… How can nothing change when everything has? That’s the central tension of Prescott’s second NFL season. On the surface, everything is different. Prescott moved out of his three-bedroom condo, which he still rents for family and friends. He bought a $1 million home in a gated community, where he lives by himself.
Prescott will make $540,000 in NFL salary this year, and his slotted fourth-round contract of $2.7 million over four years makes him one of the biggest bargains in sports through the 2019 season. (And will allow the Cowboys to keep the robust supporting cast around him. That includes the league’s best offensive line providing Brink’s truck protection for Prescott). He’s leveraged his performance, storybook rise and relatable charisma to ink more than a half-dozen endorsement deals this offseason. Those included Pepsi, AT&T, Frito-Lay, Beats by Dre, Campbell’s Chunky Soup and 7-Eleven. Adidas, one of his few sponsors prior to his rookie year, ripped up his deal and gave him a new one. Prescott will make more than 10 times his playing salary in endorsements this year.
A dinner with Al Carey, PepsiCo’s North American CEO, is emblematic of the new paradigms Prescott entered this offseason. They dined at a tony Dallas steakhouse, Town Hearth, where Carey was struck by the fact that Prescott earned a master’s degree in workforce management at Mississippi State after getting an undergraduate degree in educational psychology. Prescott told Carey his post-NFL career plans include getting a doctorate in psychology, as he wants to work to help athletes reach their potential.
… HERE’S A FUNNY thing about hip labrum tears: Some people can’t even feel it when they rip. Labrums are made of cartilage, which doesn’t have nerves to signal when something’s wrong. What people can feel are the bones of the hip’s ball-and-socket joint grinding against each other once the labrum — the joint’s cushioning tissue — begins to fray.
All of which is what makes Thomas’ condition so tricky to diagnose — and raises questions about when, in fact, he first injured himself. It’s possible it happened as far back as December.
In laymen’s terms, an FAI is when the head of the femur (the ball) and the acetabulum (the socket) rub together (impinge) when they shouldn’t. The labrum, when healthy, keeps the socket stabilized when asked to rotate and push in different directions. The 28-year-old Thomas, at 5-foot-9, needs all the agility and stability he can muster to maneuver around defenders like a crab equipped with nitro-boosters. In late May, Thomas revealed to ESPN’s Chris Forsberg that doctors have known for some time his hip bones are not normal. “Like I have an extra bone or something, like doctor talk,” Thomas said. “I don’t understand what they’re saying.”
Heleo, Scott Barry Kaufman and Caren Baruch-Feldman from
Caren Baruch-Feldman is a clinical psychologist and a certified school psychologist who works on developing grit and self-control. University of Pennsylvania psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman recently hosted her on The Psychology Podcast to discuss how gratitude amplifies grit, and how we always have the power to change for the better.
Scott: How do you define grit? Do you define it in the same way that Angela Duckworth does?
Caren: I based a lot of my book and my research on her work. She defines it as “passion and perseverance for long-term goals.” One thing I would add to my definition is the word “meaningful.” For me, grit is having a goal that’s really important to you, and being able to persist in that goal and rebound when things get tough.
When we think about “resilience,” we typically imagine bouncing back from major hardship. Management theorists have increasingly put forward a more nuanced definition, however: resilience as the ability to adapt to complex change. But in today’s world, that means the demand for resilience is almost constant. With the ongoing onslaught of problems leaders face, and change being the only constant in organizational life, leaders must cultivate resilience as an ongoing skill, not just for the “big moments” of painful setbacks or major change.
After more than 30 years working alongside senior leaders amidst profound change, I have found that there are four strategies you can use to build resilience. These recommendations stem from a significant study of 167 leaders, which revealed that the most resilient leaders know themselves well — their strengths, their triggers, and their convictions. Here’s how to build your resilience through deeper self-knowledge.
Ready, set, breathe. That is how all of my races begin—and without consciously thinking of breathing, the start of your race is exactly the same. The beginning of a race is buzzing with excitement and nerves. This is where I control my breathing and begin separating myself from my competition.
It’s the consciousness of breath that allows me to maintain better focus, channel anxiety into positive energy and push myself to the next level. The ability to control the mind, breath and stride enhances the synergy within the run that creates the flow of success.
… “When I was a young coach I used to coach pretty hard and I probably got criticised a bit for it. But I went and watched Pep’s session. He was coaching some of the best players in the world and it was minus five. It was freezing.
“They did quite a traditional warm-up and I thought, ‘Maybe I’m not going to learn anything today’. But then they had 21 players and they were in three teams of seven, working on getting into space.
“Pep was out there running the session and speaking in four or five different languages telling guys like Robben what to do.
“It was just really enlightening how hard they worked in that 20 minutes and how he was embedding his philosophy on that team and how the players had bought into it.
A new material could help harvest the energy from ocean waves or even human movement. The material, a carbon nanotube yarn, generates electricity when stretched or twisted.
An international team, led by Seon Jeong Kim of Hanyang University and Ray H. Baughman of the University of Texas, Dallas, made the materials by twisting multiwalled carbon nanotube yarns until they became tightly coiled. Stretching decreases the ability of the yarn to store electrical charge, which increases its voltage, leading to an electrical current (Science 2017, DOI: 10.1126/science.aam8771).
In a proof-of-concept clinical trial, engineers at Caltech, Huntington Medical Research Institute, and USC have demonstrated that the camera on your smartphone can noninvasively provide detailed information about your heart’s health. What used to require a 45-minute scan from an ultrasound machine can now be accomplished by simply holding your phone up to your neck for a minute or two.
The team developed a technique that can infer the left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) of the heart by measuring the amount that the carotid artery displaces the skin of the neck as blood pumps through it. LVEF represents the amount of blood in the heart that is pumped out with each beat. In a normal heart, this LVEF ranges from 50 to 70 percent. When the heart is weaker, less of the total amount of blood in the heart is pumped out with each beat, and the LVEF value is lower.
LVEF is a key measure of heart health, one upon which physicians base diagnostic and therapeutic decisions.
UConn researchers from the Department of Mechanical Engineering have developed a device that tests an important indicator of heart health that is often ignored – blood viscosity. … “We were very surprised that there is no commercial option to quickly and simply check this critical piece of information,” says associate professor of mechanical engineering and co-inventor, George Lykotrafitis. “The research shows there is a connection between blood viscosity and cardiac events, and the equipment exists to test it, but not in a practical or efficient way. We decided to try to solve the problem.”
Background: The loss of skeletal muscle mass with aging has been attributed to the blunted anabolic response to protein intake. Presleep protein ingestion has been suggested as an effective strategy to compensate for such anabolic resistance.Objective: We assessed the efficacy of presleep protein ingestion on dietary protein digestion and absorption kinetics and overnight muscle protein synthesis rates in older men. Methods: In a randomized, double-blind, parallel design, 48 older men (mean ± SEM age: 72 ± 1 y) ingested 40 g casein (PRO40), 20 g casein (PRO20), 20 g casein plus 1.5 g leucine (PRO20+LEU), or a placebo before sleep. Ingestion of intrinsically l-[1-13C]-phenylalanine- and l-[1-13C]-leucine-labeled protein was combined with intravenous l-[ring-2H5]-phenylalanine and l-[1-13C]-leucine infusions during sleep. Muscle and blood samples were collected throughout overnight sleep. Results: Exogenous phenylalanine appearance rates increased after protein ingestion, but to a greater extent in PRO40 than in PRO20 and PRO20+LEU (P < 0.05). Overnight myofibrillar protein synthesis rates (based on l-[ring-2H5]-phenylalanine) were 0.033% ± 0.002%/h, 0.037% ± 0.003%/h, 0.039% ± 0.002%/h, and 0.044% ± 0.003%/h in placebo, PRO20, PRO20+LEU, and PRO40, respectively, and were higher in PRO40 than in placebo (P = 0.02). Observations were similar based on l-[1-13C]-leucine tracer (placebo: 0.047% ± 0.004%/h and PRO40: 0.058% ± 0.003%/h, P = 0.08). More protein-derived amino acids (l-[1-13C]-phenylalanine) were incorporated into myofibrillar protein in PRO40 than in PRO20 (0.033 ± 0.002 and 0.019 ± 0.002 MPE, respectively, P < 0.001) and tended to be higher than in PRO20+LEU (0.025 ± 0.002 MPE, P = 0.06). Conclusions: Protein ingested before sleep is properly digested and absorbed throughout the night, providing precursors for myofibrillar protein synthesis during sleep in healthy older men. Ingestion of 40 g protein before sleep increases myofibrillar protein synthesis rates during overnight sleep. These findings provide the scientific basis for a novel nutritional strategy to support muscle mass preservation in aging and disease.
… In the first four days of the tournament, Frances Tiafoe, a powerful 19-year-old American, pushed Roger Federer deep into a fifth set. Denis Shapovalov, an 18-year-old Canadian and perhaps the game’s most intriguing comer, displayed breathtaking southpaw strokes in stunning eighth-seeded Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. Andrey Rublev, a 19-year-old Russian who was not in the top 100 until June, wasted No. 7 Grigor Dimitrov.
But these results can confound. When 20-year-old Borna Coric of Croatia defeated the fourth-seeded Alexander Zverev of Germany, also 20, on Wednesday night, he dispatched the player who was supposed to be not only a best bet for the future, but also primed for the present.
Zverev, it seems, has a problem holding up to the taxing conditions of best-of-five-sets tennis.
… One difference between tennis and football is that football matches can be drawn, while tennis matches cannot; most tennis is played in a knockout format, where losing the match means elimination, and the only currency worth talking about is winning. In football, winning is not the only currency; draws also have value, both in a league format where a club’s league position is determined by the total points accrued, and in a competitions like the FA cup where drawn matches are replayed. So to apply Morris’s insight to football, we need to broaden the definition of importance. I propose a metric called Gravity, (denoted Γ, gamma) which reflects the importance of an event in a football match as follows:
The importance, or “gravity ” of an event is the expected value of the match outcome if the event occurs minus the expected value of the match outcome if the event does not occur.
Whenever Marlins baseball operations president Michael Hill is mulling a personnel move, he’ll check in with his executives and scouts who spent years watching hundreds of games. He’ll also solicit the opinion of the 31-year-old prodigy with the office down the hall, the former Baseball Prospectus writer with the bachelor’s degree in cognitive science from Yale and a computer that can spit out detailed data on any player, any time.
Jason Parè, who grew up a Red Sox fan in Providence, R.I. and never played baseball beyond little league, never envisioned growing up to be the senior director of analytics for a big-league team. But only because it never occurred to him, or probably anybody else, that this job would even exist.
“It wasn’t something I envisioned for myself until I read the book Moneyball because I wasn’t aware these type of jobs existed,” said Parè, referring to author Michael Lewis’ chronicling of the early 21st-century Oakland A’s. “When I read Moneyball, I said, ‘Wow, that seems like something I would really love to do and I think I could be good at it.’
Clearly, height matters. On average, tall players can serve faster and more effectively than can shorter players. And usually, short players who succeed on tour do so by returning and moving better than their taller colleagues. The conventional wisdom is that height is an advantage, but only up to a point. An inch or two above six feet (a range between 185 and 190 cm) is good, but much more than that is too much. No player above 6’4″ (193 cm, Marat Safin) has ever reached No. 1 in the ATP rankings.
While 5’7″ (170 cm) Diego Schwartzman‘s surprise run to the US Open quarterfinals has brought this issue to the forefront, pundits and fans talk about it all the time. This is a topic crying out for some basic data analysis, yet as is too often the case in tennis, some really simple work is missing from the conversation. Let’s try to fix that.