Memphis Grizzlies forward Chandler Parsons says the team continues to keep him off the floor even though he has been cleared to play and has been participating in practice.
“The most confusing part for me is I’m healthy,” Parsons told the Commercial Appeal of Memphis on Saturday. “I’m medically cleared by the people I work with every single day, that are experts at this kind of stuff, so it’s frustrating to watch a team struggle and I’m sitting there on the bench healthy, dying to play.”
Parsons pointed to general manager Chris Wallace and the Grizzlies’ front office as the reason he isn’t back in games.
… “I love him,” an MLB scout told Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports. “He can be a star. Plus speed, good raw power, legitimate center fielder. But he’s so far behind the curve because of football, it’s going to take longer for him to develop. And I really wonder if the football bug is too strong for him to say no.”
The football projections contrast strongly with the sentiments of his baseball agent, Scott Boras, who told Passan on Thursday: “He’s very loyal to the A’s for allowing him to achieve this in college and give him the guarantee of $5 million. That is something that was very important to Kyler and his family. He has every intention of playing baseball. He’s going to be at spring training with the Oakland A’s on Feb. 10.”
The Spotlight Effect: People overestimate how much others are paying attention to them and so are too easily embarrassed and too worried about public disapproval … (2/3)
.. and The Focusing Illusion, nicely summed up as “Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” We overestimate the significance of what we’re worried about. (It’s usually not that bad.) (3/3)
Wit, whether visual or verbal, can make the commonplace uncommon again by breaking the habits that render perception routine. We tend to define the quality of wit as merely being deft with a clever comeback. But true wit is richer, cannier, more riddling. And the best of it is often based on a biological phenomenon called supernormal stimuli.
… Anger, [James] Averill concluded, is one of the densest forms of communication. It conveys more information, more quickly, than almost any other type of emotion. And it does an excellent job of forcing us to listen to and confront problems we might otherwise avoid.
Subsequent studies have found other benefits as well. We’re more likely to perceive people who express anger as competent, powerful, and the kinds of leaders who will overcome challenges. Anger motivates us to undertake difficult tasks. We’re often more creative when we’re angry, because our outrage helps us see solutions we’ve overlooked. “When we look at the brains of people who are expressing anger, they look very similar to people who are experiencing happiness,” says Dacher Keltner, the director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab. “When we become angry, we feel like we’re taking control, like we’re getting power over something.” Watching angry people—as viewers of reality television know—is highly entertaining, so expressing anger is a surefire method for capturing the attention of an otherwise indifferent crowd.
… You probably knew all of this already. But now, there is even more bad news out there for those who skip out on their zzz’s: Sleep deprivation may also help contribute to unwanted weight gain and muscle loss.
That’s the conclusion of a recent study conducted at Uppsala University in Sweden, the results of which were published in the journal Science Advances. Fifteen participants took part in two tests: In the first, they got a normal amount of sleep, which is defined as “over eight hours,” which is both correct and, in real-world terms, sadly aspirational for many of us. During the second session, they were kept awake for the entire night via a variety of methods that included, among others, keeping the lights on, watching movies, and alternating between card games and board games. (Hopefully not Monopoly, which is, objectively, the worst.)
People who frequently engage with multiple types of media at once performed worse on simple memory tasks, according to the last decade of research. However, it’s still too soon to determine cause and effect, says psychology Professor Anthony Wagner.
As the New Year rapidly approaches, many of us may be thinking about our resolutions for changes in our habits in hopes of improving our physical, emotional, or financial well being. The most common resolutions for 2018 in the US were: to eat healthier, to get more exercise, and to save more money (YouGov NY 2017 Poll). The goal of getting more sleep came in as a close fourth. However, year after year, the surveys show that most of us do not succeed in keeping those resolutions. That fact should not keep us from making them. A classic study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology (2002) indicated that those who set resolutions have more success in changing their behavior than those who don’t set any. Not surprisingly, successful individuals use a number of strategies. Following are some tips borrowed from experts in the study of habit change.
… “Hazing per se is not a mental health disorder, however, hazing and the issues that surround it have a clear mental health impact,” said Alex B. Diamond of Vanderbilt Sports Medicine and lead author of an article in the British Journal of Sports Medicine said in a HuffPost story.
Eighty percent of NCAA athletes say they have experienced some form of hazing throughout their college athletic careers. Forty-two percent reported also being hazed in high school.
The article also noted “maltreatment can have many adverse psychological effects like sexual difficulties, low self-esteem, interpersonal problems, depression, anxiety, emotional instability, physical self-abuse, eating disorders and substance abuse.
Gabriele Bleser, Bertram Taetz and their team outline the activities on mobile and wearable technologies being undertaken by the research group wearHEALTH.
The research group wearHEALTH is an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, mathematicians, movement scientists, and control engineers, associated with the Computer Science Department at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern since 2014 and working on development based on mobile and wearable technologies.
The team is funded over five years by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Together, they pursue the goal of creating reliable health systems based on mobile and wearable technologies.
A new wave of consumer DNA tests that will analyze our genetic makeup promises to offer clues, from risk for different kinds of cancer and heart conditions to how we process certain foods or whether we’re likely to weigh more than average.
Yet amid this windfall of personalized insights, the question remains: Would we actually use this information to make positive changes in our lives?
Public health researchers are eager to know the answer, as the industry explodes. The number of people who purchased kits online doubled from 6 million to 12 million in 2017. One study found that nearly one-third of more than 1,000 people reported their results had motivated them to eat more fruits and vegetables and engage in more strength training.
… Over the last year or two we’ve started to see some of the elements of that stack mature, and become more readily available. Like ultra-low power microcontrollers and sensors, the “peace dividend” of the smartphone wars, that can now just about fit into energy budget of passive power sources like vibration harvesting and other energy harvesting techniques, which makes it possible to do away with the need for heavy batteries. Something that’s been holding back real wearables integrated into day to day clothing. However, there are still parts of the technology stack missing.
Which is why it’s really rather exciting to see that OSH Park has introduced new flexible PCBs.
Their flexible PCBs are made using a Polyimide substrate just 0.0762mm thick and can have one, or two, layers.
Costing $15 per square inch, which includes three copies of your board, the flexible PCB is about three times as expensive as traditional FR4 boards. Yet a lot more flexible, and while that does more wear and tear on solder joints, and although it’s always going to be design specific, OSH Park does have some suggestions for the minimum static and dynamic bend radius you can get from the new materials.
In early December, Steelers running back James Conner was injured after catching a 10-yard pass against the Los Angeles Chargers.
His high ankle sprain has kept him from playing the past two games against the Oakland Raiders and the New England Patriots.
That’s not only disappointing for fans who have watched his rise into the National Football League from earlier days playing for the University of Pittsburgh and a battle with cancer. The injury is troubling for the Steelers organization, as each day an injured player is off the field is costly.
To try to reduce the number and severity of players’ injuries, the Steelers have begun working with a Silicon Valley startup called Sparta Science, which uses predictive analytics software to analyze injury risk for players and develops personalized training plans.
The Toronto Maple Leafs are in the middle of their 38th set of back-to-back games since Frederik Andersen arrived in the organization and until Friday there had been an unbroken pattern as to how those situations played out in net.
Andersen always got the first start on the schedule — each and every one of them — as head coach Mike Babcock tried to take advantage of the moments when his teammate’s legs would be freshest and the Maple Leafs had the best chance to claim two points.
That the streak ended here at Nationwide Arena with Garret Sparks starting Toronto’s first game out of the Christmas break appears to be a harbinger of things to come. The Leafs intend to find Andersen more rest before the playoffs and it will require them to alter their deployment strategy from years gone by.
Researchers from Ben Gurion University (BGU) have debunked a theory of how psychological momentum in sports and life leads to success.
In an article published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, Dr. Morgulev and professors Ofer H. Azar and Michael Bar-Eli of BGU’s Department of Business Administration studied the effect of fourth-quarter comebacks in NBA games and its correlation on overtime performance – whether the immediate success of tying the game before the end of regulation created enough psychological momentum to lead the team to victory in overtime.
In short, no. The study concluded that teams that come from behind do not have a greater chance of winning in overtime.