Rethinking Doping

Despite the important role doping plays in the world of sport, insufficient attention has been given to understanding the concept of doping. In this paper, I argue that we should understand doping as a means of gaining a competitive advantage through the use of exogenous substances entering an athlete’s body, where such means undermine the relevant sporting institution. By focusing on sport as socially constructed institution, not merely as competition, we can have a unified explanation for many of our pretheoretic beliefs while giving the tools to understand doping in the ever-changing landscape of contemporary sport and society

Using Animals in the Pursuit of Human Flourishing through Sport

Sport provides an arena for human flourishing. For some, this pursuit of a meaningful life through sport involves the use of non-human animals, not least of all through sport hunting. This paper will take seriously that sport – including sport hunting – can provide a meaningful arena for human flourishing. Additionally, it will accept for present purposes that animals are of less moral value than humans. This paper will show that, even accepting these premises, much use of animals for sport – including sport hunting – is unacceptable. Nonetheless it will show that there can be acceptable ways of using animals as part of a human’s meaningful life pursuits through sport, albeit in a more limited fashion than many sportspersons currently accept

COVID-19 Unmasks the NCAA’s Collegiate Model Myth

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) positions itself as an institution primarily dedicated to the health and betterment of “student-athletes” across the country, but in reality it is not so virtuous. This paper will show how decisions made during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 undermine the stated purpose of the current intercollegiate sports model in the United States. It will begin by presenting the claimed goals and values of the NCAA. Then, it will show how many decisions made during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 are incompatible with these goals. In doing so, it will illustrate that there is one purpose that is far more in line with decisions during the 2020 pandemic: revenue generation through mass entertainment. Even for those who have long bought into the NCAA’s noble rhetoric, COVID-19 is mask off for the NCAA’s “collegiate model” myth

When the Longest Jump Doesn’t Win the Long Jump: Against World Athletics' Final 3

Part of the draw of athletics is its straightforwardness. There are nuances to competitions to make them more sporting contests, but at the end of a long jump competition whomever records the longest jump should win. Unfortunately, a recent rule-change at the highest level of the sport – the “Final 3” format – undermined this simplicity for the horizontal jumps and the throws for some of the 2020 and much of the 2021 seasons. While fortunately this rule was largely reverted within days of the initial submission of this paper, it’s still valuable to critically evaluate why such a rule is problematic so as to better understand of the value of sporting competitions and give guidance on future rule changes, be they in athletics or other sports. To that end, we will be drawing from the literature on the purpose and value of competitions and coupling that with simulations based on data from actual top-tier long jump competitions to show that the Final 3 format makes for significantly worse competitions than the standard format

Integration of the Load Matching and Routing Problem with Equipment Balancing for Small Package Carriers

Small package delivery is a multi-billion dollar industry with complex planning decisions required to efficiently utilize costly resources and meet tight time requirements. The planning process is typically decomposed into sequential subproblems to establish tractability. This decomposition can greatly degrade solution quality. In this paper, we therefore consider the integration of two closely related key sub-problems: load matching and routing, and equipment balancing. First, we identify critical challenges faced in trying to solve these problems. Then, we present a novel modeling approach to address these challenges. Finally, we conclude with computational results from UPS, the world’s largest package delivery company, demonstrating an improvement of approximately 5% over their existing methods for solving this pair of problems

The Forum: Winter 2008

Winter 2008 journal of the Honors Program at the University of North Dakota. The issue includes stories, poems, essays and art by undergraduate students.https://commons.und.edu/und-books/1062/thumbnail.jp