In one of his earliest and most vivid memories, Patrik Laine is practicing his shot. He is standing in the backyard of his boyhood home in Finland, taking aim at four targets that his father had strung to a hockey net: two high, one low-blocker, one low-glove. “Soda cans, sometimes beer cans, whatever cans we had,” Laine says. “Didn’t really matter. Just always try to hit them.”
Years later, thousands of miles away, the approach remains just as simple. Store-bought aluminum has been swapped for NHL nylon, but Laine, 20, still picks spots like few else. Consider all that the Winnipeg Jets winger accomplished in November alone: fourth-youngest player ever to reach 100 career goals, first since Pavel Bure (March ‘94) to score 18 times in a single month, first since Wayne Gretzky (Oct. ‘84) to strike five times on five shots in a single game. “I feel like he’s just naturally one of the more gifted shooters I’ve seen,” says Nashville goalie Pekka Rinne. “He has that swagger about him. It looks almost casual, but it’s just deadly.”
… With the support of the organization and his teammates, Fultz has started rehabilitation in Los Angeles with physical therapist Judy Seto. He is expected to miss at least a month.
“This is hard,” teammate Wilson Chandler said. “We’ve seen this a few times when players have injuries and you can’t find out what it is and you’ve got people saying it’s not an injury, it’s mental and it’s all these other things. But you know, everybody knows their own body. I’m glad he finally found something. Now he can be at peace with that at least and work to get back on the court.”
But some close to Fultz believe the problem is more than physical. In interviews, those who know Fultz — current and former teammates, NBA people and Washington-area supporters — describe a life burdened by a number of factors, from a restrictive inner circle to lost allies to outside criticism. Those who have peeked inside this world tell stories of those closest to Fultz going to extreme efforts to keep personal details confidential.
An in-depth documentary following Arsenal captain Laurent Koscielny through the rehab process. From rupturing his achilles facing Atletico Madrid in the Europa League and missing the World Cup, Laurent made his comeback for Arsenal, facing Qarabag FK at Emirates Stadium in the Europa League.
… Jackson has run 67 times in his first four starts, shattering the Super Bowl-era record for most attempts by a quarterback in his first four starts. This has repeatedly raised the debate whether the risk of injury is worth the potential reward of a big play, especially after he missed time the past two weeks because of health scares.
On Dec. 2, he missed an eight-minute series in Atlanta after being placed in concussion protocol. Jackson, who was later cleared, was accidentally hit in the head by left tackle Ronnie Stanley’s foot at the end of a run.
Last Sunday, Jackson laid on his back after suffering an ankle injury while being sacked. He was knocked out for the game’s final two plays, but X-rays were negative. Jackson has been listed on the injury report this week as a full participant.
Ravens backup quarterback Robert Griffin III, who previously owned the record for most rushing attempts by a quarterback in his first four starts, believes Jackson is getting better at protecting himself.
At the Knicks’ practice facility in Tarrytown, N.Y., earlier this week, there were good fouls, bad fouls and push-ups. It all had to do with the rookie center Mitchell Robinson, whose defense in the first two months of his N.B.A. career has ranged from dazzling, as in nine blocks against Orlando, to disastrous, as in six fouls in nine minutes against New Orleans.
So Knicks Coach David Fizdale made a deal with Robinson. “If he doesn’t do the foul where his hands are down, I got to do push-ups,” Fizdale said. “And if he does, then he has to do push-ups. So you might see my body change here. I’m about to get in shape, man. I hope I’m doing push-ups. Trust me, I hope.”
The Knicks took a gamble on the 7-foot-1 Robinson when they selected him in the second round of the June draft with the 36th pick over all. He was the only player in this year’s draft who did not play in college, overseas or in the N.B.A.’s developmental G League. Instead, Robinson took a year off from organized basketball after high school to get ready for the draft.
… On Monday night, LetsRun.com spoke with both Marc and Joan Hunter for almost an hour in a phone interview. We’ve broken the interview into two parts. In part I, we talked about the team’s success at NXN, how they built Loudoun Valley into a powerhouse, and their training philosophy. In part II, which will be published on Thursday, we spoke about supplemental work and what the team does to improve outside of running and why Loudoun Valley has so many transfers on its team (three of its top five at NXN this year were transfers).
arXiv, Computer Science > Social and Information Networks; Yilei Zeng, Anna Sapienza, Emilio Ferrara from
Social ties are the invisible glue that keeps together human ecosystems. Despite the massive amount of research studying the role of social ties in communities (groups, teams, etc.) and society at large, little attention has been devoted to study their interplay with other human behavioral dynamics. Of particular interest is the influence that social ties have on human performance in collaborative team-based settings. Our research aims to elucidate the influence of social ties on individual and team performance dynamics. We will focus on a popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) collaborative team-based game, Defense of the Ancients 2 (Dota 2), a rich dataset with millions of players and matches. Our research reveals that, when playing with their friends, individuals are systematically more active in the game as opposed to taking part in a team of strangers. However, we find that increased activity does not homogeneously lead to an improvement in players’ performance. Despite being beneficial to low skill players, playing with friends negatively affects performance of high skill players. Our findings shed light on the mixed influence of social ties on performance, and can inform new perspectives on virtual team management and on behavioral incentives.
… [Gerd] Gigerenzer takes a different view of human decision making. He argues that although simple heuristics often yield “biased” decisions, they can deliver a better answer. This is particularly the case in uncertain or complex environments, or where there is only a small sample from which to draw conclusions. People implement these heuristics through their gut feelings, with the selection of the appropriate heuristic a function of the unconscious.
Consider the gaze heuristic: when catching a ball, run so that the ball moves in a straight line at constant velocity in your gaze. This will lead you to where the ball will land.
The gaze heuristic can lead someone to run in an indirect or curved line. They don’t run straight to where they should wait for the ball’s arrival. The movement appears inefficient, but it allows a complex calculation to be replaced with something tractable for a human.
Social dynamics are a crucial part of any team environment. Integrating new players and ensuring they have a positive experience is a key component of coaching. In this article, new PDP Contributor & PhD Candidate at La Trobe University, Dianna Lepore discusses Fernando Torres as a case study in team integration, providing practical advice for coaches on how they can ensure a smooth transition for new players at their club.
… Various studies have found that stress levels are rising in America, and around the world, yet we’re more connected than ever. Last year, a survey by the American Psychological Association (APA) stated that nearly eight in 10 Americans are attached to their mobile devices and electronic gadget on a typical day. Stress runs higher for “constant checkers,” a term mental health professionals now use to describe those who constantly check their emails, texts or social media accounts. Forty-percent of constant checkers surveyed said they find political and cultural discussions on social media stressful. Nearly half of this group also said they feel disconnected from their family, when they are physically together, because of technology. Technology was even cited as a reason why people are less likely to meet in person. To top it off, Millennials — who report being the most comfortable with technology — also report having the highest levels of stress because of it. Stress is not an innocent fleeting feeling; it can be a chronic state, and chronic stress is linked to many common causes of death such as heart disease and cancer.
The internet as we know it today gives us access to so much information, it presents us with what is known as “excessive choice” — the sense of unlimited items and experiences to choose from. As psychologist Barry Schwartz explains, excessive choice “can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures.” Excessive choice, he argues, can lead to clinical depression.
… The area of paper-based biosensors is in its infancy; thus, a gap remains between the advanced research undergone at academia and clinical applications. This is mainly due to challenges such as substrate fragility, mass production, sample preparation and system integration. There are some successful paper-based biosensors that have reached the market, such as the pregnancy test. But they mainly provide qualitative or semi-quantitative yes/no responses, limiting its range of application. Currently, there is a huge amount of research ongoing in order to solve these issues.
Work schedules that disrupt our natural circadian rhythms come with consequences.
Around 20 percent of employees perform shift work – rotating or nontraditional work hours – and these schedules have been linked to health problems including heart disease, diabetes and depression. Tired workers are more likely to be distracted, inefficient and prone to error. For workers such as medical clinicians or truck drivers, minor mistakes can be deadly.
Tanzeem Choudhury, associate professor of information science, and colleagues at Rice University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, were recently awarded a four-year, $2 million National Science Foundation grant to explore how measuring people’s biological clocks can help improve their performance or lower their stress.
“We want to look at how we can augment and enhance people’s alertness and ability to perform tasks,” Choudhury said. “Are there peak periods when they can focus on things that are more cognitively demanding than others, and can we align people’s task performance with their biological rhythm?”
The Eagles have had 24 players miss 137 games and counting to injury this season. They’ve placed 14 of those players on injured reserve, with an additional player on physically unable to perform reserve. Those numbers would be shocking alone, except that there have been an inordinate number of irregularities in recurrence, recovery, and diagnosis.
The mounting questions about the new medical staff’s handling of injuries didn’t reach code-red level, however, until quarterback Carson Wentz became the latest to suffer a setback under dubious circumstances.
SB Nation, Beyond the Boxscore blog, Azam Farooqui from
Roster construction is an exercise in economics. Given the scarcity of the resource, teams – in theory – try to maximize as many wins as possible from each spot. This maximizing of resources is constrained by factors such as budgets, desire to contend, availability of players as well as replacement value of those players.
For a 40-man roster, additional considerations may include protecting prospects from the Rule 5, having roster spots available for trades as well has having replacement players who can be promoted to the 25-man roster in the event of an injury, or some other circumstance.
However, sometimes teams end up in a situation where a player signed to a long-term deal starts to show signs of decline, the popular decision is to ride keep him on the roster till his contract runs out. Case in point is Albert Pujols – once a great hitter, Pujols ended 2018 with -0.2 fWAR while making $27 million. The Los Angeles Angels have refused to move Pujols where he’s effectively a below replacement hitter all because they owe him $87 million for the next three seasons.
So why is that an organization continue to use the resource inefficiently only because they’ve paid a price for it?
The Conversation, Peter Francis and Ashley Jones from
For many football fans, the festive football schedule is a highlight of the Christmas break. But for many clubs, the cold conditions and congestion around fixtures can lead to an increase in injuries. In fact, earlier in the year Manchester City boss, Pep Guardiola, said the festive period in English football was “killing” the players.
English football is unique in that it has a high number of fixtures, particularly during the festive period when European teams get a mid-season break. In fact, recent research has confirmed that elite football teams that do not have a winter break (England) lose on average 303 more player days per season to injuries than those teams that do (mainland Europe).
These findings may also contribute to explaining the spike in training injuries seen during the month of December in the latest injury audit of English professional football. And it’s well known that leagues in Northern Europe that play during cold winters are at a higher risk of injury than teams in Southern Europe.