… Summing up a two-decade long career is an exercise in futility, but one way to try to do so is through club accomplishments. Beasley won trophies in Scotland (Rangers), the Netherlands (PSV Eindhoven) and the United States (Chicago Fire, Dynamo), and was the first American to play in the semifinals of the Champions League, with PSV. He also spent time with Manchester City and Puebla in Mexico. His Twitter profile lists his location as “All Over…” which feels both accurate and appropriate.
Or perhaps it’s his U.S. national team career, which stretched over 16 years, 126 caps and 17 goals, that best speaks to his impressive longevity. Beasley is the only American to play in four World Cups, and had they not imploded in Couva, Trinidad and Tobago, he likely would have become just the fifth player in history to appear in five. (Of that night, Beasley remembers feeling “disbelief, shock, it was surreal” at the final whistle. He cried the next day as the magnitude of what they lost struck him.) He even tried to quit the red, white and blue, retiring from the national team in 2014, only to get pulled back into the mix when no better left-back option presented itself.
Over 20 years, Beasley has been an ultimate professional. “He always finds a way to stay on top. That’s an art. I tell a lot of young professionals that becoming a pro is easy. The hard part is staying a pro,” Oguchi Onyewu
… From a nutritional standpoint, what did you have to change after the surgery?
We started cooking a lot more at home. I love doing that—it’s a great way to get away from being in football mode. But I’m only allowed to be the sous-chef. I could never be the chef, because my better half is in charge. We try to use only fresh and honest ingredients—a lot of vegetables, and a lot of colors on the plate.
Moderation was key. I’ve never been too stringent about avoiding one thing or another. But I do love breakfast!
… Sexton somehow looks like a completely different player from the one he was before the All-Star break, not only better and far more efficient but also wired differently in terms of where he will and won’t shoot from.
That ability to know when and where to pull the trigger was a factor in his teammates’ opinion of his game. Sexton said as much when asked what prompted the seemingly overnight shift in his play. “They scream and yell at me for pump-faking, taking the one dribble and shooting a midrange [jumper],” said Sexton, who’s taken 128 contested two-point jumpers, hitting just 34 percent.
… Second-generation prospects are not limited to the Toronto system, either. ESPN’s Keith Law has San Diego’s Fernando Tatis Jr., another legacy, as the game’s No. 1 prospect, while Pittsburgh’s Ke’Bryan Hayes — son of Charlie — is also a top 20 prospect. And numerous legacy prospects are or will soon be contributing to their big-league clubs: Adalberto Mondesi (son of Raul) is expected to be in the Royals’ starting lineup, Lance McCullers Jr. is a fixture in the Astros’ rotation when healthy, and slugger Cody Bellinger (son of Clay) has already earned an All-Star nod for the Dodgers.
If it seems like the kids of former big leaguers are taking over the sport this spring, it’s because they kind of are — they’re making the majors at rates far greater than the general population.
… Heart rate is suitable for measuring sports performance that requires aerobic power but not the best measure for actions that have a strong anaerobic power component.
Quantitatively speaking, maximal power supplied by the muscles is twice as high as maximal aerobic power (Figure 2).
When the anaerobic energy system is used, the muscles take energy from high-energy phosphates. The drawback is that high-energy phosphates are depleted in 10–20 seconds and it takes a while to restore them.
The key point here is this: When we measure muscle power, we can “see” the full power capacity of the muscles that we would otherwise miss.
Nick Saban has realized that being open and accommodating to pro scouts on their visits boosts the overall image of his program—and helps his players’ draft status. And the more successful he is in getting players into the NFL, the more top high school recruits will want to come to Tuscaloosa. It’s a virtuous cycle that more schools should follow.
… What if we zoomed out and compared how often previous generations of teens spent time with their friends to how often today’s teens are doing so? And what if we also saw how feelings of loneliness differed across the generations?
To do this, my co-authors and I examined trends in how 8.2 million U.S. teens spent time with their friends since the 1970s. It turns out that today’s teens are socializing with friends in fundamentally different ways – and also happen to be the loneliest generation on record.
… When we procrastinate, we’re not only aware that we’re avoiding the task in question, but also that doing so is probably a bad idea. And yet, we do it anyway.
“This is why we say that procrastination is essentially irrational,” said Dr. Fuschia Sirois, professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield. “It doesn’t make sense to do something you know is going to have negative consequences.”
She added: “People engage in this irrational cycle of chronic procrastination because of an inability to manage negative moods around a task.”
… Rather than working through the conflicts that will help our organizations move forward, we duck, dodge, and defer them. The result is that most of us find our teams up to our eyeballs in conflict debt. Conflict debt is the sum of all undiscussed and unresolved issues that stand in the way of progress. Conflict debt can be as minor as withholding the constructive feedback that would allow your colleague to do a better job and as profound as continually deferring the strategic decision about when to scale your new product line.
Researchers have known for a long time that eumelanin—the pigment that colors human skin, hair, and eyes—can conduct electricity. But eumelanin in its natural form isn’t conductive enough to be very useful, and nobody could figure out how to give it a boost. This week, that changed. In a paper published this week in the journal Frontiers in Chemistry, an interdisciplinary team of Italian scientists describe a breakthrough process that dramatically enhances eumelanin’s conductivity.
arXiv, Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Pengfei Yao, Zheng Fang, Fan Wu, Yao Feng, Jiwei Li from
Recovering 3D human body shape and pose from 2D images is a challenging task due to high complexity and flexibility of human body, and relatively less 3D labeled data. Previous methods addressing these issues typically rely on predicting intermediate results such as body part segmentation, 2D/3D joints, silhouette mask to decompose the problem into multiple sub-tasks in order to utilize more 2D labels. Most previous works incorporated parametric body shape model in their methods and predict parameters in low-dimensional space to represent human body. In this paper, we propose to directly regress the 3D human mesh from a single color image using Convolutional Neural Network(CNN). We use an efficient representation of 3D human shape and pose which can be predicted through an encoder-decoder neural network. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several 3D human body datasets including Human3.6M, SURREAL and UP-3D with even faster running speed.
… the 2019 season will be Laulu-Pututau’s last in Provo. And yes, he plans to be ready to play, thanks to a new medical procedure performed a few weeks after the knee injury that has him healing faster than expected.
“I’m doing great,” he said after watching a spring practice last week along with other offensive stars who are missing March practices, guys such as receivers Aleva Hifo and Inoke Lotulelei, tight ends Matt Bushman and Hank Tuipulotu and quarterback Zach Wilson. “I’m still on schedule to be back for fall camp.”
The groundbreaking surgery method was designed to return athletes to the playing field 40 percent faster than traditional knee surgery methods and was developed by renowned surgeon Dr. James Andrews. It was the first time the doctor has performed the surgery outside of Alabama and Auburn.
The smart thing to do is to go the Lean Startup way and run experiments to validate your idea and what you’re building along the way, getting input from your potential customers and users, and working towards a product they’ll love.
The type of experiment to run depends highly on how far your idea is developed and what you’re trying to test. There are (at least) three different types of experiment you can run, depending on your startup level.
Decades from now, baseball historians may look back at the spring of 2019 as the moment the game entered a new era in its evolution, a period we might call the innovation era. For a sport that traditionally has been slow to evolve, sometimes to the point of self-destruction, the rate of change has had a dizzying effect, and is certain to be in evidence as the 2019 season begins.
This was the spring of rule changes — immediate, future, proposed and experimental — that could shape the way the game is played on the field, in ways large and small. This season will see a reduction in mound visits. In 2020, a three-batter minimum for new pitchers. And perhaps someday soon: a universal designated hitter and a limit on defensive shifts.
A trained basketball eye could spot Milwaukee’s strategy from a mile away, but in realtime, on March 13 it was understandable for confused fans to wonder what, exactly, the Bucks were doing on defense against the New Orleans Pelicans. The Bucks allowed shot after shot, often open and from 3-point range, to forward Julius Randle and guards Ian Clark and Frank Jackson. Like clockwork, when Randle would pick for a guard at the top of the key, his defender would sag deep into the paint, forcing a pass and practically daring the big man to shoot a 3. If Clark or Jackson kept the ball, their defenders would do the same. In total, those three Pelicans shot 3-of-22 from deep.
It’s a peculiar strategy in today’s NBA, where 3-pointers are a pivotal component of any efficient, high-scoring offense. Against New Orleans, Milwaukee sat back as 107 shots, including a Pelicans franchise-record 47 3-pointers, rained down. New Orleans made just 10 of those 3s and 46 shots in total. On the flip side, Milwaukee made 48 of 97 shots in a 130-113 win. And this strategy wasn’t a one-off. Milwaukee is leading the league by turning the deep-ball obsession on its head.