Related papers: Revisiting Stereotypes: Race and Running
Beauty standards shape self-perception and health through social comparison and objectification, while exposure to idealized imagery exacerbates body-image concerns. Media and fashion are central arbiters of these ideals, yet long-term,…
Professional sports enhance interaction among athletes through training groups, sponsored events and competitions. Among these, the Olympic Games represent the largest competition with a global impact, providing the participants with a…
We argue that traditional Western science cannot adequately describe sports and other types of human behavior. Then we make an argument why a complex adaptive systems approach has the potential to provide the foundation for such a theory.…
Evolving systems, be it an antibody repertoire in the face of mutating pathogens or a microbial population exposed to varied antibiotics, constantly search for adaptive solutions in time-varying fitness landscapes. Generalists correspond to…
We analyze statistical discrimination in hiring markets using a multi-armed bandit model. Myopic firms face workers arriving with heterogeneous observable characteristics. The association between the worker's skill and characteristics is…
While there is rapid progress in video-LLMs with advanced reasoning capabilities, prior work shows that these models struggle on the challenging task of sports feedback generation and require expensive and difficult-to-collect finetuning…
We consider an asexual population under strong selection-weak mutation conditions evolving on rugged fitness landscapes with many local fitness peaks. Unlike the previous studies in which the initial fitness of the population is assumed to…
The lonely runner conjecture, now over fifty years old, concerns the following problem. On a unit length circular track, consider $m$ runners starting at the same time and place, each runner having a different constant speed. The conjecture…
The hot streak, loosely defined as winning begets more winnings, highlights a specific period during which an individual's performance is substantially higher than her typical performance. While widely debated in sports, gambling, and…
This study examines Olympic champions characteristics on Instagram to first understand how age and gender affect the characteristics and their interrelations and second to see if the future changes in those characteristics are predictable.…
In the past decade, Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) have delivered an increasingly broad view of the genetic basis of human phenotypic variation. One of the major developments from GWAS is polygenic scores, a genetic predictor of an…
Professional team sports provide an excellent domain for studying the dynamics of social competitions. These games are constructed with simple, well-defined rules and payoffs that admit a high-dimensional set of possible actions and…
We consider evolution of a large population, where fitness of each organism is defined by many phenotypical traits. These traits result from expression of many genes. We propose a new model of gene regulation, where gene expression is…
Predicting fitness of biologically-active populations, communities or systems in fluctuating environments is a long-standing challenge. Phenotypic plasticity and bet-hedging strategy, two key evolutionary traits living systems harness to…
Motion prediction, recently popularized as world models, refers to the anticipation of future agent states or scene evolution, which is rooted in human cognition, bridging perception and decision-making. It enables intelligent systems, such…
Understanding the role of demographic diversity in group settings requires effective quantitative metrics. Intersectional feminist theory has highlighted that demographic identities can intersect in complex ways, but most metrics used to…
The Matthew effect refers to the adage written some two-thousand years ago in the Gospel of St. Matthew: "For to all those who have, more will be given." Even two millennia later, this idiom is used by sociologists to qualitatively describe…
We find that improvements in speedrunning world records follow a power law pattern. Using this observation, we answer an outstanding question from previous work: How do we improve on the baseline of predicting no improvement when…
Natural selection drives populations towards higher fitness, but crossing fitness valleys or plateaus may facilitate progress up a rugged fitness landscape involving epistasis. We investigate quantitatively the effect of subdividing an…
Historically, females were excluded from clinical research due to their reproductive roles, hindering medical understanding and healthcare quality. Despite guidelines promoting equal participation, females are underrepresented in exercise…