Murray’s retirement announcement—and the persistent hip injury that caused it—was the major story at the Australian Open. For players like Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Sloane Stephens, among others, it raises some larger questions about sustainability in the sport.
The double life of Taysom Hill begins every Wednesday at 6:30 a.m., two and a half hours before the New Orleans Saints’ first team meeting of the week. Hill studies film and reviews new plays in the Saints’ quarterback room. When Drew Brees and Teddy Bridgewater head to install plays after the team meeting, Hill splits for the special teams meeting room, a place foreign to pretty much every other quarterback. But then, pretty much every other quarterback cannot sprint 40 yards in 4.4 seconds or lift weights like a linebacker.
All day, Hill bounces between football worlds. He walks through plays with the offense, then skips quarterback-center exchange sessions to practice blocking punts or covering kicks. He steals spare time to learn new calls for the kick return team. He stays late to learn plays at different offensive positions and watch more film as a quarterback. He leaves at 7 p.m.
Hill has learned it takes a lot of time to live out one dream while keeping another alive.
Willson Contreras knows only one way to prepare and he’s not about to change his hair-on-fire style.
“I always try too hard,” the Cubs’ excitable catcher said. “That’s who I am. I’m not going to change that. That’s how I made it to the big leagues. That’s how I put myself (among) the best. I want to be one of the best. If I push myself and try too hard, I’ll get there. That’s the only way I know to get better.”
Contreras at his best — hitting .282 as a rookie, starting Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, his handling of ace Jon Lester and earning 2018 National League All-Star honors — is one of the best catchers in baseball. But after a power outage last season and unfavorable pitch-framing metrics, Contreras is plenty motivated.
“Every player should learn from frustration and bad things,” Contreras said. “That’s what makes you a better player the best season.
… Before Friday’s Championship win over Derby, the ex-Argentina manager said he sent someone to watch the Rams train.
“I observed all the rivals we played against and watched the training sessions of all opponents,” he said.
“All the information I need to clarify, I gather it without watching the training session of the opponent, so why did I send someone to watch them? Just because I thought I wasn’t violating the norm. I gathered information that I can obtain in another way.
… Early in the season, with the team struggling, Wright worried that his players might be feeling pressure to live up to the school’s extraordinary recent past.
“I told them, ‘This isn’t your fault,’ ” he said. “Things happen. I thought we’d have Omari and Donte back this year, but we don’t. That’s part of college basketball nowadays — for everyone. I told them, ‘All I’m asking of you is that you keep working and keep getting better.’ They’ve done that.
“I have no idea what’s going to happen in March, but I think we’re going to be good enough to win the Big East. There’s no one — including us — as good as we were the last five years. But I think, when it’s all said and done, we can be a good team.”
… Fast forward through the 2018 season and the shine that once emanated from the Niners’ 2017 rookie class has dimmed considerably. Be it for off-the-field issues (Foster), injuries (Colbert, Taylor), personal tragedy (Thomas) or other myriad reasons, the 49ers didn’t get the expected step forward from coach Kyle Shanahan and general manager John Lynch’s first rookie class. Save for Kittle and, to a lesser extent, Breida and Bourne, the 2017 rookie class now comes with more question marks than answers.
It’s why, at the final team gathering of the season, Shanahan’s message was all about avoiding complacency.
“I kind of talked to them a lot about, you know, the rookie slump, or the second-year slump guys have,” Shanahan said. “I’ve seen it a lot throughout my career. … I just tried to echo to the guys what is important and what I believe in. You don’t just show up four months from now and be like, ‘All right, it’s time to get better.’ It’s already too late. If you have that mindset, you’re showing up to catch up. I always say, you’re getting better or worse, and if that’s the case, you’re getting worse. I want all of our guys to really focus on these four months, how they are going to get better on their own, and we want to see it when they get back.”
While diverse thinking and disagreements can be uncomfortable, they are more likely to lead partners or a team to make progress, innovate, and come up with breakthrough solutions than consensus and “nice” conversations in which people hold back what they think.
In theory this means that a group such as, say, the U.S. Congress, ought to be pretty good at solving problems. The hundred members of the U.S. Senate come from 50 different states and several generations and should thus have a variety of viewpoints. (Perhaps they still don’t have enough variety, but we’ll leave that discussion for another day.) And boy do they argue. But the way they argue is rife with intellectual dishonesty. And the “rules” that govern their debates, especially on television, are ineffective at encouraging productive debate.
Unfortunately, most of the rest of us fall into similar pitfalls. We get sucked into trying to “win”— so we look good or don’t make the group we represent look bad — which leads us to ignore logic and evidence that go against our original beliefs. And so we fight without making much progress.
We can change this dynamic, moving toward more effective discourse (exchanging diverse ideas) and debate (arguing honestly for and against the merits of those ideas), by training people to adopt the right habits. Here’s how.
One of the most infamous dropped passes in football history clanged off Dallas Cowboys tight end Jackie Smith as he lay in the end zone during Super Bowl XIII.
Poor Smith. Forty years ago, he had only his bare hands to try to pull in Roger Staubach’s low pass. Had he played in a more recent edition of the N.F.L. playoffs, he almost certainly would have been wearing a pair of the sticky, silicone gloves that have transformed receivers’ mitts into virtual Spider-Man hands.
The technological advances on the skin of those gloves have been so profound that they now enable receivers to snare passes their forebears never dreamed of catching, and in making the seemingly impossible possible, they may be changing the way football is played.
A cooperative research group from Google, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins has proposed “Auto-DeepLab,” a new method which utilizes hierarchical Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for semantic image segmentation. The project team includes top AI researchers Director of the Stanford Vision Lab Fei-Fei Li; and UCLA Center for Cognition, Vision, and Learning Director Alan Yuille.
Semantic image segmentation is an important a computer vision task that assigns a semantic label to every pixel in an image. Neural Architecture Search is a key AutoML process that has already been successfully used for other image classification tasks, and the team explored ways to extend NAS to dense image prediction problems. Existing methods usually focus on searching the cell structure and hand-designing an outer network structure. Researchers proposed searching the network level structure in addition to the cell level structure, as many more architectural variations for dense image prediction can be found at the network level.
arXiv, Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; William R. Johnson, Ajmal Mian, David Lloyd, Jacqueline Alderson from
In sports analytics, an understanding of accurate on-field 3D knee joint moments (KJM) could provide an early warning system for athlete workload exposure and knee injury risk. Traditionally, this analysis has relied on captive laboratory force plates and associated downstream biomechanical modeling, and many researchers have approached the problem of portability by extrapolating models built on linear statistics. An alternative approach would be to capitalize on recent advances in deep learning. In this study, using the pre-trained CaffeNet convolutional neural network (CNN) model, multivariate regression of marker-based motion capture to 3D KJM for three sports-related movement types were compared. The strongest overall mean correlation to source modeling of 0.8895 was achieved over the initial 33 % of stance phase for sidestepping. The accuracy of these mean predictions of the three critical KJM associated with anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury demonstrate the feasibility of on-field knee injury assessment using deep learning in lieu of laboratory embedded force plates. This multidisciplinary research approach significantly advances machine representation of real-world physical models with practical application for both community and professional level athletes.
… these bugs weren’t bit players. They included the most plentiful species in the large intestine, an “unseen majority” that was alive and well and, to that point, invisible in our bowels.
“The first thing I started thinking was, ‘Man, all these textbooks are completely, flat-out wrong,’ ” says Relman, a physician and professor of microbiology and immunology at the School of Medicine. “If you don’t know these things are here in health, in such numbers and presumably important, how do you even know when you’ve returned somebody to health?”
… Taking the nebulous nature of the term “performance enhancement” into consideration, we’ll start with something as basic as fuel. Improving one’s diet and nutrition isn’t an illegal performance enhancer, and there’s evidence that modifying one’s diet can be beneficial. It’s probably not as significant as a certain former Montreal Expos draftee would have you believe, but it’s not prohibited and it’s low risk. In addition to working with team nutritionists and chefs, some players turn to dietary supplements to give their nutritional intake a boost, with the hopes that they’ll enjoy a performance boost as well. Dietary supplements aren’t prohibited by MLB, although players are advised to only take NSF Certified for Sport supplements, as dietary supplements are not regulated for purity or efficacy.
One category of dietary supplement is probiotics—“good” bacteria which allegedly can enhance digestion —metabolism, immunity, and offer protection from “bad” bacteria. Asked for comment regarding probiotics, an MLB spokesperson noted: “With respect to all nutritional and dietary supplements, as now described in Article XIII.K of the Basic Agreement, all MLB Clubs are required to provide to players certain categories of NSF Certified for Sport nutrition supplements to players during the season and off-season. This includes pre- and probiotic digestive aid supplements. Clubs are not permitted to recommend or provide any supplements that are not NSF Certified for Sport.”
… Driving all this is the system of coach Kenny Atkinson, who simply does a fantastic job of putting his player in position to succeed. Atkinson was a player development specialist before winning the Nets job, and his work with players like Spencer Dinwiddie and D’Angelo Russell and Joe Harris, in particular, and with his other players more generally, should be universally lauded.
Atkinson’s offense borrows heavily from Mike Budenholzer, under whom he coached in Atlanta, and thus also borrows from certain Gregg Popovich teams. But Atkinson has also incorporated a ton of the flow action commonplace in the offenses of d Rick Carlisle and especially Terry Stotts, corner sets like the kind Rick Adelman ran and Brad Stevens now runs, and dribble hand-off actions that should be familiar to anyone who has ever watched the Warriors.
The best coaches steal from other smart coaches, and nobody appears to steal from more smart coaches than Atkinson. And he steals with a purpose, using Portland action at first with Allen Crabbe (who used to play for the Blazers) and then simply inserting Joe Harris into those sets when it became abundantly clear he was the one who should be getting the wing shooter minutes.
The New York Times, Opinion, Gordon Pennycook and David Rand from
What makes people susceptible to fake news and other forms of strategic misinformation? And what, if anything, can be done about it?
These questions have become more urgent in recent years, not least because of revelations about the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 United States presidential election by disseminating propaganda through social media platforms. In general, our political culture seems to be increasingly populated by people who espouse outlandish or demonstrably false claims that often align with their political ideology.
The good news is that psychologists and other social scientists are working hard to understand what prevents people from seeing through propaganda. The bad news is that there is not yet a consensus on the answer. Much of the debate among researchers falls into two opposing camps. One group claims that our ability to reason is hijacked by our partisan convictions: that is, we’re prone to rationalization. The other group — to which the two of us belong — claims that the problem is that we often fail to exercise our critical faculties: that is, we’re mentally lazy.
However, recent research suggests a silver lining to the dispute: Both camps appear to be capturing an aspect of the problem. Once we understand how much of the problem is a result of rationalization and how much a result of laziness, and as we learn more about which factor plays a role in what types of situations, we’ll be better able to design policy solutions to help combat the problem.