Veteran New Jersey Devils goaltender Cory Schneider said Monday that a growing number of players are concerned the NHL will announce a “drop-dead” deadline for returning to play as the coronavirus pandemic lingers with summer coming up fast.
The 34-year-old Schneider said some Devils are apprehensive because the NHL has said it would take three weeks of training before allowing games. That would take any restart into June.
“I think that’s everyone’s concern right now,” said Schneider, the team’s union representative. “It’s a lot of guys asking is there a drop-dead date? What’s the date that it’s just too late, that you can get a semblance of a season or a playoff.”
In a sense, Abby Erceg was perfectly prepared and already training for the COVID-19 pandemic. Last winter she was 13,000 kilometres away from her family in New Zealand as she was forced to stay in North Carolina while she waited for her green card application to be completed.
She missed all of the family Christmas barbecues and celebrations and she spent her 30th birthday by herself. She would go on trail runs in the dead of winter, sometimes even when it was raining, in the North Carolinian mountains alone with her thoughts.
“It sucked,” Erceg told FIFA.com. “It was really hard. I fell back on exercise and keeping myself reading and things like that to keep my mind busy. Exercise really gets me through some of those tough times. If I’m sad or if I’m needing to think about something, I can just go out and run.
Virtual lacrosse training platforms that went into overdrive due to the pandemic are exceeding their own expectations.
Digital products from Attack Academy and First Class Lacrosse have seen exponential growth in the last two months, while US Lacrosse has expanded its online offerings.
Premier League on return to training from Tuesday: “Step One of the Return to Training Protocol enables squads to train while maintaining social distancing. Contact training is not yet permitted.”
Newcastle planning on Tuesday for players and staff to arrive at pre-arranged times staggered in groups of a maximum of ten players.
A maximum of 5 people in group will operate in separate areas of two pitches to allow social distancing.
All players will wear snoods on face
Biomedical engineers at Duke University are developing a massive fluid dynamics simulator that can model blood flow through the full human arterial system at subcellular resolution. One of the goals of the effort is to provide doctors with guidance in their treatment plans by allowing them to simulate a patient’s specific vasculature and accurately predict how decisions such as stent placement, conduit insertions and other geometric alterations to blood flow will affect surgical outcomes.
One of the largest barriers to clinical adoption however, is developing a user interface that allows clinicians to easily explore their options without needing any expertise in computer science. As any programmer will tell you, designing a smooth, intuitive interface that people from all types of backgrounds can quickly master is a tall task.
In a new study published on May 7 in the Journal of Computational Science, the Duke researchers report on their initial foray into creating a user interface for their blood flow simulation tool called HARVEY. They explored various interfaces ranging from standard desktop displays to immersive virtual reality experiences and found that, while users might be comfortable using a standard mouse and keyboard, some more futuristic interfaces might hold the key to widespread adoption.
For many of us, our microwaves and dishwashers aren’t the first thing that come to mind when trying to glean health information, beyond that we should (maybe) lay off the Hot Pockets and empty the dishes in a timely way.
But we may soon be rethinking that, thanks to new research from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The system, called “Sapple,” analyzes in-home appliance usage to better understand our health patterns, using just radio signals and a smart electricity meter.
Taking information from two in-home sensors, the new machine learning model examines use of everyday items like microwaves, stoves, and even hair dryers, and can detect where and when a particular appliance is being used.
What’s most striking about Major League Baseball’s 67-page health-and-safety protocol outlining an attempt to return amid the coronavirus pandemic isn’t its little, snicker-worthy details — that players won’t be able to take Ubers and can’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder for the national anthem and, gulp, will be discouraged from postgame showers. It isn’t the granularity of the plan, all the way down to the color-coded diagrams showing exactly where personnel should stand and sit in the dugout.
It’s the immensity of it all, the right-there-on-paper, brass-tacks accounting of what it looks like to bring back a professional sport in the middle of a global pandemic. It is a logistical clamber, a moonshot requiring the buy-in of parties with multivariate endgames. Over the next four weeks, or six weeks, or however long MLB and the MLB Players Association remain committed to making a 2020 season happen, they will be forced to reckon with the same reality upending the rest of the world: that change, no matter how colossal — and uncomfortable — is necessary.
… In order to proceed, the plan needs approval from the MLS Players Association, which is reportedly in the midst of salary negotiations. The current league salary proposal asks for a 20 percent across-the-board cut, along with unspecified monetary concessions.
“This community is ready to do it, and Orlando is the perfect city to hold an event like that,” Orlando City Soccer Club coach Oscar Pareja told the Tampa Bay Times on Wednesday. “Based on the experience, the infrastructure, everything. Orlando has everything to hold it. So if the league decides so … I think it will be a great decision to bring it here.”
USA Today Sports, Steve Berkowitz and Paul Myerberg from
NCAA President Mark Emmert said Friday that the breadth of college sports programs across the country makes it “almost inevitable” athletes will get sick from COVID-19 and that large-scale testing and tracing not yet available are critical to the resumption of on-campus athletics activities.
In an interview with CNN, Emmert said college sports officials have conveyed the need for such testing to “everyone from President Trump on down” and Emmert added he is “very hopeful” it will happen. Some schools have been eying June 1 as a date to begin allowing athletes to return to campus for team activities.
Emmert also said that because schools “very likely” will be re-starting their athletic programs at different times, college sports are likely to have shortened seasons and the NCAA may have to rearrange the schedules for its fall championships, perhaps moving them into the winter.
… The NHL and NHLPA’s jointly appointed Return to Play Committee convened Tuesday and Wednesday and kept working over the weekend. A person on the committee’s calls told ESPN that he is “optimistic” they will be able to announce something soon. The group, which is a mix of NHL and NHLPA execs as well as a handful of high-profile players, has been hashing out protocols for what the return would look like. That includes:
How long training camps need to be (roughly three weeks is the current word) and the playoff format
How quarantine and testing procedures would work (for example, since Russia has seen a spike in cases, would players who spent time there be forced to self-isolate for 14 days upon return?)
What happens if someone tests positive (deputy commissioner Bill Daly has said that the NHL wants to get to a point where one or two positive tests won’t shut the entire operation down)
Q: You think the discussions going on about the ethics of AI have something to learn from the African concept of Ubuntu…
A: Yes. To think we can come up with a value system to guide AI without looking into other cultures’ value systems, and then to call it universal, is off.
As we observe the actual discriminatory effects of AI and technology on segments of society, often historically marginalized people, intuitively we know something is wrong with its underlying assumptions. It comes down to the concept of personhood, what it means to be human. Who counts as human and whose humanity does AI take into account? Different societies have come up with different answers to this fundamental question.
The growth of numerical analysis in sports is simply mesmerizing. Teams have been able to use the concepts of sports analytics to better strategize and make educated decisions on players they should add in their sport’s respective drafts and free agent periods. It’s not enough to know a player’s “point per game” output anymore; the growth of sports analytics has brought forward complex numerical variables to measure the advanced performance of players in all sports. Analytics can show us a variety of important elements of a player’s/team’s production or abilities, but at the same time there are some factors which cannot be defined by data. Analytics is what has driven some teams to their peak potential, which is why its growth is so rapid.
Sam Acho doesn’t believe incentives will tempt teams to hire minorities as head coaches and general managers. The NFL Players Association executive committee member said Sunday that cronyism is the issue as it stunts opportunity.
“The problem is, it can’t be about incentives. It’s gotta be about giving the right coaches the right opportunities,” Acho said during an ESPN radio interview. “The problem with the NFL is that there’s so much cronyism; it’s all about who you know. Oftentimes, NFL coaches aren’t the best coaches; they’re not. “Oftentimes, people talk about the politics and the business of football; it’s about who you know, and no one wants to talk about it.”