Applied Sports Science newsletter – December 31, 2019

It speaks volumes about the magnitude of Friday night’s fright that a significant addition was made to the Toronto Maple Leafs’ usual pre-game preparations Saturday.

Along with scanning their personalized iPads for a pre-scout on the evening’s opponent, the New York Rangers, and taping up fresh twigs and stretching out quadriceps, several Leafs also took time to get fitted for Kevlar arm sleeves — the type of protective accessory that might have prevented their injured teammate, Ilya Mikheyev, from suffering a lacerated tendon in his right wrist during a freak skate-blade accident in Newark. (Much like the way Kevlar socks might have limited the damage to Erik Karlsson’s Achilles in 2013.)

… Big things were expected of her, but the following year didn’t go to plan. She suffered niggling injuries and struggled to find form.

Exhausted and overwhelmed, after years on the road, she took a break from the game, retreating to the family’s Ipswich home to refresh her body and mind.

For fun, the talented athlete took up cricket and was snapped up by Brisbane Heat. She scored a stunning 63 runs in her second match.

… [Erling] Haaland can essentially pick whatever club he wants, so long as that club has the means to meet his fee. Up to this point, his career seems to have been pretty carefully managed. He stayed in Norway as a teenager, joining Molde (and then-manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer) in 2017, rather than going abroad. Then, he went to the Salzburg prospect-polishing machine rather than joining a top club right off the bat. And now he goes to one of the few clubs that’s capable of 1) paying big wages, 2) providing near-guaranteed playing time to a teenager, and 3) competing at the top of a top European league and in the latter stages of the Champions League. I find it strange that he didn’t just go to the flagship Red Bull club in Leipzig — his coach seemingly tried to grease the tracks for that one — but so much player movement in Europe is a shell game. The incentives are rarely strictly competitive, and the finances are purposefully opaque. Fun stuff.

There was a time when opting to play college tennis in the US was perceived as giving up on a professional career in the sport, recalls Tunisian Skander Mansouri, who captained Wake Forest to the NCAA team title last year.

But now, the college tennis route is becoming a lifeline for many promising Arab players with limited pathways to the pros back home.

Mansouri, a 24-year-old from Tunis, is enjoying an encouraging first full year on the professional circuit after graduating from North Carolina’s Wake Forest University with a degree in mathematical business in 2018. He recently hit a career-high ranking of 303 in the world after picking up six ITF titles within the last 12 months.

… While it would seem that the Development Academy would be a perfect avenue for club athletes to enhance their competition, it comes with a catch. To play for a Development Academy club, athletes must forego playing for their high school or their own clubs. This is dismaying to Westminster head varsity girls soccer coach, Clark Meyer.

“I went from possibly the best team I’ve ever coached to 2018 where, including rising freshman, I lost 11 players to DA and it completely remade our team complexion overnight,” said Meyer. “It’s something that I think players and parents are pretty unhappy with but they feel trapped in the system because they want to be seen, they want to play at the top level so they’re stuck with this.”

Some storied programs such as Michigan Hawks and Atlanta’s Concorde Fire found that the Development Academy wasn’t a right fit and returned to the ECNL. This has changed the way college programs recruit as collegiate recruiters are now forced to split resources between the two leagues to find the talent.

LSU Football makes its college football playoff debut Saturday after a renaissance season that saw them finish 13-0. They boast this season’s Heisman Trophy winner, quarterback Joe Burrow, who, thanks to a revamped offense this season, won at Alabama in this season’s signature game and capped off their perfect season with a rout of Georgia in the SEC Conference Championship game earlier this month. Oftentimes, though, big differences in performance result from decisions that get less attention. It may be that an unexpected technology partnership has also greatly aided the Tigers’ opportunity to advance to their first National Championship game since 2007.

It all began when the three co-founders of Perch reached out to LSU Football in a cold email to inquire if the SEC powerhouse might be interested in learning more about their product; a software-enabled gym hardware that uses machine learning to track an athlete’s movements during weightlifting and provide the user with instantaneous feedback. According to the WSJ, the email caught the attention of strength and conditioning coach Tommy Moffitt, who responded with a call to Jacob Rothman, Perch’s CEO, and Co-Founder. During their discussion, Rothman and his co-founders encouraged LSU to test their device, that collects data for “velocity-based training”, and, simply put, to bring data to LSU’s weightlifting efforts in order to make the sessions and sets as efficient as possible.

In a sleepy haze, reaching out and grabbing the coffee cup in front of you seems to happen on autopilot. But your caffeine-deprived brain is working hard. It’s collecting sensory information and other kinds of feedback – clues about where your arm is in space relative to the mug – and sending it to your motor cortex. Then, the motor cortex plans the upcoming movement and tells your muscles to make it happen.

New research in mice is examining the role of those feedback signals entering the motor cortex, untangling how and when they’re necessary to guide dexterous movements like grasping.

That’s been a big open question, says study coauthor Britton Sauerbrei, an associate at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus. Some neural circuits can generate rhythmic, patterned output without sustained input. Just as a single nudge from a rider can send a horse into a trot, these “central pattern generators” can help animals walk, swim, and fly without ongoing stimulation. But not the motor cortex, it turns out.

Standard economic indicators provide an incomplete picture of what we value both as individuals and as a society. Furthermore, canonical macroeconomic measures, such as GDP, do not account for non-market activities (e.g., cooking, childcare) that nevertheless impact well-being. Here, we introduce a computational tool that measures the subjective reward value of experiences (e.g., playing a musical instrument without errors). We go on to validate this tool with neural data, using fMRI to measure neural activity in subjects performing a reinforcement learning task that incorporated periodic ratings of subjective affective state. Learning performance determined level of payment (i.e., extrinsic reward). Crucially, the task also incorporated a skilled performance component (i.e., intrinsic reward) which did not influence payment. Both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards influenced affective dynamics, and their relative influence could be captured in our computational model. Individuals for whom intrinsic rewards had a greater influence on affective state than extrinsic rewards had greater ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity for intrinsic than extrinsic rewards. Thus, we show that computational modelling of affective dynamics can index the subjective value of intrinsic relative to extrinsic rewards, a ‘computational hedonometer’ that reflects both behavior and neural activity that quantifies the subjective reward value of experience. [full text]

In the last decade, scientists have made tremendous progress in understanding that groups of bacteria and viruses that naturally coexist throughout the human body play an important role in some vital functions like digestion, metabolism and even fighting off diseases. But understanding just how they do it remains a question.

Researchers from Drexel are hoping to help answer that question through a clever combination of high-throughput genetic sequencing and natural language processing computer algorithms. Their research, which was recently published in the journal PLOS ONE, reports a new method of analyzing the codes found in RNA that can delineate human microbial communities and reveal how they operate.

… Coming in 2020: we’re integrating data from wearable devices

The InsideTracker data science team is currently completing one of the biggest integrations in our history: wearable devices! We’re working with Fitbit users to get the most out of the data collected by their watches and provide unique insights and perspectives on things like sleep, activity, and resting heart rate. We already have more than 7,000 days and nights of data recorded by Fitbit and are using them to give actionable recommendations based on the analysis. Plus, we’re creating a weekly digest report so you can track your progress over time—just like your blood biomarkers.

… For many people, the preferred way to unwind after a long day is by plopping down on the couch, kicking up their feet and vegging out in front of the TV.

Unfortunately, this habit has the potential to lead to overeating and, eventually, weight gain.

“It’s fine to sometimes have a snack in front of the TV, but when it becomes a repeated pattern, or when eating and watching TV become cognitively linked, then it becomes an unhealthy pattern,” explains psychologist Susan Albers, PsyD.

This Perspective for Progress provides a synopsis for the potential of time-restricted eating (TRE) to rescue some of the deleterious effects on circadian biology induced by our modern-day lifestyle. We provide novel insights into the comparative and potential complementary effects of TRE and exercise training on metabolic health.

… As with any pricing strategy, price skimming has a specific environment it can be deployed most effectively in. That is why we’re seeing it used in the context of the price to attend an MLB game, which is an environment where a monopoly power has a short-term outlook on dealing with a customer base with largely inelastic demand. And while a typical price skimming strategy is deployed on a new product, it’s fair to argue that every season is a new version of an MLB team’s product.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s say there are just two types of fans/customers. There is a specific set of fans, we’ll call them high-end, that will pay almost any amount of money to sit behind home plate for their favorite team or spend money on season-ticket packages. Think of these fans like die-hard supporters that line up outside a business to wait for the newest release of their favorite video game or movie. Price largely doesn’t matter to them. There is another set of fans, low-end, that have a higher price sensitivity. Money is tight, so their budget for entertainment isn’t robust. These fans want to purchase tickets to attend a game but must wait until the price is dropped or a deal is given.

This concept is clearly more complicated than what I’ve outlined, but let’s see how price skimming has worked for MLB. We need to recall that Rob Arthur of Baseball Prospectus was able to show that rising cost of attendance (attendance + stuff inside stadium) has attributed to a significant portion of the overall attendance loss. The effects of price skimming would mean that top-line revenues aren’t hurt by this lower volume.

Design systems are fast becoming essential infrastructure for ensuring design quality and development efficiency at companies around the globe. But who, exactly, finds them most useful? And why?

Material Design teamed up with Clarity, a design systems conference, to explore and understand the evolving landscape of design systems. Through a community-wide survey and informal interviews, we built upon Figma’s 2018 analysis to dig into this year’s most pressing topics and surprising insights.

Our findings show shifts in the design systems community, emerging trends like the growing prevalence of in-house design systems, and the important role of design systems in promoting collaboration between designers and developers.