… His 15 NBA seasons have been a series of role changes — the latest being where the most celebrated player in Miami Heat history watches five younger players start games while he waits for a chance to enter as a sub. But nearly a month after the trade that brought him back to the Heat, Wade has zero complaints.
“The finished product of Dwyane, you guys have seen me win three championships and all that,” Wade said. “But I’ve had so many different roles in my life in playing basketball. I came off the bench for a long time before y’all knew who I was. My ego is not too big at this point. I’m 36 years old. These guys are the future of this organization and this team. I’m definitely not the future. I’m cool with that.”
… Mackey decided to spend her forced break from running trying to figure out what was keeping her from breaking into the top tier. While her primary coach is her husband, Danny Mackey, she enlisted the outside consultation of Dan Pfaff, head coach at Altis, an elite athlete training center in Phoenix. “Talking to him is like talking to Yoda,” she says. Pfaff has been a high-level coach for more than 40 years, leading multiple athletes to world records and Olympic medals. Here’s what Mackey learned from him about changing her head game.
One by one the NFL prospects line up, preparing to practice for the four to five seconds that could change their lives.
They crouch down, pause and explode out from a starting line and stop running after about 20 yards under the watchful eye of Ato Boldon, a four-time Olympic medalist sprinter from Trinidad and Tobago. They are inside the TEST Football Academy in a little New Jersey town some 20 minutes from Rutgers University, preparing for the meat market that is the NFL combine. On this frigid January day, they’re focused on how to start the 40-yard dash.
Some are better than others. Sebastian Joseph, a Rutgers defensive lineman, has earned the nickname “Shrek” for the way he runs with his powerful arms swinging out (it’s actually effective).
… There are two contrasting ideas that I think are worth taking away from this discussion. One is that the hours you spend hiking through the mountains or honing your front crawl have value beyond the merely physical, and perhaps even beyond the emotional or spiritual. Sure, wilderness appreciation is not on the curriculum at fine arts schools, but I think the parallels are strong. The lessons you learn and the perspectives you gain from outdoor hobbies inevitably inform your approach to challenges in other areas of your life. Running a marathon or climbing a peak will make you a better scientist or businessperson.
On the flip side, in your pursuit of mastery in whatever hobby you’ve chosen, a narrower focus isn’t always better. Sometimes, to be a better runner, you need to get on the bike. Or, like Roger Bannister did amid the tumult of his final preparations for an assault on the four-minute-mile barrier in 1954.
Contemporary expressions of prejudice are often constructed in ways that are difficult for others to perceive. Given the ambiguity surrounding expressions of prejudice, judgments about whether prejudice has been expressed are influenced by a variety of factors related to the situation and the perceiver. Expressions of racial prejudice are often subtle, ambiguous, or justified in ways that decrease the likelihood individuals will be perceived as racist.
This research contributes to the literature on the psychological factors involved in attributions to prejudice by demonstrating that individuals differ in their tendencies to make attributions to racial prejudice, and that these tendencies predict attributions to prejudice in various situations.
Together, the data from the 2 studies used in this research provide evidence supporting the reliability and validity of the Propensity to Make Attributions to Prejudice Scale (PMAPS), and provide insights about the role that beliefs and expectations play in third-party observers’ judgments about expressions of prejudice.
Detroit Lions general manager Bob Quinn and head coach Matt Patricia have brought many things with them from the New England Patriots — their scouting system, their key philosophies, and now another New England concept: a character coach for team development.
Dylan Thompson appeared on the team’s website Wednesday under the title of “Character Coach/Team Development” — a position the Patriots also have in their building, filled by Jack Easterby. Easterby is the founder and chairman of the board of The Greatest Champion, an organization that works to build character and help shape influential people for the future, according to the organization’s website.
Doctors tell many expectant mothers in their eighth month to keep an eye on their blood pressure — hypertension can be a sign of preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication. In addition to schlepping to increasingly regular doctor visits, many anxious women pretty quickly figure out which pharmacy near them has the least grubby blood pressure cuff machine for a free read.
But if a group of researchers has its way, these women — and anyone else who needs to monitor their blood pressure regularly — will be able to get a reading with just their smartphone. That’s because scientists at GE Global Research, Michigan State University and the University of Rochester Medical Center, with funding support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are working on algorithms that can analyze video from a phone’s camera, detect blood pulsing just beneath the skin and offer blood pressure reading. “This new ‘cuffless’ approach involves capturing a short video of your face and hands lasting 5 to 10 seconds, during which we observe and analyze what’s happening beneath the skin to estimate your heart rate and blood pressure,” says Lalit K. Mestha, a principal engineer at GE Global Research.
Here’s how it works: The natural light in a room penetrates just below the skin’s surface. Humans can’t see this, but video cameras like those on most mobile phones or tablets can.
Samsung Electronics and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have announced the launch of My BP Lab, a jointly developed smartphone research app to help users monitor their blood pressure and stress levels and obtain personalized insights for improving their daily health.
My BP Lab leverages an innovative optical sensor available on the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+, announced today, to provide users with richer, more accurate information about their health status. This optical sensor is built into the device, and allows blood pressure to be directly measured by the smartphone without any external hardware.
… There’s a new generation of cameras that understand what they see. They’re eyes connected to brains, machines that no longer just see what you put in front of them, but can act on it — creating intriguing and sometimes eerie possibilities.
At first, these cameras will promise to let us take better pictures, to capture moments that might not have been possible with every dumb camera that came before. That’s the pitch Google is making with Clips, a new camera that went on sale on Tuesday. It uses so-called machine learning to automatically take snapshots of people, pets and other things it finds interesting.
Others are using artificial intelligence to make cameras more useful.
… It’s great to see more and more older athletes taking part in endurance events, but how does age affect things like recovery, nutritional and hydration requirements? I’m going to look at that last one in particular and discuss three common traits of aging that mean getting your hydration strategy right all the more important as the years go by.
Read more at http://www.triathlete.com/2018/02/nutrition/3-ways-hydration-needs-change-age_311122#WwE2xwlejVrTuRMZ.99
There are few feelings more satisfying than gulping down water when you are thirsty. But how does your brain know when you are dehydrated or satiated, and how does it use this information to initiate or terminate drinking? Caltech scientists have now mapped the circuit of neurons within the mouse brain that regulates thirst by stimulating and suppressing the drive to drink water. This circuit offers insight into thirst regulation in the mammalian brain, possibly including humans.
The drills at the NFL combine in Indianapolis really boil down to two questions: Do the measurables mesh with the film? And which players trigger red flags with their results?
From the 40-yard dash to the bench press, here are the numbers to know for each drill.
… The number of stolen bases is generally declining. It might just be that this trend is part of another cycle in baseball, merely a precursor to a time when teams will again find value in players capable of taking 90 feet on the bases without the need for a swing of the bat. Or it might be that, in a sport in which risk assessment now drives everything from free-agent investments to the development of young pitchers, the base stealers have become the outlier, like motorcyclists without helmets.
Bret Myers’s fascination with soccer analytics took hold some 15 years ago through a frustrating first-hand experience: He was a benchwarmer.
Stuck on the sideline watching his Richmond Kickers instead of playing for the second-tier pro team, Myers let his curiosity run wild with hypotheses on substitution patterns.
“All that time on the bench, wondering when I was going to go in,” laughed Myers, an analytics consultant for the past four years for MLS Cup champion Toronto FC. “It led me to think, ‘What is going through [the coach’s] head when he is trying to decide? Is it a reactive strategy to see how the game unfolds? Or does he have a plan going in?’ ”
From that experience, Myers entered into data-driven analysis of one of the least quantified team sports. Soccer is not a game of numbers; it’s low-scoring, features few individual statistics and lacks the figures that many sports fans crave. But in the past five years, the number of MLS teams employing analytical experts has blossomed.