… What do I mean by natural? It’s hard to explain but easy to see: look at Luka Modric, the greatest threat to England, and you will understand. He’s prodigious playing this game – and, so they tell me, every other game too – as if he was born with some muscular intelligence applicable to any activity expressed through a ball. Modric honours that natural advantage by playing with passion, enjoying what he does. He kills himself out there and yet for a superior talent like him, that does not count as sacrifice or suffering. Maybe we can call it a challenge, a test, a very particular type of fun.
We’re not talking about a gift like Diego Maradona’s, rather one that consists filling the game with common sense. He doesn’t do impossible things; when he plays a pass, you see it and think: ‘That’s what I would have done.’ We love to draw conclusions like that when we watch games but we should not believe what we say. In fact, what Modric does only Modric does.
Des Linden is who people want her to be, usually. She will play the part. She will stay in her lane: the archetype of an underdog. She’s 5 feet and barely 100 pounds. She acknowledges that the act fits: “I guess my story is like a Cinderella story, whatever. It’s nice.” That’s why, since last April, she has smiled through all the interviews, gone along with all the narratives and aw-shuck’ed her way to a place in the history books.
In this conversation, though, there are no pre-established narratives. The record books say that, prior to April, despite being without a career win in the marathon, Linden was a two-time Olympian with three career top-three finishes in the Boston Marathon and, in an amazing show of consistency, ran the fastest or second-fastest marathon time among U.S. women in eight of the past 10 years. This is no little engine that could. This is a defiant iron horse. So why in the world is Linden the perpetual long shot? For someone outside of the sectarian world of marathon running, it makes no sense.
Listening to this preamble, Linden draws a wry smirk and widens her eyes. She lowers her voice to half a whisper to disclose: “Like, I’m actually pretty talented, but if my success gives people a reason to believe in themselves, then, OK, I’m good with whatever they want to call me.”
“If pitchers spent as much time practicing and performing joint mobility work as they do on PFP’s per week we’d see a significant difference in performance & injury reduction”
This came up in a conversation with a few guys in ta training session last week, with all of them nodding their heads in agreement.
“Not even that, if we just spent half the time we do shagging fly balls on moving better, that would work too,” another trainee chipped in.
It seems like such an obvious suggestion. A conversation that you’d think wouldn’t be necessary in 2018 with the infinite amount of freely available information.
More than 300 budding players from 41 countries are participating in an International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) Women’s High-Performance Camp in Vierumaki.
The week-long event is taking place at the Sport Institute of Finland.
Some of the leading female under-18 players in the world from both national and development squad will be present to receive “top-level education in various aspects of athleticism and running a national team”.
The focus is particularly on female junior players outside North America in an attempt to narrow the gap between Canada, United States and the rest of the world.
England players seem happier and more grounded – and much of the credit goes to psychologist Pippa Grange. What can the team’s approach teach us all about facing fear and failure?
To investigate the heterogeneity of physical adaptation in Australian Army recruits completing a 12-week basic military training regimen. Design
A prospective research design. Methods
Volunteer recruits (n = 195) completed 12-weeks of basic military training. Recruit physical fitness was assessed at Week 1, Weeks 6-8 and Week 12. Recruits in the upper (75th) and lower (25th) quartiles for each assessment were then analysed using a repeated measures two-way ANOVA. The relative magnitude of recruit adaptions were classified as positive response (Rpositive, ≥5%), limited response (Rlimited, >-5%-<5%) and negative response (Rnegative, ≤-5%); Chi-square analysis determined the proportional differences in the distribution of each quartile.
Results
An interaction (p < 0.001) was observed in the lower and upper recruit quartiles for all assessments of physical fitness at each time point. After 12 weeks of military training the mean difference of the highest quartile was; 20-m multi-stage fitness test 7.4 mL·kg−1·min−1, (CI:5.8:9.1), 2-min push-ups 20.1 reps, (CI:16.2:23.9), 1RM box lift 5.6 kg, (CI:2.6:5.8) and load carriage 222.1 s, (CI:174.7:269.4) compared to the lowest recruit quartile. The highest quartile demonstrated no improvement in 1RM box lift (-4%, −1%) and push-up (2%, 0%) performance at Week 6-8 and Week 12 respectively. In contrast, adaptations in the lowest quartile for 1RM box lift (16%, 21%) and push-up (46%, 46%) over the same time periods were observed.
Conclusions
A significant proportion of recruits may complete basic military training with a decline in physical performance. Higher relative-intensity cardiorespiratory and resistance exercise should be considered to facilitate physical adaptation in all recruits.
Perhaps no team in professional sports exceeds the Sixers’ commitment to analytics and sports science, and they’re willing to share their knowledge about medicine and machines. The philosophy of using data to maximize performance is foundational to the vision that owners Josh Harris and David Blitzer conceived when they decided to rebuild the team from the ground up in 2013.
Two weeks ago, the Sixers gave the rest of the sports world a glimpse of how they have evolved at a sports science summit, where experts presented new research and ideas to an audience of more than 100 sports science developers, researchers and practitioners, including sports science staffs from other professional teams such as the Eagles and the Colts — even the Celtics.
Dr. David Martin, the Sixers’ performance and research director — the head sports scientist — coordinated the summit. His presentation served as the grand finale for the eight-hour think-fest, and it addressed the reason everyone was in the room: drafting, transitioning and developing athletes so they can compete, and so they can return to competition if they are injured.
“How do we get all of this right?” he asked the group. “Maybe you can use tech.”
At the end of last month, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) announced that it would be adding a few amendments to its official rulebook. After an update to Rule 143, which deals with athlete attire, the rules now include a clause that states: “Any type of shoe used [in competition] must be reasonably available to all in the spirit of the universality of athletics.”
In an interesting coincidence, the IAAF announcement came the day after Olympic gold medalist Gwen Jorgensen posted a YouTube video about a customized pair of track spikes that she had worn at last month’s USA Track and Field National Championships. The shoe in question was a unique spike version of Nike’s Vaporfly 4% road racing flat, which provided significantly more cushioning than a traditional track shoe.
Click goes to Wimbledon to see how artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to highlight the best moments in the tennis tournament and at the same time help players improve their game.
Princeton CITP, Freedom to Tinker blog; Noah Apthorpe, Yan Shvartzshnaider, Arunesh Mathur, Nick Feamster from
Privacy concerns surrounding disruptive technologies such as the Internet of Things (and, in particular, connected smart home devices) have been prevalent in public discourse, with privacy violations from these devices occurring frequently. As these new technologies challenge existing societal norms, determining the bounds of “acceptable” information handling practices requires rigorous study of user privacy expectations and normative opinions towards information transfer.
To better understand user attitudes and societal norms concerning data collection, we have developed a scalable survey method for empirically studying privacy in context. This survey method uses (1) a formal theory of privacy called contextual integrity and (2) combinatorial testing at scale to discover privacy norms. In our work, we have applied the method to better understand norms concerning data collection in smart homes. The general method, however, can be adapted to arbitrary contexts with varying actors, information types, and communication conditions, paving the way for future studies informing the design of emerging technologies. The technique can provide meaningful insights about privacy norms for manufacturers, regulators, researchers and other stakeholders. Our paper describing this research appears in the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.
All it took to rewrite the rules of understanding the evolution of cooperation was a series of chance encounters among Martin Nowak, Krishnendu Chatterjee, and Christian Hilbe.
During his first visit to Harvard in 2008, Chatterjee, a computer-science professor at IST Austria, mentioned stochastic games — games that can change based on players’ actions — and the idea sent Nowak down a years-long path to merge the concept with evolutionary dynamics.
“People who study evolution of cooperation do not use stochastic games,” said Nowak, who developed the new framework in collaboration with Chatterjee, Hilbe, a postdoctoral fellow in Chatterjee’s group at IST, and Stepan Simsa of Charles University in Prague. “Instead, in a sequence of repeated encounters, it is assumed that the same game with the same payoff matrix is played again and again. In a stochastic game, the game itself can change probabilistically depending on the players’ actions.”
… Are hitters simply too stubborn to adjust, or are the answers more complex? The potential hazards of a hitter going outside his comfort zone to beat the shift were evident during a recent Nationals-Blue Jays game, when Washington’s Matt Adams suffered a broken finger while squaring to bunt against a vacant left side of the infield. As hitters also can attest, teams routinely pitch to the shift. A pitcher is not going to throw soft stuff away to a left-handed hitter with the entire left side of the infield uninhabited.
ESPN.com recently asked three lefty hitters who face varying percentages of shifts for their takes on the state of affairs. How do they try to attack defensive shifts, and do they think MLB can take any steps to address the problem — if there is, indeed, a problem?
… By the end of the 2016 season Carlos Beltrán still performed well by most of Statcast’s metrics, remarkably so considering that he was about to turn 40. He still ran well, with a top sprint speed of 26.6 feet per second. More than a third of the league’s regulars were slower. And while he played his final game in centerfield in ’12, he remained no worse than exactly average in right. Statcast determined that the standard outfielder would have caught 81% of the balls hit in his direction. Beltrán came up with 81% of them.
Every source of data confirmed that he could still hit: Balls rocketed from his barrel at an average speed of 90.1 miles an hour, a velocity that ranked him in the top 20% of every-day players. Beltrán intrigued Luhnow not only because of what he had done a dozen years earlier, but also what he could continue to do, which was to potentially hit home runs in a lineup that lacked a dependable designated hitter. But Luhnow also felt that Beltrán could imbue a club with something else, a variable that neither Statcast nor any of Sig’s other metrics could begin to track.
… Europe has been enjoying the benefits of migration for centuries, and the diverse rosters at this year’s World Cup are just the latest example.
“Football allows us to put immigration on stage, a question that is agitating European countries right now,” said Yvan Gastaut, a University of Nice historian who curated an exhibit on soccer and migration. “For people who see immigration as a danger, this World Cup story won’t resolve that. But it allows us to take stock of the reality of the world, of mobility, movements, multiple identities.”
Soon, he predicts, European countries will reach a point where diverse team rosters don’t matter, and “we can focus on something else other than what are our origins.”
