Quantitative analysis of Brazilian football players' organisation on the pitch

The purpose of this study was to characterise Brazilian teams' coverage area and spread on the pitch while attacking and defending and to analyse the teams' organisation in tackle and shot on goal situations. We obtained the trajectories of 223 players in eight games with a tracking method. Team area was defined as the area of the convex hull formed by players' positions. Team spread was defined as the Frobenius norm of the distance-between-player matrix. We calculated teams' area and spread over time and in situations of shots on goal (n = 233) and tackles (n = 1897). While the players attacked, spread and area (median +/- confidence interval) ranged from 322.9 +/- 0.8 to 387.8 +/- 1.0 m and from 905.4 +/- 4.4 to 1407.6 +/- 5.5 m2, respectively. On defence, the values were smaller (p < 0.05) and ranged from 283.4 +/- 0.9 to 325.8 +/- 0.9 m and from 773.8 +/- 4.6 to 1158.4 +/- 5.5 m2 for the spread and the area. In defending circumstances, the teams presented a greater area and spread when they suffered shots on goal than when the teams performed tackles. In attacking situations, the teams presented a greater area and spread when they suffered tackles than when they performed shots on goal. The results allowed showing the attacking-defending interaction between Brazilian teams.     

Market size and innovation: The intermediary role of technology licensing

Previous literature finds that larger downstream markets fuel the innovation of new technologies by incentivizing firms to spend more on R&D. Our evidence shows that larger markets also increase the extent of licensing-based cooperation between upstream innovators and downstream commercializers. This cooperation is valuable because it pools firms’ complementary capabilities. Thus, downstream market expansions could positively impact innovative outcomes even holding R&D expenditures constant. Evidence is drawn from the drug candidate licensing market, exploiting the quasi-experimental variation introduced by the enactment of the Medicare Part D program in 2003. A model for the determination of equilibrium commercialization strategies in Markets for Technology rationalizes our finding. In this framework, cooperation gains are proportional to market size but transaction costs are not. Thus, larger downstream markets foster cooperation by reducing the relative importance of the latter. To better match the empirical context, the model extends the canonical “one technology–one application” framework of related work, to the more general case of “composite technologies,” which may have more than one end-user application.     

Semiotics as a basis for educational software design

Semiotics has recently been used to support formalisms for software design. On the other hand, every program has a certain educational potential as it exposes the user to a world of entities with which to interact. In this paper, we present a group of semiotic principles for software design and use them to show how they explain different educational possibilities. Our approach is illustrated by Theatre in the Computer: a software environment for children to experience the theatre.     

Wavelet-based deconvolution of ultrasonic signals in nondestructive evaluation

INTRODUCTION Deconvolution of ultrasonic signals is defined as the solution of the inverse problem of convolving an input signal, known as the system function h(n), with a medium reflectivity function x(n) and can be rep- resented by y(n)=h(n)*x(n) η(n), (1) where y(n) is the measured signal, * denotes the convolution operation and η(n) is the additive noise. Recovering x(n) from the observation y(n) leads to improving the appearance and the axial resolution of the RF-signals by removin…     

Analyzing learners’ engagement and behavior in MOOCs on programming with the Codeboard IDE

Educational technology research and development - Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) can be enhanced with the so-called learning-by-doing, designing the courses in a way that the learners are...