【推荐1】Lia Thomas, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, is an excellent swimmer. She often beats her rivals by tens of seconds, breaking records. Her success is based on three things. One is natural talent. Another is relentless training. And the third is biology. Although she identifies as a woman, Ms Thomas was born male.

On the eve of her biggest competition, Ms Thomas finds herself at the centre of the bad-tempered debate about whether trans women—males who identify as women—should compete in women’s sports. That, in turn, is part of a broader argument: should biological facts sometimes override people’s deeply held feelings about their identities? This newspaper believes it is almost always unfair to allow transgender women to compete in women’s sports.The advantages bestowed by male puberty (青春期) are so big that no amount of training or talent can enable female athletes to overcome them.

Florence Griffith Joyner’s 100-metres world sprinting record has stood for three decades. A male matching it would not even make it to the Olympics, let alone the final. Much of the male advantage is granted by testosterone (睾酮，睾丸素), a powerful anabolism steroid (合成类胆固醇) whose levels rise sharply in male puberty.For many years many sporting bodies, following the lead of the International Olympic Committee, hoped to cope with the issue by allowing trans-women to compete in women’s events provided they took testosterone- suppressing drugs. But the science suggests this does not level the playing field. Suppressing testosterone in adults, it seems, does little to undo the advantages granted by a male adolescence.

Sports must therefore choose between inclusion and fairness; and they should choose fair play. That does not mean that trans-women would be barred from all sport. One way to make that clear would be to replace the “men’s” and “women’s” categories with “open” and “female” ones. The first would be open to all comers. The second would be restricted on the basis of biology.

Sport is public, and results can be measured objectively. That means the argument that the material facts of biology should sometimes outrank a person’s subjective sense of identity is easier to make. But it applies in other areas, too.

【推荐2】Coaches have always taken into account the condition of players when scheduling training sessions. Now with the help of artificial intelligence, they can calculate more precisely the probability that individual athletes will get injured during the next match, the next week or the next month.

“We follow a team for an entire season, recording GPS data during training and matches, “Rossi explains. He then uses machine learning to try to detect patterns. “This gives us the probability that a player will get injured in the next days or next weeks. ”

These data reveal an athlete’s workload-how often they train and how intensely. Just enough training can pave the way to medals, out too much puts pressure on the body and can lead to injuries.

Sport is gradually entering a new era, in which artificial intelligence might act as an assistant coach. Algorithms (算法)could enable a teenager to train smarter and avoid a career-ending injury. or help a professional athlete to compete for a few years longer. But the technology’s success depends, in part, on the ability of data scientists to convince coaches to include data in their decision-process.

The teams that McHugh has worked with have seen a reduction in injuries of between 5% and 40%. Yet not every coach is happy to join forces with AI. “Coaches sometimes don’t feel good, because it seems like trying to substitute the human element, ” Rossi says. But in reality, data is only a tool. “The interpretation of the results, the change of the training load, is done by coaches, “ he says.

McHugh agrees that people have to make the final call. “Once the injury probability for an athlete on a given day is output from an injury model. the athlete or coach must then decide whether the predicted risk is acceptable or not, usually depending on the context,” he says. There might be a big game that day, and the player might be especially important to the team. “Even though the predicted injury probability may be as high as 70%, the coach may be willing to take that chance,” he says.

【推荐3】“I was not exceptional at all,” Claudia Goldin once told me of her time as an economics PhD student at the University of Chicago. But as the course progressed, she said, “I felt like lightbulbs were going on in my head.” On October 9 the brightness of those lights was confirmed, as she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”.

Goldin found men relatively dull, at least as a topic of study. Their labour was uniform compared to that of women, who might switch between caring for children, toiling (辛苦工作) in the family businesses or sweating somewhere else. But this complexity was harder to measure. According to America’s historical statistics, for example, their occupation was often unhelpfully listed as “wife”. So Goldin set out to measure their work properly.

The standard pattern of development was once that as countries got richer, women were pulled into the labour market. But by painstakingly stitching together different data sets, Goldin established that America’s path was more complicated, and that growth in the 1800s coincided with women moving away from work other than domestic labour.

Why? For a start, factory jobs were harder to combine with childcare than, say, sewing at home. And richer families could afford to spare women the indignity of toil. Goldin argued that stigma (污名) reinforced this, or the idea that “only a husband who is lazy and neglectful of his family would allow his wife to do such labour.” Later the stigma faded — the office clerk job of the 20th century was easier, and consistent with the impression of a supportive spouse. With the arrival of tight labour markets in the 1950s, discriminatory policies against hiring married women were virtually abandoned.

Today, women still work and earn less than men. As social norms have shifted and real barriers have fallen, Goldin says that most of the remaining gender gaps facing college-educated women are due to something else. So-called “greedy jobs” reward round-the-clock work and are conflicting with being on call for children. Perhaps men should also share the family burden and allow their partners to be more professionally involved instead.