Pressure source of athletes in field based on improved hierarchical K-means algorithm

Nowadays, with the development of economy, sports industry attracts more and more people's attention, and the number and scale of sports events continue to expand. But the fierce competition, for athletes, is not only physical competition, psychological competition is particularly important. Psychological pressure is an important factor that affects athletes to play at a high level in the competition field. How to analyze the pressure source of athletes in the competition field is very important for athletes to overcome the competition pressure. Therefore, this paper designs a method based on the improved hierarchical K-Means clustering algorithm (KMCA) to analyze the pressure source of athletes in the competition field, so as to help athletes overcome the pressure on the competition field and promote their high-level performance. In this method, firstly, 182 athletes were investigated by questionnaire to obtain the data of related psychological pressure sources. Secondly, because KMCA is sensitive to the selection of initial class center, the performance of KMCA is directly related to the selection of initial class. Aiming at the problem of KMCA, this paper proposes an improved hierarchical KMCA. Finally, the improved hierarchical KMCA is applied to the clustering analysis of sports competition pressure source data. Through simulation analysis, compared with KMCA, the improved layered KMCA proposed in this paper has a good performance improvement. The improved hierarchical KMCA proposed in this paper can be applied to the analysis of the pressure source of athletes in the competition field, which can analyze the pressure of athletes and get the characteristics of the pressure of athletes, so as to help athletes overcome the pressure in the competition field and achieve the mental health of the competition field?

Tracing Mechanism of Sports Competition Pressure Based on Backpropagation Neural Network

Through the overall situation of athletes’ competition pressure, the pressure level of participating athletes can be understood and revealed. Analyzing the sources of stress and influencing factors of athletes can find measures to relieve and reduce stress and provide theoretical reference for the regulation of athletes’ competition pressure. Based on genetic algorithm and neural network theory, this paper proposes a method of tracing the sports competition pressure based on genetic algorithm backpropagation (BP) neural network to solve the problem that traditional neural network learning algorithm is slow and easy to fall into local minimum. There is no significant difference between male and female athletes in the level of competition pressure. Athletes have the same training methods and the same goals, and the competition pressure tends to be the same, with no obvious difference; athletes with different educational backgrounds have no significant differences in training, academics, sports injuries, interpersonal relationships, social expectations, and evaluations. Due to the particularity of the stage, the competition pressure of fourth-year undergraduate and third-year masters is significantly higher than that of other grades. The number of athletes participating in college table tennis tournaments has very significant differences in competition dimensions. There is significant difference in training and self-expectation dimension difference. The competition pressure of athletes who participated in the college table tennis championship for the first time was significantly higher than that of athletes who participated repeatedly. There were significant differences between athletes before and after adapting to the venue. Before adapting to the venue, the competition pressure of athletes is generally greater. After adapting to the venue, the competition pressure of athletes has been relieved.

Investigating the Impact of Competition and Incentive Design on Performance of Crowdfunding Projects: A Case of Independent Movies

Recently, crowdfunding has become a popular e-commerce model based on web 2.0 platforms for fundraisers to collect funding from a large group of supporters using the Internet. However, many projects failed to reach their funding targets. Despite the growing interest of academic researchers and e-commerce professionals in identifying drivers of crowdfunding success, important factors like competition and incentive design have not received much attention in prior research. In this study we aim to fill this gap by investigating the impact of competition and incentive design on the performance of crowdfunding projects. Drawing upon literature of entrepreneurship, we develop a research model involving key factors such as competition intensity and the number of reward levels. Using real data of 209 independent movie projects of an online crowdfunding platform, we test the proposed hypotheses of the impact of competition and incentive design on crowdfunding success. Our results show that competition plays a significant role in crowdfunding performance. The higher competition pressure is, the lower performance of crowdfunding projects will be. We also find that factors such as the number of reward levels and the plan of attending movie festivals are essential to the success of crowdfunding projects, but the funding level of getting the top reward does not exert a significant impact. Our study contributes to the e-commerce literature by further exploring the mechanism of crowdfunding success with theoretical explanation and empirical evidence. Researchers and professionals can apply our theoretical findings regarding competition and incentive design in other e-commerce platforms. Furthermore, our results provide useful managerial insights and operational policies for project founders and managers of crowdfunding platforms.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR TOURISM DESTINATION COMPETITIVENESS IN THE FACE OF GLOBAL FUNCTIONAL TRANSFORMATION

Tourism is among the industries that record globally, the most rapid rate of development. Being a highly dynamic sector, modern tourism forms the third largest volume in international trade operations, after the oil and automobile industries. It is distinguished by its vulnerability to external economic, political and nature factors, but also by its great flexibility in relation to the ongoing transformation processes. In this dynamic and changing environment, the tourism industry and tourist destinations are exposed to the global competition pressure. Regarding to that, this paper explores the role of possible approaches to the destination management for improving the whole process of competitiveness increase, with accent on the cluster concept. The results show that in the frame of common approach in the management of tourist destination, when developing a model for approving its success and competitiveness, a modification on clusters' approach is purposeful to adapt.

Information transfer efficiency differs in wild chimpanzees and bonobos, but not social cognition

Several theories have been generated to understand the socio-cognitive mechanisms underlying the unique cooperative abilities of humans. The ‘interdependence hypothesis' posits first, that the cognitive dimension of human cooperation evolved in contexts when several individuals needed to act together to achieve a common goal, like when hunting large prey. Second, the more interdependent individuals are, the more likely they are to provide services to conspecifics in other contexts. Alternatively, the ‘social tolerance hypothesis' proposes that higher social tolerance allows conspecifics to cooperate more efficiently and with a wider range of partners. We conducted the first field experimental evaluation of both hypotheses in our closest living relatives by contrasting chimpanzees to the less interdependent but more tolerant bonobos. We compared each species' performance during a cooperative task: informing conspecifics about a danger. We presented Gaboon viper models to 82 individuals from five wild communities. Chimpanzees arriving late at the snake were significantly more likely to have heard a call and less likely to startle, indicating that chimpanzees were better informed about the presence of the threat than bonobos. This stems from clear species differences in how individuals adjusted their calling decisions to the level of information already available. Chimpanzees were more likely to call and produced more alarm calls when they had not yet heard a call, whereas bonobos did so when they already heard a call. Our results confirm the link between interdependence and cooperation performance. These species differences were most likely driven by differences in motivation rather than in cognitive capacities because both species tended to consider audience knowledge in their decision to call. Our results inform theories on the evolution of human cooperation by linking inter-group competition pressure and in-group cooperative motivation and/or capability.

Who Embraces Technical Barriers to Trade? The Case of European REACH Regulations

Technical Barriers to Trade are on the rise at a time when the ghost of protectionism looms large across the world economy. They are allegedly trade restrictive and some of them are more burdensome than others, particularly to foreign suppliers. The leading question of this study is who embraces technical barriers to trade better than others and why. This study examines how different countries have reacted to the REACH regulations of the European Union and what factors have motivated some, if not all, of them to harmonize their domestic policies with REACH regulations. With a random-effects ordered logistic regression analysis, this study finds strong statistical support for two out of three diffusion mechanisms – that is, transnational communication and competition pressure for exports market. The causal relationship between intergovernmental institution and the level of harmonization is found statistically insignificant. These findings imply that technical regulations, if understood correctly through communication and/or motivated by strong commercial incentives, can create upward pressure for global regulatory harmonization.

Emerging Consumer Preference for Wine Attributes in a European Transition Country – the Case of Kosovo

This study analyzes consumer preferences for wine in Prishtina, Kosovo – a transition country in the Balkans, which is making efforts to withstand to the competition pressure from the traditional neighboring wine producing countries. With the changes in life style and consumer behavior, and incomes rising rapidly since the last conflict, it is imperative to survey the changing demand for producers to compete in the domestic markets. Conjoint Choice Experiments were used to evaluate wine consumer preferences based on wine type (white vs. red), origin (domestic vs. imported), taste (sweet vs. dry) and price. Four distinct classes of consumers were identified. The top two important attributes in the choice of wine are the type and origin but preferences vary across groups – type of wine and origin appear far more important when compared to price, especially for the richest identified segment, whose consumers prefer more expensive wines.

How does market share affect the increase in the value of investment unit of voluntary pension funds?

The importance of this research stems from highly concentrated markets of voluntary pension funds, on the one hand, and intensive competition pressure among market participants, on the other. The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the static and dynamic relationship between a pension fund's market share and value of its investment unit. The research was designed to monitor the changes in the size of market share and investment units in the period from 2008 to 2017 in the funds in the Republic of Serbia. The main findings suggest that the size of market share of individual voluntary pension funds has no influence on the growth of investment unit value. Contrary to the static approach, the dynamic approach argues that the changes of market share affect the performance of voluntary pension funds. The obtained results indicate that the performances of individual pension funds do not depend on their size, but rather on their ability to occupy a larger portion of the market and increase their market share. This paper provides a systematic review of the relevant empirical literature on internal and external determinants of a pension fund's performance. It represents a significant contribution to the understanding of market factors, such as market share and value of investment units.

Dieback and expansions: species-specific responses during 20 years of amplified warming in the high Alps

The largest alpine–nival vegetation permanent plot site in the Alps, the GLORIA mastersite Schrankogel (Tirol, Austria), provided evidence of warming-driven vegetation changes already 10 years after its establishment in 1994. Another decade later, in 2014, substantial compositional changes with increasing ratios of warmth-demanding to cold-adapted species have been found. The current study deals with species-specific responses involved in an ongoing vegetation transformation across the alpine–nival ecotone on Schrankogel by using presence/absence as well as cover data from permanent plots, situated between 2900 and 3400 masl. The number of occupied plots per species remained constant or even increased during the first decade, whereas disappearance events became more frequent during the second one, especially for cold-adapted specialists (subnival–nival species). Remarkably, the latter was accompanied by continued strong losses in cover of all subnival–nival species. These losses were more frequent in plots with a more thermophilous species composition, suggesting an increasing maladaptation of subnival–nival species to warmer habitat conditions and a successive trailing-edge decline. Several species with a distribution centre at lower elevations (alpine–subnival) markedly increased in cover, comparatively more so in colder plots, indicating a leading-edge expansion. Moreover, our findings show an increase in occupied plots and cover of almost all snowbed species, suggesting that areas previously with a too long snowpack period are now becoming suitable snowbed habitats. Vegetation gaps arising from population dieback of cold-adapted species, however, could only be partly filled by advancing species, indicating that species declines have occurred already before the onset of strong competition pressure.

Cognitive neural mechanism of sports competition pressure source

At sports events, the athletes by the pressure source is varied, based on the stress status of athletes, many athletes stress related experts at home and abroad to design questionnaire, questionnaire and sports events for athletes with often life process of in-depth and meticulous investigation, has formed the one whole set athletes pressure source of cognitive neuroscience assessment system, sports competition for athlete’s "escort". By participating in state general administration of sports scientific research project " management system of athlete competition pressure cognitive neuroscience" the development of using psychological pressure on athletes’ source data, the application of natural language processing and machine learning technology research these data, mainly using clustering algorithm and recommendation algorithm, thus forming pressure source research results are applied in sports competitions.