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New Devices Help Track Olympic Winners
Darren writes "Athletes are going faster, higher and longer and as a result the technology that measures their feats at the Olympics needs to keep up. As a result a number of new devices to help track winners, losers at the Games have been developed, including microchips on marathon runners' shoes, ultrasensitive touch pads in the pool, radar guns at the beach volleyball and cameras that take 1000 images per second."
Something tells me that the technology used will inevitably be faster than the athletes it's used to track. Athletes are, after all, not going twice as high, twice as long or twice as fast, every two years.
That must be a typical media oversimplification, right? If a race comes down to a scary, rubbing-elbows-with-the-guy-beside-me sprint, I sure don't want the 'win' to be decided by where in its rotation my wheel is when we cross the line together...
I think this is another example of where general technology gets a huge boost because of the demand of an insanely rich non-human-essential industry.
There is a lot of money in the Olympics, mostly from advertisers on NBC. These new devices are developed more so to improve the TV watcher's experience; there wasn't a need for smart devices in the first Olympics, there is no need now.
Another example, medical imaging: if it weren't for the millions of you out there who are willing to shell out tons of money for games, better digital radiology technology would have never developed.
Personally, I think its great that technology can be developed and improved and debugged at the expense of entertainment industries and then be taken to other fields. No doubt the Olympics have improved the field of embedded computing as a whole.
can't sleep. clowns will eat me.
Unless of course they have a chip in both shoes which would totally invalidate my problems with it. Are you suggesting I didn't read the article?
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Yeah, even with all this technology the weakness is still a human factor.
Why can't judges watch slow speed replays and other assistment in their judgement... they can turn judging into a science rather than the crud it is currently.
Even 50 years ago, they were using exactly the same technology to figure out this stuff that they're using today: photo finishes. The fact that today the pixs are digital and available instantly and in days of yore you had to wait for them to get developed is merely an optimization.
I never really considered a sport anything where a third party (judge) decides who wins or loses. This include gymnastics, diving, figure skating and miss universe.
But no need to debate this, as this is just me. Just my humble opinion. I'm sure very few would agree with me, but heck, it's an OPINION.
* All Dockers khaki pants
* All Colgate Shave Cream packages
* All Trojan Ultra Ribbed condom boxes
* Some Gilette razors
While I'm sure that nobody is tracking you right now, RFID tags can be read by several meters away and contain unique identifiers. If you thought the Pentium chip unique IDs were bad, this should (rightly so) worry you considerably more.
Why would anyone care if there was an RFID chip in a box of gilette razors or any of the above products you mentioned, its not like any potential hacker cares what type of gilette razors your using... Maybe they'll find out the price of the khakis from the RFID chip, but I doubt there's any data that anyone cares about.
I find that the closeness of the swimming competitions--in that only machines can judge who is the second place person and the third place person, make the competition seem a bit on the irrelevant side. Am I the only person who wonders what the hell the difference is between a Gold and a Silver if there were only 1/100 difference in the competitor's performances?