The Olympics are the world's largest sporting events, attracting billions of viewers worldwide. Important parts are racing sports, such as running, swimming and speed skating. In these sports, athletes compete against each other in different heats to determine who wins the gold, or who is granted a place in the final. Of course, the gold goes to whoever is the most talented and has trained the ...

This Perspective presents a review and survey of the science and philosophy of my research career over the past five decades at Columbia as a physical organic chemist and photochemist. I explore the role of paradigms, structure, and geometric thinking in my own cognitive and intellectual development. The Perspective describes my investigations of high energy content molecules in electronically ...

OBJECTIVE To determine the extent of protective equipment use (that is, helmets, wrist guards, elbow pads, knee pads) in a representative sample of in-line skaters. SETTING Fifteen municipalities throughout the province of British Columbia. METHOD A province-wide observational survey was conducted in the summer of 1999. Skaters were observed at four types of sites (commuter, recreational, n...

This study investigated the effect of a skating unit on cardiovascular fitness, eyes-closed static balance, explosive power, and agility in fifth graders. During 6-week (12 lessons), 71students (Mage = 10.34 years, range: 10–12 years) participated during regularly scheduled physical education classes. Three classes were involved, one serving as control group other two experimental groups (rolle...

Outlier Aversion in Evaluating Performance: Evidence from Figure Skating The quality of subjective performance evaluation is dependent on the incentive structures faced by evaluators, in particular on how they are monitored and themselves evaluated. Figure skating competitions provide a unique opportunity to study subjective evaluation. This paper develops and tests a simple model of what I cal...

Our walking and running movement patterns require friction between shoes and ground. The surface of ice is characterized by low friction in several naturally occurring conditions, and compromises our typical locomotion pattern. Ice skates take advantage of this slippery nature of ice; the first ice skates were made more than 4,000 years ago, and afforded the development of a very efficient form...

A lot of research has been done for bipedal walking and many positive results have been produced, such as the ASIMO robot from Honda. However, although bipedal walking is a good solution for moving over uneven surfaces; bipedal walking is inefficient over an even surface because the robot’s walking speed and stability are limited. Consequently, employing a wheeled locomotion on even surfaces ca...

The purpose of this study was to document differences in perceived skating characteristics resulting from three unique cross sectional skate blade profiles. Sixteen (n=16) University level hockey players were used in this double blind study looking at the perceived performance differences of four different skate blade profiles. No significant differences were found between skate blade profiles,...