… “It was one of my goals to go overseas,” Palmer-Brown says. “That’s something I wanted to do at a young age, and when I went on loan to Porto I saw how tough it was. It’s a struggle at times, but to grind through those [struggles] you come out a better person and player.”
Palmer-Brown says his experience playing in Portugal aided his transition to Belgium.
“There’s more English [in Belgium], so it’s been good,” Palmer-Brown says. “I don’t have to adapt — it’s been pretty easy.”
Palmer-Brown, more commonly called ‘EPB’ by his club and country teammates, enters a U.S. team not only recovering from its failure to qualify for this year’s FIFA World Cup, but also the unending search for the next great American center back. He believes the stiff competition he faces in Europe will better prepare him to put his stamp on the USMNT.
As a child, Roger Federer played many sports—tennis, of course, but also soccer, basketball, badminton, and others. He credits badminton, where shuttlecock smashes can exceed 200 M.P.H., with developing his hand-eye coordination. Federer’s astonishing footwork may be traceable to the soccer pitch in Switzerland. “Those are soccer feet,” says Tom Farrey, executive director of the Sports & Society program at the Aspen Institute’s Project Play. “It’s the same with Rafa,” he adds, noting that Rafael Nadal gave up soccer, his first love, to focus on tennis at age 14.
Certainly, there are developmental benefits to being good at one thing, like a sport: increased self-esteem, a sense of belonging to a group of skillful youths, and the social benefits of mastery—“people look at you a certain way,” Farrey says. But, he adds, there appear to be “even more benefits to sampling a variety of sports at an early age. That lets you develop physical literacy. Later, you may specialize as you move into puberty. Multi-sport involvements help prevent the burnout that often happens to kids who focus on one game at too young an age. And it can avoid injury from repeated wear and tear on the same body part. It can also increase engagement in sports and promote lifelong involvement. Every organization in youth sports ought to be sending a message that multi-sport play and sampling a variety of sports are the best pathways for psychological and social development, as well as athletic development.”
“Among children, the foundations for any athlete are the same: a focus on athleticism, and having fun,” says New York University neurologist Brian Hainline, M.D., who became the NCAA’s first chief medical officer in 2013. “Athleticism includes agility, balance, speed, stamina, strength, and coordination. When you make kids specialize in one sport too early, you limit their ability to develop athletically. The most important thing of all is having fun; that’s what makes them likely to continue for a lifetime.” Renowned sports psychologist Jim Loehr argues that not only physical growth, but mental, emotional, and spiritual growth factor into the development equation. “We need it all,” says Hainline. “It’s not uni-dimensional development.”
… Outside of Davis Cup, Isner had just one win this year before Miami. But on the first Wednesday of the event, he had dinner with his coach, David Macpherson (whom Isner shares with the Bryans). “We hashed out what’s been holding me back,” Isner explained after the final. “And it wasn’t more reps on the court, more time in the gym. I’d been doing that all along.”
The problem for Isner was strictly mental. He couldn’t shake a tendency to get tight and tentative on the court; it was getting worse as time went on. He was holding back his own game, he said, and losing close matches.
… Duncan Watts works at Microsoft Research. He does computational social science, including prediction studies similar to the one that Salganik was doing. In fact over the years, Watts says, he’s done tons. He says when it comes to predicting stuff like what will happen in a particular human life, Watts thinks the outcome that Salganik found is just the outcome.
“We find exactly the same pattern everywhere we look… when you’re talking about individual outcomes, there’s a lot of randomness,” Watts says.
“And the other half of this conversation is that people don’t like that answer, and so they keep wanting a different answer. They say nature abhors a vacuum. Humans abhor randomness. We like deterministic stories,” Duncan says.
We like the idea that patterns can tell us what will happen in life because that idea makes us feel more secure he says.
NFL clubs hold voluntary offseason workout programs to train, teach and condition their players for the upcoming season.
Article 21 of the NFL-NFLPA CBA states that each club’s official, voluntary nine-week offseason program is conducted in three phases:
Phase One: In the first two weeks of the program, activities are limited to strength and conditioning and physical rehabilitation.
Phase Two: Over the next three weeks of the program, on-field workouts may include individual player instruction and drills and team practices conducted on a “separates” basis. No live contact or offense vs. defense drills are permitted.
Phase Three: Over the next four weeks of the program, teams may conduct a total of 10 days of organized team practice activity, or OTAs. No live contact is permitted, but 7-on-7, 9-on-7, and 11-on-11 drills are permitted.
Morgan Ellison looked shot out of a cannon on an 80-yard TD run during Indiana football practice Tuesday.
And that’s Cole Gest’s default look, too, pretty much whenever he carries the ball.
But both sophomore running backs look faster and smoother than ever this spring. And there is a clear reason why.
New Director of Athletic Performance David Ballou and “speed specialist” Dr. Matt Rhea are now on the scene orchestrating IU football’s strength and conditioning program.
… “It’s a huge factor of success in the National Football League,” Harbaugh said. “Those are things that really chip away at you, but I was really proud of the way our guys stepped up, the way our young guys played.”
As part of the effort to help prevent injuries, the Ravens made a major change to their offseason conditioning program last year. Steve Saunders took over the program and implemented a system that was more customized to each player and less reliant on machines.
Veterans like Eric Weddle and Terrell Suggs have praised Saunders for the way his program kept them healthy throughout the season.
… Your brain doesn’t want your gas tank to ever get anywhere close to zero. It doesn’t want you to blow ligaments or tear muscles. And it also knows that it’s quite the energy hog itself, with your neurons burning as many as 20% of your daily calories.
So it’s a miser. The governor errs on the side of being conservative. And your body and your mind feel tired long before you’ve gotten anywhere near empty.
But can we trick that governor into easing up a bit so we can increase our mental stamina? Sure we can. The answer lies at the intersection of sports science and neuroscience. And it’s not nearly as difficult as you think.
Does a life spent playing games change the way a person thinks? Could they make us smarter? Improve the way we think about the world? The concept of “systems literacy” is sometimes invoked to describe how humans might benefit from playing games, how they might increase our ability to understand the world as a set of complex, overlapping, dynamic systems. In this talk we will look to see if there is any evidence that games are having this effect on us. What would advanced systems literacy even look like? Would we recognize it when we saw it? We will look at concrete examples from specific games and extrapolate to a broad vision of how games might have the capacity to increase our collective intelligence.
… Research from cognitive psychology shows that people are naturally poor fact-checkers and it is very difficult for us to compare things we read or hear to what we already know about a topic. In what’s been called an era of “fake news,” this reality has important implications for how people consume journalism, social media and other public information.
Nature, Scientific Reports; Timothy V. Pyrkov et al. from
Age-related physiological changes in humans are linearly associated with age. Naturally, linear combinations of physiological measures trained to estimate chronological age have recently emerged as a practical way to quantify aging in the form of biological age. In this work, we used one-week long physical activity records from a 2003–2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to compare three increasingly accurate biological age models: the unsupervised Principal Components Analysis (PCA) score, a multivariate linear regression, and a state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network (CNN). We found that the supervised approaches produce better chronological age estimations at the expense of a loss of the association between the aging acceleration and all-cause mortality. Consequently, we turned to the NHANES death register directly and introduced a novel way to train parametric proportional hazards models suitable for out-of-the-box implementation with any modern machine learning software. As a demonstration, we produced a separate deep CNN for mortality risks prediction that outperformed any of the biological age or a simple linear proportional hazards model. Altogether, our findings demonstrate the emerging potential of combined wearable sensors and deep learning technologies for applications involving continuous health risk monitoring and real-time feedback to patients and care providers.
Concussion is a major public health problem, but not much is known about the impacts that cause concussion or how to prevent them. A new study suggests that the problem is more complicated than previously thought.
I’m sure you’ve probably heard about the 2018 FIFA Football World Cup in Russia everywhere during the last few months. And, if you are a techy too, I guess you also have realized that Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are buzzwords too. So, what better way to get ready for the World Cup than by practicing in a project that combines these two hot topics? In order to do that, we’re going to leverage a dataset of the Fifa 2018 video game. My goal is to show you how to create a predictive model that is able to forecast how good a soccer player is based on their game statistics (using Python in a Jupyter Notebook).
Fifa is one of the most well-known video games around the world. You’ve probably played it at least once, right? Although I’m not a fan of video games, when I saw this dataset collected by Aman Srivastava, I immediately thought that it was great for practicing some of the basics of any Machine Learning Project.
The Fifa 18 dataset was scraped from the website sofifa.com containing statistics and more than 70 attributes for each player in the Full version of FIFA 18. In this Github Project, you can access the CSV files that compose the dataset and some Jupyter notebooks with the python code used to collect the data.
… According to league sources, others McDonald’s All-Americans are also considering the jump to the G League as well but have remained undecided about the venture.
Iowa Wolves head coach Scott Roth, however, doesn’t see it as a positive addition to the G League.
“I think it’d be disastrous,” Roth told 2 Ways & 10 Days last week when the Wolves visited Santa Cruz. “I think at the end of the day, and I’ve said this before, (G League) is the toughest league in the world.
… This evolution of the ownership class from sportsmen to asset manager necessarily changes the dynamic of this labor dispute compared to those of previous eras. By my count, no fewer than 10 major league owners (John Henry, Boston; Thomas Ricketts, Chicago Cubs; Mark Walter, Los Angeles Dodgers; Bruce Sherman, Miami; Mark Attanasio, Milwaukee; Jim Pohlad, Minnesota; Charles Johnson, San Francisco; William DeWitt Jr., St. Louis; Stuart Sternberg, Tampa Bay; Ray Davis, Texas) have ties to the financial services industry. Many of the remainder are owned by media or telecom CEOs or have become assets of large media companies.
The net worths of some of the men who have recently bought into Major League Baseball are staggering: Mark Walter, $2.9 billion; John Malone (Atlanta Braves), $7.9 billion; Joe Ricketts, $2.4 billion; Arturo Moreno ($2.5 billion). But even more staggering is the return on investment realized by the previous owners of these teams. Jeffrey Loria bought the Expos for $18 million and eventually sold the Marlins for $1.2 billion. Bud Selig paid $10.8 million for the bankrupt Seattle Pilots in 1970 and wound up selling the Milwaukee Brewers to Attanasio for $223 million in 2004. Drayton McLane bought the Astros for $117 million in 1993 and sold them to Crane for $680 million in 2011. Good luck finding that kind of profit margin in any other industry.
The very framing–players versus owners–changes when the owners are no longer people rooted to a city but are instead amorphous representatives of capital. What binds this new kind of owner to a city? What compels them (or sometimes it) to try to win? Why should they care about the product on the field, particularly when profitability will hardly differ whether a team wins 62, 72 or 82 games?