23 January 2020

The NFL revealed its 2020 regular-season schedule Thursday, with the Kansas City Chiefs kicking off their Super Bowl title defense against the Houston Texans in Week 1.

Based on the newest forecasting models, AccuWeather forecasters have extended the upper range of hurricanes predicted for the Atlantic hurricane season.

The "Saturday Night Live" Season 45 finale, the Season 2 premiere of Netflix's "Dead to Me" and a second installment of "Disney Family Singalong" are just some of the entertainment options available this weekend.

CBS said it has ordered first seasons of three new shows -- "Clarice," "The Equalizer" and "B Positive" for the 2020-21 television season.

While low-skilled workers generally have limited opportunities to legally migrate to the European Union, seasonal migration forms an important exception. This MPI Europe-SVR webinar explores lessons from Europe on managing seasonal worker programs that are responsive to labor market needs but also prioritize the well-being of seasonal workers and interests of receiving countries. 

As governments have reacted to the coronavirus pandemic by closing borders, seasonal workers have been kept out, raising a pressing question: who is going to produce the food amid agricultural labor shortages? Policymakers in the Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America have responded by seeking to recruit residents, lengthen stays for already present seasonal workers, and find ways to continue admitting foreign seasonal labor, as this commentary explores.

Seasonal worker programs in the European Union have a long history, but have yet to find the sweet spot of working for migrants, employers, and countries of destination and origin alike. This policy brief explores some of the challenges common to these programs—drawing on examples in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand—and highlights promising practices.

Findings will be discussed during 25 February MPI Europe – SVR webinar

chicken thigh fillets, skinless and cut in to finger length strips 100g melted butter 1 tbsp. native tomato spice mix plum and chilli bottled sauce

As the European Union prepares to review the implementation of its Seasonal Workers Directive, as well as countries such as the United Kingdom continue to explore new approaches to selecting seasonal workers, this webinar features findings from a policy brief on the topic. 

Governments are facing urgent pandemic-related questions. One of the more pressing ones: Who is going to harvest crops in countries that rely heavily on seasonal foreign workers? In this podcast, MPI experts examine ways in which countries could address labor shortages in agriculture, including recruiting native-born workers and letting already present seasonal workers stay longer. Catch an interesting discussion as border closures have halted the movement of seasonal workers even as crops are approaching harvest in some places.

Thousands of teachers will head to the state capital on Wednesday to call for a nearly $10,000 raise over four years and an increase to per-pupil spending.

The NFL wants college football season to proceed as usual in 2020. It may proceed, but there's a good chance it will be very unusual. Via Sports Business Daily, commissioners of two of the Power Five conferences (Kevin Warren of the Big 10 and Greg Sankey of the SEC) have hinted in recent days at [more]

Too early to just hand him the Heisman Trophy now?

NCAA President Mark Emmert says the coronavirus is making it unlikely all schools will be ready to begin competing in college sports at the same time. Emmert appeared with Dr. Brian Hainline, the NCAA's chief medical officer, in an interview shown on the NCAA's official Twitter account Friday night. Major football conference commissioners have stated their goal is for all 130 teams in 10 conferences across 41 states to begin the season at the same time.

One of many possible plans if the league can resume play.

The Boston Bruins had planned on opening up their 2020-21 NHL regular season overseas against the Nashville Predators in Prague as part of the NHL Global Series, but that plan to visit the Czech Republic has now been postponed.

National Hockey League regular-season games that were scheduled for early in the 2020-21 campaign in Helsinki and Prague have been called off in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. With concern about when or if the halted 2019-20 campaign might resume due to the deadly virus outbreak, the NHL and the NHL Players Association announced the decision to scrap the matchups with an eye to a 2021 return. "The NHLPA and the NHL remain committed to maintaining and growing our international presence," a joint statement said.

The NHL announces it is postponing the Global Series games that were scheduled to be held in the Czech Republic and Finland in the 2020-21 season.

Kerfoot discussing his first Maple Leafs season spurred a larger discussion.

Former Flyer and current Red Wings scout Mark Howe said the "open-minded" NHL is determined to finish the 2019-20 season. By Joe Fordyce

Pac-12 Networks' Ashley Adamson catches up with Oregon's "Big 3" of Sabrina Ionescu, Ruthy Hebard and Satou Sabally to hear how they're adjusting to the new world without sports while still preparing for the WNBA Draft on April 17. They also share how they're staying hungry for basketball during the hiatus.

Jose Ameijeiras-Alonso, Akli Benali, Rosa M. Crujeiras, Alberto Rodríguez-Casal, José M. C. Pereira.

Source: The Annals of Applied Statistics, Volume 13, Number 4, 2120--2139.

Abstract:
Understanding the role of vegetation fires in the Earth system is an important environmental problem. Although fire occurrence is influenced by natural factors, human activity related to land use and management has altered the temporal patterns of fire in several regions of the world. Hence, for a better insight into fires regimes it is of special interest to analyze where human activity has altered fire seasonality. For doing so, multimodality tests are a useful tool for determining the number of annual fire peaks. The periodicity of fires and their complex distributional features motivate the use of nonparametric circular statistics. The unsatisfactory performance of previous circular nonparametric proposals for testing multimodality justifies the introduction of a new approach, considering an adapted version of the excess mass statistic, jointly with a bootstrap calibration algorithm. A systematic application of the test on the Russia–Kazakhstan area is presented in order to determine how many fire peaks can be identified in this region. A False Discovery Rate correction, accounting for the spatial dependence of the data, is also required.

Ying Chen, J. S. Marron, Jiejie Zhang.

Source: The Annals of Applied Statistics, Volume 13, Number 3, 1590--1616.

Abstract:
Electricity prices are high dimensional, serially dependent and have seasonal variations. We propose a Warping Functional AutoRegressive (WFAR) model that simultaneously accounts for the cross time-dependence and seasonal variations of the large dimensional data. In particular, electricity price curves are obtained by smoothing over the $24$ discrete hourly prices on each day. In the functional domain, seasonal phase variations are separated from level amplitude changes in a warping process with the Fisher–Rao distance metric, and the aligned (season-adjusted) electricity price curves are modeled in the functional autoregression framework. In a real application, the WFAR model provides superior out-of-sample forecast accuracy in both a normal functioning market, Nord Pool, and an extreme situation, the California market. The forecast performance as well as the relative accuracy improvement are stable for different markets and different time periods.

The Northwoods League announced Thursday that its 2020 season will not begin on May 26, as originally scheduled, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A doctor on Manitoulin Island is encouraging seasonal residents to stay home and not to come visit during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Holland America and Princess cruise lines issued notices this week cancelling the remainder of the season in Atlantic Canada, citing global health concerns, and that's taking a huge bite out of the Port of Sydney's budget.

The Korean baseball league opens its delayed season Tuesday in empty stadiums across South Korea and Canada's Jamie Romak, along with the rest of the league's players, are getting used to a new baseball normal that includes rules against high fives and spitting, daily temperature checks and the absence of fans.

Tourism Cavendish Beach says it is hopeful the Confederation Bridge and province will reopen to certain visitors as soon as it is safe to do so.

National Basketball Association executives and player agents are calling on the league to cancel the remainder of the 2019-20 season due to health concerns over the novel coronavirus outbreak, CNBC reported on Thursday.

The German soccer league reported 10 positive tests for the coronavirus among 36 clubs in the Bundesliga and second division on Monday.

The CFL and CFL Players' Association are going to get back to talking. A league source said Monday the two sides have agreed to resume discussions on potential contingency plans for the 2020 season due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The National Football League (NFL), the only major American sporting league so far largely unaffected by the coronavirus outbreak, says it is on course to begin its season on time in September.

The Kansas City Chiefs will open defence of their Super Bowl championship by hosting Houston on Sept. 10 in the NFL's annual kickoff game — pending developments in the coronavirus pandemic, of course.

A normal draft year would see NHL scouts and executives spend the spring crisscrossing Europe and North America collecting information. The circumstances surrounding a 2020 draft and the COVID-19 pandemic, however, aren't anything resembling normal.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Sunday that NHL players would — at a minimum — need to follow quarantine protocols if they were to arrive in Canada while the border remains closed due to the pandemic.

The post FIRST Tech Challenge – Kick off the 2019-2020 season with SOLIDWORKS appeared first on SOLIDWORKS Education Blog.

Times are changing for OM Mexico, with new staff and a new office.

Veracruz, Mexico :: An overview of the various initiatives crewmembers have dispersed to while Logos Hope undergoes her annual maintenance.

A long-termer shares how she, as a childless woman, has been given opportunity to speak into local women’s lives in North Africa.

A church planting team shares their faith with Muslim friends and neighbours during a time set aside for sowing intentionally in people’s lives.

THERE will be many of us who embrace technology with all the ham-fisted ineptitude of a fumbling, muttering old colonel trying to unravel the stubborn, sticky wrapping of a barley sugar.

Both the AFT and the NEA vowed to engage their members more deeply this year in deciding who to back for the White House. How well have they done?

An exchange between two of the top-tier candidates for president highlighted how segregation in education could prove to be a potent issue in the Democratic Party's 2020 primary.

The first season of the Netflix political potboiler was rich with education-policy plotlines, and we're hoping for more of the same.

With their spring season canceled due to the global coronavirus pandemic, three senior student-athletes reflect on their time as Penn State Schuylkill Nittany Lions.

With a busy season ahead, involving all 54 member associations, the latest round of UEFA development tournaments for Under-16 national sides are under way, starting in the Algarve.

Both the AFT and the NEA vowed to engage their members more deeply this year in deciding who to back for the White House. How well have they done?

Although several studies have demonstrated increased morbidity and mortality with pH1N1 in children, others have found its clinical course to be similar to seasonal influenza. Moreover, most studies were conducted at single centers, thus raising concerns about generalizability of findings.

This analysis provides national-level active hospital-based surveillance data comparing pH1N1 with 5 previous years of seasonal influenza A and demonstrates differences in risk factors and clinical presentation but not in ICU admission or mortality. (Read the full article)