For the first paper, I was surprised that the knees are barely considered for keeping balance. It makes sense for examples where, say, you're standing still and someone pushes you from behind. In that case, you react mostly by bending forward at the hip, and I'm sure you subconsciously do something with your ankles too. However, the knees are barely used. But what about in the example where the gymnast is trying to stick her landing? She bends her knees a lot there. I suppose you could say that the knees are for the impact and the hips and ankles are for balance, but since it's all one motion I feel like the knees would have to be considered. Maybe it's that I don't entirely understand the physics of it, but I feel like if you're falling or jumping, you use your knees a lot to maintain balance.
As a dancer, I found Physics of Dance to be pretty interesting, too. A lot of the different physical corrections suggested for balance were a bit funny to me, because I don't think about those things at all when I dance. The best solution for balance, I find, is to clench my abs. Of course, I don't really know how that effects things like center of mass, angular momentum, etc.
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