Why are there so many people on Wikipedia who were born in January? The ‘Christmas effect’ behind football | Policy

good morning! Today I am writing again about the effect of Christmas.

You have already said that being a footballer is easier for those born in January and the elite there is twice as much in January (13%) than it was in December (6%). it’s a well-known phenomenon: When you’re a kid, if you’re older, it’s easier to be fast and smart, which will put you on a better path, by comments: You’ll play as a starter, your parents will celebrate your goals and being a “good athlete” will become part of your identity. All this pushes you to get better. In the end, more footballers reached the First Division in January and February than in December.

And this doesn’t just happen with football.

In the past few weeks, I searched for more examples, until I found a great database: People on Wikipedia. There are millions of celebrities, more or less related people, from politicians to athletes. Will more people meet me from January? It turns out it was. Look at the birth month of 2,500 Spanish lawmakers that appears on Wikipedia.

Among politicians, the influence of Christmas seems to appear mostly in women. Although the same babies are born more or less each month, among the deputies there are 10% or 15% more than at the beginning of the year.

She has also emphasized the influence of Christmas in more sports, such as basketball. Among the Spanish basketball players that appear on Wikipedia, there is a weakness in the first quarter from the fourth, which is a massive gap. Being born on December 31 cuts your options in half. (Looking for specific instances is an exaggeration, but for the Gasol brothers, the only one who didn’t become a professional was the little one, who was born in October; Bao from July and Mark from January.)

What about writers and writers? I found the January effect again, again stronger in women. The oldest in class is 28% on Wikipedia, while the youngest is only 22%.

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Finally, I thought of a special class of competitors: chess players. Discipline tends to be the miracle talent of children, so could one of the biggest people in your year be an advantage? I took data from 9,000 professional chess players, this time from around the world, and found one of the most striking patterns: There are very few chess players from the first quarter compared to the fourth. And again, the effect is greater in women, as it happens with deputies and writers.

This data is only indicative, but is reinforced as it coincides with more complex analyses. The influence of Christmas is often evident in education. It has been found, for example, that those born at the end of the year repeat a year more — nearly double that number, according to data from the Basque Country — and that Profession Javier Soria and Pilar Benito note that girls in January get better grades in selectivity. There are also posts that say that premature birth increases your chances of going to Oxford, be a deputy NS Executive Director.

It is easy to understand that this is happening. If you’re one of the oldest students in your class at age six, it’s easier for you to be good at adding, reading, or just attending. It is not uncommon to play better soccer and chess, or to have fun before reading books or comics. This initial advantage is the advantage that is then reclaimed, by the way your teacher, classmates, or family behave, shaping what is expected of you and setting expectations that you will later feel driven to achieve.

Soria and Benito’s work with selective observations found that the effect of Christmas was greater in girls, which is interesting, because we also saw it in our data for female representatives or writers. It’s a less studied angle, they explain. But there is no escape from thinking about sexism: It’s not hard to imagine families who pay their sons more than their daughters when it comes to school, or celebrate their success over their success.

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20th century influence?

Through the data, I realize that I have only found the effect of Christmas in recent decades. It can be seen in the last graph, where all the Spaniards you find on Wikipedia are divided into three periods: born before 1900, from 1900 to 1969, and after.

Look first at the twentieth century. The influence of Christmas became more evident in the second half. I don’t want to speculate much, but maybe what you do now at school is more important. (If you were born in 1600, to appear on Wikipedia, it was still important to be noble.)

The other intriguing thing about the graph is that before 1900 there was not only a birthday effect, but we see a different pattern: much more people on Wikipedia were born in the winter than in the summer. There was no move in January, but a smooth curve. What do you think was happening?

What we see is the neonatal cycle. In 2021, roughly the same people are born every month, but this has not historically been the case, as Jose M Pavia reminded me two weeks ago. told me about Works with baby boomers in Spain throughout the twentieth century, where they found the effect of Lent which, between 1900 and 1970, reduced the load from Ash Wednesday to Allah’s Thursday. Before 1900, from what I was reading, the usual thing in agricultural societies was that there were more births in the winter, when there was less work in the fields. This would explain the pattern found on Wikipedia up to 1900.

Concepts in Spain each month, from 1900 to 1999. Source: Simó-Noguera, Lledó y Pavía (2020)

Other stories random

🤖 1. Artificial intelligence that learns a variety of things

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Some AI agents are able to learn different games on their own, without human supervision, only getting a prize for their good performance. It’s a job from the same company I talked about last week (Brits deep mindbought by Google). The funny thing is that the agents, who look like video game bots, find creative strategies in diverse scenes, learn to chase each other, climb high to see more while playing hide and seek and things like that. Be careful, there is a video. | deep mind

🐟 2. Some swans

AI sometimes surprises us because it makes the mistake of laughing. But natural intelligence also has its things: in You can see pictures of swans trying to eat animals other than fish, sometimes they are very big.

🍺 3. A Covid recovery due to football?

In the UK, there is data to suggest that every match England played during the European Championship was followed by peak cases, and not so many people who went to the stadium, like people who gathered in homes and pubs to watch matches on TV. a path? After each match there was a rise in cases of men between the ages of 20 and 34 like Imaginatively shown, this graph of financial times. After the final, there were about 10,000 more injuries from men than women at those ages. | F

🏅 4. Which countries have won the most medals in the Olympic Games?

This week, with Borja Andrino, we reviewed the Olympic superpowers in terms of wealth and population: from the United States and China to Jamaica, Cuba, New Zealand and Slovenia. In the article you have a lot of data and six graphs.

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