This afternoon I ran 20 times 200 metres, up a steep hill, at 75% of my limit. I dreaded doing it. But halfway through I began to relax and enjoy it, and when I finished I had an enormous sense of accomplishment. That’s why I run. Because the best things in life always start out hard and end up wonderf
On August 12th, the San Francisco 49ers made history by hiring Katie Sowers as their first female assistant coach.
Sowers started her coaching journey when she interned with the Atlanta Falcons last summer. During her internship, Sowers assisted Kyle Shanahan, who was then the offensive coordinator for the Falcons. She was part of the San Francisco 49ers’ Bill Walsh NFL Diversity Coaching Fellowship, during which she coached the 49ers’ wide-receivers.
LAVA Magazine, R. Simon Marshall and Lesley Paterson from
To master the art of doing, you need to create habits and routines in the brain that are relatively resistant to a whining Chimp and the paralysis-by-analysis ruminations of your Professor brain. For the routine to become automatic, we need to design it with such conscious and deliberate precision that it’s readymade to run on autopilot. Here are the step-by-step instructions.
Step 1: Learn the pattern, and crack the code
All habits follow very predictable and logical patterns. They are composed of a “neurological loop,” which is science-speak for a predictable pattern of events in the brain and body that runs on autopilot. The loop consists of three important elements: a trigger, a ritual, and a reward.8 If you want to break, modify, or build habits, you must first figure out which element is causing the most problem (it might be all three!).
The Utah Jazz announced today that the team has hired Mike Elliott as Vice President of Performance Health Care. Per team policy, terms of the agreement were not announced.
In this newly created role, Elliott will lead all of the Jazz’s medical and sports science efforts, including oversight of both the team’s training and strength-and-conditioning programs.
The time of two-a-day practices in preseason camp, under a blistering sun is long gone, and OSU coach Mike Gundy sees ample benefits in the changes.
Spending most of their time inside the Sherman Smith Training Center, with occasional trips to the outdoor practice fields, the Cowboy players are maintaining their weight better and staying sharper mentally.
“It’s clearly the better way. Science proves it,” Gundy said, comparing current practice methods to the old days. “We used to concern ourselves with whether it was hot enough or not, but dehydration, fluid loss and the soft tissue damage that comes with dehydration, those numbers were through the roof when you are out on the field for a hot practice.
“You start burning up and losing fluid and you can’t get it back in your body, much less the mental impact that the heat has on you.”
“Soccer is a game of transition,” says Bayer Leverkusen’s assistant coach Lars Kornetka. “There is a relationship between the time a team has the ball and goal rate – the longer they have it, the less chance they have of scoring.”
As Kornetka, who is also the club’s chief video analyst, shares a series of clips to demonstrate his point, he reveals that 60 to 70 per cent of all goals are scored in the transition phase.
This past week I had the privilege of joining ~30 or so people from around the country in Los Angeles to hear about the work Aetna and Apple have been doing as part of their partnership announced last Fall (Aetna to Transform Members’ Consumer Health Experience Using iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch) focusing on creating simple, intuitive and personalized solutions to transform the health and wellness experience for their employees and members. Aetna included their employees and have been challenging them to expand the use cases and maximize the experience for themselves and their colleagues as they test the concepts and “eat their own dog food” as the saying goes.
arXiv, Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Romain Brégier, Frédéric Devernay, Laetitia Leyrit, James Crowley from
The pose of a rigid object is usually regarded as a rigid transformation, described by a translation and a rotation. However, equating the pose space with the space of rigid transformations is in general abusive, as it does not account for objects with proper symmetries — which are common among man-made objects.In this article, we define pose as a distinguishable static state of an object, and equate a pose with a set of rigid transformations. Based solely on geometric considerations, we propose a frame-invariant metric on the space of possible poses, valid for any physical rigid object, and requiring no arbitrary tuning. This distance can be evaluated efficiently using a representation of poses within an Euclidean space of at most 12 dimensions depending on the object’s symmetries. This makes it possible to efficiently perform neighborhood queries such as radius searches or k-nearest neighbor searches within a large set of poses using off-the-shelf methods. Pose averaging considering this metric can similarly be performed easily, using a projection function from the Euclidean space onto the pose space. The practical value of those theoretical developments is illustrated with an application of pose estimation of instances of a 3D rigid object given an input depth map, via a Mean Shift procedure.
Proof that raising big bucks through crowdfunding doesn’t always guarantee that things always go to plan, BSX Athletics has been letting its backers know that its LVL hydration monitoring wearable is being delayed until at least summer 2018. That means it’ll ship a year later than planned.
The wrist-worn wearable that can monitor hydration as well as track fitness, heart rate and sleep quality raised over $1 million on Kickstarter last year making it one of the biggest wearable crowdfunding campaigns of 2016. It was expected to ship in June 2017, but in a message to backers the team revealed the delay and it appears that getting the tech into the form factor is part of the hold up.
Fitness trackers can be cumbersome and get in the way of proper training, often inciting athletes to go without one. But what if the fitness tracker was built into your apparel? DynaFeed is a smart garment technology that monitors your performance through your shirt —— bridging the digital and textile worlds.
A collaboration between Far Eastern New Century (FENC) and NeuroSky, a global leader in EEG and ECG technology, DynaFeed combines biosensor data with ultra-thin conductive carbon polymer film, offering a revolutionary interface between the body and digital devices. The organic polymer effectively measures the voltage of a heartbeat. DynaFeed provides for an accurate way to track training and measure performance directly from your body core to your device — making wristbands a thing of the past.
Researchers at Ohio State University developed a way to change cells inside the body from one type to another—with just one touch from a nanochip. This new technology, called “tissue nanotransfection,” could be used to repair and regenerate body tissues, including organs, in a way that is non-invasive and painless.
“When these things come out for the first time, it’s basically crossing the chasm from impossible to possible,” says Chandan Sen, co-leader of the study. “We have established feasibility.”
Previously, experiments with this sort of cell type conversion were done outside the body, in petri dishes. Even if cells from the test subject were removed from the body, converted in the lab, and then reinserted into the body, those new cells often incited an immune response and were rejected. Sen’s method is unique because the conversion takes place entirely inside the body, preventing an immune response. But working in the body can be complicated.
Toronto FC has found a unique way — at least in the world of Major League Soccer — to compensate local area youth clubs for developing players.
On May 25, TFC, in conjunction with Ontario Soccer, held what it called a scholarship night at its training facility. The event honored 15 area youth clubs that had seen a combined 27 players move to TFC’s academy program. During the event, those clubs received an unexpected gift: For every player sent TFC’s way, the club received $2,500 (CAN). One club walked away that night with $12,500 in its pocket, with TFC’s total outlay on the evening reaching $67,500.
“We didn’t know anything about [receiving money] in advance,” said one attendee, who asked not to be identified. “This happened out of the blue.”
… D.C. United recently paid a significant transfer fee for Arriola, a U.S. men’s national team winger who just had his best season as a professional at Tijuana in Liga MX. Initial reports put Arriola’s deal at $1 million in salary, which would have put him at a number few MLS-developed players reach. That kind of number would have highlighted a trend I’ve written about before, which is that players who come back to the league from overseas often have salary numbers that better reflect the global market.
The reported $1 million number was inaccurate, however, and so it would be unfair to use a comparison between Arriola and Portland’s Darlington Nagbe to make the point. The 22-year-old Arriola is going to make an average of $675,000 over the next three years, a number that is equal to some of the top skilled players in MLS, including Nagbe.
… This research is an application of Asset Pricing Theory–more specifically, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)–to assess the value of a major league baseball player. The use of this model allows the financial concepts of systematic risk and return to be practically applied towards the evaluation of a player’s worth, both to the success of his team and the financial health of his organization.
CAPM hypothetically represents the behavior of financial markets and often is used to estimate companies’ cost of equity capital. This model was first developed by financial economist William Sharpe and was published in his book, Portfolio Theory and Capital Markets, in 1970, just four years before George W. Scully’s “Pay and Performance in Major League Baseball” article was published.
The model is simple, as often the best models are, but it has many sophisticated and highly complex modifications. CAPM relies on several assumptions, including the assumption that all investments carry risk.
Like many sports in adolescence, junior hockey is organized by age groups. Typically, players born after December 31st are placed in the subsequent age cohort and as a result, will have an age advantage over those players born closer to the end of the year. While this relative age effect (RAE) has been well-established in junior hockey and other professional sports, the long-term impact of this phenomenon is not well understood. Using roster data on North American National Hockey League (NHL) players from the 2008–2009 season to the 2015–2016 season, we document a RAE reversal—players born in the last quarter of the year (October-December) score more and command higher salaries than those born in the first quarter of the year. This reversal is even more pronounced among the NHL “elite.” We find that among players in the 90th percentile of scoring, those born in the last quarter of the year score about 9 more points per season than those born in the first quarter. Likewise, elite players in the 90th percentile of salary who are born in the last quarter of the year earn 51% more pay than players born at the start of the year. Surprisingly, compared to players at the lower end of the performance distribution, the RAE reversal is about three to four times greater among elite players.