… A Giants-rooting colleague of mine said of Posey, “He’s perfect.” Last season, he was the closest thing to it — the best in the game in three areas of catcher defense.
Teammate Hunter Pence once said of Posey: “It’s hard to really quantify how special he is.”
Not anymore. Now we have the ability to measure his excellence thanks to the advanced stats that are now an accepted part of the game.
United States manager Bruce Arena said that while Borussia Dortmund deserves “a lot of the credit” for developing budding star Christian Pulisic, the U.S. player-development system deserves some plaudits as well.
Endurance sports are predicated on hope; indeed, it is practically the cornerstone of the mental aspects of sport. Hope that you can train. Hope that you stay injury-free. Hope that the weather cooperates. Hope that you can balance training with the rest of your responsibilities. Hope that you don’t get sick. Hope to overcome adversity. Phew, that is A LOT of hope.
There is limited research about hope and athletics, possibly due to the focus of sport psychology on “deficits and problems” within the athlete. C. R. Snyder, a preeminent researcher in the field of hope, defined hope within the context of goal-oriented behavior as having two parts: agency (goal-directed determination) and pathways (planning to meet goals). In this framework, pathways refers to the perceptions of being able to create “workable routes to the goal” and agency as the will to begin and continue along the pathway to the goal.
You influence your own health more than anyone else. Decisions you make every day about diet, exercise, taking medications (or not), and when to seek professional medical help matter much more, over the course of your lifetime, than anything a doctor or hospital does for you. Of course, other things matter, too — like where you live, and the genes you inherited. But considering how much attention (and money!) we put into health and healthcare, I don’t think we focus enough on helping people successfully adopt healthy behaviors, which can be a lot less expensive and painful than surgery, medications, illness, or even early death.
Athletes with most arrhythmias were traditionally advised against continuing to participate in sports, but for many athletes that has changed, and the decision should be made together through a discussion between physician and patient, an expert said at the American College of Cardiology Scientific Session.
“Until quite recently, there really was almost nothing to say to the athlete diagnosed with cardiac disease, and to even have a talk at the [American College of Cardiology] on talking to an athlete with cardiac disease is fairly radical,” Rachel Lampert, MD, FACC, professor of internal medicine (cardiology) at Yale School of Medicine, said in a TED-style talk.
… I walked with Lignelli-Dipple to her office. I was there to learn about learning: How do doctors learn to diagnose? And could machines learn to do it, too?
… Jonathan Oliver, a professor of kinesiology at Texas Christian University, and his colleagues are studying the school’s football team to measure neurofilament light (which is also sometimes rendered as “NF-L” and shall be referred to that way in this article to avoid confusion with the sports league.).
For a 2015 study, they took blood samples at specific periods and compared the results between starters, who could be expected to suffer the most damage, and non-starters. Samples were taken in the offseason, before any impacts, then right before two-a-day practices, right after two-a-days, and then every 14 to 21 days until the end of the season.
Oliver’s team found that “our non-starters remained flat throughout the season,” but the starters’ levels of NF-L showed a correlation with impacts, rising by the end of two-a-days, falling during the early portion of the season and “creeping back up” later in conference play. That pattern “is what you’d expect,” he said, “because they would get more playing time” as games became tougher and more meaningful.
… Over the last several years, Matt has been investigating the eating habits of professional endurance athletes around the world.
And his findings are powerful. World-Class runners in the United Sates, top swimmers in Australia, and champion triathletes in South Africa all have one thing in common: their diet.
There’s overwhelming evidence from around the world – and indeed, from every type of endurance sport – that the best runners in the world all eat the same way.
… Maurten looks to encapsulate, or compact, the sugar with a hydrogel. The drink converts to a hydrogel based on the acidity (pH) of the stomach. The hydrogel enables a smooth transportation of the drink through the stomach and to the intestine where the water, salt and carbohydrates are absorbed into the body. Hydrogels are produced from a combination of two ingredients: alginate (which is extracted from the cell walls of brown algae) and pectin (which is found in fruits). The ingredients are very simple and commonplace within the food industry. When the two ingredients meet under the right circumstances, they create a pH-sensitive hydrogel.
arXiv, Physics > Physics and Society; T. M. A. Fink, M. Reeves, R. Palma, R. S. Farr from
Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time; those that fail to do so fall behind their competitors and succumb to market and environmental change. Yet despite steady advances in our understanding of evolution, what drives innovation remains elusive. On the one hand, organizations invest heavily in systematic strategies to drive innovation. On the other, historical analysis and individual experience suggest that serendipity plays a significant role in the discovery process. To unify these two perspectives, we analyzed the mathematics of innovation as a search process for viable designs across a universe of building blocks. We then tested our insights using historical data from language, gastronomy and technology. By measuring the number of makeable designs as we acquire more components, we observed that the relative usefulness of different components is not fixed, but cross each other over time. When these crossovers are unanticipated, they appear to be the result of serendipity. But when we can predict crossovers ahead of time, they offer an opportunity to strategically increase the growth of our product space. Thus we find that the serendipitous and strategic visions of innovation can be viewed as different manifestations of the same thing: the changing importance of component building blocks over time.
Sometimes it’s hard to know what statistics are worthy of trust. But we shouldn’t count out stats altogether … instead, we should learn to look behind them. In this delightful, hilarious talk, data journalist Mona Chalabi shares handy tips to help question, interpret and truly understand what the numbers are saying.
As we approach the final stretch of the European season, an increasing number of teams have fewer major placings for which to compete. With that comes an opportunity for young players to make their league debut, and hopefully with it a positive impression for the following season.
It’s not unfair to suggest that these opportunities can often be the result of tokenism though; a manager making a nod to the club’s academy, but done so in the knowledge that these matches will have little bearing on the final league table.
The problem with this opportunistic approach to youth development is clearly reflected in the data; players who make their debut start in April or May tend to make about 40% fewer starts in the following season than those who debuted in August to December.
It was a classic local newspaper story from the mid-90s, joyfully regurgitated for the social media generation. “I’ve had enough Yorkshire puds, says United star Yeboah” ran the clipping from a 1996 copy of the Yorkshire Evening Post which did the rounds on Twitter last week, along with the story of how the Leeds striker’s unique bonus – two puddings per goal, plus one for each for his team-mates – had ended because “the Ghanaian hotshot’s goal-grabbing exploits have earned him so many puds he had to say ‘no more thanks’.”
I thought of that heartwarming tale while listening to the sports lawyer Ian Lynam, who has spent more than a decade acting for players and clubs on transfer deals and contracts, make a fascinating admission: that despite all the money that has flooded into the Premier League since then, most teams are getting their pay and bonus cultures wrong.
As Lynam explained in his talk to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, one top-six English club have a bizarre eight-page contract solely for individual bonuses – which involves eight algebraic equations taking in various performance metrics. “And eight is at least seven too many,” he quipped. “And no player understands it, which rather defeats the object.”
The Conversation, Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjurjo from
… The hot hand makes intuitive sense. For instance, you can probably recall a situation, in sports or otherwise, in which you felt like you had momentum on your side – your body was in sync, your mind was focused and you were in a confident mood. In these moments of flow success feels inevitable, and effortless.
However, if you go to the NCAA’s website, you’ll read that this intuition is incorrect – the hot hand does not exist. Belief in the hot hand is just a delusion that occurs because we as humans have a predisposition to see patterns in randomness; we see streakiness even though shooting data are essentially random. Indeed, this view has been held for the past 30 years among scientists who study judgment and decision-making. Even Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman affirmed this consensus: “The hot hand is a massive and widespread cognitive illusion.”
Nevertheless, recent work has uncovered critical flaws in the research which underlies this consensus. In fact, these flaws are sufficient to not only invalidate the most compelling evidence against the hot hand, but even to vindicate the belief in streakiness.