Round Of Competition Research Articles

Genomic Discoveries in Perioperative Medicine

Genomic Discoveries in Perioperative Medicine

Developing the Next Generation of Education Researchers: UCLA's Experience with the Spencer Foundation Research Training Grant

Background/Context In the early 1990s, the Spencer Foundation instituted an Institutional Research Training Grant (RTG) program to improve the preparation of the next generation of education researchers. UCLA received an RTG in the first round of competition. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study UCLA's Spencer RTG program sought to develop excellent researchers focused on educational issues associated with urban students of color and students with special needs. An evaluation was conducted to learn more about the experiences and career paths of participating Spencer students, the value added by RTG program participation, and institutional changes associated with the RTG program. Population/Participants/Subjects Participants were all 52 UCLA education PhD students who received a Spencer RTG Fellowship in the first 9 years of the program, 52 matched comparison students, and 10 Department of Education faculty. Intervention/Program/Practice Spencer and comparison students participated in the same PhD program courses and requirements, mentoring/apprenticeship model, research practica, and research apprenticeship courses. Spencer students in addition had 3 years of full financial support, came from all areas of the Department of Education, participated in a special seminar every 2 weeks for 3 years, had a personal professional development fund, and were offered many opportunities to network with students and faculty from other Spencer programs. Research Design This in-house evaluation employed multiple approaches. Institutional data provided information about RTG program goals and activities and student characteristics and performance. A Web-based questionnaire and individual interviews provided quantitative and qualitative data about the performance and opinions of all 52 Spencer students and 52 comparison students. Dissertations were scored for engagement with Spencer program areas of emphasis. Individual faculty interviews provided opinions about the RTG program itself and its implications for the PhD program. Findings/Results Nearly all students were successful and benefited from courses, mentor-ship, and opportunities. Spencer students benefited particularly from financial freedom to pursue specific research interests and opportunities for networking and support. They valued highly interacting with PhD students from the Department of Education's entire range of epistemologies and research traditions. They were seen as an elite group, particularly groomed for academic positions. Significantly more Spencer than comparison graduates were in professional positions in which engaging in education research was highly valued. Conclusions/Recommendations The study underlines the following contributions: value of the apprenticeship/mentoring model; strengthening of sites for exploring diverse research traditions and epistemologies; value of belonging to local and national communities of practice; utility of multiyear funding packages; and enhanced faculty interaction around improved research preparation.

… And the envelope, please: Forty outstanding young scientists move to final round of competition

… And the envelope, please: Forty outstanding young scientists move to final round of competition

China and the emerging regional order in the South Pacific

As China rises, it has become increasingly aggressive in applying its soft power in the Pacific. What does China's arrival mean for the emerging regional order in the Pacific? What is it up to in the strategic backwater of the Pacific, which has traditionally been regarded as an ‘American lake’ and Australia's ‘special patch’? Setting my analysis in the broad context of China's new global diplomacy, I argue that the pattern of China's assertive behaviour in the Pacific is no different from its approach to other regions in the global South. I further argue that with only limited strategic, diplomatic and economic investment in the Pacific, China has become a regional power by default. The arrival of China, therefore, is unlikely to provoke any new round of great power competition. Rather, it offers opportunities for the world's second most formidable development challenge.

Maintenance of Skilled Performance with Age: A Descriptive Examination of Professional Golfers

Demographic studies indicate a remarkable aging trend in North America. An accurate profile of the decline in physical and cognitive capabilities over time is essential to our understanding of the aging process. This study examined the maintenance of skilled performance across the careers of 96 professional golfers. Data were collected on scoring average, driving distance, driving accuracy, greens in regulation, putts per round, and number of competitive rounds played using online data archives. Analyses indicate that performance in this activity can be maintained to a greater extent than in activities relying on biologically constrained abilities. Although the generalizability of these results to "normal" aging populations is not known, they suggest that acquired skills can be maintained to a large extent in the face of advancing age.

Can an Athlete Be Taught to Cope More Effectively? The Experiences of an International-Level Adolescent Golfer during a Training Program for Coping

The purpose of this descriptive paper was to examine the experiences of an internationally ranked golfer during a training program for coping. A 16-yr.-old male English golfer maintained an audio diary for seven competitive rounds over 21 days. He answered the same five questions after each competitive round concerning his experiences of stress and coping. The training program for coping was based upon the previous research of Nicholls and colleagues with adolescent golfers at the international level. The training program reduced the number of ineffective coping strategies that the participant used.

Industrial Property in Russia: The Return of the State and a Focus on Oil

For most of two decades, Russia's political economy has been characterized by an intense struggle for property that has passed through numerous phases. The most recent phase, which began with the government takeover of prime oil assets from the Yukos company in 2003-04, has seen the central state reassert itself as the dominant player in the competition and demonstrate its intention to expand its control of the petroleum sector for both economic and foreign-policy reasons. Nevertheless, the federal government is far from the only competitor for assets in today's Russia. An analysis of the actors, motives, and resources at play points to multiple cracks in the current system that may serve as fault lines in a new round of destructive competition after Putin leaves office.

Research Funding: The View From NIH

Research Funding: The View From NIH

The Comparison Test—Not Just for Nonnegative Series

Since the initial writing of this Note, the Bernoulli Trials were held in 2005 for the (n + l)st time. After 9 rounds of competition, only 7 students remained standing, and of these only 1 had made no mistakes to that point. Round 10 saw the elimination of all but one of the remaining competitors, leaving the winner, Lino Demasi. But then ties needed to be broken so these 6 eliminated competitors were brought back in for Round 11, which eliminated all but two of them: Ian Baillargeon and Ralph Furmaniak. In a valiant effort to break this tie for 2nd/3rd place, the organizers tried to get them to crack under pressure. After two rounds with equal responses, a tie was declared for 2nd/3rd place.

Everyday misadventures of the Everyman of interpretation

Sam left home on Friday afternoon to drive down to the coast with his family for the weekend. His older children were scheduled to participate in a regional high school athletic event on Saturday and, while they were in the preliminary rounds of competition, Sam, his wife, and younger children were going to visit a construction yard in a neighboring city where a production facility for one of the company's most recent successes was being fabricated.

How Parties Create Electoral Democracy, Chapter 2

Parties neither cease to exist nor cease to compete for office when the general election is over. Instead, a new round of competition begins, with legislators as voters and party leaders as candidates. The offices at stake are what we call “mega‐seats.” We consider the selection of three different types of mega‐seats—cabinet portfolios, seats on directing boards, and permanent committee chairs—in 57 democratic assemblies. If winning parties select the rules by which mega‐seats are chosen and those rules affect which parties can attain mega‐seats (one important payoff of “winning”), then parties and rules should coevolve in the long run. We find two main patterns relating to legislative party systems and a country's length of experience with democratic governance.

Information sharing and lending market competition with switching costs and poaching

We analyze information sharing with repeated banking competition. In the presence of switching costs we find that information sharing renders poaching more profitable in future rounds of competition, since the poaching activities can be targeted towards (more) creditworthy borrowers. We find that information sharing reduces relationship benefits, and, therefore relaxes competition for initial market shares. Information sharing introduces a welfare tradeoff by promoting equilibrium profits at the expense of talented entrepreneurs whenever market power persists in credit market, whereas it is a matter of indifference without market power. Thus information sharing may induce exclusion of creditworthy borrowers from credit markets.

Power output demands of elite track sprint cycling.

Competition analysis can be used to describe the complex physical demands of elite sport. This information can be used to design sport specific training sessions that replicate critical aspects of competition. Additionally, in some cases, competition analysis can be used to identify an athlete’s strengths and weaknesses. The ultimate goal of this research was to improve Australian Coaches’ understanding of both elite Domestic and International competition of elite track sprint cycling so that specific training practices could be productively refined.Three elite male sprint cyclists (19-33 yrs; 82-101 kg; 39-47 mm sum 7 skinfolds; 1729–2282 W lab peak power) were monitored during 18 Domestic (DOM) and 18 International (INT) semi-final and final match sprint races using calibrated SRM power meters (Julich, Germany, professional version). The 36 race profiles used for analysis were matched so that each group of 18 had the same number of cyclists contributing races from the same number of semi-final and final race efforts.Although not statistically significant it appears that international match sprint racing tends to be associated with a slightly lower peak (∼70W, 3.6%) and higher average (∼54W, 10%) power output. Further research is required to understand whether these differences are meaningful and whether specific training programs could be tailored to these unique demands.We have documented peak and sustained power output during sprint cycling that establish new extremes in human physiology. A greater understanding of those physiological traits that are required for success at the highest level of match sprinting may be obtained by comparing data collected from winners vs losers in the final rounds of competition.

Why hasn’t tax competition triggered a race to the bottom? Some quantitative lessons from the EU

The integration of European financial markets in the early 1980s created an environment of near-perfect capital mobility across countries that had harmonized indirect taxes but maintained large differences in factor taxes. The years that followed witnessed several rounds of competition in capital taxes with puzzling results. Instead of the dreaded “race to the bottom” in capital taxes, the UK lowered its capital tax to a rate closer to those of France, Germany and Italy, while capital taxes changed slightly in these countries. The UK increased its labor tax marginally, but the other countries increased theirs sharply. This paper shows that these results are consistent with the quantitative predictions of a dynamic, Neoclassical general equilibrium model of tax competition that incorporates the key international externalities of tax policy operating via relative prices, wealth distribution and fiscal solvency. Tax competition is modeled as a one-shot game over time-invariant capital taxes with dynamic payoffs relative to a status quo calibrated to European data. The calibration is preceded by an empirical analysis that shows that the relationship linking taxes to labor supply and the investment rate in the model are in line with empirical evidence and that domestic taxes seem to respond to foreign taxes. The solutions of the games show that when countries compete over capital taxes adjusting labor taxes to maintain fiscal solvency, there is no race to the bottom and the Nash equilibrium is close to observed taxes. In contrast, if consumption taxes adjust to maintain fiscal solvency, competition over capital taxes triggers a “race to the bottom,” but this outcome entails large welfare gains. Surprisingly, the gains from coordination are small in all of these experiments.

Programmatic Party Cohesion in Emerging Postcommunist Democracies

Across postcommunist states, studies of electoral competition reveal variation in the capacity of political parties to compete on the basis of clearly articulated issue-based programs. Notably, the development of programmatic party competition in the Russian Federation is lagging behind other postcommunist states. Over time it is likely that democratic institutions shape the learning process that enable politicians to adjust strategies of party competition, but learning is not likely to occur at the same pace across all countries. The authors explain the observed cross-national variation in party system development as a function of the aspiring political elites'capabilities to solve social choice problems through party formation against the backdrop of past experiences with collective mobilization under and before communist rule. The authors test this model using survey data of middle-level party elites in five countries and find that legacies decisively affect elite strategies in the initial rounds of democratic party competition.

Modular production networks: a new American model of industrial organization

This paper uses the case of contract manufacturing in the electronics industry to illustrate an emergent American model of industrial organization, the modular production network. Lead firms in the modular production network concentrate on the creation, penetration and defense of markets for end products—and increasingly the provision of services to go with them—while manufacturing capacity is shifted out-of-house to globally operating turn-key suppliers .T he modular production network relies on codified inter-firm links and the generic manufacturing capacity residing in turn-key suppliers to reduce transaction costs, build large external economies of scale and reduce risk for network actors. Itest the modular production network model against some of the key theoretical tools that have been developed to predict and explain industry structure: Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of innovation in the giant firm; Alfred Chandler’s ideas about economies of speed and the rise of the modern corporation; Oliver Williamson’s transaction cost framework; and a range of other production network models that appear in the literature. Iargue that the modular production network yields better economic performance in the context of globalization than more spatially and socially embedded network models. Iview the emergence of the modular production network as part of a historical process of industrial transformation in which nationally specific models of industrial organization co-evolve in intensifying rounds of competition, diffusion and adaptation.

Romania's Danube rail bridge?a monument to Anghel Saligny

The giant steel-truss rail bridge over the mighty River Danube in Romania is a monument to the country's most revered civil engineer, Anghel Saligny. The technical challenges involved in building 60 m tall piers in 30 m of fast-flowing water and a superstructure that could cope with high winds and low temperatures proved too much for the world's leading civil engineers, none of whom provided a conforming design in two rounds of competition. It was left to Saligny, secretary of the competition, to produce a workable plan—and over 100 years later his ‘King Carol I’ bridge is still in operation.

Romania's Danube rail bridge—a monument to Anghel Saligny

The giant steel-truss rail bridge over the mighty River Danube in Romania is a monument to the country's most revered civil engineer, Anghel Saligny. The technical challenges involved in building 60 m tall piers in 30 m of fast-flowing water and a superstructure that could cope with high winds and low temperatures proved too much for the world's leading civil engineers, none of whom provided a conforming design in two rounds of competition. It was left to Saligny, secretary of the competition, to produce a workable plan—and over 100 years later his ‘King Carol I’ bridge is still in operation.

Translating Social Cleavages into Party Systems: The Significance of New Democracies

This article focuses on new democracies in Eastern Europe and addresses two questions about the translation of social cleavages into political oppositions. The first question concerns the translation of preexisting cleavages: does the evolution of new party systems influence the politicization of social conflicts? The second question concerns the translation of new social cleavages, that is, cleavages that emerge once a party system freezes: can a new social cleavage be politicized? To answer these questions, the article integrates a formalization of social cleavage theory with a game-theoretic model of a new party system. The first result is that translation of preexisting cleavages depends on which parties survive the early rounds of electoral competition. In fact, depending on which parties survive, the axis of political conflict can shift by 90 degrees. This implies that party systems in new democracies should be seen as important founding moments, during which political actors determine the long-term axes of political conflict. The second result is that once a party system freezes, the politicization of a new social cleavage is difficult. Indeed, it is possible that a new social cleavage will remain politically dormant. In the context of Eastern Europe, this result suggests that political salience of class conflict is likely to be low because competitive elections and political parties predate the entrenchment of propertyowning classes.

Estimation of the genetic correlation between performances at different levels of show jumping competitions in Ireland

The purpose of this study was to determine the value of performance at both novice (low) and medium levels of show jumping competition for predicting genetic merit for high level performance ability. Show jumping performances, consisting of 258 526 records from 9956 horses in 11 945 national competitions from 1993 to 1998 inclusive were divided into three levels, namely high, medium and low (novice). For the purpose of analysis, performance at each of these levels was regarded as performance in three different traits. The measure of performance used in the genetic evaluation of show jumping horses in Ireland is obtained by ranking all performances in all competitions. The rank is based on the number of faults incurred and the length of time taken to complete each round of competition. The heritability of performance at these three levels and the genetic correlation between levels were used to estimate the predictive value of performances at the lower levels for genetic merit for high level performance. The genetic correlations between these traits and their heritabilities were estimated using reml vce. The genetic correlation between high and low levels was 0.69 (standard error ( se) 0.07), between medium and low 0.97 ( se 0.02) and between medium and high 0.83 ( se 0.05). The heritability of performance at high level was 0.10 ( se 0.01), at medium level 0.08 ( se 0.01) and at low level 0.07 ( se 0.01). These estimates indicate that low (novice) and medium levels can be useful in predicting an animal's potential genetic merit for high level performance.