Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 24, 2016

I recently joined an applied research group at Georgia Tech, the Wearable Computing Center (WCC).

WCC is interdisciplinary and skilled in both technology development and communication. The group works with industry through contract services or on an ongoing basis. So if you are a sports team that isn’t getting desired results from athlete performance technology, the Center can create an educational workshop that gets your organization on the same page technically. WCC can also develop custom technology to help achieve unmet objectives. If you are a sports technology vendor, WCC can help with content, service designs, user interfaces and business models. Please get in touch if I can tell you more or if you have questions I can answer.

You are also invited to check out the blog at http://sports.bradstenger.com where I am writing essays that work on making sense of the rapid and often technical advances in sports science. The blog is to be a staging area for reports that should go on sale in early-2017. If your organization needs custom research into an applied sports science issue, please get in touch.

Thanks.
-Brad Stenger

… When you first arrive at Stanford, you find out pretty quickly that you’re surrounded by a bunch of geniuses. It’s something my teammates and I talk about all the time. The thing is, a lot of the guys on the team are geniuses, too.

I mean, just on my offensive line, from left to right, I’m protected by guys majoring in philosophy, biomechanical engineering, Japanese, earth systems and science, and technology and society. When guys at practice are discussing Immanuel Kant, or chemistry and calculus, while they’re flipping massive tires, you know you’re in a special place.

When we’re not studying or playing Super Smash Bros. in the lounge (for reference, Blue Kirby is the best player in the game), we’re trying to win a national championship.

… Istler still stands just 5-foot-11 and weighs just 175 pounds, but there’s hidden strength in his right arm.

“I wish I had done this earlier in my career,” Istler said. “It’s a career-changer. At first, I wasn’t sure. I figured the Dodgers wanted me to try it, so I’d try it out and see what happens.”

The Dodgers took 11 of their minor-league pitchers and handed them over to Driveline Baseball, a baseball-performance training system developed by Kyle Boddy.

The transfer of Rafael van der Vaart to FC Midtjylland – a club where I wrote extensively last year – called quite a few question marks. Why invest the club’s future in a player whose best years are in the past? I asked the president Rasmus Ankersen.

Peterson led the NFL in rushing last year, but he did not finish the season strong and played poorly in the playoffs. Then, his first two games this year had been disappointing, too.

How has sports medicine in football changed since you started your playing career in the mid-1990s?

The knowledge on training, prevention, treatment and return to play has improved massively. During my career the approach was very basic, but now there is influence from many different areas of sports science and medicine – and this is what makes the difference and as a result, football is a much, much quicker game these days.

What was the worst injury you suffered during your playing career and what was the recovery for this?

I suffered a big tear to my rectus femoris. I also tore my collateral ligament and it took 3 months to recover. The rehab was very interesting, I was playing for Espanyol in Barcelona at the time. Barcelona has high performance medical centres for athletes, so during the rehabilitation I shared this space and spent a lot of time with athletes from many different sports. It was tough, sometimes I was there from eight in the morning until eight in the evening, but I really felt that I benefitted from being in this multi-sport environment, it had a great effect on my mentality during my recovery as well.

Velocity-Based Training (VBT) conceptually seems to be very simple: the use of velocity measurements to gain daily feedback on training. However, are we OVER-simplifying the use of velocity for monitoring and coaching purposes? A look into the existing literature on VBT might indicate that things are pretty cut-and-dry in that its uses are generally accepted and agreed upon. Is it possible that we are only scratching the surface here? Is it possible that we’re only looking at one side of the coin?

It is my belief that we need to do two things here: 1) Challenge everything we currently know about VBT in order to either confirm or revise the ‘rules’ that have been established; and 2) Ask questions that we have not answered yet. Recent research from Zourdos et al. (2016) suggests that a lifter’s experience is related to their barbell velocities. This is an important and previously unexamined aspect of VBT. Zourdos showed that, with experienced lifters, within-set variation of velocity was diminished as %1RM increased. This finding is crucial to understand- a more experienced lifter does not experience as much variation in velocity as an unexperienced lifter at near maximal loads. As I mentioned, this has not been shown before in the literature- so my question is, “What else don’t we know about VBT?”

… The performance culture is an environment in which the athletes not only listen to the coach and adhere to the program, but they buy into it with the fullest conviction. … Simply put, a performance culture is one in which the athletes want to get better, and will do what it takes to make this happen.

… as a whole, the hamstring complex undergo large changes in muscle length, force, and velocity, but especially the bicep femoris with the greatest peak musculotendon strain, which corresponds with research showing the femoris is the most injured hamstring muscle (4).

During ground preparation and just prior to ground contact, there is a large stretch going through the hamstrings and the stored elastic energy during the lengthening actions is then released at ground contact. The amount of eccentric and isometric contraction, before and at ground contact paired with incredible velocities and muscle length – and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster, but also a recipe for providing an adequate training stimulus to prepare for this environment.

Knowing when and how these groups interact is important to help train speed in a specific manner that prepares the tissues for the demands of high velocity sprinting.

… There are those who are sure they see spin. “I’m just trying to pick up spin,” said San Francisco infielder Joe Panik of what he’s looking for out of the pitcher’s hand. “I see spin on breaking balls,” agreed teammate Brandon Belt. “I see spin pretty well,” said Zack Greinke, this decade’s best-hitting pitcher.

Here’s the strange thing about seeing spin, though: there’s evidence that the part of the brain that batters employ when a pitch is released isn’t the part of the brain that sees motion. It’s the part of the brain used for detail and color.

No problem. Imagine a flashing red/white mess — you can extrapolate from the color what spin is coming. It’s basically what Preston Wilson said on the MLB Network, when he said he could see if the ball was “more red or more white” and that helped him know what pitch it was. That appearance inspired this whole post.

Researchers have devised a new theory about how the brain differentiates between relevant and irrelevant information, based on a computational model.

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the study by New York University researchers focused on inhibitory neurons, which are responsible for neurological responses to incoming stimuli by suppressing other neurons, while balancing the excitatory neurons.

“It is critical to our everyday life that our brain processes the most important information out of everything presented to us,” said senior author Xiao-Jing Wang, global professor of neural science at NYU and NYU Shanghai, in a press release. “Within an extremely complicated neural circuit in the brain, there must be a gating mechanism to route relevant information to the right place at the right time.”

… The number-one thing you can do to maximize the health benefits of sleep, no matter how much you’re getting, is ­go to bed earlier—a lot earlier. “That old adage about every hour you sleep before midnight being worth two after midnight is true,” says MacRae. The rea­son? No matter when you go to bed, the closer it is to sunrise, the more likely you are to have dream-heavy REM sleep, which is less restorative.

MacRae ­recommends a bedtime that ensures you’re asleep by around 9:30 P.M., pointing to research that suggests hitting the sack earlier is much more important than the total number of hours you’re out. “There is no good science that says we must have seven to eight hours,” says MacRae. “Getting quality deep sleep and limiting the number of sleep interruptions is much more important.”

When coaches see an o-line athlete trying to catch their breath, often the first thing that comes to mind is that the athlete is out of shape and extra conditioning is needed. This extra conditioning is usually scheduled outside of normal practice and comes in the form of running, up-downs, stair steppers, bikes, treadmills, elliptical machines, etc. We’ve discussed how these aerobic forms of conditioning are detrimental to the development of o-line athletes. However, in-season, this approach is The Kiss of Death. If you want to find a better way to sabotage your o-line, I would be hard-pressed to find one. Even if you believe you are doing things “right,” “extra” is still extra regardless, and will unnecessarily wear your athletes down physically and mentally. So, what is the solution? Let’s take a step back, so we can really get a feel for what is going on. And we’ll do this by asking, “Why?”

… As teams search for multiple ways to gain an advantage, the biometric statistical revolution has begun in NHL front offices, with certain teams embracing the benefits that health-based statistics can bring to player performance.

“When I first started [in 2010], it wasn’t being done at all.” said Chad Drummond, the head strength and conditioning coach for the Edmonton Oilers. “Collecting analytics and looking at some different bio-markers is actually quite new for our sport, but it’s the way of the future. We’re starting to study what we do, and get a better understanding of biomechanical loads, physiological loads, and that gives us a better idea on how to plan out player specific training programs, and recovery regimes.”

The Edmonton Oilers utilize CoachMePlus, a sports science platform that “helps teams organize all of their data, evaluate game day readiness, and reduce the possibility for injury,” says CEO Teo Balbach. The company started working with the Buffalo Sabres in 2003, but have expanded to “about a quarter of all professional teams in North America, in all sports.” In hockey, there are currently nine teams that work with the software.

… At RMIT University and the University of Adelaid in Australia researchers have developed a material, made of microscopic titanium oxide crystals called dielectric resonators, that changes how it filters light when put under stress and strain. While in itself this technology isn’t exactly ready to make a contact lens, it does point to the real possibility of contact lenses that change their properties based on environmental and physiologic parameters.

Integrating this technology with electronic control systems may one day lead to smart contact lenses that can be optimized for different visual needs and that can address more than one eye condition in a single patient at the same time.

… On a regular basis I will ask my tenured sports coach who he thought were the 3 least performing players of training that day. I would separately then look at the GPS data to examine particular metrics that commonly are related to players’ performance.

Majority of the time, the tenured coach and I were in agreement based on his subjective analysis and my objective findings. His pattern recognition from years of exposure to training sessions and players was comparable to the algorithms provided by the GPS system.

Did we honestly learn anything new?

Former quarterback Brady Quinn takes us inside the new [optical motion tracking & functional movement] technology that is helping athletes at Notre Dame.

… Created by MIT PhD student Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao in conjunction with Microsoft Research, the Duoskin tattoos transfer onto your skin with water, and they can be customized for both aesthetic and functional purposes. Hsin-Liu Kao presented her paper about the tattoos at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers in Heidelberg, Germany last week.

… When Apple originally introduced Apple Watch, it focused on design/style, communication, and fitness. While design made Apple Watch stand out from the competition, I think it is fair to say it captured more tech adopters than it did jewelry buyers and fashionistas.
… When all is said and done, fitness remains the strongest purchase driver for wearable buyers at the moment, especially as we expand beyond early adopters.

For anyone (like this author) waiting for the Adidas miCoach Smart Run 2 to arrive… don’t hold your breath. It looks as if the German sports giant has given up on GPS running watches – at least its own branded ones.

“We’re not going to see a new running watch from Adidas for a while,” Stacey Burr, VP of wearable sports electronics at Adidas told us. “There will be some additional hardware in the future that we’re very excited about but we’re looking, on the running side, at how we can bring our algorithms and coaching and training plans to other device platforms, in addition to Smart Run.”

… In 1997, during his final year as a doctoral student, Fogg spoke at a conference in Atlanta on the topic of how computers might be used to influence the behaviour of their users. He noted that “interactive technologies” were no longer just tools for work, but had become part of people’s everyday lives: used to manage finances, study and stay healthy. Yet technologists were still focused on the machines they were making rather than on the humans using those machines. What, asked Fogg, if we could design educational software that persuaded students to study for longer or a financial-management programme that encouraged users to save more? Answering such questions, he argued, required the application of insights from psychology.

Fogg presented the results of a simple experiment he had run at Stanford, which showed that people spent longer on a task if they were working on a computer which they felt had previously been helpful to them. In other words, their interaction with the machine followed the same “rule of reciprocity” that psychologists had identified in social life. The experiment was significant, said Fogg, not so much for its specific finding as for what it implied: that computer applications could be methodically designed to exploit the rules of psychology in order to get people to do things they might not otherwise do. In the paper itself, he added a qualification: “Exactly when and where such persuasion is beneficial and ethical should be the topic of further research and debate.”

Fogg called for a new field, sitting at the intersection of computer science and psychology, and proposed a name for it: “captology” (Computers as Persuasive Technologies).

Economic and societal pressures influence modern medical practice to develop and implement prevention strategies. Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury devastates the knee joint leading to short term disability and long term sequelae. Due to the high risk of long term osteoarthritis in all treatment populations following ACL injury, prevention is the only effective intervention for this life-altering disruption in knee health. The “Sequence of Prevention” Model provides a framework to monitor progress towards the ultimate goal of preventing ACL injuries. Utilizing this model, our multidisciplinary collaborative research team has spent the last decade working to delineate injury mechanisms, identify injury risk factors, predict which athletes are at-risk for injury, and develop ACL injury prevention programs. Within this model of injury prevention, modifiable factors (biomechanical and neuromuscular) related to injury mechanisms likely provide the best opportunity for intervention strategies aimed to decrease the risk of ACL injury, particularly in female athletes. Knowledge advancements have led to the development of potential solutions that allow athletes to compete with lowered risk of ACL injury. Design and integration of personalized clinical assessment tools and targeted prevention strategies for athletes at high risk for ACL injury may transform current prevention practices and ultimately significantly reduce ACL injury incidence. This 2016 OREF Clinical Research Award focuses on the authors’ work and contributions to the field. The author’s acknowledge the many research groups who have contributed to the current state of knowledge in the fields of ACL injury mechanisms, injury risk screening and injury prevention strategies.

With the fall sports season upon us, the expectation of ACL injuries is a reality. The reported incidence of ACL ruptures is approximately 200,000 in the United States annually. Most of these (58%-70%) are non-contact injuries occurring in young athletes. Many coaches, parents, and athletes often inquire how such a high ACL injury rate transpires without the incidence of physical contact by an opposing player. One main reason, considered by many, is the athlete’s shoe – playing surface interface.

There is epidemiologic evidence that increased traction at the shoe surface interface may lead to enhanced sports performance at the expense of increased risk of ACL injury. There is documentation as far back as the 1980’s that state ACL sprains are at higher risk on artificial turf, but at that time was thought by some to occur only in certain game situations as kickoffs and punts. There is also documentation noted in the 1990’s demonstrating that during NFL game exposure there was almost a five (5) times greater of ACL injury on grass vs. turf. However, for practice sessions the reverse was true. When reviewing the total exposures (practice and games) an incidence density ratio was calculated that revealed a 90% increase in ACL injuries on artificial turf per 1000 athlete exposures. In a similar but more recent study it was reported that more ACL injuries (per 1000 athletic exposures) ensue on turf vs. grass surfaces in professional football players.

BACKGROUND:

Concussions are common incidences in sports. However, game-specific characteristics such as tactics, field positions, etc. might positively/negatively contribute to the occurrence of mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI) in various sports such as soccer, volleyball, handball, or basketball. Thus, the intention of this study was to analyze game- specific characteristics of concussive incidents in active players from the perspective of different sportive disciplines.
METHODS:

Four sport-specific questionnaires for soccer, handball, volleyball and basketball were established using an online survey tool.
RESULTS:

3001 participants completed the questionnaires. 18% of the participants answered that they had experienced a concussion which significantly differed depending on the sport practiced (?2(3)=56,868, p<0,001; soccer 25%, handball 24%, volleyball 13%, basketball 15%). Whereas handball and soccer players experienced most concussions on the amateur level, volleyball players experienced most on the professional level and basketball players during leisure play (?2(9)=112,667, p<0,001). Soccer players experienced most concussions by a collision with another player, volleyball players instead experienced most concussions by hits from the ball (?2(6)=211,260, p<0,001). In soccer, goalkeepers and defensive midfield players showed most concussive incidences (?2(7)=19.638, p<0,01); in volleyball, the "libero" position and outside positions showed to be significantly affected from sport-related concussions (?2(6)=13.617, p<0,05).
CONCLUSIONS:

The present results showed that factors critically contributing to the occurrence of concussions are sport-specific and particularly concern amateurs. This indicates that most concussions in ball games appear in situations, where medical care units are not necessarily present. Preventive measures should therefore especially address amateurs in ball sports.

When the diagnosis is a repetitive motion injury in a young athlete, a discussion about the dangers of specialization usually follows close behind.

It’s a universal concern.

Even the club and travel organizations that preach the importance of a year-round commitment acknowledge the issue.

“Specialization is causing an injury rate that never occurred when people played three sports and used different muscle groups,” said Dan Lebowitz, executive director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University. “And the demands in terms of coaches wanting a year-round commitment is crazy, so the whole mindset has changed.”

… In February 2015, Dr. Martha Murray and her team launched a study that was 28 years in the making. Twenty patients with recently torn ACLs volunteered to participate in the study. Dr. Lyle Micheli performed the surgeries for the study, in which 10 patients had traditional ACL reconstruction surgery, where a surgeon removes what is left of the severed ACL and replaces it with a graft. For these patients, the graft was created using two of their own hamstring tendons. Micheli performed Murray’s Bridge-Enhanced ACL Repair (BEAR) procedure on the other 10 patients. They became the first people to regrow a torn ACL, according to Murray.

In military and athlete populations, injury history is a strong and consistent predictor of subsequent injury. The reasons for this association remain unclear, but it is likely due to multiple factors. These may include anatomic or structural predisposition to injury; failure to rehabilitate prior injuries adequately; alterations in movement patterns; and behavioral and psychological factors such as risk-taking behavior, pressure to return to duty or competition and health care-seeking. While we can’t modify or change an individual’s injury history, we may be able to address deficits from the prior injury, if present, and improve faulty movement patterns.

In our study, published in the June 2016 issue of MSSE, we described the role of injury history as a risk factor for incident lower extremity injury and musculoskeletal-related conditions. Injury data were obtained from a large cohort of first-year military cadets who participated in an eight-week basic training at three military service academies during 2005 to 2008. Our purpose was to understand the role of injury history among males and females while controlling for influential factors such as age, baseline fitness levels and participation in injury prevention programs. Second, we wanted to understand if there were stronger relationships between histories of injury identified at baseline and ankle and knee sprains or lower leg stress fractures that occurred during the basic training program.

… If you want to improve your running, and your recovery from running, you have to pay attention to the timing of what you eat. Research shows that doing so allows you to maximize muscle glycogen fueling before exercise, extend glycogen use during exercise and maximize muscle glycogen refueling after exercise.

The present work investigated serum vitamin D (25(OH)D) status in relation to bone and muscle qualities and functions in 19 female soccer players (13–16 years) resident at northern latitude with very low sun exposure (?32–36?h/month) during winter season (late January to early March). Serum 25(OH)D, parathyroid hormone and bone turnover markers osteocalcin (OC) and beta carboxy-terminal collagen cross-links (?-Ctx), as well as body composition and muscle performance were examined. Hormones were tested using routine laboratory methods. Fat mass, lean mass, and bone mineral density in whole body, as well as femur and lumbar spine were evaluated with dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. Muscle performance was assessed through isokinetic knee extension and flexion, countermovement jump, and sprint running. 25(OH)D was low (50.5?±?12.8?nmol?l?1), whereas the values of bone turnover markers were markedly high (OC: 59.4?±?18.6?µg?l?1; ?-Ctx: 1075?±?408?ng?l?1). All bone and muscle measurements were normal or above normal. 25(OH)D was not significantly correlated with most of the parameters of bone and muscle quality or function, except the knee extension time to peak torque (r ?=??0.50, p?=?.03). In conclusion, the level of vitamin D is markedly low in adolescent female soccer players during the winter in Sweden. However, vitamin D levels did not significantly correlate with measures of bone and muscle except a moderate correlation in time to peak torque in the knee extensors. The practical implication of low vitamin D levels in young growing female athletes remains unclear.

A study published in PNAS explores how the rebellious righteousness of teens impacts their food choices. They leveraged a common coming-of-age trait, “feeling like a socially conscious, autonomous person worthy of approval from one’s peers,” to steer them toward healthier eating habits. Through an exposé of food industry marketing practices, the researchers taught the teens that healthy eating could be a stand against injustice, as junk foods are processed to encourage over-eating and targeted toward the poor and very young. This is similar to how the “truth” campaign messaging operates: Instead of finger-wagging adults, adolescents were shown real facts about how the tobacco industry operates, resulting in more anti-smoking attitudes in those who saw the campaign.

“We framed healthy eating as a way to ‘stick it to the man,'” researcher Christopher J. Bryan told Medical News Today. “We cast the executives behind food marketing as controlling adult authority figures and framed the avoidance of junk food as a way to rebel against their control.” After their newfound education, even when they didn’t know they were being tracked, the teens were more likely to choose healthy snacks like carrots over cookies, and swap soda for water.

… Players are much more likely to learn from footage which has a lot of elevation, good quality and the right level of zoom at the right times. Important tactical messages can get lost in poor camerawork. Once the match footage is uploaded and the analysis is attached, are the clips of a good length? And are they relevant? Players are likely to lose interest very quickly if the clips are too long or don’t make sense to them, especially at younger ages. Grouping or labelling clips can allow the players to digest them more easily, with most online platforms having some sort of playlist function.

… for all the mythos that surrounds Guardiola, for all the need we have for him to think like a football scientist who views the pitch as a series of complex patterns under his direct control, the system he tends to employ at the clubs he manages, while rigorous, is also elegantly simple.

Pep carves up the pitch into a series of vertical and horizontal zones, and maintains a set of rules: “no more than three players in any horizontal zone; no more than two players in any vertical zone,” writes Andy Murray. The reason for this is to stretch the opposition defense to give space to his best players on the inside ‘channels’ of the pitch, so they have more time and room to make incisive, attacking passes, preferably to the deadly forward players. It also gives players the confidence to know they have the option to “switch” play to the opposite side of the field to try and catch the defense out. But when the ball does end up in the final third of the pitch, players are free to do what they want, so long as it involves scoring.

… Injuries and football go together. Try as we might to make it safer – and we have to an extent – it is a brutal game, one that taxes the human body in ways we simply can’t guard against. In the last 20 years, football pads and conditioning drills haven’t kept up with bigger-stronger-faster players, resulting in car-crash hits and bone crunching collisions that do just that, crunch bones. Ask Demarcus Ware.

Coaches throw their hands up and rely on “next man up” cliches. General managers call it part of the game, a calculus of depth and a rolodex of free agents. Behind them, however, are the men and women trying to actually do something about it. Instead of merely listing injuries, the athletic trainers and doctors around the league are trying to prevent injuries and are at the very least asking why we’re seeing so many.

The first question that has to be asked is: Is it really more injuries, or do those star players inflate our perception? Like so many things, the crew at Football Outsiders took a hard look at this question. According to Zachary Binney’s research, in any given week between seven and eight percent of players will be injured. In Week 2, we were looking at the high end of that, but it would be within the expected margin of error. High, yes, but not remarkably high.

This study aimed to identify the tactical patterns and the timescales of variables during a soccer match, allowing understanding the multilevel organization of tactical behaviors, and to determine the similarity of patterns performed by different groups of teammates during the first and second halves. Positional data from twenty professional male soccer players from the same team were collected using high frequency global positioning systems (5Hz). Twenty-nine categories of tactical behaviors were determined from eight positioning-derived variables creating multivariate binary (Boolean) time-series matrices. Hierarchical principal component analysis was used to identify the multilevel structure of tactical behaviors. The sequential reduction of each set level of principal components revealed a sole principal component as the slowest collective variable, forming the global basin of attraction of tactical patterns during each half of the match. In addition, the mean dwell time of each positioning-derived variable helped to understand the multilevel organization of collective tactical behavior during a soccer match. This approach warrants further investigations to analyze the influence of task constraints on the emergence of tactical behavior. Furthermore, principal component analysis can help coaches to design representative training tasks according to those tactical patterns captured during match competitions and to compare them depending on situational variables.

… In the absence of an efficient market, establishing a fair value is a tricky business. Accurate valuation of anything requires consistent, rational buyer behaviour as well as predictability in the performance of the product. But football isn’t that simple, presenting us with challenges around what to offer for our transfer targets and which offers to accept ourselves.

Ultimately, a player’s value is whatever someone is willing to pay and this can vary hugely for players of an objectively similar level (see charts below). There is limited value, therefore, in understanding what the fair value of a player is if it bares little relation to what you may have to actually pay to acquire his services.

Theo Epstein walks to and from Wrigley, eats lunch in the empty bleachers and wants Chicago to see the ivy turn red in October. The Cubs president may be nearing middle age, but his love of the game is shining through more than ever.

Explosive trends in the video analytics market has really caught the eye of business intelligent departments. This little known software is quickly picking up speed for an expansive amount of applications. From security to public safety to crowd management, video analytics have begun to see a big boom on the business world.

Video analytics, or intelligent video analytics, is software that is used to monitor video streams in near real-time. While monitoring the videos, the software identifies attributes, events or patterns of specific behavior via video analysis of monitored environments. Video analysis software also generates automatic alerts and can facilitate forensic analysis of historical data to identify trends, patterns and incidents. The software enables its users to analyze, organize and share any insight gained from the data to make smarter, better decisions. It can promote enhanced coordination across and within agencies and organizations. Its applications are widespread, including monitoring vehicle patterns or violations of traffic laws, or people entering restricted areas during defined time frames. The data can then be sorted by time and date or over an extended time period to create a trend analysis.

A simple function of video analytics is motion detection with a fixed background. More technical functions can include egomotion estimation (the 3D motion of a camera within an environment) and video tracking. From here can come identification (such as a specific vehicle—worst case scenario one in an Amber Alert) and behavior analysis. The technology used to accomplish video analytics include sensors, cameras, image compression techniques and connectivity techniques.

?Much like Game Score, Bill has a Season Score. He tinkers with it, as he should. After all, we learn new things, as new data comes in. We have to revisit what we do. And when he ran the latest version, he compared it to Cy Young voting, and it seemed to do pretty well. Over the weekend I’ll do a comparison of his new Season Score to his old Cy Young predictor. I have no doubt that it’ll do better, at least for the present era. To that end, here is the Season Score for the 2016 pitchers: