Math Professor Picks 2010 MLB Division Winners

Miller Park

With Spring Training almost over and Opening Day next week, Bruce Bukiet, an associate professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), has once again applied mathematical analysis to compute the number of games that Major League Baseball teams should win in 2010.

The Philadelphia Phillies, St. Louis Cardinals and Los Angeles Dodgers should all repeat as winners in their divisions, while the Atlanta Braves will take the wild card slot in the National League (NL), says Bukiet.

In the American League (AL), the New York Yankees should blow away the competition, winning in the East, while the Minnesota Twins repeat as winners of the Central Division. The AL West is too close to call with all four teams within 5 wins and the Texas Rangers, Oakland A's and Los Angeles Angels expected to win 82, 81 and 80 games respectively. The Tampa Bay Rays and Boston Red Sox will have a close contest for the AL wild card slot.

Bukiet, an associate professor of mathematical sciences and associate dean of the College of Science and Liberal Arts at NJIT, bases his predictions on a mathematical model he developed in 2000. For this season, he incorporated a more realistic runner advancement model into the algorithm.

Bad Air Affects Women More Than Men In Marathons

Poor air quality apparently affects the running times of women in marathons, according to a study by Virginia Tech civil and environmental engineer Linsey Marr.  Her findings come from a comprehensive study that evaluated marathon race results, weather data, and air pollutant concentrations in seven marathons over a period of eight to 28 years.

The top three male and female finishing times were compared with the course record and contrasted with air pollutant levels, taking high temperatures that were detrimental to performance into consideration.

Higher levels of particles in the air were associated with slower running times for women, while men were not significantly affected, Marr said. The difference may be due to the smaller size of women's tracheas, which makes it easier for certain particles to deposit there and possibly to cause irritation
"Although pollution levels in these marathons rarely exceeded national standards for air quality, performance was still affected," Marr said.

Smart Professors' Advice: Don't Pick Upsets In Your NCAA Basketball Brackets

Its Tournament time and your NCAA brackets may be a mess after the first two rounds. You knew you should have picked upsets, but which ones?  Well, it turns out it doesn't matter... the odds are still against you picking the right underdog.

New research from Indiana University and the University of Wyoming has found that strategists, regardless of their sports expertise, would be better off sticking with the numbers -- but what's the fun in that? Bettors often think picking the upsets will give them an edge, and that they know how to pick them.

"Picking the lower seed is a good strategy, but people think, 'I can't win by doing that because everyone else is doing this,'" said Ed Hirt, professor in IU Bloomington's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. "The upsets people pick are no better than chance. People have this idea that they know how many upsets will occur, but can they predict the ones that will occur? They pick upsets but not the right ones and end up sabotaging their efforts."

Fit Kids Get Better Grades

Physical fitness is associated with academic performance in young people, according to a report presented at the American Heart Association's 2010 Conference on Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism.

"As children's health continues to be a concern -- especially when it comes to obesity -- some have suggested that children's physical fitness is associated with their academic performance," said Lesley A. Cottrell, Ph.D., study presenting author and associate professor of pediatrics at West Virginia University in Morgantown, W.Va. "The research, however, had not developed enough to define the nature of that relationship."

To study the association between children's physical fitness and academic performance, Cottrell and colleagues analyzed the body mass index percentiles, fitness levels and standardized academic test scores of 725 fifth grade students in Wood County, W.Va. The researchers focused more on the children's fitness level than their weight. They then compared that data to students' fitness and academic performance two years later, in the seventh grade...

High Intensity Workout Gets The Job Done

The usual excuse of "lack of time" for not doing enough exercise is blown away by new research published in The Journal of Physiology.  The study, from scientists at Canada's McMaster University, adds to the growing evidence for the benefits of short term high-intensity interval training (HIT) as a time-efficient but safe alternative to traditional types of moderate long term exercise. Astonishingly, it is possible to get more by doing less!

"We have shown that interval training does not have to be 'all out' in order to be effective," says Professor Martin Gibala. "Doing 10 one-minute sprints on a standard stationary bike with about one minute of rest in between, three times a week, works as well in improving muscle as many hours of conventional long-term biking less strenuously."

HIT means doing a number of short bursts of intense exercise with short recovery breaks in between. The authors have already shown with young healthy college students that this produces the same physical benefits as conventional long duration endurance training despite taking much less time (and amazingly, actually doing less exercise!) However, their previous work used a relatively extreme set-up that involved "all out" pedaling on a specialized laboratory bicycle.

Little League Arm Injuries Jump Up

Throwing arm injuries are on the rise in Little League and other youth baseball programs. After these injuries occur, many players are out for the season; others require surgery and must refrain from play for an even longer duration; still others sustain injuries so severe that they cause permanent damage and are unable to continue playing baseball.

Three new studies presented at the at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) address this critical issue, each offering new solutions to help prevent these injuries.

Pitchers and catchers under the age of 15 often experience tightness of a shoulder ligament known as the posterior-inferior glenohumeral ligament. If this ligament is not stretched, it will become increasingly tighter and more prone to pain or injury as the player ages, if that player continues to play baseball.

A study of 1,267 youth baseball players, led by Charles Metzger, MD, an orthopaedic surgeon specializing in upper extremities in Houston, Texas, found that a simple stretch known as the posterior capsular stretch can help.

Nobody Wants To Lose To The Underdog

Members of a group or team will work harder when they're competing against a group with lower status than when pitted against a more highly ranked group, according to a new study.

The results run contrary to the common belief that underdogs have more motivation because they have the chance to "knock the higher-status group down a peg," said Robert Lount, co-author of the study and assistant professor of management and human resources at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business.  "We found over and over again across multiple studies that people worked about 30 percent harder when their group was competing against a lower-status group."

"It seems surprising to many people that the high-status team has more motivation, but it really makes sense," Lount added. "The higher-ranked group has more to lose if they don't compare well against a lower-status group. But if you're the lower-status group and lose to your superior rival, nothing has changed -- it just reaffirms the way things are."

Lount conducted the study with Nathan Pettit of Cornell University. Their results appear in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The researchers conducted five studies involving college students. In most of the studies, the students were asked to complete a simple task -- for instance, crossing out all the vowels in a random string of letters. They were told to do as many as they could in a specific period of time.

Atomic Physicist Proposes Winning Formula For Baseball Success

(Credit: Photo by Bob Elbert)

Kerry Whisnant, the Iowa State University physicist, studies the mysteries of the neutrino, the elementary particle that usually passes right through ordinary matter such as baseballs and home-run sluggers.

Kerry Whisnant, the St. Louis Cardinals fan, studies the mathematical mysteries of baseball, including a long look at how the distribution of a team's runs can affect the team's winning percentage.

Whisnant, a professor of physics and astronomy who scribbles the Cardinals' roster on a corner of his office chalkboard, is part of baseball's sabermetrics movement. He, like other followers of the Society for American Baseball Research, analyzes baseball statistics and tries to discover how all the numbers relate to success on the field.

The results are ideas, analyses, formulas and papers that dig deep into the objective data.
Whisnant recently took up a decades-old formula written by Bill James, the baseball author and statistician who inspired sabermetrics and is a senior adviser for baseball operations for the Boston Red Sox. The basic formula, which has been tweaked over the years, uses the number of runs scored per game (RPG) and runs given up per game to estimate a team's winning percentage.