… “I just wanted to be myself again,” Aldridge told ESPN. “I just wanted to be productive. I’m happier about that than anything. I’m happier about being able to play at this level again. It was never about trying to make the All-Star Game. It’s about being back at that high level to help a team win.”
In his third year in San Antonio, Aldridge finally feels like himself again.
To be himself again, Aldridge felt he needed to play more minutes. In 2015-16 and 2016-17, his first two seasons with the Spurs, he averaged only 30.6 MPG and 32.4 MPG, respectively. But the 12-year vet knew he couldn’t approach Popovich with a request for more playing time without first handling business on his end.
Aldridge typically gives himself a month to “eat whatever I want” at the conclusion of each season. But he reduced that time to a week coming off the team’s Western Conference finals loss to the Golden State Warriors last May.
… In 2013, the Astros chose Appel with the No. 1 pick, one selection ahead of Chicago Cubs MVP third baseman Kris Bryant. They signed him to a $6.35 million bonus after his senior year, when he posted a 2.12 ERA, struck out 130 batters and walked just 23 in 106.1 innings. Ben Reiter of Sports Illustrated called him “as risk-free a pitcher pick as has ever been made,” while Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow deemed Appel, “the most significant investment the Astros have made in their history in an amateur player,” per Brian McTaggart of MLB.com.
Evaluators expected Appel to reach the big leagues quickly, perhaps within a season, given his experience as a collegiate pitcher. But five seasons in pro ball, a 5.06 ERA and a 1.519 WHIP later, he still hasn’t made the major leagues and only got as high as Triple-A. The Astros traded him two years ago as one of five pieces headed to the Phillies for closer Ken Giles.
And now, Appel is leaving the game behind, he tells Bleacher Report, taking an “indefinite break” from professional baseball.
Boston.com, New York Times News Service, Benjamin Hoffman from
… “He lets everyone know how good of a basketball player he was,” said Zach Ertz, the Eagles’ star tight end. But Ertz, who played basketball for Monte Vista High School in Danville, California, couldn’t help but add, “I think I can beat him one-on-one.”
It was more of the same from Alshon Jeffery, Philadelphia’s top wide receiver, who acknowledged Foles’ basketball skills while insisting he could beat him. But the team’s No. 2 receiver, Nelson Agholor, seemed convinced that Foles could hold his own regardless of the sport he was playing.
“You’ve got to see him in Ultimate Frisbee,” Agholor said. “We do a little conditioning in Ultimate Frisbee in the offseason. This dude’s got hands, got routes. Stupid athletic.”
Nature Communications; Carolyn Parkinson, Adam M. Kleinbaum & Thalia Wheatley from
Human social networks are overwhelmingly homophilous: individuals tend to befriend others who are similar to them in terms of a range of physical attributes (e.g., age, gender). Do similarities among friends reflect deeper similarities in how we perceive, interpret, and respond to the world? To test whether friendship, and more generally, social network proximity, is associated with increased similarity of real-time mental responding, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan subjects’ brains during free viewing of naturalistic movies. Here we show evidence for neural homophily: neural responses when viewing audiovisual movies are exceptionally similar among friends, and that similarity decreases with increasing distance in a real-world social network. These results suggest that we are exceptionally similar to our friends in how we perceive and respond to the world around us, which has implications for interpersonal influence and attraction.
… “Memory generally has a very intrinsic limitation,” says Faria Sana, an assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca University, in Canada. “It’s essentially a bottleneck.”
The “forgetting curve,” as it’s called, is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of what you took in.
Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says that the way people now consume information and entertainment has changed what type of memory we value—and it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you saw six months ago.
When it comes to sports, most people tend to think about the win, but there’s more to it than that.
It’s called the InSideOut Initiative, and the goal is to transform the “win-at-all-costs” mentality in sports.
The NFL, along with Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine put on an event in Minneapolis, Tuesday, to reach out to Athletics Directors and coaches from across the state.
Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have created a customizable, fabric-like power source that can be cut, folded or stretched without losing its function.
Led by Professor Chen Xiaodong, Associate Chair (Faculty) at the School of Materials Science & Engineering, the team reported in the journal Advanced Materials (print edition 8 January) how they have created the wearable power source, a supercapacitor, which works like a fast-charging battery and can be recharged many times.
Crucially, they have made their supercapacitor customizable or “editable”, meaning its structure and shape can be changed after it is manufactured, while retaining its function as a power source.
The rapid development of flexible and wearable electronics is giving rise to an exciting range of applications, from smart watches and flexible displays—such as smart phones, tablets, and TV—to smart fabrics, smart glass, transdermal patches, sensors, and more. With this rise, demand has increased for high-performance flexible batteries. Up to now, however, researchers have had difficulty obtaining both good flexibility and high energy density concurrently in lithium-ion batteries.
A team led by Yuan Yang, assistant professor of materials science and engineering in the department of applied physics and mathematics at Columbia Engineering, has developed a prototype that addresses this challenge: a Li-ion battery shaped like the human spine that allows remarkable flexibility, high energy density, and stable voltage no matter how it is flexed or twisted. The study is published today in Advanced Materials.
While Super Bowl advertisers are always trying to top the previous year’s spots, each network broadcasting that year’s game unveils a new technical innovation to dazzle audiences, like last year’s player’s-eye view from Fox Sports and Intel.
Now, it’s NBC’s turn. The Super Bowl team has completed body scans of six players from the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles—including quarterbacks Tom Brady and Nick Foles—as part of its virtual 3-D graphics package that it will deploy a few times during Sunday’s game. (Also scanned: James Harrison and Danny Amendola from the Patriots, and the Eagles’ Fletcher Cox and Brandon Graham.)
Super Bowl LII executive producer Fred Gaudelli, who also oversees Sunday Night Football and Thursday Night Football for NBC, spoke with Adweek about this year’s innovation, the most important element of the telecast to get right and what he’s learned from his five previous Super Bowls about how to keep audiences happy.
Robin Queen is an associate professor of biomedical engineering and mechanics in the College of Engineering. Matthew McCullough is an associate professor in chemical, biological, and bioengineering at North Carolina A&T State University.
Both professors are interested in how tracking human movement can help prevent injuries and improve quality of life. They’ve known each other for years, worked together on a variety of initiatives through the American Society of Biomechanics, and had talked often about striking up a research collaboration.
“But the question was, how do we get something big off the ground?” said Queen, who directs the Kevin P. Granata Biomechanics Lab. “We needed some pilot data to go after larger grants.”
Criticized heavily throughout the season for some high-profile failures of its concussion protocol, the NFL countered by taking a handful of reporters on a behind-the-scenes tour of its game-day medical procedures. From the communication between the spotters in the booth and the sidelines to whether coaches get a say in determining if a player can return to the game or not, all of it was up for discussion.
It’s almost here: Super Bowl weekend. The big game, the big TV ads, the big halftime show, the big bowls of chips and salsa … and the big hits. Dramatic hits that make some of us cheer, make others cringe, and make some players retire.
A recent paper in the BMJ’s Injury Prevention journal raises questions about the National Football League’s approach to sports-related, traumatic brain injuries (sTBI). In particular, the authors argue that the NFL partnering with the CDC to get the word out about those injuries represents a conflict of interest.
“We should be very skeptical about the NFL providing a grant to the CDC to address the very health problem associated with their sport,” said co-author, Kathleen Bachynski, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in medical humanities and ethics at NYU School of Medicine.
… But who is Arsenal chief scout Sven Mislintat? Goal investigates the German’s career, controversies and the talent he has found so far for Borussia Dortmund and Arsenal.
Born in 1972 in the north-western German town of Kamen, Mislintat played football for VfL Kamen and SV Holzwickede before becoming Jose Morais’s assistant coach at Oberliga club Westfalia Herne in 2002. Morais spent just four months in charge, but later went on to become Jose Mourinho’s assistant manager at Porto, Real Madrid and Chelsea.
After completing his sports science degree at Ruhr-University Bochum, Mislintat was initially hired by Borussia Dortmund as a scout in 2006, but quickly worked his way up through the ranks at the Westphalia club thanks to his knack for finding talent and his meticilous methods.
One of his early successes at Dortmund was finding Japanese attacker Shinji Kagawa, who had spent the first few years of his career playing in the second tier in his native country with Cerezo Osaka.
… He spoke with colts.com about his approach as the offseason kicks into full swing.
“We want to grow our own, and we want to build with homegrown Colts guys we draft,” he said. “We’ll be very selective. We were pretty active last year in free agency. I’m not saying we won’t go out and plug some holes. You want to try to fill as many holes as you can going into the draft so you’re not driven for a need. But saying that, we want to make sure we’re a good drafting team.”
Ballard says draft preparation begins with 18 straight days of meeting in February, and doesn’t slow down much after that.
… While much of this series has focused on video services like Hudl and social media allowing coaches new yet challenging ways to discover and keep up with recruits, meeting those players and their families and forming a relationship is paramount to getting a recruit’s commitment. It’s how the best coaches and recruiters separate themselves from others.
However, trips to those thousands of economy lodging establishments that dot the country cost money. As higher learning institutions have had to tighten their budgetary belts, coaches being cost-efficient in off-campus recruiting has almost become as important as being charismatic around a recruit and his/her parents.
Today’s final installment of the series will focus on the economics of recruiting — both off campus in the way of school and competition visits, and on campus via the battle to build and maintain competitive facilities.