Anytime Lamar Jackson wasn’t sharp enough during passing drills last offseason, his longtime quarterbacks coach knew just how to light a fire under him.
Joshua Harris would allude to the lingering doubts facing Jackson about his ability to throw at an NFL level.
“This is why they say you ain’t a quarterback!” Harris would bark if Jackson misfired on an easy pass. It was a reference to last year’s NFL draft when some teams didn’t think Jackson could make the necessary throws to run a pro-style offense and asked the former Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback to work out at receiver or running back instead.
… Pope attended King’s School in Ely, an independent private school in Cambridgeshire – again, a path not well-trodden by most professional footballers – but, after earning “average” GCSE grades (“I got Bs and Cs”) he decided to leave private education, too, and enrol at a college with links to non-league Bury Town.
King’s, where Pope’s mother Bridget worked for four decades as a teacher, is so posh the alumni are known as ‘Old Eleans’ and many of its pupils board, although Pope did not reside there. “I only live 10 minutes away so if I boarded I don’t think my parents would’ve liked me!” he jokes.
To turn away from that, in an education-focused family, was a huge decision. “I decided to leave that bubble,” he tells i. “I just went through a massive change and decided to leave all my friends and whatever else I built up over the years and just start again. I went to a college with a decent football setup built around Bury Town.”
As training camp gets underway, Rod Brind’Amour chatted with SI.com about Justin Williams stepping away from hockey, the Hurricanes’ newest additions and keeping his team relevant after such a successful season.
Mix things up, put it in the oven and let’s see if the desired thing comes out or not! No, we’re not here to bake but you’re in for a treat as we talk about Nagelsmann, a man with this same baker mindset and ideology.
Julian Nagelsmannn, one of the prodigious talents in the football management world. The young German has been in the centre of attention for few years in German football and now his work is being recognized more and more worldwide. His career as a manager has taken a lift-off in a short amount of time but his career as a player never kick-started. A knee injury ended his playing career before even getting a senior contract with Augsburg at the age of 20. Now 32, the RB Leipzig gaffer is putting his new team in the same mould as he did with TSG Hoffenheim.
As the Red Wings begin training camp on Friday in Traverse City, new general manager and beloved former team captain Steve Yzerman is making his presence felt.
For starters, Yzerman hired internationally renowned strength and conditioning coach and entrepreneur Mike Barwis as the director of sports science and human performance.
Barwis, who held a similar job at the University of Michigan from 2007-10 – coming from West Virginia with football coach Rich Rodriguez – said the Red Wings made the change because Yzerman wants to do everything possible to allow each player to be the absolute best they can be.
… When it comes to gaining control over bad habits, like eating food we know isn’t good for us or succumbing to distraction, I shared a technique with the women in the audience that worked wonders for me. I call it “progressive extremism,” and it works particularly well in situations in which substituting one habit for another just won’t do.
To apply this technique, start by identifying the behavior you want to stop doing. For example, say you’d like to stop eating processed sugar. Taken all at once, cutting out the manufactured sweet stuff is too big of a goal for most people to quit cold turkey. Instead, think of just one specific sugar-laden food you’re able to cut from your diet and remove it from your life—sort of like the way a religious adherent or vegetarian gives up pleasures others might enjoy. Make your first elimination choice something you wouldn’t really miss and can be gone forever from your diet; that’s critical because starting with something relatively small and easy to quit begins the process of changing your habits and your identity for good.
“He’s a big reason why a lot of people come here, just to better themselves off the ice.” – Arizona draft pick Ty Emberson on UW strength and conditioning coach Jim Snider.
TwinCities.com, St. Paul Pioneer-Press, Andy Greder from
… The players first hear about the weekly subject during Tuesday team meetings that kick off each week, and it can carry forward into the music played at practice and T-shirts handed out to players.
“It gives us something to look forward to, and we come in excited to find out the theme of the week,” said running back Rodney Smith. “I think that is what’s special about coach Fleck. … It is a business, but at the same time it’s a game.”
Each week’s theme come from a “creative team” consisting of operations director Daniel Ifft, general manager Gerrit Chernoff, director of player personnel Marcus Hendrickson, recruiting coordinator John Schaekel and graphic design specialist Will Henry.
… We would all like to feel that our work is essential and our personal contribution irreplaceable. But, as Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, notes, we’re unlikely to be doing quite as essential a job as Eisenhower’s. If he benefited from some down time, so might we.
But what sort of break is best? Should we be thinking of long sabbaticals, or is it enough to keep evenings and weekends free? Perhaps the ideal compromise is Bridget Jones’s dream of a “full-blown mini-break holiday weekend”?
Shipments of wrist-worn wearables, inclusive of smartwatches, basic watches, and wrist bands, reached 34.2 million units, up 28.8% year over year during the second quarter of 2019 (2Q19), according to new data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker. The top 5 companies – Xiaomi, Apple, Huawei, Fitbit, and Samsung – continued to push forward with new products and promotional campaigns during the quarter, collectively capturing 65.7% of the market, an almost 12-point gain from last year.
“Health is now at the forefront for these devices since companies have started providing actionable insights and prescriptive measures for end users,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for IDC Mobile Device Trackers. “Beyond health, mobile payment is also starting to become a mainstay as roughly two out of five wrist-worn wearables now include NFC, and many more simply use QR codes to complete transactions.”
Wearable health and wellness trackers based on optical detection are promising candidates for public health uses due to their noninvasive tracking of vital health signs. However, so far, the use of rigid technologies hindered the ultimate performance and form factor of the wearable. Here, we demonstrate a new class of flexible and transparent wearables based on graphene sensitized with semiconducting quantum dots (GQD). We show several prototype wearable devices that are able to monitor vital health signs noninvasively, including heart rate, arterial oxygen saturation (SpO2), and respiratory rate. Operation with ambient light is demonstrated, offering low-power consumption. Moreover, using heterogeneous integration of a flexible ultraviolet (UV)–sensitive photodetector with a near-field communication circuit board allows wireless communication and power transfer between the photodetectors and a smartphone, offering battery-free operation. This technology paves the way toward seamlessly integrated wearables, and empowers the user through wireless probing of the UV index.
Researchers have found a way to use polymer printing to stretch and flatten twisted molecules so that they conduct electricity better. A team led by chemical and biomolecular engineers from the University of Illinois report their findings in the journal Science Advances.
Conjugated polymers are formed by the union of electron-rich molecules along a backbone of alternating single and double chemical bonds. The conjunction allows electricity to travel very quickly through a polymer, making it highly desirable for use in electrical and optical applications. This mode of transporting charges works so well that conjugated polymers are now poised to compete with silicon materials, the researchers said.
However, these polymers tend to contort into twisted spirals when they join, severely impeding charge transport.
“The flatness or planarity of a conjugated polymer plays a large role in its ability to conduct electricity,” said chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Ying Diao, who led the study. “Even a slight twist of the backbone can substantially hinder the ability of the electrons to delocalize and flow.”
Stitch Fix Multithreaded blog, Anahita Hassanzadeh and Douglas Rudd from
In this post, we’ll introduce stochastic programming, a framework for making optimal decisions that involve uncertainty. Whereas classical optimization approaches modeling the real world assuming known parameters, stochastic programs allow us to explicitly treat uncertainty in our decision-making. We’ll also apply this framework to an operational problem at Stitch Fix.
There are different ways to achieve long-term success in the NFL. The Ravens, Texans, and Dolphins are examples of how varied those plans can be—and how important it is to not make mistakes.
New York Magazine, Intelligencer, Will Leitch from
… Baseball has changed rather dramatically in the nearly 40 years since Whitey’s big dice roll, and now, well, they are clearly listening to different economists than John Maynard Keynes. On Sunday night, nearly 10 months after the team he helped construct won the World Series, Boston Red Sox team president Dave Dombrowski was fired by the team’s ownership group. This is partly because the Red Sox are going to miss the playoffs this year while the hated Yankees are breezing to a division title, and this is partly because the Red Sox have turned into a bit of a Steinbrenner Lite organization, having now jettisoned each of the men (all men, though it’s worth noting that the current highest-ranking executive in Boston now that Dombrowski is gone is a woman, Raquel Ferreira) responsible for each of their four titles over the last 15 years. But the real reason Dombrowski was fired, and the one that explains the best how baseball works in the year 2019, is that Dave Dombrowski cares too much about winning right now. In baseball today, that will not do.