The United States women’s national team has reignited parts of its dispute with US Soccer five months after the sides reached a momentous agreement to increase pay and improve standards. The recurring issue at hand is one that has incensed women’s players before, when a handful of stars — Americans included — sued over FIFA’s decision to host the 2015 World Cup in Canada on artificial turf fields.
The American women are facing the same dilemma on their own, with four of their final nine games of 2017 scheduled to be played on turf.
This study examined the effects of mental fatigue and additional corridor and pitch sector lines on players’ physical and tactical performances during soccer small-sided games. Twelve youth players performed four Gk+6vs6+Gk small-sided games. Prior to the game, one team performed a motor coordination task to induce mental fatigue, while the other one performed a control task. A repeated measures design allowed to compare players’ performances across four conditions: (a) with mental fatigue against opponents without mental fatigue in a normal pitch (MEN), (b) with mental fatigue on a pitch with additional reference lines (#MEN); (c) without mental fatigue against mentally fatigued opponents on a normal pitch (CTR); and (d) without mental fatigue on a pitch with reference lines (#CTR). Player’s physical performance was assessed by the distance covered per minute and the number of accelerations and decelerations (0.5–3.0 m/s2; > −3.0 m/s2). Positional data was used to determine individual (spatial exploration index, time synchronized in longitudinal and lateral directions) and team-related variables (length, width, speed of dispersion and contraction). Unclear effects were found for the physical activity measures in most of the conditions. There was a small decrease in time spent laterally synchronized and a moderate decrease in the contraction speed when MEN compared to the CTR. Also, there was a small decrease in the time spent longitudinally synchronized during the #MEN condition compared to MEN. The results showed that mental fatigue affects the ability to use environmental information and players’ positioning, while the additional reference lines may have enhanced the use of less relevant information to guide their actions during the #MEN condition. Overall, coaches could manipulate the mental fatigue and reference lines to induce variability and adaptation in young soccer players’ behavior. [full text]
Manchester United legends Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt and Phil Neville are behind plans for a new university designed to combine sport, education and wellbeing.
… Research dating back to the 1980s suggests that children can learn “grit” from their parents. But this is the first experiment to show that babies this young are already absorbing those lessons, says Irina Mokrova, a developmental scientist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill who was not involved in the new work.
The study took place in Boston’s Children’s Museum, where parents with babies were recruited on-site. Julia Leonard, a developmental psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, took an infant and its caregiver into a room equipped with toys, a booster seat, and video cameras that captured the baby’s behavior. Facing the seated infant, Leonard got the child’s attention by trying to pull a plastic frog out of a container sealed with a concealed flap. Next, she played with a keychain full of colorful keys that could be removed only by opening a metal lever.
A series of experiments at EPFL provide conclusive evidence that the brain uses a single mechanism (supramodality) to estimate confidence in different senses such as audition, touch, or vision.
LAVA Magazine, TrainingPeaks.com, Susan Grant Legacki from
Uphill Athlete’s founders Scott Johnston and Steve House have decades of legendary climbing experience between them that they now use to help mountaineers conquer the world’s highest peaks and most adventurous ascensions.
Since they began coaching they have developed a number of science-backed methodologies on the best strength and endurance training and nutrition regimens that have helped the world’s best climbers push themselves to limits once thought impossible.
Uphill Athlete’s endurance training plans help endurance athletes do everything from get base strength and fitness for the rock-alpinist season and mountain running to climbing some of the world’s most famous mountains and lengthiest high-altitude treks.
We sat down with Scott Johnston to discuss how they used a “low-intensity training plan” for climber David Göttler, including during his recent expedition to set a new route up the South face of the mountain Shishapangma.
A new system from a startup called Kytopen could jump-start advances in modifying bacteria, allowing researchers trying to create new drugs, fuels, or food to work much more quickly.
Diabetics could soon have an effective, non-invasive way to measure glucose levels during exercise, thanks to a patch designed by researchers at the State University of New York. The paper-based patch sticks directly onto the skin like a Band-Aid, and wicks sweat into a reservoir where it’s converted into electrical energy, powering a biosensor that monitors glucose without the need for external power.
It’s a significant development because glucose tracking traditionally relies on invasive measures, such as pricking a finger to draw blood or sensors under the skin, which then require additional kit to provide a reading. There are some devices that can monitor glucose non-invasively through sweat, but a recurring problem for these has been too much sweat rendering the kit unusable. Preventing hypoglycaemia during exercise, then, has been a big challenge, but the new patch could represent an effective and inexpensive means of overall diabetes management which, according to the researchers, “holds considerable promise.”
arXiv, Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Wenqian Liu, Octavia Camps, Mario Sznaier from
In this paper, we propose a pipeline for multi-target visual tracking under multi-camera system. For multi-camera system tracking problem, efficient data association across cameras, and at the same time, across frames becomes more important than single-camera system tracking. However, most of the multi-camera tracking algorithms emphasis on single camera across frame data association. Thus in our work, we model our tracking problem as a global graph, and adopt Generalized Maximum Multi Clique optimization problem as our core algorithm to take both across frame and across camera data correlation into account all together. Furthermore, in order to compute good similarity scores as the input of our graph model, we extract both appearance and dynamic motion similarities. For appearance feature, Local Maximal Occurrence Representation(LOMO) feature extraction algorithm for ReID is conducted. When it comes to capturing the dynamic information, we build Hankel matrix for each tracklet of target and apply rank estimation with Iterative Hankel Total Least Squares(IHTLS) algorithm to it. We evaluate our tracker on the challenging Terrace Sequences from EPFL CVLAB as well as recently published Duke MTMC dataset.
Building hardware is fun but tough. We worked on Pebble for a full four years before we launched on Kickstarter in 2012. We went on to sell over $230 million worth of Pebbles, or just over 2 million watches. While it wasn’t our top goal to sell to Fitbit last year, I’m grateful that they’re continuing to work on low-power, fun, hackable smartwatches.
Startups in general are like roller coasters; adding hardware to the mix just makes them even more stomach-churning. But if it’s so hard, why do it? The most rewarding feeling in the world is seeing someone out in public using a product that you helped make. If you’re working on hardware, especially consumer electronics, I hope you’ll get a chance to feel it. It makes it all worth it.
In my new role at Y Combinator, I’ve started mentoring and helping all kinds of startups. Naturally I get to chat with a lot of hardware companies. While each one’s situation is unique, I’ve noticed that some anecdotes about my experience at Pebble have been quite useful for 95% of hardware related projects.
… Wearable technology represents opportunity not only for the teams, but for the companies who sell it. Many teams break down their data for their own personal insights, effectively doing research on the companies’ behalf. The Clemson Data Analytics Team, for instance, is studying players’ on-field physiological data and sleep data in connection with each other.
“The more people you get across it, the greater the set of information you’re going to get,” said Ryan Warkins, Catapult’s director of business operations for North America.
But the very value of the data continues to disturb those who criticize its collection, particularly for college players, who are nonunionized and barred from receiving compensation beyond scholarships. Several critics objected last year when it was revealed that the University of Michigan’s contract with Nike opened the door to the collection and exploitation of players’ data.
Moreover, the devices themselves are not the surefire gauges of futurists’ dreams.
Orioles left-hander Zach Britton is getting a stem cell injection in his sore left knee Thursday that is all but certain to end his season, with just nine games left.
Britton said his exit MRI, which the team typically conducts during its final homestand as part of season-ending physicals, revealed the MCL strain that caused him to miss some time in late August and has been bothering him for three seasons to some degree “had gotten a little bit worse, so that’s why we’re taking the steps we are now.”
After months of early mornings and gruelling workouts, the 25,000 runners in next month’s Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon and its associated races will face one final hurdle before the gun fires: the lineup outside one of the 500 portable toilets deployed near the start.
For many, it will be an urgent mission. Researchers recently estimated that more than 65 per cent of marathoners and other endurance athletes “sometimes or often” experience gastrointestinal symptoms during exercise – and races are the worst of all, with a toxic combination of emotional stress and maximal effort.
The solution? A study published earlier this month suggests that a class of poorly digested carbohydrates collectively known as “FODMAPs” may be the underlying trigger for many athletes. But before anyone gets too excited about a potential new dietary fad, the researchers involved are hoping that runners heed some important caveats.
… A team will average 1.13 points per shot from 24 feet.
A team will only average 0.8 points per shot from 10 – 20 feet.
That’s approximately 50% more points per shot!… which kinda makes sense; this chart suggests that the two most efficient places to score are either either between 0 – 3 feet and 24 – 27 feet.
