Forced to carry a heavier burden than ever this season, the 15-year NBA veteran is showing the basketball world he’s not yet finished adding to his game.
The fly ball revolution has reached all corners of baseball. The celebrated success stories — from Josh Donaldson to Justin Turner to J. D. Martinez to Chris Taylor — have resonated with players looking for ways to improve their hitting or, in some cases, revive their careers.
Even defensive-minded players, such as Mets center fielder Juan Lagares, are now giving this new offensive approach a whirl. He has turned to the same private hitting instructors — Craig Wallenbrock and Robert Van Scoyoc — that helped change the career path of Taylor, a playoff star for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Martinez, a free agent who has become one of baseball’s elite power hitters.
“This was my idea,” Lagares said in Spanish in a recent telephone interview. “I’m trying to find the help that may benefit me.”
… Belichick indicated to the team’s medical and training staff at the time that his hands were tied because of Brady’s special status with the franchise, according to a source with direct knowledge of Belichick’s exchange with the staffers. The source said Belichick told those who complained about Guerrero: Tom wants him. What am I supposed to do?
By this season, however, TB12’s client list has grown to include most of the Patriots roster – a unique arrangement in the National Football League. With Guerrero effectively involved in the health and training practices of much of the team, it’s not unusual for him and the Patriots medical and training staff to differ, according to sources.
Belichick famously dislikes distractions. He dislikes divisiveness, real or perceived, even more. Internal observers believe that restricting Guerrero’s operations in the stadium might reduce some tension in the workplace, where promoting player health and game readiness is considered a priority.
Children communicate through expressions of emotion, which is our first language universally. Knowing one’s own and others’ emotions, as well as regulating them, is what is known as emotional competence or, in common parlance, emotional intelligence. Caregivers and early childhood educators are crucial in promoting the growth of these skills. A new review article published in International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy examines the effects emotional competence might have in a child’s life and development, and how that skill can be supported and enhanced through school programs.
Bournemouth’s rise up the football pyramid holds lessons for other clubs and now they are leading the way in goalkeeper training too. Nick Wright finds out about the cutting-edge technology revolutionising the approach of Premier League sides.
Valencell, the leading innovator in performance biometric sensor technology, today announces its plan to debut new software and hardware technology, as well as new use cases in conjunction with its strategic partners at the Consumer Electronics Show 2018 (CES 2018). Wearable biometric sensor technology is being integrated within many different types of devices beyond just smartwatches and sports earbuds, including construction hardhats, virtual reality (VR) solutions for pain management in healthcare, and long-haul trucking solutions to combat drowsy driving.
… As is often the case in such plays when the ball carrier is swallowed in a mass of large human bodies, it was difficult to tell precisely where the ball should be placed.
But officials made their best guess and brought the yardsticks out to measure. Even then it was too close to call with the naked eye, so a referee, Gene Steratore, used a folded piece of paper to see if it could slip between the ball and the yardstick.
When it touched the ball, Steratore signaled a first down. The Cowboys would go on to kick the game-winning field goal, keeping their playoff hopes alive and effectively ending Oakland’s.
While the N.F.L. has long been considered a game of inches, if not millimeters, the episode raised questions: Why are referees still relying on eyesight to determine where the ball is placed? Isn’t there technology that could accurately call first downs and goal-line plays? Couldn’t officials put an electronic chip in the ball the way they do in some other sports?
University of Southern Mississippi, Southern Miss Now from
Dr. Jason Azoulay, assistant professor in the School of Polymers and High Performance Materials at The University of Southern Mississippi, has been awarded a coveted research prize by the Nokia Bell Labs.
Azoulay shared the $50,000 second-place honor with his collaborator Dr. Tse Nga (Tina) Ng, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California at San Diego. Their research led to the invention of new photosensitive polymer materials that can be used for health and medical monitoring through-the-skin with wearable, thin, flexible devices.
In light of Monday’s big announcement – the securing of a largest donation ever to athletics to proceed with the construction of a Student-Athlete Performance Center – many of Tech’s coaches went about their jobs Monday afternoon with an added sense of excitement over the array of benefits that this project brings to their respective programs.
Many cited the better overall health of their student-athletes. Some cited expected improved performances in the playing venue. Others brought up the impact in recruiting. Some even mentioned the social component, as student-athletes from different sports could be using the center at the same time.
But no one was more excited than Jennie Zabinsky, Tech’s associate AD for sports nutrition.
“Oh my gosh, I’m thrilled,” she said. “This is going to be our top priority. We’re going to make it the best. We’ve got one shot to make it great. There is a lot of planning involved, and we’re going to do it the right way.”
How do you recover from one of the worst trades in sports history? The hard way. But with Sean Marks and Kenny Atkinson now at the helm, the Brooklyn Nets are turning agony into opportunity.
The way we evaluate the performance of other humans is one of the bigger mysteries of cognitive psychology. This process occurs continuously as we judge individuals’ ability to do certain tasks, assessing everyone from electricians and bus drivers to accountants and politicians.
The problem is that we have access to only a limited set of data about an individual’s performance—some of it directly relevant, such as a taxi driver’s driving record, but much of it irrelevant, such as the driver’s sex. Indeed, the amount of information may be so vast that we are forced to decide using a small subset of it. How do those decisions get made?
Today we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Luca Pappalardo at the University of Pisa in Italy and a few pals who have studied this problem in the sporting arena, where questions of performance are thrown into stark relief. Their work provides unique insight into the way we evaluate human performance and how this relates to objective measures.
As someone who often finds himself explaining machine learning to non-experts, I offer the following list as a public service announcement.
Machine learning means learning from data; AI is a buzzword. Machine learning lives up to the hype: there are an incredible number of problems that you can solve by providing the right training data to the right learning algorithms. Call it AI if that helps you sell it, but know that AI, at least as used outside of academia, is often a buzzword that can mean whatever people want it to mean.
Machine learning is about data and algorithms, but mostly data. There’s a lot of excitement about advances in machine learning algorithms, and particularly about deep learning. But data is the key ingredient that makes machine learning possible. You can have machine learning without sophisticated algorithms, but not without good data.
A lot has been written about the issues of pay-to-play at competitive levels, generally considered ages 12-18, and Tom Byer’s work with the under-6 age group has gotten a lot of attention.
Now, the Aspen Institute’s State of Play 2017 has looked at the ages 6-12 when children first start playing different sports, and it’s bad news for soccer. The top three team sports children ages 6-12 played on a regular basis — basketball, baseball and soccer — saw declines in participation, but none like soccer has.
In 2010, 3,016,000 children 6-12 played soccer on a regular basis, but that number was only 2,303,000 in 2016, a drop of 23.5 percent. Baseball was down 5 percent while basketball was down 8 percent in the same period.
In percentage terms, 7.7 percent of children 6-12 played soccer on a regular basis in 2016, down from 10.9 percent in 2010. Those percentages show a greater decline for soccer participation as the population of children 6-12 has increased.