More than competition: exploring stakeholder identities at a grassroots cause-related sporting event

The purpose of this paper is to (a) explore stakeholder identities of a grassroots cause-related sporting event; and (b) gain a better understanding of how identities are related to stakeholder development, support of the event, and future intentions. We used a mixed methods research design that consisted of two studies: qualitative followed by quantitative. Study 1 explored stakeholder identities and how they are related to stakeholder development and support of the event, and Study 2 examined how future intentions regarding attendance, donations, and sponsor support differ based on levels of stakeholder identity. Sports marketing and non-profit management literature streams as well as identity theory and social capital theory informed our studies. The National Kidney Foundation Surf Festival was selected because it is a grassroots cause-related sporting event with financial success over the last two decades. In addition, a surf contest, an action sport, is a unique sport setting in the nonprofit sector, which offers insight to marketers seeking to target subcultures. The findings of the qualitative study revealed three identities relevant to participants: sport subculture, community, and cause. A framework emerged from the data that illustrated how these identities unite together to generate social capital, which is linked to effective volunteer and sponsorship management. Quantitative analysis through survey data provided further evidence of the impact of identification with a cause-related sport activity on consumer outcomes. Results indicated attendees with high surf-related identity are more likely to attend future Surf Festivals, have higher intentions to donate to the cause, and have higher sponsor purchase intentions compared to those with low self-identity with the sport subculture. The conclusion discusses implications, framing the findings through the intersection of the sports marketing and non-profit sector industries, and provides suggestions for future research.Ye

Measurement of the Time-Resolved Reflection Matrix for Enhancing Light Energy Delivery into a Scattering Medium

Multiple scatterings occurring in a turbid medium attenuate the intensity of propagating waves. Here, we propose a method to efficiently deliver light energy to the desired target depth in a scattering medium. We measure the time-resolved reflection matrix of a scattering medium using coherent time-gated detection. From this matrix, we derive and experimentally implement an incident wave pattern that optimizes the detected signal corresponding to a specific arrival time. This leads to enhanced light delivery at the target depth. The proposed method will lay a foundation for efficient phototherapy and deep-tissue in vivo imaging in the near future.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (9P41EB015871-26A1

Kinetic profile inference with outlier detection using support vector machine regression and Gaussian process regression

We propose an outlier-resilient Gaussian process regression (GPR) model supported by support vector machine regression (SVMR) for kinetic profile inference. GPR, being a non-parametric regression using Bayesian statistics, has advantages in that it imposes no constraints on profile shapes and can be readily used to integrate different kinds of diagnostics, while it is vulnerable to the presence of even a single outlier among a measured dataset. As an outlier classifier, an optimized SVMR is developed based only on the measurements. Hyper-parameters of the developed GPR model with informative prior distributions are treated in two different ways, i.e. maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator and marginalization using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler. Our SVMR-supported GPR model is applied to infer ion temperature T _i profiles using measured data from the KSTAR charge exchange spectroscopy system. The GPR-inferred T _i profiles with and without an outlier are compared and show prominent improvement when the outlier is removed by the SVMR. T _i profiles inferred with the MAP estimator and the marginalization scheme are compared. They are noticeably different when observation uncertainties are not small enough, and the marginalization scheme generally provides a smoother profile

New low temperature multidipole plasma device with a magnetic X-point and its properties

A new low temperature multidipole plasma device with a magnetic X-point is developed. With a usual multidipole configuration generated by permanent neodymium magnets, a pair of axially flowing electrical currents up to 1.0 kA in the chamber creates figure-eight shaped poloidal magnetic fields with the X-point which separates plasmas into three distinct regions of core, edge and private regions. This new device, magnetic X-point simulator system (MAXIMUS), is equipped with end-plate wall filaments, core filaments and a LaB6 cathode as DC plasma sources. A wide range of plasma densities from 10(8) to 10(12) cm(-3) with electron temperatures of 0.4 to 3 eV is achieved. Plasmas in MAXIMUS are highly correlated with the shape of the magnetic fields as electrons are magnetized. Furthermore, electron velocity distribution functions can be significantly modified from usual Maxwellian distributions due to the strong grad-B and curvature drifts of electrons, resulting in high skewness and excess kurtosis. Such a capability of controlling the distribution function as well as having closed circular magnetic fields will allow us to systematically investigate effects of non-Maxwellian distribution functions and curved magnetic fields on various physical phenomena such as cross-field diffusion process, plasma waves and many nonlinear physics including solitons, shock waves and three-wave interactions. Tokamak edge physics correlated with neutral particles is also to be investigated with MAXIMUS.

New low temperature multidipole plasma device with a magnetic X-point and its properties

Abstract A new low temperature multidipole plasma device with a magnetic X-point is developed. With a usual multidipole configuration generated by permanent neodymium magnets, a pair of axially flowing electrical currents up to 1.0 kA in the chamber creates figure-eight shaped poloidal magnetic fields with the X-point which separates plasmas into three distinct regions of core, edge and private regions. This new device, magnetic X-point simulator system (MAXIMUS), is equipped with end-plate wall filaments, core filaments and a LaB6 cathode as DC plasma sources. A wide range of plasma densities from 108 to 1012 cm−3 with electron temperatures of 0.4 to 3 eV is achieved. Plasmas in MAXIMUS are highly correlated with the shape of the magnetic fields as electrons are magnetized. Furthermore, electron velocity distribution functions can be significantly modified from usual Maxwellian distributions due to the strong grad-B and curvature drifts of electrons, resulting in high skewness and excess kurtosis. Such a capability of controlling the distribution function as well as having closed circular magnetic fields will allow us to systematically investigate effects of non-Maxwellian distribution functions and curved magnetic fields on various physical phenomena such as cross-field diffusion process, plasma waves and many nonlinear physics including solitons, shock waves and three-wave interactions. Tokamak edge physics correlated with neutral particles is also to be investigated with MAXIMUS.</jats:p