Applied Sports Science newsletter – December 14, 2018

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for December 14, 2018

 

Jaylen Brown’s new journey, and why it’s so important to the Boston Celtics

ESPN NBA, Jackie MacMullan from

… Despite the analytical scrutiny, the incessant trade rumors that have swirled around him, the “tough love” he has endured from teammates and the realization that his own lofty goals will have to be tempered for now, Brown says he will continue to fight for himself and his firm belief that he’s an NBA starter.

“It’s probably been the hardest thing I’ve had to deal with so far in my career,” Brown says. “Just coming from a position where you had so much responsibility, and now that responsibility is lessened. Expectations have been raised, but your responsibility goes down, so it’s hard to reach those expectations when you aren’t being asked to do as much.

“It’s been a challenge. It’s going to continue to be a challenge. It’s all about your mindset, so that’s what I’m focusing on.”

 

Carson Wentz is looking for input outside the Eagles’ medical staff. Who can blame him?

Philly.com, Marcus Hayes from

… On Wednesday, Doug Pederson began his weekly press conference by listing injuries, which was unusual for the head coach, who volunteers information like a prisoner of war.

The reason Pederson changed protocol is obvious now: He wanted to minimize alarm when Wentz didn’t practice that day. That plan failed. Within an hour, NFL.com, the league website, reported that Wentz’s ongoing back problem — which doctors repeatedly examined the last two months — might now cost him the season. Thursday, reports surfaced that he has a fractured vertebra. The initial diagnosis did not involve surgery, but sources said he will seek outside medical advice hereon out.

 

U.S. keeper Zack Steffen ready for Manchester City, European soccer this time

Sporting News, Mike DeCourcy from

It hasn’t been long since Zack Steffen played in Europe, struggled in Europe and left Europe eager for a new beginning to his professional soccer career. And yet so much has happened since he returned to the United States, nearly all of it wonderful, that it doesn’t feel at all as though he’s heading back too soon to club soccer’s biggest stage.

Steffen, 23, will leave Major League Soccer and Columbus Crew SC next July to join the roster of one the richest and most successful clubs in the world: Manchester City FC. His growth during his 18 months in Germany should serve him well as he attempts to seize this new opportunity.

“I wasn’t too happy over there, so I came back. But I definitely learned a lot on the field and off the field,” Steffen told Sporting News.

 

No. 1 overall recruit Kayvon Thibodeaux has the secret to football-life balance

ESPN, College Football, Tom VanHaaren from

… That’s what comes with being a 6-foot-5, 234-pound prospect from South Central Los Angeles who is one of the most talented football players in the country. Thibodeaux has embraced being bombarded by college coaches over the phone and fans on social media and has dealt well with all the expectations and attention that come with the label of being the top prospect, but he says all that is just work. In his personal life, Thibodeaux doesn’t want those closest to him to think of him as the No. 1 prospect, or an outstanding football player, but rather as their friend Kayvon who happens to excel on a football field.

“It’s not even that I want a normal life, it’s that that’s not who I am,” Thibodeaux said. “The whole facade of being the No. 1 — if you look at me like that, you’re looking at something the public has made. My football life has no impact on my regular life and how I live on a day-to-day basis.”

 

Nebraska volleyball players’ dance moves at matches help tighten team bond

Lincoln Journal Star, Brent C. Wagner from

You thought it would be tough to top last season, when the players on the bench for the Nebraska volleyball team were known for the celebrations they did after big plays in the match, right?

Well, this year these dancing Huskers may have just done it.

Last year the cheers included acting like the players were dunking a basketball, and dancing after a block. And they still do some of those same cheers, to help provide energy for the team.

This year the team’s thing is that several times the bench players have done a line dance during breaks in the action when a video review challenge is taking place.

 

Interview: Lorena Torres

Sports Discovery blog from

As you described earlier, your experiences are a mixture of research and applied practice. What do you think practitioners can learn from being involved in academia?

Undergoing the full process of doing a PhD or a dissertation, gives you a system, in this case the scientific method: “an orderly series of procedures to observe the extension of our knowledge”. There are different models of the scientific method, but in a brief and simplistic way, this series of procedures involves asking a question, doing background research, constructing a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis with an experiment, analyzing the data, drawing conclusions, and communicating results. In this scenario, you have time; time to study, do the literature review, to collect the data, to process the information and analyze it, to write, time until the paper is accepted… You do not have that privilege in the applied world; or probably not as a part of your -urgent, daily duties. Further, the experimental conditions to conduct a proper research study are rarely possible in the applied world.

On the other hand, traditionally, many disciplines in science have been looking at things in a linear analytical fashion, in order to search for a cause-effect relationship from a mono-disciplinary approach and a reductionist point of view. This approach obviously has provided evolution in knowledge, but things are often more interdependent that independent, including the study of the human being and its performance. We have been seeing for some time now that scientific disciplines are collaborating and being inclusive to try to explain phenomena, moving from deconstruction of elements to analysis of interactions and dynamics.

 

Understanding Motivation: Building the Brain Architecture That Supports Learning, Health, and Community Participation

Harvard University, Center on the Developing Child from

A healthy, engaged community depends on people achieving to the best of their potential, contributing actively to the economy and public well-being, and helping the next generation to thrive. A complex set of intertwined social and biological factors influences people’s motivation to participate actively and productively in schools, jobs, and communities–and to persevere in the face of setbacks.

To unlock this puzzle and ensure that all people have the opportunity to develop motivation to learn, improve skills, and make healthy choices, it would be helpful to understand the underlying mechanisms in the brain that develop in childhood and build the foundation for later complex behavior.

 

What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System – NeurIPS 2018

YouTube, The Artificial Intelligence Channel from

Michael Levin, Vannevar Bush Professor Director, Allen Discovery Center at Tufts Director, Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology Morphological and behavioral information processing in living systems

 

The Growing Promise Of Printed Electronics

Semiconductor Engineering, Ed Sperling from

Printing electronics using conductive ink rather than lithography is starting to move out of the research phase, with chipmakers now looking at how to commercialize this technology across a broad range of sensor applications.

Unlike traditional semiconductors, which use tiny wires as circuits, printed electronics rely on conductive inks and often flexible films, although they can be printed on almost anything. That allows them to be flowed into places using conformal films, or to be taped onto something like an industrial valve where multiple types of sensors can be used rather than trying to attach a single, discrete sensor on a hard substrate. Moreover, these sensors can be added to existing facilities, rather than replacing existing devices with new parts that contain built-in electronics.

This kind of capability—conductive ink with built-in RF or connected circuitry—has captured the imagination of chipmakers on multiple continents and in multiple industry segments. Most experts believe they have only scratched the surface for applications, too.

 

GWAS identifies 14 loci for device-measured physical activity and sleep duration | Nature Communications

Nature Communications journal from

Physical activity and sleep duration are established risk factors for many diseases, but their aetiology is poorly understood, partly due to relying on self-reported evidence. Here we report a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of device-measured physical activity and sleep duration in 91,105 UK Biobank participants, finding 14 significant loci (7 novel). These loci account for 0.06% of activity and 0.39% of sleep duration variation. Genome-wide estimates of ~ 15% phenotypic variation indicate high polygenicity. Heritability is higher in women than men for overall activity (23 vs. 20%, p = 1.5 × 10−4) and sedentary behaviours (18 vs. 15%, p = 9.7 × 10−4). Heritability partitioning, enrichment and pathway analyses indicate the central nervous system plays a role in activity behaviours. Two-sample Mendelian randomisation suggests that increased activity might causally lower diastolic blood pressure (beta mmHg/SD: −0.91, SE = 0.18, p = 8.2 × 10−7), and odds of hypertension (Odds ratio/SD: 0.84, SE = 0.03, p = 4.9 × 10−8). Our results advocate the value of physical activity for reducing blood pressure.

 

The NFL is the fox in the henhouse of football-injury research

Los Angeles Times, Kathleen Bachynski from

Last month, the NFL announced that it is awarding more than $35 million in grants to fund research on brain injuries. The recipients of the league’s largesse include researchers at prestigious academic institutions such as Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, the University of Pittsburgh and UC San Francisco. Peter Chiarelli, who chaired the scientific advisory board to allocate the NFL’s funds, said the league did not influence the panel in any way: “We were totally independent.”

We’ve seen this story line before. In 2012, the NFL donated $30 million to the National Institutes of Health for brain research. The NFL similarly claimed that there were no strings attached. But just last year, that NFL-NIH partnership fell apart after a congressional investigation revealed that the league wanted the NIH to avoid funding researchers at Boston University who had found damage in the brains of dozens of former pro football players. Instead, the NFL sought to redirect that money to league-affiliated scientists.

Apparently, we are meant to believe that one year later, the NFL has turned over a new leaf.

 

Staggering new study estimates the rate of CTE among NFL players could be more than 25 percent

ThinkProgress, Lindsay Gibbs from

Last year, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) made waves when they released a study that found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy — the degenerative brain disease known better by its acronym CTE, which is believed to be caused by repetitive head trauma — in 110 out of 111 brains it examined of deceased former NFL players.

The study garnered big-time headlines — 99 percent is an alarming rate, after all. But it was also the subject of criticism because of its inherent selection bias. Boston University could only study brains that were donated to its brain bank, and most who donated the brains already had reason to suspect the deceased player suffered from CTE when he was alive. Though it can only be diagnosed posthumously, the symptoms of CTE — ailments such as severe depression, dementia, vertigo, and drastic mood swings — tend to be tragically present at the surface.

Last week, Dr. Zachary O. Binney and Dr. Kathleen E. Bachynski published a study that tries to quantify and account for those biases, and provides us with a much better picture of the true prevalence of CTE among NFL players. The news is not good.

 

Players optimistic about Canadian Premier League’s standard of play

Sportsnet.ca, John Molinaro from

It’s one of the more interesting and pressing questions surrounding the Canadian Premier League.

Just what, exactly, will the standard of play be like?

It’s a difficult question to answer considering a ball has yet to be even kicked in the CPL, a new professional soccer league that is expected to kick off its inaugural season next April with seven teams from coast to coast.

 

Carmelo Anthony is the last great American ball hog

ESPN NBA, Kirk Goldsberry from

… Pop honed in: “Now you look at a stat sheet after a game and the first thing you look at is the 3s. If you made 3s and the other team didn’t, you win. You don’t even look at the rebounds or the turnovers or how much transition D was involved. You don’t even care.

“These days there’s such an emphasis on the 3 because it’s proven to be analytically correct.”

That’s the perfect choice of words — “analytically correct” — to connote the invisible algorithmic hand that now guides virtually all the action we see in NBA arenas. Front offices assign every part of the game bond ratings and credit scores. Financial terms such as efficiency, asset and value have infiltrated the discussion. Offensive tactics are homogenizing, while many tried-and-true forms of scoring fall by the wayside.

 

The ‘opener’ strategy is spreading, and that’s probably not a good sign for free-agent starters

CBSSports.com, R.J. Anderson from

Last season, the Tampa Bay Rays introduced the “opener” strategy to regular-season baseball. Originally dreamed up by Bryan Grosnick, the opener works by rearranging how pitchers are deployed: a middle reliever starts (or “opens”) the game, with the usual starter slotting in thereafter. Ideally, it allows for a platoon advantage early on and prevents weaker starting pitchers from being overexposed by facing the opponent’s best hitters too many times.

It makes sense on paper. There’s probably some marginal value to be gleaned there, depending on the team’s personnel, their buy-in and their deployment. But there’s also an ugly side to the whole thing: the idea that the Rays were implementing the opener as a means to avoid paying for traditional starting pitchers and/or suppressing the wages of their pitching prospects.

Whether or not that was the intention, it seemed certain that the opener would eventually have some impact on starters’ salaries. The only surprise is that “eventually” might have already arrived. A handful of teams have been asked about implementing the opener during the Winter Meetings and replied either affirmatively or with a nod toward considering it in due time.

 

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