… Jontay Porter hasn’t even stepped on an NBA court yet, and he’s already in danger of joining the aforementioned names. Back in October, the sophomore center tore his ACL and MCL during a scrimmage, then tore the ACL again in March (Note to future ballers: Not a good idea to disobey doctor’s orders when it comes to recovering from serious knee injuries).
Despite the hard luck that’s come his way over the past seven months, Porter seemed to be in good spirits when talking about his knee at the NBA Draft Combine in Chicago.
“I do think I have healthy knees and they will come back 110 percent,” Porter said. “It’s just a matter of time and being patient.”
… Binnington logged more than 200 minor league appearances before making his first N.H.L. start at age 25, shutting out the Philadelphia Flyers on Jan. 7, five days after St. Louis plunged to the bottom of the league standings.
He began this season as the No. 4 goalie in the organization, which sounds bad but, really, could have been worse. At least he wasn’t fifth, as he was heading into last season, when he wondered whether his N.H.L. future, if he had one at all, would be in St. Louis.
“It would be disingenuous to say that this was all part of the master plan,” Blues General Manager Doug Armstrong said.
Frances Tiafoe doesn’t remember how many times people have tried to fix his forehand. “Many, many times” is his best guess. It is, for lack of a better description, a wild stroke. There’s a lot of action in the take back—as the ball comes his way, his right arm begins to describe strange pathways behind his body, like a dragon wing unfurling—and more wrist in the shot than any instructor would typically teach. But the technique, if you want to call it that, allows him to generate incredible amounts of torque as his body turns through the tennis ball. The effect is of a slingshot being pulled way back, and then fired. Balls come off his forehand side incredibly heavy, dizzy with spin. They seem to be going up, not down, when they cross the opposite service line, before falling—rapidly now, as if dropped from a cliff—and then bounding quickly toward the back of the court. “Flick, flick, and more flick,” he said, sketching the motion of the stroke in the air.
The reason people are always trying to fix Tiafoe’s forehand is that no one taught him how to hit one in the first place.
At 16 Georgia Stanway upped sticks to pursue football. “‘Not many people leave Barrow’ – that’s what’s said,” says the forward. But that is what it took. And now, at 20, she is the youngest member of Phil Neville’s squad for the World Cup. She is no shock inclusion nor is she along for the ride. Stanway is determined to feature and will likely get game time in France.
“Everything’s happened in a short space of time and it’s been hard for me to be able to manage my emotions because it’s all just been a whirlwind,” she says. “It’s hard for me to express how I feel because I don’t think it’s real. Sometimes I’ve got to pinch myself that I’m actually here and that I’m going to compete for England at a World Cup,” she adds while absentmindedly pinching the skin on her hand.
“I’d love to play. I think that’s definitely an aim for me. Obviously I’m still young and I’ve still got a lot of time on my hands and hopefully many more World Cups, but I’d definitely love to play.
INFORUM, Philadelphia Daily News, Zach Berman from
Carson Wentz decided to make a notable change this offseason, and it has nothing to do with passing or running or sliding.
The Philadelphia Eagles quarterback from North Dakota State, who is listed at 6-foot-5 and 237 pounds, has made changes to his diet and in his focus on nutrition. He has also sought different training techniques.
“I’ve tried transforming my body a little bit this offseason,” Wentz said this week. “I’ve seen a lot of development there personally. I think it’ll help going forward staying healthy and with longevity.”
Damon Jones, Tom Thibodeau, Mike Greenberg and Laura Rutledge discuss how the Toronto Raptors’ conservative approach with Kawhi Leonard’s playing time this season paid off with a trip to the NBA Finals. [video, 5:23]
Juwan Howard has made his first personnel decision as head coach of Michigan basketball.
Howard, who was hired as the Wolverines’ head coach on Wednesday, announced in a tweet on Friday that longtime strength-and-conditioning coach Jon Sanderson would remain with the program.
“I’m pleased to announce that Jon Sanderson — an integral part of the program the last 10 years — will be staying in Ann Arbor,” Howard wrote. “His reputation precedes him — I’m definitely looking forward to witnessing that first workout.”
A fundamental cognitive process is to map value and identity onto the objects we learn about. However, what space best embeds this mapping is not completely understood. Here we develop tools to quantify the space and organization of such a mapping in neural responses as reflected in functional MRI, to show that quick learners have a higher dimensional representation than slow learners, and hence more easily distinguishable whole-brain responses to objects of different value. Furthermore, we find that quick learners display more compact embedding of their neural responses, and hence have higher ratios of their stimuli dimension to their embedding dimension, which is consistent with greater efficiency of cognitive coding. Lastly, we investigate the neurophysiological drivers at smaller scales and study the complementary distinguishability of whole-brain responses. Our results demonstrate a spatial organization of neural responses characteristic of learning and offer geometric measures appli-cable to identifying efficient coding in higher-order cognitive processes. [pdf, full text]
Psychological sciences have identified a wealth of cognitive processes and behavioral phenomena, yet struggle to produce cumulative knowledge. Progress is hamstrung by siloed scientific traditions and a focus on explanation over prediction, two issues that are particularly damaging for the study of multifaceted constructs like self-regulation. Here, we derive a psychological ontology from a study of individual differences across a broad range of behavioral tasks, self-report surveys, and self-reported real-world outcomes associated with self-regulation. Though both tasks and surveys putatively measure self-regulation, they show little empirical relationship. Within tasks and surveys, however, the ontology identifies reliable individual traits and reveals opportunities for theoretic synthesis. We then evaluate predictive power of the psychological measurements and find that while surveys modestly and heterogeneously predict real-world outcomes, tasks largely do not. We conclude that self-regulation lacks coherence as a construct, and that data-driven ontologies lay the groundwork for a cumulative psychological science. [full text]
A couple weeks ago Garmin Released the brand spanking new Garmin Forerunner 945. Garmin’s latest offering in the “Forerunner” lineup. I was lucky enough to get my hands on one! The Forerunner 945 sits in the flagship position in this series replacing the previous Garmin Forerunner 935 that was wildly popular with triathletes, cyclists, and runners alike. I always looked past the Garmin Forerunner series as historically they left out some of the key features I look for in a backcountry/trail/ultra watch like full navigation and mapping capabilities. Not this time! When I saw the spec list I knew I HAD to have one as it looked like it fixed all the minor quibbles I didn’t love about my current Fenix 5 Plus. To over simplify things Garmin has essentially taken the guts of the Fenix 5 Plus series and transplanted them into a smaller, lighter form factor. Oh yeah, and they even added a few features not available in the Fenix 5 Plus line! So it’s a no-brainer right? Well not exactly. Lets dive a bit deeper.
Harvard Business Review, Moni Miyashita and Michael Brady from
… The biggest promise of artificial intelligence — accurate predictions at near-zero marginal cost — has rightly generated substantial interest in applying AI to nearly every area of healthcare. But not every application of AI in healthcare is equally well-suited to benefit. Moreover, very few applications serve as an appropriate strategic response to the largest problems facing nearly every health system: decentralization and margin pressure.
Take for example, medical imaging AI tools — an area in which hospitals are projected to spend $2 billion annually within four years. Accurately diagnosing diseases from cancers to cataracts is a complex task, with difficult-to-quantify but typically major consequences. However, the task is currently typically part of larger workflows performed by extensively trained, highly specialized physicians who are among some of the world’s best minds. These doctors might need help at the margins, but this is a job already being done. Such factors make disease diagnosis an extraordinarily difficult area for AI to create transformative change. And so the application of AI in such settings — even if beneficial to patient outcomes — is unlikely to fundamentally improve the way healthcare is delivered or to substantially lower costs in the near-term.
However, leading organizations seeking to decentralize care can deploy AI to do things that have never been done before. For example: There’s a wide array of non-acute health decisions that consumers make daily. These decisions do not warrant the attention of a skilled clinician but ultimately play a large role in determining patient’s health — and ultimately the cost of healthcare.
Can origami protect football players and reusable rockets? Researchers have shown how the ancient art of paper-folding can soften the shock of an impact, whether it’s cracking into a helmet or touching down on a landing pad.
The technique, described today in an open-access paper published by Science Advances, takes advantage of the stress-relaxing effect of folding creases in paper and other materials.
“If you were wearing a football helmet made of this material and something hit the helmet, you’d never feel that hit on your head. By the time the energy reaches you, it’s no longer pushing. It’s pulling,” senior author Jinkyu Yang, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington, said in a news release.
Through an industry-academia partnership and a recently-released request for proposals, the Air Force Research Laboratory is looking to advance human-monitoring research and development for the future warfighter.
The request for proposals, announced May 6, 2019, targets projects designed to accelerate innovations in health monitoring, diagnostics, and performance augmentation. Specifically, topics of interest include wearable human-monitoring capabilities. The effort is being managed in a partnership between AFRL and SEMI, a global industry association of manufacturing companies.
In 2018, SEMI partnered with AFRL to facilitate and manage additional growth in the Nano-Bio Materials Consortium, a public-private partnership of technology stakeholders. NBMC seeks to bring together entities from across the supply chain—from materials suppliers to system integrators, from technology investors to defense end users and policy makers—to ensure a robust and emerging domestic supply chain for technologies enabled by nano-bio materials, which are expected to have great importance to human-monitoring technologies.
In a move that could disrupt some types of betting on the Finals, the NBA plans to cut off unauthorized sportsbooks from accessing the league’s official data feed starting next week.
Sportradar, an authorized data distributor for the NBA, sent a letter Thursday notifying sportsbook operators that the league was forcing it to “cease providing to you NBA Official Data for use in the United States unless and until you are an Authorized Gaming Operator of the NBA.”
… The annual gathering of coaches, administrators and league officials begins Tuesday in Destin, Florida. And rest assured, it will be about more than SEC types patting themselves on the back over their athletic successes.
There also figures to be plenty of talk about sports gambling — specifically the prospect of NFL-style availability lists outlining injury status — NCAA transfer waivers, and the potential for student athletes to eventually be compensated for their names, images and likenesses.