Clearly-defined rules are often assumed to be straightforward to automate and evaluate. We challenge this assumption through an in-depth study of Major League Baseball's (MLB) seven-year experimentation with the Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS). ABS is envisioned to call balls and strikes accurately: a seemingly straightforward use of technology to objectively determine the distance between a pitch and the strike zone. Although the strike zone is an area clearly defined in the rulebook, it took MLB seven years to figure out how to automate calling balls and strikes with ABS, showing how even seemingly straightforward rules require a complex translation process to operationalize via technological systems. In this paper, we trace the design decisions that led to the current implementation of ABS. Our case study reveals that "distance" exists even between a clear rule and its technological implementation. Using analytic frameworks from Science and Technology Studies (STS), we show that such distance exists because (1) historically, the "ground truth" of the strike zone is contested: the rule in practice has always reflected a hybrid between the rulebook definition and umpires' enfor
This study provides a causal validation of the dual-stressor hypothesis in a long-cycle engineering programme in Argentina, testing whether academic staff strikes (proximal shocks) and inflation (distal shocks) jointly shape student dropout. Using a leak-aware longitudinal panel of 1,343 students and a manually implemented LinearDML estimator, we estimate lagged causal effects of strike exposure and its interaction with inflation at entry. The temporal profile is clear: only strikes occurring two semesters earlier have a significant impact on next-semester dropout in simple lagged logit models (ATE = 0.0323, p = 0.0173), while other lags are negligible. When we move to double machine learning and control flexibly for academic progression, curriculum friction and calendar effects, the main effect of strikes at lag 2 becomes small and statistically non-significant, but the interaction between strikes and inflation at entry remains positive and robust (estimate = 0.0625, p = 0.0033). A placebo model with a synthetic strike variable yields null effects, and a robustness audit (seed sensitivity, model comparisons, SHAP inspection) confirms the stability of the interaction across specifi
This study extends the CAPIRE framework with a macro-shock module to analyse the impact of teacher strikes and inflation on student trajectories in engineering education. Using data from 1,343 students across 15 cohorts (2004-2019) in a public engineering faculty in Argentina, we construct a leak-aware, multilevel feature set that incorporates national inflation indicators, lagged exposure to teacher strikes, and interaction terms between macro shocks and curriculum friction. Random Forest models with cohort-based validation demonstrate that macro features provide stable, non-trivial gains in early-semester dropout prediction (improvement in Macro F1 from 0.73 to 0.78), with inflation volatility at entry and a strike-weighted basic-cycle friction index amongst the most influential variables. Lag analysis reveals that strike exposure exerts its strongest association with dropout two to three semesters after the disruption (OR = 2.34), and that effects are concentrated in early, high-friction semesters. We then embed these empirical patterns into an agent-based model, defining scenarios for inflation-only, strikes-only, and combined crisis. Simulations reproduce three stylised facts:
Carbon fiber-reinforced polymers (CFRPs) have been extensively used in the aerospace and wind energy industries due to their superior specific mechanical properties and corrosion resistance. However, their higher electrical resistivity makes them susceptible to lightning strike damage, which necessitates the addition of a surface lightning strike protection (LSP) layer. Traditional LSP systems, such as copper mesh or expanded foil, reduce lightning strike damage, but are not easily drapable around complex geometries and may introduce delamination-prone regions within the composite. Here, we propose a novel manufacturing strategy for architected hybrid composites as drapable LSP by weaving stainless steel yarns within the woven carbon fiber composites. We varied the metal-to-carbon yarn ratio and stacking configuration to assess damage evolution under quasi-static arc exposures and simulated lightning strikes. Our results elucidate that incorporating hybrid layers into composites significantly reduced surface temperatures, through-thickness damage, and mass loss under both electric arc impacts. The composites with the proposed LSP layers also exhibited higher retention of flexural m
Cybercrime has grown exponentially in both scale and sophistication, posing significant threats. As attack methods evolve rapidly, traditional classification schemes often fail to capture the complexity and diversity of modern threats. To address this gap, we introduce STRIKE,a Structured Taxonomy for Risk, Impact, Knowledge, and Emerging Threats, which provides a unified, multi-dimensional framework for categorizing cybercrimes. STRIKE spans both conventional and emerging domains, including ransomware, phishing, network intrusion, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), cryptojacking, deepfakes, and supply chain attacks. It organizes threats using criteria such as attack vectors, adversarial tactics, societal impact, detection techniques, and mitigation strategies. Alongside the taxonomy, we review recent advances in detection methodologies and present a response workflow to assist practitioners under active threat conditions. This work offers researchers, security professionals, and policymakers a practical foundation for threat analysis, comparative evaluation, and adaptive cyber defense.
Credit risk default prediction remains a cornerstone of risk management in the financial industry. The task involves estimating the likelihood that a borrower will fail to meet debt obligations, an objective critical for lending decisions, portfolio optimization, and regulatory compliance. Traditional machine learning models such as logistic regression and tree-based ensembles are widely adopted for their interpretability and strong empirical performance. However, modern credit datasets are high-dimensional, heterogeneous, and noisy, increasing overfitting risk in monolithic models and reducing robustness under distributional shift. We introduce STRIKE (Stacking via Targeted Representations of Isolated Knowledge Extractors), a feature-group-aware stacking framework for structured tabular credit risk data. Rather than training a single monolithic model on the complete dataset, STRIKE partitions the feature space into semantically coherent groups and trains independent learners within each group. This decomposition is motivated by an additive perspective on risk modeling, where distinct feature sources contribute complementary evidence that can be combined through a structured aggreg
The number of collisions between aircraft and birds in the airspace has been increasing at an alarming rate over the past decade due to increasing bird population, air traffic and usage of quieter aircraft. Bird strikes with aircraft are anticipated to increase dramatically when emerging Advanced Air Mobility aircraft start operating in the low altitude airspace where probability of bird strikes is the highest. Not only do such bird strikes can result in human and bird fatalities, but they also cost the aviation industry millions of dollars in damages to aircraft annually. To better understand the causes and effects of bird strikes, research to date has mainly focused on analyzing factors which increase the probability of bird strikes, identifying high risk birds in different locations, predicting the future number of bird strike incidents, and estimating cost of bird strike damages. However, research on bird movement prediction for use in flight planning algorithms to minimize the probability of bird strikes is very limited. To address this gap in research, we implement four different types of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models to predict bird movement latitudes and longitudes.
Weather, technological and regulatory uncertainties expose actors in highly renewable electricity markets to substantial price and volume risks. Two-way Contracts for Difference (CfDs) can mitigate these risks. They stipulate payments between the government and generators of renewable electricity based on the difference of a strike and a reference price, whose definition and unit of payment differ between CfD designs. We study the effect of three different CfD designs on wind power profit and consumer price volatility under the consideration of uncertain market outcomes in a highly renewable, sector-coupled electricity market. First, we analytically derive optimal strike prices under uncertainty. Second, we numerically determine optimal strike prices based on market expectations retrieved from optimising a set of 36 market scenarios in an energy system model. Third, we study the distribution of ex post market revenues, CfD payments and consumer prices across all 36 scenarios. Compared to purely market-based consumer prices and investor profits, we find all CfDs to significantly reduce volatility. For consumer prices, results show no substantial differences between CfD designs. For
Lightning strikes to wind turbines (WTs) pose significant hazards and operational costs to the renewable wind industry. These strikes fall into two categories: downward cloud-to-ground (CG) strokes and upward discharges, which can be self-initiated or triggered by a nearby flash. The incidence of each type of strike depends on several factors, including the electrical structure of the thunderstorm and turbine height. The strike rates of CG strokes and triggered upward lightning can be normalized by the amount of local CG activity, where the constant of proportionality carries units of area and is often termed the collection area. This paper introduces a statistical analysis technique that uses lightning locating system (LLS) data to estimate the collection areas for downward and triggered upward lightning strikes to WTs. The technique includes a normalization method that addresses the confounding factor of neighboring WTs. This analysis method is applied to seven years of data from the National Lightning Detection Network$^\textrm{TM}$ and the US Wind Turbine Database to investigate the dependence of collection areas on blade tip height and peak current. The results are compared ag
This study addresses the lack of structured causal modeling between tactical strike behavior and strategic delay in current strategic-level simulations, particularly the structural bottlenecks in capturing intermediate variables within the "resilience - nodal suppression - negotiation window" chain. We propose the Intervention-Aware Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network (IA-STGNN), a novel framework that closes the causal loop from tactical input to strategic delay output. The model integrates graph attention mechanisms, counterfactual simulation units, and spatial intervention node reconstruction to enable dynamic simulations of strike configurations and synchronization strategies. Training data are generated from a multi-physics simulation platform (GEANT4 + COMSOL) under NIST SP 800-160 standards, ensuring structural traceability and policy-level validation. Experimental results demonstrate that IA-STGNN significantly outperforms baseline models (ST-GNN, GCN-LSTM, XGBoost), achieving a 12.8 percent reduction in MAE and 18.4 percent increase in Top-5 percent accuracy, while improving causal path consistency and intervention stability. IA-STGNN enables interpretable prediction of s
Online communities and their host platforms are mutually dependent yet conflict-prone. When platform policies clash with community values, communities have resisted through strikes, blackouts, and even migration to other platforms. Through such collective actions, communities have sometimes won concessions but these have frequently proved temporary. Prior research has investigated strike events and migration chains, but the processes by which community-platform conflict unfolds remain obscure. How do community-platform relationships deteriorate? How do communities organize collective action? How do participants proceed in the aftermath? We investigate a conflict between the Stack Exchange platform and community that occurred in 2023 around an emergency arising from the release of large language models (LLMs). Based on a qualitative thematic analysis of 2,070 messages on Meta Stack Exchange and 14 interviews with community members, we surface how the 2023 conflict was preceded by a long-term deterioration in the community-platform relationship driven in particular by the platform's disregard for the community's highly-valued participatory role in governance. Moreover, the platform's
Off-the-shelf software for Command and Control is often used by attackers and legitimate pentesters looking for discretion. Among other functionalities, these tools facilitate the customization of their network traffic so it can mimic popular websites, thereby increasing their secrecy. Cobalt Strike is one of the most famous solutions in this category, used by known advanced attacker groups such as "Mustang Panda" or "Nobelium". In response to these threats, Security Operation Centers and other defense actors struggle to detect Command and Control traffic, which often use encryption protocols such as TLS. Network traffic metadata-based machine learning approaches have been proposed to detect encrypted malware communications or fingerprint websites over Tor network. This paper presents a machine learning-based method to detect Cobalt Strike Command and Control activity based only on widely used network traffic metadata. The proposed method is, to the best of our knowledge, the first of its kind that is able to adapt the model it uses to the observed traffic to optimize its performance. This specificity permits our method to performs equally or better than the state of the art while
Accurate gait event detection is crucial for gait analysis, rehabilitation, and assistive technology, particularly in exoskeleton control, where precise identification of stance and swing phases is essential. This study evaluated the performance of seven kinematics-based methods and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model for detecting heel strike and toe-off events across 4363 gait cycles from 588 able-bodied subjects. The results indicated that while the Zeni et al. method achieved the highest accuracy among kinematics-based approaches, other methods exhibited systematic biases or required dataset-specific tuning. The LSTM model performed comparably to Zeni et al., providing a data-driven alternative without systematic bias. These findings highlight the potential of deep learning-based approaches for gait event detection while emphasizing the need for further validation in clinical populations and across diverse gait conditions. Future research will explore the generalizability of these methods in pathological populations, such as individuals with post-stroke conditions and knee osteoarthritis, as well as their robustness across varied gait conditions and data collection settings t
Recent advancements in professional baseball have led to the introduction of the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system, or ``robot umpires,'' which utilize machine learning, computer vision, and precise tracking technologies to automate ball-strike calls. The Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) league became the first professional baseball league to implement ABS during the 2024 season. Leveraging pitch data from 2,515 KBO games across multiple seasons and employing mathematical modeling, we examine the aggregate decision tendencies of human umpires versus those of the ABS within the ``gray zone'' of the strike zone. We propose and answer four research questions to examine the differences between human and robot umpires, player adaptation to ABS, assess the ABS system's fairness and consistency, and analyze its strategic implications for the game. Our findings offer valuable insights into the impact of technological integration in sports officiating, providing lessons relevant to future implementations in professional baseball and beyond.
The impact of strikes in educational institutions, specifically universities, on employers remains understudied. This paper investigates the impact of education strikes in UK universities from 2018 to 2022, primarily due to pension disputes. Using data from the Guardian University Guide and the 2014 and 2021 Research Excellence Frameworks and leveraging difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity approaches, our findings suggest significant declines in several student related outcomes, such as student satisfaction, and a more mixed picture for student attainment and research performance. These results highlight the substantial, albeit indirect, cost unions can impose on university employers during strikes.
This paper carries out a scientific study of the effects of strike on Nigerian Universities. A mathematical model is formulated to examine the behavior of Nigerian University System when Public Universities are on strike. The results show that if all State and Federal Universities are on strike with the exception of the Private Universities, the University System in Nigeria is locally asymptotically stable.
In many dynamic robotic tasks, such as striking pucks into a goal outside the reachable workspace, the robot must first identify the relevant physical properties of the object for successful task execution, as it is unable to recover from failure or retry without human intervention. To address this challenge, we propose a task-informed exploration approach, based on reinforcement learning, that trains an exploration policy using rewards automatically generated from the sensitivity of a privileged task policy to errors in estimated properties. We also introduce an uncertainty-based mechanism to determine when to transition from exploration to task execution, ensuring sufficient property estimation accuracy with minimal exploration time. Our method achieves a 90% success rate on the striking task with an average exploration time under 1.2 seconds, significantly outperforming baselines that achieve at most 40% success or require inefficient querying and retraining in a simulator at test time. Additionally, we demonstrate that our task-informed rewards capture the relative importance of physical properties in both the striking task and the classical CartPole example. Finally, we valida
One fundamental limitation to the research of bird strike prevention is the lack of a large-scale dataset taken directly from real-world airports. Existing relevant datasets are either small in size or not dedicated for this purpose. To advance the research and practical solutions for bird strike prevention, in this paper, we present a large-scale challenging dataset AirBirds that consists of 118,312 time-series images, where a total of 409,967 bounding boxes of flying birds are manually, carefully annotated. The average size of all annotated instances is smaller than 10 pixels in 1920x1080 images. Images in the dataset are captured over 4 seasons of a whole year by a network of cameras deployed at a real-world airport, covering diverse bird species, lighting conditions and 13 meteorological scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first large-scale image dataset that directly collects flying birds in real-world airports for bird strike prevention. This dataset is publicly available at https://airbirdsdata.github.io/.
We model cloud-to-ground lightning strike impacts in the French Alps over the period 2011-2021 (approximately 1.4 million of events) using spatio-temporal point processes. We investigate first and higher-order structure for this point pattern and address the questions of homogeneity of the intensity function, first-order separability and dependence between events. The tuning of nonparametric methods and the different tests we consider in this study make the computational cost very expensive. We therefore suggest different subsampling strategies to achieve these tasks.
Advanced mobility concepts such as Urban Air Mobility are emerging in full swing. In that concept, a safe and efficient aviation transportation system will use highly automated aircraft that will transport passengers or cargo at low altitudes within and between metropolitan regions. To accomplish these missions, new types of aircraft which are sometimes known as air taxis are being developed. A successful integration of these aircraft into existing airspace is complicated and needs to take into account various aspects. One of these is the risk of wildlife strikes which is predicted to be higher in case of air taxis. The proposed operational cruising altitude of air taxis is lower resulting in higher probability of collision as these are the altitudes where birds typically fly. Additionally, air taxis are smaller in size and have lower certification requirements compared to conventional aircraft. As a result, the severity of damaging bird strikes is higher. To assess the risk and formulate suitable regulations, an extensive analysis is required providing more quantitative insight into the bird strike challenge. Therefore, a theoretical model of bird strike to quantify the impact for