Notre Dame Helmet Cam
Brian Kelly is strapping cameras to the side of his quarterbacks' heads:
snippet:
"Notre Dame has gone to a helmet camera to aid its evaluation of starting quarterback candidates, with Crist wearing the lightweight device on the left side of his helmet as spring practice began Wednesday.
Irish coach Brian Kelly said the program enlisted a company to make a light, portable camera with easily downloadable videos so that the staff could assess with the highest accuracy just where its quarterbacks were looking on any given snap.
"We have depth, we got guys we believe have the ability to run the offense, we want to be able to evaluate all the things they do," Kelly said following practice Wednesday morning. "To make this a real competition, we have to look at every part of their decision making. "
Have at it.
No big deal Charlie Weiss had his head up Claussen's ass.
sounds like someone has a case of helmet cam envy
winning 4 out of the last 5 M-ND games envy
Yeah, RR did this last year.
BOOM RR'd!
Kind of reminds of that great line from Liar, Liar that fit Charlie to a "T":
You've got your head so far up Mr. Allan's ass, l can't tell where you end and he begins !
I love coming home from work, logging on MGoBlog and having a fellow poster win the internet. I needed that laugh after a long day. Thanks.
You win the day with this one, sir.
Only problem is that your head doesn't always follow your eyes and you dont necessarily want the QB always turning his head in the direction he is looking.
I expect it is 2 cameras one aimed at their eyes and one facing forward to see where the ball is thrown. Otherwise I don't see how helpful it would be like you said.
Kelly is also installing a camera inside Michael Floyd's car.
thats not a camera its a breathalizer.
Brian Kelly is an Asswipe.
That made me laugh out loud it was so awesome. Thank you.
That image just offended an urban policy professor, because I believe he now knows that I'm rarely taking notes with my computer in his class.
Gotta know when the professor's in a monitoring-laptop-screens mood and adjust your choice of program accordingly.
Alright BlueDragon, you come on over and talk about restrictive covenant usage in subdivisions and their impact on zoning changes for local governments, and not get on MGoBlog.
Not.
Gonna.
Happen.
I need it man, it's my fix. It makes me not want to perform Chinese water torture on myself when I have to study local government. Especially zoning and land use.
March 24th, 2011 at 11:40 AM ^
I have a different friend in urban planning. When he isn't pretending to be a former-hippie-Communist-turned-crypto-Fascist, he says that he thinks zoning should be outlawed. I told him what's to stop some homeowners in the middle of a residential neighborhood from turning their house into, say, a strip bar, or a bowling alley, to make more money. He didn't answer my point to my satisfaction. Can you settle this?
I will. But my next time talking to you might be from "justingoblue2" because I'll be caved as a political troll.
I guess I would have to hear your friends answer to get to what you think was unsatisfactory about it, but I'll give it a blind shot here with my answer:
I share the same beliefs as your friend. I think that government intervention in property markets means an innefficient allocation of resources, and some other things that I won't get into, because again, they're so political.
If a homeowners association wants a strip club free neighborhood, either the developer or the original homeowners will enter into a contract, called a restrictive covenant. This is your standard homeowners agreement, like rules that you cannot have a pink house, green driveway and a roof made of neon lights. I don't know which side your friend is coming from (because he could be a communitarian and not believe in contracts of any [enforceable] kind), but from a market perspective these contracts would hold homeowners liable, and are enforceable in court.
In a broader sense, you can look at the city of Houston, which has no zoning laws. I've never been to Houston but my understanding is they have some things that seem odd to highly zoned cities (think mainly the distance between work and home for some people, and stores in closer proximity to homes), but overall their property market is more free, and thus more efficient. Using a utilitarian argument, there was a recent study that shows a correlation between areas with heavy land use restrictions and the effects of the housing bubble: in short, San Francisco Bay got hammered by inflated real estate costs, where Houston did not.
That sounds similar to the arguments he was making. I don't know if I buy the straight laissez-faire argument WRT zoning laws. There was a situation recently near where I live. A homeowner wanted to turn his house into a business establishment of some kind in the middle of a historic neighborhood. The property was zoned residential, and the owner had done little to keep up the appearance of the house: tall grass, broken sidewalks, bad paint job, etc. The house is in the middle of the historic district of the city, and the big brouhaha in the 90s was the extension of liquor licenses to some of the downtown shops less than a block away. To date, the crime rate in the city is still stable (and low), and the atmosphere of the historic district has been maintained. The zoning board ruled against the homeowner, and the decision was uppheld by the city council.
There is always the efficiency argument to be made with zoning laws, but I would reply that such a drastic change in our current system of property rights, while successful in a city like Houston, would not work as well in cities with more well-established patterns of building and commerce. Free zoning makes sense in Houston because there's more money invested in the city and it's a growing urban center. It does not work so well in a place like Toledo, where the limits to the city's growth are pretty much dictated by the highways and the close proximity of major, well-established urban centers. Free zoning in Toledo would lead to even more encroachment of heavy industry and transportation infrastructure into residential areas and lower the quality of life for the residents.
The housing bubble was primarily the result of subprime mortgages and not necessarily the zoning laws themselves. There is correlation, but there are too many other factors involved in these bubbles to say that a lack of zoning definitely shielded Houston from the effects of the housing bubble.
Again, this is your major and I'm playing on your turf, but that's just my perspective as a kid from the north side of Columbus who grew up in one of the nicer neighborhoods in the city and has a deeply-ingrained trust for the property laws and good decisions by the city council and public school apparatus that built the city and have helped it withstand the test of time.
Hey this isn't just my major, this is your (and my) life too.
I think if you took a look at say, Detroit or Baltimore, having strict zoning in terrible situations only makes things more terrible. A lot of places go abandoned that could be put to better use, outside what they are zoned for.
WRT Toledo, I could very well argue back that either a) heavy industry wouldn't be prevalent in residential neighborhoods simply because they need more space (and thus it is inefficient for them to buy property there). or b) there might be an increase in the residents standard of living, because their long, costly commutes might get shorter, thus shortening the workday and reducing the need for cars. Anything that would change would change because it is more efficient, at least on an aggregate level.
I don't agree that zoning is a good thing for urban areas though, and if you look at the cities that were built up in this country (much easier to look at than say, Asia or Europe, which are far older), they were built without zoning laws. In Chicago, the heavy industry and rail yards were southwest of the city, the people employed by those industries (mostly poor immigrants) lived in ethnic neighborhoods close by, and rich people who could afford to commute lived up north closer to the lake. There will emerge a "division of labor" kind of situation where the properties that have the most value in an area will be put to use in that area.
I honestly don't think things would be very different for me in the suburbs, or for friends in the city. Many places (like the Chicago Loop) have grandfather clauses anyway that allow people to continue mixed use ownership, with, say, a bar on street level, a doctor on the second floor and apartments over that.
I grew up in the Midwest, in a former settler's town founded in the early 19th Century. Plots were sold in a town center four blocks square. Land parcels were set aside for schools, libraries, and public structures. The village green, where the original center of town was located, is a protected landmark in the city. Good leadership and good teachers made my community what it is today. Zoning was a part of my community's heritage from the beginning, and it helps keep our way of life alive.
Toledo's residential areas are not growing. The city is an industrial center and a highway junction. Big business and the University will drive whatever further expansion the city undergoes. Nobody will build gorgeous four-bedroom houses with big front porches in a de-zoned Toledo because nobody will take out a mortgage with all the low-cost housing available in the city. De-zoning the city will not cause a decrease in commuting, either. Everybody owns a car or knows somebody who owns a car, and public transportation is minimal at best. The city is spread out a lot; not on the level of a Detroit, but enough that owning a car is simply a fact of life and makes the most sense for the average citizen. The trouble with Detroit and Baltimore is that they were inexpertly constructed in the first place. Baltimore is a medieval-style city. Detroit is spread out over a hundred square miles of land that the city stupidly expanded into during its salad days. That growth was unsustainable, and the very real consequences we face now are largely due to the corruption of city leaders then and now, the poor state of the schools, the growth of suburbia, and all the other ailments of post-WW2 American cities.
I don't feel that the comparison to Asian and European cities holds much water, because the cities there were subjected to invasion and other disasters that we do not need to take into account in American urban planning. They also did not have the luxury of being built in an era where, on paper at least, the will of the people and the rule of law governed the direction of the nation. Napoleon didn't like the people barricading Paris's narrow, medieval streets, so he razed hundreds of buildings and created the wide, open boulevards we know today. London is a pokey medieval maze, and always has been. I know, I've been there.
My point is, the great Western expansion from the original 13 colonies was a great test of our abilities and know-how as a nation. Our collective forbears settled on a highly-organized system of selling plots of land 200 years ago in the community where I grew up, and I and my family continue to reap the rewards today. The zoning system works well for my area, and I say stick with it. Replacing zoning and our current system of property management with a new system would risk much, and you'll forgive me for feeling a little squeamish if the test case would be the whole of the United States of America.
This is almost to the point where I'm not willing to talk further, but there are a couple more actually economic/historical points that we haven't brought up before it's purely political. In a reply or two, it's just going to be me saying "I believe this." and you saying "But I think this way." and it's not going to really be productive.
First of all, I didn't reply about the correlation between heavily zoned/places with heavy land use restrictions and the housing bubble. Undoubtedly the subprime crises was a problem, but it was a symptom, not the root cause. The problem was that the housing market was in a bubble; there was too much cheap money and not enough available homes to sell because everyone was buying homes. Obviously, people began building more, and in some places, the cost of living is heavily influenced by land use regulation. When people defaulted and tried to sell, the prices were too inflated to sell at cost and trillions of dollars were lost.
Toledo a) sorry; I'm not from Ohio and thus no expert on population shifts. What I can say is that maybe the city is put to its best use by decreasing population and increasing business presence. Toledo b) I think it will reduce commute times. The reason we live in a commuter society was the desire of mid-20th Century planners to divide sections of town for different uses. As an aside, the "zoning" you refer to with your towns development is different than the type in place today, known as Euclidian Zoning, which is the target I am using to demonstrate problems with zoning in general.
I realize I didn't comment on a few things you replied to; that was for length more than anything.
My point with Toledo, and the city I grew up in, is that each city's situation is too different to say that in 100% of the cases, removing zoning restrictions would necessarily be a good thing for the community. Maybe in a place like Chicago it could work, but I doubt the problems of Ohio's urban and suburban areas would be made better by repealing Euclidian zoning laws.
As long as we're wrapping this up, here's my take on the reason we got into a bubble in the first place: de-regulation by the feds. My dad is a retired attorney, and he was shocked that people with $30,000 a year jobs were being allowed to take out standard mortgages. In the 70s (when he and my mom got their house in Columbus), potential home buyers had to show a much stronger line of credit than the one you get for graduating from high school and working full time at a Bed Bath and Beyond.
As for my friend, he probably should have been more specific as to the kind of zoning he was railing against, as in the example from the historic district that provoked my original argument with him. Thanks for sharing some ideas and helping me understand the situation better.
Well to be clear, the de-regulation was only half deregulation. What they did was allow investment banks to get into the mortgage lending business by buying securities based on mortgages, and also trading derivatives on those mortgage backed securities. I say it was only half because there was still pressure put on lending institutions by the federal government to lend to subprime applicants (see every single reference to the "American Dream" by GWB or the Community Reinvestment Act), and also implicit guarantees of bailouts to the big investment houses. I think that all of this combined is what went wrong, though I would place more blame on the FED (for the bailouts, not to mention the interest rates) and the CRA, just because of my politics.
As to your point, though, my response would be that we should let individuals decided, based on rational self interest, what the best use for their property is. What works in one section of Toledo won't work in another, and the best kinds of building for one business isn't best for another. The easiest way to remedy that would be to just let owners decide. Of course, this is where it gets political, so I apologize for going into that territory.
Obviously agreed on the housing situation being ridiculous, but there is a ton of blame to go around (though only the people with the least blame took the consequences, IMO) and I hold the opinion that zoning and land use hurt greatly. The study I was telling you about was from the Cato Institute, by the way. In case you're ever actually that bored.
I'll click on it the next time I'm trapped in a hemo class discussing the finer points of subtle chemical changes of the blood and what they can potentially do to various parts of the body.
fuckin awesome.
This is what happens to the people watching the video:
March 23rd, 2011 at 11:28 PM ^
Am I the only one who remember spaceballs?
Someone needed to post this:
We've gone to plaid!
March 24th, 2011 at 12:04 AM ^
For those who aren't farmiliar
<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/EuFAFPjbdy4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
March 24th, 2011 at 12:16 AM ^
Great comedy from my younger days
March 24th, 2011 at 12:04 PM ^
There is no need to post anything else!!
style
EDIT: that was directed at JBE's comment
Don't touch the watch.
March 24th, 2011 at 12:13 PM ^
Their early work was a little too new wave for my tastes, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically.
The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost.
He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far much more bitter, cynical sense of humor.
I actually think it sounds like a decent idea.
Too many too soon jokes here. Must... hold back... for sake of... soul.
You were going to say, "I hope nobody gets killed this time..."
But of course that would be impossibly cruel to our friends at Our Lady college in Northern Indiana, so neither one of us would say such a thing.
I'm pretty sure there was a video from last season that showed Devin Gardner wearing a helmet cam, too. I could be wrong, but I seem to remember that from somewhere.
I thought this idea sounded familiar. I too feel like I've seen a video of a Michigan player with a helmet cam, but I can't remember for sure.
Yes, you are right. RR also explained why we were using them and it is the exact same reason. I don't know how helpful it is since the QB will be looking with his eyeballs instead of moving his head too much.
This sounds like someone trying to be too smart for their own good. If he is basing his quarterback decision on the basis of helmet-cam video...well, more power to him.
This way, even if Crist is too concussed to see straight, Kelly can just direct him from the camera view!
i think Michigan has tried this. one of my friend's housemates worked on them and he had some modified michigan helmets in his livingroom
What's the difference between wasting time getting this all calibrated and just watching the film and seeing where his progression breaks down? It should be pretty obvious in a controlled practice script.
If I were tech-nerdy enough, I would find a way to pull the pics off of my blackberry of when we toured the locker room last year. I've got a pic of a friend's kid wearing Denard's practice helmet with the camera on it.
easily downloadable = easily hackable!
ND copied our stadium, UM taught them football, so why not copy UM's old staff on QB development?