Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 1, 2019

… This will be his final summer of baseball, the last of 19 big-league seasons, of what for a ballplayer is a lifetime and then some. He’s not there yet, not yet counting backward to one last season, one last month, one last start, after all those years counting up.

“Nah,” Sabathia said. “I’m just focused start-to-start. It’s easy when you’re playing for something else. This is a team sport, not an individual sport. And the first step to that is winning the division.”

The Point God’s competitiveness has earned him praise from teammates, vilification from opponents and fans, and, one day, a spot in the Hall of Fame. But where does it all come from? Paul himself explains amid what could be his last best chance at an NBA championship.

… In the past two decades, a movement to play to our strengths has gained momentum in the world of work. It’s a travesty that many people are fixated solely on repairing their weaknesses and don’t have the chance to do what they do best every day. But it’s a problem that many people aren’t thoughtful about when to do what they do best.

… What we’re looking for is not solely eliminating the training but instead restore this natural ebb and flow of acute stress and recovery. By doing so, we can get an athlete out of the over trained state and back on track to. The following strategies can be used to combat over training syndrome and reset your body so that you can make yourself resilient to over training.

Change it Up

Research has found that one of the many variables related to overtraining is actually monotony.

… I felt like there were other people who seemed much more successful than me, and seemed much less stressed out. Why were they able to get more important things done?

So I started reaching out to researchers, and they said, “The reason why [some people] are more productive is not because they found some life hack, like ‘delegate everything’ or ‘never write more than one sentence in an email’—it’s because they’ve trained themselves to think in fundamentally different ways. They’ve learned a method for self-motivation, or how to be creative on demand. They know how to run a meeting with teammates, or build a team that gels much better and more quickly. The key is to think the right way, and the actions follow.” Once I learned that, I decided to spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how I should be thinking in order to be more productive.

Organizations in science and elsewhere often rely on committees of experts to make important decisions, such as evaluating early-stage projects and ideas. However, very little is known about how experts influence each others’ opinions, and how that influence affects final evaluations. Here, we use a field experiment in scientific peer review to examine experts’ susceptibility to the opinions of others. We recruited 277 faculty members at seven US medical schools to evaluate 47 early stage research proposals in biomedicine. In our experiment, evaluators: (1) completed independent reviews of research ideas, (2) received (artificial) scores attributed to anonymous “other reviewers” from the same or a different discipline, and (3) decided whether to update their initial scores. Evaluators did not meet in person and were not otherwise aware of each other. We find that, even in a completely anonymous setting and controlling for a range of career factors, women updated their scores 13% more often than men, while very highly cited “superstar” reviewers updated 24% less often than others. Women in male-dominated subfields were particularly likely to update, updating 8% more for every 10% decrease in subfield representation. Very low scores were particularly “sticky” and seldom updated upward, suggesting a possible source of conservatism in evaluation. These systematic differences in how world-class experts respond to external opinions can lead to substantial gender and status disparities in whose opinion ultimately matters in collective expert judgment.

When you think of Gatorade, you probably picture a neon orange or yellow sports drink. But the company is trying to carve out a niche for itself in another increasingly important aspect of fitness: technology.

Or, more specifically, technology that measures your sweat. Gatorade’s sweat patch–which it’s currently testing at its Sports Science Institute in Bradenton, Florida, and hopes to roll out to consumers next year–can be worn by athletes during practice or workouts to help them track hydration and nutrients they’ve lost through perspiration. Xavi Cortadellas, Gatorade’s head of innovation and design, says that information will help them refuel more effectively, which, in theory, should provide them with an extra edge on the field. It’s a key part of the company’s plans for providing athletes with access to comprehensive information about their performance.

“We needed a vision for the Gatorade of the future,” Cortadellas says of the sweat patch’s conception. Users attach the three-inch-long patch to their forearm, and built-in sensors measure how much they sweat and how much sodium they lose during their workout. That info is relayed to Gatorade’s GX app, which then offers advice on how to refuel–with Gatorade, naturally.

AFRL entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with Profusa, Inc., a company specializing in the development of biosensor technologies. Through an investment from both DARPA as well as the private sector, the San Francisco-based startup researched and developed minimally-invasive physiological sensing technologies over the past decade. Its novel approach involves a two-part monitoring system in which tiny flexible hydrogel sensors are injected under the skin, integrating into the surrounding tissue. A lightweight optical reader worn on the skin detects a fluorescent signal from the embedded sensors, resulting in a data readout that can be sent to a smartphone or other data collection device.

According to AFRL Scientist and Program Manager Dr. Jeremy Ward, this minimally-invasive approach provides reliable and repeatable data, while solving the foreign body response challenge that is common with most biosensors that are embedded under the skin. This response occurs when the body defensively builds up collagen around a foreign object. Such an occurrence greatly decreases the embedded sensor’s effectiveness at providing reliable information about a human’s biochemistry.

Your ability to recognize objects is remarkable. If you see a cup under unusual lighting or from unexpected directions, there’s a good chance that your brain will still compute that it is a cup. Such precise object recognition is one holy grail for artificial intelligence developers, such as those improving self-driving car navigation.

While modeling primate object recognition in the visual cortex has revolutionized artificial visual recognition systems, current deep learning systems are simplified, and fail to recognize some objects that are child’s play for primates such as humans.

In findings published in Nature Neuroscience, McGovern Institute investigator James DiCarlo and colleagues have found evidence that feedback improves recognition of hard-to-recognize objects in the primate brain, and that adding feedback circuitry also improves the performance of artificial neural network systems used for vision applications.

Healthy bone is a balancing act. Our bodies continually remove older bone and replace it with new. As adults, if we lose bone at too fast a rate, replace it at too slow a rate, or both, the result is osteoporosis—weak, porous bones that fracture easily. The National Osteoporosis Foundation estimates that nearly 10 million Americans have osteoporosis, and over 43 million more have its precursor—low bone density. The disorder is more common in older than younger people. Fractured bones from this condition can be life-altering, and even life-threatening, but they are not inevitable. There is much we can do to maintain our bones. The earlier we start the better.

Concerns are being raised about how Major League Soccer handles travel snags and scheduling after some tough games for two Canadian teams.

The Montreal Impact was scheduled to fly to Boston on Tuesday evening, but its flight was first delayed for five hours, then cancelled entirely.

MLS clubs are allotted four charter flights a season and must use commercial airlines for the rest of the year.

After its commercial flight was cancelled on Tuesday, the Impact was forced to use one of its charter flights on Wednesday morning in order to get to a game against the New England Revolution on time.

Joe Maddon likes to work on his lineups at a local coffee shop. Armed with his iPad, the manager looks over a variety of statistics and other data while searching for every edge for the Chicago Cubs.

The process has been the same for Maddon for a long time. But this year is a little different.

Maddon is doing his lineups three days at a time, giving his players an advance look at what to expect for the upcoming series. It is a marked departure from the days of managers posting the starting nine in the clubhouse before the game, or even the modern practice of nightly text messages, and Maddon likes how it’s going so far.

… Week after week, the Buckeyes have seemed to always stay one step ahead of their opponents, out-witting respected defensive minds like Gary Patterson and Don Brown thanks in large part to the way Day not only calls plays but the manner in which he organizes the entire offensive philosophy. Now, with the program fully under his control in just his third year on campus, Day shared some of the secrets to his success at the Ohio State Coaches Clinic earlier this month.

“I believe with all my heart in bucket organization,” he told the audience. “We have certain buckets on offense. They are concepts that our players will learn.”

These buckets are grouped as concept types, with runs characterized either by zone (such as Tight or Outside zone) or gap principles (like Power or Counter). Within each bucket, there are numerous variations that may be incorporated to attack the weakness of that week’s opponent. However, each and every variation is taught beforehand during the offseason and spring practice so that the players are familiar with them by the time they’re included in a fall game plan.

… For our analysis, we created a 38-year panel data set that included the win-loss record of each team in each season. (See our methodology section toward the end of the article for more.) Over the course of our sample, combined leadership explained a remarkably high proportion of the success or failure of each team. In total, our four leader variables—quarterback, coach, general manager, and owner—explained 68.2%, or more than two-thirds, of the variance in team performance. It is interesting, if not totally surprising, to see how much influence just four individuals can have in organizations worth billions of dollars. Of that 68.2%, owners carried the least weight (roughly 11.12% of explained variance), followed by general managers (22.43%), then coaches (29.08%), and finally, quarterbacks (37.37%).

That means a quarterback accounts for more than three times the variance in performance that an owner does and appears to be the most critical factor in team success. However, coaches and general managers are still very important: they represent more than half of our model’s explained variance.

… the Islanders have to win Game 3. But fortunately for them, the weakened state of the Hurricanes might make that easier. Mrazek had been unsolvable in the series before he exited, with the only goal he allowed coming off his own defender’s stick. He’s not ruled out of Game 3 yet, but the likely starter is McElhinney, who’s 35 years old and has made just one start in the month of April. The veteran did get 17 saves in his relief appearance on Sunday, and his overall numbers are only a slight drop-off, but it’s Mrazek who’s helped carry the Canes to where they are now, and the shutout monster will not be missed by the Isles.