Jean Balchin • Jan 11, 2018 •
Imagine, if you will, a cold, blustery day in the city. With the wind howling and the rain coming down in horizontal sheets, the interior of the bus seems positively luxurious. From your vantage point on the plush red seats, you watch as a bedraggled young man runs towards the bus stop, arms flailing and suitcase flying. Just as he … Read More
Robert Hickson • Dec 07, 2017 •
Robotic combat is becoming a thing. In TV studios, not the battlefield. A tiresome thing, the hi-tech equivalent of Monster Truck shows. MegaBots promotes itself as “the future of sports“. (I think they forgot the (TM) in that tag line.) But they have a way to go to be more that dudes driving dumbbots. Its … Read More
Guest Work • Jun 21, 2016 •
By Peter Sonksen, University of Southampton and Daryl Adair, University of Technology Sydney There are performance differences between the sexes in elite sport. It has long been assumed that contrasting levels of testosterone in men and women can largely account for that gap, but new scientific studies are bringing that into question. Read More
Eric Crampton • Aug 27, 2015 •
So, what’s the deal with special licences then? The Greens’ minority view on legislation enabling extended bar hours during the Rugby World Cup noted that special licences can do the job that the legislation is meant to do, and that the committee heard no evidence of special licence applications being refused and no submissions from licensees dissatisfied with the process. Read More
Will Hayward • Aug 11, 2015 •
We expect people to be consistent. We either like John Key and think everything he does is great, or we are skeptical of him and think everything he does is part of a clever plan that ensures his own success. We want our heroes to be purer than snow and our villains to be irredeemably evil. Read More
James Zuccollo • Jun 18, 2014 •
Football penalties are often controversial and the first couple of days of the World Cup have already provided one dubious decision. Luckily for the referee’s personal safety it favoured the hosts, Brazil. But, according to Randal Olson’s fascinating analysis of penalty decisions, there may be more than luck involved: 70.6% of all penalty kicks were awarded to […] … Read More
Eric Crampton • Mar 08, 2014 •
I love this Colby Cosh piece on curling:The funny thing is that curling, even with money at stake, is formidably immune to most of the ugliness that modernity imposes on sport—the frantic marketing, the soul-killing training, the illicit performance-enhancers, the odiousness of billionaire ownership. Curling is unruinable. It will never be invaded by monsters with overdeveloped right arms. It … Read More
Eric Crampton • Oct 28, 2013 •
The NZ Health Promotion Agency released a pretty interesting study earlier this month. They surveyed attendees at a variety of sporting events about their attitudes towards alcohol and the link between alcohol and those specific events; they were inter... Read More
Robert Hickson • Mar 12, 2013 •
I’ll move on from bionics, but this video from Bebionic illustrates how advanced prosthetics have become. And the company MC10 is developing temporary flexible electronic tattoos for monitoring health and physical activities. This gives a great illustration of one the directions healthcare and sport are heading. … Read More