Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 1, 2018

… Lamar Jackson is not hiring an agent. He’ll head to the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis this week with no official representation.

The Heisman Trophy winner’s mother is reportedly helping him with his NFL Draft preparation. This is probably something NFL teams will at least ask the quarterback about.

… So what do we know? Lincecum is in great shape. He can maybe hit 93 mph throwing at max effort at an indoor baseball facility. He’s well-rested after not pitching in 2017 and is now more than two years removed from the surgery. He obviously knows how to pitch, although precision control was never his forte.

This is obviously a complete roll of the dice by the Rangers, a minimal investment with the hope you hit the lottery. The most likely scenario would see Lincecum pitch out of the bullpen, where he would be a better bet to hold his velocity over short stints. With the Angels, his fastball averaged just 87.7 mph. One writer suggested that with the Rangers’ closer job wide-open, Lincecum even has a chance to win that role.

Call me skeptical.

… Okafor’s time away from the league came to an end when he signed a 10-day contract on Feb. 3 to return to New Orleans, where he played from 2009 to 2012.

It took a long journey before the 35-year-old worked his way back onto an NBA roster, but there was never a doubt in his mind that he would eventually make it happen.

A study by researchers from Caltech, the Wharton School, Western University, and ZRT Laboratory suggests that higher levels of testosterone make men more likely to rely on snap judgments and less likely to realize when they’re wrong.

Caltech’s Colin Camerer, the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics, T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience Leadership Chair, and study co-author, says the topic is of particular importance because of the growing testosterone-replacement-therapy industry, which is primarily aimed at reversing the decline in sex drive many middle-aged men experience.

“If men want more testosterone to increase sex drive, are there other effects? Do these men become too mentally bold, thinking they know things they don’t?” Camerer asked.

For the last three years, Cal State Fullerton’s Center for Sports Performance has been conducting pre-season fitness testing for members of the Anaheim Ducks hockey team. The results are then used by Scott Lynn, center co-director and associate professor of kinesiology, and Ducks strength and conditioning coach Mark Fitzgerald to create indiviual training programs for each player.

The goal? Improve the Ducks’ chances of winning the Stanley Cup by helping players perform at their peak and stay safe on the ice.

… The Cubs launched their mental skills program at the start of 2015. They consulted with Dr. Ken Ravizza, a sports psychology researcher from Cal-State Fullerton, and hired Josh Lifrak, former IMG Academy mental conditioner, to design the program. Darnell McDonald was hired as a mental skills coordinator soon thereafter and has been joined in that position by former Cubs catching/pitching great and guitarist, John Baker.

The vision for the program, as Joe Maddon described, is to have players, “[In the] present tense, staying in the moment, understanding it’s not always going to be perfect but you can still do well.” These are all part of the standard nomenclature of mindfulness advocates.

Wearable medical sensors used widely in hospitals and clinics are spreading into the mainstream as tech companies increasingly incorporate them into popular electronics, from Apple’s smart watches to Fitbit fitness bands.

Princeton engineers are working to take these sensor technologies one step further by developing software that could one day use multiple health clues from wearable sensors to diagnose myriad diseases in real-time. When fully developed, the system would warn a patient who is developing diabetes, for example.

In a paper in the journal IEEE Transactions on Multi-Scale Computing Systems, researchers led by Niraj Jha reported that their system, the Hierarchical Health Decision Support System (HDSS), used biomedical data to successfully detect five diseases in simulations created from an amalgamation of patient data. The paper, published in the journal’s Oct.-Dec. issue, states that the system diagnosed type-2 diabetes with 78 percent accuracy, arrhythmia with 86 percent accuracy, urinary bladder disorder with 99 percent accuracy, hypothyroid with 95 percent accuracy and renal pelvis nephritis with 94 percent accuracy.

The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) published a press release Feb. 14 regarding the approval of a blood biomarker test for the detection of intracranial hemorrhage following traumatic brain injury. The media reaction to the press release resulted in headlines of “Concussions Can Be Detected With New Blood Test Approved by F.D.A” (New York Times) and “FDA Clears First Blood Test to Aid in Concussion Diagnosis” (www.medscape.com). Unfortunately, these headlines and the information contained in many of these media articles are not correct and provide a false sense of the state of biomarker science related to concussion.

Athletic trainers are experts in the diagnosis and management of sport-related concussion and will likely be called upon to discuss these headlines at their institutions or in their local communities. Therefore, understanding the facts regarding the FDA approval is important when communicating with other stakeholders.

There are several important facts that should be understood about the approved biomarker test that are relevant to the conversation. First, this test was not approved to diagnose concussion, sport-related or not. The biomarker is intended to detect the presence of two proteins that may suggest intracranial hemorrhage and was developed to assist emergency department providers in determining whether a CT scan is indicated. Indeed, if the markers are present a CT scan may be warranted, but the absence of the markers does not indicate or refute the presence of brain injury.

… When NHL commissioner Gary Bettman talks about player tracking, he talks about it in these terms: That the data will tell a different, fuller story for fans. Maybe it’s the speed of a player’s shot or skating. Or maybe it’s something more biometric. It will open up the game in new ways.

“Anything that can help grow the game. Anything that can help,” he said last week at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

The National Hockey League Players Association has a different view of “anything” when it comes to tracking data, and executive director Donald Fehr says how that data is used is a concern for those he represents.

“It’s the new hot fad. Whether it’ll be around in 10 years in any meaningful fashion is anybody’s guess. The push to quantify everything, without knowing what those quantities mean … for example, if I saw you’re skating slower than you did three years ago, does that mean your play is better or worse? Can you not keep up any more? There’s a real danger in negotiations about a lot of statistics that merely provide excuses for doing what they want to do,” he said.

An international team of researchers has developed a computational resource that provides a 3D view of genes, proteins and metabolites involved in human metabolism. Researchers used the tool to map disease-related mutations on proteins and also probed how genes and proteins change in response to certain drugs. The work provides a better understanding of disease-causing mutations and could enable researchers to discover new uses for existing drug treatments.

The findings were recently published in Nature Biotechnology. The work was led by the research group of Bernhard Palsson, Galletti Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California San Diego, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Luxembourg, Technical University of Denmark and other institutions around the world.

The tool, called Recon3D, is the most comprehensive human metabolic network reconstruction to date. It integrates 3,288 open reading frames, which are stretches of DNA and RNA that contain protein-producing genes; 13,542 metabolic reactions; and the 3D structures of 4,140 metabolites and 12,890 proteins.

Oxygen is fuel for muscles and is critical to an athlete’s performance, yet few, if any, consumer wearables help athletes measure oxygen in real-time. Until now.

Sweetzpot is an Oslo-based athletic wearables company which has turned to Kickstarter to raise funds for FLOW, a combined breathing sensor and heart rate monitor. Worn as a chest band, this innovative wearable aims to help improve athletic stamina and performance.

… Imagine being able to decode that glow to get a precise image of your bones, or even a count of all the white blood cells in your veins. That’s exactly what researchers from Houston’s Rice University and Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University hope to do, powered by a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

The universities announced the new project Tuesday. It aims to develop a camera that can literally see through human skin, using elements of machine learning. The work will be led by Rice University’s Ashutosh Sabharwal, the grant’s principal investigator, and CMU computer vision researcher Srinivasa Narasimhan.

“Essentially, we are trying to build the next generation super-cameras that see the unseen,” Narasimhan told GeekWire via email. He said the new camera is less like a single device and more like a platform, which could power new medical technology addressing more than 100 diseases.

… In my February 15th column, we looked at the many problems in nutritional research: The studies tend to be small and speculative; the effects of any given food or food component tend to be small; research designs are often faulty; and researcher bias is somewhere between rife and universal. All of this contributes to the likelihood that the conclusions of a lot of nutrition research, possibly even most nutrition research, are wrong.

What we didn’t talk about last time is the data problem.

You see, most nutrition researchers are forced to collect their data using a notoriously unreliable scientific instrument: the human brain. It’s hard and expensive to conduct rigorous nutritional experiments where you know through direct observation and measurement exactly what people are eating. Instead, most studies are conducted by asking people what they ate.

And that, says Edward Archer, is a huge problem.

… when you look strictly at the numbers, it’s been a disappointing 2018 Winter Olympics for the United States. America sent 242 Olympians to Pyeongchang but will take home just 23 medals, ending up in fourth place overall. Compare this to Norway, which has an Olympic delegation less than half the size of Team USA’s, with 109 team members, and won 39 medals.

Below, we have organized the medals earned by each nation into categories. First, we counted the sheer number of medals earned, and then we weighted them by type of medal. Through calculations by Charlotta Mellander, my colleague at the Martin Prosperity Institute, we also controlled for population size, economic output, and team size.

What the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference is — and what it is not. On the evolution of a conference and an industry, and the tensions it’s now experiencing.