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Posts Tagged ‘world cup’

Engineering the Earth's resources with remote-controlled clouds, artificially induced snow, and trained monkeys -- for sports' sake

Qatari engineers recently announced a project to develop solar-powered artificial clouds to shade the 2022 World Cup from the country’s unforgiving summer sun. One remotely steerable cloud comes with a hefty price tag - $500,000 - just to cool the field by 10 degrees.

This isn't the first time humans have battled weather for the sake of a sporting event. Click through the gallery below to read more about Qatar’s clouds, Chinese rain-battling techniques and other ways geoengineering has been deployed for the love of the game.

Click to launch an in-depth look at sports' craziest geoengineering projects.

Clairvoyant cephalopod Paul also chooses Spain over the Dutch

Queen Mary, University of London professors -- and soccer fans -- Javier López Peña and Hugo Touchette collected ball-passing data from each World Cup team and used graph theory to analyze each team's style of play. Their results reveal "gaping holes" in England's strategy against Germany, which they say explains team England's loss. The results also show that Spain's propensity for passing might help them beat the Dutch this weekend.

Touchette explains in a university press release that the researchers devised a network of passes among each player. Each player gets a score called centrality, which measures how important he is to the network; the higher the centrality score, the bigger the impact if he can't play. Regrettably, the team did not elaborate on Thomas Müller's centrality score.

Graph theory is often used to study computer networks by modeling what would happen if a certain element was removed. But why not use it to study soccer patterns?

The networks show Spanish players make a lot of passes -- almost 40 percent more than Germany and twice as many as the Dutch. López Peña explains the passes are well-distributed among all the players, especially those playing at mid-field. The stats bear this out: David Villa, the tournament's highest goal scorer, has received an average of 37 passes per game, more than any other forward from any team, López Peña says.

By contrast, Team Netherlands plays a more offensive game, with fewer passes and less intricate footwork, López Peña says. They have scored plenty of goals on free kicks and rely on their sheer physical prowess to dominate the game, he says.

The duo also analyzed the England-Germany game to unveil weaknesses in the English strategy. Forward Wayne Rooney received nearly three times more passes than Jermain Defoe, so it was easy for the Germans to block him.

In other soccer prediction news, Paul the Octopus agrees with the mathematicians and says Spain will win the World Cup. The clairvoyant cephalopod has yet to make an inaccurate prediction, garnering him international stardom and even lucrative contract offers, according to AP.

By choosing a mussel from a Spanish flag-bedecked container, he predicted Spain would defeat Germany in the semifinals. In response, some German fans called for octopus stew -- which prompted the Spanish Prime Minister to offer "El Pulpo Paul" official state protection.

"I am concerned about the octopus," PM Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said. "I'm thinking about sending in a team to protect the octopus because obviously it was very spectacular that he should get Spain's victory right from there."

Maybe those math professors ought to have some protection, too.

[PhysOrg, AP]

"It is obvious that after the experience so far in this World Cup it would be a nonsense to not reopen the file of technology at the business meeting of the International FA Board in July," Blatter said in Johannesburg today. This goes against what was previously a strong anti-technology stance from FIFA. In fact, as recently as this March, Blatter himself spoke out against allowing technical intrusions into the beautiful game.

It's certainly true that soccer presents some unique challenges for incorporating instant-replay tech in any form. The conststantly running clock, few if any actual stoppages of play and an almost militaristic adherence to tradition are all good reasonss for fans to be wary of any high-tech changes.

So what would an instant-replay system look like? Hard to say. Something like tennis's Hawk-Eye system could work for monitoring the goal line at least. In that system, video from several precisely positioned cameras around the stadium is continuously analyzed by a computer algorithm, plotting the exact position and trajectory of the ball with a high degree of accuracy. The USTA has done a great job of incorporating the system into the actual event of watching a match; when a player challenges a call, the Hawk-Eye simulation is immediately called up on both the television broadcast and on screens in the actual stadium, adding a quick few seconds of excitement and suspense.

But then again, action completely stops in tennis every few second between points, so how something like Hawk-Eye would fit into soccer remains to be seen. Will we see an even more novel approach to adding accuracy to officiating without disturbing what is by its nature a fluid and dynamic game? I'm excited to find out.

[Guardian, Christian Science Monitor]

Over at Mashable the editors were monitoring new traffic across the Web via Akamai’s Net Usage Index, a traffic meter that keeps real time tabs on how many visitors per minute are landing on more than 100 major news sites. In the minutes after Donovan’s game-clinching, elimination-defying goal during added stoppage time, Web traffic spiked to 11.2 million visitors per minute, eclipsing even the 2008 U.S. presidential election as measured by the viewers per minute metric.

Of course, Donovan can’t take all the credit. Elsewhere in South Africa England and Slovenia were wrapping up a similarly tense match, and all that breaking news hitting the wire at once likely contributed to the spike, which reportedly threw Yahoo Sports out of sorts for several minutes and also caused some Twitter issues (what doesn’t these days?).

The all-time news traffic record was set on the first day of World Cup play at 12 million visitors per minute, but apparently Akamai’s final numbers aren’t in yet on today’s action. That means today’s post-game spike could be the biggest ever or it could remain the second biggest traffic uptick in history. But it also means that as the World Cup moves into more and more meaningful games, we may see the record eclipsed again and again. Somebody better tell the IT guys over Yahoo to cancel their weekend plans.

[Mashable, homepage photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty]

Yesterday we explained how to block the 233-Hz drone of the vuvuzela with software at home. Today, Host Broadcast Services, providers of the TV feed of the World Cup, announced that it has increased the EQ filtering on the back end, after viewer complaints about the controversial horn.

"Despite HBS’ core philosophy, which is to provide ‘realistic’ host broadcast coverage reflecting the ambiance in the stadiums, additional audio filtering has been implemented," the announcement stated.

The BBC, meanwhile, is considering providing two separate audio channels for the broadcasts, one with ambient horning muted and another including the full glory of the vuvuzela.

[MSNBC]

When Germany hosted the 2006 World Cup, people flocked to public parks, arenas, and sporting stadiums worldwide to watch the games on massive screens at public viewing events. If Japan lands its bid for the 2022 Cup, you may be able to go to your local soccer stadium and view real-time 3-D hologram displays of tournament games projected full-size on the pitch.

Japan's bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup includes an initiative called Universal Fan Fest, a $6 billion plan to treat fans around the world to live 3-D telecasts of tournament matches. Four hundred stadiums in 208 countries would provide some 360 million people with live 3-D feeds of games played in Japan, where each game would be captured from 360 degrees by 200 HD cameras.

But if the technology has come far enough along by that point, Japan wants to actually project each match onto fields in other nations hologram-style, giving fans the illusion of actually seeing the game live. And just to add a tint of green to the energy-hungry scheme, part of the power for all the necessary equipment would be harvested from the fans themselves as they rock the bleachers by cheering and stomping their feet, as well as from solar arrays.

We've got to say, we like this idea for two reasons. Obviously the idea of chalking the dimensions of a soccer pitch over the field at the Meadowlands and catching some holographic World Cup action live in 3-D tickles all of our most sci-fi fancies.

But perhaps even better, by proposing the idea Japan has placed the impetus on itself to develop the necessary technology. A lot of our best 3-D technology already comes out of Japan's consumer electronic giants, so it is certainly the leading candidate to create a functioning setup for this kind of thing. And just like DARPA dangles the carrot in front of private industries to encourage development of technologies that might otherwise rest comfortably on the back burner, Japan has placed the onus on itself to be the first nation to simulcast live games in 3-D, projected onto foreign soccer fields.

That means World Cup notwithstanding, the technology to project events live in holographic 3-D might be realized sooner rather than later, and that might be an even more tantalizing prospect than actually hosting the Cup. FIFA will decide the home of the 2018 and 2022 tournaments on December 2.

[AP]

And by football, we of course mean soccer ... er, football.

Tests showed that some of England's footballers had more difficulty coping with the thinner air at the high altitudes for six of the 10 World Cup stadiums. That select group would spend eight to 10 hours per night for three to four weeks inside the altitude tents, so that their body can produce more red blood cells to compensate for carrying oxygen to their muscles.

Each hypoxic generator flushes 100 liters of air per minute through the tents at a set altitude. Other national competitors for the World Cup have also reportedly adopted the same practice.

David Beckham -- currently on temporary leave from the LA Galaxy to play with AC Milan -- spent some time in one of the tents to speed up recovery from an injury before the 2002 World Cup. And other footballers have similarly used the devices to help boost fitness and recover faster.

The Spoiler football blog notes that the World Anti-Doping Agency once considered whether the tents might represent an unfair advantage on the level of blood doping, but dropped the subject. Considering the race to keep up new blood-doping drugs and even gene therapy treatments, it probably has enough troubles on its hands.

[via Daily Mail and The Spoiler]