Eddie Jones, the England rugby coach, has already admitted that The Captain Class was one of his favourite summer reads and now Gareth Southgate has revealed that it will influence arguably his most important decision as England manager.
It could also mean that the expected coronation of Harry Kane as captain is far from certain and that Eric Dier will instead be chosen as Southgate’s on-field proxy.
If sitting is the new smoking and doctors advise striving for 10,000 steps a day, it seems obvious that, when given the choice, you should favor the stairs over an elevator, escalator, or tempting airport people-mover. But what if you’re a competitive athlete and you’ve already logged your 10,000 steps (or more) by 7 AM – or you have a goal race on the horizon and want to stay off your feet? Here’s what five Polar professional athletes have to say about the stairs vs. elevator debate.
… “By being forced, in a way, to step aside and play a different role [that weekend at RFK], it provided some necessary closure and gave me a taste of what that would look like as a former player,” Rolfe, 34, said in an emotional, hour-long telephone interview in which he explained his decision to retire.
“It felt like I was stepping into a different group now. It was more beneficial for me to be treated like one of the former players instead of pretending like everything is okay.”
It has not been okay since April 30, 2016, when a Chicago Fire player inadvertently elbowed him on the right side of the nose, causing a concussion that sidelined him for the remainder of the season and prevented him from returning this year.
… evel for as long as Meb did. What’s more amazing is that Meb was only a marathoner for the last half of his career.
I’ve broken down Meb’s career into six distinct phases, and each has one or more remarkable achievements. Here is a brief recap of each, along with a compilation of his major races.
Before every snap in practice, every snap in games, every snap in walk-throughs, the same thing happens. Quenton Nelson comes to the line of scrimmage, gathers himself for an instant before getting into a stance and extends his left fist. Two feet away, Mike McGlinchey extends his right fist.
The fists collide, and the two Notre Dame offensive linemen become one. They coalesce into a single, surging mass of power – a combined 650 pounds and more than 13 feet of synchronized, solar-eclipsing blocking prowess. They are the best part of the best line in college football, paving the way for a running game that leads the nation at 7.04 yards per carry. Running back Josh Adams deserves credit for making himself a prominent Heisman Trophy candidate, but so do the guys opening the holes – especially on the left side of the Notre Dame line.
The purpose of this study was to conduct a conceptual replication of the proposition that mental toughness is associated positively with behavioural perseverance. Design
Repeated-measures design. Methods
In total, 38 male Australian rules footballers took part in this study (age, 21 + 3 y; mass, 82.7 + 11.0 kg; height, 1.84 + .07 m; football experience, 13 + 4 y). Participants self-reported mental toughness approximately one week prior to their first testing session where we assessed their aerobic capacity via the measurement of peak oxygen consumption (Math EqO2peak). Approximately one week later, participants completed a 20 m shuttle run test (MST). The final testing session took place approximately one week later, where participants completed a simulated team game circuit (STGC; 60 min) to simulate game-relevant level of fatigue, which was followed immediately by a 20 m MST. Results
Mental toughness was a salient determinant of the variation in behavioural perseverance under typical circumstances, when prior knowledge from past research was incorporated directly into the estimation process. However, the positive association between mental toughness and behavioural perseverance did not generalise to a performance context in which participants were fatigued. Conclusions
The results of the current study suggest that mental toughness represents a salient psychological correlate of behavioural perseverance in a discrete physical task that taxes the aerobic energy system in some but not all situations. When fatigued, the effect of mental toughness is outweighed by greater underlying fitness.
Researchers have successfully incorporated washable, stretchable and breathable electronic circuits into fabric, opening up new possibilities for smart textiles and wearable electronics. The circuits were made with cheap, safe and environmentally friendly inks, and printed using conventional inkjet printing techniques.
AI-powered machines are now able to recognize images more accurately than human beings. This has prompted tech companies to explore the new field of video understanding, in which machines are trained to answer questions like “Who is in this video?” or “What are the cats in the video doing?”
In a session on video understanding at last week’s AI Frontiers Conference, Google Principal Scientist Rahul Sukthankar, Facebook Manager of Computer Vision Manohar Paluri, and Alibaba iDST (Institute of Data Science and Technologies) Chief Scientist Xiaofeng Ren all agreed that video understanding has an unfathomable potential if energized by AI.
Deep learning has certainly delivered better results than previous methods in video understanding research, said Sukthankar. Five years ago, multiple steps were required between input and output of training models, including manually designed descriptors and codebook histograms; now, deep learning offers end-to-end solutions by directly feeding data into the model. Deep-learned models can effect an 80% improvement in mean average precision over models using hand-crafted features.
Spectral images, which contain more color information than is obtainable with a typical camera, reveal characteristics of tissue and other biological samples that can’t be seen by the naked eye. A new smartphone-compatible device that is held like a pencil could make it practical to acquire spectral images of everyday objects and may eventually be used for point-of-care medical diagnosis in remote locations.
Potential applications of the new device include detecting oxygen saturation in a person’s blood, determining the freshness of meat in the grocery store and identifying fruit that is the perfect ripeness. The spectrometer could also make it easier to acquire spectral data in the field for scientific studies.
In The Optical Society (OSA) journal Biomedical Optics Express, the researchers describe how to make the new pencil-like spectrometer and demonstrate its ability to acquire spectral images of bananas, pork and a person’s hand. The new device can detect wavelengths from 400 to 676 nanometers at 186 spots simultaneously.
… Orthopedists have believed for years that torn tendons or ligaments put patients, no matter how young, at risk for arthritis. But quantifying the long-term risk has been difficult because most orthopedic patients are not studied for extended periods after their injuries.
Dr. Mininder Kocher, an orthopedics professor at Harvard Medical School, has reviewed the available data and determined that the chance of getting arthritis within a decade of tearing a tendon or a ligament in the knee is greater than 50 percent.
Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury is a considerable source of morbidity among athletes. Most ACL injuries (70%) are non-contact in nature, with women and patients aged between 15 and 30 years at particularly high risk.1,2 The vast majority of patients undergo surgical reconstruction, with annual costs associated with treatment and rehabilitation of ACL injuries estimated at $3 billion.
While the risk of primary ACL injury has been studied extensively, there is limited understanding of the risk factors for secondary ACL injuries, and how these are related to return-to-play (RTP) assessments. RTP decisions often do not rely on objective measures of function, but are instead based on the time since surgical intervention.3,4 However, many athletes have residual muscle imbalances, muscle weakness, and altered lower extremity mechanics at the time of RTP that may persist for up to two years following ACL reconstruction.5,6 With the current return to sport decision metrics, up to 29% of all ACL reconstruction patients will suffer a secondary tear.
Sports Medicine Research: In the Lab & In the Field, Nicole Cattano from
Take Home Message: Most athletes are NOT meeting accepted clinical cutoffs for strength and functional testing prior to returning to sport after an ACL reconstruction.
How are we affected by other peoples’ opinions? To answer this question, scientists[1] at the CNRS, Inra and Université Toulouse 1 Capitole conducted a study in France and Japan, quantifying this impact on our decisions. They identified five behaviors common to both countries: a majority of subjects make a compromise between their opinion and that of others (59% of people in France), some hold to their opinion (29% in France), whereas others follow faithfully, amplify or contradict the information they receive. The study also shows how social information can help a group collectively improve its performance and the precision of its estimates. From this analysis, a model has been developed that reproduces the results of the study and predicts the performance of a group depending on the amount and quality of information exchanged between its members. The long-term goal would be to develop algorithms for decision-making support tools.
arXiv, Computer Science > Computers and Society; Allison J.B. Chaney, Brandon M. Stewart, Barbara E. Engelhardt from
Recommendation systems occupy an expanding role in everyday decision making, from choice of movies and household goods to consequential medical and legal decisions. The data used to train and test these systems is algorithmically confounded in that it is the result of a feedback loop between human choices and an existing algorithmic recommendation system. Using simulations, we demonstrate that algorithmic confounding can disadvantage algorithms in training, bias held-out evaluation, and amplify homogenization of user behavior without gains in utility.
