By Peter H. Hansen
The background of hiking has lengthy served as a metaphor for civilization successful. as soon as upon a time, the Alps have been an inaccessible habitat of specters and dragons, until eventually heroic men—pioneers of enlightenment—scaled their summits, categorised their strata and plant life, and banished the phantoms perpetually. a desirable interdisciplinary examine of the 1st ascents of the key Alpine peaks and Mount Everest, The Summits of recent guy surveys the far-ranging importance of our encounters with the world’s such a lot beautiful and forbidding heights.
Our obsession with “who received to the pinnacle first” could have started in 1786, the yr Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard climbed Mont Blanc and inaugurated an period during which Romantic notions of the chic spurred climbers’ aspirations. within the following many years, mountaineering misplaced its progressive cachet because it turned linked in its place with bourgeois outside relaxation. nonetheless, the mythic tales of mountaineers, threaded via with subject matters of imperialism, masculinity, and ascendant Western technological know-how and tradition, seized the mind's eye of artists and historians good into the 20th century, supplying grist for degree exhibits, poetry, motion pictures, and panorama paintings.
Today, we are living at the threshold of a sizzling planet, the place melting glaciers and emerging sea degrees create ambivalence in regards to the conquest of nature. lengthy after Hillary and Tenzing’s ascent of Everest, although, just like glossy guy ideal at the mountaintop keeps its foreign money. Peter Hansen’s exploration of those continual photos shows how tough it truly is to visualize our courting with nature in phrases except domination.
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Additional resources for The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering After the Enlightenment
Sample text
After accounting for all of these factors, if pitchers or hitters have clutch ability, then past RISP performance should predict present RISP performance. The results presented in the table below strongly support the hypotheses that neither hitters nor pitchers have clutch ability. The table below reports the estimated impact of each factor on the likelihood of the outcome occurring, where a one-unit change in the predicting variable is associated with an X-unit change in the outcome variable at the average.
0000018. For practical purposes, there is no effect here; especially when compared to the other factors in the model. The performance variables show a nearly one-for-one relationship with outcomes. 3 to 4 percent—that is, 14 to 17 points in batting average and 33 to 40 points of on-base percentage. 043 bases or 39 to 43 points of slugging average. Those who wish to cling to the idea that clutch ability exists may identify imperfections in the analysis to justify their continued faith in clutch players.
Other metrics are also subject to random fluctuations; therefore, care must be taken when inferring skills from any performance metric. At this stage it appears that several offensive metrics are highly correlated with run production and are similarly stable. Any of these metrics would do a fine job at estimating player value, but because I have to choose one metric for valuing hitters, I use the one that makes the most intuitive sense, which the third criterion requires. OPS, battter’s run average, and runs created measure batting skill, but do not include stolen bases.