… He is not a player who can do things alone, without the help of joined-up tactics and productive teammates. At least, not yet. But Pulisic is only 19 and his performances must be seen in the context of his age group. Pulisic might have only reached average levels of output as an attacking midfielder, but for his age he has been outstandingly good.
“A comparison with Bundesliga attacking midfielders under 20 shows that only Ousmane Dembele (Dortmund) and Kai Havertz (Leverkusen) have done better over the last two seasons,” says Reinartz. “Scouts read his profile as that of a very talented player who is great in the final third and can still progress in all other departments.”
… [Tommy] La Stella’s at-bats constantly amaze his teammates as there’s never a hint of emotion involved in his offensive game — which he claims is the key. Though he often comes to the plate with the game on the line, his demeanor — and probably his heartbeat — don’t show it.
“The thing that I found is I put together my best at-bats when I had my simplest thought process,” La Stella explains. “Starting in 2015, when I began to be better at it, I was simplifying everything. Simplifying mechanics, the thought process between pitches, simplifying what I do well offensively.”
The biggest difference between La Stella and many other hitters when they come off the bench is that he doesn’t care if he doesn’t swing. It’s human nature for a baseball player who may get only one at-bat every other game to want to get his hacks in. Not La Stella. He averages four pitches per plate appearance and has earned five walks off the bench already, tops in the game.
The burgeoning careers of Madison Keys and Sloane Stephens have often run parallel.
The two friends made breakthrough runs to Australian Open semifinals just before their 20th birthdays. Both reached their first Grand Slam final at last year’s United States Open, which Stephens won in straight sets.
On Sunday at Roland Garros, each reached the quarterfinals of the French Open for the first time to complete a quartet of sorts. For Keys, 23, and Stephens, 25, the milestone meant that they had both advanced to the quarterfinals or better at all four Grand Slam events.
“Super cool,” Stephens said, grinning broadly at mention of the feat. “Isn’t that exciting?”
… He had a decision to make: Either take a chance, move up a division and maybe play, continuing the journey to a full-time soccer player; or he could accept a college scholarship offer in the United States, play soccer part-time and get a degree, giving himself a backup plan if his dream never happened.
Gressel was considered a late bloomer, someone who was just beginning to grow into his body and develop the skills necessary to even test the waters of becoming a professional. He’d already been cut from one youth team and had to refocus his career goals. Now, he was being asked to do it again. He had begun to explore the possibility of college soccer in America. The ability to continue school while playing soccer enticed him, and he chose to take a scholarship from Providence College in Rhode Island. He knew he needed the time and the degree.
“I probably would have got the chance, but I don’t know if I would have taken it,” Gressel said of professional opportunities in Germany during a phone interview with ESPN FC.
… ASN: In MLS, Tyler Adams, Chris Durkin, and Mark McKenzie are playing regularly in MLS while a few others are getting occasional minutes while many are in USL. How do you assess the opportunities of the current U-20 age group based domestically? Are they earning enough minutes, and are the opportunities there right now?
Ramos: There is no secret that our young players do not get enough opportunities overall. If Tyler Adams, Mark McKenzie, Auston Trusty, Chris Durkin, Kellyn Acosta, Brooks Lennon and Justen Glad were at different clubs than their current, they would be so much further behind in their development. Some clubs recognize that they can get a return on the investment they are making on their academies, but they have to take chances and give opportunities.
With the MLB draft only two days away, we examine which college conferences and parts of the country are producing the most talent, football-baseball decisions and some names that might ring a bell. … When it comes to hotbeds of talent in college baseball, the SEC is usually the first place that comes to mind, and rightfully so: There is a deep history of SEC players taken very high, including four No. 1 picks.
Three days before the NFL announced measures aimed at ending player protests during the National Anthem, 40 NFL rookies were sitting around tables in a curtained-off section of ballroom at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles. Matt Hasselbeck, Steve Smith and a handful of former players were giving life advice to would-be NFL stars. They spoke beside a stage and a banner reading PRESERVE OUR GAINS, DEFINE OUR FUTURE.
Players created vision boards using images cut out from magazines, and were warned against superficial goals like cars and jewelry. They discussed the career arcs of Cam Newton, among others, with the aid of worksheets that noted Newton’s college arrest for stealing a laptop and his subsequent success and good deeds, and Johnny Manziel’s path to unemployment. An NFLPA organizer’s parting words: Get more out of football than it gets out of you.
… Three factors, she says, have contributed mightily to this crisis.
First: Where, how and how much kids are allowed to play has changed. Second, their access to technology and social media has exploded.
Finally, Lewis suggests, children today are too “unemployed.” She doesn’t simply mean the occasional summer job for a high school teen. The term is a big tent, and she uses it to include household jobs that can help even toddlers build confidence and a sense of community.
… By taking thumbprints of our athletes using EMG sensors, biomechanical data, velocity data, and other metrics in our performance software database, we can expose it to machine learning methods to constantly analyze the markers that contribute most to performance gains and what seems to cause backslides in ability or worse, injury.
For example, a common issue that we have found that is a marker for injury is high angular velocity at the elbow and shoulder combined with low ball velocity. This is an efficiency problem; why does the athlete have such high arm speed, but comparatively low fastball velocity? Three things are true about this athlete:
They are at higher risk for injury due to some breakdown in the kinetic chain
Ball velocity would be a poor way to monitor this athlete’s throwing load
This athlete has high potential to gain fastball velocity due to arm speed
… I called up Yaniv Erlich, the scientist who wrote the intelligence program, to ask him about his prediction. Erlich, I should point out, majored in computational neuroscience, got a Ph.D. in genetics, became an associate professor at Columbia, and is on leave from teaching to serve as the chief science officer at the DNA-testing company MyHeritage. I imagine Erlich’s mother is very proud of her boy.
I bring all this up because Erlich burst out laughing when I told him about my report and told me about his own.
“I also get that on the left side,” he said. “Everything is cool. Many smart people end up there.”
Erlich explained that he designed the program to make people cautious about the connection between genes and intelligence. All those disclaimers and notes that surrounded the bell curve were intended to show that these predictions are, in a sense, worse than just wrong. They’re practically meaningless.
Israeli scientists have developed an integrated system of wearable monitors that passively detect and transmit vital signs as early markers for disease. Such wearables aren’t unique, but this system is unprecedented because it’s powered by energy from the wearer’s movements and body heat, and can fix its own tears or scratches.
There have been many cases in which OLEDs are applied to electronic devices, and now they have even been extended to therapeutic fields. A KAIST research team succeeded in developing a wearable photobiomodulation (PBM) patch to treat wounds. This technology will allow injuries to be treated regardless of location or time.
Professor KyungCheol Choi from the School of Electrical Engineering, in collaboration with Seoul National University Bundang Hospital’s team, conducted research on PBMs which are a clinical method widely used in hospitals. They are considered to be a safe, noninvasive, and nonsurgical method that require relatively low light power.
Conventionally, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have been used in PBM applications; however, LED devices are usually inflexible and difficult to irradiate light uniformly. They may also produce localized heat. Due to these constraints, it was difficult to enhance the clinical effects of LED devices as they cannot stick to the human body.
Choi’s team developed a wearable patch using flexible OLEDs, allowing people to be treated outside of hospitals. A thin film has been developed for the patch, containing not only flexible OLEDs but also batteries and anti-superheating devices.
Artificial sweeteners are everywhere, but the jury is still out on whether these chemicals are harmless. Also called nonnutritive sweeteners, these can be synthetic, such as saccharin and aspartame, or naturally derived, such as stevia. To date, the Food and Drug Administration has approved six types of artificial and two types of natural nonnutritive sweeteners for use in food.
That’s been great news for those working hard to curb their sugar consumption. Aspartame, for example, is found in more than 6,000 foods worldwide, and about 5,000 to 5,500 tons are consumed every year in the United States alone.
The American Diabetes Association — the most well-respected professional group focusing on diabetes — officially recommends diet soda as an alternative to sugar-sweetened beverages. Seven U.S. municipalities have imposed a sugary-beverage tax to discourage consumption.
However, recent medical studies suggest that policymakers eager to implement a soda tax may also want to include diet drinks because these sweeteners may be contributing to chronic diabetes and cardiovascular diseases as well.
All data arise within a particular context and often as a result of a specific question being asked. That is all well and good until we attempt to use that same data to answer a different question within a different context. When you match an existing dataset with a new question, you have to ask if the original context in which the data were collected is compatible with the new question and the new context. If there is context compatibility, then it is often reasonable to move forward. If not, then you either have to stop or come up with some statistical principle or assumption that makes the two contexts compatible. Good data analysts will often do this in their heads quickly and may not even realize they are doing it. However, I think explicitly recognizing this task is important for making sure that data analyses can provide clear answers and useful conclusions.
Understanding context compatibility is increasingly important as data science and the analysis of existing datasets continues to take off. Existing datasets all come from somewhere and it’s important to the analyst to know where that is and whether it’s compatible with where they’re going. If there is an imcompatibility between the two contexts, which in my experience is almost always the case, then any assumption or statistical principle invoked will likely introduce uncertainty into the final results. That uncertainty should at least be communicated to the audience, if not formally considered in the analysis. In some cases, the original context of the data and the context of the new analysis will be so incompatible that it’s not worth using the data to answer the new question. Explicit recognition of this problem can save a lot of wasted time analyzing a dataset that is ultimately a poor fit for answering a given question.
I wanted to provide two examples from my own work where context compatibility played an important role.
… Jupyter Notebooks allow data scientists to create and share their documents, from codes to full blown reports. They help data scientists streamline their work and enable more productivity and easy collaboration. Due to these and several other reasons you will see below, Jupyter Notebooks are one of the most popular tools among data scientists.
In this article, we will introduce you to Jupyter notebooks and deep dive into it’s features and advantages.