If everything had gone according to his original plan, Pekka Rinne would be headed for retirement at the end of the 2018-19 NHL season. He would be making his farewell tour now, visiting rinks for the last time, shaking hands with old opponents, maybe even snagging some parting gifts along the way. From there, the Predators goalie would hang up his mask and decide what would come next: owning a restaurant, opening a clothing store, finding another job in hockey, working on his tennis serve…
“That was my thing,” Rinne says. “I always thought that this year would be my last year.”
Missy Franklin had just announced her retirement, hastened by chronic shoulder pain, in a letter posted on ESPN’s website when the first mournful emails arrived in my inbox. People expressed surprise that one of swimming’s brightest lights would leave the sport at “only” 23. This kind of sentiment, however well intentioned, underscores a lamentable byproduct of the professionalization of Olympic sports. No longer do we grant our stars a graceful exit.
Franklin left the sport more exquisitely than most, with five Olympic gold medals, the world record in the 200-meter backstroke and a sterling perspective. While the tributes poured in, many of them sounding unnecessarily like eulogies marking a great competitor’s passing, Franklin sagely wrote, “I choose to look at this as a new beginning.”
Good for her. Franklin always seemed to have her size 13 feet firmly planted on the ground.
… “We were hopeful but realistic,” Nelson says regarding Doncic’s immediate impact. “You just don’t know. When you look at what he did with Real Madrid, you hope that it’s a quick transition. But most rookies, especially rookies coming from the other side of the pond, it takes at least a year. He’s hit the ground running.”
D’Antoni has seen enough to declare that Doncic will be “an All-Star at worst.”
“He’s only going to get better,” says D’Antoni, whose Rockets have lost twice to the Mavs on nights Doncic dropped more than 20 points. “He’s not in his man body yet, so Dallas has got to be really happy.”
That body, which could be described as doughy, was the biggest knock on Doncic leading up to the draft. It’s also the reason the Mavs felt Doncic had room for drastic improvement, figuring he could boost his quickness and mobility if he immersed himself in their strength and conditioning program, which isn’t a priority in European basketball.
Earlier this week, Luchi Gonzalez was named the new head coach at FC Dallas. As the former academy director, Gonzalez will now be tasked with leading a squad that consists of several top American youth internationals. ASN’s Brian Sciaretta spoke with Gonzalez on his vision for the future.
Donnetta Etienne said there’s a rule in her family. If her kids did their chores and kept up their grades, they could have anything they wanted. That, she said, is why Travis is always so happy. He’s smart and dedicated and so, in turn, he’s always had whatever his heart desired.
Still, she might’ve been the one person in Clemson Memorial Stadium who’d seen this scene before. Back when Etienne was a legend in the making at Jennings High in small-town Louisiana, he wore his emotions all over his face, and so after a tough play or a bad loss, he’d keep his helmet on. He didn’t want anyone to see the hurt.
But Donnetta knew, just as she did during the game against Duke, when her boy had retreated to his personal safe place, on a bench, beneath a towel.
“He had to sit down and have a talk with himself,” she said.
… I have been coaching kids for over 30 years, and I can tell you there’s a better way to teach kids how to handle adversity: Let them figure out for themselves that even if they’re not the best player on the team, their role is still important. Rather than transferring high schools or changing Amateur Athletic Union teams to find a place where they can be the biggest star, why not teach them about the value of being a small part of something big? Why not talk about the importance of developing mental toughness by working through some bumps in the road and the long-term benefit gained by learning early in life that sometimes you have to sacrifice “me” for “we”?
Playing a team sport teaches athletes so many important life lessons. Sure, it teaches you about winning, but winning isn’t really the point. Competing and giving it your best shot, that’s the point. Learning the value of a great work ethic, and never giving up — that’s the point. It teaches you that life isn’t fair and just because you go to practice every day doesn’t mean you will get to play in the game. It teaches you the value of sacrificing your individual goals for the good of the team, and that the ultimate goal is not how many points you score but whether the team wins. It teaches you that everything is not about you — and this is probably the most valuable lesson of all.
… [Chris] Napier dared to kick that hornet’s nest by writing a recent commentary in the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggesting that running shoe design makes no difference when it comes to preventing injuries.
His conclusion was blunt.
“Runners should be instructed to choose a certain type of running shoe over another shoe no more so than a blue shoe over a red shoe,” he wrote.
A team of researchers based at The University of Manchester have found a low cost method for producing graphene printed electronics, which significantly speeds up and reduces the cost of conductive graphene inks.
Printed electronics offer a breakthrough in the penetration of information technology into everyday life. The possibility of printing electronic circuits will further promote the spread of Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
The development of printed conductive inks for electronic applications has grown rapidly, widening applications in transistors, sensors, antennas RFID tags and wearable electronics.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags have become a key component of global commerce, enabling stakeholders to track physical assets quickly and reliably. Deployed properly, the tags could be used in a new class of wearable designed to track physical movement and shape change.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have figured out how RFID tags could be used do things like control virtual avatars or tell slouching users to sit up straight.
RFID tags are cheap, battery-free and washable, which makes them appealing to developers.
“By attaching these paper-like RFID tags to clothing, we were able to demonstrate millimeter accuracy in skeletal tracking,” says Haojian Jin, a Ph.D. student in CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII).
Scientists have discovered that irisin, a hormone released by muscles during exercise, directly acts on key regulatory cells that control the breakdown and formation of bone. The researchers say this insight raises the prospect of new treatments for bone-thinning disorders such as osteoporosis.
Reporting in Cell, Bruce Spiegelman and colleagues at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute say they have for the first time identified a molecular receptor for irisin, which Spiegelman discovered in 2012. The receptor allows irisin to bind to and activate osteocytes, the most abundant cell type in adult human bone.
Spiegelman, the Stanley J. Korsmeyer Professor of Cell Biology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and others have proposed that the irisin hormone serves as a link between exercise and its beneficial effects on health, including burning fat, strengthening bones, and protecting against neurodegenerative diseases.
Come 2019, Major League Baseball’s going to look even weirder.
The game’s drift toward analytics has turned into a tidal wave – and whether you find the outcome aesthetically pleasing likely depends on if you feel the current product represents progression, regression or a cyclical turn that will correct itself.
Either way, the facets that make the game harder for purists to recognize – be it progressive pitching use, platooning and roster maximization and the ever-vexing infield shift – will only be writ larger when a new season dawns March 28.
Throughout the autumn of this year, OptaPro Analytics Forum judges faced another difficult challenge in selecting the presentations and posters for the 2019 event, which takes place on 6th February in central London.
Entering its sixth year, the OptaPro Forum remains a key date in the football analytics calendar, attracting over 60 clubs from around the world.
Everybody agrees organisational culture is extremely important for managers to understand and shape. Few are satisfied with the tools we have to do it today. It’s not the absence of solid theories about culture that’s the problem; the challenge has been reliable measurement. That’s a cue for machine learning and big data to enter the fray. These techniques mine large volumes of free-form text data to infer relatively simple attributes (e.g. employee sentiment), as well as more complex constructs, such as the strength and uniqueness of an organisation’s culture.
Pioneers in this area include The Computational Culture Lab, a collaborative venture between Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. Its recently published papers analyse years of internal emails at a tech firm to show how employees’ use of single vs. plural pronouns reflects their level of “enculturation”, which in turn predicts the probability that they will leave the firm. Another research team found that the language used in shareholder letters from 167 European banks was highly indicative of overall corporate culture as well as the banks’ propensity to engage in risky behaviour.
Yes, Paul, you don’t need a library to visualize data. But here are two reasons why you might want to use a library like D3 (or Vega).
Visualization is harder than you think. It’s easy to draw shapes, but there are a surprising number of subtleties in visualization, such as how to draw nice ticks or a smooth curve between data points. A library can provide good defaults and let you explore the design space more quickly.
In this essay we make four interrelated points. First, we reiterate previous arguments (Kleinberg et al 2015) that forecasting problems are more common in social science than is often appreciated. From this observation it follows that social scientists should care about predictive accuracy in addition to unbiased or consistent estimation of causal relationships. Second, we argue that social scientists should be interested in prediction even if they have no interest in forecasting per se. Whether they do so explicitly or not, that is, causal claims necessarily make predictions; thus it is both fair and arguably useful to hold them accountable for the accuracy of the predictions they make. Third, we argue that prediction, used in either of the above two senses, is a useful metric for quantifying progress. Important differences between social science explanations and machine learning algorithms notwithstanding, social scientists can still learn from approaches like the Common Task Framework (CTF) which have successfully driven progress in certain fields of AI over the past 30 years (Donoho, 2015). Finally, we anticipate that as the predictive performance of forecasting models and explanations alike receives more attention, it will become clear that it is subject to some upper limit which lies well below deterministic accuracy for many applications of interest (Martin et al 2016). Characterizing the properties of complex social systems that lead to higher or lower predictive limits therefore poses an interesting challenge for computational social science.