Before you pencil Brandon Marshall onto the Seattle Seahawks’ roster, let alone into the No. 3 spot in their wide receiving corps, it’s important to remember Antoine Winfield.
Or Jahri Evans. Or Eric Winston. Or Barrett Ruud.
All four fit a similar profile. They were well-known veterans either nearing or over 30 years old, whom the Seahawks signed well into free agency as inexpensive insurance at positions where they lacked experience. None of them ended up making the team once general manager John Schneider and coach Pete Carroll decided younger players were the better options.
Draft prospect Miles Bridges had the rare opportunity to seek career advice from the King of the NBA.
The 6-foot-7 Michigan State forward took advantage of the fact LeBron James is part of the same agency Bridges signed with in late March. Bridges reached out for some tips on how to succeed in something he’s been dreaming about since childhood.
“I asked him how does he take care of his body so good,” Bridges, projected to be picked in the teens in the first round in Thursday’s NBA draft, said Wednesday at the pre-draft media day. “He’s in his 15th year, playing the most minutes. So I just asked him how he took care of his body.”
Here’s a tip: Let’s not read too much into Andy Murray’s return to competitive tennis, his first match in 342 days because of a hip injury. The road back to the top for the three-time Grand Slam champion and former world No. 1 is likely to be long and perhaps problematic, but at least he’s on it. Right now, that’s all we know. And it is all he knows, too.
Things will become clearer when he wakes up on Wednesday morning, when he feels how his 31-year-old body reacts to the 2 hours, 39 minutes of effort he put it through against Nick Kyrgios in the first round of the Fever-Tree Championships at London’s Queen’s Club. It was a match Murray eventually lost 2-6, 7-6 (4), 7-5, but only after a lot of encouraging moments.
On the face of it, things look good. Murray moved better than many people expected and he battled as hard as ever. Even the old snarls toward his players’ box were there, along with the fist pumps and “c’mons!” as he tried to lug his body toward an unlikely victory. The warm reception he received as he stepped onto the court at 3.51 p.m. local time surely made him feel good. Being out there, on the court again, even better.
Setting aside the questions about performance-enhancing drugs, how far have we come in our never ending quest to go faster, higher, and farther? And what are we learning about how technology and new training methods can help us push the limits of human performance?
A demonstration included in a 2014 Ted Talk given by sports journalist David Epstein showed that if Owens had run on the same surface as Bolt, Owens’s best time in the 100 meters (10.2 seconds)—accomplished shortly before the 1936 Olympics—could have been within one stride of Bolt’s performance in the 100 meters (9.77 seconds) at the 2013 World Championships.
In the eight decades since Owens’s historic victories, improvements in training, testing, technique, clothing, and equipment have helped athletes become better, faster, stronger, and more precise. But researchers believe we have not yet reached the limits of human possibility.
With his bleach-white beard, piercing blue eyes and sturdy frame, Mexico’s “mental coach” Imanol Ibarrondo wouldn’t look out of place auditioning for the part of the wizard in “Lord of the Rings.”
The borderline mystical aura almost encourages the speculation about what Ibarrondo actually does with El Tri. After all, employing someone to coach the mental side of the game is still relatively new to professional soccer. In Mexico, Ibarrondo’s presence has seemed to cause both intrigue and confusion in equal measure — though he shares some insights on Twitter — but the win against Germany last Sunday has certainly put his work under the spotlight.
Ibarrondo floats around the camp, watching training with a keen eye and sitting in on press conferences. He doesn’t give many interviews, making it clear that he is just another member of the coaching staff of which Juan Carlos Osorio is very much the boss. But speak to him and one thing becomes very clear: This is not some kind of wizard casting spells onto the group. Ibarrondo’s job is one of meticulously planned steps, has rationality at its core and is done mainly behind the scenes.
As the coach of the most successful national soccer team in Icelandic history, Heimir Hallgrimsson has had to make some sacrifices. This year, for instance, he was abroad with the team and could not dress up as his favorite mythological character, Gryla the child-snatching troll, at the Christmas party in Heimaey, his hometown.
Because Gryla’s costume obscures the wearer’s identity, few people realized that Hallgrimsson was for many years the man in the troll suit. “I don’t know who did it this year,” his nephew, Arne Olafsson, said, “but he was not as aggressive as Heimir.”
Coaching a team bound for the World Cup has also left less time for Hallgrimsson’s original job, looking after people’s teeth in his dental practice in Heimaey (population 4,300), a 5.2-square-mile volcanic island off Iceland’s south coast.
“It’s a good way to relax,” Hallgrimsson said this year during a lull in Iceland’s soccer schedule here. Despite high winds and a looming snow and ice storm, he was heading home for some delayed dental therapy (for himself). “Some coaches play golf, shoot reindeer, whatever — everybody has something,” he said. “But I really enjoy going back home to my clients.”
World Economic Forum, Frontiers, Conn Hastings from
If a sports team plays a critical game in which losing means elimination from a league, do they work harder to win — or does the high pressure mean they are more likely to make mistakes and lose? A new study in Frontiers in Psychology suggests the latter, finding that basketball teams playing for survival in critical NBA playoff games are more likely to lose. This suggests that the threat of elimination caused the teams to ‘choke.’ The study is the first to illustrate this effect in a real-world team sports environment — and may be applicable to a variety of high-pressure performance situations, such as those found in the workplace.
With the NBA 2018 finals drawing to a close, many teams will have experienced intense pressure to avoid elimination by winning critical games during the playoffs. Researchers are working to understand how athletes and others handle pressure, and how this affects their performance. Previous studies led some researchers to predict that high-pressure situations can help to focus minds and increase motivation, leading to increased success.
“Theories predict that individuals exert the most effort, and therefore produce their best performances, when the possible returns for their success — or the consequences of their failure — are highest,” says Dr. Yair Galily, of the Interdisciplinary Center, Hertzlya, Israel.
The early years are when the brain develops the most, forming neural connections that pave the way for how a child — and the eventual adult — will express feelings, embark on a task, and learn new skills and concepts. Scientists have even theorized that the anatomical structure of neural connections forms the basis for how children identify letters and recognize words. In other words, the brain’s architecture may predetermine who will have trouble with reading, including children with dyslexia.
But teaching can change that, a new University of Washington study finds.
Using MRI measurements of the brain’s neural connections, or “white matter,” UW researchers have shown that, in struggling readers, the neural circuitry strengthened — and their reading performance improved — after just eight weeks of a specialized tutoring program. The study, published June 8 in Nature Communications, is the first to measure white matter during an intensive educational intervention and link children’s learning with their brains’ flexibility.
“The process of educating a child is physically changing the brain,” said Jason Yeatman, an assistant professor in both the UW Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences and the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS).
The Boston Celtics are now the leader in the NBA’s arms race for practice facility supremacy.
The Celtics on Tuesday hosted the grand opening of their brand-new, state-of-the-art, 70-000 square-foot practice facility located at Boston Landing, in the Boston neighborhood of Allston/Brighton. The building has been named the Red Auerbach Center at New Balance World Headquarters, paying tribute to the patriarch of the organization who led the Celtics to their first 16 world championships, with the goal of more to come.
“This will be the foundation as we build the Celtics teams of the future in our relentless quest of Banners 18, 19, and beyond,” said Managing Partner and Team Governor Wyc Grousbeck.
The building will serve as Boston’s practice facility, but in a way, it is actually the team’s new home. It is equipped with everything the players, the coaching staff and the front office staff will need to live their daily lives – without ever leaving the building.
Today, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) open sourced DensePose, our real-time approach for mapping all human pixels of 2D RGB images to a 3D surface-based model of the body.
Recent research in human understanding aims primarily at localizing a sparse set of joints, like the wrists, or elbows of humans. This may suffice for applications like gesture or action recognition, but it delivers a reduced image interpretation. We wanted to go further. Imagine trying new clothes on via a photo, or putting costumes on your friend’s photos. For these tasks, a more complete, surface-based image interpretation is required.
Google, Deep Mind, S. M. Ali Eslami and Danilo Jimenez Rezende from
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to how we understand a visual scene: our brains draw on prior knowledge to reason and to make inferences that go far beyond the patterns of light that hit our retinas. For example, when entering a room for the first time, you instantly recognise the items it contains and where they are positioned. If you see three legs of a table, you will infer that there is probably a fourth leg with the same shape and colour hidden from view. Even if you can’t see everything in the room, you’ll likely be able to sketch its layout, or imagine what it looks like from another perspective.
These visual and cognitive tasks are seemingly effortless to humans, but they represent a significant challenge to our artificial systems. Today, state-of-the-art visual recognition systems are trained using large datasets of annotated images produced by humans. Acquiring this data is a costly and time-consuming process, requiring individuals to label every aspect of every object in each scene in the dataset. As a result, often only a small subset of a scene’s overall contents is captured, which limits the artificial vision systems trained on that data. As we develop more complex machines that operate in the real world, we want them to fully understand their surroundings: where is the nearest surface to sit on? What material is the sofa made of? Which light source is creating all the shadows? Where is the light switch likely to be?
In this work, published in Science (Open Access version), we introduce the Generative Query Network (GQN), a framework within which machines learn to perceive their surroundings by training only on data obtained by themselves as they move around scenes. Much like infants and animals, the GQN learns by trying to make sense of its observations of the world around it. In doing so, the GQN learns about plausible scenes and their geometrical properties, without any human labelling of the contents of scenes.
Previous research has sought to quantify head impact exposure using wearable kinematic sensors. However, many sensors suffer from poor accuracy in estimating impact kinematics and count, motivating the need for additional independent impact exposure quantification for comparison. Here, we equipped seven collegiate American football players with instrumented mouthguards, and video recorded practices and games to compare video-based and sensor-based exposure rates and impact location distributions. Over 50 player-hours, we identified 271 helmet contact periods in video, while the instrumented mouthguard sensor recorded 2,032 discrete head impacts. Matching video and mouthguard real-time stamps yielded 193 video-identified helmet contact periods and 217 sensor-recorded impacts. To compare impact locations, we binned matched impacts into frontal, rear, side, oblique, and top locations based on video observations and sensor kinematics. While both video-based and sensor-based methods found similar location distributions, our best method utilizing integrated linear and angular position only correctly predicted 81 of 217 impacts. Finally, based on the activity timeline from video assessment, we also developed a new exposure metric unique to American football quantifying number of cross-verified sensor impacts per player-play. We found significantly higher exposure during games (0.35, 95% CI: 0.29–0.42) than practices (0.20, 95% CI: 0.17–0.23) (p<0.05). In the traditional impacts per player-hour metric, we observed higher exposure during practices (4.7) than games (3.7) due to increased player activity in practices. Thus, our exposure metric accounts for variability in on-field participation. While both video-based and sensor-based exposure datasets have limitations, they can complement one another to provide more confidence in exposure statistics.
Doughnuts are particularly difficult to resist – and now we know why. A study of how our brains respond to food has found that treats that are high in both carbs and fats trigger a super-charged amount of activity in our brain’s reward centre.
As more mainstream consumers, and not just professional athletes and dedicated body builders, seek sports nutrition products, food and beverage formulators may consider targeting niche markets. Think millennials, people with allergies or people seeking clean label or free-from products.
The source of protein in such products becomes important in these scenarios. Besides dairy and soy, protein may be sourced from chicken and almonds. Whatever the protein source, formulators also may wish to consider the amount of creatine, glutamine and leucine in the protein source.
FrieslandCampina DMV took millennials into account in its Nutri Whey Native whey protein ingredient line. A consumer research effort sought to understand the needs of millennials.
“In this recent insights and innovation study executed in the U.K. and U.S., we discovered that naturalness of ingredients is an important value that is increasingly seen as a necessity,” said Benjamin Maclean, product group manager. “Offering more natural concepts based on a few pure ingredients can create exciting opportunities for our customers to engage new audiences and grow their businesses.”
They are largely minnows in the soccer world, countries that have far fewer people and far less money than the countries they had to beat to get to the World Cup.
And yet there they are, on soccer’s biggest stage, taking on the giants of the sport. Iceland held Argentina to a 1-1 tie on Saturday, a strong result that will help its chances to advance out of the first round. Panama squares off with Belgium on Monday. Costa Rica lines up against Brazil next Friday.
So how, exactly, did they beat out the bigger countries in their regions to get there? And what can the countries that aren’t in Russia, despite a much deeper history of success in the sport, or more resources, or millions more people, learn from what they did so they can get to Qatar in 2022?
Interviews with coaches, players and administrators from these countries reveal a through line — in each case, the team found a problem that was solvable and a way to turn a weakness into a strength. Iceland has spent the past two decades seeding its youth coaching ranks with professionals. Panama, traditionally a baseball-first country, got its best players on the best possible teams outside the country. Costa Rica has instilled the simplest of strategies and makes no apologies for aesthetics. They all know who they are, and who they are not.