… Ask [Carl] Soderberg or any other teammate — whether from the Avalanche, the AHL’s San Antonio Rampage or the Finnish national team — and the first thing they mention about Rantanen is his happy-go-lucky nature and that big ol’ grin. Don’t get it twisted, though: He’s not the loud guy in the room or the distracting joker always demanding attention. His buoyant personality is simply a fact of his existence. Like his marvelous talent, which is the next topic his comrades are eager to tell you about.
Heading into this early December game against the Red Wings, Rantanen is the NHL’s leader in points. And since the calendar flipped to 2018, only one player has registered more: Connor McDavid. Fans and national media outlets are slowly catching on, realizing that something truly special is happening in Colorado, but not at the pace the right winger’s production warrants. “I honestly think it’s mind blowing how it’s taken everybody so long to recognize what he’s been able to do in this league,” says linemate Gabriel Landeskog.
… Now comes the hard part: making sure the second year is as good as the first. As fellow Union defenders Keegan Rosenberry and Jack Elliott can attest to, that is easier said than done.
The stakes are raised further by the tactical changes sporting director Ernst Tanner is installing this winter, and by the potential for McKenzie to play for the U.S. at the under-20 World Cup next May and June.
… Despite a season in which Nelson has somehow delivered on the enormous expectations thrust upon him as a once-in-a-generation, “nearly perfect prospect,” he likely won’t be the offensive lineman to make NFL history by being the first to win offensive rookie of the year.
Saquon Barkley — the electrifying New York Giants running back the Colts will attempt to slow down this weekend — already has that particular honor in the bag. Not that he’s undeserving. Much like Nelson, the No. 2 overall pick has delivered on immense hype coming out of college, closing in on 2,000 yards from scrimmage and nearing 15 total touchdowns. He’s a superstar who delivers highlight-reel plays every week while playing a showcase position.
Nelson, though, has done all he can to keep pace at a position that usually goes unnoticed by casual observers. In fact, he’s actually done a remarkable job of maintaining a high profile considering he often seems bent on saying as a little as possible.
… People in good aerobic shape look more or less the same from a distance or even up close, but every runner is put together a little differently. Between leg-length discrepancies, unfavorable lower-leg-meets-knee (or foot) configurations, and too many other human variants to name, it seems likely that for the majority of runners, running volume is ultimately limited by the sheer effects of biomechanical stress on their bodies.
One thing to note is that what may feel like a permanent blockade to running more may really be a temporary ceiling resulting not from true structural limitations, but from muscle breakdown and attendant soreness. The amount of running that had me feeling as if I’d been put through a farm combine at age 20 seemed like a modest total a decade hence. But muscle soreness and fatigue can be readily distinguished from frank injury, a clear propensity toward certain overuse injuries, and chronic problems that clearly spell a need for volume moderation.
Les Reed’s final legacy to Southampton was a complete revamp of their performance department focusing on “innovation and collaboration”.
The 65-year-old Vice Chairman was sacked by the Saints in November after eight years at the club. Before that, he had overseen a restructure with three main aims: to bring medical, science and performance under one umbrella; to unify the first team and Academy departments; and to make research and innovation a specific focus.
A key player is Mark Jarvis, hired from the English Institute of Sport (EIS) during the summer to become Southampton’s first High Performance Manager. Jarvis is the strategic lead for the whole department, working in parallel with Director of Performance Science Mo Gimpel, a club veteran of 21 years who now oversees research and innovation.
… What underpins that decision-making process? How much do we take into account risk, uncertainty, timing, and other variables when deciding whether to imitate or emulate? How much do the stability of our environment, our understanding of a given situation, and our self-confidence influence the ways we learn?
Combining behavioral measures of observational learning with brain imaging, Charpentier is developing computational models that will help us understand these types of human social behaviors. Computational models are algorithms that formally describe how different variables produce a behavior—for example, a decision to imitate or emulate.
If you want to win a race or stick to a difficult diet, coaches of all kinds will tell you it’s all about “mind over matter.” But that advice rarely crosses over into the medical community, where an inborn ability—or risk—is thought to depend more on genes and environment than on mindset. Now, in a study examining what may be a novel form of the placebo response, psychologists have found that just telling a person they have a high or low genetic risk for certain physical traits can influence how their body functions when exercising or eating, regardless of what genetic variant they actually have.
The results could be an eye-opener for medical providers and consumer DNA testing companies. “From a psychological science perspective, it’s not terribly surprising that genetic risk information can function this way,” says behavioral researcher Susan Persky of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved in the study. But it’s a novel idea in the genetics community, she adds.
Understanding multi-agent cooperative behavior is challenging in various scientific and engineering domains. In some cases, such as team sports, many cooperative behaviors can be visually categorized and labeled manually by experts. However, these actions which are manually categorized with the same label based on its function have low spatiotemporal similarity. In other words, it is difficult to find similar and different structures of the motions with the same and different labels, respectively. Here, we propose an automatic recognition system for strategic cooperative plays, which are the minimal, basic, and diverse plays in a ball game. Using player’s moving distance, geometric information, and distances among players, the proposed method accurately discriminated not only the cooperative plays in a primary area, i.e., near the ball, but also those distant from a primary area. We also propose a method to classify more detailed types of cooperative plays in various situations. The proposed framework, which sheds light on inconspicuous players to play important roles, could have a potential to detect well-defined and labeled cooperative behaviors.
Researchers at MIT, Draper, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have designed an ingestible capsule that can be controlled using Bluetooth wireless technology. The capsule, which can be customized to deliver drugs, sense environmental conditions, or both, can reside in the stomach for at least a month, transmitting information and responding to instructions from a user’s smartphone.
The capsules, manufactured using 3-D-printing technology, could be deployed to deliver drugs to treat a variety of diseases, particularly in cases where drugs must be taken over a long period of time. They could also be designed to sense infections, allergic reactions, or other events, and then release a drug in response.
“Our system could provide closed-loop monitoring and treatment, whereby a signal can help guide the delivery of a drug or tuning the dose of a drug,” says Giovanni Traverso, a visiting scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, where he will be joining the faculty in 2019.
… Ghent University and SEED Co., a contact lens manufacturer based in Japan, collaborated with imec to develop the device. Designing flexible electronic components and seamlessly integrating them into a soft hydrogel lens were major challenges in creating the new device. … Medgadget asked Prof. Herbert De Smet of Ghent University and imec, some questions about the system.
… BLE does sound good but, is it really all that good?
That’s a good question from a security standpoint. The fact is – BLE is just a protocol. It’s up to the manufacturers to implement BLE securely in their device. Even the strongest cryptographic protocol has been known to fail due to the random number generator not being “random enough.” The same applies to BLE. Thus, it can be said that the security of BLE lies in the hands if its implementers.
While all Bluetooth Low Energy devices were developed with the principal motive of enhancing user experience, did security take a backseat during the process?
University of Colorado-Boulder, CU Boulder Today from
… Bruns, who has some ink himself, wants to change that. He and graduate student Jesse Butterfield are developing a series of “tech tattoos” that don’t just linger in your skin and look cool—they also change color in response to diverse signals. The team’s prototypes include tattoos that only appear in sunlight and colorful inks that vanish when they get hot. … “When you think about what a tattoo is, it’s just a bunch of particles that sit in your skin,” said Bruns, also an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Our thought is: What if we use nanotechnology to give these particles some function?”
On the wider point of “team culture”, Omar Chaudhuri, head of football intelligence at the consultancy 21st Club, has a theory. “Smarter clubs in general are beginning to think a lot more around culture and identity – taking a lead from the corporate world,” Chaudhuri said. “This means thinking more about what the club ‘stands for’, and working back from that, rather than simply building a team through individual pieces.
“The idea is that even in a transient environment like a football club, if you can get players pulling together around a common culture, then the team might be bigger than the sum of its parts. This is clearly at odds with making marquee signings, who for whatever reason might be ‘above’ the team. Players and agents are also very aware of how wealthy their employers are, and marquee signings can create a slipstream effect in the wage bill.”
