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Here’s the story.
Remember the days when you just watched the players to see how they were doing?
As baseball’s statistical revolution marches on, the last refuge for the baseball aesthete has been the sport’s less quantifiable skills: outfielders’ arm strength, base-running efficiency and other you-won’t-find-that-in-the-box-score esoterica. But debates over the quickest center fielder or the rangiest shortstop are about to graduate from argument to algorithm.
A new camera and software system in its final testing phases will record the exact speed and location of the ball and every player on the field, allowing the most digitized of sports to be overrun anew by hundreds of innovative statistics that will rate players more accurately, almost certainly affect their compensation and perhaps alter how the game itself is played.
[…]
Bowman said he preferred the data be more open so that statistically minded fans and academics could brainstorm ways to wring useful information from what would become petabytes of raw data. Software and artificial-intelligence algorithms must still be developed to turn simple time-stamped x-y-z coordinates into batted-ball speeds, throwing distances and comparative tools to make the data come alive.
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
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Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said he will discuss with Apple how his role on its board might change after Google’s move to launch a new operating system.
Because Google’s new Chrome OS would compete with Apple’s own computer software, Schmidt said he would talk to the Mac computer maker about whether he should recuse himself from Apple’s board.
“I’ll talk to the Apple people. At the moment, there’s no issue,” Schmidt told reporters at a Sun Valley media and technology conference organized by boutique investment bank Allen & Co.
While Google and Apple compete directly or indirectly in a number of areas — the most obvious being the smartphone market — Google’s announcement this week that it will launch an operating system raised more questions about the relationship between their boards…
Schmidt began recusing himself from Apple board meetings where the iPhone was discussed after Google launched its own Android mobile phone operating system.
Google’s Chrome OS — expected to debut in netbooks in the second half of 2010 — would compete directly with Apple’s OS X platform.
Schmidt said Chrome, which is based on open-source technology, worked with Apple’s Safari browser.
“There’s a very large collaboration with respect to Chrome and Safari,” he said.
RTFA if you absolutely, positively have to hear about Steve Jobs health.
Are they afraid the prisoners will find things in the books that will help them with appeals? Might they read passages stating Obama’s belief that some Gitmo’d people’s incarceration, torture, etc was possibly illegal? If not that, I can’t even guess at a reason for this.
The federal government’s most secure prison has determined that two books written by President Barack Obama contain material “potentially detrimental to national security” and rejected an inmate’s request to read them.
Ahmed Omar Abu Ali is serving a 30-year sentence at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo., for joining al-Qaida and plotting to assassinate then-President George W. Bush. Last year, Abu Ali requested two books written by Obama: “Dreams from My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope.”
But prison officials, citing guidance from the FBI, determined that passages in both books contain information that could damage national security.
Doesn’t this imply the books are too dangerous for anyone to read? Guess they’ll have to be pulled from bookstores and burned.
We’re paying these jokers for…??? Oh, right. They have to do fund raising for the next election.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it.
“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.
Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.
In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.
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In 1999, there was an attempt to prosecute a newspaper for a cartoon mocking the church, but the judge in that case noted that he could not prosecute, because there was no definition of what legally constituted blasphemy. Well now there is. And it concerns itself with what might or might not cause “outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion” (note, not just Christianity, as was the case with English blasphemy law: this is, at least, equal opportunities idiocy).
As Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland has pointed out:
“The proposed law does not protect religious belief; it incentivises outrage and it criminalises free speech. Under this proposed law, if a person expresses one belief about gods, and other people think that this insults a different belief about gods, then these people can become outraged, and this outrage can make it illegal for the first person to express his or her beliefs.”
So Irish law has now enshrined the notion that the taking of offence is more important than free expression. If something might cause a motivated group to be “outraged”, rather than, say, cause them to live in fear, then it is illegal, with a fine of up to €25,000 payable.
Why would anyone need a blasphemy law?
FT.com – Fed warns on Congressional scrutiny — Now ask yourself who is really in charge. This is going to blow up into a scandal. If they didn’t want the audit, the could have stonewalled. This is a bad idea.
The Federal Reserve warned on Thursday that a growing congressional threat to curtail its independence would destabilise markets and raise the cost of servicing US debt for “current and future generations”.
Ron Paul, the Texas Republican, has gathered the support of a majority of the House of Representatives for a bill that would audit the Fed’s monetary policy decisions. He told a Congressional hearing he wanted the power to prevent the Fed being “secret and clandestine and serving special interests”.
Found by Aric Mackey.
- Did Google pre-announce the Chrome OS just to one-up the Monday MSFT announcement of web apps? Perhaps.
- BT going big into fiber optics and 40Mbps with 1.5 million connections.
- Allen and Company Sun Valley event seems preoccupied by Twitter.
- Germans getting sick of Neo-Nazi sites.
- Ericsson taking over management of Sprint network.
- Sharp going all LED backlighting with new panels.
- Americans dumb about science. No kidding?
- Episode brought to you by Squarespace.com code word TECH. And Avis.com/tech5.
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Creeps who swiped a Lady Liberty replica from outside Brooklyn coffee and book shop last month have posted a sick Web video showing them sawing off the statue’s blindfolded head.
The YouTube video, which the NYPD is investigating, ends with the slogan “Death to America” appearing on the screen.
It evokes the terrorist-produced videos of the decapitations of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and American entrepreneur Nicholas Berg. The Fiberglas statue, which stands 8 feet tall and weighs 200 pounds, until June 21 stood outside the Vox Pop shop on Cortelyou Road in Ditmas Park.
As Liberty’s head is being sawed off in the video, the words, “We don’t want your freedom” are flashed on the screen.
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, has told the House Intelligence Committee in closed-door testimony that the C.I.A. concealed “significant actions” from Congress from 2001 until late last month, seven Democratic committee members said.
In a June 26 letter to Mr. Panetta discussing his testimony, Democrats said that the agency had “misled members” of Congress for eight years about the classified matters, which the letter did not disclose. “This is similar to other deceptions of which we are aware from other recent periods,” said the letter, made public late Wednesday by Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, one of the signers.
In an interview, Mr. Holt declined to reveal the nature of the C.I.A.’s alleged deceptions,. But he said, “We wouldn’t be doing this over a trivial matter…”
The question of the C.I.A.’s candor with the Congressional oversight committees has been hotly disputed since Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of failing to disclose in a 2002 briefing that it had used waterboarding against a terrorism suspect. Ms. Pelosi said the agency routinely misled Congress, though she later said she intended to fault the Bush administration rather than career intelligence officials.
Uh, when did they say this started?
Everybody panic! The horror that Al Gore told us about is happening even faster!!!
A new study from NASA has revealed how Arctic sea ice thinned between the winters of 2004 and 2008. The study utilized NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite, known as ICESat, to allow researchers with NASA and the University of Washington in Seattle to, for the first time, measure ice coverage over the entire Arctic basin.
In the winter, Arctic ice thickens due to the sun setting for several months and ocean currents lessening. In the summer, there are long sunlight-filled days, stronger ocean currents, and wind to melt the ice. A lot of ice melts each year, but each year some thicker, older ice survives. This older ice is 9 feet thick, typically, as opposed to the single-year ice which is on average 6 feet thick.
According to the satellite measurements, the ice has been thinning at a rate of 7 inches per year for a total of 2.2 feet in the last year. Multi-year ice, meanwhile, shrunk by 42 percent. Ice cover, meanwhile decreased 595,000 square miles — nearly the size of Alaska’s land area.
It’s not all bad news:
A melting ice cap may unlock new oil deposits and shipping routes.
Guess we’ll soon be like the Dilbert characters, the Elbonians, whose land is under water and mud.
- Google preannounced Chrome OS to shake up Microsoft.
- Cyber-attack seems to have come from N. Korea using a MyDoom variant.
- Kindle lowered to $299.
- IE 8 is custom made for hackers, says Computerworld.
- VMware has low hopes for Intel getting into mobile space.
- HTC still makes more money from MSFT phones over Android phones.
- Spam tool maker gets busted.
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