How I learned to stop worrying and love the distributed team

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We often hear a lot about the positives – and negatives – of distributed teams.  You can certainly argue about the benefits of increased focus, happiness, and productivity.  I agree that these things are all true, but my own experiences are more focused. But only 20% of workers have a remote work option or a distributed team. “Distributed team” means many things – home office, satellite “away” office, NO office.… Read More »How I learned to stop worrying and love the distributed team

Baseball advice changes over the years

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Weren’t we all taught to swing level when we were young?  It’s part of a keep it simple principle.  There are too many nuanced mechanical dynamics for any single baseball swing that it wouldn’t be possible to capture them all in a series of complicated demands.  It would be like a game of Twister.  You are stepping, you are swinging, you are rotating your hips while keeping your head as… Read More »Baseball advice changes over the years

Coaching: A New World Order

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With the Yankees recent hiring of pitching coach Matt Blake, it seems like a rather opportune time to talk about how both technology and analytics have infiltrated professional baseball. Long gone are the days where every coach needed to be a student of the game. Now it seems that coaches are just students. Nerds. Now, I don’t know Matt Blake, and I hadn’t heard of him prior to last week.… Read More »Coaching: A New World Order

Defining meaning

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The more pressing, if more complex, task of our digital age, then, lies not in figuring out what comes after the yottabyte, but in cultivating contact with an increasingly technologically formed world.  In order to understand how our lives are already deeply formed by technology, we need to consider information not only in the abstract terms of terrabytes and zettabytes, but also in more cultural terms. How do the technologies… Read More »Defining meaning

Kinect for Windows SDK 1.5

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Yesterday in the Kinect for Windows Blog, we found that some new features will be released in an update for the SDK. In addition to increased language support and “seated mode,” we’ll be getting record, playback and debug capabilities.  This just brings questions to mind: Will this functionality be better or worse than the KinectRecorder? Will the SDK have discrete saved parts (image, depth, skeleton) for inspection? Will the SDK… Read More »Kinect for Windows SDK 1.5

New, New Things

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I am glad the author of this article gives proper attribution to Michael Lewis: http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/18/the-next-next-thing/ It’s true that the next, next thing will incorporate multi-device, multi-user propositions, with a great nod to the NUI.  We are, in fact, due for the next thing at this point.  Information or data must be accessible anywhere, with fluid ease and a more comprehensible accessibility at that.  The level of abstraction that information technology… Read More »New, New Things

The Role of CIO and IT

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This is a little of topic, but coming from an IT management background, I think it’s relevant: IT Consumerization, the Cloud, and the Alleged Death of the CIO I agree there will always be a place for the CIO, and in turn, the IT department, even while tech gets consumerized.  One thing sort of missing, or rather given some short shrift, from the link above is an explanation of policy and… Read More »The Role of CIO and IT

Skeleton Serialization

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The serialization of the skeleton was a new development with the release of the official Kinect for Windows SDK v1.  While the format is not ideal (text as opposed to XML, due to inherent limitations in the skeleton-joint object model), neither is the size, which is something we’re working on. If you are producing up to 30 frames per second, you are going to create up to 30 binary serialized… Read More »Skeleton Serialization

Fitness as a game…

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…makes sense, since most training activities are centered around a game of one sort or another.  Engadget reported today that Nike is extending the Nike+ brand to gamify training, in this case: basketball.  Several tangible components are measured during training, but some abstract concepts (hustle!), as well as “for-fun” activities (dunking!!) are shown as well.  These applications are tied to the sale of shoes, which is a great cross promotional… Read More »Fitness as a game…

Baseball Biomechanics and Kinematics

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As Jonah Keri reported yesterday in Grantland, the Houston Astros made an interesting hire or two in the recent past.  One of these hires, Sig Mejdal, is the most compelling to me: “All the pieces of information that you can imagine that we evaluate on an everyday basis to make decisions, we’re going to do that in a systematic way,” said new Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow, who brought Mejdal… Read More »Baseball Biomechanics and Kinematics