Relating on-field performance to paid football club membership

An empirical investigation based on seven years’ data for a professional football league finds that on-field performance bears little relation to the number of paid members or season ticket holders for the clubs.

The position of Australian community sporting organisations in the third sector: membership profiles, characteristics and attitudes

Australian community sporting organisations have been relatively underresearched within the wider study of voluntary associations, yet their membership base is large and constitutes a sizable proportion of the population. This paper analyses data from the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA) 2003 (Gibson et al. 2004), initially to describe characteristics ofmembers ofcommunity sporting organisations in Australia (n=948). It goes on to compare attitudinal dimensions between members of sporting and other major third-sector organisations. On the basis of these comparisons three groupings of associations are suggested: social change, individual/social progress and individual/social maintenance. Sporting organisations form part of the latter category, and the paper briefly discusses the likely nature of social capital production associated with each.

Professional accounting qualifications of audit committee membership : implications for curriculum and learning

A useful attribute of the audit committee is to have accounting financial experts on that committee of the Board. Defond, Haan and Hu (2005) argue there is a positive market reaction to the appointment of such experts. This study analyses how many qualified accountants there are on the Boards of Australia’s largest companies. The study finds that, while many Boards have at least one qualified financial accountant on their audit committee, the great majority of members are not qualified accountants. The paper considers whether this paucity of professionally qualified accountants on audit committees has any implications for the curriculum development and learning objectives of corporate governance and related topic areas within the disciplines of accounting and auditing in undergraduate and graduate professional accounting programs within the international tertiary education sector?

Multilevel model of trade union membership

Presents a new theory of why people join or leave trade unions. Shows that a major influence on this decision is the quality of social relationships in the workplace. In particular, workplaces with a workforce of diverse occupational groups are not conducive to trade unionism.

Optimization of gaussian fuzzy membership functions and evaluation of the monotonicity property of fuzzy inference systems

In this paper, two issues relating to modeling of a monotonicity-preserving Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) are examined. The first is on designing or tuning of Gaussian Membership Functions (MFs) for a monotonic FIS. Designing Gaussian MFs for an FIS is difficult because of its spreading and curvature characteristics. In this study, the sufficient conditions are exploited, and the procedure of designing Gaussian MFs is formulated as a constrained optimization problem. The second issue is on the testing procedure for a monotonic FIS. As such, a testing procedure for a monotonic FIS model is proposed. Applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated with a real world industrial application, i.e., Failure Mode and Effect Analysis. The results obtained are analysis and discussed. The outcomes show that the proposed approach is useful in designing a monotonicity-preserving FIS model.

Family support and ease of access link socio-economic status and sports club membership in adolescent girls : a mediation study

Background Much research has been conducted into the determinants of physical activity (PA) participation among adolescent girls. However, the more specific question of what are the determinants of particular forms of PA participation, such as the link between participation through a sports club, has not been investigated. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to investigate the relationships between participation in a sports club and socio-economic status (SES), access to facilities, and family and peer support, for female adolescents.

Methods A survey of 732 female adolescent school students (521 metropolitan, 211 non-metropolitan; 489 Year 7, 243 Year 11) was conducted. The survey included demographic information (living arrangements, ethnicity indicators, and indicators of SES such as parental education and employment status and locality); access to facilities; and family and peer support (travel, encouragement, watching, praise, joint participation). For each characteristic, sports club participants and non-participants were compared using chi-square tests. Multiple mediation analyses were used to investigate the role of access, family and peer support in the link between SES and sport participation.

Results There were significant associations (p<0.05) between sports club participation and: all demographic characteristics; all measures of family and peer support; and access to sport-related facilities. Highest levels of participation were associated with monolingual Australian-born families, with two parents, at least one of whom was well-educated, with both parents employed, and high levels of parental assistance, engagement and support. Participation in club sport among both younger and older adolescent girls was significantly positively associated with the SES of both their neighbourhoods and their households, particularly in metropolitan areas. These associations were most strongly mediated by family support and by access to facilities.

Conclusions To facilitate and promote greater participation in club sport among adolescent girls from low SES neighbourhoods and households, strategies should target modifiable determinants such as facility access and parental support. This will involve improving access to sports facilities and promoting, encouraging and assisting parents to provide support for their daughters’ participation in sport clubs.

The musical and social benefits of community choir membership in Melbourne (Australia)

Averaging aggregation functions for preferences expressed as Pythagorean membership grades and fuzzy orthopairs

Rather than denoting fuzzy membership with a single value, orthopairs such as Atanassov's intuitionistic membership and non-membership pairs allow the incorporation of uncertainty, as well as positive and negative aspects when providing evaluations in fuzzy decision making problems. Such representations, along with interval-valued fuzzy values and the recently introduced Pythagorean membership grades, present particular challenges when it comes to defining orders and constructing aggregation functions that behave consistently when summarizing evaluations over multiple criteria or experts. In this paper we consider the aggregation of pairwise preferences denoted by membership and non-membership pairs. We look at how mappings from the space of Atanassov orthopairs to more general classes of fuzzy orthopairs can be used to help define averaging aggregation functions in these new settings. In particular, we focus on how the notion of 'averaging' should be treated in the case of Yager's Pythagorean membership grades and how to ensure that such functions produce outputs consistent with the case of ordinary fuzzy membership degrees.

Segmentation of gray scale image based on intuitionistic fuzzy sets constructed from several membership functions

Segmentation is the process of extraction of objects from an image. This paper proposes a new algorithm to construct intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) from multiple fuzzy sets as an application to image segmentation. Hesitation degree in IFS is formulated as the degree of ignorance (due to the lack of knowledge) to determine whether the chosen membership function is best for image segmentation. By minimizing entropy of IFS generated from various fuzzy sets, an image is thresholded. Experimental results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.