… Last year when we talked after the championship parade, you had said the run to the NBA title was the hardest one yet. Obviously I know you guys came up short this year but give me an idea of how this run compared to last year.
I mean, I did say that last year, considering each playoff series and what not, you get into the Finals you’re getting the job done. This year was 10 times harder, physically and emotionally for sure. All the tough blows we were dealt on the way with injuries, you got three guys getting pretty significant injuries throughout the course of the playoff series, they were important guys and I would answer that question by saying I’m even more proud of how we handled it and how we fought to the end this year. There’s really no reason other than our sheer fighting ability and competitiveness that we were within a possession to get to Game 7. It says a lot about who we are as a team and what we’ve been through. It sucks to lose and we’ll be thinking about for a long time, but we battled and gave ourselves a sliver of hope until the end to get the job done.
AJC.com, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Doug Roberson from
In their first conversation since last week’s irresponsible behavior before the Toronto game, Atlanta United manager Frank de Boer said he spoke to Andrew Carleton on Monday about how character is as important as talent.
De Boer said that Carleton, who trained with the first team on Monday, apologized for not having his passport when the team met to fly to Toronto before last Wednesday’s game.
“You have to learn from it,” de Boer said. “Ninety percent has to come from yourself, your inner-energy, motivation to get the most out of yourself. The last 10 percent we can help you with.
Ashleigh Barty says “feel” rather than analytics will be the backbone of her game at Wimbledon, where she has been warned Serena Williams is still the woman to beat.
At a time when sports stars and teams are increasingly using, and being dictated to by, data, Barty is using modern technology to her advantage but is wary of overly relying on spreadsheets when it comes to handling an opponent.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Mohammad Ahmadpoor and Benjamin F. Jones from
Scientists and inventors increasingly work in teams, raising fundamental questions about the nature of team production and making individual assessment increasingly difficult. Here we present a method for describing individual and team citation impact that both is computationally feasible and can be applied in standard, wide-scale databases. We track individuals across collaboration networks to define an individual citation index and examine outcomes when each individual works alone or in teams. Studying 24 million research articles and 3.9 million US patents, we find a substantial impact advantage of teamwork over solo work. However, this advantage declines as differences between the team members’ individual citation indices grow. Team impact is predicted more by the lower-citation rather than the higher-citation team members, typically centering near the harmonic average of the individual citation indices. Consistent with this finding, teams tend to assemble among individuals with similar citation impact in all fields of science and patenting. In assessing individuals, our index, which accounts for each coauthor, is shown to have substantial advantages over existing measures. First, it more accurately predicts out-of-sample paper and patent outcomes. Second, it more accurately characterizes which scholars are elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Overall, the methodology uncovers universal regularities that inform team organization while also providing a tool for individual evaluation in the team production era.
Prior to his arrival at Leeds United, Marcelo Bielsa’s pre-season training regimes were the stuff of legend.
“The first two days were tests and after that it was hardcore,” Aston Villa’s former Lille winger Anwar El Ghazi said during Bielsa’s previous managerial stint in France. “We trained at 10am and second training was 6.30pm”.
PLOS Computational Biology; Filip Gesiarz, Donal Cahill, Tali Sharot from
To make good judgments people gather information. An important problem an agent needs to solve is when to continue sampling data and when to stop gathering evidence. We examine whether and how the desire to hold a certain belief influences the amount of information participants require to form that belief. Participants completed a sequential sampling task in which they were incentivized to accurately judge whether they were in a desirable state, which was associated with greater rewards than losses, or an undesirable state, which was associated with greater losses than rewards. While one state was better than the other, participants had no control over which they were in, and to maximize rewards they had to maximize accuracy. Results show that participants’ judgments were biased towards believing they were in the desirable state. They required a smaller proportion of supporting evidence to reach that conclusion and ceased gathering samples earlier when reaching the desirable conclusion.
Here in James Bond’s native country, Alex Cora commended the Yankees for doing bloody good spy work.
Legal spy work, to be clear. But effective nonetheless as Cora’s Red Sox took an absolute lashing overseas.
“It wasn’t a good weekend on the field,” the Boston manager said, after the Yankees pounded the Bosox on Sunday at London Stadium, 12-8, to complete a sweep of the inaugural London Series and put them in an 11-game American League East hole. “That’s a good offensive team. We know that. They’re better than last year. Their attention to detail is phenomenal.
… It’s part of the larger blueprint put into place by manager Phil Neville and England: Be mentally strong, physically tuned and stay united.
The Lionesses have done just that as they have charged through this Women’s World Cup, making their second straight trip to the semifinals, this time against the favored powerhouses from the United States (Tuesday, 9 p.m. local time/3 p.m. ET).
When their Round of 16 match against Cameroon spiraled into controversy, the Lionesses pressed finger against temple, signaling the need to keep their focus. During their group-stage match versus Argentina, the players huddled and collectively paid tribute to their teammates who had lost loved ones. Then, in the heat of Le Havre in their quarterfinal match against Norway, England was physically prepared for the scorching temperatures thanks to the pre-tournament conditioning.
Digital medicine is a new field that got its start around 2007, the time when smartphones were introduced. The connectivity of mobile devices with the internet ushered in technology platforms like telemedicine and wearable sensors, endowing hand-held devices with the ability to acquire images and perform lab assays. This introduced a new path for generating health and medical data—by the individual, in real time, in a real-world environment. Although these features are alluring, the benefits of digital medicine have to be proven through rigorous research, especially validation through randomized, controlled clinical trials. This Focus article, the sixth in a special series celebrating the 10th anniversary of Science Translational Medicine, discusses successes and challenges of digital medical devices over the past decade (1) and strategies for enabling this key technology to transform medicine.
… Topol: I thought we’d start out talking about the program you have been building at Stanford. It’s called “Presence. The Art and Science of Human Connection.” I had the privilege to join one of your programs last year at Stanford and I’m sure you’re continuing to build on that. Maybe you could tell us about what you’ve been building there, because it’s perfect for the subject of medicine and machines.
Verghese: I’d love to tell you more about that. “Presence” came about for two reasons. One was our sense that the electronic medical record, at the time, was a technology that was so intrusive in the lives of physicians and was causing so much distress that we needed to better understand it. We needed to better explore the effects of technology—especially new technology—on the practice of medicine and anticipate what it would do to human beings, as opposed to what it did in terms of what it was designed to do.
That also led us to realize that on a campus like ours, where you have all these other schools—engineering, law, business, fine arts, and so on—so many other people were doing interesting work that never quite made it to the living laboratories of the hospital and clinic, even though it applied to us. [audio, 29:25]
Professional Baseball Strength & Conditioning Coaches Society, Nancy Clark from
Keeping up with the latest science-based sports nutrition recommendations is a challenge. We are constantly bombarded with media messages touting the next miracle sports food or supplement that will enhance athletic performance, promote fat loss, build muscle, and help you be a super-athlete. At this year’s Annual Meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine (www.acsm.org), a sports nutrition myth-busters session sponsored by the global network of Professionals In Nutrition for Exercise and Sport (www.PINESNutrition.org) featured experts who resolved confusion with science-based research.
MYTH: Protein supplements build bigger muscles. Protein needs for a 150-pound (68 kg) athlete average about 110 to 150 grams of protein per day. (More precisely, 0.7 to 1.0 g pro/lb. body weight/day; 1.6 to 2.2 g pro/kg/day) Hungry athletes can easily consume this amount from standard meals. Yet, many athletes believe they need extra protein.
In 16/17, Bartomeu launched a new Masia 360 strategy to professionalize the academy, putting more money aside to make coaches and staff stay, add psychological help, advance academy studies etc. Sounded great, but an idea is nothing without right people to execute it….
… Durant has sent multiple signals that he’s not coming back to Golden State and that he’s livid with the Warriors, making a lawsuit more likely with each passing day.
On Monday, reports surfaced that Durant was still “really pissed off at the Warriors” based on their role in causing his Achilles injury. On Tuesday, his teammate, Andre Iguodala, explained that the Warriors were intentionally deceptive about his own fractured leg and that he eventually gave in to the immense pressure, returning early so he could play in last year’s NBA Finals. On Wednesday, Durant formally opted out of his Warriors contract, silencing any talk of returning on a one-year deal. Thereafter, reports came out that Durant is bound to leave in free agency – it’s just a matter of where he goes.
These actions are in line with someone who is so angry with their team that they are planning to sue them.
Council for Foreign Relations, Rebecca Turkington from
The FIFA Women’s World Cup enters the semi-finals, capping off a tournament that has broken numerous records for women’s soccer. What will it mean for the future of the sport?