Below is a print version of a presentation I gave Friday, 10/22 at the Vision Midwest conference in Madison, Wisconsin. The timing was good for a number of reasons, not least of which was the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 that the president signed into law on October 8th. Among other things, the law requires the FCC to create a committee within 60 days of 10/8 to advise on the technical challenges of adding audio description to online video and to present a report within 18 months. I’ve spent the last year studying this problem and coming up with my own solution (that deploys within two months, not two years) and hope that whoever ends up on the committee doesn’t settle on requiring something that’s unworkable or inadequate. Now’s a good time to throw some voices from the trenches out there.

My name is Liam Moran. I work for a digital media unit at the University of Illinois. I wear a lot of hats: I’m a videographer, a programmer, I run our audio studio, configure our streaming servers, and try to keep up with the latest technology to stay at the forefront of delivering the best quality of service possible on the budget we have to work with. As of August of this year, my unit exists as a partnership between the college of LAS and the Office of Continuing Education in order to devote more of our resources to developing video content for online and blended courses for LASOnline, one of the programs for providing online courses at the University of Illinois. I’ve been thinking about Audio Description for about a year and a half, feel confident that the plan I came up with for producing and delivering audio descriptions is a good solution, and was allocated time during my work week to implement it in the past few months. In this presentation, I walk through the different possible ways to produce and deliver audio descriptions and try to convince you that what we’re doing at the University of Illinois makes the most sense for the various stakeholders involved: the faculty members who provide the content, the media units that produce the content, the server administrators who host the content, and the students who must learn the content.

Video is being used in higher education at an increasing pace: in traditional classrooms, for blended learning, and in online courses. This is a good thing: video is an informationally dense source of curriculum materials and presenting the learning material in different ways can’t be a bad thing. There are certain situations where video is necessary: where a demonstration is too dangerous or expensive to perform in a classroom with students present or where an individual can’t schedule time to be present in a classroom, but a camera crew and interviewer can meet with them. However, using video without taking care to make the video accessible deprives students with various disabilities of the learning materials they are expected to master. If a video is presented that is not fully accessible—especially accessible to the blind and those with low-vision, it is not a decision made in malice, but that there simply does not exist the infrastructure or standards to generate or deliver accessible video. Let’s take a step back and think a little bit about what accessibility is in the grand scheme. Accessibility has two major aspects: usability and equivalent content. Usability has to do with how easy it is to anticipate how to navigate and control whatever it is that is to be accessible. The provision of equivalent content means that when information should be presented in a way that everyone can acquire it. Building codes require that structures be built accessibly with respect to usability by specifying how high off the ground and far away from a doorway a light switch should be located, where handrails should be installed, and how a door can be opened by a visitor in a wheelchair. Buildings are accessible with respect to equivalent content if signs have braille equivalent for the text, elevator buttons have a tactile means of indicating which floor the button will take you to, etc. A webpage is accessible with respect to usability if it uses high-contrast colors and is structured in a way that screen-reader software can index it and provide a navigation method of its different content areas. A webpage is accessible with respect to equivalent content if, for example, the images have alt-tags to describe what the image shows.

Jumping back to accessible media: the player controls have to be usable to blind and low vision users–they have to be of appropriate size and use high-contrast colors and they have to be navigable and operable with a screen reader and a keyboard. The media also has to provide equivalent content for users with disabilities. Most of the time, when media professionals talk about accessibility, they’re really talking about captions. Captions are great, of course, and a mainstream part of life now: captions are usually turned on at bars and restaurants so many patrons can watch different television programs on different televisions without interfering with one another or the music being played, for one example. Captions are only half of the game, though: providing the equivalent content if you can’t hear the audio portion of the video. The motion picture part of the video contains content that needs to be made accessible, too, otherwise we wouldn’t buy all the expensive cameras we have. So how do we provide equivalent content for that portion of the video material?

The solution came in the 1970s from Margaret Pfanstiehl, an avid fan of the theater who lost her eyesight while in her young 30s. She cultivated a group of volunteers who would describe the visual aspect of the performance for her and other blind and low vision patrons, eventually developing an infrastructure involving radio transmitters and headset receivers for broadcast to those patrons in the audience that has become the standard for providing equivalent content for theatrical performances and is the basis for all other forms of making visual media accessible to those with visual impairments.

The current best-practice method for including the equivalent content is to play a second audio track over the video, synchronized with the video—exactly like a director’s commentary track on a DVD (which is a standard designed for audio description in the DVD specification, but that hasn’t been widely exploited, unfortunately). Two resources for guidelines on producing the descriptions are: Audio Description Coalition—with free registration, you’ll receive a PDF file containing the standards used by the theatrical audio description community which contains a useful set of ethical guidelines; and Joe Clark’s AD Principles, a concise and clear presentation.

My own distillation of the guidelines for educational content:

1. Describe what you observe
2. Keep interpretation to a minimum
3. Respect your audience

The objective is to be the user’s eyes, not their brains. Good descriptions are not annotations of the video. You have to keep your ego in check and try not to be too helpful. A good rule of thumb to keep you from being too helpful is to watch the video with your audio descriptions turned on and to verify that the descriptions add no content that isn’t readily apparent from the video. I acknowledge that this is impossible at times; that some human judgment is often needed to determine what information it is that students who can see the visual aid are likely getting from it. I suggest that it’s better to err on the side of completeness–to describe the apparent content as completely as possible for reasons that will be clear later. Finally, make sure to resolve ambiguous references that rely on visual cues: “the second figure on the left”, “this one right here”, “the green arrow.”

Here is a clip from the Ribbon of Sand sample made by Audio Description Solutions, chosen to demonstrate this method of audio description because it is both beautifully shot and beautifully described. Note that the production house who produced this video did something interesting: Meryl Streep’s narration is in one channel (left) and the description audio is in the other channel, so you could, in theory, turn the AD off if you wanted to and if the player provided a method to turn it off. Quicktime does not allow you to control the panning or balance of the audio.

The question is whether this technique would work for educational video. For the following clip, I made the audio track by watching the video, noting what time a description should occur what the description should say, recording the descriptions in my studio, editing them in a multi-track editor so they would start when I noted they should, and exporting it as a mono file. Here’s the first demo using this method:

The standard method clearly isn’t going to work all the time for educational video: the lecturer has a finite amount of time with students and has to provide as much information as possible in that time—natural pauses are few and short. Visual aids used are often dense with information and require extensive description in order to provide equivalent content. In video shot for entertainment, the camera does a lot of the exposition—it tells a good portion of the story. That’s not always always the case for some types of educational video.

Since my first mission on making our media accessible was captioning, that was my only tool when I turned to audio description—it was a hammer and every problem looked like a nail. My first attempt to improve on the standard practice was to leverage the screen reader’s typically fast speech rate, by essentially presenting the text of the descriptions to the screen reader to synthesize at the appropriate time. Captions standardly work in Flash by being provided in a w3c standard dfxp.xml timed text file, containing paragraph nodes having values of the text of the caption, with attributes begin and end with values of the time stamps when the caption should appear and disappear, respectively. To get the screen reader to synthesize the text displayed, you need to use the Accessibility.updateProperties() method to force the screenreader to refresh its buffer containing the accessible objects in the movie (including the new text), then force focus onto the text box where the description is printed with the FocusManager.setFocus() method. I can comprehend the synthesized speech in JAWS with a setting at 85, so if you have JAWS available, turn it on and set the JAWS Cursor Dialog speech rate there (or higher) and watch Demo #2.

Demo #2 worked better than Demo #1, but is still not good enough. JAWS spoke over the audio native to the video; JAWS couldn’t keep up with the pace of the video, even when speaking at a high word rate; and seizing keyboard focus from the user would be problematic with a properly functional user interface.

WGBH noticed that it frequently happens where a natural pause is not available into which to insert a description without interfering with the native audio and so suggest “extended descriptions” where the video pauses as needed to allow time for the description.

Their example is: WGBH “All Systems Go” Extended Description demo. As much as it pains me to criticize the great work they do at WGBH, I have problems with this particular implementation. First, the descriptions in the video aren’t descriptions, but annotations. There’s information presented in the extended descriptions that is not readily apparent from the motion picture. Also, the player doesn’t actually pause, it merely displays the same frame repeatedly until the descriptive audio finishes.

This is problematic for a number of reasons: we’d more than double our disk usage and costs in order to deliver accessible video in this manner, the media producers would have to make two different versions of each video we make, web designers would have to come up with a clever way to reliably route users to the correct version of the video for them (if that’s even knowable), and users would have no way to skip the description if they didn’t feel it necessary to listen to (the objective is to provide equivalent content, not to extend the amount of time they are required to consume content) or to switch to the other version of the video if they were routed to the wrong one.

Flash does more than play video—we can push the technology to do what we need it to do, exactly how we need it to do it. This is one of the benefits of using Flash over an embedded commercial player. Extended descriptions are going to be necessary in educational video, so a mechanism is needed to pause the video stream when necessary and resume it either when the description has finished playing or the user chooses to skip the remainder of the description.

The player should work basically the same in any platform, and provide audio labels for buttons and confirmation that the button was pressed and what it’s doing using a built-in set of sounds, including a help-menu that presents the shortcut key set. This is because we can’t predict all the situations that a user with a visual impairment wants to use the media will be situations where he has access to his personal computer with a screen-reader installed (such as a case where a blind faculty member needs to play a video for a presentation at a conference where his laptop won’t work with the projector, or a student wants to show a video for a class presentation on a stock classroom computer.) The UI for my player isn’t quite that well-developed yet but I’m working hard on it and know the popular javascript-based workarounds if I do in fact have to fall back on them.

Not only because my only tool is closed captioning, the audio descriptions are controlled via an xml file extened from the timed text standard, with two new attributes available for p-nodes: pause, which takes a boolean value (defaulting to false), and href, which tells the player where to find the audio to be played at the time specified by the begin attribute. The player doesn’t interact much with the screen reader, since I intended it to behave the same everywhere, except to detect that it’s in use and to turn on the audio descriptions. It only makes that check once, then stops checking in case the user doesn’t want them on. This has been a little confusing for beta-testers so far, and so am working out under what conditions to let the screen reader handle the UI and when to let the built-in controls take over. The goal is for the thing to behave in an expected manner, and my beta-testers know a lot better than I do what is expected.

Note that the buttons are large and use high-contrast colors; that the real-estate is limited since the buttons are large; and that captions over the screen are only useful when their location indicates the speaker, but that keeping the captions off the screen where it can’t block the motion picture content is preferable from my point of view (and others on campus). So when captions are turned on, the controls panel flips to reveal the captions and a button to flip back. Keyboard controls still work with captions on in the predictable manner. When you played the video, observe that it pauses when it has to and doesn’t when it can. It’s easy to skip a caption if you don’t want to see it by pressing spacebar or the play button. I need to add forward-back buttons to go back to the last description if you skipped it but then find that you missed something and also for general navigation control.

When it comes down to it, getting audio descriptions to be used widely on campus will depend on a cost-benefit analysis. The benefits are fixed: audio description have to be provided by law for government online materials in Illinois. The trick is to reduce costs enough that the decision isn’t made to just get rid of online video, which would be bad for me, since making it is my profession, and bad for everyone because online video is a valuable type of learning material for the students and the public at large. Costs can be measured in either cash or in how much their way of doing things needs to change.

Nothing much changes for server administrators: they don’t have to double their disk installations for media servers. There are a few mp3 files that are very small relative to video and another xml file that’s hosted on our video content management system.

Media producers need to make the xml files I intend to use as a standard method of delivering audio descriptions and to record the audio files. I estimate that all AD generation requires about 2X realtime to produce. If we were to adopt the standard workflow, where we produce an audio file to play in sync with the video, the way I’d produce them would be to watch the video and take notes of when a description would need to play and what the description would be, then watch the video a second time with a headset on and record the descriptions from my notes at the right time. For an hour-long video, that would take about two hours. I estimated that it took me a little under twice the length of the video to type up and time-sync the descriptions using SubtitleWorkshop, but quite a while to record the audio because I’m not a competent voice actor. That estimate does, of course, depend on the amount and complexity of visual aids presented.

Furthermore, since the format is Timed-Text, the infrastructure to generate them is already in place for captioning and can be re-purposed; also some of the skills people with expertise in captioning possess carry over as well, which altogether should make adoption of the process more acceptable. All that is needed is a post-processing script to convert the standard timed-text file to the proposed extension to the timed-text format. (More on that later).

Also, many of the videos my unit makes are storyboarded: we know from the early planning phase what each shot is meant to communicate and translating the storyboards to descriptions is straightforward. Since almost all television shows and feature films are storyboarded, the excuse for them not to provide audio descriptions once they have the infrastructure in place to deliver them is flimsy.

For faculty and other instructors, the routine is the same if they’re working with us. In my experience, faculty new to video often report that working with us to tighten up their presentation for scripted video forced them to re-think the way they present content in a way that benefited their teaching methods in positive, career changing ways. It’s fair to assume that they already think hard about what visual aids to use and have a good idea of what they intend it to communicate, so if they produce their own videos, producing their own audio descriptions shouldn’t be a stretch and might become just “part of the process”. I assume that when people do things in an inacessible ways, like failing to structure a pdf file so that a screen reader can index or even read it, they do so just because they don’t know how to do it right. I only learned that (very minor) skill a few months ago and now it’s simply how I do things—doing it any other way would be doing it wrong and creating work for myself down the road.

There are secondary benefits to implementing audio description as we will be doing at the University of Illinois. Since the timed text files I suggest using include the text of the descriptions within the p node even though the player doesn’t directly use it at this time, it’s good to have it in there for future proofing in case Flash 11 includes a built-in speech synthesizer. It’s immediately good to have in the file for search: with a fully accessible video, you can search for a term and navigate to either when it’s spoken or described. Being able to simply search the motion picture part of the video isn’t possible with inaccessible video, so that’s a significant advantage. That’s another reason why I suggest erring on the side of too much descriptive audio instead of too little, especially if it’s easy to skip them and to navigate back as needed.

Those secondary benefits are critical to mainstreaming audio description the way that closed captions are now mainstream and expected. Once students without vision impairments notice that descriptions are available, I’d hope that they start using them to multi-task: playing the video with the descriptions on in the background while reading or typing their notes, cooking dinner, whatever… That it becomes of value to the way they do their learning, too, and come to expect it as well. Even though I’m a video producer, I don’t particularly watch much online video because I’m usually too busy to do just one thing at a time. Sometimes I’ll start a video, then switch to another tab to do something else and will get lost immediately, since I’m depriving myself of the motion picture content. If audio description becomes as mainstream as I’d like it to be, I would watch more online video.

The method I propose structurally reduces the costs about as much as I can see possible, with a few exceptions.

Recording the audio would be time and labor expensive, and so it would be preferable from a cost-savings perspective if we could synthesize the descriptions. The workflow I have in mind for this would be to have the tool that translates the standard dfxp.xml file to my proposed ad.xml file format also synthesize the audio by piping the text through a synthesizer like Festival or whatever we have handy on campus. It’s been a few years since I worked on speech synthesis, but when I last did, the hot area was in prosody and communicating emotional states, etc., which is needed for dramatic presentations. The simplest way to do it would be to generate a caption file in SubtitleWorkshop (which needs a patch to export timed text xml in the current version at least) and for each description, set the end time to be the same as the begin time if you don’t want it to pause and to some later time (to display for a non-zero duration) if you do want it to pause. The script for translating the xml would then know what the value for the pause-attribute would be by comparing times and could assign the href values depending on where it writes the output from the synthesizer. I’ll be using a synthesizer in any case, since that workflow provides descriptions faster instead of having to wait for studio time: it’ll just be a matter of replacing the synthesized speech with recorded human speech. If it can be experimentally demonstrated that the synthesized speech is just as good a presentation of the material, though, we can devote all of our resources to creating the descriptions instead of splitting it between typing them up and then recording them, which would mean more audio described video gets made per dollar. We know that audio description aids learning, but I need to know under what parameters that effectiveness is maximized so we can best position resources.

There’s a possibility that the descriptions themselves could be automatically generated. Since the objective is for the descriptions to be free from interpretation, there’s a good chance that some fancy image recognition and OCR could produce the descriptions without continuing, or at least with limited, human supervision. In the simplest case, where the visual aid is a powerpoint and the professor provided alt-text in them, the task of producing much of the descriptions would be trivial. A pair of ECE professors at the University of Illinois are working on a lecture-capture system that automatically performs the mix between the camera video source and the projected video source based on the professor’s gestures as identified by the camera system, which could be re-purposed to sync the descriptions if their system is reliably successful.

The question of whether either of these would be acceptable isn’t a policy issue: not a decision that needs to be made by someone well credentialed, but is an empirical issue (and in the latter case, an engineering issue) that needs to be answered by learning comprehension studies testing how well the different methods of generating descriptions present the equivalent content to the students.

An outstanding issue is how to let students know how to report when an audio description file is missing for a video that they want one for. For captions, this is straightforward: if the ensemble server that catalogs our media reports the the player that no captions are available, it displays a message in the caption area on how to report that the captions aren’t available. It’s not clear how to go about providing the same information for reporting missing audio descriptions, but not an unresolvable problem.

That’s the end of the presentation.

If I could go back and add anything, I’d probably talk about how relatively easy it would be to do audio description for live streaming video. To caption live video, our regular procedure is to hire a professional caption writer and a very bright WILL broadcast engineer named Matt Jones to add line-21 captions to the video feed (which would probably be aired live on UI7, the campus television station, anyways) then decode them with a PCD-88 before capturing the video for encoding and streaming up to the server.

For audio description, we’d just need to send an audio only stream to the server, make sure it’s synced up on the downstream side, and have the player use the same controls for both streams. An alternative method would be to send two video streams, one with the descriptive audio mixed in, and re-purpose the dynamic bitrate switching machinery to swap between the two on demand.

Since I think extended descriptions are of real benefit to the users, I think it would be best if whatever standard the television broadcasters adopt would allow users with DVRs to allow the video to pause while the descriptions play as needed and until the buffer runs out. I assume that alternative audio tracks are extra audio streams in an mp4 container so the video stream and audio stream would have to go increasingly out of sync as the program played, which might be possible with a DVR, but I’m thinking more thinking is needed.

I should also point out that you can implement this standard using HTML5 and javascript, if it’s OK to deliver your video over the http protocol. In the standard case, you’d just need a video tag for the video and an audio tag for the audio description, and link the two with the same controls parameter. Since I know captions for HTML5 video are possible to implement in javascript and my recommended message is based closely on how captions work, javascript must be able to listen for the right playhead events to handle playing the audio and pausing the video intelligently when necessary.

However, suppose that school districts were run entirely by local boards elected only from the top 70-percentile by income of that district’s alumni. How would that arrangement benefit or hinder present-day students in the district?

This is the population who would presumably have the best understanding of the district’s shortcomings at the time they attended, so one would expect school boards maximally interested in the needs for their region’s students to succeed best in life.

Assuming a reasonable rate of geographic transfer in population, it would be difficult for any one group of people to manipulate the school system to benefit one local company or interest group to corrupt the students’ curriculum from what they need to succeed.

However, the kind of exotic rotation I propose in the "You're Thinking Too 2-Dimensional, Marty" hypothesis is implausible to the extreme without an elaborately doctored baseball and, furthermore, completely unnecessary. I neglected to consider the most basic mechanics equation, F=MA, that forces cause acceleration, and so no exotic spin is needed for the ball to be deflecting more rapidly as it approaches the plate (both due to the constant force of gravity and the magnus, which decreases as velocity and spin rate decrease.)

There's no harm in making a mistake except when you're looking for mistakes. With a little help from an expert on this, my error's found and I like the "Back to the Future" joke, so am not erasing the post. Also, the rate of decay hypothesis has some merit, I think. The correct lesson to take away from it, though, is the more obvious one that a baseball has to be given a very fast initial spin to maintain accelerating deflection late in the trajectory as velocity and spin-rate decrease at some unknown, but measurable, quantity.

As for the distinction between "frisbee" sliders and regular-old sliders, that's something that my research specialty can address: just need to find cases where people refer to a slider as a frisbee slider and see whether the pitch was actually thrown differently than for normal sliders. My guess is that the angle of rotation would be flatter to the horizontal. And maybe in the case of a sinking fastball, it has less backspin so that it falls faster than another fastball. Data exists publicly to evaluate both claims in a later post.]

When someone who is the best in the world at performing a given task says that they failed at it for a particular reason, I’m biased to believe their explanation. So when great baseball players all claim that late movement is what caused them to miss a pitched baseball or to hit it poorly, I’m inclined to believe that pitches really can break late, and that their explanation is not related to some psychological factor of human perception that causes us to misidentify a rapidly spinning object’s true trajectory. In this post, I’ll present two ideas on late break, the first is probably testable on existing data, the second requires unavailable data.

Pitch movement

Once a pitch leaves the pitcher’s hand three forces continue to act on the ball after the initial conditions set by the pitcher to cause the ball to deflect from its initial trajectory. Two of them are out of the pitcher’s control: gravity pulling the ball downwards and drag slowing the pitch’s velocity. The third force is the Magnus force that is exerted on the ball perpendicular to the direction that it is thrown in the plane of its axis of rotation and in the direction that the front of the baseball is spinning towards. A fastball thrown over the top leaves the fingers with backspin, and so the magnus force opposes gravity and keeps the ball from dropping as fast as it would without the magnus force; a curveball thrown with a snap of backspin has a magnus force that makes the ball drop more than it would by gravity alone; cutters, sliders, and screwballs have sidespin that make the ball move in a sideways direction. The best publicly-available quantitative study of magnus forces was done by Prof. Nathan of the University of Illinois Physics department, the paper, The Effect of Spin on the Flight of a Baseball, and slides from a talk on the paper are available from his Physics of Baseball website. In that paper, a major conclusion (which contradicts predictions of the aerodynamic model of Robert Adair, the first official physicists to the National League) is that for the pitch velocity range for baseballs thrown by professional baseball pitchers (between 50 and 100 mph), the amount of magnus force is not strongly dependent on the velocity. [This is badly mis-stating the conclusion: "the lift coefficient does not depend
strongly on velocity at a fixed value of omega/v, where omega is the spin rate and v is the velocity."]

Rates of decay

One way that a baseball could deflect more late in its trajectory than early in its trajectory is if you define break as units of movement in the X and Z dimensions per unit movement in Y, where Y is the horizontal dimension from the pitcher’s mound to home plate, X is the horizontal dimension to the catcher’s left and right, and Z is the vertical dimension.

Take, for example, a fairly typical slider thrown with an initial velocity of 90 mph (call it 130 fps—the figures here are back-of-the-napkin stuff just to illustrate differing proportions) and crossing the plate at 80 mph (~115 fps). It’s moving in the Y dimension 12% slower as it crosses the plate than when it left the pitcher’s hand. Let’s imagine for the moment that the spin of the ball doesn’t change as it travels from pitcher to catcher. We know from Prof. Nathan’s work that the magnus force is not dependent on velocity—only rate of spin—at these speeds [See note in above section], so if the ball breaks 6 inches in the X dimension due to magnus force during the trajectory from mound to home plate, it’s breaking at a uniform rate of 1fps in X at all times during flight. Thus, if we define break as rate of spin-induced movement per unit velocity to plate, the break does in fact increase late in the trajectory (1x/130y < 1x/115y). In a game of inches, perhaps enough.

The ball's spin rate no doubt does decrease during its flight due to drag, but if the ball's spin-rate decreases at a normalized rate less than the ball's velocity decreases, then this sort of late-movement is real.

You’re Thinking Too 2-Dimensional, Marty

A second idea of how a pitch might deflect more at various points in its trajectory towards home plate, and one that I find more likely [see note at top], is that the plane of rotation changes while the baseball is in flight. The example I have in mind here is the perfect sinking fastball. When it leaves the pitcher’s hand, it’s thrown with (say 2000rpm of) backspin, so that the direction of magnus force is upwards, significant and working against gravity. Suppose that the pitch is also thrown such that its axis of spin rotates 180 degrees clockwise from the batter’s perspective over the distance from the pitcher’s hand to home plate. In this scenario, the ball would have “hop” for the first third of its trajectory, would slightly break horizontally for the middle third, then drop dramatically for the last third. This is because the direction of magnus force would turn uniformly from up, working against gravity; to the side, neutral with respect to gravity; then downwards as it approached the plate, in concert with gravity.

If it seems far-fetched that a pitcher has the kind of fine motor skill needed to impart such a finely controlled spin on a baseball, consider that knuckleball pitchers typically throw the ball such that it makes a half rotation from pitcher’s hand to catcher’s glove. This is known because the ball is spinning slowly enough to measure the spin with high speed video. A pitcher who puts late movement on his fastball has to impart that same amount of spin while also adding a component of very fast spin in the perpendicular direction (and another twenty miles per hour of initial velocity or so). If you are still not convinced, pay careful attention to the athletes themselves, as in this postgame recap from 2007:

The change in Halladay’s cutter wasn’t drastic, by any means. Fasano said that he offered a few tips about varying finger pressure with the grip that creates different types of movement with the pitch.

That’s recounting advice from backup catcher Sal Fasano to Roy Halladay, a pitcher to whom late movement is frequently attributed, as in this story by a different catcher of Doc’s:

“A lot of guys, they’re just kind of surprised,” Barajas said. “The pitches that are coming in, they look like balls. I’m sure they go up and they look at the videos and the pitches aren’t exactly where they thought they were going to end up, because he has so much late movement — late life.

Subtle changes in finger pressure to create different types of movement is the sort of tweak that, with a lot of practice and natural skill, would seem to add that crucial spin component that’s worth all those tens of millions of dollars.

So a perfect sinking fastball’s plane of rotation would make a half rotation from pitcher to plate, perpendicular to the direction the ball is thrown; a perfect cutter would make a quarter rotation, etc. This seems intuitively correct to me in considering that you can throw a cutter from the same arm slot as a straight fastball; and that a frisbee slider thrown with a fixed sidespin moves differently than a late-breaking slider with a slowly rotating angle of rotation.

I believe late movement is a real, measurable phenomenon in baseball, but it’s not to be found in the published Pitch F/X data, which is post-processed to give a smoothed, average trajectory assuming a fixed angle of rotation. Perhaps if all the in-flight pitch location recorded were available, it may be possible to estimate the angle of the ball’s rotation, but I’m not sure. What you’d really need is an incredibly high-resolution, high frequency doppler measurement so you could tell which side of the baseball is moving fastest and thus what the ball’s angle of rotation is for many samples during its flight.

How smartphones will disrupt PCs
Greed kills: Why smartphone lock-in will fail and open source win

The first essay describes a near-future scenario where your home computer setup is basically a good monitor, a full-size keyboard, mouse, and a docking station for your smartphone to interface with those devices. Your work setup would be the same, and plugging your phone in at the office provides you with the same computing environment you have at home, and, in a more restricted mode, while on your way to the office.

The second is how Apple’s strategy to lock their customers into using only software approved by the company (and deemed non-threatening to opportunities for in-house profit) is doomed to failure, making a loose analogy to how IBM’s hardware designs came from behind to win out over Apple’s, back in the day. Their walled-garden model, I think they like to call it.

I find the main argument of both essays to be completely persuasive and have a bit to add about how I see computing going in the near future.

First, a bit of introduction: I have no dog in the Apple vs. Microsoft hunt. I think they’re both pretty crappy companies that I wouldn’t want to work for. I tend to prefer Windows to Mac, for the sole reason that everyone knows Windows is garbage, but some people seem to think Macs are significantly better. Mac OSX is no better than a severely broken linux distribution (with an extremely hands-off, generally successful package handler) as far as I have investigated and the shell environment needs almost as much augmentation as a Windows build in order to function usefully. My personal computers are all dual-boot Windows XP and Slackware. At work, my workstations run Windows XP, except one Mac that I use for audio ( since Bias makes some nice software for that platform)…

Over the past few years, I’ve worked hard to move as much heavy-lifting computing work onto dedicated linux servers to free up resources on my and my colleague’s workstations for creative work. That’s the key of where I see computing going. We’re going back to a terminal-mainframe system, in which ERS’s idea of evolving smartphones works great.

An obvious example of this is my own smartphone, the Droid. I’ve got an application called ConnectBot installed on it that let’s me run secure shells on any server I have access to in the world. I have access to enormous computing power at all times from a pocket-sized, ubiquitously networked device.

Another, slightly further-off example of the return to terminal-mainframe computing is in thin clients. I could easily see cable companies and other ISP’s offering thin clients in the near future, where the company maintains a small server cloud and rents thin client boxes and peripherals to customers that access it. They’d no doubt offer subscription tiers that give the customers access to different software packages. If they were to adopt an Apple-like model, where customers would only be allowed to install “signed” software that wouldn’t infringe on their tiered subscription business model, it would be an unpopular service. If the tiers were worked more like the standard cable subscription model, where customers who pay more would get access to bundles of services that they’d already have to pay for (like ESPN360 access and other services like that), it would make sense for a lot of people, who’d free themselves from a lot of problems like keeping their hardware up to date, maintaining a secure computing environment with redundant data storage, and having access to a routinely scaling amount of computing power and storage with very little trade-off: they’d just be giving their money to Comcast instead of Best Buy.

As a quick aside before getting to the point of this essay, I don’t have much faith in the future of iPads or the Android tablets coming out; or for the existing netbooks. They strike me as half-measures: I want a portable, inobtrusive computing machine and I want it to be integrated seamlessly with my desktop workflow. The screen should be in my hand or on a big screen, not perched on my knees, girlishly pinched together.

To sum up, a vision of the very near future: ESR argues that smartphones can displace desktop workstation boxes and that closed software markets are likely to fail in competition with freer alternatives; I observe that thin-client type devices might fill the void more quickly than smartphone computing power can keep up (and satisfy marketplace demand given telecom contracts and what-not), thus moving smartphones into that sort of a terminal-server constellation.

So where does Flash fit in to this equation, at the risk of raising the ire of the early-adopter Apple segment?

I don’t want to get into the Flash vs. Apple war, which I find to be overheated, to put it mildly. I do want to make some observations and predictions on the future of Flash, however.

While Flash is largely closed and proprietary, it does allow content developers to make applets that work on any platform that has the Flash plug-in—and that’s a very good thing. I hope that Flash 10.1 works well on phones. Almost certainly it’ll work better on Android than on PalmOS or Windows Mobile 7, for the simple reason that Android developers uniquely have no profitability motive to close off access from the eventual Flash plug-in for Android devices from the hardware video decoders available on the device.

And somewhat counter-intuitively, I believe it to be an advantage that Flash is largely closed and proprietary. You can do things with Flash that you can’t do with any HTML5 video player, most importantly, you can play streaming video from an RTMP server like FMS, Wowza, or Red 5; and you can serve up copyrighted materials in a way that makes it as difficult as possible for people to steal the content and save it to their own computers. You need a proprietary plug-in if you want to do that. (Which I need to do.) Hulu and many Universities will continue to depend on Flash because there is no viable alternative. Without a closed plug-in (and some other things) there’s really no way to make copyrighted materials available and protected.

The non-philosophical complaints that I see about Flash most often are: “I hate advertisements!”, “My scroll wheel stops working when my pointer hits Flash objects!”, and “It’s inaccessible to the blind!” The first one is a bogus complaint: there will always be advertisements and you can do things even more obnoxious with javascript than what you can do with Flash. The second one is more of a browser problem than a Flash problem as far as I know. That happens with Firefox, but not with IE. And seems a pretty damned trivial complaint to me. The last one is just a fact about the priorities that Flash programmers seem to have, because Adobe puts a lot more effort into making their products support accessibility features than most companies out there. There’s a fourth complaint that I don’t hear much about, that it’s pretty hard to embed flash with w3c compliant code and make it work in all browsers, but that’s a solved problem.

I’m sure that Flash will stick around for online video because I believe the HTML5 video tag is somewhat misguided or at least that the direction HTML5 is heading has been hijacked somewhat by folks with non-altruistic interests. (As background, one of the new features in HTML5 is a video tag that is intended to allow web designers to add video to their pages as easily as they add pictures. They don’t need to design a player, that work will presumably be performed by the browser itself, although they can use javascript to override whatever the browser wants to do. The way it’s done pre-HTML5 is by using a plug-in like Flash, quicktime, or windows media player that has controls and can decode and play the video file that you send to it. Since HTML5 pushes the problem onto the browser developers, you have the problem of these competing organizations having to agree on what codecs are supported. Firefox basically won’t support any codecs that anyone uses—just VP3 which is probably patent-free, Safari will support the patent-encumbered h.264 and some prorietary mac stuff, IE will support h.264 and windows media stuff. The Flash plug-in can decode h.263, h.264, and VP6 video in MP4 or FLV containers.) I’ve avoided encoding video to MP4 containing h.264/aac because I’m not certain where the University of Illinois sits with respect to MPEG-LA’s potential royalty claims. Apple and Microsoft both have financial interests in pushing h.264 since they’re members of MPEG-LA. I’ve been using h.263 (Sorensen Spark) in FLV containers, since nobody seems to pursue Lucent’s IP on it. I also prefer the way it renders text on a chalkboard to VP6 and like how fast it encodes relative to h.264. I don’t know whether any browsers will support h.263, but I don’t care, because I’ll be delivering it via the Flash plug-in.

So my prediction is that Flash sticks around and that eventually, Apple and Adobe will compromise by allowing a stripped down Flash plug-in that only includes the features needed to decode and render video and that requires HTML5 style controls to manipulate. That’s assuming, of course, that Flash 10.1 works as well as it needs to on mobile devices.

Nimrod’s Folly is a variation on the Babelizer java program.

If you find a particularly entertaining sentence, let me know. Getting the students to suggest difficult-to-translate sentences was like pulling teeth.

I may re-write the script to translate everything back into English before translating to a new language, just so that limitations in the French-German dictionary not present in the French-English and German-English dictionaries won’t produce occasional screwy results.

That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of. Whichever University scoops him up will certainly improve their stature, if this truly should come to pass.

The only place where that shows up, in fact, is in the gameday_Syn.xml file loaded by Gameday. There’s a subtree in the file containing information about the next two batters and the current (final) pitch sequence, as well as containing nodes for the three bases with Boolean attributes to indicate occupation. That came as something of a snag for me this past week, but it’s an intriguing one.

In any case, I’ve got to do something far more interesting than table-lookup for this part of the project to work but have a plan. So far, it’s looking good—should have something quite amazing built by the time I hit the sheets tomorrow night.

Update: Some more stuff I learned this week: my data indicates that there were 283,862 plays or personnel changes made during the course of the 2009 MLB season. Of those, the most frequent were assisted groundball outs at 32,655 that didn’t advance a runner, followed by 31,267 fly ball outs that didn’t advance a runner. The third most frequent play type was the swinging strikeout: 26,918 of them. There were 13,726 walks issued with 1st base unoccupied and 7,861 pop outs. The most common hits were bases-empty singles on line drives followed by ground ball singles at 7,830 and 7,172, respectively. There were 3,602 two-throw double plays with outs at 1st and 2nd. 1933 batters struck out on foul tips. There were 9,896 pitching changes not involving a defensive switch. One batter lined into an unassisted triple play. Six other players hit into a triple play, four on liners, two on ground balls. Fifteen players hit inside the park home runs. 862 play-types occurred only once, out of 2,300 different play-types (suppressing player and position names).

Amazingly, this information has non-trivial uses… Trust me!

(Re-ran the data set, so the numbers changed at 10:23 from an hour or two earlier.)
((Turns out those numbers were wrong, but I do have them correctly now.))

Final update: I noticed what seemed to be some odd inconsistencies with that dataset and figured it out. Those counts include spring training and WBC games, so those numbers (and some of the underlying data) are a slightly screwy.

The word, ‘jerk’, was only used once.

‘Pujols’ was the 516th most frequent word used. ‘Greatest’ only occurred 36 times, tied with ‘Hancock’.

(These figures are all tentative.)

Best new show this week is definitely Return of Supermans, which takes the basic joke from Superhawk and the Whipmaster to the next level. Well, it’s a little different—making fun of crappy Turkish Knockoff flicks. (If anyone can tell me for certain if they’re doing to the buried alive lady in this one is what I think they’re doing, a tip of the cap to you…)

I bought new shoes yesterday for the first time in probably five years. My faithful Dr. Marten’s finally wore out on me. I’d planned on going to the mall here to get another pair for the $130 or so I’d wisely invested in them lo those many years ago, but my pal told me about a website called Zappos. They were selling my shoes for $94, no sales tax added, and overnight shipping is free—plus if they don’t fit, you can return the shoes within 365 days of getting them with a pre-paid UPS slip. That’s a hell of a deal. I put my order in at 4:43pm yesterday and hoped they’d come tomorrow sometime. They were delivered to the office before noon today, about seventeen hours after I clicked “submit” on the website. That’s impressive. And so are my stylin’, ultra-durable new kicks.

Research is going well. I took most of last week off, but hit the ground running this weekend and am off to the races. I plan to get a shit-ton done over the next week. And will make an effort to post something at least mildly entertaining daily.

After: I passed and am now A.B.D.. Now the hard work begins.

And last night, I caved in and bought myself a Nintendo Wii, along with a bunch of games, the best of which is Wario Ware: Smooth Moves. An amazingly fun game.

And tonight, I’ll be seeing Nick’s show.

And I just finished making my D-Fence sign. Not for Saturday’s game vs. Michigan, but for when my colleagues do their public dissertation defenses. I figure it’ll be great for one of us to sit in the back row with that up in the air until we get kicked out. Show some love and support, ya know?

Saturday I woke up long enough to watch the Illini lose to Iowa. We should have won that game, but it’s not so upsetting that we didn’t. Kind of a pisser to be the bookends of Iowa’s 8-game Big Ten losing streak, though. I feel bad for Eddie McGee. He showed poise after his 83-yard TD pass was called back and I was certain that he’d get the ball in the end zone before the clock ran out. Thought he was managing the game well until that incredibly bad pass to the Iowa linebacker. It would have been a great win to march down the field and put the game away at the end. Wasn’t to be.

Mendenhall needs to get the ball more often, to hell with the option if it’s not working, which it clearly wasn’t the entire first half. I completely agree with Mark Tupper that it’d be great to see the line hold a pocket open and put these talented receivers to better use. The most frustrating thing was that McGee had great protection on the fatal interception play—plenty of time to let the receivers get into their routes and see where the defense left men underprotected. It’s a young offense, but still a pretty good one, even if they only managed to put up six points this weekend.

In basketball news, Bruce Weber and his assistants received three major verbal commitments for the class of 2009 last week. That’s exciting news and I’m hearing good things about the team from my neighbor who goes to watch some of the players work out on their own time. Basketball Prospectus has officially launched—a link is added to the sidebar. Their introductory motivation for their tempo-neutralized statistics is presented here. I’m excited to see what those two very bright fellows have to offer this winter. They’ve definitely enhanced my appreciation for college basketball over the last several years.

In hockey news, the Illini team remains undefeated with a sweep of Penn State over the weekend. The Blues are outscoring their opponents 15-8 through four games with a 3-1 record. Erik Johnson’s already made a big impression on the blue line. I’m a little disappointed that Jeff Woywitka didn’t make the team. I saw him play in a pre-season game in the 2005-06 season and liked what he was doing on the ice.

Last October, I was watching game 7 of the NLCS at a bar that was 90% Cub fans—all rooting fanatically for the Mets. After Wagonmaker froze Beltran, there was a split second of pained silence (aside from my celebration) before a chant went up: Lets Go Tigers! *clap* *clap* *clap*clap*clap*

I’d never be so lame as to root for whatever team is playing the Cubs, but as a fan of the Cards, I find it very hard to root for them to win—not for any hatred-fueled rivalry, but for what it would mean going forward.

The Cubs have a small window to win the World Series before all these backloaded contracts they recently signed turn into pumpkins. If they can ride these new horses to a world series, the faithful in the friendly confines would be grateful enough to give Cub management a free pass for whatever they want to do, and if they’re wise, they’d rid themselves of those contracts to some dumb GM who pays more attention to the playoffs than to the likely future performance of players with large contracts and restock their farm system with a supply of top prospects to tap into for years to come.

This would be a very bad thing for the Cardinals, since it would give a division rival in a big market huge payroll flexibility and a stream of talent coming up for years to come just when they were on the brink of being handcuffed through the first half-decade of the second century of their World Series drought.

The Cubs are very hot right now and have a good front three in their rotation, but it’s hard to believe that the worst division in baseball could produce two WS champions in consecutive years.

I’m not rooting against ‘em, but most definitely not rooting for ‘em either.

It was a difficult season, come to a close today in fine fashion on a five game winning streak. Rest up, birds. Be ready to have some real fun again next year.

****

Wasn’t feeling great last night, so I used the evening to read Bing West’s The Village. This morning, I read through this webpage maintained by marines who fought in Combined Action Platoons. Included are West’s Marine Corps Gazette article, Fast Rifles, and scans of his pamphlet Small Unit Action in Vietnam. Incredible stories. I couldn’t stop reading the book until it was finished. Every review mentions that West’s style of writing is emotionally detached and without pretense. It’s a palpable effect—you learn of these amazing men and come to admire and respect them only to have their deaths at Viet Cong hands reported with unceremonious brevity.

It’s a good thing to take from the book—and impossible to miss—these men deserve respect and gratitude for their work. Not just those men in the book, too. At the CAP Veteranas website, there’s an anecdote of digging three VC out of a tunnel and finding them in possession of boxes of clothing donated by Berkeley students. Shameful.

****

I’ve made significant academic progress (finally) over the past few weeks. I wrote my proposal and the first draft was accepted. I’ve scheduled my written Prelim for two weeks from now and the oral defense in a little over three weeks. I’m swamped with non-academic work this week—I’ll be working 8am-7pm the next two days for two very important clients and it only gets slightly better the rest of the week. I’m going to get working on my research project in whatever downtime I have, though. I’m hoping to put myself into a position where I can go into my oral prelim with some proof-of-concept work in my back pocket to address whatever issues my committee identifies as areas of concern.

I’ll be working late in the lab tonight getting things ready for the week, so I don’t expect to sleep much the next three nights.

****

On a monthly good-news note, a new episode of Cautionary Tales of Swords will be out sometime tomorrow. Hopefully it comes back for a fifth episode. Because I laugh hard at it.

****

In non-Cardinal sporting news, the Lambs got their butts handed to them by the Cowboys today in a game I didn’t watch. Fortunately, the Illini beat #21 AP-ranked Penn State (19 in the Coach’s poll) and a promising young Blues team starts the new season on Thursday. In this week’s polls, the University of Illinois football team received 59 votes from the AP, which I guess lands us at #28 in their rankings. Put up a good showing (or even, dare to dream, defeat) #5 Wisconsin this Saturday and we’ll start getting some national recognition. To have a team built on talented freshmen and sophomores having that kind of success would do wonders for Zook’s already exceptional recruiting efforts.

****

Barbarism in Burma: this blog is a good place to start.

I finally finished writing my dissertation proposal yesterday afternoon. I stayed up all night Thursday working on it and am pleased with how it turned out. A colleague of mine who recently finished his PhD in Linguistics read through it and liked it. I wasn’t too pleased with the introduction section but came to not hate it so much after re-reading it a few times last night. Now I’ll start working on slides for the presentation and wait for my advisors to either ask for some revisions or reject the idea outright.

I also discovered that if you don’t sleep for 40 hours and then drink beer for 7 hours on an empty stomach, you’re going to end up very, very drunk.

On another note, I’ve come to be very impressed with the women who write Ladies…. This week, they’ve got two recipes I’ll likely give a go: a tzatziki dip that’d be great with toasted pita and some clever pudding shots. I’ve never been a morning drinker, but could see me putting a few of those away at an 11am kickoff like today’s.

I also nailed three songs.

I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight, by the Cutting Crew. I was well-prepared for it after watching the video earlier in the day thanks to Boxcar. Used the “it must’ve been something I aaaaaate” bit that I thought were the real lyrics when I was wee. Got laughs. Also had a little fun with the “followed my hands, not my head” line.

Since today was Talk Like a Pirate Day, I did the closest thing to a shanty I know: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot. A beautiful song. I did it meager justice.

Then I rocked Pour Some Sugar on Me and finished up with a tried and true classic: Werewolves of London.

But most importantly, I worked out what to do for the literature review for the formal semantics section of my dissertation proposal. It’d been killing me for days.

Callix Crabbe has carried over his skillset to AAA—continuing to get on base and steal a few. Looks like he’s having trouble seeing the ball batting lefty. RHP are striking him out way above his career rate.

Brooks Conrad is swinging a mighty bat for a second baseman for the Astros’ AAA affiliate. More than half his hits are for extra bases, including seven home runs in 122 AB. It’d be nice to get that kind of production from the second baseman in the Cardinals lineup. It’s got to suck to spend your peak season stuck in AAA so that Craig Biggio can complete his crawl to 3,000 hits.

I finished one fairly complicated paper this morning. I have until 2:30pm tomorrow to finish a short, much simpler writeup and to finish taking notes on a notoriously difficult paper. Then the Spring 2007 semester will be in the can.

Been going nonstop all day. Was at lecture by William Labov (details of talk here until the ninth inning and working, in meetings, running errands, and helping set up for the talk beforehand. I’ve got a hockey game in a little over an hour and need to be at work at 8:30am tomorrow morning. If I’m wired up after the hockey game, I might just end up pulling an all nighter. Plenty of reading to get done.

And it’s cold.

Hey, nice! Second hit of the night for the Cardinals by Chris Duncan, a monster double off the wall. Being outscored 20-3 on the series is a little better than 20-2! The Mets played a heckuva series—I’ll be looking forward to the rematch at Shea in the last week of the season.

Post-game Wrap: My hockey team won the season opener 6-4. It should have been 6-3, but I made a truly boneheaded pass up the middle in my own zone without enough mustard on it. The other team had a ringer and he was right there to intercept it—walked in and scored. The shame! I’m in a beginner’s league and judging by what I saw tonight, we may be a little bit advanced. The forwards did a great job crashing the net and made some pretty nifty moves down in the zone. As for me, my endurance and legs are in pretty good shape, although I’m a much slower skater than I was thirteen years ago. That should improve. My puckhandling has gotten better over the past two months, but it’s still pretty bad. The shot hasn’t returned at all yet, but I’m able to control a little saucer shot pretty well that’s a good weapon for a pointman whose forwards establish themselves in the crease so well.

Overall, I’m pleasantly surprised with how well my body’s handling the games. The mental mistakes are frustrating as all get-out, though.

Kinda like the Cardinals—physically capable of playing the game pretty well, but making stupid mistakes that keep them from getting the job done consistently. We’ll both improve over the next month.

On Monday, I came up with my paper topic for the seminar I’m in this semester—the professor seems pretty excited to see what I do with the problem. It deals with de se and de te readings of pronouns embedded under attitude verbs. It’s an interesting problem and I’m looking forward to finishing the paper—I plan to try to publish it in a journal if it turns out as well as I hope.

Yesterday, I pitched a dissertation topic to my co-advisors and got both of their endorsements. I’m attacking a long-standing, hairy problem using a data set that’s ideal for the task and that I’m quite fond of, to say the least. That’s about as specific as I’m willing to get publicly, but it’s a topic that I’m very happy to be working on. More than that, I’m extremely relieved to have finally chosen one. Now I can get to work. I’m working on the literature review portion for the rest of this semester—I’m going to force myself to read and add to a souped-up annotated bibliography at least five or six papers per week—ideally, one per day. I tend to be far more productive reading-wise during baseball season when I’m guaranteed to sit still for three hours per day. I’m going to begin the computational component next week after I read the limited amount of literature existing to assist on that side of the coin. This is, to say the least, an exciting and long-overdue development.

Then today, I get an email from my supervisor telling me that I’m getting a not insignificant raise. Excellent news!

Oh, and last Sunday, my hockey team won the playoff tournament and I got a t-shirt identifying me as a champion, even though I contributed very little in the three games I played with them. My new team’s first game of the next season is this coming Wednesday. Bobovski is my team captain and I hope to keep improving my play and endurance.

I didn’t mention it, since Pip covered it so well (scroll down to “Chass Chafes at VORP”), but Murry Chass’ column at the New York Times was, for me, officially the moment the Grey Lady became birdcage liner—the straw that broke the camel’s back after their baseless hit piece on Ron Zook. I’ve long held the belief that the last bastion of credibility in a newspaper are in the sports and business pages, where the reporters work an actual beat on which they walk with authority born of expertise. Via Dan Agonistes, I see a piece at the Wall Street Journal rounding up the reaction from the “new-age” crowd.

In that roundup, there’s a link to something Alan Schwarz, one of Chass’ fellow columnists at the NYT, wrote back in 2004, A Middle Man’s Worth, about the efforts to better quantify the performance of middle relievers. I put together a file of inherited runner numbers after the 2005 season and was stunned by how few baserunners the typical reliever inherits. It’s good to see that smarter people than I have figured out a way to put that small amount of data to good use.

Remarkably, Pip cites a new column by Schwarz in that same post—and a few paragraphs up suggests that Josh Kinney may be the best suited bullpen pitcher to appear in high leverage situations where runners are on base and another pitcher needs to be bailed out.

I’ve been a fan of Skip Schumaker for a long time, so it was very good to hear him sock two homeruns on a 3-5 day at the plate today. At the Bird Land, DG writes: (some typos removed from quoted text)

Skip Schumaker, making a strong push to unseat one of the other outfielders written onto the major-league lineup, cracked two home runs on Wednesday in the Cardinals’ 11-1 victory against the Dodgers. One was definitely wind-aided. The other was gone out of any park. Turns out Chris Duncan was not the only Cardinal outfielder to work with Mark McGwire this offseason. Schumaker got some individual tutelage from the former slugger as well, and with just a few lessons McGwire altered Schumaker’s swing to the point that manager Tony La Russa has said Schumaker “has a better chance” at the plate now.

That means he has a better chance of making the club, too.

Don’t tell Pip about the Mark McGwire connection to Skip’s power surge.

The Big Ten Tournament starts tomorrow at noon in Chicago. Illinois plays Penn State at 5pm and John Supinie worries that Illinois will look ahead to a Friday game against Indiana. I share his worries. A loss there would likely land the Illini in the NIT. Losing out of an NCAA bid would be chum for the conspiracy theorists. (There’s a group of people who believe the Chief was retired when he was because Illinois basketball is teh sux0r, and the DIA wanted those bloody NIT dollars.

Added after: Matthew Leach wrote a full-length story about Skip, talking about the adjustments in his batting approach McGwire tried to teach him. In the article, he mentions that Skip didn’t walk much last season, which was sadly true. As a leadoff hitter, I’d hoped he would show the same kind of OBP and K:BB improvement in his second year of AAA that he’d done in his second year of AA in 2004. It didn’t happen, though. Highly detailed situational hitting figures aren’t published for minor leaguers, but in non-rigorous examinations of his gamelogs throughout last season, I recall that he struck out looking on full counts pretty often. It seemed at the time that he might be better off trying to master the Eckstein approach of shortening up to foul off close pitches with two strikes and wait for the pitcher to chuck one well away. If McGwire can turn him into the next Brian Giles, you’ll hear no complaints out of me.

There’s no word as to who is the ninth player at major league camp to be re-assigned to minor league camp. My guess from yesterday, Mike Smith, is the most likely candidate. I wonder whether nobody followed up on that due to a belief that his re-assignment isn’t all that noteworthy or whether it’s a different player, whom I speculated on in the comments to that post. In order to better understand the consequences of that speculated player’s assignment to minor-league camp, I dug up this useful article, and found that he’d need to be placed on irrevocable waivers. It sounds like it’s going to happen sooner or later, but I’d prefer they wait until he has a few bad games (maybe) or other teams get closer to establishing their 25-man rosters. I don’t know well the effective strategies front offices use in these situations, though, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for a few days.

This kid‘s dad has a happy home life.

It’s a good thing I didn’t send a boastful email to Bobovski when the Blues were up 2-0 late in the second period. His beloved Flames just came back to win 4-2.

I got my first look at Windows Vista, running on a new HP box with 2 gig RAM. Applications pop open quick. With nothing running but an empty excel spreadsheet, 871 megs of memory was in use. With all the driver problems I’ve heard of, this looks like a great opportunity for Linux to grab a bit of the home market. All my personal computers dual-boot to XP and Slack. I’d imagine that at least some people will give at least a dual-boot setup a try, given the opportunity. I’m not sure if any distribution has tried to exploit the niche, but you’d think somebody would build a disk partitioner into their install procedures.

I stayed up until 4:30am last night preparing a talk for this morning on this paper. I was mildly annoyed by what must be a major error in example (33), where there’s a * next to Andrew in the gloss that can’t be there without making the example useless. The talk went pretty well from what classmates told me. I figure I hit myself a double. I’m safe from a double play and I’m in scoring position. I’ve got another talk tomorrow on a much longer, more complex paper and with a good presentation of that one, I’ll be circling the bases like the Gashouse Gorillas.

The plan is to set the coffee pot to kick on at 4:30am and get back to work.