… One year from now, for all we know the coronavirus might be well under control via vaccine or improved treatment. But there likely won’t be a salve to cure the itch for talented players to skip their junior seasons. And where there are talented prospects with little to prove, agents will be in tow.
“It’s already happening,” said a veteran agent with nearly 20 years in the business. “Look, I don’t know [Penn State linebacker] Micah Parsons, but it’s my personal belief that Parsons left school because he could leave school and still be a top-10 pick.
“Now that’s two [top-10 picks] who have opted out, with Chase, and I guarantee it carries over to next year. And pretty soon, that bar will drop; we’ll be seeing players opting out who are viewed as first-rounders, or the top-50 guys. I don’t know how they’ll prevent it.”
In Marcelo Bielsa’s first year as Leeds coach, the Yorkshire side almost ended their stint in the wilderness. As they finally seal their return to the Premier League, we revisit how the Argentinian coach ended up in the north of England
… Barcelona have to change their way of thinking,” he said. “Football has evolved a lot, the DNA is being left behind, other teams are improving in other ways. Football is now more physical, it’s about more strength and speed, and technique sometimes becomes less important.
“In the end you pay the price when you face an organised team, a team that has a winning mentality, with players who prepare themselves physically, and who have a strong playing system. That ends up costing you when you’re weak mentally and in terms of energy. That’s what happened.”
Vidal also criticised Barca’s recent squad planning and transfer strategy, after sporting director Eric Abidal resigned earlier this month to be replaced by Ramon Planes.
… The incident that changed everything for the worse was Valverde’s sacking and Quique Setien arriving. Messi did not like that change because he was not even consulted.
Quique started badly in the dressing room. While Valverde got on with everyone, nobody liked Quique, says a dressing room source. “Disrespectful”, “humiliating”, “he showed us even how to control a ball”. Even the most tranquil players – Riqui Puig, Ronald Araujo, had big rows with Setien. Quique’s assistant Eder Sarabia did not help and nor did the fact the goalkeeper coach was stripped of his duties.
Messi, Suarez and others turned their backs. Some of them did not even attend the talks that the coach gave before games. They didn’t even make excuses, they just didn’t come.
SB Nation, Bavarian Football Works blog, Schnitzel01 from
Is it super soldier serum? Is it the “dessert before dinner” regime? Is it Süle’s 10 burgers a day cheat? Whatever the formula, Bayern players are looking more bulked up than ever before.
… Track and field, like many other Olympic sports, lost its primary showcase with the postponement of this year’s Tokyo Games. But for many athletes, that wasn’t the worst of it. The annual international circuit for dozens of sports also were disrupted, with travel restricted and meets and competitions delayed or canceled. Some athletes, their motivation sagging, decided to throw in the towel and resume serious training again in the fall in preparation for the Games next summer, if they happen.
But not everyone.
On July 18, after driving 10 hours to compete in one of the rare track meets held this summer, [Ryan] Crouser unleashed the best throw of his life — 75 feet 2 inches, or 22.91 meters — which tied for the fourth-best throw of all time.
With a surname that evokes feelings of reverence from Oregon fans and a scoring resume that leaves soccer fans in awe, newest Duck Callan Harrington knows all eyes will be on her when her first college season finally begins.
For now, however, the freshman is just trying to navigate her new life on a new team in a new, independent living environment.
It hasn’t been without its challenges.
“I have to make my own meals now,” Harrington said with a laugh.
It’s been a whirlwind summer for Harrington, who asked to be released from her commitment to Washington in early June and weeks later signed with Oregon. She arrived in Eugene at the end of July, bringing with her the heightened expectations associated with being the most decorated high school player in Oregon history.
… “Nutrition is absolutely important for coping with stress and supporting your mood, but there’s no single food that’s going to do it all,” says integrative medicine doctor Yufang Lin, MD. “You have to look at the whole lifestyle picture.”
Taking everything like that into account is more important than ever right now as we deal not just with the stress from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but the emotional ups and downs that come with it.
Here’s her big-picture advice for keeping cortisol — and the rest of your body and mind — in balance.
This week, Amazon launched a new wearable device and service, while Fitbit tweaked its product offering to include the Sense, a device designed to offer health monitoring as opposed to simple activity tracking. The launch of both devices has me wondering whether this is an inflection point for wearables, one that will allow them to become the first and most personal link in our health care delivery system. Conversely, I’m wondering if they will fail to make the leap and instead remain a fad for those focused on their health and wellness.
In short, will COVID-19 do for our health interactions what Amazon’s Alexa did for our control of connected smart home products? In five years, are we going to look back at the delivery of health care and see that it started with an earbud, a smartwatch, or a wrist strap? This is the future that Amazon and Fitbit are betting on with their new products, and the future that Apple, Samsung, and others are hoping to make real.
There are three trends here, and only one of them has to do with the pandemic. The first is a new focus on wellness and preventative health. The second is a focus on personalization that’s rooted in individual health data and decisions. And the third is a change in the delivery of health care that has been a long time in the making, but thanks to COVID-19 is rapidly occurring.
Syracuse University, The Daily Orange student newspaper, Danny Emerman from
After spending much of the summer in a safe, contained environment on campus, many Syracuse football players are worried.
Early in training camp, they sat out multiple practices to address health concerns associated with playing this season. Chief among them was the idea of traveling to campuses where COVID-19 is more prevalent than in central New York and where it’s unclear how well their opponents are protected and handling the virus.
On Aug. 13, defensive lineman Josh Black said it’s the “biggest concern.” Defensive back Trill Williams didn’t rule out potentially sitting out a game if the Orange felt their opponent’s protocol was insufficient.
The University of Iowa shut down its athletes from workouts Monday following the latest COVID-19 testing. Training will be paused through at least Sept. 7, according to a press release.
Iowa conducted 815 COVID-19 tests in the athletic department for the week of Aug. 24-30 with 93 positive tests and 722 negative tests being received. A total of 176 positive tests and 2,560 negative tests with one inconclusive test have come back since testing began on May 29.
arXiv, Computer Science > Computers and Society; Jina Suh, Eric Horvitz, Ryen W. White, Tim Althoff from
Most work to date on mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic is focused urgently on biomedicine and epidemiology. However, pandemic-related policy decisions cannot be made on health information alone but need to take into account the broader impacts on people and their needs. Quantifying human needs across the population is challenging as it requires high geo-temporal granularity, high coverage across the population, and appropriate adjustment for seasonal and other external effects. Here, we propose a computational framework, based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that can characterize a holistic view of relative changes in needs following the pandemic through a difference-in-differences approach that corrects for seasonality and query volume variations. We apply this framework to characterize changes in human needs across physiological, socioeconomic, and psychological realms in the US, based on more than 35 billion search interactions spanning over 36,000 ZIP codes over a period of 14 months. Our analyses reveal that the expression of basic human needs has increased exponentially while higher-level aspirations declined during the pandemic in comparison to the pre-pandemic period. In exploring the timing and variations in statewide policies, we find that the duration of shelter-in-place mandates significantly influenced social and emotional needs. We demonstrate that potential barriers to addressing critical needs such as support for unemployment and domestic violence can be identified through web search interactions. Our approach and results suggest that population-scale monitoring of shifts in human needs can inform policies and recovery efforts for current and anticipated needs.
Public health and safety would benefit from eliminating daylight saving time, according to a position statement from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
The AASM supports a switch to permanent standard time, explaining in the statement that standard time more closely aligns with the daily rhythms of the body’s internal clock. The position statement also cites evidence of increased risks of motor vehicle accidents, cardiovascular events, and mood disturbances following the annual “spring forward” to daylight saving time.
“Permanent, year-round standard time is the best choice to most closely match our circadian sleep-wake cycle,” said lead author Dr. M. Adeel Rishi, a pulmonology, sleep medicine and critical care specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and vice chair of the AASM Public Safety Committee. “Daylight saving time results in more darkness in the morning and more light in the evening, disrupting the body’s natural rhythm.”
… Three-fifths of the Ray’s rotation now is on the IL, and the bullpen also has been hard hit. Despite the wave of health issues, the Rays are in first place in the AL East.
“It’s super weird,” starter Blake Snell said. “It stinks to see your teammates get hurt, especially because we count on our pitching so much. It definitely makes it harder, but it just lets you know the depth we have.”