Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 3, 2018

… Back in the UK, football fans are largely in the dark about Bale’s life in Madrid – whether things are going well for him or if he’s happy; that’s partly due to the exclusivity agreement he has in place with a television broadcaster and also due to his own, natural tendency to shy away from the limelight – on top of the protection he receives, like all of Madrid’s players, from the club. So his huge differences with Zidane were left hidden while the team reaped success after success. The Welsh winger could not for the life of him understand why the club would be telling him one thing (his importance to the team now and for the future) while the coach wasn’t giving him the confidence he needs to take flight and turn himself into an even better player. Bale was the only member of Madrid’s first team squad who didn’t post a good luck message for Zizane on social media. He left the possibility of leaving the club himself wide open, his decision pending a heart-to-heart with his own circle as well as discussing it with the club. In the end, he didn’t even need to sit down to talk it over. The same message was repeated to him, via his agent and by telephone, that he would be handed the responsibility he craves, that he would be the star of the new project – that he would not be sold and the club would not bring in a new player who might steal his thunder.

… Listen, I know it’s a stereotype, but have you ever seen a normal, 30-year-old white guy shoot a three-pointer? That elbow is tucked, man. The knees are bent. The follow-through is perfect. Always. You know how in America, there’s always an older guy wearing like EVERLAST sweat-shorts at the court? That guy is always a problem. His J is always wet.

Those are the guys I learned from on YouTube. Just random people shooting threes with perfect form. Me and Michael would play after practice for hours, and I’d just try to imitate how they shot the ball, and I started being able to compete. It was crazy, because getting some range changed my whole game. Teams couldn’t play off me anymore, and I started doing a lot better.

I know people are going to think I’m exaggerating, but that’s a real story. I didn’t even really know who J.J. Redick was at that point.

Vegas Golden Knights defenseman Nate Schmidt will miss the first 20 games of the season after he was suspended for violating the NHL’s performance-enhancing substances policy.

It’s the league’s first suspension under the policy since Jarred Tinordi in 2016 and just the fifth since the most recent collective bargaining agreement went into effect in 2013. Schmidt, his agent and the Golden Knights criticized the punishment and questioned its merits.

“It is difficult to accept this suspension,” Schmidt said Sunday in a lengthy statement. “I understand that I will miss these games, but I do not agree with the suspension and I will not accept being labeled a cheater.”

… “I want my team to have a real emotional intelligence. They do care about each other and they should care about me, I believe. As a manager they should want to do well for me.

I’ve told them about my family, my kids, what they mean to me. My father is not very well at the moment, bless him, he’s on the way out. Life is short and football careers are even shorter.

I always speak to them and will say, ‘before I speak to you about your performance today or your data, is everything alright at home?’ Because you don’t know what someone’s had at home, you don’t.

In the curious way that one decision can unfold so many unexpected paths in life, Rhonda Martin surely couldn’t have foreseen what all would come from such a simple move.

Martin’s family lived in Centerville, Ohio, but she wanted to raise her sons, as she put it, “in a smaller town.” She didn’t want to be too far from her family, so the Martins settled in West Milton, population 4,630, on the other side of Dayton, just far enough north to be out in the country.

It turned out to be what she was looking for, even in ways no one could have predicted.

We propose a self-supervised learning method to jointly reason about spatial and temporal context for video recognition. Recent self-supervised approaches have used spatial context [9, 34] as well as temporal coherency [32] but a combination of the two requires extensive preprocessing such as tracking objects through millions of video frames [59] or computing optical flow to determine frame regions with high motion [30]. We propose to combine spatial and temporal context in one self-supervised framework without any heavy preprocessing. We divide multiple video frames into grids of patches and train a network to solve jigsaw puzzles on these patches from multiple frames. So the network is trained to correctly identify the position of a patch within a video frame as well as the position of a patch over time. We also propose a novel permutation strategy that outperforms random permutations while significantly reducing computational and memory constraints. We use our trained network for transfer learning tasks such as video activity recognition and demonstrate the strength of our approach on two benchmark video action recognition datasets without using a single frame from these datasets for unsupervised pretraining of our proposed video jigsaw network.

While vacationing on the coast of Spain in 2012, the computer vision scientist Antonio Torralba noticed stray shadows on the wall of his hotel room that didn’t seem to have been cast by anything. Torralba eventually realized that the discolored patches of wall weren’t shadows at all, but rather a faint, upside-down image of the patio outside his window. The window was acting as a pinhole camera — the simplest kind of camera, in which light rays pass through a small opening and form an inverted image on the other side. The resulting image was barely perceptible on the light-drenched wall. But it struck Torralba that the world is suffused with visual information that our eyes fail to see.

“These images are hidden to us,” he said, “but they are all around us, all the time.”

The experience alerted him and his colleague, Bill Freeman, both professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to the ubiquity of “accidental cameras,” as they call them: windows, corners, houseplants and other common objects that create subtle images of their surroundings. These images, as much as 1,000 times dimmer than everything else, are typically invisible to the naked eye. “We figured out ways to pull out those images and make them visible,” Freeman explained.

An introduction to and tour of computer vision programs written in Go using GoCV––with code snippets and live demos!

It was clear when Ouster started developing the OS-1 three years ago that deep learning research for cameras was outpacing lidar research. Lidar data has incredible benefits — rich spatial information and lighting agnostic sensing to name a couple — but it lacks the raw resolution and efficient array structure of camera images, and 3D point clouds are still more difficult to encode in a neural net or process with hardware acceleration.

With the tradeoffs between both sensing modalities in mind, we set out to bring the best aspects of lidars and cameras together in a single device from the very beginning. Today we’re releasing a firmware upgrade and update to our open source driver that deliver on that goal. Our OS-1 lidar now outputs fixed resolution depth images, signal images, and ambient images in real time, all without a camera. The data layers are perfectly spatially correlated, with zero temporal mismatch or shutter effects, and have 16 bits per pixel and linear photo response. Check it out.

… For all the will-he-or-won’t-he-play conversation, key questions have been left unanswered. Such as: What exactly do the doctors need to see in order to give him the green light? He looks good on the practice field and is even participating in 11-on-11, so what’s holding them back from medically clearing Wentz for a return from ACL and LCL surgery?

For answers, we turned to a pair of medical experts: chief of sports medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Dr. Brian Sennett and ESPN’s injury analyst Stephania Bell.

Current sports nutrition guidelines recommend that athletes only take supplements following an evidence-based analysis of their value in supporting training outcomes or competition performance in their specific event.

While there is sound evidence to support the use of a few performance supplements under specific scenarios (e.g., creatine, beta-alanine, bicarbonate, caffeine, nitrate/beetroot juice and, perhaps, phosphate), more research is needed around several challenges involved with their real-life use in competitive sport.

There is limited knowledge around the strategy of combining the intake of several products in events in which performance benefits are seen with each product in isolation. Supplement combinations have the potential to produce additive, neutral or counteractive outcomes.

The Nebraska football team has spent weeks on the practice field and in the weight room preparing for its opponents this season. There’s one other place they’ve been that could give them an edge – the cafeteria. With Scott Frost now at the helm, there’s a new approach to nutrition for the football program and it’s got its roots in the past.

Nestle, the world’s largest food company, has joined the trend for personalised nutrition with a blend of artificial intelligence, DNA testing and the modern obsession with Instagramming food.

The program, which began in Japan, could provide the Swiss company with a wealth of data about customers’ wellness and diet as it pivots towards consumers who are seeking to improve their health and longevity.

In Japan, some 100,000 users of the “Nestle Wellness Ambassador” program send pictures of their food via the popular Line app that then recommends lifestyle changes and specially formulated supplements. The program can cost $600 (£463) a year for capsules that make nutrient-rich teas, smoothies and other products such as vitamin-fortified snacks.

You could hardly find a group of people less likely to share an ethos with the counterculture movement of the 1960s than NFL decision makers. But increasingly, they don’t seem to trust anyone over the age of 30, either.

In 2007, there were 201 players — not including kickers and punters — over 30 who started at least eight games, according to Pro-Football-Reference.com.1 That number was down to 133 last season, equating to roughly four per team. That’s a drop of 33.8 percent.

Various studies suggest the importance of sport-specific cognitive and perceptual abilities in soccer. However, the role of general perceptual-cognitive abilities and the relation of age respective to position have not been clarified for soccer in detail. Therefore, it was the objective of the present study to determine the relation of age and position to general perceptual-cognitive abilities. 178 highly talented male soccer players (mean age 16.2, age range 10 to 33 years) were involved. The participants performed computer-based sustained attention and anticipation (using Vienna Test System) tests. 139 subjects (mean age 16.6) took part in visual and acoustic reaction tests (using Talent Diagnostic System). The soccer players, subdivided into age and position groups, were recruited from a youth academy of a professional soccer club and played at the highest and 2nd highest national soccer competition for their age. Group differences were tested using analysis of variance. Correlations were analyzed for age and abilities.

Significant correlations and group differences were found for age and sustained attention tasks. Significant differences for position groups were observed with regard to acoustic reaction time (ART). Further, we found statistical tendencies for group differences regarding the visual reaction time (VRT), indicating that midfielders outperform defenders and strikers in simple reaction tasks. Improved skills in sustained attention tasks resulted for defenders, who worked faster and more precisely in figural tasks. Regarding general anticipation tasks differences were not found. No group differences were found in basic anticipation tasks. Our study indicates that additional research is needed to further clarify the development of general perceptual-cognitive abilities and position-specific differences in the above abilities of highly talented soccer players.