… There have always been injuries in tennis, but it is a concern when the top two male players, as well as a string of others in the top 30, and the dominant female player are on the sidelines. Simona Halep, Garbine Muguruza and Madison Keys meanwhile have been battling injury for much of the last year, and all of the men’s top 10 have withdrawn from tournaments or retired hurt from matches in the last 12 months.
The Mercury News, Bay Area News Group, Daniel Brown from
Let’s begin where the process so often ends.
“We’re actually going to go into the bathroom, of all places,” said Geoff Head, the Giants sports science specialist.
It’s almost five hours before the first pitch at AT&T Park last September, so we’re free to barge unannounced into the Giants’ clubhouse restroom. The players have yet to trickle in.
Head selected this lonely hour to provide an extended look at a largely unknown part of the Giants’ late-season success. Now in its third full season, the sports science program takes a high-tech approach to assessing health and fitness by looking at what Head calls “the physiological biomarkers of fatigue and performance.”
A fortnight ago, I fell into conversation with the head teacher of a local school. “You’ve got to create room for late developers,” he said. “The obsession with early attainment doesn’t suit most children.”
We were soon finishing each other’s sentences – talking about long-term confidence rather than short-term hothousing, how children don’t develop in a linear way, and the value of having transferable skills rather than a single focus from a young age.
What a shame, I reflected, that his message doesn’t reach a wider audience. We hear so much about prodigies and precociousness – Serena Williams and her pushy father, Tiger Woods and “tiger mothers” – and so little of the counter-argument: the high achievers who emerge at a slower pace in more balanced circumstances.
Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health from
There is a growing worldwide interest in understanding optimal and healthy pathways for talent development in sport. The purpose of the study was to explore how familial, environmental and social factors facilitated the athletic development of elite Touch representatives who grew up in the small town of Petersville (pseudonym), New Zealand. An interest in understanding these factors influenced the decision to use an ecological model of development as an analytical lens and to apply (auto)ethnographic methodologies. The participants, which included the first author, grew up in Petersville and had represented New Zealand in the sport of Touch, in various capacities, i.e. of player, referee and manager. While the primary focus is on athletic development of the players who grew up in Petersville, they grew up in a community in which other members were active in the elite NZ Touch community. Consistent with an ecological view of development, the discussion illustrates how influential the referee (who was also the coach of the school Touch team) and the manager were to player development. The findings contribute to the literature by demonstrating a nuanced interpretation of the ‘birthplace effect’, particularly in countries with small populations and limited geographical areas.
… the Ducks stumbled upon a secret weapon this season using the opposite strategy. The Ducks use their entire coaching staff, including Altman, who is 58.
“But he moves like he’s 20 when he’s excited,” guard Dylan Ennis said.
Like that one geriatric who manages to embarrass his younger competitors at YMCAs everywhere, men who qualify for AARP membership take the Ducks to school before each game. The looks they provide have been enough to get Oregon to the Final Four.
Before the Kansas game, the youngest staffer, playing forward Landen Lucas, was graduate assistant Matt Zosel. He’s 38.
The source of mobile electric power is always an issue in terms of cost and efficiency. The tiny piece of mobile power pump is hard to produce due to its low yield. In addition, the lifetime of the mobile power source can, in general, only last couple minutes to hours. It becomes the bottleneck of the growing of small robots. The researcher team at MIT now have discovered a new hydraulic propel power system that can last several days and is like to be the future source of power on tiny robots. The results have been published last week in Nature Plants.
This new mechanism of source power generation is inspired by the steam flow within tree. They called it “tree-on-a-chip,” which mimic the pumping process of trees and plants that passively generate the driving power for the transportation of substance inside. Its principle lies on the pressure of the substances of the xylem and phloem, which bring the nutrient from root to the leaves without external driver.
… side channels can involve measuring several of the device’s characteristics, including its power consumption, the time it takes to perform certain functions, or the amount of light or other electromagnetic radiation it emits. These outputs have long been used as a way of spying on communications. But now there is an increasing risk that they could also be used to disrupt the operation of electronic devices. This is a particular worry as more and more objects are equipped with miniature computers to connect them to the internet.
In the latest example of this, researchers from the University of Michigan have found a new way of using sound to interfere with devices containing accelerometers, a device for measuring acceleration that is found in things such as navigation systems. Smartphones use them to detect movement and calculate things like which way up the phone is being held, and even how many steps it has been carried. The researchers found that the vibrations from music playing on a smartphone could affect its accelerometer in a way that made it seem as if the user was moving. Overall, they found the flaw in more than half of the devices they tested.
Ryan Smyth reaches into a large, black CCM hockey bag, but no sticks or skates can be found inside. Instead, there are just plenty of gadgets.
There’s a compression undershirt outfitted with sensors, and a GPS tracker that can fit in your palm. There’s a small box that can be affixed to a player’s hip for 3D motion capture, and many other pieces of wearable technology.
Smyth, a sports technologist for the Anaheim Ducks, is going to change the Ontario Hockey League Combine with this bag of goodies. He’s confident its contents will help push the league into the future and eventually advance other North American combines, too.
“This is going to accomplish something that’s never been seen before,” Smyth says. “This is where combines should be at now—[where they] will eventually get to.”
Are your cells out of sync with the world around you? Known as cellular jet lag, this condition may put you at high risk of diabetes and other metabolic disorders.
Many people in the modern world live in circadian misalignment, also known as cellular jet lag. The internal clocks of their cells simply do not match up with the demands of the outside world. This common condition may be contributing to a variety of metabolic disorders, including diabetes. Could increasing rates of circadian misalignment be contributing to ever increasing rates of metabolic disease?
Protein may be athletes’ most-loved macro, and for good reason. It’s crucial for muscle synthesis and incredibly satiating, making it perfect for endurance athletes in particular. “If you eat a whole loaf of bread all by itself, you’re probably not going to feel very satisfied,” says Stevie Smith, a Washington D.C.–based registered dietitian and multiple Ironman finisher. Add some peanut butter, though, and you have yourself a filling meal.
But as our obsession with protein grows—and the market for protein products grows with it—it’s harder than ever to know how to fuel for maximum potential. We talked to the experts to help you navigate what you need to perform at your best.
… It all starts with a top secret booklet DePodesta likes to call his decision guide.
“We started writing down every decision in the moment we had to make those decisions. What were the pros and cons, what were the other options at the time, what were the chances it would work out, etc.,” DePodesta said. “We found we were terrible at recalling all the specific circumstances back when we made a decision. Especially confidence level.”
It’s simple, borderline boring, and surely not the “Chamber of Secrets”-level discovery the room full of sports fans, analytics enthusiasts and casual observers on the edge of their seats was looking for. But, DePodesta’s strategy isn’t about reinventing the wheel. It’s looking at the wheel from a view nobody has seen before.
Zachary C. Lipton, Approximately Correct blog from
This pairing of interest with ignorance has created a perfect storm for a misinformation epidemic. The outsize demand for stories about AI has created a tremendous opportunity for impostors to capture some piece of this market.
When founding Approximately Correct, I lamented that too few academics possessed either the interest or the talent for both expository writing and for addressing social issues. And on the other hand, too few journalists possess the technical strength to relate developments in machine learning to the public faithfully. As a result, there are not enough voices engaging the public in the non-sensational way that seems necessary now.
Unfortunately, the paucity of clear and informed voices has not resulted in a silent media.
Recently, one of my VanHAC slides was used to justify the Bruins’ decision to take Trent Frederic over Alex DeBrincat (and many others) in the first round of the 2016 NHL Draft. Needless to say, I haven’t slept soundly since then.
Unfortunately, crafting a solid rebuttal isn’t as easy as saying “DeBrincat has a higher ceiling.” To that end, I present a framework for evaluating these types of draft decisions. There are two basic questions to consider:
The best Derek Falvey can say about himself, as a pitcher, is that he usually put the ball where he wanted. He had a generic assortment of pitches: a curveball, a changeup and a fastball that never reached 90 miles per hour. Sometimes he varied arm angles. He tried anything to survive.
“I was going to work to contact,” Falvey said, “and usually that contact was loud.”
Falvey, now 34 and the Minnesota Twins’ new chief baseball officer, peaked as a pitcher in high school, but he made the team at Trinity College in Hartford. He was not very good by then, but he watched the games intently. He formulated strategies for teammates and studied opponents, hoping to decode their signs. If he could not help the Bantams with his pitching, Falvey would find other ways.