The Dodgers offered a payday, but the Phillies offered security. Bryce Harper entered free agency looking to commit to one team’s future until his retirement. Philadelphia is where he’ll do it.
… “If we expect this guy to win majors now, I think that’s a bridge too far unless he addresses the physical gap between him and the other guys,” four-times Grand Slam champion Courier said on the Tennis Channel at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California.
Thousands of athletes come through the Nike Sport Research Lab (NSRL) every year; many of them are professional. The first thing each does is take a digital survey that asks about their activity and sport, goals and motivation, product history, preferences and future needs. From there, the athlete goes through five physical baseline tests.
These tests are the first, critical step in developing strong relationships with athletes. Nike uses each test to consistently and thoroughly evaluate every athlete in order to get a better understanding of them. This technology also helps Nike build a huge global database that informs design and fine tunes fit for footwear to apparel.
Matthew Nurse, Vice President of the NSRL, breaks down the tests and explains how each plays a crucial role in Nike’s understanding of all athletes, and how the insights and results of these assessments help researchers and designers create new technologies for apparel and footwear.
The Conversation, Deepa Burman and Hiren Muzumdar from
… Is there something we can do to deal with this loss of sleep and change of body clock timing?
Of course. The first step to dealing with this is increasing awareness and using the power of knowledge to combat this issue. Here are some quick tips to prepare yourself for the upcoming weekend.
As recently as four years ago, FC Barcelona’s four professional indoor sports were using four different athlete tracking systems. The club’s flagship team—the La Liga soccer powerhouse—was using a fifth product, STATSports’ GPS wearables, running on a completely different technology.
The club’s R&D branch, the Barça Innovation Hub, set to work benchmarking the various tracking systems on accuracy, reliability, and usability. The best-rated wearable was Wimu, a hybrid indoor-outdoor technology built by a startup called RealTrack Systems, whose team consists of former Nokia engineers based in Andalucia, Spain. The BIHub’s head of knowledge, Albert Mundet, said RTS “had a lot of potential with what they were delivering and what, at the same time, they were willing to improve.”
Wimu was first tested with Barcelona’s futsal team but soon displaced the wearables in all five sports because the device can access both GPS and GNSS satellite systems outdoors, and communicate with indoor antennas via ultra-wideband radio frequencies.
This blog post marking the start of series (Hopefully) will be a walkthrough of the ideas shared in the Bag of Tricks for Image Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks paper and a few thoughts by me.
The paper discusses a few tricks and does an analysis of their individual as well as combined contributions to training a few of the recent CNN models.
… Perhaps we are living in a golden age of unhappiness. Rich Harvard Business School graduates are miserable; millennials are burned out; Trump supporters are unhappy; Trump opponents are in despair. Or perhaps people are no more unhappy than they ever were, and we are simply more likely to hear about it. (As a phrase, the age of anxiety is as old as the N.B.A.) The league has become, in many ways, a more humane place; on many teams, when players are struggling mentally or emotionally, they are encouraged to acknowledge and address it, at least privately. At the Sloan conference, Silver talked about how individual teams and the league are devoting more and more resources to helping players with mental-health issues. Some of the current and former players who have spoken publicly about their struggles with depression—DeMar DeRozan, Kevin Love, and Chris Bosh, among others—have been instrumental in helping to challenge the taboo against seeking help.
But there may also be a dynamic that Silver, who, as commissioner, was appointed by the league’s owners, and sits at the center of its labor and management conflicts, can only dance around: the unintended and complicated consequences of player empowerment.
The America East Conference is strengthening its efforts to be a leader in mental health among its athletes.
The conference last month announced its Board of Presidents adopted the NCAA autonomy proposal to improve student-athlete access to mental health resources. The proposal was originally approved by the Power Five conferences in January, and America East is the first outside the group to adopt the proposal, but Commissioner Amy Huchthausen said the conference’s efforts stretch back several years. Huchthausen also said it wasn’t a major lift to adopt the proposal because of efforts in the past.
Several years ago, the conference’s student-athlete advisory committee surfaced mental health as an area where it wanted greater attention on the campus and league level. The America East’s 4th Annual Health & Safety Summit will be held in May at UMass Lowell, with part of the summit focused on mental health.
… Whatever the symbolism, these people’s behavior is not doing them harm. Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University and the author of several books about nutrition and the food industry, says the consequences of eating the same lunch every day depend on the contents of that lunch and of the day’s other meals. “If your daily lunch contains a variety of healthful foods,” she says, “relax and enjoy it.”
So there is nothing wrong with this habit. In fact, there are many things right with it. I spoke with about half a dozen people who, at one time or another, have eaten the same thing for lunch every day. Together, their stories form a defense of a practice that is often written off as uninspired.
Many of the people I talked with emphasized the stress-reducing benefits of eating the same thing each day.
Scientists from EPFL and the UNIL/Ludwig Cancer Research have found that supplementing diet with nicotinamide riboside, an analogue of vitamin B3, boosts the production of blood cells by improving the function of their stem cells. This can help overcome problems in stem cell-based therapies that treat leukemia and aggressive lymphomas.
Some people think machine learning models are black boxes, useful for making predictions but otherwise unintelligible; but the best data scientists know techniques to extract real-world insights from any model. For any given model, these data scientists can easily answer questions like
What features in the data did the model think are most important?
For any single prediction from a model, how did each feature in the data affect that particular prediction
What interactions between features have the biggest effects on a model’s predictions
Answering these questions is more broadly useful than many people realize.
In the final part of our deep dive into more than 73,000 scouting reports given to us by a former Cincinnati Reds front-office exec, we look at how technology and sabermetrics have changed player discovery and development—how to maintain a position as a scout in turbulent, tech-driven times