… After being sidelined the past two seasons, Pondexter is ready to make his comeback on opening night for the Chicago Bulls, who acquired him from the New Orleans Pelicans this summer. He is finally healthy after multiple surgical procedures — and major setbacks — on his left knee.
It’s been a longer journey than many people know about. While his knee problems have been public, Pondexter revealed to ESPN that his health issues were much grimmer. He was dealing with a life-threatening infection. He thought he was going to die.
… So while the career 36.5 percent 3-pointer shooter in five NBA seasons is focused on being a leader and contributing to the Bulls’ rebuild, he also simply is relishing the chance simply to sweat again.
“With all of the things I’ve been through, to be able to play for an organization like this, it’s a blessing man,” Pondexter said after Thursday’s practice. “This is a great group of guys who all want to learn and thrive and get better. I just want to do my part.”
Pondexter, who has been working out in Chicago since Labor Day, said his knee feels great.
On the U.S. men’s national team, nothing’s for certain…especially the World Cup. So why, from injury limbo in Germany, is Team USA’s most expensive, highest rated young superstar still oozing confidence? Because his American story is just getting started.
Halfway through his book, Matthew Walker comes out with an absolute belter of a graph. Between 1950 and the present, the US obesity rate rises in an exponential curve from 13 per cent of the population to something more like 35 per cent. Over the same period, the line denoting the amount of sleep an average American adult gets each night swoops down from nine hours to six and a half.
The result is a viciously hooked cross that resembles an arcane martial arts weapon. It looks alarming, but you have to ask: is it meaningful? Is sleep deprivation actually making us fat? Or is it just one of those odd flukes of statistics, like the link between sour cream consumption per capita and the number of motorbike riders who die in road accidents?
Walker, the Liverpudlian head of the sleep and neuroimaging lab at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks the correlation is no accident. His book, Why We Sleep, should really be subtitled 101 Horrible Things That Happen to Insomniacs. Readers will leave it with the distinct impression that for every hour of sleep they lose, they may as well have spent 90 minutes punching themselves in the face with a stick of cholera deep fried in loneliness.
… To get a better understanding of how exactly DI football players spend their time, we talked to NCSA head recruiting coach Zak Willis. Coach Willis has an impressive background as a grad assistant and tight end coach for University of South Carolina’s football team, assistant offensive line coach and recruiting intern at Michigan State, and special teams coordinator and recruiting teams coordinator at Miami of Ohio, not to mention his head coaching experience at various smaller colleges.
Jonas Sahratian’s job description is pretty simple: he teaches players how to do what they believe is impossible.
Every year Sahratian, Carolina’s strength and conditioning coordinator, is presented with a new crop of Tar Heels. This year’s group is particularly large; in addition to six freshmen, the roster also has a pair of transfers. And every year, Sahratian knows those newcomers’ limits are far beyond what they actually believe. His job, especially in the weeks before practice begins on Oct. 2, is to show them how to exceed their own expectations.
“Especially with the young guys, we have to teach them they can do more than they think they can,” Sahratian says. “They can push harder. They haven’t been taken to that place yet, and a couple of them have to be taken to the deep water to teach them how to swim.”
… “I look at coaching as being a teacher in any school. And that is, you create a curriculum, you create a progression of teaching. We do a lot of whole-part-whole where we’re throwing a lot at them, then breaking it down, then trying to get better at it. But ultimately it’s about bringing each individual up to speed on what they do best so that they can help us. And everybody needs to be taught a little bit differently. Everybody learns a little bit differently. And, you know, kind of balancing all that. So that’s why it’s dope.”
The cognitive-motor performance (CMP), defined here as the capacity to rapidly use sensory information and transfer it into efficient motor output, represents a major contributor to performance in almost all sports, including soccer. Here, we used a high-technology system (COGNIFOOT) which combines a visual environment simulator fully synchronized with a motion capture system. This system allowed us to measure objective real-time CMP parameters (passing accuracy/speed and response times) in a large turf-artificial grass playfield. Forty-six (46) young elite soccer players (including 2 female players) aged between 11 and 16 years who belonged to the same youth soccer academy were tested. Each player had to pass the ball as fast and as accurately as possible towards visual targets projected onto a large screen located 5.32 meters in front of him (a short pass situation). We observed a linear age-related increase in the CMP: the passing accuracy, speed and reactiveness of players improved by 4 centimeters, 2.3 km/h and 30 milliseconds per year of age, respectively. These data were converted into 5 point-scales and compared to the judgement of expert coaches, who also used a 5 point-scale to evaluate the same CMP parameters but based on their experience with the players during games and training. The objectively-measured age-related CMP changes were also observed in expert coaches’ judgments although these were more variable across coaches and age categories. This demonstrates that high-technology systems like COGNIFOOT can be used in complement to traditional approaches of talent identification and to objectively monitor the progress of soccer players throughout a cognitive-motor training cycle.
This smart mirror isn’t very smart,” says Jun Wang, standing in front of a full-length mirror wearing designer jeans ripped at the knees. “It’s just a camera and a mirror,” he says, looking mildly distressed—or as distressed as possible for a man whose face is perpetually unperturbed. “What I want is a mirror that does a 3-D scan of me here,” he says, using his hands to trace the contour of his thighs, “and here.” Wang indicates his belly, which is lean. “We want an exact 3-D figure of you: the fat, the muscle—your entire body shape, plus facial recognition, and what’s going on with your skin.” He points to the top right area of the mirror. “And I want readouts about my health up there, next to where I’m brushing my teeth—my weight, blood pressure, and heart rate, and how does that correlate with my DNA?”
This as-yet-unrealized smart mirror is just one of several gadgets that Wang, a 41-year-old biologist and computer scientist turned entrepreneur, says he is building. The devices will help gather, analyze, and display a crush of health data he wants to collect about himself—and, he hopes, from millions of others. This is why Wang cofounded iCarbonX (ICX), a highly ambitious, if quixotic, personal-health company based here in Shenzhen, in southern China.
ICX wants to capture more data about your body than has ever before been possible.
Billy Beane, the analytics-driven general manager of the budget-strapped Oakland A’s, shook up sports and corporate boardrooms by melding overlooked, under-valued players into oddball yet cheap and winning teams. As depicted in the book Moneyball , Beane enshrined a new job category in serious sports — director of analytics. But there is one big thing that it never accomplished: win Beane a championship.
Enter artificial intelligence: Some pro-sports teams are exploring how machine learning, the leading form of AI, might help where Moneyball has fallen short.
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Richard Zemel, an AI consultant for the Toronto Raptors, tells Axios that among things that could transform a season are forecasting an opposing team’s next play, or signaling whether, if you swap out one player for another, “we go on to win the championship.”
… Qualcomm Life President Rick Valencia told MobiHealthNews that perioperative care and therapeutic interventions have been frequently requested areas of need, so that institutions can track patients recovery both inside the hospital and after they’re discharged. Unfortunately, they tend to be costly which restricts their use.
“Generally speaking right now in the market, they’re relatively expensive. In some cases they need to be cleaned up and reused because they’re that expensive,” Valencia said. “And it ends up that most are being used in pilots, are being used in research, in relatively low volume. Whereas ultimately we think the industry is going to be using these full time and all the time for patients. So you’ll walk into the hospital you get a patch put on you, or after some sort of procedure they put a patch on you, send you home, capture information for a day to seven days, then you rip the thing off you and throw it away. In order to do that you need to design something very small, very unobtrusive, very inexpensive.”
For diabetics, the constant finger pricks to obtain a blood drop and measure its glucose level is an annoyance. But it’s essential, too. Out-of-whack blood sugar can be fatal.
That’s why engineers have tried for decades to create a noninvasive glucose sensor, but developing one has proved difficult. It’s just not feasible to accurately measure sugar levels through the skin.
So why not, instead, redesign a person’s body to do the measuring instead? That’s the bright idea that Xiaoyang Wu and colleagues at the University of Chicago’s Ben May Department for Cancer Research had.
… The decision to get into the radar sensor business is a calculated move based on TI’s internally developed technology. He said, “TI wouldn’t have gone into the market if they thought we wouldn’t dominate the market.”
Two factors favor TI radar chips, according to Wasson. First, TI has developed the smallest footprint CMOS sensor portfolio. Second, TI’s radar sensors offer “highly accurate stand-alone sensing with less than a 4-centimeter range resolution.” When it comes to precision, Wasson said, “Nobody comes close.”
… The effect of a single competitive elite youth football match on hamstring strength has demonstrated significant acute and transient strength reductions (Wollin et al., 2016). It is not known how hamstring strength and lower limb flexibility in youth football players respond to a competitive 2-match congested fixture over a 72-h follow up period. There is a need to establish youth players’ responses to competitive congested match periods on measurable intrinsic injury risk factors to inform the clinical reasoning and risk management process during these periods. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of playing two competitive football matches in three days on clinically relevant hamstring outcome measures (hamstring strength and associated pain, ankle dorsiflexion, hip extension, knee extension and flexion ROM). We hypothesised that hamstring strength would decrease after each match and that strength reductions might be greater and take longer to recover post-match 2. [full text]
The successful use of analytics in sports, both on the field and off, comes down to integrating analytics within an organization. Three strategies — collaborative analytics, a common language, and accessible technology — are key.