The division of athletes into male and female categories for competition is a widely accepted practice and is ordinarily straightforward, requiring no intervention from authorities. However, for reasons ranging from deliberate cheating to complex medical conditions resulting in ambiguous development of sex organs, the controversy of sex verification in athletic events has existed for 70 years. ...

It is thankfully rare for extenuating circumstances to fully test the processes and procedures enshrined in national and world antidoping authorities' rules and laws. It is also thankfully very rare that a failed drugs test can have some positive implications. Antidoping laws are undoubtedly focused on ensuring fair competition, however, there are occasions when honest athletes discover medical...

OBJECTIVE To assess the impact of body mass index (BMI) screening with parental notification on weight status for California public school students. DESIGN A natural experiment wherein nearly all California school districts conducted annual BMI screening in the fifth, seventh, and ninth grades, but parental notification of BMI screening results was optional. SETTING Data from mandatory fitn...

The present work raises an investigation about prediction and the feature importance to estimate COVID-19 infection, using Machine Learning approach. Our analyzed inclusion of climatic features, mobility, government actions number cases per health sub-territory from existing model. Random Forest with Permutation Importance method was used assess list thirty most relevant that represent probabil...

Mike Wright (Wright, M. OR analysis of sporting rules – A survey. European Journal of Operational Research, 232(1):1-8, 2014 ) recently presented a survey of sporting rules from an Operational Research (OR) perspective. He surveyed 21 sports, which consider the rules of sports and tournaments and whether changes have led to unintended consequences. The paper concludes “Overall, it would seem th...

From the last decade of the twentieth century, professional football has become a transnational global business in which financial profits are as important as sports successes (1). Being a full occupational category, professional football relies on a diversity of stakeholders including among others players, clubs, (inter)national governing bodies, sponsors and sport ministries (1). Despite the ...