… “Right from the moment I came here, it was something different,” he says. “That was something I needed to try and ignite my career again.” And that’s what he did, with Ridgewell a key part of the Portland Timbers side that won, for the first time in the club’s history, the MLS Cup in 2016. He has since fallen out of the Timbers’ starting lineup this season, dropped by new manager Gio Savarese at the start of the year, but remains something of a cult figure for the world renowned Timbers Army.
… “Yeah, I’ve just been working hard every day just to be able to be out there with my teammates,” he said. “And I’m just happy I was able to be out there yesterday.”
The question now is will Ansah return to play a second straight game when the Lions visit the Chicago Bears on Sunday, and if he does, how much action will he see? Ansah said he expected limited snaps against the Vikings.
“It’s a process and we’re just taking it week in and week out,” he said of his future workload. “We’ll see how it goes during the week and we’ll find out on Sunday how many reps I get.”
With it looking like he’s coaching for his life, at least in Baltimore, John Harbaugh is taking an unorthodox approach to the Baltimore Ravens’ bye week:
No game, no practice.
‘We’re better off resting’
The Ravens are not practicing this week. They’re are holding meetings and players are doing conditioning work and of course getting whatever treatment they need, but they won’t step on the field to practice.
Unai Emery’s mix of grit and total football has rejuvenated Arsenal but his start to the season does not match that overseen by Joe Montemurro with the women’s team
Wearable technology is a strong trend in the Internet of Things community. The new Apple Watch now has the potential to perform electrocardiograms, introducing FDA-approved devices to the mass consumer market. Wearable technology use will only increase as developers and engineers create smaller and more efficient devices.
To that end, Purdue University has developed new wearable technology that can be applied like a sticker—allowing for ease-of-use and flexibility while monitoring physical activity and alerting the wearer about possible health risks.
When it comes to considering the future of technology across industries, it’s important to look at soft sensors and the value they provide. These intricate devices are being incorporated into textiles, medical devices, and nearly every industry you can imagine.
So, what do they do? How can they add value to your product? Soft sensors help interface humanity with technology. Bend Labs, a soft sensor company, has focused their efforts in exploring the integration of humans with novel technologies by designing from the ground up the most accurate conformable flex sensor to date.
Bend Labs’ soft sensors are designed with simplicity in mind, ensuring high quality angular displacement data in real-time. What makes Bend Labs’ soft sensors stand out from the competition is that they’re uniquely designed to reject any stretching or extraneous bending, which in turn offers a high-fidelity measurement of end-to-end angular displacement.
Objective assessment of an athlete’s performance is of importance in elite sports to facilitate detailed analysis. The implementation of automated detection and recognition of sport-specific movements overcomes the limitations associated with manual performance analysis methods. The object of this study was to systematically review the literature on machine and deep learning for sport-specific movement recognition using inertial measurement unit (IMU) and, or computer vision data inputs. A search of multiple databases was undertaken. Included studies must have investigated a sport-specific movement and analysed via machine or deep learning methods for model development. A total of 52 studies met the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Data pre-processing, processing, model development and evaluation methods varied across the studies. Model development for movement recognition were predominantly undertaken using supervised classification approaches. A kernel form of the Support Vector Machine algorithm was used in 53% of IMU and 50% of vision-based studies. Twelve studies used a deep learning method as a form of Convolutional Neural Network algorithm and one study also adopted a Long Short Term Memory architecture in their model. The adaptation of experimental set-up, data pre-processing, and model development methods are best considered in relation to the characteristics of the targeted sports movement(s).
… “The problem is that healthy is relative,” said Bruce Y. Lee, a professor of international health at Johns Hopkins. Subsisting on broccoli alone, for instance, wouldn’t be healthy.
The federal standards for use of the word “healthy” on labels was established in 1994 and set limits on total fat and cholesterol.
Susan Mayne, who heads the FDA’s food labeling division, said the definition reflects decades-old understanding of nutrition and needs to be updated.
… The Food & Drug Administration regulates all products defined as food to ensure they’re safe for human consumption. Coffee drinks and soda, for instance, aren’t allowed to be too high in caffeine lest they cause heart problems. But energy drinks are classified as supplements, which means they’re unregulated—and manufacturers are free to shove as much caffeine inside a single can as they please. They can even mix caffeine with other stimulants in such a way that could cause cardiovascular or nervous system problems.
That’s why physicians have been trying to investigate what the health effects of these caffeinated cocktails might be. A new study showing that a single drink can diminish blood vessel function is making headlines, but similar findings have been accruing for years now. The latest results are being presented at the annual American Heart Association Meeting. Back in 2015, Mayo Clinic researchers presented a study at the AHA’s Scientific Sessions demonstrating that a single beverage raised the drinker’s blood pressure and cortisol levels (a measure of stress).
… This revolution has left the NBA’s defensive intelligencia to retreat to icy caves, like the rebels in Star Wars, to ponder just what the hell they can do about it. The team that figures out how to defend modern offenses could own the future. But the volume of shooting plus the freedom of movement rules referees have been instructed to enforce this season have created a perfect storm.
It’s a full-blown defensive coaching crisis.
“It’s a lot more difficult to play and pioneer defense right now,” said San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, who has been at the forefront of strategy changes for two decades. “Switching seems to be everybody’s answer. But that is really player-dependent.”
Toronto Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins supports the idea of a simplified trade deadline with a mid-August cut-off and an end to the revocable waiver period, a topic he and his fellow GMs discussed during the opening day of the General Managers Meetings.
As things stand now, the non-waiver trade deadline is July 31, but teams can still make deals afterwards by running players through revocable waivers. Anyone that passes through unclaimed can then be traded to any of the other 29 clubs, while a claimed player can either be withdrawn from waivers, be let go to a claiming team for nothing, or be traded to the team that wins a claim.
In the game of football, statistical division of credit is often an impractical task given the dynamic nature of any given play. Using Next Gen Stats player tracking technology, we have developed metrics to move beyond traditional box score statistics and derive insights to improve our analysis of individual player performance.
This week, we are introducing another new metric for the 2018 season, Expected Yards After Catch, to contextualize passing plays from the receiver’s perspective. The machine learning model estimates how many yards should a receiver gain after the moment of reception, based on the factors of the play? The purpose of the model is not to perfectly predict yards after the catch, but rather to set expectations driven by the dynamic factors of the play.
The state of youth sports in America is either booming or suffering, depending on which box score you’re checking.
You could follow the money. Kids’ sports is a nearly $17 billion industry, which makes it larger than the business of professional baseball and approximately the same size as the National Football League. Or you could follow the kids. The share of children ages 6 to 12 who play a team sport on a regular basis declined from 41.5 percent in 2011 to 37 percent in 2017, according to a recent report from the Aspen Institute. Going back to 2008, participation is lower across categories, including baseball, basketball, flag football, and soccer, in some cases by a lot: Baseball is down about 20 percent
The decline of youth sports participation is the sort of phenomenon that seems exquisitely tailored to exacerbate fears about the state of American childhood. One might suspect that the falloff is the result of children gravitating to video games, television, and other electronic distractions that don’t require an open field or a court. Perhaps athletics is just another legacy institution that can’t compete for attention anymore, like church, community centers, and bowling leagues.
In this article, Kirsten Hextrum considers institutional avenues that limit upward mobility opportunities by revealing a hidden curriculum of athletic recruiting that favors students from privileged backgrounds. The study’s data center on forty-seven life history interviews with National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I athletes from an athletically and academically prestigious university. Hextrum’s findings reveal three phases of a hidden curriculum—socialization, covert selection, and overt selection—that secure greater access to elite colleges for White middle-class communities via athletic participation. In this case, social reproduction required active effort by both representatives of higher education and representatives of White middle-class communities to protect existing class and race relations.