Wednesday Links: Recession Solutions

BROOKLYN, New York -- Everyone is trying to cope with economic hardships. The Russian government is giving people free lumber. New Yorkers can no longer steal paper plates from their local Whole Foods. And Oprah just wants you to read The Secret and think positively to solve all of your financial, emotional, and medical problems.

Wall Street Journal: Let the forest be your stimulus. Despite having the third-largest hard currency reserves in the world, Russia still can't spend its way out of economic oblivion. So instead, the government is letting ordinary citizens fell timber, prospect for gold and plant potatoes for free in hopes of stimulating the economy.

New York Times: Russia's defense minister is a "stool salesman." Russia's military has long been plagued by a bloated officer corps, but in its current economic dire straits, the country can hardly afford to gently show these officers the door. They just roughly kick them to the curb.

Architects' Journal: We will build Europe's largest ... er ... parking lot. The Russia Tower was slated to become Europe's tallest building, but financial mismanagement has brought the project to a halt, and little has been built since the cornerstone was laid two years ago. So much for Norman "The Apologist" Foster's wet dream of a building.

Geography of Jobs: Americans are equally screwed everywhere. That's not entirely true, but almost no major cities have been free from job losses. This map comes from consulting firm TIP Strategies and displays the change in the number of jobs for the 100 largest metropolitan areas since 2004.

WNYC: Forget NYSC, I'm joining the YMCA. Like the two-dollar bill story reported earlier, WNYC is asking listeners to submit their own uncommon indicators of the recession. The result is a fascinating interactive map of New York City.

Newsweek: Oprah wants you to inject things into your vagina. Oprah got thoroughly skewered by Weston Kosova and Pat Wingert in this Newsweek cover story, where they portrayed her as an uncritical, weak-minded ninny who unflinchingly endorses crackpots and cranks. The results are hilarious.

Toronto Star: Foreigners don't like hockey. Canada has been lauded for its open and fair immigration policies. Now if they could only get the new arrivals to take up hockey.

ESPN: I wanna be like Barry. If you want to get close to Obama, join in on some hoops. This borders a bit on a cult of personality, but luckily basketball is already very popular in the US, so we don't risk facing a situation like Russia, where niche sports like tennis, judo and skiing saw their popularity skyrocket simply because the president (Yeltsin in the first case, Putin in the latter two) played them.

Metropolis Magazine: Meet America's stupidest mayor. We have leveled our own broadsides against illiterate Boston mayor Tom Menino; now he may be facing a challenge to his authoritarian rule.

Tor Project: Help stop the Iranian thugocracy. Speaking of authoritarian rule, the Iranian government has become quite adept at thwarting journalists and would be protesters from gaining access to the Internet to get information about the unrest out of the country. This piece of software prevents the authorities from easily tracking them and cutting off their access, or worse, finding out their identity and personally targeting them. It can also be quite useful to bloggers and journalists in any part of the world.

People Who Are Terrible at their Jobs: ESPN's Gregg Easterbrook

BOULDER, Colorado -- The New Republic's senior editor Gregg Easterbrook writes a laughably-uninformed column about football each week for ESPN.com, entitled "Tuesday Morning Quarterback." This week, he tackles the issue of close goal line calls. Easterbrook argues in favor of some sort of electronic tracking system to remove the element of human error in scoring plays. Here is his case:

If swim meets and horse races can be photo-timed to the hundredth of a second, it is ridiculous that the football world has to argue about whether a ball crossed a line. Some kind of radio chip embedded in footballs, and weighing next to nothing, could surely provide a GPS-like readout on whether the ball touched some kind of electronically projected line in front of the end zone and along a field's sidelines. Considering the state of miniature electronics, this doesn't seem as if it would be very hard to do. College engineering departments surely would compete for the right to design such a system. The system might prove too expensive for high schools and small colleges, but with all the money involved in the NFL and in football-factory colleges, the price of adding electronic sensing would be small by comparison. So let's insert a chip in the football!

In other words, "If two totally different sports can use technology to solve a completely unrelated problem, then why can't football?" Your logic is impeccible.

If you think about it at all, or bother to do any research, it actually is quite hard. FIFA, the world governing body for soccer, experimented extensively with placing RFID chips in balls for the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Adidas had developed a system that involved placing a chip in the center of the ball and 12 antennae along the goal posts and crossbar. When the ball crosses the touchline, a signal is sent to a watch worn by the match referee. Ultimately, the system was scrapped because of reliability issues - Adidas had problems keeping the fragile chip positioned inside the ball as it was rocketed around the field. Add to these problems the fact that in football, there are 22 men, all of them well north of 200 hundred pounds, piling on top of this ball as it is stretched across the goal line.

This is not "Medieval Times," Gregg, but it is a simple issue of technology, and the technology does not yet exist with any degree of feasibility or reliability to replace visual confirmation of the ball crossing the line. In addition, as he admits, there are many other considerations in football, like the position of the ball carrier's body and the position of the ball in his hands, that go into ruling on a touchdown that make this one tiny bit of information that an RFID chip might yield basically useless.

One of the most important elements of football remains highly subjective - where the referee spots the football after each down - and no one believes we should find some "electronic fix" for it. Spots are often reviewed, but only at the behest of the officiating crew, not the teams. In this area, the ref's discretion is sacrosanct. I am not arguing for a referee's right to ignore evidence to get a call wrong, as opponents of video replay do. This is just wrong-headed and stubborn. But in sports, many things come down to a referee's judgment - like spotting - and I do not think this technology, as it currently stands, will allow an official to make a better-informed call. I think referees should be able to use every bit of video technology to get the call right, but if nobody saw it cross the line, either on the field or on TV, it isn't a touchdown.

It turns out almost all of the commenters on this piece agree with me, though many make much more sophisticated and interesting arguments about the shortcomings of RFID technology.

In the interest of full disclosure, part of the reason that I dislike Mr. Easterbook so much is his relentless criticism of the New England Patriots and their coach, Bill Belichick. He likened the coach to Richard Nixon, called Michael Vick more honorable for owning up to his mistakes (when he was staring down six federal felony charges), and believes that Belichick is the worst serial cheater in sports history (in the NFL, I believe that honor belongs to Broncos boss Mike Shanahan, who drills his players in the criminal art of cut blocking).

So, just for spite, I will direct you all to Easterbrook's Wikipedia page and ask you to compare that photo with one he uses on ESPN.com.