Search

Esports are not a conventional fit with a traditional model of college life. However, this has not stopped them from becoming extraordinarily popular, particularly among independent colleges. In the broader culture, esports have an entire ecosystem supporting them. International events can draw crowds in the hundreds of millions, and professional teams are sprouting up across the country to pay players salaries on top of the prize money available in tournaments. Some colleges conduct esports in athletic departments alongside traditional sports, while other colleges house programs in student activities or operate them in conjunction with an academic program. This brief aims to provide college leaders with more information about the concept of esports and the benefits and challenges it presents. While esports could prove to be a significant draw for students--particularly male students--the complicated structure of competitions and leagues may or may not be a good fit on a given campus. Nonetheless, the rise of esports is a cultural phenomenon that may provide colleges with opportunities to innovate and connect with students as well as with potential sponsors and employers.

The popular image of college football is that of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I programs whose nationally known student athletes participate in televised bowl games before being drafted by the National Football League (sometimes entering the draft before finishing college). The salaries of Division I team coaches can outstrip those of their university presidents, not to mention those of their faculty, by millions of dollars. However, college football is also popular at smaller institutions whose players rarely go on to professional football careers or participate in nationally televised bowl games as college athletes. Indeed, roughly half the smaller private colleges and universities that are members of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) have football programs on their campuses. The recent adoption of football by many smaller independent colleges is the focus of this report by the College Sports Research Group at the University of Georgia. This brief delves into the effects of adopting football on recruitment and student enrollment in general, male student enrollment in particular, and net tuition revenue at CIC member campuses. In addition, the story of Berry College is recounted as a case study of a college's decision-making process with regard to the addition of football to the college's sports roster. The aim of this brief is to provide an informative examination of the role of college football at smaller independent colleges and universities.

With the advent of outcomes-based funding policies, state policymakers are increasingly committed to basing public college and university funding on how institutions perform on valued measures such as program progress and degree completion. This rising emphasis is considered here in the historical context of three earlier state funding approaches: "base-plus" approaches, enrollment-based formula-funding approaches, and early performance-based funding approaches. After detailed reviews of these funding approaches and the newer outcomes-based approach, the four models' respective strengths and weaknesses are reviewed comparatively. This paper then identifies some central conclusions for policymakers in this arena. [This paper was prepared for HCM Strategists, LLC.]

Galaxy clusters, the most massive collapsed structures, have been routinely used to determine cosmological parameters. When using clusters for cosmology, the crucial assumption is that they are relaxed. However, subarcminute resolution Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect images compared with high resolution X-ray images of some clusters show significant offsets between the two peaks. We have carried out self-consistent N-body/hydrodynamical simulations of merging galaxy clusters using FLASH to study these offsets quantitatively. We have found that significant displacements result between the SZ and X-ray peaks for large relative velocities for all masses used in our simulations as long as the impact parameters were about 100-250 kpc. Our results suggest that the SZ peak coincides with the peak in the pressure times the line-of-sight characteristic length and not the pressure maximum (as it would for clusters in equilibrium). The peak in the X-ray emission, as expected, coincides with the density maximum of the main cluster. As a consequence, the morphology of the SZ signal and therefore the offset between the SZ and X-ray peaks change with viewing angle. As an application, we compare the morphologies of our simulated images to observed SZ and X-ray images and mass surface densities derived from weak lensing observations of the merging galaxy cluster CL0152-1357. We find that a large relative velocity of 4800 km/s is necessary to explain these observations. We conclude that an analysis of the morphologies of multi-frequency observations of merging clusters can be used to put meaningful constraints on the initial parameters of the progenitors., Comment: 10 pages, 10 Figures and 1 Table, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

State open-meetings and records laws, often colloquially termed "sunshine laws," affect public higher education systems in numerous ways. Perhaps most visibly, the laws shape the governance activities of institutional boards and high-level campus leaders. Since their beginnings in the 1970s and 1908s, the laws have become an institutionalized element in public higher-education governance in most states. Unfortunately, however, the laws have only rarely been investigated systematically. This study begins an ongoing examination of sunshine laws with a review of the existing literature. Researchers are beginning an analysis of the current status of these laws using data from six selected cases plus data from a recent national governance survey. Data gathering is not complete; this paper reports on the literature review and discusses the characteristics, dimensions, and variations of the laws currently in place. It considers aspects of the laws deemed harmful or beneficial to effective governance, and describes several potential challenges to the laws. The paper concludes with cautions regarding the complexity of ascertaining the laws' benefits, costs, and ultimate effects. An appendix describes the ongoing study. (Contains 52 references.) (Author/SLD)

Asteroids can be eclipsed by other bodies in the Solar System, but no direct observation of an asteroid eclipse has been reported to date. We describe a statistical method to predict an eclipse for an asteroid based on the analysis of the orbital elements covariance matrix. By propagating a set of Virtual Asteroids to an epoch correspondent to a close approach with a Solar System planet or natural satellite, it is possible to estimate the probability of a partial or total eclipse. The direct observation of an eclipse can provide data useful to improve the asteroid orbit, especially for dim asteroids typically observed only for a few days. We propose two different methods: the first, based on the inclusion of the apparent magnitude residuals into the orbit's least squares minimization process, capable of improving the asteroid's nominal orbit and the related covariance matrix; the second, based on weighting different Virtual Asteroids in relation to their apparent magnitude during the eclipse, useful for recovery purposes. As an application, we have numerically investigated the possibility of a Near Earth Asteroid eclipsed by the Moon or the Earth in the 1990-2050 period. A total of 74 distinct eclipses have been found, involving 59 asteroids. In particular, the asteroid (99942) Apophis has a probability of about 74% to enter the Moon's penumbra cone and a probability of about 6% to enter the umbra cone on April 14, 2029, less than six hours after a very close approach to Earth., Comment: 14 pages, 2 tables, 8 figures, submitted to ICARUS

Public higher education is a major recipient of state funding and resources. As such, public colleges and universities directly respond to state needs for higher education and are required to provide transparency in decision-making, which is codified in state open-meeting and record laws. These laws, often termed "sunshine laws," present challenges and opportunities to institutional leaders across many dimensions: executive search and selection processes; board deliberation and decision-making; and institutional finance and business operations. Within the context of sunshine laws, effective institutional governance depends on deftly balancing the need for transparency with the obligation to ensure an institution achieves its public purpose. This policy brief reviews the critical issues associated with these laws and provides institutional leaders and state policymakers with recommendations that address the important need for transparency while recognizing the challenges of board governance and leadership in the sunshine.

We summarize the results of numerical simulations of colliding gas-rich disk galaxies in which the impact velocity is set parallel to the spin axes of the two galaxies. The effects of varying the impact speed are studied with particular attention to the resulting gaseous structures and shockwave patterns, and the time needed to produce these structures. The simulations employ an N-body treatment of the stars and dark matter, together with an SPH treatment of the gas, in which all components of the models are gravitationally active. The results indicate that for such impact geometries, collisions can lead to the very rapid formation of a central, rapidly rotating, dense gas disk, and that in all cases extensive star formation is predicted by the very high gas densities and prevalence of shocks, both in the nucleus and out in the galactic disks. As the dense nucleus is forming, gas and stars are dispersed over very large volumes, and only fall back towards the nucleus over long times. In the case of low impact velocities, this takes an order of magnitude more time than that needed for the formation of a dense nucleus., Comment: To be published in Proceedings of 'The Evolution of Galaxies III- From simple approaches to self-consistent models,' held in Kiel, Germany, July 2002, Astrophysics and Space Science (Kluwer), vol. 284, p. 479, 2003

We resolve the extended X-ray emission from the prototypical ultraluminous infrared galaxy Arp 220. Extended, faint edge-brightened, soft X-ray lobes outside the optical galaxy are observed to a distance of 10 to 15 kpc on each side of the nuclear region. Bright plumes inside the optical isophotes coincide with the optical line emission and extend 11 kpc from end to end across the nucleus. The data for the plumes cannot be fit by a single temperature plasma, and display a range of temperatures from 0.2 to 1 keV. The plumes emerge from bright, diffuse circumnuclear emission in the inner 3 kpc centered on the Halpha peak, which is displaced from the radio nuclei. There is a close morphological correspondence between the Halpha and soft X-ray emission on all spatial scales. We interpret the plumes as a starburst-driven superwind, and discuss two interpretations of the emission from the lobes in the context of simulations of the merger dynamics of Arp 220., Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ; see also astro-ph/0208477 (Paper 1)

Colliding galaxies are excellent laboratories for studying galactic evolution and global star formation. Computer simulations of galaxy collisions, in which at least one galaxy has a significant gaseous component, show the production of density enhancements and shock waves in the interstellar medium. These high-density regions coincide with the locations of recent, large-scale star formation in observations of some real colliding galaxies. Thus, combined n-body/hydrodynamic computer simulations can be used to explore the history and conditions of star forming regions in colliding galaxies. The galaxy system Arp 119 (CPG 29) contains a southern member, Arp 119S (Mrk 984), that has an extremely disturbed appearance, and a northern member, Arp 119N, a gas-poor elliptical. The morphology of both members can be fit well by a simulation in which a gas-rich disk galaxy has been impacted by an equal mass elliptical that had a trajectory approximately perpendicular to the plane of the disk and passed through the disk slightly off-center. We compare multi-wavelength observations of the Arp 119 system with a combined n-body/SPH simulation of colliding galaxies. We find that the progression of recent, large-scale star formation in this galaxy can be accounted for by a single, outwardly propagating collision-induced density wave in the gas., Comment: Submitted to The Astrophysical Journal; for related simulation material, see http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/collide/video.html

We present a brief overview of some recent observations of colliding galaxies and relevant numerical simulations. These are compared, and details of the locations and history of collision induced star formation are explored, with possible application to star formation at earlier epochs., Comment: 6 pages, uses newpasp.sty, to be published in the proceedings of III "Guillermo Haro" Astrophysics Conference on Cosmic Evolution and Galaxy Formation: Structure, Interactions, and Feedback, held in Puebla, Mexico, November 15 - 19, 1999

In this paper we demonstrate for the first time the connection between the spatial and temporal progression of star formation and the changing locations of the very dense regions in the gas of a massive disk galaxy (NGC 1144) in the aftermath of its collision with a massive elliptical (NGC 1143). These two galaxies form the combined object Arp 118, a collisional ring galaxy system. The results of 3D, time-dependent, numerical simulations of the behavior of the gas, stars, and dark matter of a disk galaxy and the stars and dark matter in an elliptical during a collision are compared with multiwavelength observations of Arp 118. The collision that took place approximately 22 Myr ago generated a strong, non-linear density wave in the stars and gas in the disk of NGC 1144, causing the gas to became clumped on a large scale. This wave produced a series of superstarclusters along arcs and rings that emanate from the central point of impact in the disk. The locations of these star forming regions match those of the regions of increased gas density predicted the time sequence of models. The models also predict the large velocity gradients observed across the disk of NGC 1144. These are due to the rapid radial outflow of gas coupled to large azimuthal velocities in the expanding ring, caused by the impact of the massive intruder., Comment: 12 pages in document, and 8 figures (figures are separate from the document's file); Submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters