RAND Corporation

SEATTLE, WA, AUGUST 9, 2015 - Quantitative analysis of the performance of men and women professional tennis players over the past five completed seasons shows for the first time that evidence of inconsistency in women's play is likely attributable to match format (e.g., best of three or five sets), not gender, Stephanie Kovalchik--an associate statistician with the RAND Corporation--today revealed at a session focused on analytics of women's sports at the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM...

With the wars in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen dominating headlines, Afghanistan appears to have gotten lost in the shuffle. Afghanistan seems passé, both in U.S. policy circles and among Americans in general. In 2014—for the first time since the 9/11 attacks—roughly half of Americans polled by Gallup thought that the United States should never have sent troops to Afghanistan.

In April 2015, USA Today reported a disconcerting, if somewhat incongruous, finding about the Army’s morale. Despite a six-year, $287 million effort to make troops more optimistic and resilient, an Army survey found that 52 percent of soldiers scored badly on questions that measured optimism, while 48 percent reported having little satisfaction or commitment to their job. This study is only the latest of several such studies.