For years, the New Orleans Saints held back Drew Brees from winning his second Super Bowl. Now, could the biggest obstacle for the 2019 Saints actually be their star quarterback?
They enter the season with a 15.7% chance of winning the Super Bowl per ESPN’s Football Power Index, odds that are second in the NFL behind the Chiefs, but those numbers surely rely upon the future Hall of Fame quarterback continuing to play at his accepted level of greatness.
After an uncharacteristic error on floor exercise during the first night of the U.S. Gymnastics Championships in Kansas City this past Friday, Simone Biles saluted the judges, left the podium, and proclaimed: “I’m just pissed off already.” NBC’s perennially excitable gymnastics commentator, Tim Dagget, concurred, informing viewers that this was unequivocally the worst meet he’d ever seen Biles complete. (She later referred to her own perfectly decent bar routine as a “piece of shit” on live television, forever cementing herself as my simultaneous swearing and gymnastics hero.)
Still, there’s no denying that Biles—who recently wore an actual bedazzled goat head on the back of her leotard in a training session—remains the greatest of all time. Yes, it’s been established that she is eons better than all of the women and most of the men in the world of elite gymnastics. But what casual fans may not realize is that her greatness goes beyond her medal count and margins of victory. Biles has pushed the sport to places where it’s never dared go, and even after she retires, there will be no unringing that particular bell.
Brandon Payne is haunted by his past, and Stephen Curry is paying for it.
While the six-time NBA All-Star and two-time league MVP makes splashing buckets look oh so easy, it’s Curry’s longtime trainer — and his unwavering attention to detail — who continues to have the biggest impact on Curry’s free-flowing game. And now he’s shaping the next generation of transcendent guards.
“Some days I don’t wanna come to the gym and give it 110 percent,” admits Curry, who has worked with Payne since 2011. But “can you push yourself — when you don’t wanna work and you don’t wanna grind — and know that it’s gonna pay off in the long run?”
Facilitating proper recovery after training sessions is essential to improve the athlete’s performance, as it allows us to shorten rest times between sessions and increase workload in subsequent sessions. There are several strategies to accelerate recovery, ranging from nutritional strategies (for example, taking supplements) to physical strategies such as massages, active recovery or applying cold therapy. The latter of these strategies is, in fact, one of the most popular nowadays in team sports, and it is common to see top-level athletes submerged in ice baths following a game or an intense training session.
Pros and cons of the application of cold post-exercise
… Bill Johnson tried taking a break. The 46-year-old sales director from Marion, Iowa, stopped using social media for 30 days, and it was eye-opening: Johnson read books, tackled his to-do list and discovered a knack for cooking.
But then he slowly re-introduced social media in his life, “and guess what? I started spending too much time on it again.”
Johnson’s giving social media abstinence another shot – this time for 90 days.
Aditya Rao has also found it hard to kick the habit: “I gave up completely on smartphones, and the experience for me was tougher than quitting cigarettes.”
Is it possible to unplug from the Matrix? And really, would you even want to?
The result of the 2016 US presidential election was, for many, a surprise lesson in social perception bias — peoples’ tendency to assume that others think as we do, and to underestimate the size and influence of a minority party.
Long documented in psychological literature, a panoply of social perception biases play out differently in different contexts. Many psychologists attribute the source of these biases to faulty cognitive processes like “wishful thinking” or “social projection,” but according to a study published August 12 in Nature Human Behaviour, the structure of our social networks might offer a simpler explanation.
“There’s a fundamental question about how people perceive their environment in an unequal society,” says co-lead author Eun Lee, a network scientist based at the University of North Carolina. “[These perception biases] show up [in a devastating way] around contentious issues like gun control and abortion, race, and the distribution of wealth.”
… If you’re one of the many people who wears a fitness band or smartwatch to count your steps, you may not be aware of one inescapable fact: they lie. Just because they tell you that you’ve reached your daily goal doesn’t mean that you actually took that many steps. The sad truth is that these devices can undercount or overcount the number of steps that you take in a day. In fact, your counts can differ widely depending on which brand you’re using.
Part of the reason is based on how they work. Today’s fitness bands use multiaxis inertial sensors called accelerometers to detect when the device is moving. Some also use gyroscopes to determine the direction and rotational movement. Because these sensors generate so much data that must be sifted through and interpreted by the device’s controller, results can often be misinterpreted and badly reported. In other words, what you see isn’t necessarily what you walked.
Norwich City players won’t be the only ones making their Premier League debuts tonight.
Los Angeles-based Second Spectrum, who describe themselves as the “world leader in building machines that understand sports”, also make a bow by providing the ball and tracking data.
The firm, which was founded in 2013, is starting a three-year deal with the Premier League to provide the data for all teams for all matches. They take over from ChyronHego, who had held the contract since 2013, dealing a major blow to their US rivals.
While studying for an MBA at the University of British Columbia, Dan Eisenhardt pitched an idea during class to bring augmented reality to swimming. A dozen years later, Eisenhardt is finally bringing that concept to market with the release of FORM swimming googles.
Eisenhardt swum competitively as a child growing up in Denmark, and won NJCAA All-American honors while swimming for Indian River State College in Florida as a freshman in the mid-1990s. Because looking at a stopwatch or a wearable tracker always meant stopping, he wanted to bring real-time metrics to swimming in a non-disruptive way.
His original project was a startup called Recon Instruments, but the concept pivoted to snow sports. Ski goggles were bulkier and didn’t need to be quite so waterproof, so packaging the electronics was easier. Recon’s first heads-up display product, Transcend, launched in 2010, pre-dating Google Glass by more than a year.
An Achilles tendon rupture can be a catastrophic injury, especially for a soccer athlete, but a recent online study which only reviewed internet reports titled, “Eighty-two percent of male professional football (soccer) players return to play at the previous level two seasons after Achilles tendon rupture treated with surgical repair, ” published online at the British Journal of Sports Medicine on July 29, 2019, suggests a more hopeful scenario for athletes who want to remain competitive after this type of injury. It should be noted that this was not a comprehensive study and more work needs to be done on this subject—particularly with respect to professional players who are incentivized to minimize their injuries.
For this study, the researchers identified through internet-based reports from January 2008 to August 2018 all the professional male soccer players who had sustained an Achilles tendon rupture and had it repaired surgically. Data was only collected on League 1 and League 2 players for which at least one year of follow-up data was available.
Mistrust of health care providers, fueled by painful experiences with racism, makes African American men more likely to delay routine screenings and doctor’s appointments, according to a new study in the journal Behavioral Medicine by the Health Disparities Institute (HDI) at UConn Health, with potentially serious implications for their overall health.
“Medical mistrust is significantly contributing to delays in African American men utilizing the health care system,” says Dr. Wizdom Powell, the study’s lead author, who is HDI director and associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UConn School of Medicine.
The new study reports that “medical mistrust” – defined as a suspicion or lack of trust in medical organizations – is associated with delays in African American men’s routine health visits, blood pressure, and cholesterol screenings. It also found that men who report experiencing frequent everyday racism had higher odds of delaying screenings and routine health care visits. Also, those who perceived racism in health care had more medical mistrust with significantly reduced rates of preventive health care utilization.
The midbrain is biomechanically susceptible to force loading from repetitive subconcussive head impacts (RSHI), is a site of tauopathy in chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and regulates functions (e.g., eye movements) often disrupted in concussion. In a prospective longitudinal design, we demonstrate there are reductions in midbrain white matter integrity due to a single season of collegiate football, and that the amount of reduction in midbrain white matter integrity is related to the amount of rotational acceleration to which players’ brains are exposed. We then replicate the observation of reduced midbrain white matter integrity in a retrospective cohort of individuals with frank concussion, and further show that variance in white matter integrity is correlated with levels of serum-based tau, a marker of blood-brain barrier disruption. These findings mean that noninvasive structural MRI of the midbrain is a succinct index of both clinically silent white matter injury as well as frank concussion. [full text]
The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA), Peter Harriman from
… “Terry distinguished herself by getting to know every member of the (athletics board) by name, interest and skill set,” said Sheila McGuirk, Wisconsin’s former athletics faculty representative. “In a time when the student side of athletics was believed to be overlooked, neglected or forgotten, Terry earned trust from all members of the board by being consistent, authentic, dedicated, extremely capable and deeply connected across all sports.”
Her background may have shaped this fundamentally personal approach to college athletics. Gawlik was among the first generation of women to benefit from Title IX.
“The next step is, we have to sell one of them,” Philadelphia Union coach Jim Curtin told Yahoo! Sports’ Doug McIntyre, referring to his young Homegrown Players. “Of course we want to win first, but to sell one of our guys, we still haven’t done that as a club. You flip a guy for a couple million bucks, then maybe you can invest in a [Designated Player].”
This quote, to me, is the most important event in Major League Soccer right now. It’s the start of the future, the first admission of what’s to come. We are in the middle of an inflection point in league history.
Curtin went on to add, “If we can get this pipeline going and there is a steady flow of good young players going out for good fees and the money is invested back into our academy and into our first team, I think that’s a sustainable model.”
Underpowered studies make it very difficult to learn something useful from the studies you perform. Low power means you have a high probability of finding non-significant results, even when there is a true effect. Hypothesis tests which high rates of false negatives (concluding there is nothing, when there is something) become a malfunctioning tool. Low power is even more problematic combined with publication bias (shiny app). After repeated warnings over at least half a century, high quality journals are starting to ask authors who rely on hypothesis tests to provide a sample size justification based on statistical power.
The first time researchers use power analysis software, they typically think they are making a mistake, because the sample sizes required to achieve high power for hypothesized effects are much larger than the sample sizes they collected in the past. After double checking their calculations, and realizing the numbers are correct, a common response is that there is no way they are able to collect this number of observations.
Published articles on power analysis rarely tell researchers what they should do if they are hired on a 4 year PhD project where the norm is to perform between 4 to 10 studies that can cost at most 1000 euro each, learn about power analysis, and realize there is absolutely no way they will have the time and resources to perform high-powered studies, given that an effect size estimate from an unbiased registered report suggests the effect they are examining is half as large as they were led to believe based on a published meta-analysis from 2010. Facing a job market that under the best circumstances is a nontransparent marathon for uncertainty-fetishists, the prospect of high quality journals rejecting your work due to a lack of a solid sample size justification is not pleasant.
The reason that published articles do not guide you towards practical solutions for a lack of resources, is that there are no solutions for a lack of resources.