If you filled out a March Madness bracket this month, you probably faced the same question with each college match-up: What gives one team an edge over another' Is it a team's record through the regular season' Or the chemistry among its players' Maybe it's the experience of its coaching staff or the buzz around a top scorer. All of these factors play some role in a team's chance to advance. But according to a new study by MIT researchers, there's one member who consistently boosts their team's performance: the data analyst. The new study, which was published this month in the Journal of Sports Economics, quantifies the influence of basketball analytics investment on team performance. The study's authors looked in particular at professional basketball and compared the investment in data analytics on each NBA team with the team's record of wins over 12 seasons. They found that indeed, teams that hired more analytics staff, and invested more in data analysis in general, tended to win more games....
Artificial-intelligence company Google DeepMind has put a version of its most advanced large language model (LLM), Gemini, into robots. Using the model, machines can perform some tasks ' such as 'slam dunking' a miniature basketball through a desktop hoop ' despite never having watched another robot do the action, says the firm. The company is among several working to harness the artificial intelligence (AI) advances that power chatbots to create general-purpose robots. The approach also comes with safety concerns, given such models' propensity to generate wrong and harmful outputs. The hope is to create machines that are intuitive to operate and can tackle a range of physical tasks, without relying on human supervision or being preprogrammed. By connecting to Gemini's robotic models, a developer could enhance their robot so that it comprehends 'natural language and now understands the physical world in a lot more detail than before,' says Carolina Parada, who leads the Google DeepMind robotics team and is based in Boulder, Colorado....
But a long-running pickup basketball game that I play in, made up of people with various political leanings, including Trump supporters, remains intact. I explored the group's dynamics in my 2020 memoir. In March 2025, we will celebrate its 50th anniversary. Our semiweekly pickup game has seen several transformations. It started in 1975 as a faculty-student game at Guilford College, a small Quaker school in Greensboro, North Carolina. And we played in an old gym, known as the Crackerbox, once the home court of former NBA players Bob Kauffman, M.L. Carr and World B. Free. Over the next 35 years, the game moved to a newer gym, went from half court to full court, and back to half court. Students and faculty moved on, while others joined the game, including many people from the Greensboro community. Since 1975, besides an 18-month stretch when we didn't meet due to COVID-19 restrictions, the game took place three times a week before COVID-19 and has taken place twice a week since pandemic restrictions were lifted....
The backers include Skype Co-Founder Geoff Prentice, former Facebook Executive Grady Burnett, and SC Holdings, led by Jason Stein and Daniel Haimovic. Inspired by Formula 1, the league's rotating schedule aims to build a global fan base. However, the venture faces challenges. Competing with the NBA, which dominates the market and has expanded internationally, will be difficult. Recently, the NBA held games in Paris and Abu Dhabi and is considering opening a Middle East office. Meanwhile, live sports streaming is booming in Asia. Local platforms are investing heavily in Western leagues like MLB and the English Premier League. Homegrown sports, such as Indian cricket and South Korea's baseball league, also drive significant revenue. Subscribe to our Newsletter to increase your edge. Don't worry about the news anymore, through our newsletter you'll receive weekly access to what is happening. Join 120,000 other PE professionals today....
