… Rodgers’s ability to throw on the run is nothing new. Nor is his aptitude for clock-beating, game-winning drives. When the Cowboys gave the ball back to the Packers—leading by only three points with 73 seconds on the clock—even the home crowd could foresee what was about to happen next: The nine-play, 75-yard drive capped by Rodgers’s perfect touchdown pass to Davante Adams in the corner of the end zone. Up in the press box, team president Mark Murphy and GM Ted Thompson leapt to their feet as Adams came down with the ball.
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But the thing about a brilliant performance like the one Rodgers delivered is that it puts into context what teams on the other end of the standings are missing: A quarterback who can cure other ills around him. On that final drive, Rodgers didn’t have starting left tackle David Bakhtiari protecting his blindside (he was inactive for the game); and his No. 1 receiver, Jordy Nelson, was sidelined with an injury; and in the backfield, rookie Aaron Jones was making his first NFL start. But those end up being footnotes to the story, rather than major plot points. Case in point: after the game, right tackle Bryan Bulaga didn’t even know Nelson wasn’t playing on that final drive.
“You’ve gotta look at the past five years for this guy and the type of adversity he’s had to go through with no Jordy, the O-Line banged up, me getting hurt, [Randall] Cobb getting hurt,” Adams said. “He’s always gotta kinda just work through something. It’s never just beautiful; we never have all 11 out there healthy … he’s improvising and making it work, that’s what he does.”
… Pro Soccer Talk understands that Cameron, 32, held talks with Bruce Arena at the start of the international break where he was told he was not fit enough to play and Omar Gonzalez would be playing ahead of him. End of discussion.
With the pace of the National Basketball Association (NBA) becoming faster than ever within the last two or three years, physical demands on the league’s players have increased correspondingly.
Despite the heightened toll on their bodies however, players are also enjoying longer careers than before.
Almost a third of the 95 seasons played by a player 37 years or older while averaging at least 20 minutes a game have come in the last seven years, for example.
… “Back then, training for a goalkeeper was joining in with the rest of the team and having the strikers shoot at you all morning,” [Jimmy] Glass told ESPN FC. “You might have had one session a week with a goalkeeping coach if you were lucky, but it is so much better for keepers now.”
In a game now dominated by the search for the elusive “one percent gain” which can be the difference between success and failure, Bournemouth’s 11 goalkeepers — from youth-team to first-team — belong to one of a growing number of Premier League outfits, including Chelsea and Tottenham, who have adopted the Catapult G5 goalkeeper monitoring system: a GPS device worn between the shoulder blades in a mini-vest, which has been designed to provide the same kind of in-depth data for keepers that outfield players have had for over a decade.
NEW Manchester City Academy boss Jason Wilcox says challenging players will be more important than winning on his watch.
The 46-year-old, who took the role on an interim basis when Mark Allen left to become Director of Football at Rangers in June, has now been made permanent.
City have carried out research showing that 83% of players in the quarter-finals of the Champions League over the previous 10 years had played first-team football from the age of 17.
… American Girls details the social media habits of teenaged girls from all walks of life, and what it finds should force the technology industry into a serious bout of self reflection. In the past five or so years, teenagers have become the number one users of social media, and as Sales puts it, “You cannot talk about the the culture of social media, this place where girls are spending most of their time, without talking about the culture of Silicon Valley.” And as we’ve vividly learned over the past year, that culture is both disturbingly sexist and inarguably driven by the science of addiction.
So what happens when an entire generation gets hooked? That’s what Sales set out to discover. She interviewed hundreds of teenagers around the United States. Her conclusions: Social media has become a distorting force amplifying adolescents’ tendency toward social drama, highly sexualized behavior, and reckless decision making. Sales also theorizes on the longer term impacts of social media addiction: The erosion of empathy, a deepening inequality between genders, the loss of an “interior mind,” and rising depression and suicide rates amongst teens.
Royal Philips, a health technology company, has announced that PSV Eindhoven will be the first professional soccer club to use Philips Lumify for the diagnosis of injuries and the acute care of its players.
It currently takes around 12 hours before a definitive diagnosis of a player’s injury can be made, delaying the drafting of a treatment plan.
The Philips Lumify portable ultrasound device for tablets and smartphones, PSV’s medical staff can now make a first diagnosis of suspected injuries immediately, anytime anywhere.
Chief executive of World Olympians Association (WOA) asks athletes to be fitted with microchips in fight against doping.
Speaking to anti-doping leaders at a Westminster forum on integrity in sport on October 10, Chief executive of World Olympians Association (WOA), Mike Miller, stressed the need to fit athletes with microchips in order to succeed in the fight against doping in sport.
According to Miller, recent developments in technology will allow an implant to track people’s movements and detect performance-enhancing drugs in their systems. The benefit of microchipping, Miller said, lies in the fact that microchips are hard to manipulate.
Athletes have much to consider if they hope to operate at their highest potential. In addition to skill, an athlete’s ability to thrive in his/her field also depends on nutrition, recovery and collaboration among providers.
During a discussion at the Chicago Sports Summit hosted by Chicago-based Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush Oct. 4, industry leaders of varying expertise shared their take on what is driving advancements in the sports medicine field and what athletes should consider to perform at their peak ability.
As Arizona Coyotes general manager John Chayka took his place in the far left corner of the visiting press box at Staples Center, his age was not the only thing that set the 28-year-old apart from many of his contemporaries. Eschewing the coffee favored by most hockey folks, Chayka instead sipped a cup of mint tea and chased it with occasional gulps from a bottle of water mixed with a BioSteel nutritional supplement.
Chayka pointed out that the antioxidants in the tea and the nutrients in the supplement are more likely to help him stay healthy over the grind of an 82-game season than an artificial — and temporary — boost from caffeine.
“You can get worn down and get sick in this business,” Chayka said, explaining why he chooses to go healthier with his beverage choices.
For a long time, School of Interactive Computing (IC) Professor John Stasko was information visualization and visual analytics at Georgia Tech. After joining the faculty in 1989, he spent the better part of two decades as a one-man shop, teaching and leading research with just a handful of graduate students at a time.
Recent years, however, have seen a steep rise in interest in the field, and Georgia Tech has positioned itself as a national leader.
That leadership is again on display this week at IEEE VIS 2017 in Phoenix, Ariz., where Georgia Tech is presenting six conference papers, two journal articles, six workshop papers, and six posters across the multiple co-located conferences – Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), Information Visualization (InfoVis), and Scientific Visualization (SciVis), among others.
“Most universities have a vis person,” Stasko explained. “Maybe one. There are a few places that have more than that. With the faculty and resources we have now, I think we’re among the biggest presences out there. At the visualization conferences, people know about us. They know we’re a force.”
A recent McKinsey report found that while 84% of corporate executives think innovation is key to achieving growth objectives, only 6% are satisfied with the innovation performance of their firm. That’s quite a mismatch. It’s hard to imagine that a success rate that low would be tolerated in any other business function.
One reason for the paltry performance is that while other business areas, like sales or finance, are considered to be core functions, innovation is often considered to be something that’s “nice to have” rather than essential. Even if executives try to prioritize it, innovation often gets crowded out by more “urgent” short-term pressures.
Another pervasive reason is that senior executives are trained as operators, not innovators. And there’s a fundamental conflict between innovation and optimizing an existing operation. While the execution of a conventional strategy lends itself to linear progress and clear benchmarks, innovation often proceeds by S-curves, moving at a slow crawl until it explodes at an exponential rate. To close the gap, we need to treat innovation differently than we do normal operations.
