This paper explores how changing various end game statistics effects a given teams probability of winning a game in the National Football League (NFL). Data from the 2000-2016 NFL seasons is split into two subsets, one for teams winning at halftime, another for losing teams. Using this data an empirical model is estimated to study how the determinants of a team’s success differ between the two sets of data. Overall, the factors which determine a team’s outcome are consistent between the two subsets, varying primarily by magnitude of the effect.

Piezoelectric energy harvesters in the road pavement are developed and studied to collect energy from the passing vehicles. A numerical model based on the Westergaard's stress model is proposed to calculate the three dimensional stress distribution in the pavement and the power generation from the piezoelectric harvesters placed inside the pavement. Piezoelectric patch, plate and beam harvesters are designed. Based on proposed numerical models, simulations are conducted to reveal the effects of vehicle velocity as well as the location and size of the Piezo-electric harvesters on the generated power. Optimally designed plate energy harvester attached with four cantilever harvesters generates up to around 28 W electrical power with the assumption of continuum vehicle passing the pavement by 22.2 m/s. This power can be used to collect enough energy in 2 hours to raise the ice temperature with the thickness of 1 cm, covering a 5 m wide road by 20 degree Celsius. / February 2017

The relationship between Japan and the U.S. has endured contention since the beginning of the millennium, but the two countries remain allies. This quantitative and qualitative content analysis examines the print coverage of two controversies in Japan-U.S. relations: the sinking of a Japanese fishing trawler and the controversy surrounding the Futenma base. By applying the theoretical framework of media framing, the research examines four U.S. newspapers and one Japanese newspaper while considering the two corresponding geopolitical periods: Japan (sur)passing. By coding each article for predefined framing categories, the research found in the era of (sur)passing, the application of the mea culpa and responsibility frames mirrored the geopolitical dynamic of the time. However, the reconciliation frame, created by the U.S. newspapers’ use of elite news sources in the period of Japan passing, went against the scholarly interpretation of the period, and instead focused on a positive bilateral relationship in order to influence public opinion.

Title The Safety of a Cyclist passed by car Objectives: The aim of this thesis is to identify by field research whether drivers abide by the distance of at least 1 m when passing cyclists or not. Furthermore to find out from the results of a survey whether previous experience of the drivers as a cyclist influences their behavior. Methods: As for the methods used in this study, field research and public survey had been conducted. Results: Drivers are respecting the passing distance at least 1 meter. The average passing distance, which was foundet out from the results of the survey, was 153 centimeters by the speed of 50 km/h. In conclusion of this thesis is that cyclists and non-cyclists have the same opinion of the passing distance between the cyclist and the passing car. Keywords: Cyclist, passing, safety, accident.

Development of highly intelligent computers requires a conceptual foundation that will overcome the limitations of the von Neumann architecture. Architectures for such a foundation should meet the following design goals: * Address the fundamental organizational issues of large-scale parallelism and sharing in a fully integrated way. This means attention to organizational principles, as well as hardware and software. * Serve as an experimental apparatus for testing large-scale artificial intelligence systems. * Explore the feasibility of an architecture based on abstractions, which serve as natural computational primitives for parallel processing. Such abstractions should be logically independent of their software and hardware host implementations. In this paper we lay out some of the fundamental design issues in parallel architectures for Artificial Intelligence, delineate limitations of previous parallel architectures, and outline a new approach that we are pursuing.

Purpose: The purpose of the present study is to determine the treatment strategies that male-to-female transgender individuals consider to be critical to passing as their true gender as well as the unique factors that may contribute to these individuals seeking speech therapy services. This study also seeks to determine awareness of the transgender population in regards to the availability and scope of speech therapy services relative to transitioning or passing as their true gender. Method: A 38-question electronic survey (N= 17 respondents in final data corpus) was developed to address our research questions and was distributed via email to various transgender listervs, organizations, etc. Results: Although male to female individuals, regardless of their age or geographic location, reported speech therapy to be an important part of the transition, they did not seek speech therapy for themselves. They are highly motivated to achieve an overall feminine presentation, specifically a more feminine vocal quality. These individuals are aware of speech therapy services but are not familiar with specific factors targeted in therapy or the breadth of services available. Conclusion: Preliminary results revealed the rated importance of speech therapy services for the male to female transgender population as well as the lack of awareness and availability of the breadth of speech therapy services available to transgender clients. These findings will further enhance our ability to meet the needs of the male to female transgender client. / text

Syfte Syftet med studien är att analysera tillslagsprecision i fotboll och jämföra eventuella skillnader mellan juniorer och seniorer på både herr- och damsidan. Metod Totalt 30 elitspelare varav 16 herrar och 14 damer utförde tester i tillslagsprecision. De färdigheter som testades var passning och skott. Upplägget var 60 skott (30 stillaliggande och 30 halvvolley) och 80 passningar (20 stillaliggande bästa fot, 20 rullande bästa fot, 20 stillaliggande näst bästa fot och 20 rullande näst bästa fot). Testresultaten analyserades via Excel och Kinovea, där kunde medelvärden och standardavvikelser för varje testperson och testgrupp räknas ut. Resultat Resultatet visar att det endast var signifkant skillnad på ett av sex moment vad gäller tillslagsprecisionen på herrsidan. På damsidan var det ingen signifikant skillnad på något moment. Slutsatser Författarna har i denna studie identifierat en platå mellan spelare i åldrarna 16-18 år och seniorspelare vad gäller tillslagsprecision. Spelare i åldrarna 16-18 är lika bra som seniorspelare på de individuella färdigheterna passning och skott. Denna platå kan vara resultatet av för lite individuell träning, sk isolerad träning vad det gäller tillslagsprecision, på föreningsträningarna. Om föreningstränarna följer den utbildning SvFF ger dem ska endast två minuter per träning gå till varje individuell färdighet (13 st enligt SvFF). Bristen av tid för dessa färdigheter kan vara en avgörande faktor för att utvecklingen av tillslagsprecision står stilla idag. / The aim of this study is to analyze if the precision of a shot and a pass differs between professional youth players (16-18 years) and senior players (22+ or older). Method A total of 30 elite players which were 16 males and 14 females performed tests in shooting and passing precision. The set-up on the test days were a total of 60 shots(30 lying still and 30 half volley) and 80 passes (20 lying still best foot, 20 rolling best foot, 20 lying still next best foot and 20 rolling next best foot). The test results were analyzed using Excel and Kinovea. In these programs the mean value and standard deviation for each player and test group could be calculated. Results The result shows that there were only significant differences in one of six parts regarding precision on the men's side. On the women's side, there was no significant difference in any of the six moments. Conclusions The authors of this study identified a plateau between players aged 16-18 and senior players in terms of accuracy in passing and shooting. Players between the ages of 16-18 is as good as a senior player at the individual skills passing and shooting. This plateau can be the result of too little individual training so called isolated training in terms of precision. If the club coaches follow the training SvFF educate, only two minutes per training session goes to each individual skill (SvFF names 13 skills). The lack of time for these skills can be a decisive factor for why the development of precision stands still today.

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The IMAPCAR2 from Renesas Electronics is an embedded realtime image processor, combining a single core with a 128-way SIMD array. At runtime, sections of the SIMD array can be retasked as additional CPU cores, interconnected via a message passing ring. Using these cores effectively, however, is made difficult by the low-level nature of the message passing API and the lack of cache coherency between processors. Developing and debugging software for this platform is a difficult task. The AutoPilot library addresses this by providing a high-level message-oriented parallel programming model for the IMAPCAR2. AutoPilot's API is closely based on that of Pilot, a wrapper around the Message Passing Interface (MPI) for cluster computing. By reimplementing the Pilot API for the IMAPCAR2, AutoPilot shows that its processes-and-channels architecture is a viable choice for parallel programming on cache-incoherent multicore architectures. At the same time, it provides a simpler API for programmers, with builtin safety checks that eliminate some common sources of errors.

High Performance Computing (HPC) is the key to solving many scientific, financial, and engineering problems. Computer clusters are now the dominant architecture for HPC. The scale of clusters, both in terms of processor per node and the number of nodes, is increasing rapidly, reaching petascales these days and soon to exascales. Inter-process communication plays a significant role in the overall performance of HPC applications. With the continuous enhancements in interconnection technologies and node architectures, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) needs to be improved to effectively utilize the modern technologies for higher performance. After providing a background, I present a deep analysis of the user level and MPI libraries over modern cluster interconnects: InfiniBand, iWARP Ethernet, and Myrinet. Using novel techniques, I assess characteristics such as overlap and communication progress ability, buffer reuse effect on latency, and multiple-connection scalability. The outcome highlights some of the inefficiencies that exist in the communication libraries. To improve communication progress and overlap in large message transfers, a method is proposed which uses speculative communication to overlap communication with computation in the MPI Rendezvous protocol. The results show up to 100% communication progress and more than 80% overlap ability over iWARP Ethernet. An adaptation mechanism is employed to avoid overhead on applications that do not benefit from the method due to their timing specifications. To reduce MPI communication latency, I have proposed a technique that exploits the application buffer reuse characteristics for small messages and eliminates the sender-side copy in both two-sided and one-sided MPI small message transfer protocols. The implementation over InfiniBand improves small message latency up to 20%. The implementation adaptively falls back to the current method if the application does not benefit from the proposed technique. Finally, to improve scalability of MPI applications on ultra-scale clusters, I have proposed an extension to the current iWARP standard. The extension improves performance and memory usage for large-scale clusters. The extension equips Ethernet with an efficient zero-copy, connection-less datagram transport. The software-level evaluation shows more than 40% performance benefits and 30% memory usage reduction for MPI applications on a 64-core cluster. / Thesis (Ph.D, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2010-10-16 12:25:18.388