In this study we investigate the effect of modeling type and reflection on the acquisition of dart-throwing skills, selfefficacy beliefs and self-reaction scores by replicating a study by Kitsantas, Zimmerman, and Cleary (2000). Participants observing a coping model were expected to surpass participants observing a mastery model who in turn were expected to outperform participants who learned w...

Seed Throwing Optimization is an easy to implement probabilistic metaheuristic for multimodal function optimization with roots in hill climbing and the evolutionary computation like technique Harmony Search. It is a randomized Gradient Ascent with multiple initial states and the possibility to limit exploration to only paths which have shown potential. In this paper, the speed of convergence of...

Treatment of the overhead throwing athlete is among the more challenging aspects of orthopaedic sports medicine. Awareness and understanding of the throwing motion and the supraphysiologic forces to which the structures of the shoulder are subjected are essential to diagnosis and treatment. Pain and dysfunction in the throwing shoulder may be attributed to numerous etiologies, including scapula...

We present a quantitative analysis of throwing ability for major league outfielders and catchers. We use detailed game event data to tabulate success and failure events in outfielder and catcher throwing opportunities. We attribute a run contribution to each success or failure which are tabulated for each player in each season. We use four seasons of data to estimate the overall throwing abilit...

The purpose of this study was to compare the throwing kinematics and kinetics of youth catchers and pitchers. It was hypothesized that catchers and pitchers would exhibit differences throughout the throwing motion. Descriptive statistics were used to investigate kinematics during the four events of throwing: foot contact (FC), maximum shoulder external rotation (MER), ball release (BR) and maxi...

Elbow injuries in the throwing athlete are common. Because of the tremendous medial tensile forces and lateral compressive forces borne by the elbow, there is a wide array of injuries that occur. A detailed history and physical examination are necessary for an accurate diagnosis. Many of the injuries discussed can be treated successfully with conservative measures followed by aggressive physica...

This report reviews the anatomy, overhead throwing biomechanics, injury mechanism and incidence, physical examination and diagnosis, diagnostic imaging and conservative treatment of medial elbow injuries in young throwing athletes. Based on the information a clinical management decision-making algorithm is presented.

Quiet eye training (QET) may be a more effective method for teaching children to catch than traditional training (TT) methods, but it is unclear if the benefits accrued persist in the long term. Thirty children were randomly allocated into a QET or TT group and, while wearing a mobile eye tracker, underwent baseline testing, training and two retention tests over a period of eight weeks, using a...

In this paper we describe how a robotic arm can acquire new skills, and specifically how to play beer pong. We used two different optimization algorithms are described and applied to teach a robot how to play the game beer pong. The first algorithm is the gradient based finite difference method. The second one is the expectation maximization algorithm PoWER. Their performance, consisting of bot...