Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 30, 2018

… “I had this little recording toy when I first moved to the States,” he said. “I recorded myself eventually wanting to make the Costa Rican national team. I had forgotten about it, then found it a few years ago. I put the batteries back in because I knew what I had said. It was a cool moment because I knew at that time where I wanted to be. Now, I am living it.”

… An additional key to understanding if the driving force behind Markakis’ success is luck or skill based is through plate discipline. The charts below will answer all of those questions. Firstly, he’s not making contact with any more pitches that are thrown in the zone than in prior seasons. He’s also not making contact with any more pitches outside of the zone. Finally his swing percentage overall is not much higher than his past.

So what gives? There are two keys to those specific numbers that clears things up. When you break down his swing percentage you see a massive change in both outside and inside the zone swings. He’s increased his swing percentage on pitches in the zone and decreased his swing percentage on pitches outside the zone.

Leading theories propose that sleep presents an opportune time for important, new memories to become stabilized. And it’s long been known which brain waves are produced during sleep. But in a new study, researchers set out to better understand the brain mechanisms that secure memory storage.

The team from Northwestern and Princeton universities set out to find more direct and precisely timed evidence for the involvement of one particular sleep wave — known as the “sleep spindle.”

In the study, sleep spindles, described as bursts of brain activity typically lasting around one second, were linked to memory reactivation. The paper, “Sleep spindle refractoriness segregates periods of memory reactivation,” published today in the journal Current Biology.

The way parents and teachers praise children is known to influence not only their future performance, but how they feel about the malleability of intelligence. If a child has done well, focusing positive comments on their efforts, actions and strategies (saying, for example, “good job” or “you must have tried really hard”) is preferable to saying “you’re so smart”, in part because process-centred praise is thought to encourage kids to interpret setbacks as opportunities to grow, rather than as threats to their self-concept. In contrast, a kid who’s led to believe she succeeds because she’s “intelligent” may not attempt a difficult challenge, in case she fails.

Now – and somewhat remarkably, given all the praise and growth mindset research conducted on children – a new study, led by Rachael Reavis at Earlham College, Indiana, US, published the Journal of Genetic Psychology, claims to be the first to test the effects of different types of praise on how adults feel after failure.

When he talks about where his fields of neuroscience and neuropsychology have taken a wrong turn, David Poeppel of New York University doesn’t mince words. “There’s an orgy of data but very little understanding,” he said to a packed room at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in February. He decried the “epistemological sterility” of experiments that do piecework measurements of the brain’s wiring in the laboratory but are divorced from any guiding theories about behaviors and psychological phenomena in the natural world. It’s delusional, he said, to think that simply adding up those pieces will eventually yield a meaningful picture of complex thought.

He pointed to the example of Caenorhabditis elegans, the roundworm that is one of the most studied lab animals. “Here’s an organism that we literally know inside out,” he said, because science has worked out every one of its 302 neurons, all of their connections and the worm’s full genome. “But we have no satisfying model for the behavior of C. elegans,” he said. “We’re missing something.”

Poeppel is more than a gadfly attacking the status quo: Recently, his laboratory used real-world behavior to guide the design of a brain-activity study that led to a surprising discovery in the neuroscience of speech.

… Noise is easier to measure than bias, though, and that makes it easier to control, he said. But the best way to do it is to turn that task over to a machine. Algorithms are effective at reducing noise, and thus reducing the costs associated with it, because each iteration of the same task is guaranteed to produce a consistent result, he said.

“The big advantage that algorithms have over humans is that they don’t have noise,” Kahneman said. “You present them the same problem twice, and you get the same output. That’s just not true of people.”

A human can still provide valuable inputs that a machine can’t — impressions, judgments — but they’re not particularly good at integrating information in a reliable and robust way, Kahneman said. The primary function of a person in a human-machine relationship should be to provide a fail-safe in an emergency situation.

Compression therapy is a standard form of treatment for patients who suffer from venous ulcers and other conditions in which veins struggle to return blood from the lower extremities. Compression stockings and bandages, wrapped tightly around the affected limb, can help to stimulate blood flow. But there is currently no clear way to gauge whether a bandage is applying an optimal pressure for a given condition.

Now engineers at MIT have developed pressure-sensing photonic fibers that they have woven into a typical compression bandage. As the bandage is stretched, the fibers change color. Using a color chart, a caregiver can stretch a bandage until it matches the color for a desired pressure, before, say, wrapping it around a patient’s leg.

The photonic fibers can then serve as a continuous pressure sensor — if their color changes, caregivers or patients can use the color chart to determine whether and to what degree the bandage needs loosening or tightening.

The FDA has been approving its fair share of AI-powered medical technology, but its latest might be particularly helpful if you ever have a nasty fall. The agency has greenlit Imagen’s OsteoDetect, an AI-based diagnostic tool that can quickly detect distal radius wrist fractures. Its machine learning algorithm studies 2D X-rays for the telltale signs of fractures and marks them for closer study. It’s not a replacement for doctors or clinicians, the FDA stressed — rather, it’s to improve their detection and get the right treatment that much sooner.

The approval came relatively quickly by using the De Novo premarket review pathway, which streamlines the process for products with “low to moderate risk.”

Take Home Message: Patients that received platelet-rich plasma during an anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction with bone-patellar tendon-bone autograft had similar patellar defect size and patient-reported outcomes compared with patients that did not receive the injection.

A glass of wine may be a popular way to relax in the evening, but does it also help you sleep? New research sheds light on this question by connecting the dots between alcohol consumption and its impact on the restorative quality of sleep.

The new study from Finland is unique in that it utilized data from over 4000 men and women recorded in the real-world conditions of daily life. Notably, even a single drink had a demonstrably negative impact on the restorative quality of sleep.

Sleep needs vary from person to person, but also from day to day. While some individuals tend to need more, others require less. A mounting body of evidence shows that daily routines, activities, and consumption patterns play role in sleep quality, making it important to investigate the relationship between what a person does and how well they sleep.

A huge rise in the number of reports of sexist discrimination in football targeted at high‑profile women in the game is worrying but not surprising, according to the sport’s leading gender equality pressure group.

There has been an overall increase of almost 400% in the number of reports of sex discrimination and harassment incidents received by Women in Football, with alleged abuse on social media accounting for the biggest leap.

During the course of the 2017‑18 season, Women in Football claims to have received complaints from individuals across the football industry. Lewd comments of a sexual nature, racist, gendered remarks and threats of violence were reportedly made to a number of high‑profile female journalists, broadcasters, players and referees.

“Our country doesn’t do many things well, but when it comes to big occasions, no one else comes close,” so claimed an instructor I heard at the gym this week. He might be an expert in physical fitness but it’s doubtful this chap was drawing on any evidence or established knowledge about the UK’s standing on the international league table of pageantry or anything else, and what’s more, he probably didn’t care about his oversight. What he probably did feel is a social pressure to have an opinion on the royal wedding that took place last weekend. To borrow the terminology of US psychologist John Petrocelli, he was probably bullshitting.

“In essence,” Petrocelli explains in his new paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, “the bullshitter is a relatively careless thinker/communicator and plays fast and loose with ideas and/or information as he bypasses consideration of, or concern for, evidence and established knowledge.”

While pontificating on Britain’s prowess at pomp is pretty harmless, Petrocelli has more serious topics in mind. “Whether they be claims or expressions of opinions about the effects of vaccinations, the causes of success and failure, or political ideation, doing so with little to no concern for evidence or truth is wrong,” he writes.

… The important subtext here is this: What is a Concacaf Champions League really worth?

The answer may seem obvious – it’s a major, regional championship. But while the wonkish MLS fan may crave CCL glory, plenty of demographic research shows a majority of MLS supporters (or general soccer supporters who are amenable to becoming MLS foam-finger-wearers) care most about one thing: MLS Cup.

They aren’t engrossed with the U.S. Open Cup and aren’t particularly enamored with a regional tournament where games can sometimes require forensic sleuthing to locate on TV.

Does anyone think sponsors will suddenly see an MLS club as significantly more valuable for lifting a CCL trophy? Doubtful. Will local TV rights deals skyrocket? Almost certainly not. Would clubs see season ticket numbers tick increase beyond some marginal percent? Nah.

… Dig deeper and you can see Philly’s commitment to grinding out at-bats the way some of the more successful Yankees and Red Sox teams have in recent years. Only one team’s hitters have swung at the first pitch less frequently than the Phillies have this year; only five have taken more pitches.

Odubel Herrera has been the poster child for the Phillies’ on-base success. Though he has walked about half as often as the club’s leaders, he also built one of the most impressive streaks in the game’s recent history. Herrera reached base in 45 straight games before having his streak snapped against the Cardinals on May 20. You could even argue that the streak should still be going, given what happened in his final at-bat that day.

… “They clearly have a different approach to the draft,” ESPN scouting guru Keith Law said. “They are looking for a specific player archetype and I think it’s working for them, too. Because it’s not a style of drafting or philosophy for the draft that a lot of teams are using right now. Teams are so analytically focused that the Padres are playing from a slightly different playbook and I think it allows them to get players that they really like that are getting overlooked a little bit by other teams.”

Of the Padres’ top-30 prospects as ranked by MLB.com, more arrived via drafts in the Preller era (11) than any other avenue. That group includes first-rounders from high school (MacKenzie Gore) and college (Cal Quantrill) that both rank among the top-100 minor leaguers in the game, another first-rounder (Eric Lauer) that recently joined 2016 fourth-rounder Joey Lucchesi in the big league rotation and a selection as far back as the 35th round (David Bednar).