… Blackmon, who has been one of baseball’s best offensive players the past three seasons, has begun introducing data-collecting technologies into his training program under the guidance of Mike Berenger at Rapid Sports Performance on the outskirts of Atlanta. The devices he uses already range from simple (a heart-rate monitor) to sophisticated (velocity-based training tools), and Berenger plans to add more this coming offseason.
Until he started tracking his heart rate, Blackmon could never satisfy his appetite as he bulked up to 220 pounds every offseason, and he didn’t quite understand why.
“I had no idea how many calories I was burning,” he said. “I always have a tough time gaining weight, but it wasn’t until I wore that heart rate [monitor] and got through a workout that I realized we were burning 1,700 or 1,800 calories in a tough workout—no wonder I’m hungry all day. That’s a time where you’re supposed to be growing your body and getting stronger. So it makes me realize, sometimes it’s OK to eat another cheeseburger.”
Titans right tackle Jack Conklin ended last season at the lowest point of his young career. He spent most of the Titans’ 35-14 divisional playoff loss in New England nursing a torn ACL.
The injury gave the 23-year-old a chance to evaluate the first two years of his career, and he told Jim Wyatt of Titans Online that he’s dedicated himself to losing weight and becoming more athletic to fit the Titans’ new offensive system.
Wyatt noted that Conklin has dropped about 10 pounds and now weights about 310. Less weight should allow the right tackle to improve his athleticism in an offense that will ask more of him on the edge.
… Lee vividly remembers her friend’s motionless body strewn like a napkin across the floor. She remembers getting rushed into the locker room, her heart thumping, her hands and feet trembling with fear.
Lindsay-Noel was paralyzed with a broken spine.
It was Lee’s first exposure to serious injury, and it made the back pain she soon felt even more of a concern. She couldn’t stoop to pick up a pencil she dropped in math class. Using the bathroom felt like her back was being branded. She cried when she sneezed.
“You’re 14 years old,” her father told her. “You shouldn’t be like this.”
A specialist found that her spine was unstable, a condition that left unaddressed could lead to paralysis. She was advised to take a year away from gymnastics, with no running or physical strain of any kind.
For most people Candy Crush is the continual source of notifications that clog up their Facebook feed. For Arsenal it could be the final piece of the puzzle in their bid for glory next season.
The Gunners have appointed Russian Mikhail Zhilkin, whose most notable claim to fame prior his move into the world of football was as one of the minds behind the all-conquering mobile app, to their backroom staff, where he will work as a data scientist in director of high performance Darren Burgess’ team.
… In some circles of American soccer, comfort is taken in the idea that as the years pass each generation of talent will have more exposure for longer to more people in their lives who know the game better than the proverbial average child of the previous generation would have, and that with that ever-increasing volume of the sport the U.S. will reach a sort of critical mass from which it will have become a full-on soccer nation, however one conceives of such a thing.
That’s not wrong, coaches say. Some of their starkest critiques are cultural.
Lilley notes that parents at American youth clubs can and in some cases do move their child onto another team when they’re upset with the coach. The academy players Pulisic coached at Borussia Dortmund from 2015-17 were all so immersed in the game, he hardly had to worry about motivating them. Vidovich bemoans the number of games that strike him as “throwaway” in the U.S. Soccer Development Academy (USSDA) regular season. “And then there’s just plenty of showcases,” he said.
“We only learn when there is uncertainty, and that is a good thing,” said Daeyeol Lee, Yale’s Dorys McConnell Duberg Professor of Neuroscience and professor of psychology and psychiatry. “We really don’t want to be learning all the time.”
Lee and Yale colleagues presented monkeys with tasks where outcome probability was either constant or fluctuating and detected fundamental differences in brain activity during those two conditions, they report July 19 in the journal Neuron.
Activity in areas of the frontal cortex were dramatically reduced when outcome probabilities were fixed and the animal was more certain of the outcome.
“We were able to detect how the brain decides to learn,” Lee said.
The results also illustrate why it is important that we take a break from learning, he said.
Let’s say you are offered a new job in a different city, and you need to figure out whether to accept it. How are you going to do this? Most likely, you will think about what the job offer means to you: what will the new city be like? How fulfilling will the new job be? What about the pay and other benefits? How does all of this compare with where you live and work now? It’s not trivial, but in the end you’ll manage to make up your mind.
This sort of situation is a fascinating conundrum of human living – and not just because of the immediate prospects for career advancement and relocation enjoyment. What makes it exciting for cognitive scientists is that, in making this decision, you mentally represent the different factors that go into it (what it is like to accept the job, what your current situation is like, and so on), and then act based on these mental representations.
Such mental representations have two features that make them very interesting objects of study. First, they are like internal models: intermediaries between the world and your reactions to the world, and you use them – rather than the world itself – to decide what you are to do. The job offer is not like a shove that moves you out of the way of an oncoming bicycle. To the extent that it moves you at all, it does so via the way it is represented in your mind.
Second, mental representations have the traditional features of meaning. The same job offer can be represented in very different ways; and you can be mistaken in the ways that you represent life in a new city: maybe life in the British town of Maidenhead has a lot more to offer than you thought. This is different from most other things in the world.
Manchester Metropolitan University’s (MMU’s) plans to establish an Institute of Sport next to Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium – in a move that could kick-start the next stage of regeneration in the east of the city – are “gathering momentum”, with a number of important land deals in the works.
In March 2017, Manchester City Council’s Executive endorsed the draft Eastlands Regeneration Framework for consultation, which included plans to create a higher education campus, commercial development aimed at sports-related businesses, a hotel, a strengthened food and drink offering, and more homes.
In December, the authority’s Executive gave approval to the initiative, with the same report also confirming that MMU would establish the Manchester Metropolitan Institute of Sport on a Sports and Innovation Zone (SIZ).
I went for a run last night and, at times, the track I looked at later was over 20m off. When I drive in London the car Satnav often has no idea where I am.
If you have experienced the same as me then you might be surprised to know that a well-designed GPS receiver can achieve an accuracy of better than 5m.
You might also know that GPS can be used to measure your elevation/altitude but the accuracy of that, in ideal conditions, is not quite so good.
But the error is not simply from the device you are using or the building you are near. There are also continually varying factors linked to the satellites’ positions above you. That’s why you can do the same run on different days and see differently plotted tracks of your route.
Let me tell you about two systems administrators I know. Both were overloaded, busy IT engineers. Both had many repetitive tasks to do. Both wanted to automate these tasks. After observing these two people for a year, I noticed that one made a lot of progress, while the other one didn’t. It wasn’t a matter of skill—both were very good software engineers. The difference was their approach, or mindset.
I’d say that the successful one had a mindset of always thinking in terms of moving toward the goal of a better automated system. Imagine an analog gauge that points to the left when measuring that a process is completely manual but slides to the right as progress is made toward a fully autonomous system. The developer mindset is always intent on moving the needle to the right.
The less successful person didn’t write much code, and he had excellent reasons why: I’m too busy! The person who made the request can’t wait! I have 100 other things to do today! Nobody’s allocating time for me to write code!
The successful person had the same pressures but somehow managed to write a lot of code.
… “Outworking the competition with the power of a solid nutrition plan is what high performance fueling is all about,” [Dave] Ellis said. “We set the bar in this space during the Osborne era and now we will set it again in the Frost era. This is an opportunity to bring all of my key learnings from working 35-plus years in sports to the table for the welfare of our student-athletes.”
arXiv, Statistics > Applications; Zachary O. Binney, Kyle E. Hammond, Mitchel Klein, Michael Goodman, A. Cecile J.W. Janssens from
The National Football League’s (NFL) 2011 collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with its players placed a number of contact and quantity limitations on practices and workouts. Some coaches and others have expressed a concern that this has led to poor conditioning and a subsequent increase in injuries. We sought to assess whether the 2011 CBA’s practice restrictions affected the number of overall, conditioning-dependent, and/or non-conditioning-dependent injuries in the NFL or the number of games missed due to those injuries. The study population was player-seasons from 2007-2016. We included regular season, non-illness, non-head, game-loss injuries. Injuries were identified using a database from Football Outsiders. The primary outcomes were overall, conditioning-dependent and non-conditioning-dependent injury counts by season. We examined time trends in injury counts before (2007-2010) and after (2011-2016) the CBA using a Poisson interrupted time series model. The number of game-loss regular season, non-head, non-illness injuries grew from 701 in 2007 to 804 in 2016 (15% increase). The number of regular season weeks missed exhibited a similar increase. Conditioning-dependent injuries increased from 197 in 2007 to 271 in 2011 (38% rise), but were lower and remained relatively unchanged at 220-240 injuries per season thereafter. Non-conditioning injuries decreased by 37% in the first three years of the new CBA before returning to historic levels in 2014-2016. Poisson models for all, conditioning-dependent, and non-conditioning-dependent game-loss injury counts did not show statistically significant or meaningful detrimental changes associated with the CBA. We did not observe an increase in injuries following the 2011 CBA. Other concurrent injury-related rule and regulation changes limit specific causal inferences about the practice restrictions, however.
Decision trees are one of my favorite models. They are simple, and they are powerful. In fact most high performing Kaggle entries are a combination of XGBoost, which is variant of decision tree, and some very clever feature engineering.
The concept behind decision trees is refreshingly straightforward. Imagine creating a data set by recording the time you left your house, and noting whether you arrived at work on time. Looking at it, you can see that for the most part, departure times before 8:15 result in punctuality, and departure times after 15 result in tardiness.
You can summarize this pattern in a decision tree. The very first branching point is the question “Did departure occur before 8:15?” There are two branches, a yes and a no. For consistency we will keep our yesses on the left. Placing this decision boundary divides the data up into two groups. Although there are some stragglers and exceptions, the overall pattern is captured placing by the decision boundary at 8:15. If you depart before 8:15, you can be reasonably sure of getting to work on time. If you depart after 8:15, you can be reasonably sure of being late.
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