This paper develops and estimates a model of college basketball teams’ search for scoring opportunities, to provide a benchmark of the winning margin distributions that should arise if teams’ only goal is to win. I estimate the model’s structural parameters using first-half play-by-play data from college games and simulate the estimated model’s predicted winning margin distributions. Teams’ opt...

BACKGROUND The preparation of people for surgery has traditionally included the routine removal of body hair from the intended surgical wound site. However, there are studies which claim that pre-operative hair removal is deleterious to patients, perhaps by causing surgical site infections (SSIs), and should not be carried out. OBJECTIVES The primary objective of this review was to determine ...

We describe an automatic procedure for building risk maps of unexploded ordnances (UXO) based on historic air photographs. The system is based on a cost-sensitive version of AdaBoost regularized by hard point shaving techniques, and integrated by spatial smoothing. The result is a map of the spatial density of craters, an indicator of UXO risk.

We introduce and solve a new problem inspired by energy pricing schemes in which a client is billed for peak usage. Given is a sequence of n positive values (d1, d2, . . . , dn) that represent resource demands (typically energy) over time. At each timeslot i, the system requests a certain amount ri to meet the demand di. The added piece of infrastructure is the battery, which can store surplus ...