【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障4系列】【4-02】科技-sports

babybearmm

曾请示过神猴老大，这次我想来点娱乐性的话题——恰逢欧洲杯刚落幕，奥运会倒计时24天…. here it is!
希望今天的阅读能带给大家欢乐和新知，以及对自己的学习和工作的启迪。Enjoy~

[Audio]
Engineering SportExploring the technology and innovation behind sporting success...
http://richannel.org/collections/2012/engineering-sport#/engineering-sport
该片曾被RI (Royal Institute) Channel 评为” The week's best science videos”
上面那个网页里有文本(transcript)

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Vocabulary
Penalty          （足球）点球.  enalty shootout = 点球决战
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Winning a Soccer Penalty Shootout: Cheering Convincingly Increases Changes of Success

[计时一]

ScienceDaily (June 24, 2010) — Behaviour is contagious. If you see someone yawn or smile, it's often a matter of seconds before you do the same yourself. This copying behaviour also turns out to work on the soccer pitch. "The more convincingly someone celebrates their success with their teammates, the greater the chances that team will win," according to Dr. Gert-Jan Pepping, Sport Scientist and lecturer in Human Movement Sciences at the University of Groningen.

From an evolutionary point of view, this 'contagious' behaviour is easy to explain. The ability to copy certain behaviours is important to survive in social groups. Pepping: "A good example is the behaviour of a school of fish, such as herring or sardines. Only by synchronizing with each other, that is, doing exactly the same thing as much as possible, do they increase their chances of survival." In addition, copying behaviour has another function: learning from each other. These two functions imply that we communicate individual and group aims via movement. Also emotional movement behaviour, such as cheering, can be understood in this way.

Emotions are often understood and explained in the context of what has just happened. However, emotions can also influence the future, Pepping's research has revealed. His research group investigated whether the way soccer players express their delight at a successful penalty influences the final result of a penalty shootout. Pepping: "What's nice about a penalty shootout is that the individual aim of scoring a penalty directly serves the group aim of winning the match."

[252 words]

[计时二]

Positive attitude

Pepping and his research group (Moll, Jordet, & Pepping, 2010) studied a large number of penalty shootouts during important soccer matches, but only as long as the score in the shootout was still equal. After every shot at goal, the player was assessed on the degree to which he expressed happiness and pride after scoring. This revealed that the players who expressed this clearly, for example by throwing their arms up into the air, usually belonged to the winning team. "This enthusiastic behaviour infected the team with a positive attitude. Also important, the opposing team was made to feel that little bit more insecure." In the study this latter effect was shown by the finding that when someone cheered with both arms in the air, it was more than twice as likely that the next opponent would miss his penalty.

What's very important is that the scored goal is celebrated with the people you want to infect. Pepping: "If you cheer facing the supporters after you've scored a penalty, the supporters will get wildly enthusiastic. That's all very fine, but they're not the ones who have to perform at that moment. Your team members on the pitch are. It's very important to celebrate together -- that's what makes scoring contagious."

Motivating each other

The same principle is easy to project onto situations outside the sports field, according to Pepping. Even in an office situation you can motivate each other by dwelling on a good group performance and celebrating it with each other. That means that the whole team will share the feelings of pride and confidence, which raises performance levels. However, you should be careful not to exaggerate by taking the expressions of happiness or pride out of context, according to Pepping.

In some countries people tend to react to success in a less heated way than in others. "In the Netherlands many people seem to have forgotten how to react exuberantly." According to Pepping, if you want to increase your chances of success, both on the sports field and in daily life, it's important to 'take the brakes off'. It's natural to cheer in reaction to a victory. What's more, as revealed by the research, when individual and group interests coincide it's also a very functional reaction. More cheering means more success.

[385 words]


Soccer (Football) Players' Performance Is More Than the Sum of Their Parts

[计时三]

ScienceDaily (June 30, 2011) — Scientists have shown that soccer (football) players with superior ability in areas such as passing accuracy or sprint speed do not necessarily achieve better overall performance on the field (pitch).

Gwendolyn David, PhD researcher at the University of Queensland, says "Athletic abilities measured in the lab were not associated with any measure of performance on the pitch. In other words, it's not your ability, it's what you do with it that counts."

In the study, which is being presented at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Glasgow, 27 semi-professional male soccer players were tested in the lab on their abilities in athletic tasks including dribbling speed, jump distance and volley accuracy, sprint speed and passing accuracy.
Researchers then watched soccer matches and scored the subjects on their success in 'complex tasks' which brought together the abilities that had been measured in the lab with the skills needed for a soccer game. These included ball-interception, challenging another player for the ball, passing, shooting and blocking the ball.

This research provides important information for soccer team scouts, highlighting that measuring only athletic-type traits when identifying soccer players may result in missed talent. "The more skilful players, who achieve greater success on the pitch, are not necessarily the most athletic players," says Ms. David. This research may also inform coaches designing training regimes for players, suggesting that time spent actually playing might be much more valuable training than working on athletic abilities in the gym.

The results also showed that players can adopt different strategies on the pitch to maximize their success. Ms David explains: "Interestingly if a player is weaker at some aspects of the game, they can make up for this by attempting match 'tasks', such as tackling and passing, more often. This suggests that the old saying, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again can be a winning strategy."

These results may also apply to other sports, where players or participants need to combine athletic abilities with skill.

Finally this research might also shed light on animal behaviour, suggesting that the physical capabilities of an animal alone may not predict their success in complex tasks such as foraging or fighting.

[368 words]

Psychological Testing May Predict Success in Soccer

[计时四]

ScienceDaily (Apr. 5, 2012) — Measuring what are known as 'executive functions', which reflect the cognitive ability to deal with sudden problems, may make it possible to predict how good an elite soccer player will become in the future. This has been shown by a new study from Karolinska Institutet. Scientists believe for the first time that they have found the scientific key to what has previously been described as 'game intelligence' in successful soccer players.

It has long been known that physical ability and ball sense are not enough to become really good at soccer. A third vital component has often been mentioned: game intelligence, which is the ability to 'read' the play, to be always in the right place at the right time, and steal goals. Many people have regarded game intelligence to be almost a magical ability, something that is impossible to measure.

The scientists at Karolinska Institutet, however, claim that game intelligence is hardly mystical, and that it can be understood from a scientific perspective. It is, rather, an example of something that cognitive scientists call executive functions, which encompass the ability to be immediately creative, to be able to see new solutions to problems, to change tactics rapidly and to revise previous behaviour that has proved not to work.

"Our brains have specific systems that process information in just this manner, and we have validated methods within cognitive research to measure how well the executive functions work in an individual," says Dr Predrag Petrovic at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience.

[254 words]

[计时五]

Predrag Petrovic and his colleagues report in one study, to be published in the on-line scientific journal PLoS ONE, tests of certain executive functions in soccer players in Allsvenskan (the highest Swedish league) and in Division 1 (the league under Allsvenskan), a total of 57 elite soccer players. The scientists found that soccer players in both groups performed much better in tests of executive functions than the general population. And they found that players in Allsvenskan achieved much better results in these tests than players in Division 1.

The study then compared the test results with the performance of the players on the field. The scientists followed several of the soccer players for some years and recorded the number of goals and the number of assists each player made. In this way, each player was awarded points related to his or hers performance on the field. A clear correlation appeared between the results of the tests of executive functions and the number of points obtained on the soccer field (when corrected for such factors as a player's position and age).

It was thus shown that the best players had also performed best on the tests of executive functions. These results are unique, since they are based on scientifically standardized tests. Previously, researchers have used either specific tests from which it has not been possible to generalize the results, or studied specifically how heading the ball can cause cognitive abilities to deteriorate.

"We can imagine a situation in which cognitive tests of this type become a tool to develop new, successful soccer players. We need to study whether it is also possible to improve the executive functions through training, such that the improvement is expressed on the field. But there is probably a hereditary component, and a component that can be developed by training," says Torbjörn Vestberg, psychologist and a member of the research group that carried out the study.

[319 words]



[越障]

Do Soccer Players Choke?
Assessing the research on penalty kicks and pressure.


By Phil Birnbaum|Posted Friday, July 9, 2010, at 12:44 PM ET

While Spain is a modest favorite over the Netherlands to win Sunday's World Cup final, the matchup is not lopsided by any means. That means there's a reasonably good chance that, after 120 minutes of play between two fairly even teams, the game will come down to penalty kicks. Whether you greet that prospect with a casual fan's delight or a purist's horror, there is no question that a penalty shootout is dramatic and stressful. If the game does go to penalties, there will be at least one moment when the entire tournament—and with it a lifetime of glory or infamy—comes down to a single kick, just as last week's infamous Ghana-Uruguay came down to a missed penalty by Ghanaian striker Asamoah Gyan.

How would you hold up under that kind of pressure? That's an ongoing question in sports psychology—whether people sometimes exhibit a tendency to "choke" when they're under pressure or, alternatively, to raise their level of performance when the situation demands it. According to a handful of published studies, choking does exist in soccer. Nevertheless, I'm a choking skeptic—from where I sit, the evidence that penalty kickers succumb to pressure is very weak.

The "Yerkes-Dodson Law" predicts that participants in a penalty shootout should buckle under pressure. According to the theory, human performance follows an "inverted U shape." Under the effect of mild stress, or "arousal," proficiency improves as the subject expends more concentration and energy. But past a certain point, too much pressure leads to panic and attention problems, and choking ensues.

Outside the laboratory, it's hard to come up with experiments to test the "inverted U" theory. How can you determine how much stress a subject is under? And how can you find a group of subjects who do exactly the same task, so you'll be able to compare them properly?

That's where penalty kicks come back in. Psychologists love to study penalties because they provide easy answers to the above questions. How much stress is the subject under? That can be estimated from the score and the game situation. Plus, every penalty kick is taken under exactly the same rules and conditions (save the identity of the goalkeeper, which, the consensus is, doesn't matter nearly as much as the identity of the kicker).

The penalty kick, then, seems like the perfect laboratory to study how we respond to pressure. A handful of researchers, after sifting through penalty shootout data, have determined that soccer players do show a tendency to choke under stress. In one study, described in last month's New York Times, researcher Gier Jordet looked at a dataset of important international matches and found that when a team needed an immediate goal to win a shootout (and the game), it succeeded 90 percent of the time. But when a team needed a goal simply to tie the shootout, and a miss would mean an immediate loss, it succeeded only 60 percent of the time. (The overall average on penalties was 79 percent, as Jordet and colleagues reported in this paper.) David A. Savage and Benno Torgler found similar results in their own study. (The Savage-Torgler paper doesn't seem to give a nontechnical interpretation of the numbers, but if I understand their method properly, their findings seem comparable to Jordet's.)

Still, despite the two studies reaching such similar conclusions, I'm not convinced that penalty kickers choke under pressure.

Why not? First, the effect—a 90 percent success rate on "immediate win" shots compared with 60 percent on "immediate loss" shots—seems implausibly large. Implicit in these studies is the assumption that all players respond the same to stress. But isn't it reasonable to assume that athletes react to stress differently? For any given stressful situation, some of the kickers might be in the rising portion of the "inverted U" and still be at their best. Suppose, then, that in an "immediate loss" situation, half the kickers are still "clutch," with 90 percent conversion rates, and the other half choke. For the average of the two groups to wind up at the observed rate of 60 percent, the "chokers" would have to convert at the rate of 30 percent. That just doesn't seem right. Not only is that figure absurdly low, but you also have to accept that shooting for the win is much, much less stressful than shooting for the tie—so much less stressful, in fact, that it bumps your chances all the way up from 30 percent to 90 percent. Does that really seem reasonable?

Second, we need to think about the context of the "immediate loss" kicks. In a penalty shootout, each team gets to pick its five best shooters. If the contest is still tied after five kicks apiece, the shootout goes to "sudden death"—if the first team makes its kick, the second team has to score or it will lose the game. In this sudden death phase, each squad must deploy its lesser shooters, the preferred five having already been used in the first phase of the shootout. It's in these situations—when less-skilled players are likely to be shooting—that many of the "immediate loss" kicks happen.

Suppose the score is tied after five kicks each. The first team's sixth kick will never be an "immediate win" or an "immediate loss" kick—it either takes the lead or preserves the tie. The second team's sixth kick, on the other hand, will always be an "immediate win" or "immediate loss" kick. But it will be an "immediate loss" kick much more often than an "immediate win" kick, because the first team will have scored on its previous kick much more often than it will have missed. The "immediate loss" category, then, will almost certainly carry a larger proportion of worse players than the "immediate win" group. That means we should expect worse performance on "immediate loss" kicks even if stress plays no role at all.

How significant is this factor? I don't really know for sure. My gut feeling is that it's big enough to explain the statistical significance of the small "immediate win" improvement, but not enough to negate the larger "immediate loss" difference the studies found.

It's also worth noting that even though the results in these reports were reported as statistically significant, they're based on fairly small samples. The Savage/Torgler study was based on only 49 "immediate loss" kicks, meaning the "choking" conclusion is based on a mere handful of extra misses.

In search of a larger sample, I was led by Google Scholar to this study by Thomas J. Dohmen. Dohmen, who looked at the 40-year history of in-game penalty kicks in Germany's Bundesliga, found one situation that was statistically significant: home kickers were more likely to "miss by choking." (Dohmen's definition of choking: missing the net or hitting the posts or crossbar.) The suggestion here is that the expectations of the home crowd stress the kicker to the extent that he's more likely to miss completely.

The finding was based on 3,619 penalty kicks, about 10 times as many as the other studies. Still, the narrow definition of "choke" meant that there were only 59 such misses by the visiting teams. If you took 15 chokes by home teams and handed them to visiting teams—that's one choke every three years—the effect would disappear. And, of course, there's the more obvious criticism: If playing at home is so stressful, how do you explain home field advantage?

So: Three studies, all of which claim to have confirmation that penalty kickers choke. Still, I'm skeptical that Asamoah Gyan choked when he missed that kick for Ghana. And if some poor Spanish or Dutch player botches a penalty kick on Sunday, I won't be calling him a choker either. If you miss a kick in the World Cup final, though, I'm not sure that's much of a comfort.

[1339 words]

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2010/07/do_soccer_players_choke.single.html

teddybearj4

哇哈哈~baby姐的这期好娱乐的样纸~ 先占沙发一个~刚刚考回来就占到沙发！后面的考试一定人品大爆发！！！

人暂时离开小分队，心还在做阅读~~(= =呃，这~~~)  离考完试一起来补~^^

harryhenry

占

ladyMcc

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relationship between shootout and pressure,positive effect and negative effect
the best laboratory is on the pitch.
several researchers claim that there are explicit relation.
the author oppose the finding above in three aspects,
first  not resonable
second immediate......
third  small sample...
oppinion  not sure with the relationship

暮已央

来了来了~今日baby姐姐的文好可爱~不过偶不太关注体育的说~
计时：
1:08；
copying behaviors能影响一个球队是否获胜，同样，情绪的表达很能影响人；
1:32；
P及他的团队研究了足球赛事后发现，成功点球的人把双臂举起与队友欢呼，他们队胜利的可能性大，
而对手可能会因此丧失安全感，不仅是足球，办公室中与团队分享喜悦骄傲都很能激励人，也更容易成功。
2:08；
GD做了一个实验，证明了足球运动员的运动能力与他在赛场上的表现无关
重要的不是能力而是你真正进了多少球，往往最受重视的人不是那个运动能力最强的人，教练们要因此制定正确的策略来训练，
这个研究对于其他运动，甚至动物行为都有指导意义；
1:35；
KI的科学家发现
现在有一个除了身体素质和球感以外的第三重要因素：game intelligence，
这是考察运动员临场反应能力的重要因素，许多成功的球员身上可以找到，甚至能预言比赛的成功与否，
可以用科学的方式解释它；
1:57；
做了一组实验，有两对人A和D，两队都比普通人,D队又比A队好；
主要是关于executive function的实验，这个function与球员生涯中的点数是有关联的
然后展望了一下未来的研究方向，是否能据此培养球员训练球队，这又跟什么其他因素有关呢。
越障：
9:10；
点球大战在足球赛中很奇妙，它可能会让球员产生巨大心理压力导致“choke ”
球员要在巨大压力面前hold住，对于压力，一些人会变得非常weak，压力过大会导致各种心理问题；
心理学家特别爱研究点球大战，因为这个场景可以不断出现也有恒定不变的规则
研究实验表明球员的表现是一个U型图，这个理论在两个研究中都有数据体现，均支持在压力下choke的说法
而作者不支持这个说法，
理由一：之前的数据90%（在某情况下罚进）与60%（在某情况下罚失）都太large了
理由二：要仔细想想immediate loss kicks的内容，然后发现问题
并且是wrong noting的，因为样本小，
另一个统计上的重要数据显示主场作战的球员失败可能性大
这一点作者也给出了反驳，并质问那么如何解释主场优势。
3个研究都认为pressure kicker choke，“我”不这么认为。

jolene91

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猫咪团团

谢谢baby~是我爱的话题呢

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树姑娘

占座先，baby的文章，期待~
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果然好文，赞~越障还是晕~要努力啊~
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Olina加油

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铁板神猴

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1'43'' positive atittude & motivate each other
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