The lack of agreement on definition of terms and consistent reporting strategies in sports epidemiology complicates the determination of injury rates in any sport. This study describes Canadian Intercollegiate ice hockey injuries over a 6-year period by following a standardized reporting strategy and clearly defined terminology. Overall, the data show that the knee is most susceptible to injury, that the forwards recorded the highest number of injuries, and that body contact caused the majority of injuries. Compared to other studies the results indicate a decreasing per game injury rate over the last 15 years and provide evidence that helmets and visors reduce the risk of head and facial injuries. Recommendations are propagated toward the adherence of standardized reporting strategies and uniform definitions to be used in future sports injury epidemiologic research.

No abstract

We present a new nonlinear optimization procedure for the computation of generalized Gaussian quadratures for a broad class of functions. While some of the components of this algorithm have been previously published, we present a simple and robust scheme for the determination of a sparse solution to an underdetermined nonlinear optimization problem which replaces the continuation scheme of the previously published works. The performance of the resulting procedure is illustrated with several numerical examples.

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Since May 2004, the Department of Defense (DoD) has had a series of contracts with Aegis Defense Services, Limited (Aegis), for private security and related services in Iraq. As of April 7, 2011, Aegis had received over $1 billion for its services. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), DoD's primary user of Aegis services in Iraq, is decreasing its reconstruction activities in Iraq as U.S. military forces plan to withdraw by the end of calendar year 2011. In January 2009, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) issued a report on DoD's oversight of Aegis's performance on the largest active and completed contracts at the time. 1 SIGIR's objectives for this current report are to determine if and on what basis Aegis's contract services have been adjusted to reflect changes in USACE's reconstruction activities in Iraq. SIGIR found that the number of USACE's active projects in Iraq has declined and Aegis's security personnel services have also declined since our January 2009 report. Moreover, USACE's active projects and security personnel requirements are projected to decline much further by July 2011. USACE's Gulf Region District (GRD) 2 monitors the utilization of Aegis's security teams and provides Aegis with planning information from which Aegis can determine the number and composition of security personnel to satisfy GRD's requirements. Information provided by GRD includes the number of active projects GRD must monitor, how often GRD inspectors need to visit each project, the location of each project to be visited, and the duration of the projects. GRD monitors the utilization of contractor security teams to ensure contract requirements are adjusted to reflect changes in GRD's reconstruction activities. GRD's process for adjusting contract requirements appears reasonable and responsive to changes in reconstruction activities.