Image Credit: Matt Hecht
An article co-authored by James Archsmith, assistant professor at the University of Maryland in the department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, is currently on the leaderboard at the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics (JAERE) for most-read articles in the last 12 months.
The JAERE is widely recognized as a top-ranked journal in the fields of environmental studies and economics based on impact factor data from Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate Analytics) and Scopus (Elsevier).
“Air Quality and Error Quality: Pollution and Performance in a High-skilled, Quality-focused Occupation,” was written with collaborators Anthony Heyes, a University of Ottawa professor, and Soodeh Saberian, a professor at the University of Manitoba. According to the study, short-term exposure to even low levels of carbon monoxide or fine particulate pollution can adversely affect decision making by baseball umpires during baseball games.
The novel approach of analyzing pitch tracking data from Major League Baseball alongside EPA air quality data gathered from baseball stadiums all over the country led to the journal article that continues to resonate with a wide audience.
"The work requirements of MLB umpires allows us to examine the impacts of air pollution on cognition in unprecedented ways. By the nature of their job, we'll observe an umpire working one day in Los Angeles and then a week later in New York,” said Archsmith.
“This breaks the spatial correlation in local pollution and allows us to pinpoint the specific pollutants that are impacting their work performance. We can definitively identify carbon monoxide and fine particulates as the cause of the effects we see here."
In an interview with TERP Magazine, Archsmith noted, "This is actually something that’s the center of a big policy debate in the United States right now. How should we be setting environmental quality standards? This is saying maybe we should be a little bit more cautious about what these standards should be.”
Professor Archsmith teaches AREC 380, an undergraduate course in Data Science in Environmental and Energy economics, and along with Lars Olson will be offering HUNH 258A, Harvesting Big Data to Examine Agriculture and Climate Change as part of the University Honors Information & Power thematic cluster in the 2021 to 2023 academic years.
Read more news coverage of this journal article:
Dirty Air and the Human Brain: Does Pollution Poison the Mind?, Salon, December 2019
Unfair Strike Zone?, TERP Magazine, May 2019
How Pollution Can Hurt the Health of the Economy, The New York Times, November 2018
Blame the Air, Not the Ump? Connecting Air Quality and Cognitive Errors in Major League Baseball Umpires, UMD College of Agriculture and Natural Resource News, October 2018
Baseball umpires aren't blind. They just have trouble breathing, study of balls and strikes shows, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 2018
Air Pollution Inside Baseball, Energy Institute at Haas Blog, July 2018
