Texans defensive end J.J. Watt knows there are questions about his health as he enters the 2018 season.
But the three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year, who has played in just eight games over the past two seasons, said he’s not worried about what other people are saying about him.
“I’ve realized there’s people that doubt the best players in the history of the game. I’m sure there’s people that doubt Tom [Brady], which, he’s the best quarterback of all time. I’ve learned that peoples’ opinion doesn’t really matter,” Watt said. “I’m very excited. I’m sure there are a lot of people who are cautiously optimistic. Obviously the last two years we’ve said the same thing. So, I’m just looking forward to going out there and playing football, letting it loose, having fun and letting the chips fall where they may.
… There was a time, not that long ago, when turning out for England was reckoned by many of those called up as less an opportunity to smile than frown. It was a burden, something they wanted to be over as quickly as possible so that they could return to the comfort of the club game.
Alexander-Arnold is typical of those who have benefited from the Southgate way, who feel motivated, enthused, above all privileged to play for their country. His attitude is all the more noteworthy given that in Russia, behind Kieran Trippier in the selection rankings, the young right back spent his time gathering splinters on the bench, making only one appearance, in the dead-rubber group game against Belgium. And still he loved it.
Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.
In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Gerrit Cole, Dallas Keuchel, and Charlie Morton — on how they learned and/or developed their go-to fastballs.
Shaquem Griffin will make his first NFL career start Sunday.
Because he earned it, but not by himself.
The 6-foot, 227-pound rookie linebacker — who will start against the Broncos in place of injured veteran K.J. Wright — attributes part of his preparation this week to standout middle linebacker Bobby Wagner, who has paired nearly every practice rep with a pre-snap pop quiz.
“He asks me so many questions throughout the play, so I was forced to learn,” Griffin said Friday. “With him, each play he’ll ask me what (responsibilities) I got, and I’ll tell him. He already knows what I need to do. He just wants to see if I’ll answer correctly.
Evan VanBecelaere has been named strength and conditioning coach for men’s basketball, athletic director Rob Mullens announced Monday.
VanBecelaere comes to Oregon after spending the last two seasons as an assistant strength and conditioning coach with the Sacramento Kings. While with that NBA franchise, he assisted in training the Kings’ professional and developmental league players. That training included the implementation of performance technologies such as force plates, velocity-based systems, GPS and isokinetics.
Embedded below are a set of clinic notes from Erik Spoelstra’s clinic at this past summer’s Coaching U Live in Las Vegas. Spoelstra’s topic was “NBA Pick & Roll Coverages” and he focused on Miami’s “Show” technique, but also had some great stuff on their culture and some book recommendations.
Social Science Research Network; Cass R. Sunstein from
If people have freedom of choice, do their lives go better? Under what conditions? By what criteria? Consider three distinct problems. (1) In countless situations, human beings face a serious problem of “navigability”; they do not know how to get to their preferred destination, whether the issue involves health, education, employment, or well-being in general. This problem is especially challenging for people who live under conditions of severe deprivation, but it can be significant for all of us. (2) Many of us face problems of self-control, and our decisions today endanger our own future. What we want, right now, hurts us, next year. (3) In some cases, we would actually be happy or well-off with two or more different outcomes, whether the issue involves our jobs, our diets, our city, or even our friends and partners, and the real question, on which good answers are increasingly available, is what most promotes our welfare. The evaluative problem, in such cases, is especially challenging if a decision would alter people’s identity, values, or character. Private and public institutions — including small companies, large companies, governments – can help people to have better lives, given (1), (2), and (3). This Essay, the text of the Holberg Lecture 2018, is the basis for a different, thicker, and more elaborate treatment in a book.
Some years ago – according to a story I’m fairly sure is true, and which I’ve decided is definitely true for the purposes of today’s column – the operators of Houston airport faced a headache. Travellers on one specific route kept complaining about how long they had to wait for their luggage. Extra baggage handlers were hired, cutting waiting times to eight minutes, but complaints continued unabated. Further study revealed that passengers spent one minute walking to baggage claim, then seven waiting, prompting some bright spark to devise a solution: switch the arrival gate, so the walk took far longer. The result was less time standing around, and much less grumbling.
Airport luggage is a classic example of a bottleneck, “a resource that can’t keep up with the demand placed on it”, to borrow a definition from The Bottleneck Rules, a recent short book by Clarke Ching, drawing on the work of the legendary business scholar Eli Goldratt. And bottlenecks are everywhere – from traffic jams to self-checkout machines to work meetings that proceed, as the saying goes, “at the pace of the slowest mind in the room”.
Engineers at the University of British Columbia have developed a new ultrasound transducer, or probe, that could dramatically lower the cost of ultrasound scanners to as little as $100. Their patent-pending innovation—no bigger than a Band-Aid—is portable, wearable and can be powered by a smartphone.
Conventional ultrasound scanners use piezoelectric crystals to create images of the inside of the body and send them to a computer to create sonograms. Researchers replaced the piezoelectric crystals with tiny vibrating drums made of polymer resin, called polyCMUTs (polymer capacitive micro-machined ultrasound transducers), which are cheaper to manufacture.
“Transducer drums have typically been made out of rigid silicon materials that require costly, environment-controlled manufacturing processes, and this has hampered their use in ultrasound,” said study lead author Carlos Gerardo, a Ph.D. candidate in electrical and computer engineering at UBC. “By using polymer resin, we were able to produce polyCMUTs in fewer fabrication steps, using a minimum amount of equipment, resulting in significant cost savings.”
Anyone making a cursory inquiry into the intriguing world of 3D textiles will find that the sector embraces a rather nebulous term leading to an untold number of different routes and a wide array of opportunities. A quick Google search of 3D fabrics, for example, results in somewhere around 325 million hits, which include 3D versions of everything from traditional wovens and knits to nonwovens and non-traditional prints, not to mention an exponentially diverse list of applications, some obvious and others not so much so. An immediate thought surrounding this growing interest is that engineers are finally becoming significantly more comfortable with and accepting of 3D textiles in dynamic performance-based applications. At the same time, product designers continue to become even more adept at creating fabrics or maybe more appropriately fibrous materials, which exhibit these specific technical, visual and/or tactile requirements.
Versatility and clearly defined performance attributes continue to be the prime drivers for interest in 3D textiles. Given that virtually all textile manufacturing technologies can be adapted or modified in some way to create 3D textiles, the breadth of applications is truly almost endless.
Mountain View, California-based AliveCor announced yesterday that its KardiaK Software Platform has been granted Breakthrough Device designation by the FDA.
AliveCor’s software is a neural network trained to read ECG data for elevated levels of blood potassium, a condition known as hyperkalemia that affects the kidneys.
Primarily diagnosed through invasive laboratory blood test, KardiaK would require no blood draws to measure a patient’s blood potassium, and could be performed at home if the user owns a home ECG device (which are also produced by AliveCor).
… The ability to measure one’s internal clock is vital to improving health and personalizing medicine. It could be used to predict who is at risk for disease and track recovery from injuries. It can also be used to time the delivery of chemotherapy and blood pressure and other drugs so that they have the optimum effect at lower doses, minimizing the risk of side effects.
However, reading one’s internal clock precisely enough remains a major challenge in sleep and circadian health. The current approach requires taking hourly samples of blood melatonin – the hormone that controls sleep – during day and night, which is expensive and extremely burdensome for the patient. This makes it impossible to incorporate into routine clinical evaluations.
My colleagues and I wanted to obtain precise measurements of internal time without the need for burdensome serial sampling. I’m a computational biologist with a passion for using mathematical and computational algorithms to make sense of complex data. My collaborators, Phyllis Zee and Ravi Allada, are world-renowned experts in sleep medicine and circadian biology. Working together, we designed a simple blood test to read a person’s internal clock.
Qualcomm has unveiled its next generation smartwatch chip. The Snapdragon Wear 3100 will appear in Android watches later this year, the company said at an event in San Francisco earlier today. It brings new low-power modes, sports watch-focused tweaks and improved always-on watch faces.
… Yes, Hawaii beat Great Lakes in that Game 2, but it was not Hawaiian baseball and certainly not how this group got to Williamsport. “You guys didn’t get here because you played for the TV. You got here because you played together as a team,” Oda, 50, told them in a team meeting later that Sunday.
He then unlocked his iPhone, scrolled through his messages and recited a Harry Truman quote that a coaching friend had texted him:
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
After that meeting, in the three games that followed, Hawaii didn’t make another error. Better yet, it didn’t allow a single run.
… It’s worth remembering why Team USA fared so poorly in 2002 and 2004. The short answer is that the roster wasn’t constructed as well as it could have been and there was no continuity. Larry Brown, who did such a bad job with the 2004 roster he actually blamed himself, which is shocking if you know anything about Larry Brown’s career, had no real sense of how his weird roster should be used. It felt as if this wasn’t even really a concern as Team USA struggled through the group stages.