Someone's watching you -- and it might be a good thing...

from ArsTechnicaEthnic biases were found when the authors of an article in the American Economic Review compared baseball games with automated pitch monitoring systems vs those without.

"A black pitcher throwing a nonterminal pitch in the early innings of poorly attended games in a non-QuesTec ballpark gains over 6 percentage points by matching [the umpire's ethnicity] (41.4 versus 35.2 percent called strikes)."

They also found that pitchers would throw in ways that would take advantage of the bias... Hmmm... Who wouldn't?

The government wants to see if you'll be annoyed...

It seems that it's expensive to synchronize the frequencies between different sectors of the national power grid. And it's only going to get worse as we add 'green', 'sustainable' technologies like wind.

So, why don't we just not do it, see if people really do depend on their wall clocks to be accurate and then make a decision (or not) later to turn the synching back on later.

He said there are alternatives if people have problems from the test: The federal government provides the official time by telephone and on the Interne