… If there’s a reason to worry about the Bulls’ wobbly first half of the season, it has to do with the slippage in their defense. If there’s one player responsible for that, it’s Joakim Noah, the supremely versatile and tireless big man and reigning Defensive Player of the Year who has served as the backbone to coach Tom Thibodeau’s suffocating system for the last several seasons.
This is the same Noah who had surgery on his left knee last May after helping drag the Bulls to a playoff berth despite Rose’s absence. The same surgery the team referred to as “minor” but required eight to 12 weeks of recovery, twice the normal time of a standard arthroscopic procedure to clean out the joint or deal with a small tear.
On Tuesday, Tom Thibodeau cancelled practice. The Chicago Bulls’ coach decided his team was too banged-up after a stretch of seven games in 11 days, one that’s seen the team fall from the class of the Eastern Conference to an underachieving group with concerning problems.
Instead of practicing, Thibodeau called a meeting. He wanted everybody on the roster to have their say about where the team is, and how it can get better. He also didn’t want to call a practice when not everybody could participate. There have been too many of those this season, and they’ve hurt the Bulls’ chemistry.
Omaha World-Herald, Omaha.com: Big Ten Network from
New Nebraska strength and conditioning coach Mark Philipp is holding off on doing interviews with the media for the time being, but a BTN video appeared Wednesday that gives a peek into some changes the Huskers are making in the strength and conditioning program — and they involve assistant athletic director for strength and conditioning Boyd Epley and the Nebraska Athletic Performance Lab.
You may recall the NAPL being a big part of the East Stadium expansion project that opened in 2013. In year one, if Husker football used it much — if at all — the school didn’t promote the usage, and as I talked to a handful of players during the season about the NAPL, they had all seen the lab on tours but hadn’t known how it was being used.
That changed, clearly, this semester, as the video shows. [video, pre-roll + 2:04]
… I had fallen trap to the “natural-born teacher” fallacy which Elizabeth Green (2014) so brilliantly summarizes in Building a Better Teacher (p. 6). Unconsciously I had equated manic energy, hilarity, sacrifice, and other aspects of personality with “good” teaching, but those are not essential characteristics. A brief survey of some of my high school friends uncovered something incredibly revealing. When asked “Who was the best teacher you ever had?” many responded with a question of their own: “Do you mean best or favorite?” And that, I believe, is a truly important distinction. The most energetic, the most memorable, the most loved teachers are not always going to be the “best” teachers.
So what does make a teacher “good?” It is an incredibly nuanced question.
Not all naps are created equal. Some naps have been shown to rejuvenate where others boost creativity. What’s more, when you nap can be as important as how you nap. Here’s how to nap like a professional, nap-taking machine. Here’s how to nap like you MEAN IT.
“Wearable devices” are pieces of technology that are worn in clothes or accessories, and they often have biometric functionality – they can measure and record heart rates, steps taken, temperature, or sleep habits. Numerous tech companies have begun manufacturing and marketing such devices, which are part of a larger movement often referred to as the “quantified self” – where data about one’s life is meticulously gathered and recorded. Only 1% to 2% of Americans have used a wearable device, but annual sales are projected to increase to more than $50 billion by 2018.
Health and fitness apps are also proliferating, from software that maps where you run or provides a digital workout community, to programs that count calories or suggest how to improve your sleep. But what’s the real impact for people’s health?
… if we based everything on sound training principles, would injury rates go down? Some would say yes based on subjective and anecdotal data. The validity of that is questionable. However, common sense would tell us that they would go down. Would they go down 20%, 30% or 50%? What if we could make them go down 80% by looking at things a little differently? It would make sense that practitioners who are more versed in these sound training principles that they would get better results. But what percentage of people who are training others does that represent. Is it 80%, 50% or just 1%. The fact is that there are over 250,000 anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries every year in high school athletics. Over 60-80% of these ACL injuries, depending on the author, are non-contact in orientation. Meaning there was no contact with another player. The common theory is that the majority of these can be reduced with proper training or sound training principles.
The question then becomes, if the mass majority of training that is applied uses sound training principles, then wouldn’t we see these numbers go down. With increased knowledge of the biomechanical factors associated with these non-contact ACL injuries, then application of sound training principles would see some level of impact on these over the last 20 years.
It started as a question about the left shoulder of sophomore center Gavin Schilling — a minor sprain that is not serious — and turned into an impassioned Tom Izzo taking on the season-ending foot injury of Michigan guard Caris LeVert, injuries the Spartans have had, and his belief that over-use is contributing to them.
With the issue of injuries and concussions in sports becoming more prevalent at all levels of the game, U.S. Soccer and Major League Soccer partnered together to conduct a trailblazing Medical Symposium, which was held Jan. 15-16 during the National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) Convention in Philadelphia.
Medical professionals from U.S. Soccer and MLS got together to conduct the two-day event that focused on player health and safety issues related to youth, amateur and professional soccer, as well as the topic of concussions.
The words we use to talk about food offers surprising insights on history, economics, psychology, and even evolution. Daniel Jurafsky explores the relationship between food and language around the globe, from the origins of America’s national condiment as a Chinese fermented fish sauce to the reason crispy food brands tend to have different vowels than their creamy counterparts. Jurafsky will also look at the stunningly complex language of restaurant menus and reviews, and what they tell us about our culture and society. [video, 67:00]
Those are the heights of the top five picks in this year’s SuperDraft (Cyle Larin, Khiry Shelton, Romario Williams, Fatai Alashe, Nick Besler).
5-foot-8, 5-foot-6, 5-foot-7, 5-foot-7, 5-foot-6.
Those are the heights of the five players signed to Homegrown contracts during the 2014 regular season that weren’t available for selection until the 2015 season (Collin Fernandez, Ben Swanson, Alejandro Zendejas, Sebastian Saucedo, Marco Bustos).
These two different samples are just a small example of the disparity between SuperDraft picks and Homegrown players in terms of physical size.
Sometime in mid to late January, researchers from MIT plan to gather around a manhole on Portland Street in East Cambridge, dressed in plastic disposable biohazard coats and gloves. Each hour over the next 24, working in teams of two over four-hour shifts, they’ll sink a tube into the muck and pump one to two liters of sewage water into a plastic container. The container will be put into a cooler and taken to the nearby lab at MIT run by Eric Alm, a computational microbiologist. Alm’s lab will analyze all 24 of these sludgy samples to see what viruses and bacteria they hold; meanwhile, a vial of each sample will be sent to another lab to be analyzed for biomarkers (molecular or cellular flags for things like diseases and drugs, legal and illegal ).
These researchers—who include architects, computational biologists, designers, electrical and mechanical engineers, geneticists, and microbiologists—will be testing an idea that’s attracting interest around the world: namely, that sewage can tell us important things about the people who excrete it. Already, research has shown that sewage can reveal illicit drug usage, the presence of influenza, the poliovirus and other pathogens, and the state of community health. So far, however, none of this has been tested in our local waste systems, other than some proof-of-concept sampling done in Boston. That has led to this first formal effort by scientists and public health officials to get a sewage snapshot of the people of Cambridge.
We are delighted to confirm the 10 presentations at the 2015 OptaPro Analytics Forum, which takes place on 5th February in central London.
Now in its second year, the OptaPro Analytics Forum offers a unique platform for the most talented amateur analysts, bloggers and academics working with football data to share their research with those working within the professional game, offering theories that can be applied and used by clubs in their own day-to-day analysis.
The Professional Footballers’ Association has questioned whether players in English academies show the commitment levels of their Brazilian counterparts. The PFA, which sent a group of coaches to Brazil to study their youth-development methods, has now published a report which also highlights the importance of futsal.
“It gives us an opportunity to look at ourselves and see what we might to do to find our own fountain of hope for the future,” said Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the PFA whose coaches visited Flamengo, Fluminense, Palmeiras, Santos and Vasco Da Gama before compiling the 68-page report.