He was already one of the year’s most polarizing prospects, even before a string of decisions during the pre-draft process—most notably eschewing an agent and making his mother his manager—caused some NFL teams to bristle. Through it all, Jackson and his mother are the same as they’ve always been: silent and singularly focused on making him a starting quarterback
… Ellington: There was a point, I think maybe my rookie year and my second year in Minnesota, I played point guard a little bit. I was asked to be in a lot of different pick-and-roll situations, handling the ball, instead of put in situations coming off screens and being able to catch and shoot, and get out in transition and run the floor—which are my strengths. As I look back, man, you know it’s all just kinda like a learning experience. Those type of teams didn’t exactly have any direction themselves so it was hard for them to point any player in a direction as well.
Mahoney: To be fair, some of that is just player development in action. The only way to find out what a young player is capable of is to try them in different roles and different functions. It’s not as if Ellington was pushing Raymond Felton off the ball at North Carolina so he could run the offense. The idea of him creating was new, and plausible, and so it was worth exploring. Where the Wolves fell short was in their imagination; there are ways to dynamic play beyond running high pick-and-roll. There is a whole spectrum of utility in between working as a ball-dominant creator and a shooter waiting in the corner. Minnesota never fully realized how Ellington’s shooting could be put to use, and because of that, they never understood why he would be worth keeping.
If the leaks are to be believed, Lamar Jackson’s Wonderlic score is lower than that of the typical janitor.
If scientific studies are to be believed, however, quantifiable brainpower will have little bearing on his future in professional football.
The University of Louisville’s Heisman Trophy winner reportedly scored a 13 (out of 50) on the Wonderlic Personnel Test administered at the National Football League’s Scouting Combine. And though that score would be alarmingly low for a chemist or an engineer, numerous studies have found no connection between the test and the ability to complete passes.
… Mental skills coaches, employed by a record 27 baseball clubs to open the 2018 season, are valued more than ever.
“If you said mental skills before,’’ Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon says, “that was an absolute sign that you were weak among the old-school guys. Deep down, there were a lot of guys who wanted to talk to them, but they knew that if they were seen talking to them, it would be seen sign as a sign of weakness. And the manager might think less of him.
“That was an absolute fact, and even today, I don’t think that stigma has been totally erased. To think that psychology is an indicator of weakness, truly is an ignorant statement. When people are fighting it, it’s only because they don’t understand it.
The most noticeable differences between Virginia football last year and Virginia football this year will a trio of new defensive leaders that step up with the departures of Micah Kiser, Quin Blanding and Andrew Brown.
Then there’s the business of a new quarterback in Bryce Perkins and the new offensive playbook that comes with his skillset.
But another new aspect of this UVa team will be as a result of its new strength and conditioning coach. Virginia brought in strength and conditioning coach Shawn Griswold this offseason to re-vamp the Cavaliers’ physically. And he’s doing that early on this spring.
The primary purpose of this study was to describe an early detection and management strategy when monitoring in-season hip and groin strength, health and function in soccer. Secondly to compare pre-season to in-season test results. DESIGN:
Longitudinal cohort study. METHODS:
Twenty-seven elite male youth soccer players (age: 15.07±0.73years) volunteered to participate in the study. Monitoring tests included: adductor strength, adductor/abductor strength ratio and hip and groin outcome scores (HAGOS). Data were recorded at pre-season and at 22 monthly intervals in-season. Thresholds for alerts to initiate further investigations were defined as any of the following: adductor strength reductions >15%, adductor/abductor strength ratio <0.90, and HAGOS subscale scores <75 out of 100 in any of the six subscales.
RESULTS:
Overall, 105 alerts were detected involving 70% of players. Strength related alerts comprised 40% and remaining 60% of alerts were related to HAGOS. Hip adductor strength and adductor/abductor strength ratio were lowest at pre-season testing and had increased significantly by month two (p<0.01, mean difference 0.26, CI95%: 0.12, 0.41N/kg and p<0.01, mean difference 0.09, CI95%: 0.04, 0.13 respectively). HAGOS subscale scores were lowest at baseline with all, except Physical Activity, showing significant improvements at time-point one (p<0.01). Most (87%) time-loss were classified minimal or mild.
CONCLUSIONS:
In-season monitoring aimed at early detection and management of hip and groin strength, health and function appears promising. Hip and groin strength, health and function improved quickly from pre-season to in-season in a high-risk population for ongoing hip and groin problems.
During this past off-season, the Los Angeles Lakers opened their brand new world-class training center in El Segundo, CA, which not only serves as the Lakers practice facility but is also home to the NBA G League South Bay Lakers. The UCLA Health Training Center was designed to optimize the Lakers performance, and to give them full access to world-class technology, including NormaTec Recovery Systems.
“We are excited about the work and progress we’ve made training in the UCLA Heath Training Center,” remarks Marco Nunez, Head Athletic Trainer for the Los Angeles Lakers. “We are invested in making sure that our players have the absolute finest and most cutting-edge technology at their fingertips, such as NormaTec, which is a system our players use frequently. Proper recovery by our athletes is essential to our success, and the NormaTec PULSE PRO is second to none for rapid recovery.”
It’s supposed to help keep your body healthy in stressful situations. But the constant stress of our everyday lives means we’re getting overexposed to cortisol. Raychelle Burks, Ph.D. explains why too much cortisol is bad for you in the latest episode of the Reactions series “Get To Know A Molecule”.
As part of its ongoing effort to develop world class players, coaches, and referees, the U.S. Soccer High Performance Department will work in conjunction with four Development Academy clubs to put on the first bio-banded event in any sport in the United States. It will also be the first organized event of its kind featuring female soccer athletes.
Bio-banding allows players to be grouped based on their maturity and biological age and not by their chronological age. By doing this, massive swings in maturity that can be seen within the current chronological groupings are removed. By grouping players based on maturity, the physical advantages that early maturing players have when playing against less mature players are reduced.
… This bracelet is representing one of the first wearable products with flexible organic electronics from the European pilot line.
Fraunhofer FEP was responsible for the anode deposition on barrier web, which has been produced by the project partner Holst Centre as well as for the OLED-deposition by using evaporation processes. The OLED-deposition at Fraunhofer FEP can be done in Roll-to-Roll (R2R) and Sheet-to-Sheet (S2S) processes.
When we think of wearables, we often think of devices clinging to our bodies. Smartwatches and fitness trackers – sometimes even headgear or glasses – that are tracking our vitals with state-of-the-art sensors. Which new gadgets can enable what new data? How advanced and accurate are the sensors within them?
The University of Southern California’s Center for Body Computing believes that software is more important than hardware. Its executive director and founder, Dr Leslie Saxon, tells Wareable that – ultimately – most sensors in devices are going to become medical-grade. What’ll separate devices is what powers them.
The crown jewel of the CBC is the Virtual Care Clinic, which not only pulls in students from departments around USC’s campus, but a number of companies, like VSP and smart pill maker Proteus. It is constantly absorbing new technologies, from telemedicine to VR, and incorporating them into its central mission: the protected free flow of healthcare information around the world.
Like a yoga novice, electronic components don’t stretch easily. But that’s changing thanks to a variation of origami that involves cutting folded pieces of paper.
In a study published April 2 in the journal Advanced Materials, a University at Buffalo-led research team describes how kirigami has inspired its efforts to build malleable electronic circuits.
Their innovation — creating tiny sheets of strong yet bendable electronic materials made of select polymers and nanowires — could lead to improvements in smart clothing, electronic skin and other applications that require pliable circuitry.
Video understanding tasks such as action recognition and caption generation are crucial for various real-world applications in surveillance, video retrieval, human behavior understanding, etc. In this work, we present a generic recurrent module to detect relationships and interactions between arbitrary object groups for fine-grained video understanding. Our work is applicable to various open domain video understanding problems. In this work, we validate our method on two video understanding tasks with new challenging datasets: fine-grained action recognition on Kinetics and visually grounded video captioning on ActivityNet Captions.
In the following post, we will first introduce the concept and motivation of the proposed method for human action recognition. Second, we will show how the same concept can be further extended to generate a sentence description of a video. For details of the proposed method, please refer to our paper here.
From object interactions to human action recognition
Recent approaches to video understanding have demonstrated significant improvements over public datasets such as UCF101, HMDB51, Sports1M, THUMOS, ActivityNet, and YouTube8M. They often focus on representing the overall visual scene (coarse-grained) as a sequence of inputs that are combined with temporal pooling methods, e.g. CRF, LSTM, 1D Convolution, attention, and NetVLAD. Given the state-of-the-art methods, it’s relatively easy for machine to predict playing tennis and playing basketball by relying on overall scene representation.
Taking a hard hit to the head can give you a concussion, but how has largely remained a mystery. Now, Stevens Institute of Technology researcher Mehmet Kurt has found that the key difference between impacts that lead to concussions and those that do not, has to do with how–and more importantly where–the brain shakes.
The work, reported today in Physical Review Letters, could have enormous payoff in the long run, including better helmet designs and the development of technologies that can diagnose a concussion on the sidelines in real time. By better understanding the biomechanics of the brain during an impact, researchers could better diagnose, treat and prevent concussions.
Over the last decade, we’ve seen four-man outfields on a rare occasion. But I’m not sure there has ever been a defensive alignment where only one non-pitcher or non-catcher was standing on the infield dirt. Only Astros first baseman Marwin Gonzalez had his cleats in the Arlington, Texas infield skin. Now that’s extreme.
That the Astros might bring us the four-man outfield as a regular strategy in meaningful games at the onset of 2018 is not much of a surprise. After all, the Astros also brought us the outfield shift last season. The outfield shift is the latest way to optimize defensive positioning, and some batters have dramatic tendencies on balls hit in the air. The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh wrote an excellent deep-dive piece on the subject of outfield alignment last month.
The four-man outfield could have some staying power.