… Health will be paramount for Bradley and the Clippers.
He played in just six games for the Clippers last season after being acquired from the Detroit Pistons as part of the Blake Griffin trade.
Bradley had surgery to repair his abdominal muscles.
“I’m good. I’m good,” Bradley repeated. “At the end of the day, I know at this point in my career the only thing that can hurt me or affect the team is my health. I know I just need to be healthy and everything is going to be fine. I’m going to play well.”
Before his professional debut, Jadon Sancho was mostly known for a surprising exit from Manchester City. But 13 months after he left the comfort and familiarity of England, it’s his habit for making spectacular entrances that’s turning heads at Borussia Dortmund and across the footballing world.
The latest example came on Saturday. After Bayern Munich dropped points for the second game in a row, Dortmund had a chance to climb to the top of the table and raise hopes that the Bundesliga might be home to a rare title race this term.
Claude Giroux is in a two-man race, it’s just that he’s the only one of the competitors who knows it right this second. In the middle of what should be a casual pre-practice warmup skate, the Philadelphia Flyers captain passes teammate Travis Konecny, and with a tap on Konecny’s shin pads, Giroux starts gunning it, wordlessly declaring this a sprint. Konecny responds as fast as his legs can carry him, but he’s already way behind. As Giroux approaches the red centre ice paint, he sticks out his front foot like a speed skater, then throws up his arms with a “Woo!” The race, apparently, is over — and there’s no question who won.
About an hour later, Giroux sits in the Flyers’ practice dressing room scratching his reddish-blonde beard and saying “umm” while he thinks about how best to describe himself off the ice. Barefoot after the morning’s practice, last season’s fourth-place finisher in MVP voting eventually settles on one of the most generic and oft-used hockey player labels of all time: “I’m easygoing,” Giroux says. “I’m a pretty simple guy.”
“What?” says long-time teammate, Wayne Simmonds, head shaking, when he catches wind of his buddy’s self-assessment. “He’s not easygoing at all.”
Amsterdam Collaboration on Health & Safety in Sports (ACHSS) from
Previously we reported on the FIFA11+ Kids study of our own Roland Rossler. Just published now is a secondary analysis of this trial, in which the effects of the programme on reducing severe injuries in 7 to 13 year old football (soccer) players was assessed.
Football clubs (under-9, under-11 and under-13 age groups) from the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland were cluster-randomised (clubs) into an intervention (INT) and a control group (CON). INT replaced their usual warm-up by ’11+ Kids’ two times a week. CON followed their regular training regime. Match and training exposure and injury characteristics were recorded and injury incidence rates (IRs) and 95% CIs calculated. For the present analysis, only severe injuries (absence from training/ match ≥28 days) were considered. Hazard ratios (HR) were calculated using extended Cox models.
The Red Sox are about to see whether a yearlong commitment to changing player usage will pay dividends at the most meaningful time of year.
Alex Cora inherited a team that won back-to-back division crowns but sputtered in the playoffs. For two straight years, an extremely talented group of players had fallen short of expectations in October.
Last year, the Astros reached October cruising on a full tank; the Red Sox entered the playoffs with a tank nearing empty and a blown tire.
“We certainly learned that we don’t want to get to the regular-season finish line and then have nothing left in the tank for the playoffs,” said Red Sox head trainer Brad Pearson.
How do we perceive properties of objects in the physical world? What strategies help us determine if a suitcase is too heavy to carry or how hard we should hit a tennis ball? While such physical intuition can’t easily be quantified in the real world, it can be modeled and measured with computer simulated environments. Neil R. Bramley, Moore-Sloan Post-doc Researcher, Tobias Gerstenberg and Joshua B. Tenenbaum of MIT, and Todd M. Gureckis, CDS Affiliated Associate Professor of Psychology Cognition & Perception Research at NYU, with new research, approach these fundamental concerns about human interactions with the physical world.
To determine whether people’s actions effectively reduce uncertainty about objects in their environment and to categorize those actions, the researchers built 2D digital microworlds, with the Javascript Box2D physics game engine, that reflected the latent properties of the physical world. The microworlds were like billiards or air hockey tables — bounded, continuously dynamic, two-dimensional settings. Each microworld had varying properties of surface friction and global (gravity-like) forces, and each microworld contained four pucks, two of which acted on each other with varying local (magnet-like) forces, and two of which were distractions.
Post and Courier (Charleston, SC), Andrew Miller from
Andrew Carleton should have been studying for a chemistry exam or deciding who to ask to his junior prom.
Instead, Carleton, who was 16 when he joined the Charleston Battery in the fall of 2016, was playing professional soccer against grown men, some twice his age.
But that was all part of the plan. From a very early age, Carleton knew he wanted to be a professional soccer player. His laser focus, work ethic and nifty footwork made him one of the nation’s top young players.
Carleton was good enough to earn a spot on every U.S. national youth team from the age of 14. He attended Hillgrove High School in metro Atlanta, a traditional prep soccer power in Georgia, but the thought of playing for his high school team never entered his mind.
“The talent level in high school just isn’t very good,” Carleton said.
Even the idea of playing in college was never given serious consideration.
Biosensors have the potential to revolutionize the way we monitor the human body, pathogens and food or environmental contaminants. Professor Man Bock Gu of Korea University explains more and tells us about his own innovations in the field. His review on the topic in Journal of Biological Engineering won this years Institute of Biological Engineering article of the year award.
… The Nix sensor (a rendering is pictured at right) isn’t for sale right now but is in development. In addition to seeking funding, the company is focused on building a market for the product by targeting race partnerships (the sensor would be sold to race participants when they register online), specialty retailers and sports influencers.
Unger, whose background includes developing business strategies for health startups, said the Start-Up Challenge not only will help the company move closer toward its goals but is also validation of the work she and her team have invested. There’s also a chance that venture capitalists will come forward with funding, as they have for past winners (and runners up).
SGB spoke with Unger this week about the honor of winning the Start-Up Challenge and what’s next for Nix Biosensors following this achievement.
As video technology has progressed, so too have the potential use cases, not least in terms of security. I’ve written previously about technologies that aim to spot criminals from CCTV footage, and there are a growing number of projects aiming to speed up security checks at airports simply from video footage of people as they travel through the airport.
New research from A*STAR highlights the latest development, with technology that can understand what humans are doing in video footage. Whereas previous technologies have been developed for use in areas such as security, the Singapore-based team believe their work will have the biggest impact in autonomous transportation, where vehicles will need to be able to quickly detect people like police offers, and then interpret their actions rapidly and accurately.
It’s the first thing someone usually says when you’re writhing in agony after stubbing your toe really, really hard and are wondering if it might be broken. “Can you move it? In that case, you haven’t broken it.”
In fact, you can sometimes move a broken bone, so this is not one of the main signs to look for when deciding whether you have a fracture. The top three symptoms of a broken bone are pain, swelling and deformity. If a bone is sticking out at 90 degrees or poking through the skin, not surprisingly, that’s not a good sign and it might well be broken. Another sign is if you heard a snap when the accident happened…
Sweat sensing may provide a noninvasive means of estimating blood biomarker levels if a number of technological hurdles can be overcome. This report describes progress on a physiologically-based transport model relating sweat glucose and key electrolyte concentrations to those in blood. Iontophoretically-stimulated sweat glucose and fasted blood glucose were simultaneously measured in two healthy human subjects. Sweat glucose was measured with a novel, prototype skin sweat collection/analysis system and blood glucose with a commercial fingerstick glucometer. These data, in combination with data from three published studies, were used to calibrate a dynamic mathematical model for glucose transport and uptake in human skin, followed by extraction into sweat. Model simulations revealed that experimental and literature sweat glucose values were well represented under varying physiologic conditions. The glucose model, calibrated under a variety of experimental conditions including electrical enhancement, revealed a 10 min blood-to-sweat lag time and a sweat/blood glucose level ranging from 0.001 to 0.02, depending on sweat rate. These values are consistent with those reported in the literature. The developed model satisfactorily described the sweat-to-blood relationship for glucose concentrations measured under different conditions in four human studies including the present pilot study. The algorithm may be used to facilitate sweat biosensor development.
Objectives To systematically identify and qualitatively review the statistical approaches used in prospective cohort studies of team sports that reported intensive longitudinal data (ILD) (>20 observations per athlete) and examined the relationship between athletic workloads and injuries. Since longitudinal research can be improved by aligning the (1) theoretical model, (2) temporal design and (3) statistical approach, we reviewed the statistical approaches used in these studies to evaluate how closely they aligned these three components.
Design Methodological review.
Methods After finding 6 systematic reviews and 1 consensus statement in our systematic search, we extracted 34 original prospective cohort studies of team sports that reported ILD (>20 observations per athlete) and examined the relationship between athletic workloads and injuries. Using Professor Linda Collins’ three-part framework of aligning the theoretical model, temporal design and statistical approach, we qualitatively assessed how well the statistical approaches aligned with the intensive longitudinal nature of the data, and with the underlying theoretical model. Finally, we discussed the implications of each statistical approach and provide recommendations for future research.
Results Statistical methods such as correlations, t-tests and simple linear/logistic regression were commonly used. However, these methods did not adequately address the (1) themes of theoretical models underlying workloads and injury, nor the (2) temporal design challenges (ILD). Although time-to-event analyses (eg, Cox proportional hazards and frailty models) and multilevel modelling are better-suited for ILD, these were used in fewer than a 10% of the studies (n=3).
Conclusions Rapidly accelerating availability of ILD is the norm in many fields of healthcare delivery and thus health research. These data present an opportunity to better address research questions, especially when appropriate statistical analyses are chosen. [full text]
In another example of how dramatically the NBA is embracing the gambling industry, the Dallas Mavericks are hiring former professional sports gambler Bob Voulgaris as director of quantitative research and development, league sources told ESPN.
For years, Voulgaris made a living betting on NBA games, successfully wagering based on his research and information. Voulgaris is known for his deep analytics and expertise on coaching strategy and tendencies of individual referees.
arXiv, Statistics > Applications; Lotte Bransen, Jan Van Haaren from
Several performance metrics for quantifying the in-game performances of individual football players have been proposed in recent years. Although the majority of the on-the-ball actions during games constitutes of passes, many of the currently available metrics focus on measuring the quality of shots only. To help bridge this gap, we propose a novel approach to measure players’ on-the-ball contributions from passes during games. Our proposed approach measures the expected impact of each pass on the scoreline.