This paper empirically investigates three hypotheses of biased officiating by National Basketball Association (NBA) referees. Using a sample of 28,388 quarter-level observations from six seasons, we find that NBA referees make calls that favor home teams, teams losing during games, and teams losing in playoff series. All of these biases are likely to be profitable to the league. We identify the...

The causes of seat change in midterm elections have been debated for decades. Some political scientists believe seat change is caused by heightened national conditions; others argue seat change is a result of conditions within districts. Political scientists agree however that candidate quality affects election outcomes. In general, the party that recruits the highest quality candidates and run...

The Tongan suffix -‘i has been variously analyzed as a transitivizer, a passive suffix, a perfective suffix, and a modifier of verbal semantics. It has a variety of effects on the valency and aspect of the verb to which it is affixed. The One Form/One Meaning Principle (Johns 1992) suggests that these various effects should be linked together. I show that the apparently divergent functions of -...

This article, based on data from the Retirement History Study, examines coverage by an employee pension plan on the longest job and the extent to which covered workers received an employee pension upon retirement and the size of their benefits. It also examines the joint receipt of employee pension and OASDI benefits and the size of the combined benefits. Each of these pension variables is anal...

A third of the Dutch highways is monitored and controlled by roadside units. These RSUs are safety-critical systems, as they safeguard roadworks accidents. Therefore, it essential to have guarantees on correctness unit controller. Using supervisory control theory, a correct-by-construction supervisor obtained from model system its requirements. From model, controller implementation can be autom...

In this paper, we propose a supervisory control system for motion planning of humanoid robots. The proposed system is hierarchically structured into two levels. The lower level controls and monitors the robots using modular state nets. The upper level generates an optimal sequence of motion for user’s requirements using timed Petri nets. Keywords— humanoid robot, modular state net, timed Petri ...