Hosting sporting events improves national wellbeing.
What are the biggest mistakes sports decision-makers make?
We tend to think of recent technological change as a complex process involving huge amounts of capital and labor (large numbers of researchers and developers). Yet the Winter Olympics should remind us that it is still possible to improve output with a little thought, luck and experimentation.
In both sports, it’s expected that someone or something “almost always get[s] hurt,” writes Malcolm Gladwell in this New Yorker article, where he goes over the sports’ similarities — including the reason why, despite their brutality, both will likely stick around for a long time.
The Independent featured a series of before-and-after photos from photographer Lois Hechenblaikner’s book Off Piste: An Alpine Story that show “how skiing changed the Alps” during the last few decades.
The extortion concern might explain a lot of our reluctance to offer bribes. But there are circumstances where a one-off bribe can work wonders. When my kids were little, I remember bribing a college student on an Amtrak train to move to another open seat so that my family could sit together.
The concept of survivor bias, if you don’t know it, is well worth being aware of. It’s most often used in finance, where it refers to a “tendency for failed companies to be excluded from performance studies” (thanks, Wikipedia). Think of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which indexes the stock prices of 30 of the largest and most important U.S. companies – until, that is, one of said companies does so poorly that it is booted from the index and is replaced by a company that’s doing better.
It was during a trip to the Boston Science Museum that I had an idea about calculating statistical slumps.
A reader named Christopher Rumney writes in with an interesting idea for how to discourage illicit performance-enhancing drugs in pro sports. Perhaps something like this has already been proposed, but I’ve not heard of it, and it’s certainly an interesting idea — although any players’ union in its right mind would likely rather blow itself up than submit.
This is in spite of the fact that there have surely been technological advances in tracks and shoes, as well as expanding knowledge of weight training and fitness. The world’s population has increased substantially, as have nutrition levels, especially in developing countries.
The biggest puzzle to me is not how remarkable Usain Bolt is, but rather why it’s been so hard to get people to sprint faster.
If you like cheating, you have to love British rugby player Tom Williams‘s ploy last week.
Apparently there is a rule in rugby, as in soccer, that once a substitution is made to take a player out of the match, that player can’t return to the game. The exception to this rule is “blood injuries,” in which case a player can come off until the bleeding is stopped and then return to play.
After winning a stage of the Tour de France, Frenchman Thomas
Voeckler was quoted as saying,
Now that A-Rod has delivered the annual Yankees Substance Abuse Lecture to kick off spring training, I think we’re all ready for some actual baseball. Micah Kelber is a writer and freelance rabbi who lives in Brooklyn, currently writing a screenplay about divorce in New York in the 1940’s. He has written a terrifically entertaining guest post on the oft-neglected . . .
Photo: C.P.Storm Every time an opposing player is penalized at a University of Michigan home hockey game, the student fans begin chanting long strings of obscene epithets. After the first few times this happened, the band began playing loud music (lots of drums) to drown this out. This is a repeated game, with the students as the first-mover (strategy: chant/no . . .
Andrew Zimbalist Andrew Zimbalist is the Robert A. Woods professor of economics at Smith College and one of the most prominent sports economists in the land. (Yes, this is a big day for Andrews.) His most recent book — he’s published 18 — is The Bottom Line: Observations and Arguments on the Sports Business. He’s written broadly for the media, . . .
If you’re looking for a silver lining in this bad economy and especially in a dismal Christmas retail season, you can at least console yourself with the thought that there will be less deadweight loss this year than in past Christmases — that is, less inefficiency generated by people spending money to buy things for other people who value the . . .
About 140 million people in the U.S. will attend a major-league sporting event this year, according to this NPR article. But as the same article says, museums will draw about 850 million attendees this year. So why do more people make trips to museums than to sports games? Well, they are obviously cheaper, and more abundant, but it may also . . .
Photo: G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times A few years back, I wrote an article about the N.F.L.’s annual “rookie symposium,” a four-day gathering during which the league tries to warn incoming players about all the pitfalls they may face — personal threats, bad influences, gold-digging women, dishonest money managers, etc. The N.F.L. even brought in a bunch of veterans . . .
Last year on this blog, Ian Ayres wondered why, to truly keep their opponents guessing, football teams don’t pick plays at random. Two California high school football coaches have taken the thought one step further and randomized the plays themselves — by scrapping the traditional starting formation and making every player a potential receiver (normally, only five players can receive . . .
Bruce Silverglade at Gleason’s Gym, Brooklyn, NY Sports fan or not, chances are you’ve heard of Sugar Ray Robinson, George Foreman, and Rocky Marciano. But unless you follow boxing, you probably haven’t heard of Antonio Margarito, who recently beat Miguel Cotto to become a three-time welterweight champion. This disparity may explain why boxing isn’t as popular as other U.S. sports . . .
Most swimmers competing in the Bejing Olympics this summer believe they will fail without a new $600 swimsuit, The Economist reports. In February Speedo introduced its LZR swimsuit and 38 of the 42 world swimming records broken since then were by swimmers wearing the suit — which has no seams and takes 20 minutes to get into. Do good swimmers . . .
Major League Baseball teams that travel through three time zones or more are at a significant disadvantage against their time-adjusted opponents, according to a new study by neurologist W. Christopher Winter of the Martha Jefferson Sleep Medicine Center. The performance impairment diminishes with each day a given team has to acclimate to the new time zone. But the circadian advantage, . . .
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen draws an intriguing parallel between accusations made by disgraced NBA ex-referee Tim Donaghy, and models of collusion. While David Stern has denied explicit collusion between the league and the refs to influence game outcomes, Tyler argues that there may instead be implicit collusion: refs may simply perceive that the league wants them to produce . . .
I stayed up way too late last night watching the first hockey game I’ve watched this year — Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals. The Detroit Red Wings were up 3 games to 1, playing the Pittsburgh Penguins at home, hoping to clinch the title. The Pens won in the third overtime. It was a phenomenal game, with great . . .
Earlier this week, Dubner wondered what kinds of changes might make Major League Baseball more interesting to the modern T.V. viewer. A number of you suggested instituting salary caps. This chart comparing team performance with total player salaries over the 2008 season, by data visualization guru Ben Fry, does seem to suggest a link between higher pay and sluggish performance. . . .