Knowledge is power. And in this case, Harrison Barnes has harnessed the power of math to launch perhaps the best stretch of offensive basketball he’s played since joining the Mavericks last season.
In his last 15 games, Barnes is averaging 21.7 points on 45.0 percent shooting from the field, a sizzling 43.8 percent from beyond the arc, and 83.6 percent on 4.9 free throw attempts per contest. He’s adding 2.8 assists, which is nearly a full assist higher than his season average and nearly double his mark from last season.
The secret? The fact that three is greater than two. Barnes and head coach Rick Carlisle watched film recently and discovered that too often Barnes was settling for inefficient jumpers.
… That is exactly the kind of scenario Shalane Flanagan imagined over and over again as she wrestled with whether to run this year’s Boston Marathon.
And she arrived at the decision that, in fact, she was not ready to spend April 16 watching from the sidelines and reciting other contenders’ mile splits on air. The 36-year-old had publicly contemplated retirement in November after winning New York City, a hard-fought marathon victory for the four-time Olympian. With that win, she’d reserved her place in history as one of the country’s most decorated and accomplished athletes, and she’d earned the satisfaction of knowing that if she went out, she went out on top. Something, however, was still gnawing at her: Was satisfaction enough?
“I created that version of Patriots’ Day in my mind, where I wasn’t competing and imagined what that felt like, and how I’d feel about it. And then I created another vision of being on the starting line—and hopefully a fit and healthy version of myself like I was in New York,” Flanagan says. “And I just felt like I would regret, for sure, not giving myself at least one more chance at Boston.”
Jack Cork wears his status lightly. The Burnley midfielder has been aware of it since his brother pointed it out a few weeks ago, and he is proud of it, too. He is much too bashful to draw attention to it, though, and much too circumspect to read too much into it.
Burnley has played 30 games in the Premier League this season: 2,700 minutes (plus injury time) of soccer in what is marketed as the most intense league in the world. And Cork has been there for every second of it.
This status does not make Cork unique. There are 11 other players who have yet to miss a minute of the current Premier League season. The majority — as should be expected — are goalkeepers, the one position where conventional wisdom still decrees that permanence is paramount. The other four are central defenders.
But since early March, Cork has been the only midfielder in the group. Dale Stephens, of Brighton, had been keeping pace with him, but then he picked up a minor training injury that ruled him out of a game at Everton. That left Cork standing alone.
Except that Cork is never standing. Over the course of those 30 games, according to Tracab, which provides the Premier League’s official tracking data, Cork has run 227.4 miles. His nearest challenger, Abdoulaye Doucouré of Watford, has clocked up almost six miles fewer. Cork runs so much that he is amicably mocked for it at Burnley’s training ground.
Poor and inadequate sleep negatively impact cognitive and physical functioning and may also affect sports performance. The study aim is to examine sleep quality, sleep duration, and daytime sleepiness in collegiate student-athletes across a wide range of sports. Design
Questionnaire. Setting
University setting. Participants
628 athletes across 29 varsity teams at Stanford University. Measurements
Athletes completed a questionnaire inquiring about sleep quality via a modified Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), sleep duration, and daytime sleepiness via Epworth Sleepiness Scale. Sleep quality on campus and while traveling for competition was rated on a 10-point scale. Results
Collegiate athletes were classified as poor sleepers (PSQI 5.38 ± 2.45), and 42.4% of athletes experience poor sleep quality (reporting PSQI global scores >5). Athletes reported lower sleep quality on campus than when traveling for competition (7.1 vs 7.6, P< .001). Inadequate sleep was demonstrated by 39.1% of athletes that regularly obtain <7 hours of sleep on weekdays. Fifty-one percent of athletes reported high levels of daytime sleepiness with Epworth scores ≥10. Teen student-athletes in the first and second year of college reported the highest mean levels of daytime sleepiness. Greater total sleep time was associated with daytime functioning including lower frequency of difficulty waking up for practice or class (P< .001) and lower frequency of trouble staying awake during daily activities (P< .001).
Conclusions
ENGLAND Under-17 coach Steve Cooper has revealed the behind-the-scenes work that led to his side’s World Cup win last October.
The Three Lions beat Spain 5-2 in the final to win the tournament for the first time in their history. While most accepted England had the best group of players, fewer realised they were also the best-organised and resourced team in India.
The Football Association took 15 full-time performance staff to the tournament, while Cooper carried out two recces ahead of arrival, which none of his rival coaches was able to do.
In a fascinating interview with Fifa’s technical report group, the Welshman outlined exactly how England had been so effective behind the scenes during the competition.
… Our ability to retrieve and encode information from stored memories can be quite easily hijacked by stressful situations. Stress is shown to annihilate our ability to retrieve old memories (link is external). It offers to a brain-based explanation for why we so often blank during these types of memory-related performances.
How and why does this happen, exactly? And perhaps more important, how can we overcome stress? (link is external)
Recently, a team of neuroscientists (link is external)sought to uncover the neural underpinnings of stress, learning, and memory retrieval.
The British Psychological Society, Research Digest, Christian Jarrett from
The idea that we learn better when taught via our preferred modality or “learning style” – such as visually, orally, or by doing – is not supported by evidence. Nonetheless the concept remains hugely popular, no doubt in part because learning via our preferred style can lead us to feel like we’ve learned more, even though we haven’t.
Some advocates of the learning styles approach argue that the reason for the lack of evidence to date is that students do so much of their learning outside of class. According to this view, psychologists have failed to find evidence for learning styles because they’ve focused too narrowly on whether it is beneficial to have congruence between teaching style and preferred learning style. Instead, they say psychologists should look for the beneficial effects of students studying outside of class in a manner that is consistent with their learning style.
For a new paper in Anatomical Sciences Education, a pair of researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine have conducted just such an investigation with hundreds of undergrads. Once again however the findings do not support the learning styles concept, reinforcing its reputation among mainstream psychologists as little more than a myth.
Harvard Business Review, Alison Reynolds and David Lewis from
… In an earlier article, “Teams Solve Problems Faster When They’re More Cognitively Diverse,” we reported our research findings that teams with high levels of cognitive diversity performed better on these kinds of challenges. In these groups, we observed a blend of different problem-solving behaviors, like collaboration, identifying problems, applying information, maintaining discipline, breaking rules, and inventing new approaches. These techniques combined were more effective than in groups where there were too many rule-breakers, or too many discipline-maintainers, for example.
But in the case of these 12 managers, they did show a cognitively diverse approach. So what happened? We returned to our data to find out. In this team, as well as other under-performing teams, we observed a smaller percentage of the group contributing, longer intervals between testing ideas, and greater repetition of the same mistakes.
This is a story about traditionalists fighting back against technology. And winning!
For much of this decade, the NFL has pushed for video access on sidelines during games. It seemed logical. Coaches and players spend hours every week studying video. They still call it “film” or “tape,” of course. By any name, it is an essential part of reviewing the previous game and preparing for the next. Why not have it available in real time, to help with in-game adjustments or on-the-fly matchup evaluations?
So at last week’s owners meetings, for the second time in three years, the NFL competition committee proposed a bylaw change to add video functionality to select Microsoft Surface Pro tablets already used to view still images on sidelines.
… A year ago, no gene had ever been tied to performance on an IQ test. Since then, more than 500 have, thanks to gene studies involving more than 200,000 test takers. Results from an experiment correlating one million people’s DNA with their academic success are due at any time.
The discoveries mean we can now read the DNA of a young child and get a notion of how intelligent he or she will be, says Plomin, an American based at King’s College London, where he leads a long-term study of 13,000 pairs of British twins.
Plomin outlined the DNA IQ test scenario in January in a paper titled “The New Genetics of Intelligence,” making a case that parents will use direct-to-consumer tests to predict kids’ mental abilities and make schooling choices, a concept he calls precision education.
As of now, the predictions are not highly accurate. The DNA variations that have been linked to test scores explain less than 10 percent of the intelligence differences between the people of European ancestry who’ve been studied.
I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people about if the vegan diet is good for performance. I understand that some people “go vegan” due to ethical concerns but if you are considering becoming vegan for purely overall health and performance then I suggest you look to other diets. I tried a vegan, vegetarian and pescatarian diets during my career. At times my performance and recovery were compromised. Here are my tips on how to optimize your diet for performance and also a few tips if you still choose a vegan diet.
1.The Vegan Diet Lacks Omega 3s That Are Important To Overall Health. There are several potential health issues with a vegan diet, one of which is a lack of adequate omega-3 fatty acids. The conversion of omega-3s that originate from plant sources is very, very small in comparison to those coming from fish or grass-fed beef.
The more visual comparisons an analyst makes, the more likely they are to find spurious patterns — a version of the Multiple Comparisons Problem (MCP) well known in statistical hypothesis testing. We discuss recent research from Zgraggen, Zhao, Zeleznik & Kraska (CHI 2018) that investigates this problem through a careful study of how a group of students identify insights in data using a visualization tool. We describe why studying MCP is exciting in its implications for work at the intersection of visualization, human-computer interaction, and statistics. However, we also question several assumptions made in studying MCP as a visualization process so far. At stake is the integrity of visualization tools for supporting exploratory data analysis (EDA) in ways that align with organizational values for data analysis, and our understanding of what it means to do “good” versus “biased” data analysis.
Earlier this year, Rushil Ram, Mike Gallimore, and Prashanth Iyer launched Tape to Tape, an online tracking system that can be used to record locations of shot assists, zone exits, and zone entries. Rushil and I will be running the Tape to Tape Project in order to compile a database of these statistics with the application Rushil created. We have already had close to 30 trackers sign up from an announcement on Twitter last week.
Each individual will track zone exits, zone entries, and shot assists for games they sign up for. Once the games are complete, the data will be exported to a public Dropbox folder. The goal with this project is to enhance our understanding of these microstats as they pertain to coaching decisions, player performance, and wins. What follows next is a description of what we will be tracking, a brief summary of the research that describes why these specific microstats are important, and how we will be tracking these events.
The South Siders haven’t merely embraced the rebuilding methods that led the Cubs and Astros to World Series glory. They’ve taken the modern baseball tank to the extreme—and it looks like it’s going to work.