Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 7, 2015

The Mariners found their guy in Jerry Dipoto, and he found his guy in former catcher and Angels executive Scott Servais. The Phillies found their guy in that same Angels front office, hiring Dartmouth grad Matt Kentak. The Angels found in Billy Eppler their guy to replace those guys. The Brewers made fresh-faced Harvard man David Stearns their fresh-faced Harvard man.

And then these guys, and other guys, started hiring their guys: The Marlins chose Don Mattingly, the Padres chose Andy Green, the Nationals chose Bud Black—then lost him with a lowball offer so that now the Dodgers might choose him. And then, on Tuesday, a minor miracle: Washington chose Dusty Baker, the first move in months to suggest this isn’t all just a little bit of history repeating. Though it probably is.

After Servais’ Mariners press conference, much was made of the rapport between the new manager and the new GM, their previous collaboration, and the importance of speaking the same language. This is a crucial phrase, nearly as troubling in the figurative meaning as if it were literal. At the heart of the push for front office and managerial diversity is the desire to expand the range of common language.

Chapters about goal-setting in sports psychology texts frequently focus on the difference between process-oriented and outcome-oriented thinking. Teams and players can either emphasize only the end result and ignore the circumstances, or they can try to implement an approach that should net them wins in a more sustainable fashion.

That often means looking at indicators of success even when that success isn’t coming. For example, Portland Timbers coach Caleb Porter frequently mentions that his team led the league in shots, 486 in the regular season to the second-ranked New York Red Bulls’ 476, to illustrate that the attacking process had been building toward something more than the Timbers’ precarious standing would indicate.

“We’ve played aggressively this year,” he said after training on Tuesday. “No one lacked confidence or belief in the process or what we were doing, and I think that’s the big reason that at the end of the year, we got results.”

It is only early November and it is already Arsenal’s physical condition that feels likely to present the biggest obstacle to Premier League title challenge

Shuffling between relatives and foster homes, Lorenzo Mauldin IV used his surrogate family — advisers, coaches
and teachers — to defy expectations and end up in the N.F.L.

The first thing Edmonton Oilers fans should do: Step back from the ledge. Yeah, it stinks like a kettle of dead fish that Connor McDavid is injured. And as general manager Peter Chiarelli told a press conference: “We’re talking months.”

I’m here to tell you, Oilers fans, to buck up. Even if McDavid, who suffered a broken left clavicle Tuesday night against Philadelphia, is out for two months or more as Chiarelli suggested—and there’s reason to believe he could recover sooner—not all is lost for the franchise.

The All Blacks victory in todays World Cup Final (over a gallant & respectful Wallabies team) sparked a perusing of my Evernote “dossier” on the Kiwis, compiled over the last few years. This contains a number of articles, snippets and notes from all manner of sources, including a couple of conversations I’ve been fortunate to have with AB staff.

So many gold nuggets and pearls of wisdom are immediately evident – where to start?! I want to provide a couple of examples that relate to learning and the concept of everyone in an organisation being a learner.

When they compared which is worse, researchers found some striking effects on mood.

We’re a nation of unhealthy sleepers. Ten percent of us are insomniacs, many more wake up constantly throughout the night and a growing number are simply too enthralled with our smartphones to put them down and go to bed.

But what’s the worst kind of sleep for your health: the kind where you keep a normal bedtime but are constantly up every few hours, or the kind where you go to bed late and only get a few hours of shut-eye? Scientists might finally have an answer.

Eight-to-ten minutes of high-intensity interval training a day is not enough for kids to realize the full health benefits of being active, but it’s a start. That’s the message behind a new study published in the American Journal of Physiology.

“People must remember is that this Center for Disease Control (CDC) guideline is the recommended minimum amount of daily exercise,” says the study’s lead author, Dr. Bert Bond.

Running has a special place in Hopi culture, and the Hopi High School boys’ cross-country team is building on that heritage, with a chance at a 26th straight Arizona state title Saturday.

Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University and a leading researcher in the field of motivation, examines the mindsets people use to understand themselves, guide their behavior and affect their achievement.

Local entrepreneur Matt Ginsberg is trying his hand at yet another venture, which he said has financial backing from Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks.

This venture, called Sportstech LLC, is creating technology to predict the trajectory of a ball before it completes its flight.

Using a video camera, laptop computer and code that Ginsberg developed with his 21-year-old son, Navarre, the technology predicts what will happen in a sporting event about a half a second to a second before it happens, Ginsberg said.

Prior research has shown that footwear can enhance athletic performance. However, public information is not available on what basketball shoe properties should be selected to maximise movement performance. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to investigate the influence of basketball shoe mass, outsole traction, and forefoot bending stiffness on sprinting, jumping, and cutting performance. Each of these three basketball shoe properties was systematically varied by ±20% to produce three shoe conditions of varying mass, three conditions of varying traction, and three conditions of varying bending stiffness. Each shoe was tested by 20 recreational basketball players completing maximal effort sprints, vertical jumps, and a cutting drill. Outsole traction had the largest influence on performance, as the participants performed significantly worse in all tests when traction was decreased by 20% (p < 0.001), and performed significantly better in the cutting drill when traction was increased by 20% (p = 0.005). Forefoot bending stiffness had a moderate effect on sprint and cutting performance (p = 0.013 and p = 0.016 respectively) and shoe mass was found to have no effect on performance. Therefore, choosing a shoe with relatively high outsole traction and forefoot bending stiffness should be prioritised, and less concern should be focused on selecting the lightest shoe.

Many people think of Facebook as just the big blue app, or even as the website, but in recent years we’ve been building a family of apps and services that provide a wide range of ways for people to connect and share. From text to photos, through video and soon VR, the amount of information being generated in the world is only increasing. In fact, the amount of data we need to consider when we serve your News Feed has been growing by about 50 percent year over year — and from what I can tell, our waking hours aren’t keeping up with that growth rate. The best way I can think of to keep pace with this growth is to build intelligent systems that will help us sort through the deluge of content.

To tackle this, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) has been conducting ambitious research in areas like image recognition and natural language understanding. They’ve already published a series of groundbreaking papers in these areas, and today we’re announcing a few more milestones.

Humans have been bending electronics to our will for more than a century. Biology, on the other hand, has always been a little harder to tame. A new project from the MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group called BioLogic is exploring how we might gain a little more control over the biological side of things.

The investigation, led by Lining Yao of MIT, focuses on how we can grow actuators that control the interfaces around us instead of manufacturing them in a factory. In other words: Yao and her team want to use the natural behavior of certain microorganisms to power objects and interfaces, the same way a motor might.

It’s that time of year again – SIGGRAPH Asia 2015 is fast approaching. The conference will take place in Kobe, Japan on 2-5 November. Among the fantastic tech papers, presentations, courses, computer animation festival and other CG-related events is a special panel on pioneers. One of the panelists is augmented reality (AR) researcher Steven Feiner from Columbia University. At SIGGRAPH Asia, Feiner will be discussing human computer interaction and VR/AR tech – we caught up with the Professor to find out more.

fxg: When we hear about augmented reality today, what does that term mean to you as a researcher? What are some of the areas right now or recently that you’ve been looking at in AR?

Feiner: To most researchers in the field, augmented reality (AR) refers to interactively merging virtual information with our perception of the physical world, so that the virtual and real are geometrically aligned with each other. This can make it possible for important information that we wouldn’t normally be aware of, or that would require additional effort to obtain, to be immediately perceptible and tied into the exact context to which it relates. And, that can provide crucial advantages over the status quo in many domains. Although work on AR uses graphics to appeal to our sense of sight, AR can also involve sound, touch, smell, and taste.

Tendon Elastography & UTC – What does it really mean for the clinician? by Prof. Nick Webborn, Center for Sport & Exercise Science & Medicine, University of Brighton.

BACKGROUND:

The few studies that have assessed oral health in professional/elite football suggest poor oral health with minimal data on impact on performance. The aim of this research was to determine oral health in a representative sample of professional footballers in the UK and investigate possible determinants of oral health and self-reported impact on well-being, training and performance.
METHODS:

Clinical oral health examination of senior squad players using standard methods and outcomes carried out at club training facilities. Questionnaire data were also collected. 8 teams were included, 5 Premier League, 2 Championship and 1 League One.
RESULTS:

6 dentists examined 187 players who represented >90% of each senior squad. Oral health was poor: 37% players had active dental caries, 53% dental erosion and 5% moderate-severe irreversible periodontal disease. 45% were bothered by their oral health, 20% reported an impact on their quality of life and 7% on training or performance. Despite attendance for dental check-ups, oral health deteriorated with age.
CONCLUSIONS:

This is the first large, representative sample study in professional football. Oral health of professional footballers is poor, and this impacts on well-being and performance. Successful strategies to promote oral health within professional football are urgently needed, and research should investigate models based on best evidence for behaviour change and implementation science. Furthermore, this study provides strong evidence to support oral health screening within professional football.

As elite athletes are asked to cope with increasingly punishing schedules, sports scientists and medical staff are faced with the constant challenge of managing training load, monitoring physical performance, and achieving a high rate of athlete availability.

Injury prevention is currently a major talking point across a number of sports, with the quantity of injuries during the Rugby World Cup and the recent spate of ligament injuries in the English Premier League bringing the subject into the media spotlight. As clubs and organisations seek to protect their most valuable assets, their athletes, the implementation of effective athlete monitoring technologies is becoming an increasingly important part of the analysis process.

… After learning about Dorsett’s recent memory problems, [Jackie] Sherrill, 71, asked Dorsett, 61, to consider alternative medicine that might give both of them better lives after football. He invited Dorsett to try stem cell treatments that are not allowed in the USA — treatments they both received in Mexico last year and are planning to receive again this month.

The stem cells were extracted from their own stomach fat in Texas, before Celltex, a company in Houston, cultured and multiplied them with the help of a serum derived from cattle. The cells were then purified and injected back into them, about 200 million at a time, in Cancun.

nside the home Antoine Brooks hardly leaves these days, where balloons and get-well cards pile up on a table and the 160-pound Cane Corso can get around more easily than its owner, a debate raged over the risks of playing football again.

Though the traumatic injury that left Brooks relegated to the couch was just two weeks old, he tapped on the air cast surrounding his right leg and proclaimed himself, “Superman,” as if the ending was already written in a comic book and a return to the field was certain.

Antoine Brooks Sr. even joked his son was “more man of steel now,” with titanium plates and screws holding his broken ankle and wrist together. But Brooks’s grandfather, Charles, wasn’t so sure, not after reading articles on the Internet about the unpredictable recovery times associated with similar injuries.

… Nutrition fads come and go, and the popularity of red meat has catapulted from one extreme to another. Current dietary guidelines suggest a prudent intake of red meat, however not everyone follows these guidelines, with the recent jump onto the Paleo bandwagon keeping the grass-fed beef farmers in business. Regardless of the style of eating, when it comes to sports nutrition, red meat is a winner. We don’t always talk about meat as a food on it’s own, often you hear about the importance of nutrients like protein or specific minerals for athletes, but when we break it down, meat is amazingly rich in a range of nutrients.

You might not know it, but you may well be short of one, or several nutrients which are vital for your health and wellbeing. Whilst you might get adequate energy (kilojoules)through the foods you eat, the balance of foods you eat and your lifestyle may still mean that you are deficient or falling short of several nutrients. The result? You won’t be as healthy as you could be. While being low in iron and calcium are often discussed, there are other nutrients you might be short on too, here are some of them…

Injuries are the topic de jour again in the NFL. Everybody is talking about the carnage of last Sunday. Too bad nobody is talking about the potential source of the problem.

On Sunday NFL fields were littered with broken bodies of big-name players – Le’Veon Bell (knee), Matt Forte (knee), Steve Smith (Achilles tendon), Ricardo Lockette (concussion, neck), Calvin Johnson (ankle), Larry Donnell (neck).

The NFL has tried to curb injuries by tweaking the rules on the field, which has mostly served to confuse (and even endanger) defensive players. Meanwhile, the league tends to ignore something more insidious that could be the source of many injuries: PEDs – performance-enhancing drugs.

Behavioral Law and Economics has created a dilemma for policymakers. On the one hand, research from the field suggests a wide range of unconventional policy instruments (“nudges”) may be used to shape people’s voluntary choices in order to lead them to the option they most prefer. On the other hand, the very nature of these new instruments precludes researchers from measuring people’s preferences in the traditional way, i.e., by evaluating which option people choose from the set of available choices. As a result, policymakers often lack the information they need to design nudges that will make people better off. To tackle this dilemma, I propose a new framework that focuses on the distinction between those decision makers who respond to nudges and those who do not. The framework highlights that existing methods for designing nudges come up short—none accounts for what I argue is the crucial piece of information: the preferences of the nudge-sensitive decisionmakers. After exploring this dilemma, the Essay describes two new approaches for uncovering the preferences of this group and argues that they hold promise for informing the design of nudges in a wide range of policy settings.

When the team nicknamed El Submarino Amarillo briefly took over the lead of the Spanish championship last month, it was Villarreal’s first taste of the top in its 92-year history. Representing a town of 52,000 people, three years after being demoted to the second tier, here it was ahead of Real Madrid and Barcelona. Just weeks earlier, the team had turned over half of its roster.

Villarreal’s manager, Marcelino Garcia Toral, called it merely “an anecdote.” Like every soccer fan in the country, he knew it couldn’t last. Of course, he was right. With only the rarest exceptions, no one messes with Spain’s big two.

“Playing Madrid and Barca on a regular basis, sometimes it’s helpful,” said Marcelino, whose side now sits in a tie for fourth. “And sometimes it’s depressing.”

They call it the sweet spot – a typically Kiwi way of describing the workings of the All Blacks inner sanctum.

That sweet spot is effectively a control panel, where four gatekeepers pull the strings of this big black machine.

All told the All Blacks’ World Cup group is made up of 51 members – 31 players and 20 management personnel.

What if tweets by NBA players the day of the game could predict their performance on the court?

Yang Yu found a direct correlation during his data-driven analytics on the Twitter social media website. After tracking tweets by more than 200 NBA players during the past two years, he said there is a positive correlation between sentiment and sports performance.

“If players’ tweets on the day of the game are positive they are more likely to play better than if their comments on Twitter are negative,” said Yu.

November 1 marked the end of Major League Baseball in 2015, as NBA basketball launched its 2015-2016 regular season on October 27. If you’re following the games this year, you may want to watch for patterns predicted by recent SFI research. For example– if your NBA team’s up 18 points at the half, chances are pretty good they’re going to win. In fact, their lead is 90 percent safe. What’s more, if they blow such a comfortable lead, they’ll probably do it late in the fourth quarter.

Those are some of the findings of research by SFI Professor Sid Redner, External Professor Aaron Clauset (CU Boulder), and Boulder graduate student Marina Kogan. But the really incredible insight, Redner says, “is that apart from some technical details, basketball scoring conforms to a randomwalk process” – essentially, it’s a series of coin flips, with a few modifications to account for alternating possession and the teams’ relative strengths.

It’s a thin book. I was hoping to gain some real insights into both Moore and the Royals’ wildly surprising success over these last, oh, 15 months or so. I don’t know that I got those, but it does strike me that the Royals’ success, far more than some organizational commitment to speed and contact-hitting, might best be explained by patience. Or maybe “commitment” is the better word. But there’s definitely something to be said for patience and commitment, and maybe nothing’s ever said it better than the 2014 and ’15 Kansas City Royals.

Just look at the Royals’ core players this season; or rather, their core hitters.