… He was a junior rower for Scotland and an impressive cross country runner. But it was, he says, a combination of enjoyment and genetics that led to his eventual career.
“I used to row as a junior for Scotland but I was never massive, I was always tall and rangey,” says the Edinburgh born Hoy. “[Being good at cycling is] not so much your size, it’s more about your physiology and your physiological makeup — you have a certain percentage of fast-twich fibres or slow-twitch fibres.
“I could always see as a kid that I was good at short sprints, running, throwing things far, jumping… anything that required a burst of power. Whilst I did do longer distance stuff — cross country, mountain biking, junior Tour of Ireland on the road, all kinds of aspects of cycling and even rowing — I think it was just the speed and short bursts of sprinting that I really enjoyed.”
… “I had a long talk with him two, two-and-a-half weeks ago and told him that I wasn’t pleased with his physical condition in general. I told him that if he wants to play he would have to change something,” he said.
“He didn’t see it exactly that way but from that point on, he has trained and behaved differently in training. This week he has trained exceptionally well.
“I know what type of performances he is capable of from our time together at Leverkusen — the way he played today that’s how he played during my first year there, often scoring goals and full of strong running. I expect that from him.”
… Now, it’s the middle of November. While there are some terrific matches at the ATP Finals played by Grigor Dimitrov and Alexander Zverev, four multiple Grand Slam champs who are not there: Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka. Those four have combined to win 33 majors; but they aren’t in London town. For the fans, that hurts.
It is not just them. Three excellent competitors also became substantially injured this season: Milos Raonic, Kei Nishikori and Nick Kyrgios.
The 36-year-old Federer says that now, you can play longer and you don’t have to retire so early, such as Pete Sampras and Steffi Graf. Perhaps so, but one of the problems is the length of the year; they have to start at the beginning of January and continue until the middle of November. Essentially, in pro tennis, you have to play the entire year.
Those who’ve worked with McAdoo in previous spots say he’s driven, hard-working and personable. But as his tenure running the Giants reaches a critical point, the question is whether he has the right qualities to run an NFL team
In an attempt to turn around the Giants locker room, McAdoo has begun meeting in-depth with individual players
The England U-17s World Cup winner has a host of players in front of him at Manchester City – perhaps United’s policy of having an academy product in every squad should spread
After No. 3 Georgia steamrolled Florida 42–7 in Jacksonville on Oct. 28, the Bulldogs cooled down, cleaned up and cleared out of the locker room at EverBank Field to head back to campus in Athens. It should have been a quick flight home, but the team’s charter planes were delayed because of mechanical issues and inclement weather.
Stranded at the airport with midnight approaching, Trevor Moawad realized he was about to spend the night there. Moawad, the team’s mental conditioning coach, had just watched the Bulldogs improve to 8–0, but he was scheduled to be in Seattle on Sunday afternoon. The Seahawks were set to face the Texans and Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson was expecting Moawad to be on the sideline. After six years and counting as the quarterback’s mental conditioning coach, Wilson considers him a “best friend.” And you can’t let your friends down.
Researchers at the University of Michigan and Jiangnan University in China have developed a type of artificial cartilage using Kevlar, a synthetic fiber better-known for its use in bullet-proof vests, and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), a material used in hydrogel cartilage replacements. The new hybrid material combines the strength and water content of natural cartilage, and might be useful as a replacement for cartilage or other soft tissues in the body.
Researchers at MIT and several other institutions have developed a method for making photonic devices — similar to electronic devices but based on light rather than electricity — that can bend and stretch without damage. The devices could find uses in cables to connect computing devices, or in diagnostic and monitoring systems that could be attached to the skin or implanted in the body, flexing easily with the natural tissue.
The findings, which involve the use of a specialized kind of glass called chalcogenide, are described in two papers by MIT Associate Professor Juejun Hu and more than a dozen others at MIT, the University of Central Florida, and universities in China and France. The paper is slated for publication soon in Light: Science and Applications.
… Fibroblasts (connective tissue cells) are important for wound healing. When the skin is injured, these cells accumulate in the wound. They play a crucial role in building granulation tissue by producing a precursor of collagen that eventually matures into solid collagen fibers. These connective tissue cells demonstrate circadian timing that gives their biological function an approximately 24-hour rhythm.
The researchers concluded that the faster healing during the day could be attributed to the skin cells moving much faster to repair the wound site when the clock was set for daylight.
Aim This paper aims to systematically review studies investigating the strength of association between FMS composite scores and subsequent risk of injury, taking into account both methodological quality and clinical and methodological diversity.
Design Systematic review with meta-analysis.
Data sources A systematic search of electronic databases was conducted for the period between their inception and 3 March 2016 using PubMed, Medline, Google Scholar, Scopus, Academic Search Complete, AMED (Allied and Complementary Medicine Database), CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature), Health Source and SPORTDiscus.
Eligibility criteria for selecting studies Inclusion criteria: (1) English language, (2) observational prospective cohort design, (3) original and peer-reviewed data, (4) composite FMS score, used to define exposure and non-exposure groups and (5) musculoskeletal injury, reported as the outcome. Exclusion criteria: (1) data reported in conference abstracts or non-peer-reviewed literature, including theses, and (2) studies employing cross-sectional or retrospective study designs.
Results 24 studies were appraised using the Quality of Cohort Studies assessment tool. In male military personnel, there was ‘strong’ evidence that the strength of association between FMS composite score (cut-point ≤14/21) and subsequent injury was ‘small’ (pooled risk ratio=1.47, 95% CI 1.22 to 1.77, p<0.0001, I2=57%). There was ‘moderate’ evidence to recommend against the use of FMS composite score as an injury prediction test in football (soccer). For other populations (including American football, college athletes, basketball, ice hockey, running, police and firefighters), the evidence was ‘limited’ or ‘conflicting’.
Conclusion The strength of association between FMS composite scores and subsequent injury does not support its use as an injury prediction tool.
Puffing on a cigar, Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf said what many fans believe.
“It doesn’t matter if the game is 3 1/2 hours if it was an exciting game. But if it’s a 2-1 game, it takes 4 hours, nobody’s too happy with it,” he said Tuesday. “I believe we should speed up the game. That’s one of the things we should do, is limit the number of trips that a catcher can take to the mound in the course of an inning or a game. We could easily cut 20 minutes off the time of a game if we really wanted to.”
The average time of a nine-inning contest was a record 3 hours, 5 minutes this season, up from 2:56 in 2015. The postseason average was 3:29.
It’s not hard to find players going on the record about how much they hate Thursday Night Football (TNF). Their concerns center around player health, safety, and fitness to play after just a four-day rest period.
These concerns were on display in last night’s TNF matchup, where Doug Baldwin attributed his groin injury to short rest and Richard Sherman reportedly ruptured his Achilles after nursing soreness in the tendon for at least two weeks (when his Achilles first popped up on the injury report). Would Baldwin have avoided injuring his groin and Sherman avoided exacerbating his Achilles if the game had been played on Sunday instead? It’s impossible to know in any individual case, but I was curious if these concerns would show up in NFL-wide injury reports. Are there higher rates of reported injuries for weeks with short rest, as opposed to normal or even extended rest?
Now, with [Alex] Rucker at the helm, the Sixers employ a team of 10 who are under the analytics umbrella. That’s not counting consultants, scouts who use analytics, and the sports science team that works closely with Rucker’s department.
“We almost certainly have the largest analytics staff in the NBA,” Rucker said, noting that his team is as diverse as it is large. “We are, I believe, the only analytics team with two women full-time, and my team has members hailing from Catalonia, Italy, Taiwan, Croatia, and Canada.”
… My company recently assembled a team to try to do “deep learning” that consisted of two PhD statisticians, a ML PhD and a PhD engineer.
The statisticians worked their asses off trying to build clever approximations of distributions involved to better select features.
The ML PhD built a cutting-edge adversarial approach to the problem and wrote it up in tensorflow.
The engineer wrote “from sklearn.ensemble import random_forest” because that’s what she knew would probably do fine.
At the end of the day, the statisticians had wrong assumptions and the adversarial model didn’t have enough data to get anywhere, but the random forest kept on trucking.