… “I think he makes spectacular throws,” Pryor says. “A lot of QBs aren’t the same when pads come on and there are guys who can hit you, but Sam, he’s the type of guy who is going to be be the same player. This is how he is.”
In assimilating to the NFL, Darnold has had the help of veterans like McCown, who patted Darnold on the helmet and spent time talking with him after his practice interception, and also the Jets’ young core players. During OTAs, fellow Trojan Leonard Williams invited Darnold to join him and a group of about 20 teammates for a dinner at Tao restaurant in Manhattan. Knowing that the transition from college—where players are always around each other in the dining halls and dorms—to the pros can be a lonely one, Williams made sure to include the rookie. Sitting around the table were the Jets’ last four first-round picks: Darnold, safety Jamal Adams, linebacker Darron Lee and Williams.
… The duffel is known among the Sox as J.D.’s Bag of Toys, and it is the key to maintaining the majestic swing that has since 2014 allowed J.D. Martinez, Boston’s first-year slugger, to post an OPS of .951 that ranks third in the big leagues, and this season to threaten to win a Triple Crown as the centerpiece of the game’s highest-scoring offense. As of Aug. 5, the 30-year-old outfielder ranked first in the majors in home runs, with 33, and RBIs, with 93, and his .324 batting average was third in the American League.
Martinez’s iPhone X stores 2,739 videos, and at least 2,000 of them are recordings of the same thing: J.D. Martinez taking batting practice. “Hitting, hitting, hitting,” he says, as he scrolls through the files. “Hitting. Fortnite. Couple on a boat. Hitting, hitting, hitting.” The video he views most often is from his pregame cage session last Sept. 4, the night he hit four homers for the Diamondbacks against the Dodgers. He studies the clips constantly, to detect any hint that he might be deviating from the cuts he took that evening. Each toy in the duffel has its purpose—its way of getting him back there.
Take the kickball. During BP, Martinez holds it between his forward elbow—his left one—and his torso, as he faces the pitching machine. “If the ball drops too early,” he explains, “then my elbow’s pushing back in a way that it shouldn’t.”
… Guardiola agrees: “Definitely. Definitely, it was so good for me. It was good because I had one game a week, I had time to analyse my process, and I did not have spotlights, I did not have media.
Liverpool’s attacking, fast paced and dynamic style of play may be catching up with them as manager Jurgen Klopp laments the fitness of his front three with their opening Premier League match against West Ham on Sunday drawing nearer.
Liverpool had eight players at the World Cup – six English sides had more players in Russia – and Klopp says he has been left with a squad that has varying levels of fitness.
“They boys who trained from the beginning could go 90 [minutes], Millie [James Milner], Gini [Georginio Wijnaldum],” said the manager, who was less hopeful of his front three’s fitness, especially Roberto Firmino. “But Sadio, Mo… Bobby was not allowed to go more than 45, that was already the edge. He needs training now.”
… “Rick is a world-class physiotherapist and will play a vital role in helping to sustain the performance level of our players,” Warriors general manager Bob Myers said in a news release. “He has worked closely with a number of elite athletes throughout his career and is a great fit for our organization as we strive to maintain the on-court successes of these past few seasons.”
… Even if an athlete is training specifically for 5K or 10K and will never race a half marathon, spending some time running at this not-too-intense (yet still aerobically demanding) pace does wonders to improve endurance and efficiency, develop a sense of race rhythm and ease the transition into more intense race-pace and below-race-pace running that will occur later in the training cycle. Half marathoners and marathoners will reap all these same benefits, in addition to developing the confidence that comes from running close to their race pace for an extended amount of time. I typically have athletes follow this type of tempo run with a session of short hill sprints—6 x 15-20 seconds at 90 percent effort with full recovery—to recruit fast-twitch fibers and promote good mechanics. This is an optional addition to the workout, but a good way to kill two birds with one stone.
Microfluidic devices are a major topic of research lately, partly because they have the potential to scale down existing devices and to make new diagnostic tools possible. Typically, microfluidic systems consist of scaled-down versions of conventional tubes, pumps, and valves. While effective for many applications, conventional components often get quickly clogged and lose their function when working with complex biological fluids such as blood. This is because blood, and other bodily fluids, contain a variety of components, such as proteins, that adhere to surfaces.
Now researchers at Duke University are showing off a new microfluidic system that works entirely differently, one that freely moves liquid droplets, mixes them, and splits them without any tubes, pumps, or valves. Moreover, because all this happens on a layer of oil, the droplets can be manipulated so they don’t leave any traces behind, significantly increasing the lifetime of such microfluidic devices and avoiding any cross-contamination in the process.
The technology utilizes a small pool of inert oil below which piezoelectric transducers create microscopic waves. These waves are carefully controlled by a computer to gently push droplets placed on top of the oil. The vibrations can be used to bring droplets together and to break them apart without splashing any excess around the pool of oil.
arXiv, Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Da Zhang, Xiyang Dai, Yuan-Fang Wang from
Recognizing instances at different scales simultaneously is a fundamental challenge in visual detection problems. While spatial multi-scale modeling has been well studied in object detection, how to effectively apply a multi-scale architecture to temporal models for activity detection is still under-explored. In this paper, we identify three unique challenges that need to be specifically handled for temporal activity detection compared to its spatial counterpart. To address all these issues, we propose Dynamic Temporal Pyramid Network (DTPN), a new activity detection framework with a multi-scale pyramidal architecture featuring three novel designs: (1) We sample input video frames dynamically with varying frame per seconds (FPS) to construct a natural pyramidal input for video of an arbitrary length. (2) We design a two-branch multi-scale temporal feature hierarchy to deal with the inherent temporal scale variation of activity instances. (3) We further exploit the temporal context of activities by appropriately fusing multi-scale feature maps, and demonstrate that both local and global temporal contexts are important. By combining all these components into a uniform network, we end up with a single-shot activity detector involving single-pass inferencing and end-to-end training. Extensive experiments show that the proposed DTPN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the challenging ActvityNet dataset.
If center Tyler Biadasz had to endure an initiation when he became the youngest member of the Red Robin High Council, his fellow Wisconsin offensive linemen aren’t revealing any details. “The first rule of Fight Club,” left guard Michael Deiter says, “is don’t talk about Fight Club.”
That might be one of the most accessible, decipherable statements from a group that communicates frequently in quotes from movies (The Big Lebowski), TV shows (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Office, Trailer Park Boys) and YouTube videos featuring random Canadian bumpkins fixing cars. The more obscure the reference, the better. “Nobody knows what they’re talking about except for them,” Badgers quarterback Alex Hornibrook says.
People often prioritize their own interests, but also like to see themselves as moral. How do individuals resolve this tension? One way to both maximize self-interest and maintain a moral self-image is to misremember the extent of one’s selfishness. Here, we tested this possibility. Across three experiments, participants decided how to split money with anonymous partners, and were later asked to recall their decisions. Participants systematically recalled being more generous in the past than they actually were, even when they were incentivized to recall accurately. Crucially, this effect was driven by individuals who gave less than what they personally believed was fair, independent of how objectively selfish they were. Our findings suggest that when people’s actions fall short of their own personal standards, they may misremember the extent of their selfishness, thereby warding off negative emotions and threats to their moral self-image.
Don’t overlook the big picture of the new rules announced by the NCAA this week, which is that movements toward real change in the athletes’ favor clearly have momentum.
The 2018 World Cup in Russia may seem like a distant memory, but with less than a month having passed since France lifted the trophy, football fans haven’t had to wait long before the European leagues start to return to action this week. Many will have their eyes on Serie A, Italy’s top league, which played host to the biggest story of the summer: Cristiano Ronaldo’s move from Real Madrid to Juventus.
The Portuguese striker was signed by the Italian giants in July at a cost of €112 million – the sixth most expensive transfer of all time. Ronaldo is considered one of the world’s most marketable athletes, and in the days following his move, the Turin club had reportedly sold €52m worth of club jerseys. Surely that enormous transfer fee would be paid back in no time?
Well, no. To make this assumption would be to ignore the economics of running a football club. Indeed, Business Insider have already shown that Juventus will only receive 10-15% of the revenue from shirt sales, meaning the club would need to sell well over 5 million Ronaldo jerseys before his transfer fee is recouped, and even that wouldn’t cover his wages. The reality is that making money running a football club relies on a complex mix of on-field performances and off-field rights and deals. And this is what makes Ronaldo such a good case study for the economics of football today.
… The infamous “Van Exel Game” inspired Matthew van Bommel, who works in the Sacramento Kings’ analytics department, to quantify inconsistency among scorekeepers. … His findings weren’t as sensational as Alex’s confession, but Van Bommel did calculate what he called scorekeeper generosity (how willing a team’s scorekeeper was to award an assist to either team) and scorekeeper bias (how much more likely a scorekeeper was to award assists to his team).