Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 30, 2019

… If an American should win—which may be a longshot, if 2018 champion Brigid Kosgei is part of the yet-to-be-announced international field—it would be the first time since Deena Kastor’s 2005 victory.

The prospect seems more likely than it was just a few years ago. Now American women expect to be on the podium at the sport’s biggest marathons. “We have women who have won marathon majors, we have women who have placed in the top three, a bunch of sub-2:30 marathoners,” Cragg, 35, said. “It’s more competitive to be the top American now than it was back then, which is a really good thing. And I think the U.S. is just going to keep getting better and better.”

Earlier this year, Allie Kieffer posted a picture of herself flexing on Instagram. The caption read: “Strong is empowering. It’s knowing you belong in the free-weights section of the gym, holding your own amongst grunting men. Strong is seeing the number on the scale, but knowing it isn’t tied to your self-worth. It’s the feeling that you can accomplish all of your goals. Strong is standing up for your values regardless of what others say. It’s the confidence to be unapologetically you. Strong looks like you!”

… when the subject of the NFL potentially moving from a 16- to an 18-game schedule comes up, the 200-pound Westbrook grimaces like he just ran full-speed into a 300-pound lineman.

“Preseason games are different,” Westbrook said. “You’re only playing for a quarter or a half. And it’s not the same, effort-wise. To play two more games when guys are already beat up, that’s just tough.”

… The Eagles entered camp healthier than they were a year ago, particularly on offense. There are about a half-dozen starters who have yet to make full returns, but the majority have been suited up and participating in at least the positional portion of the first three practices.

Cornerback Jalen Mills is the only starting-caliber player who isn’t practicing and is seemingly in jeopardy of missing the season opener.

But the Eagles’ good fortune could change in a flash. And coach Doug Pederson knows that.

“You never know how the season is going to play out because anything can happen, but it’s encouraging from the standpoint we have a few more guys practicing,” Pederson said Thursday after the first practice. “Guys that didn’t practice this time last year are out there. We still have to be cautious with the guys that are still working through some stuff.”

For his recent paper on the past, present and future of sports science in football, Professor Barry Drust counted the number of ‘touch points’ a player had with a practitioner during the week.

There were 49.

“People talk about footballers’ unwillingness to be involved in these things, but I don’t know many people who have that level of scrutiny about what they do day-to-day, and I wonder if this has potential to cause issues,” Drust, the Professor of Applied Exercise Physiology at Liverpool John Moores University, told TGG.

… after a 4-12 finish to 2018, thanks largely to franchise quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo’s season-ending knee injury in September, the 49ers overhauled their medical and strength and conditioning staffs. Instead of those being separate departments that didn’t operate in lockstep, Shanahan and general manager John Lynch wanted to make a drastic change.

“There’s a culture in the NFL that’s existed for a long time where the strength staff is kind of the strength staff and you don’t tell them what to do, and the training room’s over here,” Lynch said Friday. “We wanted one that was working hand in hand together to allow our players to be at optimal level. That was a goal, and we felt having someone over the top is the best way to do that.”

Think about a conversation you had recently. Could you tell whether it was going well or poorly? How did you know whether the other person was interested in what you had to say? The ability to imagine what someone might be thinking or feeling (known as mentalizing) probably plays a large part in what makes a social interaction successful. We know that certain brain regions are involved when we are asked what someone might be thinking, but do we engage these “mentalizing brain regions” whenever we interact with others, or just when something reminds us to think about thoughts? This question can only be answered by studies that make participants feel like they are in a real social interaction. Therefore, we designed an experiment in which children believed they were interacting with a partner while getting their brains scanned.

… “I could see my parents become more open to their kids doing different things as we all went from school and into the job market,” [Glen Allsopp] says. “I had total freedom to quit my part-time job, leave college and essentially start a new life on a different continent.”

The idea that last-borns are more adventurous is just one of several theories swirling around the research literature on how our position in the family affects us in ways that play out in our adult careers. An even more popular idea – an almost taken-for-granted fact – is that first-born children, with their years of experience as top dog, are more disposed to become leaders.

Yet the scientific evidence for this is weak at best – some experts even describe the influence of birth order on personality as a “zombie theory”, i.e. one that refuses to die despite being refuted.

… One of the reasons I’m most excited about TinyML is that adding machine learning to microphones and cameras will let us create smart sensors. I think about these as small, cheap, self-contained components that do a single job like providing a voice interface, detecting when a person is nearby (like an infra-red motion sensor that won’t be triggered accidentally by animals or trees moving in the wind), or spotting different hand gestures. It’s possible to build these using audio and image sensors combined with machine learning models, but only expose a “black box” interface to system builders that raises a pin high when there’s a person in view for example, or has an array of pins corresponding to different commands or gestures. This standardization into easy to use modules is the only way we’ll be able to get mass adoption. There’s no reason they can’t be as simple to wire into your design as a button or temperature sensor, and just as cheap.

I see this future as inevitable in a technical sense, probably sooner rather than later. I’m convinced that engineers will end up building these devices because they’re starting to become possible to create. They’ll also be very useful, so I expect they’ll see widespread adoption across all sorts of consumer, automotive, and industrial devices. The reason privacy has been on my mind is that if this does happen, our world will suddenly contain many more microphones and cameras. We won’t actually be using them to record sound or video for playback, in the traditional sense, they’ll just be implementation details of higher-level sensors. This isn’t an easy story to explain to the general public though, and even for engineers on a technical level it may be hard to guarantee that there’s no data leakage.

John Carter isn’t a household name for most basketball fans, let alone NBA players. Yet, if the Noah Basketball CEO has his way, he may be changing the game for players and fans sooner than later.

That’s because Carter believes he’s on the forefront of player development and evaluation innovation, not just for high school and college players still shaping their craft, but for the best in the world who’ve already made it to the highest level.

‘Noah’ is a basketball shooting aid, aptly named after the biblical figure and his arc, that focuses on correcting, well, the arc of a player’s shot.

In June 2019 the “IntWash” research project, led by Hohenstein, began focusing on the opportunities and challenges of intelligent laundries. The establishment of Industry 4.0 concepts in laundries will be promoted through Hohenstein’s research network, targeted marketing measures and international cooperation.

“The laundry sector is becoming increasingly important because of the higher demands on hygiene and job safety, but it is also threatened by a shortage of skilled workers,” project coordinator Dr. Igor Kogut said, describing the current situation.

The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)-funded project aims to create easier access to information on the future of work in intelligent laundries.

… There was discussion among the brain trust, including Gorton and assistant GM Chris Drury, about where the Rangers were in their rebuild and whether the investment in Panarin would be beneficial. It was a brief discussion because it was clear that when this collection of young players actualizes as a contender, there might not be a player of Panarin’s caliber available on the open market.

“That’s one of the conversations we had. When we’re starting to hit our stride here, who will be there?” Gorton said. “We couldn’t count on ‘Player X’ being there because the best players generally sign [long-term] with their teams. So to get a player of his age and his skill level, it just fit into what we were doing. For the life of the contract, we would have a top player.”

Not only that, but the Rangers will have a winger with unparalleled playmaking ability on a team that could be young down the middle with players such as Lias Andersson (20) and Filip Chytil (19). “He’s not a center, but he drives a line because he makes so many plays,” Gorton said.

Ask any of WNBA All-Stars, and they’ll tell you this: 2019 is the most important season in the 23-year history of the WNBA.

That should make it no surprise that the league and USA Basketball came together to announce a new plan to showcase Team USA ahead of the 2020 Olympic Games.

This plan will compensate the participating players financially with a guaranteed amount of money, keep players at home during the WNBA offseason, and give some of the best women’s basketball players in the world more visibility leading to the 2020 Games.

After the United States won the World Cup this summer, the message to fans was clear: If you enjoyed watching these women conquer the world, just wait until you see them battle at home in the NWSL. The league usually receives a bump in interest following the tournament, and this year is no different. That interest also highlights a conflict that the NWSL still struggles to navigate: Its best players have a larger priority than NWSL glory.

Take this fall, when the U.S. will play five games around the country, including Sept. 3 at Allianz Field, in what’s being billed as the team’s “Victory Tour.” The issue is that those games are, in some cases, directly in conflict with NWSL match days and add wear and tear on the league’s best players.

The 2019 Arizona Diamondbacks had the bad fortune to be born in the same division as the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Diamondbacks have had plenty of good surprises this year, and they have the third-best run differential in the National League. They’re also 15 games out of first place, as the Dodgers are on pace to win 104 games. According to FanGraphs’ playoff odds, the Diamondbacks haven’t had better than a 5% chance to win the NL West at any point this season, and they hit 0.0% on June 4.

But the rest of the National League (and Ketel Marte) have kept Arizona in the middle of a playoff race nevertheless. The Diamondbacks are 3.5 games behind the second wild-card spot, and their chances of claiming a playoff spot are somewhere from 10% to 50%, depending on which baseball stats site you go to. The question that will hang over the trade deadline the next three days — for the Diamondbacks and at least six other teams directly and for the rest of baseball indirectly — is how much that wild-card spot is worth.