… “I think each goalkeeper has their own little detection triggers,” [Brad] Friedel told ESPN. “If you’re looking at the shooter’s eyes, that’s something you should never do. Generally speaking, if you can look from the waist down, the way that the hips will generally face is the way that the ball is going to go. Now you have really good players that can change at the last split second, but the other way to detect is looking where the plant foot goes.”
These days, it’s not unusual to see players — like Orlando City’s Nani at times — take an almost painfully slow run-up to the ball in a bid to get the keeper to commit early, but Friedel argues that the extra time actually allows a goalkeeper to take in more information.
“You have such a small reaction window to it,” he said. “The slower they ran up, they more they exaggerated their planting foot and it gave me more time to see which way it was going to go.
… I was a late bloomer so I didn’t get into football until I was 12. I grew up playing Aussie rules but my mum and dad stopped me from playing after I started coming home with black eyes and a bloodied face. My cousin was playing football so I thought I’d try it – and I hated every second of it.
It wasn’t until I was 15 and I got identified by the national team that I realised I was pretty good and could go somewhere. Up until that point I had just been playing with boys.
Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores comments on sports science under COVID-19 during a virtual media press conference after practice at Baptist Health Training Facility at Nova Southeastern University on Thursday, December 3, 2020. [video, 2:56]
… Alexandra DeJong, a graduate kinesiology student in the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development, has been studying runners through wearable sensor research and data collection since 2017, as part of her work as a research assistant within the Exercise & Sport Injury Laboratory under the supervision of kinesiology faculty member and lab co-director Jay Hertel.
We talked to DeJong about what she’s learned through her studies, especially concerning injury prevention, what insights she has on how to benefit from this free form of exercise, and what other factors contribute to becoming a strong, injury-free runner.
We became aware that the study described in this blog might not see the light of day for various reasons. Due to its novelty (world class athletes, field-based testing, etc.), we invited Marco to publish his data here on our HIIT Science Blog and in SPSR, as it reveals a practical and convenient way to monitor individual athlete adaptation to altitude training. We also believe that Marco’s findings may prove to have a link with those described in the last two blogs. Regardless, we hope the work inspires researchers to dig further into this area and address the limitations to the research Marco identifies.
When it comes to football, it is surprising to see how a team is able to win a football match against a stronger opponent. At times, viewers get to predict the score of the match by observing team players (their capabilities and strength). Wouldn’t it be interesting to build an automated machine learning model that is able to track team players on the pitch, such that we could predict the next move of a player?
To further demonstrate this, let’s take a bite into how we can intuitively apply computer vision techniques like object detection/tracking to monitor team players right on the football pitch.
A portable & lightweight camera affordable for academy & amateur teams. Producing entire match & statistics: match data, heat maps, just like elite clubs!
Soccer ball
Softening of thermoelectric generators facilitates conformal contact with arbitrary-shaped heat sources, which offers an opportunity to realize self-powered wearable applications. However, existing wearable thermoelectric devices inevitably exhibit reduced thermoelectric conversion efficiency due to the parasitic heat loss in high-thermal-impedance polymer substrates and poor thermal contact arising from rigid interconnects. Here, we propose compliant thermoelectric generators with intrinsically stretchable interconnects and soft heat conductors that achieve high thermoelectric performance and unprecedented conformability simultaneously. The silver-nanowire-based soft electrodes interconnect bismuth-telluride-based thermoelectric legs, effectively absorbing strain energy, which allows our thermoelectric generators to conform perfectly to curved surfaces. Metal particles magnetically self-assembled in elastomeric substrates form soft heat conductors that significantly enhance the heat transfer to the thermoelectric legs, thereby maximizing energy conversion efficiency on three-dimensional heat sources. Moreover, automated additive manufacturing paves the way for realizing self-powered wearable applications comprising hundreds of thermoelectric legs with high customizability under ambient conditions. [full text]
Pohang University of Science and Technology (Korea), Research Highlights from
POSTECH-Stanford joint research team develops multimodal ion-electronic skin that distinguishes temperature from mechanical stimuli.
– This skin can detect various movements and is applicable in fields including humanoid skin and temperature sensors.
Doc Rivers has yet to coach a game for the Philadelphia 76ers, but that hasn’t stopped him from worrying about how the NBA will finish the 2020-21 season amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“Man, I tell you I’m very concerned if we can pull this off,” Rivers said Tuesday as Philadelphia opened training camp. “Just watching football, in college you have Ohio State missing games, Pittsburgh and Baltimore can’t even play a game (in the NFL), they can’t get to it, hopefully they play Wednesday now.
“The difference in football is they play once a week. They have 1,000 players, so when you miss three or four players, you can still get away with it. If we miss three or four players, we’re in trouble, especially with the amount of games [we play]. We’re playing three to four games a week. So if one of our guys, or two of our key guys, get the virus and they miss 10 days to 14 days, that can be eight games. In a 72-game season, that can knock you out of the playoffs.
… While there’s decent evidence that most runners can go faster in certain types of shoes, there’s much less certainty on the relationship between running shoes and injury. Below is a summary of what we know about whether shoes cause or prevent injury.
Major League Baseball’s number of drug tests dropped sharply during the novel coronavirus pandemic.
There were 3,733 urine samples and 412 blood samples for human growth hormone testing collected during the year ending with the World Series, independent program administrator Thomas M. Martin said in his annual report Tuesday. That was down from 9,332 urine samples and 2,287 blood samples in the year ending with the 2019 World Series.
“The lower testing numbers were a result of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the extended closure of the WADA-accredited anti-doping laboratory in Montreal,” Martin wrote.
… “A lot of the perception that has been out there says departments make so much money that they pay for themselves,” said Nick Schlereth, a sport management professor at Coastal Carolina University who studies finances in college athletics. “It’s a common thing I hear from my students. It’s actually wrong.”
Still, those larger institutions with wealthier athletic departments have security blankets of which smaller schools can only dream, none of which is more important than the annual payouts from conferences that are boosted primarily by television contracts. During the 2018-19 fiscal year, Pitt received $29.12 million from the Atlantic Coast Conference while Penn State and its Big Ten brethren got about $55.6 million each. Schlereth noted that since football games are being played, even though the number of them has been reduced, he doesn’t believe the value of those television contracts will change too much.
… What Has the NBA Done to Minimize the Negative Effects on Players?
It appears that the NBA has worked closely with the NBA Players Association to ensure the health of players is at the forefront of any scheduling decisions. Although players have reduced off-season recovery time, they are required to play 12% fewer regular season games. The NBA is also contemplating organizing the schedule such that teams would have less travel, with back-to-back games in the same cities against the same opponent. In addition, although the traditional All Star break remains, no All Star game will be played, meaning that the best players who regularly play the most minutes and Finals series (e.g. LeBron James) will have some additional mid-season rest.
Wastewater tests are a window into the amount of virus in a community, while preserving citizens’ anonymity. Consensus is that spikes in virus counts in wastewater are a 7-10 day advance indicator that precedes a spike in known COVID cases. The lead time has been used to tamp down future spikes. The first time was this past August at University of Arizona.
Burlington, like many U.S. municipalities, received word that a wastewater spike recently occurred. I’ll take extra care as I move through my day, and I’ll stay attentive my local news.
I pay attention to lots of technical fields and one that rarely makes it into this newsletter is insurance. It caught my attention when Google’s parent company, Alphabet, purchased a large ($95 million) catastrophe bond, primarily directed at earthquake protection.
Ten years ago I lived in California and felt the earthquakes underfoot. It was also the time of Governor Schwarzenegger and a completely dysfunctional state government. There was no real safety net for anyone middle- or low-income, like me, in the case of large-scale disaster.
The list of potential California catastrophes went far beyond earthquakes. There were fires, floods, levee breaches, terror attacks, blackouts and pandemics. And they weren’t mutually exclusive, so any response to fires compromised the response to any other disaster that in the absolutely worst case could cascade into something approaching Armageddon. I left California soon after the realization.
Stay safe out there. Stay aware. Protect yourself and others. And thank you for reading.
-Brad