The Celtics were in sunny Los Angeles, it was another sub-zero winter day back in Boston, and Gordon Hayward was stuck in rehab, shooting baskets from a chair and picking up marbles with his toes to work his surgically repaired ankle back into shape.
“The hardest part of the whole process has been the mental challenge,” Hayward said Thursday, reporting that he is 100 percent healthy and preparing to be on the court for the Oct. 16 opener against the Philadelphia 76ers. “I think you find the fight within yourself.”
Justin Verlander probably won’t win the American League Cy Young Award, although he helped his case with a crucial effort on Sunday, allowing one run with 11 strikeouts over seven innings in the Houston Astros’ 5-4 win over the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Verlander leads the American League in innings pitched and strikeouts, and ranks fourth in ERA. His deficit in that category — he’s at 2.67 compared to Chris Sale at 1.92 and Blake Snell at 2.03 — might make it difficult for voters to recognize his advantage in volume of work. Verlander has pitched 52 more innings than Sale and 38 more than Snell.
More importantly, Verlander has come up with big games down the stretch when the Astros most needed them, with the A’s making a late push for a division title.
The aim of the current study was to evaluate field-based physical performance of under 16 years (U16) elite and sub-elite soccer players. Forty elite (n = 20) and sub-elite (n = 20) soccer players were enrolled and tested for countermovement jump (CMJ), 10-m sprint and agility, in terms of sprint with 90° turns (S90), S90 with ball, Slalom, Slalom with ball, and reactive agility (RAT). Statistical and practical significant differences were observed in CMJ, S90 and RAT between elite and sub-elite. Elite players exhibited a likely better performance in Slalom, Slalom with ball and S90 with ball despite a non-significant difference by level of play. Concerning sprint ability, both groups showed similar performance in the 10-m sprint. Countermovement jump and agility tests are field-based physical assessments recommended to better distinguish between U16 elite and sub-elite soccer players.
… “It really does frustrate me, when I watch MLS, and I see our best U-17 players — who, again, are so talented and so capable — being rostered … but then not being put on the field much to actually play,” Pulisic wrote. “I watch that, and I just think about how I was given a chance … a real chance … and it changed my life. Why then are we seemingly hesitant to allow these other talents to blossom?”
In an extensive interview in Newcastle’s match day program last December, Yedlin was asked for his take on Pulisic’s comments: “I thought he was spot on,” he said. “Coming from a kid who notices the problem, especially with youth soccer and the way we’re developing kids in America, the fact that he can see it at such a young age is pretty telling. It shows that I think a change does need to be made.
“We’ve seen that young players, especially American players, are being put on the bench in MLS. They’re taken out of college, so they’re not going to have an education, and they’re just being put on the bench. Then, say they don’t play for a year, it’s tough. Then maybe you have to go to the second division in America, or stuff like that.
psyArXiv; Ayse Enkavi Ian Eisenberg Patrick Bissett Gina L. Mazza David P. MacKinnon Lisa A. Marsch Russell Poldrack from
The ability to regulate behavior in service of long-term goals is a widely studied psychological construct known as self-regulation. This wide interest is in part due to the putative relations between self-regulation and a range of real-world behaviors. Self-regulation is generally viewed as a trait, and individual differences are quantified using a diverse set of measures including self-report surveys and behavioral tasks. Accurate characterization of individual differences requires measurement reliability, a property frequently characterized in self-report surveys, but rarely assessed in behavioral tasks. We remedy this gap by (1) providing a comprehensive literature review on an extensive set of self-regulation measures, and (2) empirically evaluating retest reliability in this battery of measures in a new sample. We find that self-report survey measures of self-regulation have high test-retest reliability while measures derived from behavioral tasks do not. This holds both in the literature and in our sample. We confirm that this is due to differences in between-subjects variability. We also compare different types of task measures (e.g., model parameters vs. raw response times) in their suitability as individual difference measures, finding that certain model parameters are as stable as raw measures. Our results provide greater psychometric footing for the study of self-regulation and provide guidance for future studies of individual differences in this domain.
Optical sensing is one of the most prevalent biosensing techniques and, yet, we have only just begun to leverage its full capability. This article uses a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor to illustrate how an optical sensing system works and discusses possible extensions in new healthcare applications.
What Makes a Biosensor Truly Useful?
To measure a patient’s heart rate, an optical biosensor shines a light into the capillary bed of the patient’s tissue and measures the light that has either traversed or scattered from the tissue. As arterial blood pulsates through capillaries in the tissue, the amount of light it absorbs or scatters changes with each pulse, synchronously to the patient’s heart beat. By observing the variations of light intensity, the optical biosensor can monitor heart rate and other vital signs.
While, at a high level, the principle for optical sensing seems simple, there are a lot of detailed considerations in making a biosensor truly useful.
When we think about wearable technology, we tend to think about fitness trackers and AR headsets, but wearable technology goes well beyond that. In fact, wearable technology is making a huge impact on healthcare industry with devices such as Continuous Glucose Monitoring, Smart pills, Remote Patient Monitoring etc. Another aspect of healthcare that’s being impacted by wearable technology is rehabilitation. Experts believe wearable technology can be successfully incorporated in clinical rehabilitation. According to the American College of Sports Medicine, wearable technology is the world’s current number one fitness trend. At our WT | Wearable Technologies Show 2018 MEDICA in Dusseldorf November 12-15 we will highlight great thought leaders and innovators from all over the globe. The companies introduced below will exhibit at the upcoming event.
A successful surgery depends on monitoring the patient’s condition after the surgery. It is a common drawback in orthopedic surgery. Consensus Orthopedics aims to solve this problem with their innovation of TracPatch, a groundbreaking wearable device that tracks a patient’s post-surgical activities. With the use of smartphone technology and Internet of Things, TracPatch monitors key patient metrics allowing a surgeon to remotely monitor a patient’s recovery for effective managed care. The patch monitors wound healing through temperate measurement and keeps track of the patient´s activity via smartphone.
Scientists at the University of California San Diego created a flexible ultrasonic patch that can measure the blood pressure in major vessels such as the jugular vein and carotid artery. The technology has already shown, in a proof-of-concept study, that it may be made as accurate as invasive means to measure the central blood pressure. If turned into a product, patients may soon benefit from continuous, highly accurate blood pressure monitoring the reach, convenience, and benefits of which existing BP cuffs or invasive lines simply can’t provide. Moreover, it may serve as an intraoperative technique for real-time blood pressure monitoring during surgeries such as cardiopulmonary procedures in which invasive methods are currently employed.
… With the sports drink having been born on the Gators’s playing field and invented by a University of Florida employee, it’s not hard to see why both [Robert] Cade’s estate (he died in 2007) and the school get a percentage of royalties from sales, an agreement that’s still in place today. But if they had their way, the university would be getting all of it.
After Cade and his co-researchers finalized Gatorade’s formula, Cade approached the school’s head of sponsored research to see if they wanted to come to an arrangement over the rights to the drink (Cade wanted $10,000) and determine if they wanted to try and sell it to a national distributor. According to Cade, University of Florida (UF) officials weren’t interested, so he struck a deal with beverage maker Stokely Van-Camp in 1967.
Stokely’s offer was for Cade and his cohorts—now known as the Gatorade Trust—to receive a $25,000 cash payment, a $5000 bonus, and a five-cent royalty on each gallon of Gatorade sold. When UF realized that they had been shortsighted in assessing the brand’s mass market appeal—and that they were missing out on profits—they allegedly told Cade that the drink belonged to them.
“Go to hell,” Cade responded, a statement that kicked off several years of litigation.
The obvious solution is to restrict the window before and after injury to get at the abilities right before and right away injury. This doesn’t quite work because of the way players are used and how the schedule works. In order to compare effects you need a sufficient number…
SABR's Statistical Analysis Committee, Mark Armour from
ometime earlier this summer I got to thinking about Miguel Cabrera, and how sad it was that he—like Albert Pujols—had fallen from his rightful and longtime place as one of baseball’s best hitters. Pujols signed a 10-year contract with the Angels after the 2011 season and had his last 4-win season (using bWAR, Baseball-Reference.com’s WAR) in 2012 at age 32. Cabrera put up a great season at age 33 in 2016 followed by two seasons of mediocrity or injury. The Tigers still owe him $154 million for the next five years.
Although their declines seemed inevitable, I got to wondering if players weren’t aging as well as they had 20 years ago. There didn’t seem to be as many good old players as there used to be. I decided to try to figure it out.
Dan Levitt helped me gather the data I needed, namely all the bWAR in major league history broken down by year and by the age of the player who accumulated it. This was enough to answer my questions.
The most controversial trade at this year’s August 31 waiver-deal deadline was the Indians’ swap of Julian Merryweather for the injured Bringer of Rain, Josh Donaldson. It’s not hard to see the appeal for Cleveland: at the cost of a 27-year-old hurler who missed the year with Tommy John surgery, the team picked up a third sacker who produced no fewer than five wins each year between 2013 and -17. And yet, the deal has been met by no small amount of consternation from the Indians’ American League postseason competitors, with the Astros, Red Sox, and Yankees all complaining to MLB that the trade was against the rules. Their argument is twofold: not only that the Indians shouldn’t have been allowed to deal for Donaldson, but that they (the Astros, Red Sox, and Yankees) didn’t outbid the Indians because they thought such a deal would be against the rules.
It makes sense, that the Indians’ competitors for the AL pennant would be taken aback. Donaldson isn’t a small acquisition; as Dan Szymborski noted, Donaldson is likely still close to an elite hitter when healthy, even after his injury-plagued 2018. So let’s take a look at whether the Astros, Yankees, and Red Sox have a case.
Sarcomere length is a key physiological parameter that affects muscle force output; however, our understanding of the scaling of human muscle from sarcomere to whole muscle is based primarily on cadaveric data. The aims of this study were to explore the in vivo relationship between passive fascicle length and passive sarcomere length at different muscle-tendon unit lengths and determine whether sarcomere and fascicle length relationships are the same in different regions of muscle. A microendoscopy needle probe capable of in vivo sarcomere imaging was inserted into a proximal location of the human tibialis anterior muscle at three different ankle positions (5° dorsiflexion [DF], 5° plantar flexion [PF], 15° PF) and one distal location at a constant ankle position (5° PF distal). Ultrasound imaging of tibialis anterior fascicles, centred on the location of the needle probe, was performed for each condition to estimate fascicle length. Sarcomere length and fascicle length increased with increasing muscle-tendon unit length, although the correlation between sarcomere length change and muscle fascicle length change was only moderate (r2 = 0.45). Passive sarcomere length was longer at the distal imaging site than the proximal site (P = 0.01). When sarcomere number was estimated from sarcomere length and fascicle length, there were fewer sarcomeres in the fibres of distal location than the proximal location (P = 0.01). These data demonstrate that fascicle length changes are representative of sarcomere length changes, although significant variability in sarcomere length exists within a muscle, and sarcomere number per fibre is region dependent.
