Saturday, January 24, 2015
If a Car Is Going to Self-Drive, It Might as Well Self-Park, Too
Technology may soon render another skill superfluous: parking a car.
Sensors and software promise to free owners from parking angst, turning vehicles into robotic chauffeurs, dropping off drivers and then parking themselves, no human intervention required.
BMW demonstrated such technical prowess this month with a specially equipped BMW i3 at the International CES event. At a multilevel garage of the SLS Las Vegas hotel, a BMW engineer spoke into a Samsung Gear S smartwatch.
“BMW, go park yourself,” and off the electric vehicle scurried to an empty parking spot, turning and backing itself perfectly into the open space. To retrieve the car, a tap on the watch and another command, “BMW, pick me up,” returned the car to the engineer.
The i3 was equipped with laser scanners, including two mounted in the front right and left quarter panels. No G.P.S. was used. Instead, the car relied on a map of the parking garage and an onboard cellular data connection. No smartphone was needed. The Samsung watch includes its own cellular connection, so commands are sent to a BMW server, which then relays the instructions to the car, said Yves Pilat, one of BMW’s engineers developing the feature. BMW calls it fully automated remote valet parking.
Several other companies have demonstrated similar self-parking cars, including Toyota, Valeo and Volkswagen. In many ways, the development is an extension of existing parallel parking assist technologies. In such systems, the driver remains behind the wheel, but with a push of a button, the vehicle measures the parking space and then swings backs into it without any input from the human operator.
“Now, the concept is you can do any kind of parking spot,” Mr. Pilat said, and without a driver.
Aside from preventing Ferris Bueller-like joy rides by garage attendants, the advantage of introducing autonomous car features to handle parking has several benefits, foremost being to win over skeptical consumers.
Parallel parking was “the first step in getting drivers to understand that there are some tasks the car might be able to do better than you,” said John Hanson, Toyota Motor Sales USA’s national manager for advanced technology and business communication.
Sensors and software promise to free owners from parking angst, turning vehicles into robotic chauffeurs, dropping off drivers and then parking themselves, no human intervention required.
BMW demonstrated such technical prowess this month with a specially equipped BMW i3 at the International CES event. At a multilevel garage of the SLS Las Vegas hotel, a BMW engineer spoke into a Samsung Gear S smartwatch.“BMW, go park yourself,” and off the electric vehicle scurried to an empty parking spot, turning and backing itself perfectly into the open space. To retrieve the car, a tap on the watch and another command, “BMW, pick me up,” returned the car to the engineer.
The i3 was equipped with laser scanners, including two mounted in the front right and left quarter panels. No G.P.S. was used. Instead, the car relied on a map of the parking garage and an onboard cellular data connection. No smartphone was needed. The Samsung watch includes its own cellular connection, so commands are sent to a BMW server, which then relays the instructions to the car, said Yves Pilat, one of BMW’s engineers developing the feature. BMW calls it fully automated remote valet parking.
Several other companies have demonstrated similar self-parking cars, including Toyota, Valeo and Volkswagen. In many ways, the development is an extension of existing parallel parking assist technologies. In such systems, the driver remains behind the wheel, but with a push of a button, the vehicle measures the parking space and then swings backs into it without any input from the human operator.
“Now, the concept is you can do any kind of parking spot,” Mr. Pilat said, and without a driver.
Aside from preventing Ferris Bueller-like joy rides by garage attendants, the advantage of introducing autonomous car features to handle parking has several benefits, foremost being to win over skeptical consumers.
Parallel parking was “the first step in getting drivers to understand that there are some tasks the car might be able to do better than you,” said John Hanson, Toyota Motor Sales USA’s national manager for advanced technology and business communication.
by John R. Quain, NY Times | Read more:
Image: BMW AG
Friday, January 23, 2015
4 Ways Copyright Law Actually Controls Your Whole Digital Life
We all know that copyright law means you shouldn’t download copies of movies from shady torrent sites, and that you should pay for the music you listen to. We know it means people and companies have rights to stuff they make, like photos and music and books, and that there are legal and illegal ways of sharing those things.
But what most of us don’t really think about is how broad the net of copyright law really is.
Nominally, copyright protects content creators. If you write a book, or sing a song, or take a photograph, you have the right to control distribution of — to make money from — your original work. And, for a period of time, you are the only one with that right. If you take a picture, I can’t then print a copy and sell it for money without your explicit permission, because you have the right to the income from your own hard work. That much makes sense: legally and ethically, it’s yours.
That’s how it works in theory, anyway. Realistically, here in 2015, copyright law is a far cry from the original question of who has the right to copy a work. Now, copyright law is so much bigger.
The tendrils of copyright law reach worldwide into almost everything we consume, do, and are in the digital era. The rules and regulations about how the internet works, what privacy rights you have, and how the entire digital economy functions all spring from copyright. It’s everything from why a bar can’t buy a really big-screen TV to why you don’t actually own any of the media you pay for.
If you ever use a computer, or read, watch, look at, use, or listen to any piece of media or software created since printing or recording were invented, copyright law affects you.
Writer Cory Doctorow, probably best known for his work with tech and culture site Boing Boing, is a copyright expert. He’s joined a special project with the EFFto advocate for easing the burdens of DRM on consumers and content creators. And late last year he published a book, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, explaining the impact of copyright law on pretty much everyone in clear, plain English.
Doctorow’s book is a readable, concise look at the breadth and scope of copyright law in the modern age. Here are four key takeaways we should all keep in mind.
1. Copyright is all about locks.
At this point, DRM and software go hand in hand. Everything comes with some kind of anti-sharing, anti-piracy, anti-copying, anti-any-unauthorized-use key built in.
The first digital battleground was music. After the Napster era dawned and crashed at the turn of the century, Apple’s iTunes and iPod launched an era of device-locked music. Now, the music industry has largely backed away from DRM (both iTunes and Amazon sell DRM-free tracks and albums), in favor of streaming services — but everything else is locked by platform.
But, Doctorow points out: all digital locks break. Every one can be broken, and is, usually quickly. From DRM on Kindle books to tech that supposedly locks down features on a blu-ray disc — any piece of code ends up with a cracked version all over the internet within, usually, minutes.
And that leads to…
But what most of us don’t really think about is how broad the net of copyright law really is.
Nominally, copyright protects content creators. If you write a book, or sing a song, or take a photograph, you have the right to control distribution of — to make money from — your original work. And, for a period of time, you are the only one with that right. If you take a picture, I can’t then print a copy and sell it for money without your explicit permission, because you have the right to the income from your own hard work. That much makes sense: legally and ethically, it’s yours.That’s how it works in theory, anyway. Realistically, here in 2015, copyright law is a far cry from the original question of who has the right to copy a work. Now, copyright law is so much bigger.
The tendrils of copyright law reach worldwide into almost everything we consume, do, and are in the digital era. The rules and regulations about how the internet works, what privacy rights you have, and how the entire digital economy functions all spring from copyright. It’s everything from why a bar can’t buy a really big-screen TV to why you don’t actually own any of the media you pay for.
If you ever use a computer, or read, watch, look at, use, or listen to any piece of media or software created since printing or recording were invented, copyright law affects you.
Writer Cory Doctorow, probably best known for his work with tech and culture site Boing Boing, is a copyright expert. He’s joined a special project with the EFFto advocate for easing the burdens of DRM on consumers and content creators. And late last year he published a book, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, explaining the impact of copyright law on pretty much everyone in clear, plain English.
Doctorow’s book is a readable, concise look at the breadth and scope of copyright law in the modern age. Here are four key takeaways we should all keep in mind.
1. Copyright is all about locks.
At this point, DRM and software go hand in hand. Everything comes with some kind of anti-sharing, anti-piracy, anti-copying, anti-any-unauthorized-use key built in.
The first digital battleground was music. After the Napster era dawned and crashed at the turn of the century, Apple’s iTunes and iPod launched an era of device-locked music. Now, the music industry has largely backed away from DRM (both iTunes and Amazon sell DRM-free tracks and albums), in favor of streaming services — but everything else is locked by platform.
But, Doctorow points out: all digital locks break. Every one can be broken, and is, usually quickly. From DRM on Kindle books to tech that supposedly locks down features on a blu-ray disc — any piece of code ends up with a cracked version all over the internet within, usually, minutes.
And that leads to…
by Kate Cox, Consumerist | Read more:
Image: Consumerist
What You Can Learn from Oakland's Raw ALPR Data
Police cars mounted with automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) wind their way through the streets of Oakland like a “Snake” game on an old cell phone. Instead of eating up pixels of food, these cameras gobble down thousands of license plates each day. And instead of growing a longer tail, ALPRs feed into a giant database of locational data as they conduct surveillance on every driver within the city limits, and sometimes beyond.
This is the portrait that emerged when EFF analyzed eight days of ALPR data provided by the City of Oakland in response to a request under the California Public Records Act.
As cities and counties across the country pursue new law enforcement technologies, EFF is on a mission to use transparency as a counterbalance to mass surveillance. Since May 2013, EFF and the ACLU of Southern California have been engaged in a legal battle with two Los Angeles law enforcement agencies who are refusing to hand over a week’s worth of ALPR data. San Diego County, another jurisdiction, has similarly fought efforts by citizens to obtain access to data that law enforcement has collected on them using ALPRs. Both claim that the records are exempted under the California Public Records Act because they are records of law enforcement investigations. The agencies also argue the public interest in maintaining secrecy in ALPR data outweighs the public interest in learning how and where ALPR systems are being used.
The rub here is that law enforcement agencies like those in LA, San Diego, and Oakland aren’t using ALPR for targeted investigations, but rather running a dragnet on all drivers in their jurisdictions. As states across the country become more and more concerned about ALPRs andtake steps to limit their use, we believe the disclosure of a limited amount of license plate records will help to inform public debate on this mass surveillance tool.
Events in other jurisdictions support our position. After Muckrock and the Boston Globe obtained Boston Police ALPR data, the city suspended the program in the wake of the privacy concerns raised by the data. When the Minneapolis Star-Tribune obtained ALPR data that it used to track the whereabouts of the mayor, it kicked off debate in the legislature about how to balance the privacy of innocent drivers against the ability of police to fight crime. As a Minneapolis city official noted at a public hearing on ALPRs after the data release, “now that we see someone’s patterns in a graphic on a map in a newspaper, you realize that person really does have a right to be secure from people who might be trying to stalk them or follow them or interfere with them.” A state legislator and former police chief noted at that same hearing, “even though technology is great and it helps catch the bad guys, I don’t want the good guys being kept in a database.”
by Jeremy Cillula and Dave Maass, EFF | Read more:
This is the portrait that emerged when EFF analyzed eight days of ALPR data provided by the City of Oakland in response to a request under the California Public Records Act. As cities and counties across the country pursue new law enforcement technologies, EFF is on a mission to use transparency as a counterbalance to mass surveillance. Since May 2013, EFF and the ACLU of Southern California have been engaged in a legal battle with two Los Angeles law enforcement agencies who are refusing to hand over a week’s worth of ALPR data. San Diego County, another jurisdiction, has similarly fought efforts by citizens to obtain access to data that law enforcement has collected on them using ALPRs. Both claim that the records are exempted under the California Public Records Act because they are records of law enforcement investigations. The agencies also argue the public interest in maintaining secrecy in ALPR data outweighs the public interest in learning how and where ALPR systems are being used.
The rub here is that law enforcement agencies like those in LA, San Diego, and Oakland aren’t using ALPR for targeted investigations, but rather running a dragnet on all drivers in their jurisdictions. As states across the country become more and more concerned about ALPRs andtake steps to limit their use, we believe the disclosure of a limited amount of license plate records will help to inform public debate on this mass surveillance tool.
Events in other jurisdictions support our position. After Muckrock and the Boston Globe obtained Boston Police ALPR data, the city suspended the program in the wake of the privacy concerns raised by the data. When the Minneapolis Star-Tribune obtained ALPR data that it used to track the whereabouts of the mayor, it kicked off debate in the legislature about how to balance the privacy of innocent drivers against the ability of police to fight crime. As a Minneapolis city official noted at a public hearing on ALPRs after the data release, “now that we see someone’s patterns in a graphic on a map in a newspaper, you realize that person really does have a right to be secure from people who might be trying to stalk them or follow them or interfere with them.” A state legislator and former police chief noted at that same hearing, “even though technology is great and it helps catch the bad guys, I don’t want the good guys being kept in a database.”
by Jeremy Cillula and Dave Maass, EFF | Read more:
Image: EFF
Thursday, January 22, 2015
'American Sniper' Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize
I saw American Sniper last night, and hated it slightly less than I expected to. Like most Clint Eastwood movies – and I like Clint Eastwood movies for the most part – it's a simple, well-lit little fairy tale with the nutritional value of a fortune cookie that serves up a neatly-arranged helping of cheers and tears for target audiences, and panics at the thought of embracing more than one or two ideas at any time.
It's usually silly to get upset about the self-righteous way Hollywood moviemakers routinely turn serious subjects into baby food. Film-industry people angrily reject the notion that their movies have to beabout anything (except things like "character" and "narrative" and "arc," subjects they can talk about endlessly).This is the same Hollywood culture that turned the horror and divisiveness of the Vietnam War era into a movie about a platitude-spewing doofus with leg braces who in the face of terrible moral choices eats chocolates and plays Ping-Pong. The message of Forrest Gump was that if you think about the hard stuff too much, you'll either get AIDS or lose your legs. Meanwhile, the hero is the idiot who just shrugs and says "Whatever!" whenever his country asks him to do something crazy.
Forrest Gump pulled in over half a billion and won Best Picture. So what exactly should we have expected from American Sniper?
Not much. But even by the low low standards of this business, it still manages to sink to a new depth or two.
The thing is, the mere act of trying to make a typically Hollywoodian one-note fairy tale set in the middle of the insane moral morass that is/was the Iraq occupation is both dumber and more arrogant than anything George Bush or even Dick Cheney ever tried.
No one expected 20 minutes of backstory about the failed WMD search, Abu Ghraib, or the myriad other American atrocities and quick-trigger bombings that helped fuel the rise of ISIL and other groups.
But to turn the Iraq war into a saccharine, almost PG-rated two-hour cinematic diversion about a killing machine with a heart of gold (is there any film theme more perfectly 2015-America than that?) who slowly, very slowly, starts to feel bad after shooting enough women and children – Gump notwithstanding, that was a hard one to see coming.
Sniper is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. The only thing that forces us to take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the war in question.
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Warner Brothers
I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what – I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it."
Cooking With Kimchi
Ask any native or transplanted Koreans about kimchi and you will be told that it is the very backbone of Korean cuisine. It is a cultural necessity, eaten enthusiastically at every meal, and daily life is unimaginable without it.
For the uninitiated, kimchi is a tangy, pungent preserved vegetable preparation, like sauerkraut. To describe it only as a fermented vegetable mixture or a pickle, though, is hardly fair. This is Korean soul food.
It’s commonly used in traditional cuisine as a condiment or side dish with grilled foods (Korean barbecue), served with steamed rice for a humble meal or as an accompaniment to ramyun (Korean noodles), nibbled between slurps or added to the bowl for extra zest. Indeed, kimchi can perk up just about anything, even a plate of bacon and eggs.
But to think of it merely as a condiment is a mistake. Kimchi is also a magic ingredient with many possibilities, and home cooks would do well to explore them. Adding it to soups, stews, noodles or rice dishes gives them more dimension. It’s like adding a layer of very flavorful vegetables.
Lauryn Chun, who owns Mother-in-Law’s, a company that makes kimchi, is adamant on the subject.
“I want people to know that cooking with kimchi is incredible,” she said. “Especially older or aged kimchi. Cooking it releases kimchi’s sweetness, allowing deep, mellow umami flavors to shine.”
The best example is kimchi jigae (or chigae), a hearty traditional stew-like soup in which pork belly and kimchi simmer together until the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Ms. Chun, who is also the author of the “The Kimchi Cookbook,” makes a vegetarian version that uses butter and olive oil instead of pork to enhance the flavor, producing what she described as a “great vegetal complexity.” She also sautés kimchi with brown butter and capers, for a twist on the French classic sole meunière. (...)
At home you can do something as simple as topping a hot dog with kimchi, or layering it into a Reuben or a grilled cheese sandwich. Tuck it into a baguette to make a cross-cultural banh mi. Cooking it more thoroughly, though, is eminently worthwhile, and the results are utterly delicious.
It’s commonly used in traditional cuisine as a condiment or side dish with grilled foods (Korean barbecue), served with steamed rice for a humble meal or as an accompaniment to ramyun (Korean noodles), nibbled between slurps or added to the bowl for extra zest. Indeed, kimchi can perk up just about anything, even a plate of bacon and eggs.
But to think of it merely as a condiment is a mistake. Kimchi is also a magic ingredient with many possibilities, and home cooks would do well to explore them. Adding it to soups, stews, noodles or rice dishes gives them more dimension. It’s like adding a layer of very flavorful vegetables.
Lauryn Chun, who owns Mother-in-Law’s, a company that makes kimchi, is adamant on the subject.
“I want people to know that cooking with kimchi is incredible,” she said. “Especially older or aged kimchi. Cooking it releases kimchi’s sweetness, allowing deep, mellow umami flavors to shine.”
The best example is kimchi jigae (or chigae), a hearty traditional stew-like soup in which pork belly and kimchi simmer together until the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Ms. Chun, who is also the author of the “The Kimchi Cookbook,” makes a vegetarian version that uses butter and olive oil instead of pork to enhance the flavor, producing what she described as a “great vegetal complexity.” She also sautés kimchi with brown butter and capers, for a twist on the French classic sole meunière. (...)
At home you can do something as simple as topping a hot dog with kimchi, or layering it into a Reuben or a grilled cheese sandwich. Tuck it into a baguette to make a cross-cultural banh mi. Cooking it more thoroughly, though, is eminently worthwhile, and the results are utterly delicious.
by David Tanis, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Karsten Moran
Recipes: Kimchi Soup (Jigae), Kimchi Noodle Cake, Kimchi With Greens and Bean Sprouts
Recipes: Kimchi Soup (Jigae), Kimchi Noodle Cake, Kimchi With Greens and Bean Sprouts
Introducing HoloLens
[ed. See also: This CNET Review]
I just had a 40-minute in-person demonstration of HoloLens, Microsoft's new computer headset, and I'm convinced that personal computing is on the verge of a major change.
In 10 years or so, people will be using head-mounted displays that project 3D images that you can interact with in actual space.
It's going to be a huge leap over the flat-screen computing that we've all become used to over the past 30 years. It's so much obviously better that once people try it, there will be no going back.
I just had a 40-minute in-person demonstration of HoloLens, Microsoft's new computer headset, and I'm convinced that personal computing is on the verge of a major change.
In 10 years or so, people will be using head-mounted displays that project 3D images that you can interact with in actual space.It's going to be a huge leap over the flat-screen computing that we've all become used to over the past 30 years. It's so much obviously better that once people try it, there will be no going back.
Augmented Versus Virtual
This was the second time in two months that I felt as if I were glancing into the future. The first was when I tried on the latest version of the Oculus Rift, Facebook's virtual-reality headset. It reminded me of that "wow" feeling I had the first time I tried an iPhone back in 2007.
HoloLens and Oculus are similar but distinct. Oculus Rift is virtual reality, which means the image seems to surround you entirely, and you don't see any part of the real world.
HoloLens is augmented reality, which means it projects images on top of the real world. (It doesn't really project holograms everybody can see — to see the images, you need to be wearing the headset or looking at a computer display of what the viewer is seeing.) The goggles, or glasses, are translucent. It's a little like Google Glass but with actual glass and much more immersive. (...)
Microsoft showed us a couple of key things, such as how to move the cursor around the virtual world (that's easy — you just move your head), and how to select using a particular finger gesture — you basically stick your finger straight up in the air as with one of those foam hands fans show at football games, then move the finger down and back up again.
Then we were ready to go. I tried three applications and got a demo of another person using a fourth one.
This was the second time in two months that I felt as if I were glancing into the future. The first was when I tried on the latest version of the Oculus Rift, Facebook's virtual-reality headset. It reminded me of that "wow" feeling I had the first time I tried an iPhone back in 2007.
HoloLens and Oculus are similar but distinct. Oculus Rift is virtual reality, which means the image seems to surround you entirely, and you don't see any part of the real world.
HoloLens is augmented reality, which means it projects images on top of the real world. (It doesn't really project holograms everybody can see — to see the images, you need to be wearing the headset or looking at a computer display of what the viewer is seeing.) The goggles, or glasses, are translucent. It's a little like Google Glass but with actual glass and much more immersive. (...)
Microsoft showed us a couple of key things, such as how to move the cursor around the virtual world (that's easy — you just move your head), and how to select using a particular finger gesture — you basically stick your finger straight up in the air as with one of those foam hands fans show at football games, then move the finger down and back up again.
Then we were ready to go. I tried three applications and got a demo of another person using a fourth one.
Skype
This was the most obviously useful and the easiest to understand, as it was an extension of a familiar application, Skype video calling.
For the demo, I was told I would be installing a light switch. (I've never done this.) I would use the Skype app on HoloLens to call our handy friend, Lloyd, who would walk me through how to do it.
Lloyd appeared in a little window. He could see everything I was looking at. (My field of vision would appear on the Surface app he was using back at his house.) He told me to look at the set of tools, then told me to pick up the voltage meter, the screwdriver, and so on. When he needed to, he could "draw" on the world in front of me — so, for instance, he drew a little diagram to show me which way to hold the light switch when I was attaching it to a couple of wires. If I wanted to have a clear field of vision, I could "pin" the little window with him in it, so it would stop following my field of vision around. (...)
In this way, he walked me through the installation in about five minutes. I succeeded! I wish I'd had this product last weekend, when I struggled to install some curtain rods into plaster in my house. (It took a couple of tries.)
This will apparently be a real app, and it will be available when HoloLens ships.
This was the most obviously useful and the easiest to understand, as it was an extension of a familiar application, Skype video calling.
For the demo, I was told I would be installing a light switch. (I've never done this.) I would use the Skype app on HoloLens to call our handy friend, Lloyd, who would walk me through how to do it.
Lloyd appeared in a little window. He could see everything I was looking at. (My field of vision would appear on the Surface app he was using back at his house.) He told me to look at the set of tools, then told me to pick up the voltage meter, the screwdriver, and so on. When he needed to, he could "draw" on the world in front of me — so, for instance, he drew a little diagram to show me which way to hold the light switch when I was attaching it to a couple of wires. If I wanted to have a clear field of vision, I could "pin" the little window with him in it, so it would stop following my field of vision around. (...)
In this way, he walked me through the installation in about five minutes. I succeeded! I wish I'd had this product last weekend, when I struggled to install some curtain rods into plaster in my house. (It took a couple of tries.)
This will apparently be a real app, and it will be available when HoloLens ships.
by Matt Rosoff, Business Insider | Read more:
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Everything You Need to Know About DeflateGate
Last year was a big year for scandal in the NFL. There was actual football being played for the last five months, but between the awkward press conferences, scathing reports, various legal battles and doubling down on the same personal conduct policies that got Roger Goodell in trouble in the first place, the games have taken a back seat to the league's stumbling, mumbling and fumbling. It's only fitting that we now have the Patriots and DeflateGate (I prefer BallGhazi, personally) perched atop the news cycle less than two weeks ahead of Super Bowl 49.Letting the air out of game balls isn't as serious as the incidents that rocked the NFL world last fall. But it is another round of bad news coming at a time the NFL usually reserves for hyping its biggest event of the year.
The Patriots are now under investigations over allegations that they intentionally deflated game balls. On Tuesday night, ESPN reported that 11 of the 12 balls set aside for the Patriots offense were found to be under inflated. Whether or not that was intentional and how it could have happened is what the NFL is now looking into, with the expectation of getting to the bottom of it by the end of this week.
With that, here's a run down of what we know so far and a closer look at the biggest questions about the incident.
Why deflate the game balls?
Sunday's game at Foxborough was rainy and windy. Wet footballs are harder to grip, thus more difficult to throw and catch. Letting some of the air out would make them more pliable and easier for a player to handle.
Pounds of pressure or weight of the ball?
By regulation, all NFL game balls are supposed to be inflated to a range between 12.5 and 13.5 pounds per square inch (PSI). When you hear reporters talking about 11 of 12 balls found to be under-inflated by as much as two pounds, that means the air pressure in the balls was as low as 10.5 PSI. A regulation NFL football itself only weighs between 14 and 15 ounces, less than a pound.
Sunday's game at Foxborough was rainy and windy. Wet footballs are harder to grip, thus more difficult to throw and catch. Letting some of the air out would make them more pliable and easier for a player to handle.
Pounds of pressure or weight of the ball?
By regulation, all NFL game balls are supposed to be inflated to a range between 12.5 and 13.5 pounds per square inch (PSI). When you hear reporters talking about 11 of 12 balls found to be under-inflated by as much as two pounds, that means the air pressure in the balls was as low as 10.5 PSI. A regulation NFL football itself only weighs between 14 and 15 ounces, less than a pound.
Could the cold temperatures have caused the balls to deflate?
Temperature can change air pressure, lowering it because the molecules that make up the gas are less active. However, the weather for the AFC Championship would have deflated the balls set aside for the Colts as well as the Patriots. Only the Patriots balls were found to be deflated.
Temperature can change air pressure, lowering it because the molecules that make up the gas are less active. However, the weather for the AFC Championship would have deflated the balls set aside for the Colts as well as the Patriots. Only the Patriots balls were found to be deflated.
Wouldn't the deflated balls help the Colts too?
No, because each team has their own balls for use when its offense is on the field.
Per NFL rules, each team has 12 balls they use on offense. The home team is also required to provide 12 more balls for backup, and visitors can bring 12 backup balls of their own if they so choose. In addition to those balls, Wilson, the company that manufactures NFL footballs, ships eight new balls directly to the officials for a game. Those are the kicking balls used by both teams, and they're kept under the control of the referees.
Why the NFL doesn't provide game balls and control them tighter than they do now is a question for another time.
No, because each team has their own balls for use when its offense is on the field.
Per NFL rules, each team has 12 balls they use on offense. The home team is also required to provide 12 more balls for backup, and visitors can bring 12 backup balls of their own if they so choose. In addition to those balls, Wilson, the company that manufactures NFL footballs, ships eight new balls directly to the officials for a game. Those are the kicking balls used by both teams, and they're kept under the control of the referees.
Why the NFL doesn't provide game balls and control them tighter than they do now is a question for another time.
by Ryan Van Bibber, SBNation | Read more:
Image: Elsa/Getty Images
Eighty People are as Rich as Half the World
Eighty people hold the same amount of wealth as the world’s 3.6 billion poorest people, according to an analysis just released from Oxfam. The report from the global anti-poverty organization finds that since 2009, the wealth of those 80 richest has doubled in nominal terms — while the wealth of the poorest 50 percent of the world’s population has fallen.
To see how much wealth the richest 1 percent and the poorest 50 percent hold, Oxfam used research from Credit Suisse, a Swiss financial services company, and Forbes’s annual billionaires list. Oxfam then looked at how many of the world’s richest people would need to pool their resources to have as much wealth as the poorest 50 percent — and as of March 2014, it was just 80 people.
Four years earlier, 388 billionaires together held as much wealth as the poorest 50 percent of the world.
Thirty-five of the 80 richest people in the world are U.S. citizens, with combined wealth of $941 billion in 2014. Together in second place are Germany and Russia, with seven mega-rich individuals apiece. The entire list is dominated by one gender, though — 70 of the 80 richest people are men. And 68 of the people on the list are 50 or older.
by Mona Chalabi, FiveThirtyEight | Read more:
Image: Farah Abdi Wasaweh/AP
School Reform Fails the Test
[ed. See also: Our Addiction to Testing]
During the first wave of what would become the 30-year school reform movement that shapes education policy to this day, I visited good public school classrooms across the United States, wanting to compare the rhetoric of reform, which tended to be abstract and focused on crisis, with the daily efforts of teachers and students who were making public education work.I identified teachers, principals, and superintendents who knew about local schools; college professors who taught teachers; parents and community activists who were involved in education. What’s going on in your area that seems promising? I asked. What are teachers talking about? Who do parents hold in esteem? In all, I interviewed and often observed in action more than 60 teachers and 25 administrators in 30-some schools. I also met many students and parents from the communities I visited. What soon became evident—and is still true today—was an intellectual and social richness that was rarely discussed in the public sphere or in the media. I tried to capture this travelogue of educational achievement in a book published in 1995 called Possible Lives: The Promise of Education in America. Twenty years later, I want to consider school reform in light of the lessons learned during that journey, and relearned in later conversations with some of these same teachers. (...)
To update Possible Lives, I spoke to each of these teachers again about 10 years after my visit and found that all of them shared a deep concern about the potential effect of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 on the classrooms they had worked so hard to create. No Child Left Behind and the Obama administration’s 2009 Race to the Top initiative are built on the assumption that our public schools are in crisis, and that the best way to improve them is by using standardized tests (up to now only in reading and math) to rate student achievement and teacher effectiveness. Learning is defined as a rise in a standardized test score and teaching as the set of activities that lead to that score, with the curriculum tightly linked to the tests. This system demonstrates a technocratic neatness, but it doesn’t measure what goes on in the classrooms I visited. A teacher can prep students for a standardized test, get a bump in scores, and yet not be providing a very good education.
Organizing schools and creating curricula based on an assumption of wholesale failure make going to school a regimented and punitive experience. If we determine success primarily by a test score, we miss those considerable intellectual achievements that aren’t easily quantifiable. If we think about education largely in relation to economic competitiveness, then we ignore the social, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of teaching and learning. You will be hard pressed to find in federal education policy discussions of achievement that include curiosity, reflection, creativity, aesthetics, pleasure, or a willingness to take a chance, to blunder. Our understanding of teaching and learning, and of the intellectual and social development of children, becomes terribly narrow in the process. (...)
When the standardized test score is the measure of a teacher’s effectiveness, other indicators of competence are discounted. One factor is seniority—which reformers believe, not without reason, overly constrains an administrator’s hiring decisions. Another is post-baccalaureate degrees and certifications in education, a field many reformers hold in contempt. Several studies do report low correlation between experience (defined as years in the profession) and students’ test scores. Other studies find a similarly low correlation between students’ scores and teachers’ post-baccalaureate degrees and certifications. These studies lead to an absolute claim that neither experience nor schooling beyond the bachelor’s degree makes any difference.
What a remarkable assertion. Can you think of any other kind of work—from hair styling to neurosurgery—where we don’t value experience and training? If reformers had a better understanding of teaching, they might wonder whether something was amiss with the studies, which tend to deal in simple averages and define experience or training in crude ways. Experience, for example, is typically defined as years on the job, yet years in service, considered alone, don’t mean that much. A dictionary definition of experience—“activity that includes training, observation of practice, and personal participation and knowledge gained from this”—indicates the connection to competence. The teachers in Possible Lives had attended workshops and conferences, participated in professional networks, or taken classes. They experimented with their curricula and searched out ideas and materials to incorporate into their work. What people do with their time on the job becomes the foundation of expertise.
More generally, the qualities of good work—study and experimentation, the accumulation of knowledge, and refinement of skill—are thinly represented in descriptions of teacher quality, overshadowed by the simplified language of testing. In a similar vein, the long history of Western thought on education—from Plato to Septima Clark—is rarely if ever mentioned in the reform literature. History as well as experience and inquiry are replaced with a metric.
These attitudes toward experience are rooted in the technocratic-managerial ideology that drives many kinds of policy, from health care to urban planning to agriculture: the devaluing of local, craft, and experiential knowledge and the elevating of systems thinking, of finding the large economic, social, or organizational levers to pull in order to initiate change.
by Mike Rose, American Scholar | Read more:
Image: David Herbick/Getty/istockphoto
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
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