… TAKK, AS HE’S known, is sitting around his apartment in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles watching Nicktoons when we meet. He’s 21 now, wearing gym shorts and a white tank top, and his right shoulder is still in a sling, fresh off surgery to repair a torn labrum and fractured glenoid. The fact that he basically competed with one arm for two seasons in college, and that he insisted on working out and performing his drills at the 2017 NFL combine before surgery, had people there talking. So did his performance: elite times among defensive linemen in the 40-yard dash (4.59 seconds) and the 10-yard split (1.61 seconds).
He’s coming off a breakout senior season at UCLA, where he finished first-team All-Pac-12 and was one of the nation’s most productive edge rushers, amassing the kind of sack and tackles-for-loss numbers that 2016 NFL defensive player of the year Khalil Mack put up before going to the Raiders as the fifth overall pick in 2014. Takk is what scouts refer to as a “riser” — the more you look at him, the more you like what you see.
… Manfred’s guiding principle is “pace of play,” rooted in a presumed need to appease increasingly restless fans: Millennials who supposedly (proof is lacking) can’t keep their eyes off their phones. Speeding up the game has become a full-on crusade, and Manfred is focused on the feature of baseball that entails the most standing around—the pitch. The pitch clock, which was introduced into the minor leagues in 2015, shortened games by an average of 12 minutes, for example. He has talked about wanting batters to hurry up and get in the box, catchers to hurry up and flash the sign, and pitchers to hurry up and pitch.
But here, in daring to contemplate meddling in the action (or seeming inaction) on the mound, Manfred is in for trouble. A pitcher throwing to a batter is the most elemental event in baseball: Nothing can happen until the pitcher releases the ball. All the fielders, all the base runners—they’re just bystanders like the rest of us. The drama out there on the field can’t compare with the drama going on between those two men, one poised to pitch and the other to hit, each trying to outsmart the other. Mess with that delicate balance, and I’m not sure the sport will be baseball anymore.
… From the start of the Rome Masters in May last year, Murray won 61 of his 65 matches, during which time he won Wimbledon for the second time, claimed a second Olympic singles gold and his last five events of the year to overtake Novak Djokovic at the top of the rankings. With the calendar so crowded, it was always possible that it would come back to bite him, one way or the other.
“It’s definitely a possibility,” said Murray, who lost in the fourth round at the Australian Open, won the Dubai title but then went out in his first match at Indian Wells before getting injured. “I think the elbow injury was nothing to do with what happened. The shingles would have been more likely something to do with that but I feel fine now. I got ill in Miami and had some tests when I got back and everything was completely normal and I feel great.”
… The question of whether I would train had been replaced by how and when. The Australian marathon great Derek Clayton covered between 160 and 200 miles a week while working a full-time job. I have no idea how he did that, but clearly there was no question of his not running.
In Bangui, therefore, I found a solution. I rose early each day, ate some bread and honey in the kitchen of the ex-pat French restaurateur whose room I had rented, joined my incredulous driver, who would tap on the car’s thermometer (in the 80s, even at 7:00 am) as if to remark upon my folly, and rode across town to the Ledger, a $300-dollar-a-night expat and politician’s hotel that possesses, I believe, the only treadmills in Bangui. There, in the sweatbox gym, I performed the exact same sessions I would have done at home: mile repetitions, a progressive six-miler, an easy run, a long run. The satisfaction that accompanied the end of such workouts was not only physiological. Impressing the familiar pattern of my program in a steamy, chaotic place was a little victory. I held on to that feeling, trying to understand why it mattered to me. And then, on my way back from the gym on my final morning, I scribbled a single word in my notebook: “speed-bag.”
Juju Smith-Schuster crouched into his stance, knowing the next 40 yards could change everything.
Ever since he’d officially entered the NFL draft, anticipation of these next few seconds at the league’s scouting combine had weighed heavy on his shoulders. Even the slightest slip-up, he knew, could send his stock plummeting.
Before, his speed had never been a concern. Sure, Smith-Schuster was no track star. It was his tantalizing combination of size, physicality and body control that vaulted the Long Beach native from five-star prospect to the conversation among the NFL draft’s top receivers.
Now, he found himself obsessing over fractions of a second, hyper aware of the length of his stride and the quick twitch of muscles at the starting gun.
Ajegunle is known for being one of Lagos’ toughest, most dangerous slums, but it also has another reputation – for producing some of Nigeria’s top footballers. So what’s the secret to its unlikely success? BBC Africa’s Stanley Kwenda has been finding out.
More and more, people don’t care about expert views. That’s according to Tom Nichols, author of “The Death of Expertise,” who says Americans have become insufferable know-it-alls, locked in constant conflict and debate with others over topics they actually know almost nothing about. Nichols shares his humble opinion on how we got here.
When I (or any cognitive psychologist) refer to “short-term memory”, we’re talking about memory that lasts for 15-30 seconds. Not minutes, not a day, not a few weeks. Just 15-30 seconds.
This differs quite drastically from the way people commonly use the term “short-term memory”. Have you heard people referring to how they can never find stuff they’ve left around the house, and following this with “my short-term memory is really bad”? According to cognitive psychology, that would be a completely inappropriate use of that term.
PLOS Computational Biology; Nicolas Gauvrit, Hector Zenil, Fernando Soler-Toscano, Jean-Paul Delahaye, Peter Brugger from
Random Item Generation tasks (RIG) are commonly used to assess high cognitive abilities such as inhibition or sustained attention. They also draw upon our approximate sense of complexity. A detrimental effect of aging on pseudo-random productions has been demonstrated for some tasks, but little is as yet known about the developmental curve of cognitive complexity over the lifespan. We investigate the complexity trajectory across the lifespan of human responses to five common RIG tasks, using a large sample (n = 3429). Our main finding is that the developmental curve of the estimated algorithmic complexity of responses is similar to what may be expected of a measure of higher cognitive abilities, with a performance peak around 25 and a decline starting around 60, suggesting that RIG tasks yield good estimates of such cognitive abilities. Our study illustrates that very short strings of, i.e., 10 items, are sufficient to have their complexity reliably estimated and to allow the documentation of an age-dependent decline in the approximate sense of complexity. [full text]
There are obvious benefits that having been a player has when it comes to coaching, but is it the be-all and end-all or merely just a string to the bow of an elite soccer coach/manager?
“Coaching is 30% tactics, 70% social competence” Julian Nagelsmann
I agree with Nagelsmann here and I feel that a large portion of the 70% is, or at least comes from, having empathy with your players. To understand how a players are feeling before and after big matches is something that en ex-pro would have a better understanding of than a manager that didn’t play. In terms of the in-game mindset of a player, I would argue that a non-ex-pro would have no idea of what being in that situation is like compared to a manager who has played at that kind of level. Only somebody who has played at the top level would be able to fully empathise with his players what it is like playing against a high level of opponent, at a high intensity, under large amounts of pressure.
“Bridging the gap” and “science into practice” have long been themes in high-performance sports training, conditioning, and monitoring. Recently, parallel developments in sports science and translational science in the United States have perhaps set the stage for a new era to solve old problems. This article will discuss the trends in sports science in the United States, provide an overview of translational science and knowledge management, summarize and align existing translational science research models, address problems and potential solutions in the translational sports science framework, and provide examples of research that have translated sports science research into practice. The objectives of this article are to stimulate collaborations between academics and practitioners and to provide solutions for harmonizing integrated sports performance models. [full text]
“Glycogen is gold.” Those are the words of Iñigo San Millán, PhD, of The University of Colorado Sports Medicine and Performance Center (CUSM&PC) in Boulder, Colorado. Hyperbole? Perhaps. But fact is you can’t win gold—or even go for it—without this precious resource. And if you ever find yourself fresh out of glycogen when you’re miles from nowhere, you’d likely be willing to pawn anything you’ve got on you for just a bite of amazing, life-saving, pedal-powering carbohydrate—the source of this crucial energy-producing resource. Here’s why.
US Soccer has a new performance director – and he’s the former head of sports science at the Premier League. James Bunce tells Simon Austin of his grand ambitions
I’m thinking by looking at my face. But, says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, it’s possible that they might remain confused even if my face were more expressive.
Barrett, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, is the author of How Emotions Are Made. She argues that many of the key beliefs we have about emotions are wrong. It’s not true that we all feel the same things, that anyone can “read” other people’s faces, and it’s not true that emotions are things that happen to us.
The Verge spoke to Barrett about her new view of emotion, what this means for emotion-prediction startups, and whether we can feel an emotion if we don’t have the word for it.