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Predictive tools like Hawkeye and Snickometer may well turn out to be the next innovations that will improve umpiring decisions, just like the third-umpire. Fear of technology should not be the only reason for discarding them -- they deserve a fair trial.
Technology In Cricket:
I was watching Cricket Classics on television a few days back. For the uninitiated, Cricket Classics is a program that shows highlights of old cricket matches. Being a cricket fan since childhood, I have watched a few of those matches live on television. But now, when I watch those highlights, one thing that strikes me is, how much the live coverage of Cricket has evolved in the last few years: the action replays from multiple angles, the stump vision, the statistical information bytes, the third-umpire, the wagon wheel and other visual aids, frame-by-frame replays, etc. Many of these technologies have enriched the experience of watching the game on television. It is really hard to say how much they have contributed to the popularity of cricket telecasts, but surely, they're one of the factors.

More recent tools like the Hawkeye and Snickometer, are the center of controversy these days, with some of the former cricketing greats questioning their value to the game. More prominent being Dennis Lillee, the great Australian fast bowler, who slammed Hawkeye recently as:

"I have no problems with technology that assists in helping umpires adjudicate correctly on run-outs and stumpings, but I am afraid 'hawkeye' and his mate, the 'snickometer', are pure gadgetry."

Predictive Tools: The Next Step?
Hawkeye is different from other technologies used in Cricket, in that it is a predictive tool. The way Hawkeye is supposed to work is, it observes the trajectory of a delivery at various points, till say it hits the batsman's pads, and then predicts its trajectory past that point based on various additional factors, like speed, how it got off the pitch, etc. Now, I understand that there are limitations to the predictive curves that Hawkeye gives, that it's not 100% right, and probably won't be in the near future. But then before a gadget is discarded, we must measure its effectiveness -- both absolute and w.r.t. the alternatives!

How does one measure absolute effectiveness of a predictive tool? A simple way would be, to record trajectories of an assorted deliveries bowled by different kinds of bowlers in different condition -- without any batsmen there to play the deliveries -- which means the complete reference curves would be with us for comparison. Then we should simulate how Hawkeye would predict decisions, by invoking a Hawkeye simulator at random points in these test cases. Since we already know the results, we can measure effectiveness of the gadget. We should probably start with an a-priori consensus minimum performance requirements that we expect from the tool, to be considered effective judge (or a helper tool) of LBW decisions.

Now for measuring effectiveness w.r.t. the alternatives: what are the alternatives here? The on-field umpires who do the same prediction, in a split second! What is their success rate? Most experienced of the current umpires -- David Shepherd and Steve Bucknor -- missed plumb LBW decisions, in the India's tour to Australia that concluded recently, screwing up India's chances of winning a series down-under. LBW is probably the most misjudged decision in cricket, even on the international level. Few years back, run-outs and stumpings would have competed with it, but now thanks to the third-umpire, that's changed. Technology -- which was questioned in a similar manner when it was being introduced - has supplemented the umpires. Even with Snickometer, can the best (and I'm not even talking about the average) umpires beat Snickometer consistently in judging a thin edge (especially in noisy stadiums like Eden Gardens), or in distinguishing an edge from bat hitting the pad?

Mistakes: Honest and Dishonest
We must also consider that the umpires are, after all, human -- meaning they can be incompetent, or they can be plain biased! It's not uncommon for some teams to change the bowler's end just to get him from a more sympathetic end. It's not uncommon for umpires to be pressurized by bowlers, fielders and indeed the crowds. It's not uncommon for umpires to hold personal grudges against some players. All these factors affect their effectiveness. This, when cricket has become a high-profile game, viewed by millions. This when one mistake -- honest or otherwise -- can completely turn the outcome of the game!

It's surprising that former greats have reservations about such gadgets, even when they're being used only to judge the judges. Remember? These gadgets are used by the TV crews only to asses the umpiring decisions, which they will do anyways, based on visual/audio evidence). When third umpires were being introduced, there was a similar commotion in some ex-players. Maybe it's just their age and their archaic fears that bring out such knee jerk comments. Today no one doubts the value of the third-umpire. It's a valuable assistance to the umpires. Even visual aids like replays, can go long way in improving the LBW decisions -- did the ball hit outside the line of off-stump? Did it pitch outside the leg-stump? We don't need predictive tools for this! Visual evidence is enough; something which every television viewer has at his disposal! Umpires will be judged more and more in these televised days. It's cruel to leave them without the aids that can enhance their effectiveness. We should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater in case of predictive tools because of our implicit discomfort with technology. We must evaluate them objectively.

For months, there have been rumors that Facebook was working on turning the inboxes of its 500 million-plus users into a full-blown e-mail service.
Today, Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg formally unveiled the subject of the rumors--code-named "Titan" and officially named simply "Facebook Messages"--at an event in San Francisco. And he spent much of his time stressing that whatever this new thing is, it's not e-mail.

Instead, it's a massive update to Facebook's current messaging system, chat feature, text-messaging integration, and smartphone applications that mashes up all sorts of communications (including e-mail) into one unified stream. Zuckerberg and Facebook engineering honcho Andrew Bosworth mostly talked about the service rather than demoing it, but they said that it'll include features such as these:

• Every Facebook user will get an e-mail address: If your Facebook profile is located at facebook.com/yournamehere, your e-mail address will be yournamehere@facebook.com.
• If you're logged into Facebook, incoming e-mail will show up in the service's chat service; reply to a message, and it'll be sent as an e-mail.
• Similarly, the Facebook iPhone app will notify you of e-mail and let you receive and send messages. (An Android version will come along later.)
• In a feature that sounds a little like Google's Priority Inbox, you can organize the people you receive messages from into important folks (friends and family), others who aren't so vital (your credit card company, say), and Junk. The goal is let you see stuff you really want to see immediately, allow you to check in on less urgent messages once a day, and ignore spam.
• You can also choose to have messages from people not on your Facebook friends list bounced, period.
• Like e-mail, Facebook messages will be able to include file attachments; a deal with Microsoft will let you edit documents using the Office Web Apps online suite.
• The service will go beyond threaded-message interfaces such as Gmail's Conversations by letting you scroll back through all the communications you've had with a particular person via Facebook, all in one place. (You'll be able to opt out of this--or skip all the new features, period--but that presumably won't be enough to satisfy every privacy watchdog out there. In fact, I can hear them growling from here.)

Zuck and Bosworth explained that all this is in part a reaction to the needs of folks younger than themselves--Facebook-and-text-message-loving high schoolers who find e-mail too slow and too isolated from the rest of their communications. They seemed awfully confident that they've come up with something better than e-mail, in a way that left me flashing back to last year's launch of Google's spectacularly unsuccessful Wave. But while Wave suffered from having far too many features, Zuck says part of the goal with this new messaging service is to have fewer features than e-mail. And from what we saw this morning, it does indeed seem to have a minimalist, IM-like feel.

Three hundred and fifty million of Facebook's half-a-billion-plus members are active users of its messaging tools in their current form, and the service delivers four billion private messages a day. The company isn't going to spring all these new features on everybody all at once: Instead, it'll roll them out gradually over the next few months. Only a few folks will get them starting today.
In the end, all this sounds like...well, like another attempt to improve e-mail. And even though e-mail is rife with weaknesses, it keeps on keeping on even while supposedly better alternatives crash and burn.
The good news is every aspect of Facebook is subject to continuous revision; if you don't like this service in its initial form, just wait. Unlike Wave, which was an all-new effort, this is an upgrade to Facebook's existing messaging features, so it'll surely be around for the long haul.