For a couple of years now, Jonny Venters’s Baseball-Reference page has read as a confusingly short story. You see the reliever receiving a handful of Rookie of the Year votes after his debut in 2010, and then being named an All-Star in 2011. But following that initial burst of success, his 2012 season is abbreviated, and after that, there’s nothing at all. There’s no slow decline or signs of an attempted comeback; instead, the record just stops.
Very soon, though, that’ll change. As of this afternoon, Venters is on the Tampa Bay Rays’ big-league roster—more than 2,000 days since his last bit of major-league action. In between, he’s had multiple Tommy John surgeries, and he’s taken full seasons away from baseball altogether. And now, a month after his thirty-third birthday, he’s made it back.
… We are almost a full third of the way through 2018 and the 12-time Grand Slam singles champ Djokovic is 5-5, his worst start since his first year on tour. His confidence is obviously in tatters. His surgically repaired right elbow is no longer painful, but it remains an ongoing subject of conversation. And opponents he once rolled through — Klizan being a perfect example — are showing him that payback is a daily fact of life for slumping titans.
“Everybody he dominated over the years is walking on the court now with a different attitude,” ESPN analyst Brad Gilbert told ESPN.com. “If you’re Novak, whatever they say, the guys you smoked are not feeling badly for you because you’re struggling. I’m not going to say [Djokovic] can’t get it back — look at Rafa and Fed. But Novak has to realize his situation.”
Gilbert feels Djokovic isn’t moving as well as he did in his glory days, guessing that he might have become too thin. Others say Djokovic waited too long to have surgery on his elbow, then jumped back into competition too soon.
Kyle Korver wants to preface a discussion about shooting – his sublime three-point shooting in particular – with a caveat.
“It’s a journey, and I don’t pretend to have the whole thing figured out, because I feel like there’s still a lot to learn,” the humble Cavaliers shooting guard told USA TODAY Sports.
If he doesn’t have shooting figured out, he’s as close as an NBA player is going to get. A 43.1% three-point shooter for his career – his 2,213 made threes are fourth all-time in NBA history – Korver perhaps saved Cleveland’s season with four three-pointers, including two late in the fourth quarter of a 104-100 Game 4 victory on Sunday in Indiana.
“I won’t say mastered,” said Lakers coach Luke Walton who was in Korver’s 2003 draft class. “But he’s come close to mastering his skillset of being an absolute knockdown shooter, and when you can do something better than everyone else in the world, then you’re going to play for a long time.”
… Last year, I asked 9 elite athletes to share their injury prevention secrets. There are trail runners, road marathoners, triathletes, obstacle course racers, and everyone in between.
The goal was to outline each athlete’s favorite prevention strategies (so you can learn from them).
Now, anybody can download the free Little Black Book of Prevention & Recovery to peak behind the curtain and discover their most treasured tactics for staying healthy.
Today, I want to highlight two of my favorites from Olympian Dathan Ritzenhein and 4x Leadville Trail 100 winner Ian Sharman.
… “I suck at [missing free throws],” Irving told reporters that day. “I’ve been up there probably four, five times and I’ve failed every single time trying to miss on purpose. I don’t know. Don’t ask me. I keep telling my teammates I’m not good at missing. I’m not. I’m serious.”
Irving isn’t alone. Even the league’s best foul shooters admit missing on purpose is more difficult than it looks.
“You’re trained all your life to make free throws,” said Los Angeles Clippers guard Lou Williams, who shot 86.2 percent from the line in clutch situations this season, per NBA.com. “So you have that rare scenario where somebody asks you to miss one, and it’s extremely difficult.”
It isn’t enough to simply miss the free throw. It has to hit the rim, or it’s a violation. This allows for a few options, none of which are foolproof, even for the world’s best shooters.
The brain is complex; in humans it consists of about 100 billion neurons, making on the order of 100 trillion connections. It is often compared with another complex system that has enormous problem-solving power: the digital computer. Both the brain and the computer contain a large number of elementary units—neurons and transistors, respectively—that are wired into complex circuits to process information conveyed by electrical signals. At a global level, the architectures of the brain and the computer resemble each other, consisting of largely separate circuits for input, output, central processing, and memory.1
Which has more problem-solving power—the brain or the computer? Given the rapid advances in computer technology in the past decades, you might think that the computer has the edge. Indeed, computers have been built and programmed to defeat human masters in complex games, such as chess in the 1990s and recently Go, as well as encyclopedic knowledge contests, such as the TV show Jeopardy! As of this writing, however, humans triumph over computers in numerous real-world tasks—ranging from identifying a bicycle or a particular pedestrian on a crowded city street to reaching for a cup of tea and moving it smoothly to one’s lips—let alone conceptualization and creativity.
So why is the computer good at certain tasks whereas the brain is better at others? Comparing the computer and the brain has been instructive to both computer engineers and neuroscientists. This comparison started at the dawn of the modern computer era, in a small but profound book entitled The Computer and the Brain, by John von Neumann, a polymath who in the 1940s pioneered the design of a computer architecture that is still the basis of most modern computers today.
SpringerOpen blog; Valentin Kassarnig, Sune Lehmann & Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen from
… In our new study, we analyze this dataset in order to shed light on how different aspects of behavior impact the students’ academic performance. We place a special focus on the students’ social environment which was captured across five different channels: calls, text-messages, physical proximity (from Bluetooth scans), Facebook interactions, and Facebook friendships. These ways of interacting are arguably some of the most important channels of communication.
Our analyses revealed that the mean grade point average (GPA) of peers is highly correlated with academic performance. That is, students with high performing friends are very likely to also perform well. Although this effect was consistently observed across all investigated channels, it was most pronounced for calls and text messages, which are considered to be proxies for strong social ties. When we divided students into three groups according to their GPAs we could observe that the dominant fraction of text messages was exchanged among members of the same group.
Adaptation of our knowledge, skills and understanding is a challenging and confronting process. David Pye’s idea of the ‘workmanship of risk’ emphasises the idea that this process should go on throughout our lifespan. Think of an artist working on a painting, a sculptor chiselling out the finer details or indeed a young player learning to become skilfully attuned to the multiple possibilities for action in each unique situation, the quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making and learning. This is a rich description of how child-youth football environments should look in practice and elucidates the idea that interactions between coach and learner(s) are of the utmost importance as they constitute a learning system.
The best youth coaches look to create an environment where young players learn to understand that they will never stop learning what they can do with their skill.
Deakin Institute for Frontier Materials (IFM) scientist Dr Shayan Seyedin said the strain sensing textiles could be used to produce compression garments that monitor professional athletes during competition, or to allow patients to track and compile data while undergoing physical rehabilitation.
The devices could also be applied to virtual and augmented reality technology, providing more thorough feedback and accurate movement within VR games and simulations.
“Strain sensing textiles have particular relevance in the development of smart devices for health, sports, and soft robotics,” Dr Seyedin said.
“These wearable devices can convert a wide range of body movements into electrical signals, making it possible to track and record physical activities such as those involved in fitness and health monitoring, improving exercise efficiency, injury prevention and rehabilitation.”
A little less than a year ago I wrote about MobileNets, a neural network architecture that runs very efficiently on mobile devices. Since then I’ve used MobileNet V1 with great success in a number of client projects, either as a basic image classifier or as a feature extractor that is part of a larger neural network.
Recently researchers at Google announced MobileNet version 2. This is mostly a refinement of V1 that makes it even more efficient and powerful. Naturally, I made an implementation using Metal Performance Shaders and I can confirm it lives up to the promise.
In this blog post I’ll explain what’s new in MobileNet V2.
Sensor-solutions company ams introduces the first integrated vital sign sensor reference design based on its AS7024.The solution can perform accurate, fast, and convenient 24/7 cuffless blood pressure measurement. The reference design integrates all the hardware components, including the AS7024, as well as the software required to implement blood pressure measurement, heart-rate measurement (HRM), heart rate variability (HRV) and electrocardiograms (ECG).
The AS7024 sensor IC includes three LEDs, photodiodes, an optical front end and sequencer for HRM, and an analog front end for ECG in a low-profile 6.1mm x 2.7mm package. The reference design also enables calculated measurements of vagal tone and arterial elasticity, as well as skin temperature and skin resistivity via interfaces to external sensors.
Pensacola News Journal, Melissa Nelson Gabriel from
Strength and conditioning coach Joe Gomes has prepared football’s elite for the NFL Combine, trained Britain’s Olympic track team, headed the Oakland Raiders’ conditioning program and helped the U.S. Army’s top special forces teams test their physical endurance.
Gomes is now using all of that training to work with some of the nation’s top scientists at Pensacola’s Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. He isn’t training the scientists for athletic endeavors; he is helping them in their cutting-edge research involving the melding of humans and technology.
“The opportunity here isn’t to help one team or one military unit,” said Gomes, who was recently named the institute’s director of high performance. “This is an opportunity to solve wider problems, to work hand-in-hand with top researchers and to give back.”
… One example of changes in the brain that might help restore function is change in the structure of the white matter, or wiring of the brain. Previous research in my laboratory found in people with a memory system that had deteriorated (people with a disorder called mild cognitive impairment), alternative connections can pick up the load and help to compensate for damage.
We don’t yet know whether the white matter fibres actually change after the injury, or whether they always had this reserve capacity. But we do know white matter pathways change in response to learning new skills, such as juggling or memory training.
When Victor Oladipo picked up two fouls in the first minute of Game 2, it raised a common question: what is the right way for coaches to manage foul trouble?
From Lance McCullers to Patrick Corbin, MLB pitchers are avoiding the strike zone at record rates. The strategy is mostly proving successful—but has brought a few unintended side effects.