Text messaging programs on mobile phones have shown some promise in helping people quit smoking. Text2Quit is an automated, personalized and interactive mobile health program that sends text messages and emails timed around a participant’s quit date over the course of 3 months. The text messages include pre- and post-quit educational messages, peer ex-smoker messages, medication reminders and relapse messages, as well as multiple opportunities for interaction. Study participants were university students (n=23) enrolled in the Text2Quit program. Participants were surveyed at baseline and at 2 and 4 weeks post-enrollment. The vast majority of participants agreed that they liked the program at 2 and 4 weeks post-enrollment (90.5% and 82.3%, respectively). Support for text messages was found to be moderate, and higher than that of the email and web components. Seventy-five percent of participants reported reading most or all of the texts. On average, users made 11.8 responses to the texts over a 4 week period, although responses declined following the quit date. The interactive feature for tracking cigarettes was the most used interactive feature, followed by the craving trivia game. This pilot test provides some support for the Text2Quit program. A future iteration of the program will include additional tracking features in both the pre-quit and post-quit protocol and an easier entry into the not-quit protocol. Future studies are recommended that identify the value of the interactive and personalized features that characterize this program.

Major League Baseball (MLB) franchises expend an abundance of resources on scouting in preparation for the June Amateur Draft. In addition to the classic "tools" assessed, another factor considered is age: younger players may get selected over older players of equal ability because of anticipated development, whereas college players may get selected over high school players due to a shortened latency before reaching the majors. Additionally, Little League rules in effect until 2006 operated on an August 1-July 31 year, meaning that, in their youth, players born on August 1 were the eldest relative to their cohort. We examine the performance of players selected in the June Draft from 1987-2011. We find that for all draftees, more relatively old players are selected in the Draft. Conversely, for high school (HS) draftees, both relative age and absolute age have a significant negative relationship with the odds of reaching the major leagues. Given that a HS draftee reaches the majors, there is no difference in professional performance based on age or relative age, measured by games played, wins above replacement (WAR) and on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS). For college draftees the results are less clear. We find that age, but not relative age, has a significant negative relationship with the odds of reaching MLB. Given that a college draftee reaches the majors, there is no difference in professional performance based on age or relative age. Had the draft market operated efficiently, neither relative age nor age on draft day would have captured additional variation in performance after controlling for draft position and other factors. We conclude that teams have undervalued both absolutely, and relatively, younger high school players in the draft and have undervalued absolutely young and relatively old college draftees.

Fixture hardening is the process of choice when thin-walled, carburized gears need to be heat treated with minimal distortion. Only a few publications have studied and described the phenomena taking place in carburized gears during a fixture hardening process. An integrated approach is proposed to improve the design of hardening fixtures and introduce new strategies and instrumentation to better understand and control the process. The proposed approach is to tightly integrate the knowledge in metallurgy, numerical simulation, process control, and machine design areas to mutually compensate and overcome the current limitations in each single area. An instrumented fixture is designed for a reference gear and tested on an industrial quenching press. The signals from the fixture are combined directly with the signals from the quenching press, recorded, and used to validate and improve the numerical simulation models. Metallurgical simulations are used to predict temperature distribution, phase transformations, distortion, and to identify new process strategies.

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