Growing up with one hand may have been a hindrance for many, but the Griffin family isn’t one for excuses. His father, Terry Griffin, constantly encouraged and trained Shaquem and twin brother, Shaquill, in preparation for the career path they both so desperately wanted. Today, the identical pair play for the Seattle Seahawks, with Shaquem in his rookie year after an incredible showing at the 2018 NFL Scouting Combine.
Here, the Griffins chat with EBONY about their new partnership with Gillette, who’s short film chronicles the dedication, hard work and perseverance it takes to accomplish any dream under any circumstance.
… It doesn’t matter. LeBron torches him from every spot he chooses. Ingram closes out to play him tightly. He slides his feet quickly. But LeBron hits one shot after another. On offense, Ingram gets solid looks. But his jumpers miss short, and he is unable to fall into a rhythm.
The two continue to battle. The intensity of this late-September workout at the Lakers practice facility in El Segundo is palpable. Ingram’s energy is unwavering. “I wanted to get the best out of LeBron James,” Ingram would say later, sitting in the team’s media room.
After a few more daggers, LeBron finishes Ingram off.
Jean Michaël Seri has grown used to the comparisons and, when they have come, they have nearly always been complimentary. Back in his youth when he would venture across the capital to the Centre Cyrille Domoraud in Bingerville, a suburb on the eastern fringes of Abidjan, the coaches nicknamed him “Galla” after Marcelo Gallardo, the diminutive Argentinian playmaker who had swapped River Plate for Monaco and was imposing himself on Ligue 1.
Later, once Seri was making his own impression in France with Nice, observers would point to flashes of Marco Verratti in his style. Most flattering of all were the similarities Xavi spied of his own game in the Ivorian, qualities that had the Barcelona midfielder and World Cup winner “entranced, madre mia!”.
Those reminders bring a smile to Seri’s face even now, the compliments a reward for the boldness of his approach. “As a player, if you’re not willing to try things on the ball, you’ll never fulfil your true potential,” he says. “You have to give things a go and take calculated risks: not things that put your team in danger but passes forward to surprise your opponents.
“Otherwise you are just a water carrier. It’s not always about a simple pass. Sometimes it’s about being daring. Since I’ve been young, I’ve always had that desire, to look forward and test myself. It is an attitude.”
Former Canadian men’s national team star Alex Bunbury is excited about the future of soccer in this country as the Canadian Premier League takes its formative steps.
Bunbury, 51, is criss-crossing the country with coaches from each of the seven CPL teams and talent scouts to take a look at over a thousand aspiring players. It’s all part of a series of open tryouts this fall in the seven cities that will become home to the CPL’s founding franchises when the new league kicks off in 2019.
The CPL has already held its “Got Game Open Trials” in Halifax, Montreal and Hamilton. The tryouts continue in Toronto on Oct. 11 and 12, followed by stops in Winnipeg (Oct. 18 and 19), Calgary (Oct. 25 and 26), and wraps up on Vancouver Island (Nov. 5 and 6).
“I love the fact that this league was created and put forth by Canadians for Canadians,” Bunbury, who scored 16 goals in 65 appearances for Canada, told Sportsnet.
Canada is a hockey country, but Toronto is quickly becoming a basketball town. The success of the Raptors, an immigrant population and one of the best prep teams in the world has made the 6ix into a basketball factory. In this episode of THE WAY WE BALL, we trace the journey of a few local products, including Jamal Murray’s path from Kitchener to the NBA and the young career of the best middle school basketball player in the world.
The British Psychological Society, Research Digest, Christian Jarrett from
In what feels like an increasingly polarised world, trying to convince the “other side” to see things differently often feels futile. Psychology has done a great job outlining some of the reasons why, including showing that, regardless of political leanings, most people are highly motivated to protect their existing views.
However a problem with some of this research is that it is very difficult to concoct opposing real-life arguments of equal validity, so as to make a fair comparison of people’s treatment of arguments they agree and disagree with.
To get around this problem, an elegant new paper in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology has tested people’s ability to assess the logic of formal arguments (syllogisms) structured in the exact same way, but that featured wording that either confirmed or contradicted their existing views on abortion. The results provide a striking demonstration of how our powers of reasoning are corrupted by our prior attitudes.
We experience the world through our senses, a constant torrent of sights, sounds, smells, and more. Our brains take these signals and process them, giving rise to our individual perceptions of the world. But sometimes our senses play tricks on us, notably in the case of perceptual illusions.
Now, Caltech researchers have developed two new illusions that reveal how the senses can influence each other—in particular, how sound can give rise to visual illusions. These illusions occur so quickly that they illustrate a phenomenon called postdiction (as opposed to prediction) in which a stimulus that occurs later can retroactively affect our perceptions of an earlier event.
The Caltech work is among the first to show this kind of time-traveling illusion across multiple senses.
… MIT engineers have developed a technique to fabricate ultrathin semiconducting films made from a host of exotic materials other than silicon. To demonstrate their technique, the researchers fabricated flexible films made from gallium arsenide, gallium nitride, and lithium fluoride — materials that exhibit better performance than silicon but until now have been prohibitively expensive to produce in functional devices.
The new technique, researchers say, provides a cost-effective method to fabricate flexible electronics made from any combination of semiconducting elements, that could perform better than current silicon-based devices.
“We’ve opened up a way to make flexible electronics with so many different material systems, other than silicon,” says Jeehwan Kim, the Class of 1947 Career Development Associate Professor in the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering. Kim envisions the technique can be used to manufacture low-cost, high-performance devices such as flexible solar cells, and wearable computers and sensors.
On Oct. 5, President Donald J. Trump signed the Sports Medicine Licensure Clarity Act of 2017 into law. Under the new law, legal protections for sports medicine professionals who travel outside of their primary state of licensure to deliver medical care to athletes will be significantly improved, according to a press release from the National Athletic Trainers’ Association.
First introduced by Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) in the U.S. Senate as S. 808 and by Reps. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) and Cedric Richmond (D-La.) in the U.S. House of Representatives as H.R. 302, the Sports Medicine Licensure Clarity Act of 2017 allows sports medicine professionals to engage in treatment of injured athletes across state lines without loss of license to practice while being protected from monetary loss with professional liability insurance, according to the release. The release also noted, if the secondary state’s licensure requirements are substantially similar to the primary state, health care services to an athlete, an athletic team or a staff member of the team provided by covered sports medicine professionals would be deemed to have occurred in the professional’s primary state of licensure.
Ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) reconstruction is a reliable treatment for elite overhand throwers with UCL tears. In recent years, this procedure has become increasingly common among Major League Baseball (MLB) pitchers. Predisposing factors and associated comorbidities, however, have not been fully elucidated. Purpose/Hypothesis:
The purpose of this study was to determine whether professional baseball pitchers who underwent UCL reconstruction had an increased incidence of hip or groin injuries 4 years before or after surgery. We hypothesized that MLB pitchers who sustain hip or groin injuries may be more likely to develop UCL tears because of alterations and overcompensation in the kinetic chain during overhand throwing. Study Design:
Cohort study; Level of evidence, 3. Methods:
A comprehensive list of all 247 MLB players who underwent UCL reconstruction between 2005 and 2017 was created using publicly accessible online data. The application of inclusion criteria yielded a final sample size of 145 athletes. These athletes’ injury histories were identified and cross-referenced with the official MLB disabled list. Matched controls were generated for a comparison of results. Results:
Of the 145 MLB pitchers who underwent UCL reconstruction between 2005 and 2017, 40 (27.6%) endured a proximal lower extremity injury within 4 years of their surgery. Specifically, 16 pitchers sustained hip injuries, 13 suffered hamstring injuries, and 14 experienced groin injuries. A significantly lower rate of hip- and groin-related injuries (17.9%) was identified in matched controls during a similar time frame (P = .049). Conclusion:
The results of this study demonstrate that MLB pitchers who required UCL reconstruction sustained a higher frequency of proximal lower extremity injuries both before and after surgery compared with matched controls. This finding is significant as the treatment of antecedent hip lesions, as well as an emphasis on hip and core muscle mobility and strengthening, may help reduce injuries to the UCL. [full text]
… Research shows that in developed countries, more affluent and educated people tend to consume higher-quality diets — including more fruits and vegetables, fish and whole grains.
Conversely, socioeconomically disadvantaged people report diets that are nutrient-poor and energy-dense, replete with foods like pasta, potatoes, table sugar, fried foods and processed meats. They are less likely to have food-purchasing habits that conform to public health recommendations.
As part of its annual coaches’ compensation package, USA TODAY Sports has obtained and reviewed the most recent contracts of more than 130 Football Bowl Subdivision coaches over the past year. And for the schools that hired those coaches, some of these contracts are better deals than others.
Three hundred fifty-nine days and six miles from Alex Cora’s promise to the Red Sox front office that he was prepared to manage aggressively, ace Chris Sale jogged to the mound to begin the eighth inning of Game 4 of the ALDS.
In the dugout, utilityman Brock Holt had done almost a cartoon double-take an inning earlier, when he saw his team’s projected Game 5 starter warming up. Is that Chris Sale? he wondered. Then he grinned. That’s Chris Sale! Hell yeah!
In centerfield, Jackie Bradley Jr. turned to his right and quickly scanned the visitors’ bullpen. He turned to rightfielder Mookie Betts and called, “Long lefty’s coming in!” Betts nodded.
At first base, Steve Pearce paused to soak in the moment. I guess we’re all in, he thought.
As an African American soccer player growing up in the South a generation ago, Eddie Pope didn’t have many role models to look up to.
“The first black player I saw was Pele on a videotape,” he said. “You definitely notice that you’re the only one. I had people saying the N word and things of that nature.”
Cobi Jones had a similar experience, without the epithet, 2,400 miles away on the Ventura County border.
“I didn’t see anybody that really looked like me,” said Jones who, like Pope, went on to play in three World Cups before they were inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame together in 2011. “There were very few other blacks playing the game when I grew up.”
… Most of us — including me — would like to believe that if we produced a big hit, it would help us produce more hits afterwards. After all, we know that winning begets more winning. So are we really regressing toward mediocrity after we break through? To answer these questions my student Lu Liu and I along with other collaborators studied the careers of about 30,000 scientists, artists, and film directors. We used a given work’s number of citations (as provided by the Web of Science), auction price, and IMDB rating, respectively, as measures of quality and impact. We find that across these diverse careers, the random impact rule holds firm.
In fact, it’s not just the biggest hit that occurs at random: The second-biggest and third-biggest also hit randomly. This finding paints an unpredictable view of creativity, with an outsized role of chance in individual success. If our careers are indeed like lotteries, should we just keep drawing and hope for the best?
This, thankfully, is an incomplete reading of the data, as we found upon examining the relative timing of hit works. Specifically, we asked: Given when someone produced their best work, when would their second-best work be? We find that knowing the timing of one’s best work points to when their next best works will arrive: They’re just around the corner. So, while the timing of most-successful works in a career is random, their relative timing is very predictable. In other words, creative careers are characterized by bursts of high-impact works clustered together in sequence. The result begs a key question: Why?