… Kim Clijsters has been the only women since Evonne Goolagong to win a Grand Slam title after having a child. That stat would suggest that a comeback like Clijsters’ would take something approaching a miracle. But Williams has been one of the most miraculous players in the sport— winner of the most Majors in the Open Era and the highest-earning female athlete of all time—so normal odds might mean little in her case.
With so few historical examples that can be compared to Williams, can we look at her own playing history for signs that could support her chance of a strong return?
Even with the most rigorous training, we can expect that being a year older and having gone through childbirth will mean that Williams may never return to the physical shape she has been at in recent years. But this need not diminish her match win rate if she finds strategies to compensate for any decline in her physical capacity.
… [Guss] Armstead calls Witherspoon “a super, super late bloomer.” Said Witherspoon’s father, Lucky: “He was tiny. I mean, like 98 pounds as a freshman in high school, 4-foot-11, 5-feet tall.”
When his growth spurt finally came, it was more of an eruption. Witherspoon was 5-11 going into his senior year at Christian Brothers – the only year he lettered in football – and 6-2 coming out of it.
When he visited the 49ers earlier this month he measured 6-3, 200 pounds. He says he figures he’ll eventually play at 210 pounds, which is what makes him so alluring for NFL defensive coaches.
… Dr. Raul Artal, an obstetrician-gynecologist who spent some of his early career in Southern California, not far from the tennis courts where Serena and Venus Williams were introduced to tennis, when they were preschool age, has been instrumental in reshaping the medical world’s attitudes about pregnancy and exercise. A generation ago, doctors were unlikely to recommend exercise for even a healthy pregnant woman. (Meanwhile, they would have thought little of a pregnant woman, or an athlete, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day; let’s not forget that Virginia Slims was a longtime sponsor of women’s tennis.) Artal recalls that, in the nineteen-eighties, the conventional wisdom among doctors was that women with diabetes should be hospitalized and placed on bed rest during their third trimester of pregnancy. “I thought it was completely unreal,” he told me recently. Concerned about the consequences of so much sedentary time, Artal conducted a study that placed pregnant patients with diabetes on stationary bicycles for fifteen minutes a day, and found that it helped to lower blood-sugar levels in both mother and baby. “We had to prove that exercise was good for pregnancy, just like it is in a non-pregnant state,” he said.
… The good news is that Clint is right when he says the doctors told him that “this is something that can be fixed.” The $3,892,933.50 question is whether that is a permanent fix or not. As described in the September article, he almost certainly underwent an ablation procedure, but when it came to speculating on how likely he’d be to remain in a normal rhythm I wrote, “Unfortunately it is very difficult to say for two reasons. The first is that I don’t know the results of his testing, and medical studies on the effectiveness of these procedures vary greatly depending on those details. The other reason, which is even more important to bear in mind, is that the studies were not done on elite world-class athletes. As a result, the likelihood of effectiveness for Dempsey could be much higher or much lower than that of the average population, but there is no way to know for sure.”
Since most recurrences happen early on, based on when he returned to action and the fact that he’s still going hard to goal a couple of months later, I’m not only more willing to speculate now, but increasingly optimistic with each passing game.
Despite spending at least one quarter to one third a day sleeping, good sleep can elude many people, and the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders remains primitive. Osaka University researchers have designed new technology that uses machine learning to model a personal sleep pattern based on the sounds made during sleep. Because the sounds can be recorded at home with no fancy devices, it is expected that doctors using this technology could diagnose patients under normal sleeping conditions, which is expected to lead to better treatment.
Patients with sleep disorders are often evaluated by polysomnography (PSG), which measures an assortment of the body’s activity during sleep, including brain activity, eye movement, and heart rhythms. Osaka University Associate Professor Ken-ichi Fukui calls PSGs ineffective because they take the patient out of his natural sleeping environment.
“Our environment influences how we sleep. We should not expect the same patterns sleeping at a hospital or sleeping at home.”
… Flying home to tell my 7-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son that their father had died was the worst experience of my life. During that unimaginable trip, I turned for advice to a friend who counsels grieving children. She said that the most important thing was to tell my kids over and over how much I loved them and that they were not alone.
In the fog of those early and brutal weeks and months, I tried to use the guidance she had given me. My biggest fear was that my children’s happiness would be destroyed by our devastating loss. I needed to know what, if anything, I could do to get them through this.
I also started talking with my friend Adam Grant, a psychologist and professor who studies how people find motivation and meaning. Together, we set out to learn everything we could about how kids persevere through adversity.
… Playgrounds suck kids in and amuse them for hours. They’re a great place to hang out, and have fun.
But for the young athlete, there’s more to it.
Not only do playgrounds present exciting movement challenges of all kinds to explore in nonthreatening, self-paced ways, but they can help teach the fundamental movement skills and athletic abilities of injury-free, skilful sports performance.
When animals hunt or forage for food, they must constantly weigh whether the chance of a meal is worth the risk of being spotted by a predator. The same conflict between cost and benefit is at the heart of many of the decisions humans make on a daily basis.
The ability to instantly consider contradictory information from the environment and decide how to act is essential for survival. It’s also a key feature of mental health. Yet despite its importance, very little is known about the connections in the brain that give us the ability to make these split second decisions.
Now, in a paper published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT reveal the circuit in the brain that is critical for governing how we respond to conflicting environmental cues.
Transparent bones enable researchers to observe the stem cells inside
Ten years ago, the bones currently in your body did not actually exist. Like skin, bone is constantly renewing itself, shedding old tissue and growing it anew from stem cells in the bone marrow. Now, a new technique developed at Caltech can render intact bones transparent, allowing researchers to observe these stem cells within their environment. The method is a breakthrough for testing new drugs to combat diseases like osteoporosis.
Jack Valmadre, Luca Bertinetto, João F. Henriques, Andrea Vedaldi, Philip H.S. Torr from
The Correlation Filter is an algorithm that trains a linear template to discriminate between images and their translations. It is well suited to object tracking because its formulation in the Fourier domain provides a fast solution, enabling the detector to be re-trained once per frame. Previous works that use the Correlation Filter, however, have adopted features that were either manually designed or trained for a different task. This work is the first to overcome this limitation by interpreting the Correlation Filter learner, which has a closed-form solution, as a differentiable layer in a deep neural network. This enables learning deep features that are tightly coupled to the Correlation Filter. Experiments illustrate that our method has the important practical benefit of allowing lightweight architectures to achieve state-of-the-art performance at high framerates.
If the rules of the game were being written today, making head-to-ball contact would be outlawed — but they were written 150 years ago. Backed by research and growing concussion awareness, U.S. Soccer is trying to reframe how we think about such an ingrained and dangerous part of the sport.
… So we know why Thames has been so good. We know what underlying processes are at work here thus far. But what happened while he was out of sight and out of mind?
There aren’t many of historical comps for a Thames’ road map and comeback. Perhaps there’s only one, actually — that of Cecil Fielder, who spent a year in Japan before return to the majors in 1990 as a bonafide slugger with a 51-homer campaign.
One shared feature of their respective experiences playing on the far side of the world? Fielder and Thames enjoyed everyday playing time, something which neither was afforded during their first experiences in the majors.
In this post, we’ll look into the evolution of NFL drafting ability over time, and compare it to other North American Leagues.
Our interest lies in the link between where a player was drafted (pick number) and how well he performs. No player-level metric is perfect, but Pro Football Reference’s career approximate value (CAV) provides a decent snapshot of a player’s talent. We’ll use that as our outcome.
