency as a function of $p$. The relevance of the model for several research areas is briefly discussed.Comment: 21 pages (including 12 figures and 4 tables), uses revtex4.cls, accepted for publication in Physica

Noise-induced energy excitation by a general environment

We analyze the effects that general environments, namely ohmic and non-ohmic, at zero and high temperature induce over a quantum Brownian particle. We state that the evolution of the system can be summarized in terms of two main environmental induced physical phenomena: decoherence and energy activation. In this article we show that the latter is a post-decoherence phenomenon. As the energy is an observable, the excitation process is a direct indication of the system-environment entanglement particularly useful at zero temperature.Comment: 14 pages; 7 figures. Version to appear in Phys Lett.

VCBART: Bayesian trees for varying coefficients

Many studies have reported associations between later-life cognition and socioeconomic position in childhood, young adulthood, and mid-life. However, the vast majority of these studies are unable to quantify how these associations vary over time and with respect to several demographic factors. Varying coefficient (VC) models, which treat the covariate effects in a linear model as nonparametric functions of additional effect modifiers, offer an appealing way to overcome these limitations. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art VC modeling methods require computationally prohibitive parameter tuning or make restrictive assumptions about the functional form of the covariate effects. In response, we propose VCBART, which estimates the covariate effects in a VC model using Bayesian Additive Regression Trees. With simple default hyperparameter settings, VCBART outperforms existing methods in terms of covariate effect estimation and prediction. Using VCBART, we predict the cognitive trajectories of 4,167 subjects from the Health and Retirement Study using multiple measures of socioeconomic position and physical health. We find that socioeconomic position in childhood and young adulthood have small effects that do not vary with age. In contrast, the effects of measures of mid-life physical health tend to vary with respect to age, race, and marital status. An R package implementing VC-BART is available at https://github.com/skdeshpande91/VCBAR