Former New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski, who announced his retirement in March, said in an interview that he absorbed about 20 concussions in a lifetime on the gridiron.
Gronkowski, 30, told CBS News correspondent Reena Ninan that he would only allow a future son to play football after educating him about the suffering he endured during nearly a decade in the trenches.
“I truly believe that any injury that you receive is fixable,” Gronkowski said. “I went through it. I had nine surgeries, probably had like 20 concussions in my life, no lie. I remember five blackout ones.”
… Coach Doug Pederson talked this offseason about how Wentz was getting through his reads more quickly entering Year 4, which allows him to stay within the construct of the play. Pederson saw that in the game Sunday.
“In the first half, I called a play-action pass that was designed to get Alshon the ball,” Pederson said. “We ran a jet motion, and the safety [Quinton Dunbar] was going with [Nelson Agholor] on the motion, and then he stopped. Carson was coming off the play fake, and he saw him sitting there. And instead of trying to force it or move, Jordan Howard was in the flat, and he just dropped it right down to him, so he was getting through the progression.
“Those are the things we talk about. He’s just going through the progression, understanding the defense, putting the ball in the playmaker’s hands and continuing to work that way.”
… “I felt like it was important to explore European football at least once,” [Alex Morgan] said. “Whether that was six months or six years, it was important for me to experience something new.”
Morgan knows better than most the conundrum in front of Sam Kerr — remain playing where she is or head overseas to play? — in the waning weeks of this NWSL season and beyond. But as one of the sport’s best players moves toward, at the very least, a decision on where to find a challenge, Morgan’s now comes in staying put.
Foul calls are down significantly, dropping by 1.4 fouls per game from 2018. But the “big” bigs — the best fives the league has to offer — have been hit especially hard. Through 32 games, the number of free-throw attempts by Liz Cambage of the Las Vegas Aces, Brittney Griner of the Phoenix Mercury and Sylvia Fowles of the Minnesota Lynx is down 37 percent.
The results have been evident. Griner, tired of taking so much uncalled contact, was involved in an altercation last month that resulted in a three-game suspension. Cambage described it, in an interview earlier this summer, this way: “I don’t really see myself playing into my 30s because I don’t want to go to war.” Cambage is still having an elite season, but her overall production is down from last year — her field-goal percentage has fallen from 58.9 to 49.3 percent while her true shooting percentage has dropped from 64.3 to 55.2 percent.
But Fowles, through a combination of inter- and intraseason adaptations, has kept her production remarkably consistent. Her career field-goal percentage is 59.3 percent. This season, her field-goal percentage is … 59.1 percent.
Behavioral Scientist, Ask a Behavioral Scientist, Michele Gelfand from
Q: Societies have norms which you’ve described as tight or loose—what does it mean for norms to be tight or loose, and how is that put into practice?
Today more than ever, we need to understand cultural differences. A lot of times, we think about our differences in terms of rather superficial characteristics like red versus blue, East versus West, rich versus poor, religious versus secular. I’m a cross-cultural psychologist and have been trying to understand the deeper codes that drive behavior.
My focus has been on the degree to which groups strictly adhere to social norms. All groups have norms, or unwritten rules for behavior. We need them to predict each other’s behavior and coordinate on a daily basis. But what I’ve found is that certain groups are tight—they have strict rules and punishments for deviance—and other groups are loose—they’re more permissive and accept a wider range of behavior.
PostMedia, The Province (Toronto), Patrick Johnston from
… It has been five years since Mike Gillis last worked full time in hockey.
Since being dismissed as general manager of the Vancouver Canucks in 2014, Gillis has travelled around the world to learn how other sports go about their day-to-day business.
During the last year or so, Gillis’s name has been linked to several NHL teams and jobs. We recently caught up with him to discuss that, and what he’s learned in his global travels:
Athletes who study for a second career off the pitch are better performers on the pitch.
That’s according to recent research by professor David Lavallee of Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland.
Lavallee looked at the careers of 632 players in Australia’s National Rugby League over a period of three years. Those players who were actively preparing for their career transition were more likely to be picked for matches, and enjoy a longer professional sports career.
… The challenge for your brain is similar to what you’re faced with when trying to engage in conversation at a noisy cocktail party. You’re able to focus on the person you’re talking to and “mute” the other discussions. This phenomenon is selective hearing – what’s called the cocktail party effect.
When everyone at a large, crowded party talks at roughly the same loudness, the average sound level of the person you’re speaking with is about equal to the average level of all the other partygoers’ chatter combined. If it were a satellite TV system, this roughly equal balance of desired signal and background noise would result in poor reception. Nevertheless, this balance is good enough to let you understand conversation at a bustling party.
How does the human brain do it, distinguishing among billio
… Historically, improving team training and team building has been targeted by the research, mainly driven by group dynamics constructs such as cohesion, leadership, and collective efficacy that were selected to investigate team togetherness. Other works investigated team learning practices (e.g., verbalization and debate-of-idea) as a part of the process of improving team intrinsic value during training, while moderate effects have been highlighted on effective team performance during games (Chow et al., 2007). More recently, real-time teamwork has been suggested a good candidate to explain on-the-field team successes (Eccles, 2010). Teamwork was defined as a main team process that make the team function effectively (McEwan and Beauchamp, 2014). Teamwork investigation thus promises to understand team performance variability resulting from team members’ coordinated movements. In team sport, the most fruitful research on team performance in recent years addressed team coordination processes to better understand effective on-the-field teamwork (see Araújo and Bourbousson, 2016). Team coordination is defined as the process of arranging individual movement of team members into a patterned collective behavior. Team coordination implies individual players adjustments, thus needing a theory of how individual cognitions can merge and act together. [full text]
While the Internet of Things is pretty much everywhere, it’s becoming even more prevalent on consumers’ wrists.
Shipments of wrist-worn wearables, comprising smartwatches and wristbands, reached 34 million devices in the second quarter, a 29% increase from a year earlier, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
The market is dominated by five companies (Xiaomi, Apple, Huawei, Fitbit and Samsung), which account for 66% of the entire market.
The National Football League wants a better helmet, and for the first time, it’s willing to pay for it.
The richest and most-watched U.S. sports league has created the NFL Helmet Challenge, a $3 million, 18-month contest to see who can create a piece of equipment that outperforms anything in use. The money includes $2 million in development capital and a further $1 million winner’s prize.
The competition, the NFL said, will bring together manufacturers, engineers and entrepreneurs amid heightened awareness of the risks of repetitive head trauma. It’s the next step in the league’s so-called Engineering Roadmap, a league-funded initiative aimed at a better understanding of the biomechanics of head injuries.
Memos from ML@GT blog; Min-Hung Chen, Zsolt Kira and Ghassan AlRegib from
Videos have become an increasingly important type of media from which we obtain valuable information and knowledge. This motivates the need for the development of video analysis techniques. The development of these techniques could, for example, provide recommendations or support discovery for different objectives. Given the recent progress in deep neural networks, many approaches for video understanding and action recognition have been developed. However, the majority of the performance gains have come from the availability of massive amounts of labeled data to feed supervised learning, which requires a great amount of time for manual human annotation. Therefore, effectively and efficiently generalizing trained models to different datasets has become an important problem necessary to enable real-world applications.
About 22 percent of soccer players 14 years old and younger are hobbled by overuse injuries, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons’ OneSport Injury campaign, the academy’s latest initiative to reverse the trend of overuse injuries in children and teens. The percentages are even higher for young baseball (25 percent) and football players (28 percent).
“In middle school and high school kids, 50 percent of injuries we are seeing are preventable if these kids weren’t playing year-round,” said Dr. Elizabeth G. Matzkin, chief of women’s sports medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
The lure of mastering a sport at a tender age to gain college scholarships or entree into the pros can be a big driver of these overuse injuries, said Matzkin. She advises children to play multiple sports throughout high school, rather than specializing in one.
When it comes to nutrition, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Meal replacements may claim to strike a perfect balance of nutrients, but they taste terrible. Supplements like probiotics and vitamin B are touted as cure-alls for a wide range of ailments, but they’re largely unregulated and most people don’t need them. Now magnesium is getting the silver-bullet treatment. Marketers of magnesium pills, body sprays, and bath salts claim that their products will boost recovery and energy levels and promote all kinds of important-sounding bodily functions like DNA synthesis and bone strength. Here’s what you need to know about getting enough magnesium.
CWL [Common Workflow Language] is a way of describing analytical pipelines and computational tools — one of more than 250 systems now available, including such popular options as Snakemake, Nextflow and Galaxy. Although they speak different languages and support different features, these systems have a common aim: to make computational methods reproducible, portable, maintainable and shareable. CWL is essentially an exchange language that researchers can use to share pipelines for whichever system. For Finn, that language brought sanity to his codebase, reducing it by around 73%. Importantly, it has made it easier to test, execute and share new methods, and to run them on the cloud.
There is a learning curve to adopting workflow languages. But, says Brian Naughton, data lead and co-founder of the drug-discovery firm Hexagon Bio in Menlo Park, California, “the energy that you expend learning is more than made up for by the energy you save in having your code be reproducible.”