Forms of Life: The Method and Meaning of Sociology, Collins Harry

Автор: Collins Harry, Evans Robert, Higgins Christopher
Название: Bad Call: Technology`s Attack on Referees and Umpires and How to Fix It
ISBN: 0262534444 ISBN-13(EAN): 9780262534444
Издательство: MIT Press
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Цена: 2212.00 р.
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Описание:

How technologies can get it wrong in sports, and what the consequences are -- referees undermined, fans heartbroken, and the illusion of perfect accuracy maintained.

Good call or bad call, referees and umpires have always had the final say in sports. Bad calls are more visible: plays are televised backward and forward and in slow motion. New technologies -- the Hawk-Eye system used in tennis and cricket, for example, and the goal-line technology used in English football -- introduced to correct bad calls sometimes get it right and sometimes get it wrong, but always undermine the authority of referees and umpires. Bad Call looks at the technologies used to make refereeing decisions in sports, analyzes them in action, and explains the consequences.

Used well, technologies can help referees reach the right decision and deliver justice for fans: a fair match in which the best team wins. Used poorly, however, decision-making technologies pass off statements of probability as perfect accuracy and perpetuate a mythology of infallibility. The authors re-analyze three seasons of play in English Premier League football, and discover that goal line technology was irrelevant; so many crucial wrong decisions were made that different teams should have won the Premiership, advanced to the Champions League, and been relegated. Simple video replay could have prevented most of these bad calls. (Major League baseball learned this lesson, introducing expanded replay after a bad call cost Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game.)

What matters in sports is not computer-generated projections of ball position but what is seen by the human eye -- reconciling what the sports fan sees and what the game official sees.

Автор: Collins Harry
Название: Gravity`s Kiss: The Detection of Gravitational Waves
ISBN: 0262535122 ISBN-13(EAN): 9780262535120
Издательство: MIT Press
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Цена: 2036.00 р.
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Описание:

A fascinating account, written in real time, of the unfolding of a scientific discovery: the first detection of gravitational waves.

Scientists have been trying to confirm the existence of gravitational waves for fifty years. Then, in September 2015, came a "very interesting event" (as the cautious subject line in a physicist's email read) that proved to be the first detection of gravitational waves. In Gravity's Kiss, Harry Collins--who has been watching the science of gravitational wave detection for forty-three of those fifty years and has written three previous books about it--offers a final, fascinating account, written in real time, of the unfolding of one of the most remarkable scientific discoveries ever made.

Predicted by Einstein in his theory of general relativity, gravitational waves carry energy from the collision or explosion of stars. Dying binary stars, for example, rotate faster and faster around each other until they merge, emitting a burst of gravitational waves. It is only with the development of extraordinarily sensitive, highly sophisticated detectors that physicists can now confirm Einstein's prediction. This is the story that Collins tells.

Collins, a sociologist of science who has been embedded in the gravitational wave community since 1972, traces the detection, the analysis, the confirmation, and the public presentation and the reception of the discovery--from the first email to the final published paper and the response of professionals and the public. Collins shows that science today is collaborative, far-flung (with the physical location of the participants hardly mattering), and sometimes secretive, but still one of the few institutions that has integrity built into it.