Denzel Valentine is hoping to tackle his third season in the league with a vast show of improvement. The Chicago Bulls wing is coming off a reconstructed ankle after lingering issues took away his third season in the league in 2018-19.
What was once a moderate ankle sprain ultimately led to a reconstructive procedure that kept him from the court. Valentine’s original recovery timeline was four-to-six months after he went under the knife. While he is still a week away from being cleared to resume to 5-on-5 workouts, Valentine is expected to return on “a brand-new ankle” once the 2019-20 starts, hopefully showing much more than he was able to upon finishing his second season in April 2018.
Malindi Elmore once ran with the weight of nagging injuries and frustratingly tough Olympic standards, at a time track and field was struggling through one of its darkest doping eras.
She runs more lightly these days.
The former 1,500-metre specialist, who walked away from track and field disheartened and unfulfilled in 2012, has reinvented herself as a marathon runner. And what began as a whim has the 39-year-old from Kelowna, B.C., within striking distance of an Olympic berth next summer in Tokyo.
She’s still wrapping her head around her almost-accidental return to Canada’s elite running scene.
“I feel like somebody who just likes to run and run fast moreso than a professional athlete,” Elmore said.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is confident Manchester United will have the fitness levels to play the front foot football he wants next season.
The United manager was unimpressed by his side’s fitness last term and watched the campaign end in relegation form, with just eight points taken the final nine league games en route to a dismal sixth placed finish.
Solskjaer has been determined to boost fitness during pre-season and there has been a marked step up in the intensity of the sessions since United reported back on Monday last week.
There has been no let during the first leg of the club’s pre-season tour in Australia, with Marcus Rashford claiming they are already in much better condition than this time last year, and Solskjaer hopes the approach will pay dividends next season.
… a study of 5,018 10- and 11-year-old pupils funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has found that pupils who were taught after their teachers had been on the Changing Mindsets project, delivered by the University of Portsmouth, made no additional progress to those in a control group.
“The independent evaluators found that pupils who received the intervention didn’t make any more progress than those who did not,” said Sir Kevan Collins, chief executive of the EEF.
“It was also clear that most of the teachers taking part in the trial were already aware of growth mindset theory and its messages. What this tells us is that schools should be wary of using growth mindsets as a standalone way of boosting attainment.”
For decades, research has shown that our perception of the world is influenced by our expectations. These expectations, also called “prior beliefs,” help us make sense of what we are perceiving in the present, based on similar past experiences. Consider, for instance, how a shadow on a patient’s X-ray image, easily missed by a less experienced intern, jumps out at a seasoned physician. The physician’s prior experience helps her arrive at the most probable interpretation of a weak signal.
The process of combining prior knowledge with uncertain evidence is known as Bayesian integration and is believed to widely impact our perceptions, thoughts, and actions. Now, MIT neuroscientists have discovered distinctive brain signals that encode these prior beliefs. They have also found how the brain uses these signals to make judicious decisions in the face of uncertainty.
“How these beliefs come to influence brain activity and bias our perceptions was the question we wanted to answer,” says Mehrdad Jazayeri, the Robert A. Swanson Career Development Professor of Life Sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.
Playing football at the highest level implies significant stress for players. In the 2018/2019 season, F.C. Barcelona competed in 60 official matches; in other words, a match every 4 ½ days. In addition, for the most outstanding players, we also have to add friendly matches as well as international fixtures to the total. This number easily exceeds 70 clashes per season. The number of training sessions during a season is also significant – completing over 250 preparatory sessions per season is not unheard of. Players simply train and compete a lot and we know that there is a high risk of injury and of physical fatigue when players train and compete too much. But there are other aspects that we must keep in mind. The importance of the matches towards the end of the season means that players’ stress levels tend to increase significantly in the final months. Every match becomes a finale, resulting in a high risk of mental fatigue. This mental fatigue can be defined as a psychobiological state caused by a prolonged cognitive demanding activity1 period.
Trust is the enabler of global business — without it, most market transactions would be impossible. It is also a hallmark of high-performing organizations. Employees in high-trust companies are more productive, are more satisfied with their jobs, put in greater discretionary effort, are less likely to search for new jobs, and even are healthier than those working in low-trust companies. Businesses that build trust among their customers are rewarded with greater loyalty and higher sales. And negotiators who build trust with each other are more likely to find value-creating deals.
Despite the primacy of trust in commerce, its neurobiological underpinnings were not well understood until recently. Over the past 20 years, research has revealed why we trust strangers, which leadership behaviors lead to the breakdown of trust, and how insights from neuroscience can help colleagues build trust with each other — and help boost a company’s bottom line.
“We’re sharing everything we do in-house and sharing outside with other clubs and people who are interested because we believe that will make it possible for us to be the Silicon Valley of sports.”
That’s how Marta Plana i Dropez, the head of FC Barcelona’s Innovation Hub, describes the club’s ambitious embracing of the tech world.
The Barcelona Innovation Hub, an incubator for start-ups, started two years ago under the presidency of Josep Maria Bartomeu. “He decided we needed to foster technology, innovation and research to allow sports to increase its performance, but also the club itself and society in general.”
… Dietary supplements are a more than $45 billion industry, and they got that way by promising amazing results in nearly every aspect of your physical well-being, from bigger muscles to better heart health. More than half of American adults regularly take some kind of supplement, whether fish oil, vitamin E or D, or protein powders. But supplements are also notorious for being poorly regulated. The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t examine a product unless there are reports that people have had serious adverse reactions. With no pre-market regulation and booming demand, the industry has been flooded in recent years with a wide variety of products, many sporting their own proprietary blends.
Paul Thomas, a nutrition consultant at the National Institutes of Health, describes these elixirs and concoctions like snowflakes: “No two are alike.” That makes their effectiveness extremely difficult to study. Nutrients don’t work in a vacuum. Different combinations affect your body differently. Those special mixtures of amino acids and protein powders could have varying dosages and results. Blends are also frequently spiked with extra caffeine, sugars, steroids, or other ingredients that haven’t been tested at all. Although dietary supplements are regulated under the presumption of safety, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that they cause some 23,000 visits to the emergency room every year, many due to cardiovascular problems.
Earlier this year, a half-dozen students from City Hill Middle School in Naugatuck, Connecticut traveled with their science teacher Katrina Spina to the state capital to testify in support of a bill that would ban sales of energy drinks to children under the age of 16. Having devoted three months to a chemistry unit studying the ingredients in and potential health impacts of common energy drinks—with brand names like Red Bull, Monster Energy, and Rockstar—the students came to a sobering conclusion: “Energy drinks can be fatal to everyone, but especially to adolescents,” 7th-grader Luke Deitelbaum told state legislators. “Even though this is true, most energy drink companies continue to market these drinks specifically toward teens.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A rudderless franchise hires a smart, respected, analytically minded executive from another sport to bring a new type of process to its front office. The organization had no other answers—it had bottomed out and had no clear plan, so why not hire a guy from a completely different field? I’m not talking about former Browns executive vice president Sashi Brown, whom the Washington Wizards hired on Monday. I’m talking about Paul DePodesta.
DePodesta, the longtime baseball executive made famous in Moneyball, joined the Browns three years ago alongside Brown. The two carved up Cleveland’s roster, and Brown became a symbol of the football analytics movement and a controversial figure in Cleveland before and after his December 2017 firing (DePodesta is still in Cleveland). After one year out of sports—one year that includes his former team developing into an honest-to-goodness contender—Brown resurfaced in Washington on Monday as “chief planning and operations officer.” Wizards owner Ted Leonsis said Brown will be in charge of, among other things, technology, finance, and research. That Brown will serve essentially the same function DePodesta did three years ago—to bring his ideas from another sport to a team looking for a fresh perspective—is quite funny. There was a raging debate over whether an NBA-style “Process” could work in the NFL, and now the NFL’s process is coming to the NBA. Hiring Brown is a good move—as long as it’s done exactly right.
Mike Gillis was recently recommended a book called “Tape to Space: Redefining Modern Hockey Tactics.” The former NHL general manager hasn’t finished it, but he felt compelled to scribble down a passage from the book’s foreword.
“The ever-present malaise within this sport, the crushing weight of consensus, the warm safety blanket of inactions that consumes the ruling class in hockey …” Gillis said Friday, reciting his favorite part to the 200-plus attendees at the TeamSnap Hockey Coaches Conference held at Ryerson University.
“That is outstanding,” he continued. “Like anything, if you want to be good at something, you need to take risks and you need to think a little differently about every possible opportunity, and you have to push the competitive boundary, no matter what it is.”
Teams are shifting more, throwing fewer fastballs, and swinging more on first pitches. Are these increasingly commonplace occurrences the sign of things to come in MLB?
The National Football League Opens a New Window. is turning to artificial intelligence to determine whether its teams are paying some of their star players too much money.
Pro Football Focus (PFF) is an analytics company that is majority-owned by former Cincinnati Bengals player and NFL broadcaster Chris Collinsworth. The new system, in conjunction with Amazon Web Services (AWS), will provide never-before-seen metrics of all 32 NFL teams.
“We break down every player on every play on every game,” Collingsworth said during an exclusive interview on FOX Business’ “Bulls & Bears Opens a New Window. ” Monday. “We have this treasure-trove of data that we work with and then we have four data scientists that work here along with 500 people that are doing various things within the football world.” [video, 8:22]
Ok, something a little different from me. Had lots of fun discussing college lacrosse statistics with @jamiemunro3 using @YaleLacrosse as a case study. [video, 56:47]