One and Done: The Long Eclipse of Women’s Televised Sports, 1989–2019

For 3 decades we have tracked and analyzed the quantity and quality of coverage of women’s and men’s sports in televised news and highlights shows. In this paper, we report on our most recent iteration of the longitudinal study, which now includes an examination of online sports newsletters and social media. The study reveals little change in the quantitative apportionment of coverage of women’s and men’s sports over the past 30 years. Men’s sports—especially the “Big Three” of basketball, football and baseball—still receive the lion’s share of the coverage, whether in-season or out of season. When a women’s sports story does appear, it is usually a case of “one and done,” a single women’s sports story obscured by a cluster of men’s stories that precede it, follow it, and are longer in length. Social media posts and online sports newsletters’ coverage, though a bit more diverse in some ways, mostly reflected these same patterned gender asymmetries. Gender-bland sexism continued as the dominant pattern in 2019 TV news and highlights’ stories on women’s sports. Three themes of this “gender-bland” coverage include: 1) nationalism, 2) asymmetrical gender marking coupled with local parochialism, and 3) community service/ charitable contributions.

PPS: Energy-Aware Grid-Based Coverage Path Planning for UAVs Using Area Partitioning in the Presence of NFZs

Area monitoring and surveillance are some of the main applications for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks. The scientific problem that arises from this application concerns the way the area must be covered to fulfill the mission requirements. One of the main challenges is to determine the paths for the UAVs that optimize the usage of resources while minimizing the mission time. Different approaches rely on area partitioning strategies. Depending on the size and complexity of the area to monitor, it is possible to decompose it exactly or approximately. This paper proposes a partitioning method called Parallel Partitioning along a Side (PPS). In the proposed method, grid-mapping and grid-subdivision of the area, as well as area partitioning are performed to plan the UAVs path. An extra challenge, also tackled in this work, is the presence of non-flying zones (NFZs). These zones are areas that UAVs must not cover or pass over it. The proposal is extensively evaluated, in comparison with existing approaches, to show that it enables UAVs to plan paths with minimum energy consumption, number of turns and completion time while at the same time increases the quality of coverage.

A dosimetric comparison of linac-based stereotactic fractionated radiotherapy techniques for pituitary adenoma and craniopharyngioma

AimTo compare the dosimetric outcomes of linear accelerator-based stereotactic radiotherapy (SRT) techniques—static conformal field (SCF), static conformal arc (SCA) and dynamic conformal arc (DCA), for treating pituitary adenoma and craniopharyngioma.Materials and methodsComputer image sets of 20 patients with pituitary adenoma or craniopharyngioma and treated with post-operative SRT were selected for this study. For each dataset, three SRT plans, with SCF, SCA and DCA techniques were generated using Brain LAB, iPlan RT V.4.5.3, TPS software. The conformity index (CI), homogeneity index (HI), quality of coverage of the target, dose–volume histograms for the target and organs at risk (OARs) and the time taken to deliver treatment was compared across three sets of plan.ResultsThere were 12 patients with pituitary adenoma and eight with craniopharyngioma. The CI and HI were comparable across three techniques. The quality of coverage was superior in DCA technique. OARs were better spared in SCF and DCA techniques. Time taken to deliver treatment was least in SCF technique.ConclusionsThe linac-based SRT techniques SCF, SCA and DCA are efficient in delivering highly conformal and homogenous dose to the target in pituitary adenoma and craniopharyngioma. Among these three techniques, SCF and DCA had acceptable quality of coverage. The dose received by OARs was least in the SCF technique.

Defining criteria for good environmental journalism and testing their applicability: An environmental news review as a first step to more evidence based environmental science reporting

While the quality of environmental science journalism has been the subject of much debate, a widely accepted benchmark to assess the quality of coverage of environmental topics is missing so far. Therefore, we have developed a set of defined criteria of environmental reporting. This instrument and its applicability are tested in a newly established monitoring project for the assessment of pieces on environmental issues, which refer to scientific sources and therefore can be regarded as a special field of science journalism. The quality is assessed in a kind of journalistic peer review. We describe the systematic development of criteria, which might also be a model procedure for other fields of science reporting. Furthermore, we present results from the monitoring of 50 environmental reports in German media. According to these preliminary data, the lack of context and the deficient elucidation of the evidence pose major problems in environmental reporting.

Comparison of spray dose measured on leaf surfaces with spray coverage estimated from Kromekote paper

The control of tomato potato psyllid largely depends on effective application of pesticides This paper presents an experiment to measure deposition using leaf washing of spray containing water and rhodamine dye on a potato canopy The treatments included conventional boom canopy submerged DropSpray combination electrostatic spraying system (both engaged and disengaged) and airassisted rotary atomizer During the same experiment the quality of coverage was measured using Kromekote paper Comparison of both sampling methods illustrated a rapid decrease of deposited material as it descended through the canopy The leaf washing indicated more deposition within the canopy with the DropSpray unit and a sampler difference when the electrostatics either were engaged analysis of spray dose on real leaves and its position affected the results Finally novel spray technologies gave better deposition to the undersides of leaves

Collaborative Scheduling Using Cooperative Sensing Model for Wsns

One of the major challenges in constructing wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is to ensure the quality of coverage (QoC) as well as save energy. Considering the cooperative sensing model and the random deployment policy, the judgment model of redundant node without location information is presented. Furthermore, the distributed collaborative scheduling algorithm (DCSA) is designed to guarantee the QoC of networks with the least number of nodes. It chooses the uniformly-located working nodes and makes sure that the energy consumption of each node consumes homogeneously. Simulation results show that the DCSA policy not only provides the desired QoC of networks, but also reduces the number of working nodes significantly, saves the energy of the networks, and extends the network lifetime.