Sports Science
Are umpires biased? There has been sociological woo produced trying to prove they are racist in baseball but a paper has found that if a cricket team has home umpires, some bias does get introduced, at least in Test cricket, the longest form of the sport .
The introduction of neutral umpires in Test cricket led to a drop in the number of Leg Before Wicket (LBW - think the offsides rule in soccer for how arcane and subjective it once was) decisions going in favor of home teams, according to economists writing in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, and it validates that neutral…
Epigenetics has gotten new life 200 years after it was first postulated - it is temporary biochemical changes in the genome, caused by various forms of environmental impact that can be permanent and even passed down to future generations, basically an update on Jean Baptiste Lamarck's inheritance of acquired characteristics.
One type of epigenetic change is methylation, where a methyl group is added to or removed from a base in the DNA molecule without affecting the original DNA sequence. Epigenetic researchers liken it to computers: If genes are considered the hardware of cells, then…
Retired baseball stars Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro each have Hall of Fame-worthy numbers, more than 500 home runs.
Yet each is clouded by suspicion or admission of steroid use.
Did some of them get favorable treatment compared to others? A paper in Communication Research finds that over 12 years of national television news coverage, Barry Bonds got twice as many negative stories as McGwire and 4X as many as Palmeiro.
The data is based on an analysis of 1,247 news transcripts from 2000 to 2011 from seven national networks - ABC, CBS, CNBC, CNN, FOX, MSNBC and NBC…
It’s a known fact that exercise is addictive. But CrossFitters – those who take part in CrossFit’s brutal workouts and stringent diet – are infamous for their fanatical devotion to their fitness philosophy. They can be found doing pull-ups and heavily weighted squats, flipping tires or hitting them with a sledgehammer, climbing ropes, tossing medicine balls, and “going Paleo.”
The CrossFit movement has been labeled a cult – even a religion – and the movement’s popularity has skyrocketed; by 2014 there were 7,000 CrossFit-affiliated gyms (or “boxes,” as CrossFitters call them), up from just…
Hank |
Though the World Series is over, baseball never really ends in the modern era. There are MVP announcements, free agency and then the winter meetings. Before we know it, it will be February and pitchers and catchers reporting for spring training in Florida and Arizona.
So it's time to talk about 'the best' in an area. We've tackled does a curveball really curve? and who hit the farthest home run? Since Clayton Kershaw of the Los Angeles Dodgers has shown himself to be in Warren Spahn/Sandy Koufax territory when it comes to left-handed pitching I was thinking about the greatest left-…
In the NFL, teams share revenue from national television contracts and to sell local tickets, if a team has not sold at least to a specific threshold, the game is blacked out locally. If enough people are attending, the game is shown to fans in the region
That appeals to 'hometown' fans. One satellite network shows all games to its package subscribers but otherwise fans are only going to see their local team. If they don't have one, they see something nearby. It is a rule and there is no choice.
In the modern mobile population, that may not be a wise strategy. Fans no longer live within an…
Arm pain is common among healthy young baseball players, according to a recent survey. Nearly half say they have been encouraged to keep playing despite arm pain, which suggests that more individualized screening is needed to prevent overuse injury in young ballplayers.
The questionnaire was designed to learn more about the frequency, severity, and psychosocial effects of arm pain among active adolescent baseball payers. The questionnaire was completed by 203 players from New York and New Jersey between the ages of 8 and 18. All of the surveys were completed without input from parents…
In the United States, professional basketball, the NBA, opens its regular season tonight. That means at this time tomorrow there will be talk that some player 'flopped' - fell on the ground to draw a foul and get a chance at a free basket.
A new analysis has found that two-thirds of the falls examined by the group at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev were found to be intentional. And it happens a lot.
It happens so much because there is insufficient punishment for deception and teams are not doing the math. A cost/benefit analysis of "flopping" finds that 90 percent of…
There are lots of distance runners in the United States, there is no real gender gap about participation. But there is when it comes to competition, the difference is there.
A new paper in Evolutionary Psychology says that, on average, American men participate at track meets about three times as often as American women, and this difference has been consistent since the late 1990s. By contrast, at road races, the sex difference in participation has disappeared.
"The differing pattern of results at track meets and road races is remarkable," says first author
Robert Deaner, associate…
If you need another good reason to hit the gym, a new study finds it can improve memory. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have found that an intense workout of as little as 20 minutes can enhance episodic memory, also known as long-term memory for previous events, by about 10 percent in healthy young adults
They aren't the first to find that exercise can improve memory but they took a new approach. While many existing studies have demonstrated that months of aerobic exercises such as running can improve memory, the current study had participants lift weights just once two days…