CategorySports
Micro Softy 47: Baseball: Is This an “Intentional” Error? Why?
This is an incident that merits a Micro Softy; it has happened more than once in major league baseball
Monday Micro Softy 39: Astounding Sports History
A player you've never heard of played for three major league sports
Monday Micro Softy 38: A Pitcher’s Lament
How can Lefty Wright be the winning pitcher in an exciting game without throwing a single pitch?
Sports Gambling: The New Addiction Storming America
Making money off your favorite team just got wildly popular. But is it healthy?Super Bowl 2025 is less than two weeks away, with the Philadelphia Eagles finding themselves in a rematch with reigning champions, the Kansas City Chiefs. Sports engagement has ballooned over the past few years through the medium of online sports betting. Formerly illegal, sports betting has taken the U.S. by storm, with major celebrities and sports stars going on air advocating the practice. Making money off your favorite team just got wildly popular. But is it healthy? A recent article titled “I Got Divorced Because of Sports Betting” shows the dark side of the gamble. Pitched as an easy way to make money online, no one talks about the mad fury that ensues after your bet fails to deliver, your Read More ›
Do Fantasy Sports Tell Us Something About Artificial Intelligence?
My biggest takeaway from my own involvement is how well fantasy football illuminates some weaknesses of artificial intelligence (AI)
The World Series of Coin Flips
Here we go again with the annual coin-flipping ritual known as the World Series
Dolphins Quarterback Suffers Another Concussion
Head trauma remains a dark reality in American football
Bad Luck Seldom Persists — But it Never Guarantees Good Luck
Many people embrace the fallacious law of averages in their daily lives when "regression toward the mean" is a more realistic picture
What the Luck? How Luck Matters to Olympic and Major League Wins
One way to think about the relative importance of skill and luck is to consider the consistency of the outcomes
Olympics: The Woke Have a Message for Science: Scram
Science no longer has a seat at the High Table. I hope readers will think through the implications of that and what it portends for all of us
This Time, Houston Was Blessed More by Luck Than by Stolen Signs
The victory parade over, let’s look at whether luck had more to do with the Astros’ success than Astro fans want to admitThe Houston Astros are the 2022 Major League Baseball (MLB) World Champion — this time, as far as we know, without relying on electronically stolen pitching signs sent to batters by banging trashcan lids or using buzzers hidden under uniforms. Now that the champagne has popped and the victory parade has been held, let’s consider the fact that maybe, just maybe, luck had more to do with the Astros’ success than Astro fans want to admit. Athletes and fans want to believe that the team that wins the World Series, Super Bowl, or any other championship is the best team that year. The reality is that in every sport — some more than others — outcomes are influenced by good Read More ›
Elite World of Chess Rocked by Machine-Driven Scandal
A young player’s astonishing rise in the standings is linked to illegal use of a chess computerAfter withdrawing from matches in protest, on September 26, world champion Magnus Carlsen accused Hans Moke Niemann, a grandmaster at 19, of cheating. He described cheating in chess as “a big deal” and “an existential threat to the game.” How is it possible to cheat in elite chess and how is cheating detected? Well, in many matches, the moves are made online. Chess.com is a website that detects cheating by comparing players’ moves with those of powerful machines. As Ella Feldman explains at Smithsonian Magazine, the Wall Street Journal got hold of a 72-page report from Chess-com on the problem: Did a player make a critical move that aligns with what a chess engine might suggest? And if the answer Read More ›
We Love Baseball Because of — Not Despite — Lady Luck
With a big game approaching, emotions run high so let’s heed some statistical realitiesAs we approach the MLB All-Star Game in Los Angeles on July 19, we can be confident of one thing — most current league leaders will not do as well after the break as they did before it. Baseball broadcaster and National Sportswriter of the Year Peter Gammons was among the first to notice this. He wrote in 1989 that, of those baseball players who hit more than 20 home runs before the All-Star break, 90 percent pegged fewer than 20 after the break. Gammons concluded that there was a “second-half power outage,” perhaps because the sluggers got nervous about the possibility of breaking a home run record. More recently, sports forecaster Max Kaplan made a similar observation, which he Read More ›
Why Giving the Second Best Guy a Chance Is a Smart Move
Business prof Gary Smith explains…Gary Smith, author of The AI Delusion, has some interesting advice for those who think that a star athlete wins only on performance: It doesn’t quite work that way: A study by two business school professors, Cade Massey and Richard Thaler, found that the chances that a drafted player will turn out to be better than the next player drafted in his position (for example, the first quarterback drafted compared to the second quarterback drafted) is only 52%, barely better than a coin flip.Yet, teams pay much more for early draft picks than for later picks. Even leaving salary aside, teams that trade down (for example giving up the first pick in the draft for the 14th and 15th pick) Read More ›
Luck Matters More Than Skill When You’re at the Top
What? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? No, because… Prof. Gary Smith explainsWith basketball fever at a high pitch… when LA Times sportswriter Jim Alexander talked to Pomona College business prof Gary Smith about what it takes to win, he got a different answer than some might have expected. If you are really good, it takes luck to win, Smith explained. What? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? No, because… “You can take the four best golfers in the world – any sport, but let’s do golf because it’s head-to-head,” Smith said in a phone conversation this week. “And they play a round of golf and see who gets the lowest score, and it’s pretty much random. Nobody’s going to win every single time. One guy might win more than 25 Read More ›
Promising New Developments in AI Prostheses Raise Stark Questions
The Olympic performance of amputee runner Oscar Pistorius in 2012 led to accusations that the prostheses performed better than natural limbsOur rapidly developing ability to interface neurons and electronics offers amputees much more functional prostheses (though it is still a long and winding road). Here are some encouraging recent developments: ● A newer technology pioneered at Helsinki University Hospital and Imperial College London enables improved compatibility between a prosthesis and the remaining portion of the amputee’s limb. One current problem is that the connections between the prosthesis and the muscle that gives the commands (the myoelectric interface) can grow weaker due to external factors like sweating. Currently existing systems require adjustments or other measures from the user, but Yeung and his team developed a fully automated system that learns during normal use and thus adapts to varying conditions. “In this Read More ›
2022 Beijing Olympics: Politicizing the Olympic Games
One columnist wrote that unlike the 2008 games, the 2022 games “carries a distinct sense of foreboding.”Despite admonitions to not “politicalize the games,” Beijing’s opening ceremonies for the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games conveyed a political message to the world. Politics has always been part of the Olympic Games. The impetus behind the modern Olympic Games, as conceived by William Penny Brookes and Pierre baron de Coubertin, was to use sports for promoting peace among nations, an inherently political agenda. Decisions on whether dignitaries will attend or who lights the torch are intentional on the part of the visiting and hosting countries, particularly since the first televised Games in 1960. Therefore, when the Chinese Olympic Committee chose first-time Olympic athlete Dinigeer Yilamujiang, also spelled Dilnigar Ilhamjan,* a twenty-year-old cross-country skier of Uyghur heritage, the country was Read More ›
Surveillance and Silence at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics
Why are countries instructing their Olympic athletes to use burner phones?In a previous article, I looked at the security issues with the MY2022 app, the official app for the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games, and the app that everyone who attends must download. The app has two key vulnerabilities that leave user data exposed when sending information over WiFi.* Aside from these vulnerabilities, the University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab found a list of censored keywords in the app’s code, as well as the capability to report someone who has sent politically contentious content over the messaging service. The keyword feature does not seem to be active, but as Jeffrey Knockel, author of the Citizen Lab report, told the New York Times, they could censor content with “the flip of a switch.” This is one Read More ›
2022 Winter Olympics: Security Vulnerabilities in the MY2022 App
All Olympics attendees are required to download the MY2022 app to track their health and other personal data, despite security concernsThis February should be a time of celebration in China. The opening ceremonies of the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games is the day after the beginning of Lunar New Year. The Olympic Games commence two days later on February 4th. However, the Chinese government has put a damper on celebrations by continuing to pursue its “zero-Covid” strategy even though every other country has eased restrictions and begun transitioning from a “pandemic” to “endemic” mentality. People in Beijing along with surrounding regions have become exasperated over the daily testing protocols and harsh measures that are in place to ensure the Chinese Communist Party can save face over its prior claims of having defeated the virus. Among many of the issues plaguing the Read More ›