… Men’s Health caught up with LaVine the week before all those ups and downs for an inside look at player who does the literal up and down better than just about anyone in the league: the dunk. And how does the 2x NBA Slam Dunk Contest Champion do the dunk? “I feel like I got a lot of it from working out and doing plyometrics—doing different squats,” explains LaVine, as he shows us down to the basement of his Chicago apartment, which he’s converted into an iron man cave. “I worked extremely hard at it with weights and jumping.”
Weighted exercises like trap bar deadlifts and plyometrics help give LaVine the leg strength and explosiveness he needs to get up high. But LaVine also has some natural hops; he says he first dunked as a 5’8” eighth grader after going up for a layup and “accidentally was high enough” (LaVine was drafted 13th overall by the Timberwolves in 2014 when he was 19 before getting traded to Chicago for Jimmy Butler a few years later).
San Jose Mercury News, Bay Area News Group, Curtis Pashelka from
… “It’s a credit to Burnzie, not just the hockey player his is, but what he does away from the rink to take care of himself,” Sharks defenseman Brenden Dillon said. “He’s physical, he’s big. It’s not like he’s able to glide around out there like some of these younger, smaller defensemen. He’s playing 25 to 30 minutes a night.
“It’s pretty crazy to think a hip flexor or groin hasn’t bugged him in that time. That’s just a credit to him and what he’s done.”
There have been times when he’s had to play hurt, notably in Feb. 2018 when general manager Doug Wilson acknowledged that Burns was dealing with an upper body ailment.
A moment captured at the World Cup in France in June flipped the usual narrative in women’s football, in showing the game – at least in one way – to be lightyears ahead of the men’s.
Denmark striker Pernille Harder leaned forward in the stands at the Parc des Princes to kiss her girlfriend, Sweden’s Magda Eriksson, who had just helped her team to the quarter-finals. Chelsea’s Ramona Bachmann remembers seeing the photograph online a few hours later. She is herself in an openly gay relationship with a fellow footballer, West Ham striker Alisha Lehmann.
Bachmann says the image helped reinforce part of what she believes the game stands for: allowing women to be themselves. “It’s obviously amazing because what everyone tries to do is just be ourselves, and not to hide things, trying to show it’s normal for us in women’s football,” she says. “We try and bring that into the world.”
Purpose: The relative age effect (RAE) refers to the bias influence of birthdate distribution, with athletes born later in the selection year being under-represented in talent development systems. However, the ‘underdog hypothesis’ suggests that younger birth quarter (BQ) athletes are over-represented among those who successfully transition from youth systems to senior professional status.
Methods: Accordingly, the purpose of this study was twofold; (1) to provide further test of the RAE over twelve seasons (n= 556), and (2) to examine the BQ of professional contracts awarded to academy graduates at an English professional football club over eleven seasons (n= 364).
Results: Significantly skewed (P< 0.001) birthdate distributions were found for academy players (BQ1 n= 224: BQ2 n= 168; BQ3 n= 88; BQ4 n= 76). The distribution from academy graduates was also significantly skewed for professional contracts awarded (P= 0.03), with greater BQ4 representation (n= 8) compared to other BQs (BQ1 n= 5; BQ2 n= 8; BQ3 n= 6).
Conclusion: These findings are indicative that the RAE continues to manifest within an academy setting. Interestingly however, the underdog hypothesis shows BQ4s were approximately four times more likely to achieve senior professional status compared to BQ1s. Implications for talent identification and development in football are discussed.
… “I think last year changed my mindset, I guess,” Lenzy says. “I wouldn’t say I had things easy coming in, but I realized I needed to do a lot more. I couldn’t just be the fast guy. Even though I am the fast guy, there’s a lot of other parts of my game that have vastly improved.”
Those include route-running, ability to escape press coverage and even his blocking. At 5-11 and 183 pounds, his body also feels stronger, particularly in the lower half.
“My high school profile, I don’t really know where those numbers came from,” Lenzy says with a laugh. “I was never 170. I probably came in at, like, a mean 160.”
When Yale research psyhcologist Irving Janis coined the term “groupthink” in 1972, he identified eight symptoms of the pathology: the “illusion of invulnerability”; a “belief in the inherent morality of the group”; “collective rationalization”; “out-group stereotypes”; “self-censorship”; the “illusion of unanimity”; “direct pressure on dissenters” and “self-appointed mindguards.”
The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster is one of the most studied disasters in history; University of Washington psych prof Jacob Leonesio uses it as a way to illustrate groupthink for his intro to psych course in a neat little explanation that shows how groupthink led the Challenger team to launch a spacecraft that many of them knew was not safe to launch.
arXiv, Computer Science > Computers and Society; Mitchell L. Gordon, Tim Althoff, Jure Leskovec from
Activity tracking apps often make use of goals as one of their core motivational tools. There are two critical components to this tool: setting a goal, and subsequently achieving that goal. Despite its crucial role in how a number of prominent self-tracking apps function, there has been relatively little investigation of the goal-setting and achievement aspects of self-tracking apps.
Here we explore this issue, investigating a particular goal setting and achievement process that is extensive, recorded, and crucial for both the app and its users’ success: weight loss goals in MyFitnessPal. We present a large-scale study of 1.4 million users and weight loss goals, allowing for an unprecedented detailed view of how people set and achieve their goals. We find that, even for difficult long-term goals, behavior within the first 7 days predicts those who ultimately achieve their goals, that is, those who lose at least as much weight as they set out to, and those who do not. For instance, high amounts of early weight loss, which some researchers have classified as unsustainable, leads to higher goal achievement rates. We also show that early food intake, self-monitoring motivation, and attitude towards the goal are important factors. We then show that we can use our findings to predict goal achievement with an accuracy of 79% ROC AUC just 7 days after a goal is set. Finally, we discuss how our findings could inform steps to improve goal achievement in self-tracking apps.
Reddit Inc. co-founder Alexis Ohanian is betting that the world of soccer scouting is an industry ripe for disruption.
The tech entrepreneur’s Initialized Capital firm is a key investor in Gloria, an app that looks to ease soccer scouting by providing a platform where players in remote areas can submit standardized material and get noticed in the industry. The app, created by two Argentine entrepreneurs based in Silicon Valley, is set to launch its beta version on Monday in Buenos Aires.
… On June 26, 2000, upon announcing the first draft of the human genome, President Bill Clinton proclaimed it would “revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases.” Now, two decades on, that promise is still only just beginning to be fulfilled. Rooting out the genetic causes of the most common medical conditions and turning those insights into blockbuster treatments turned out to be far more complicated than anyone had imagined. But genetic testing is radically changing some corners of medicine. And more are sure to follow.
Take cancer care. Decades of research into the genes that turn normal cells into cancerous ones mean that doctors can use new and existing drugs to target tumor-specific mutations. So today, if you find a lump or a radiologist sees something blurry on a scan, it’s likely that doctors will extract some cancerous tissue to run through a gene panel test and match you up with the best available treatment option. As more of these targeted treatments, including a promising new class of living drugs, called immunotherapy, make their way through FDA approval, cancer care will only get more personalized. It’ll also get proactive. It’s now possible to scan people’s blood for bits of DNA shed by cancerous cells—an emerging technology known as liquid biopsy—meaning that doctors can attack tumors before they get big enough to be felt or seen on an X-ray. For many patients that might be enough to shift the odds in their favor.
For the first time, The Arthroscopy Association of North America (AANA), the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM), the International Cartilage Repair Society (ICRS) and the ON Foundation have collaborated to form The Biologics Alliance (BA)TM, an orthopaedic organization dedicated to providing one voice for all matters on musculoskeletal biologics and regenerative medicine.
Recently, randomized clinical trials and clinical practice guidelines have called into question the ability of treatments such as oral medications, injection therapies, physical therapy, arthroscopy and arthroplasty to provide significant clinical improvement to patients with osteoarthritis (OA), the most common condition evaluated and treated by orthopaedic surgeons. With numerous remedies being used clinically despite minimal rigorous evidence to support their use, the need for medical and scientific leadership in defining and assessing biologic therapies becomes evident.
EurekAlert! Science News, Helmholtz Zentrum München from
Abnormal scarring is a serious threat resulting in non-healing chronic wounds or fibrosis. Scars form when fibroblasts, a type of cell of connective tissue, reach wounded skin and deposit plugs of extracellular matrix. Until today, the question about the exact anatomical origin of these fibroblasts has not been answered. In order to find potential ways of influencing the scarring process, the team of Dr. Yuval Rinkevich, Group Leader for Regenerative Biology at the Institute of Lung Biology and Disease at Helmholtz Zentrum München, aimed to finally find an answer. As it was already known that all scars derive from a fibroblast lineage expressing the Engrailed-1 gene – a lineage not only present in skin, but also in fascia – the researchers intentionally tried to understand whether or not fascia might be the origin of fibroblasts.
A vital aspect of a football manager’s job is to select team formations – the spatial configuration of the players on the field. … In our paper we presented a new, data-driven technique for measuring and classifying team formations as a function of game state, analysing the offensive and defensive configurations of each team separately, and dynamically detecting major tactical changes during the course of a match. We applied our methodology to a large sample of player tracking data, using unsupervised machine learning techniques to identify the unique set of template formations used by the teams in the dataset. We used the results to study transitions between defence and attack, and analyse changes in formation during matches.
… Take Atlanta United. The convention for expansion teams in MLS was to recruit older, big names from Europe as designated players, because of the supposed performance and commercial benefits. Atlanta rejected that, signing younger players from South America, and within two seasons were MLS Cup champions.
In Denmark, FC Nordsjælland have broken convention in consistently fielding one of Europe’s youngest teams. Received wisdom is that teams need some experience in order to survive in a first division. Nordsjælland haven’t just survived, they’ve qualified for European football too.
As for one extreme example: Hashtag United broke the convention that you need history, a stadium, and well, anything, to grow a fanbase and a brand.
Some conventions are easier to break with the support of evidence.
The work of coaches and strength and conditioning coaches is to train the players as well as possible to be successful on the pitch. This involves trying to match or even increase the physical, technical and tactical requirements of a match in training tasks. Football players must be prepared for maximum demand scenarios during a match (the so-called “worst-case scenarios”). Understanding the demands of the game seems to be vitally important for improving a player’s capabilities. This is why we are interested to know what will football look like in the future. We must anticipate this during training to prepare the players as well as possible.
Several studies published in recent years give us some clues on what the game will be like in the near future. Wallace and Norton (2014) studied the evolution of the game by taking the World Cup Finals from 1966 to 2010 as an example. According to their results, it is possible to simulate what a football match will look like in the future by using different regression models for five-game indicators.