Utah Jazz guard Donovan Mitchell drops his shoulder, sneaks under Portland Trail Blazers swingman Evan Turner’s arm and explodes upward, attempting to float the ball over Jusuf Nurkic, catching the big man on the arm and drawing a foul while trying to erase an 11-point deficit with just under five minutes remaining in a recent game.
The second-year player coming off a sensational rookie year later drives left, gets Turner on his back again, tilts to the middle and nails a leaning floater off his right hand. Mitchell rubs shoulders with teammate Rudy Gobert, whose screen leaves CJ McCollum in the dust, and commandeers the tight runway between Nurkic and the rim with a series of berserk movements — tiny yet convincing — in opposite directions. Mitchell’s forays to the rim amount to an oddly fluid amalgamation of herky-jerky explosions. Mitchell crosses to his left, the ball still spinning in his palm, then Eurosteps to the right, a move he learned in mere days in his rookie season, only this time he finishes with another floater and draws another foul.
Since the offseason, Mitchell has been picking 12-time All-Star Dwyane Wade’s brain, trying to squeeze every ounce of knowledge he can from the 6-foot-4 guard who leveraged a frame similar to Mitchell’s into a Hall of Fame career. “I wanna talk to him eventually about every possible thing that I can find,” Mitchell told Yahoo Sports. For now, his questions center around how to get to the free-throw line.
The 22-year-old phenom took the stage at the NHL’s All-Star weekend and tried to escape the swirling chaos surrounding his team. But like it has for the past decade, future success still seems far away in Edmonton.
The newly minted head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves wears a Fitbit on his left wrist to track his exercise and a Whoop band on his right wrist to monitor his sleep. While overseeing a late-January shoot-around, the longtime sneaker-head rocked Air Jordan 11s but expressed a preference for the Jordan 3s, first released in 1988, when he was still a toddler.
To prepare for upcoming opponents, he watches footage from three of their previous games and digs into advanced stats and tendency data to craft his game plans. During games, he proactively calls plays and chirps at referees, and he spends timeouts eyeing reports of his team’s best and worst sets, charted diligently on an iPad by an assistant. He says his personal coaching philosophy is centered on confidence-building through “positivity, energy and positive reinforcement,” and his team comes together, after wins and losses, for what all-star center Karl-Anthony Towns calls “family time.”
In the days after Alen Stajcic’s dismissal – amid the opinions and innuendo – Matildas midfielder Chloe Logarzo had just one thing to say about her former coach. “I hold Staj in the highest of regards,” she said. “He’s a great man.”
It is a view echoed by many players, past and present, who have spoken to the Herald over the past week. And it is a statement seemingly at odds with the depiction of a man who stands accused by his former FFA bosses of presiding over a toxic team culture.
The neurotransmitter famously provides the thrill we get from a surprise, a phenomenon known as reward prediction error. But growing evidence suggests the chemical also tracks movement, novelty and other neurobiological factors.
Many of us rely heavily on Heart Rate (HR) to set our zones and train. But there is another metric, Muscle Oxygen Saturation, that can provide more detailed, real-time insight into performance.
There are many limitations when training with heart rate that monitoring SmO2 does not have. Not only can SmO2 be localized to specific muscles (unlike heart rate, which is a systemic measurement), but it gives measurements in real-time. This allows athletes to understand exactly when the body switches from aerobic to anaerobic during an interval, and the exact pace and duration at which that interval is most effective.
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association; Grace Shin et al. from
Objectives
Activity trackers hold the promise to support people in managing their health through quantified measurements about their daily physical activities. Monitoring personal health with quantified activity tracker-generated data provides patients with an opportunity to self-manage their health. Many have been conducted within short-time frames; makes it difficult to discover the impact of the activity tracker’s novelty effect or the reasons for the device’s long-term use. This study explores the impact of novelty effect on activity tracker adoption and the motivation for sustained use beyond the novelty period. Materials and methods
This study uses a mixed-methods approach that combines both quantitative activity tracker log analysis and qualitative one-on-one interviews to develop a deeper behavioral understanding of 23 Fitbit device users who used their trackers for at least 2 months (range of use = 69–1073 days). Results
Log data from users’ Fitbit devices revealed 2 stages: the novelty period and the long-term use period. The novelty period for Fitbit users in this study was approximately 3 months, during which they might have discontinued using their devices. Discussion
The qualitative interview data identified various factors that users to continuously use the Fitbit devices in different stages. The discussion of these results provides design implications to guide future development of activity tracking technology. Conclusion
This study reveals important dynamics emerging over long-term activity tracker use, contributes new knowledge to consumer health informatics and human-computer interaction, and offers design implications to guide future development of similar health-monitoring technologies that better account for long-term use in support of patient care and health self-management. [full text]
Insurmountable detection challenges will impede the development of many of the next-generation of lab-on-a-chip devices (e.g., point-of-care and real-time health monitors). Here we present the first membrane-based, microfluidic sample preconcentration method that is continuous, quantifiable, simple, and capable of working with any analyte. Forward osmosis rapidly concentrates analytes by removing water from a stream of sample fluid. 10-100X preconcentration is possible in mere minutes. This requires careful selection of the semi-permeable membrane and draw molecule; therefore, the osmosis performance of several classes of membranes and draw molecules were systematically optimized. Proof-of-concept preconcentration devices were characterized based on their concentration ability and fouling resistance. In-silico theoretical modeling predicts the experimental findings and provides an engineering toolkit for future designs. With this toolkit, inexpensive ready-for-manufacturing prototypes were also developed. These devices provide broad-spectrum detection improvements across many analytes and sensing modalities, enabling next-generation lab-on-a-chip devices.
… The HMS group, working with colleagues at the University of Washington, Seattle, and MIT, are hoping to answer this very question in an ambitious new project aimed at deciphering the structure and function of several tardigrade proteins suspected to play a role in the organism’s resilience, and then use these proteins as the basis for human therapies that halt tissue damage and prevent cell death.
The team’s goal is to engineer an optimized version of these proteins and use them to slow down metabolic activity in injured cells — the biological equivalent of hitting the pause button on cellular processes, including damage-causing inflammation, infection and, ultimately, cell demise.
The team’s ultimate goal is to develop a protein-based therapy that can halt tissue damage in traumatic injuries, heart attacks, strokes and sepsis, among other conditions.
… Puck and player tracking has arrived, although like any emerging technology, it’s still being tweaked and revised. It will be implemented beginning in the 2019-20 regular season, changing the way we watch the NHL, how broadcasters analyze games, how teams evaluate their players and, soon, how gamblers wager on hockey.
“We’re committed to ensuring that the NHL is at the forefront of all new technology,” commissioner Gary Bettman said prior to this grand test of the tracking system at the All-Star Game at the SAP Center. “We think many of our fans — especially the innovation generations, the millennials and Gen Z — are going to love this new frontier.”
And the players?
“More analytics for the GMs to hold against you,” Columbus Blue Jackets forward Cam Atkinson said with a laugh. “No, I think it’s good for the fans. It looks pretty cool, to be able to track your favorite player when he’s on or off the ice.”
… With the quadriceps tendon, above the kneecap, there are no bone attachments that allow you to protect the tendon in the same way. All that’s holding the tendon to the kneecap are some stitches, meaning you have to wait for it to heal back to the bone or risk the tendon tearing right back off. It delays the start of rehab for about six weeks, or until the doctors feel comfortable that the tendon has fully healed back to the bone.
… “Not only are there battles on the sports field, there are battles in sports science, and they can often be brutal,” said Professor John Hawley, director of ACU’s MacKillop Institute for Health Research, adding that diet was “a horribly emotive topic”.
Professor Hawley and his wife Louise Burke, an ACU professorial fellow and the long-time head of nutrition at the Australian Institute of Sport, are among the world’s leading researchers in the field.
In a comprehensive review published in Science, the duo found that different tactics work depending on the sport, the phase of training and the athlete’s individual experiences with a nutritional strategy.
The Economist published an article last week exploring which head coaches are able to consistently lead their teams to overperform the overall talent level in the squad. This is one of the most important functions of a head coach, but not the only one. As we have argued before, in addition to winning on the weekend a manager should also be able to develop young players, in the process increasing the overall value of the squad and relieving pressure on the club’s transfer strategy.
To understand why this is so important, one doesn’t need to look any further than Real Madrid and Zinedine Zidane. Measured by trophy haul, Zidane is undeniably one of the most successful managers of all time. Nevertheless, during his years in charge Real Madrid failed to develop a new generation of talent who would be able to maintain performance levels when the old guard stepped down. As a result, Real Madrid have entered a period of rapid decline as their best players age past their peak years, a decline that likely can’t be arrested without significant expenditure in the transfer market.
… Rest also can mean rust, the dangerous oxidization of mind, body, and spirit too often part and parcel of such a long respite. The Bruins haven’t had such a lengthy in-season break since the 2014 Putin Games in Sochi.
Rested or rusty or somewhere inbetween, we get the first look at the Black-and-Gold early Monday afternoon when they convene for practice again in their Brighton Warrior room.
“We practice hard and we train hard and it’s pretty easy to get back in the swing of things,” said veteran winger Brad Marchand, acknowledging the potential pitfalls prior to beginning vacation. “The first few days are sometimes a little slow, but as long as you have guys who are competing and putting the work in, you’ll be OK. When you go away, don’t do anything over the break and come back, and you’re still in that vacation mode, that’s when it gets tough. But guys in here are pretty good about taking care of themselves. I don’t think it will be an issue.”