Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 19, 2021

… Among the Nets singled out, and trashed by VOS Gasbags for sitting against Philly Wednesday night, was veteran forward LaMarcus Aldridge, who was listed out with a non-COVID-19 illness.

“How many days off do you need?” Stephen A. Smith asked Wednesday afternoon on Twitter. “You Blake (Griffin), you LaMarcus Aldridge. For what? What have you been doing that you need a vacation day? Oh, I’m sorry a personal day.”

On Thursday, Aldridge suddenly announced his retirement because of an irregular heartbeat. He said he experienced his heart racing during Saturday’s game against the Lakers. He wound up in the hospital to get checked out.

The wide receiver opted out of Minnesota’s season twice, but says those decisions taught him about who he is and what kind of person his future NFL team is getting.

NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith said it is the union’s position that it is in the best interest of players to not participate in voluntary offseason workouts.

“I think what a lot of players have said that they’ve heard from their coaches is that they need to show up,” Smith said Saturday on SportsCenter. “We’ve known for years that this is a voluntary workout where a lot of coaches put their finger on the scale and, while they call it voluntary, they expect players to show up.

I’m a hybrid, an early riser and a sensitive sleeper who has a hard time wrangling my thoughts in the dark. I don’t often struggle to fall asleep, but I’m usually up and down at least a few times in the night and I rarely make it to my 5:45 a.m. alarm. I know that my sleep habits aren’t ideal — especially for a competitive marathoner — but I also know that stressing only exacerbates them.

Fortunately, I’m capable of training and racing well off what others might consider skimpy sleep, because I’ve been doing it for years. I do the best I can, leaning heavily on the tips and tricks I’ve picked up over time (and ditching conventional wisdom when it gets in the way). Here are eight things I do to set myself up for solid sleep.

… As different as Toronto and Philly are, both share a particular focus on their respective academy systems. By now, the Union’s approach, which has been compared to Ajax’s more than a few times, will be familiar to most readers. The club’s leaders long ago resolved to build a player development pipeline that could eventually enable them to punch above their financial weight in MLS, and fuel the US national teams in the process. That undertaking bore fruit with the capture of last year’s Supporters’ Shield. Selling standouts Brenden Aaronson and Mark McKenzie to European clubs for seven-figure transfer fees over the winter marked another breakthrough and a new phase of the project.

… Taking over for a struggling student alleviates frustration in the moment, but in the long run, it can be demotivating. In recent experimental research, my colleagues and I found that when adults take over on a challenging task, children are more likely to quit sooner on the next one. Kids may interpret the help as proof that they aren’t capable or that an adult will always complete hard tasks for them, so putting in more effort isn’t worthwhile.

It’s natural to want to intervene when you see your child struggle. But taking over isn’t usually a good idea. Instead of overcoming challenges for your child, help them recognize the next possible steps that they can tackle on their own. There’s a world of difference between offering suggestions and doing it yourself.

We study a model of social learning and communication using hard anecdotal evidence. There are two Bayesian agents (a sender and a receiver) who wish to communicate. The receiver must take an action whose payoff depends on their personal preferences and an unknown state of the world. The sender has access to a collection of n samples correlated with the state of the world, which we think of as specific anecdotes or pieces of evidence, and can send exactly one of these samples to the receiver in order to influence her choice of action. Importantly, the sender’s personal preferences may differ from the receiver’s, which affects the seller’s strategic choice of which anecdote to send.

We show that if the sender’s communication scheme is observable to the receiver (that is, the choice of which anecdote to send given the set they receive), then they will choose an unbiased and maximally informative communication scheme, no matter the difference in preferences. Without observability, however, even a small difference in preferences can lead to a significant bias in the choice of anecdote, which the receiver must then account for. This can significantly reduce the informativeness of the signal, leading to substantial utility loss for both sides. One implication is informational homophily: a receiver can rationally prefer to obtain information from a poorly-informed sender with aligned preferences, rather than a knowledgeable expert whose preferences may differ from her own.

Smart clothes – also referred to as high tech clothing, smart garments, smart wear, electronic textiles, smart textiles, e-textiles, monitor clothing, or smart fabrics, are clothes enhanced with technology to add functionality beyond traditional use. Most smart clothes are made from advanced textiles with interwoven circuitry. Then, sensors and additional hardware are embedded for further smart functionality.

Smart clothes can connect to apps on smartphones or software on secondary devices such as laptops and PCs via bluetooth or wi-fi. Via the smart sensors, these smart garments collect activity metrics and key biometrics. The data is sent to AI-powered apps on your smartphone, to help with your health and performance.

However, wireless connectivity isn’t necessary to classify a garment as a type of smart clothing.

In the past 20 years, drones have become a fixture of modern life. From photography and journalism to package delivery and crop monitoring, companies of all kinds are increasingly turning to unmanned flying devices to cut costs, increase efficiency, decrease workload or simply do what humans cannot.

Where the world hasn’t seen drones play a prominent role, however, is in the world of health and fitness. But that may be changing.

Researchers say that the recreational drone market — valued at $2.33 billion in 2020, according to data from Research and Markets — could come together with the $30 billion wearables market to produce what may one day be a fixture in personal health and wellness: fitness drones.

Substrate plays an essential role in the construction of flexible electrode and related wearable sensors. Compared with conventional flexible substrates such as Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the common transparent adhesive tape exhibits the unique advantages in the non‐adhesive surface with good printability, allowing the conductive layer to be deposited directly on its surface, and in another adhesive surface with good fastening, thus facilitating the fabrication of as‐prepared electrode in subsequent wearable sensors. Herein, we constructed a new type of flexible sensor to detect ascorbic acid which is closely related to human health in sweat by integrating flexible electrode based on transparent adhesive tape with potentiostat that incorporate the critical signal conditioning, processing, and transmission functions. Experiment results show that resulting electrode still has the good electrochemistry performance even after 1000 bending cycles (20 % bending degrees). By connecting as‐prepared flexible electrode to the potentiostat to carry out real time analysis, the resulting sensor exhibits excellent sensitivity, detection limit and repeatability (0.15 V detection potential vs printed Ag/AgCl reference electrode, 3.8 μM detection limit, 25 μM‐1 mM linearity, and good selectivity).

Thanks to the convergence of on-device intelligence with AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities, simple self-contained machines have turned into intelligent devices. Enabled with endpoint AI, these devices can communicate with other devices and act in real-time, unlocking new use case with substantial benefits—especially in health and wellness:

Benefit 1: Real-Time Health Insights

Devices driven by endpoint AI offer more benefits for users than typical IoT devices. Beyond the uninterrupted monitoring of key metrics, such as blood oxygen and pressure, heart rate, perspiration, and glucose levels, endpoint AI can generate additional insights over time.

The muscles of elite endurance athletes boast high numbers of extra-efficient mitochondria, the ‘energy’ powerhouse of muscle cells. Unlocking the secrets of these cellular components could yield gains for future Olympians.

Leading exercise biologist Professor John Hawley, director of ACU’s Mary Mackillop Institute for Health Research, lends his expertise in this Nature Outlook: Sports science piece looking at whether better mitochondria can help athletes to make gains in performance.

Professor Hawley says elite endurance athletes pack many more of these aerobic power plants into muscle cells than the average person.

… By 2018, my colleague George Chahrouri and I had developed enough quality football-based machine learning models for PFF CEO Neil Hornsby and former Cincinnati Bengal and PFF majority owner Cris Collinsworth to offer us the job of a lifetime: the opportunity to work full time in football as data scientists for the world’s most prominent football data company. While it was not easy to leave my position at UW–La Crosse, especially because I had just earned tenure the previous year, it was a risk I decided to take.

Now almost three years later, I have held several different roles at PFF as the company continues to grow. From data scientist to Vice President of Research and Development, I have consulted with teams on the use of our data to evaluate players, coaches, and front office members. I have also mentored other employees who have grown to do the same thing. When PFF moved from a data provider to an analysis company, our group began to build machine learning models for fantasy football and simulators for gambling. Our dashboards and contract projections help pair agents with rising professional prospects, and our text and video content provide alternatives to traditional sports media. I have been lucky enough to appear on NFL Network and frequent talk radio shows in almost every major media market in the country to discuss fantasy football, gambling, and the NFL draft. PFF’s work has been featured on NBC Sunday Night Football as well as the TODAY show. In fact, MSNBC’s national political correspondent Steve Kornacki used our simulation to analyze the playoff picture in the same engaging way he analyzed the electoral map during the 2020 U.S. election season.

Seattle has typically looked for very specific players from a size/athletic traits standpoint at the outside cornerback position. Which players fit those prior thresholds and could this be the season that the organization overlooks its strict arm length preference?