Why you may want your child on the third place team ...

If your child is keen and a strong ball player, you probably want her to join the team that will contend for the championship. On the other hand, if your child is a marginal sportsmen, you may want him on the team that will contend for third place.

At least that's the conclusion I came to from my first season coaching (assistant/manager) a 10-12 yo ball team. In our league the teams start out reasonably equal (there are some inequalities with pitching that can't quite be eliminated), but at the end of the season there's a wide range of abilities. There are really three major determinants of success -- coaching input, chance (injuries), and natural selection.

The natural selection bit isn't hard to game. If you drive hard, push a bit, yell a bit, tone down the encouragement, it's not hard to eliminate two or three of the weaker players. If your numbers get too low you get to bring up the very best players from the lower league -- who will play well above the weakest players you gave up. I really doubt this is done consciously; I think these coaches would be profoundly offended if the topic were broached. It's just the way the world works.

The winning team this year had a superb coach (I've been learning from him) and, as near as I can tell, just this kind of natural selection. I suspect it's a universal rule in all team sports, no matter how egalitarian the league. On the other hand, I think in a league of nine teams a very good coach (better than I am now) can probably contend for third or fourth place with their original squad.

BTW, the optimization problems of a full-rotation 14 player ball team roster are pretty darned impressive ...

Hinduism, Mormonism and more - Fundamentalist America in disarray

How the mighty have fallen.

Only seven years after inflicting Cheney/Bush upon the world the American Fundamentalist faces ruin on every front. Gay relationships barely draw notice (do they draw any notice?) in the Twin Cities -- at the very heart of fly-over land. The creationist movement, though far from spent, is in disarray. Polls suggest a dramatic increase in the number of Americans without religious affiliation (though still a smallish minority). Wiccans have their symbols in military cemeteries, and are an identified religious group in the military. Islam has come to Congress. So many evangelical figures have gone down to flames that scandals barely draw notice any more. Perhaps worst of all, current GOP presidential candidates range from incredibly lapsed Catholic (3 marriages?) to a flip-flopping non-Christian.

Into the ruins comes .... Hinduism [1]. Along with Jains, Hindus challenged the display of the ten commandments in the court (though they lost that fight). Now there've been Hindu prayers in the Senate, six years after Bush's post-9/11 invocations pointedly ignored "non-biblical faiths" and non-faiths:

Hindu Groups Ask '08 Hopefuls to Criticize Protest - washingtonpost.com

... Ante Nedlko Pavkovic, Katherine Lynn Pavkovic and Christan Renee Sugar -- identified in the Christian media as a couple and their daughter -- were removed from the Senate floor and arrested by Capitol Police on July 12 after they began shouting, "This is an abomination," and asking for forgiveness from God...

... A brief prayer was then delivered by Rajan Zed, a chaplain from Reno who was invited by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

Several Christian organizations spoke out against the prayer, before and after it was delivered. The American Family Association circulated a petition, urging its members to contact their senator to protest the prayer. "This is not a religion that has produced great things in the world," it read. The Rev. Flip Benham of Operation Rescue/Operation Save America issued a statement saying the prayer placed "the false god of Hinduism on a level playing field with the One True God, Jesus Christ."...

... A focus of the Christian organizations was the perception that Hindus are polytheistic. "Our national motto isn't 'In gods we trust,' " Janet L. Folger, president of Faith2Action, said the day before the Senate prayer.

However, the U.S. Hindu groups say this criticism reflects ignorance of the monotheistic underpinnings of their faith. Hinduism has many deities, all manifestations of one god.

According to the foundation, there are 2 million Hindus in the United States.

Hindusim is monotheistic? Umm, I don't think it's that simple (read the eb article by the way, it's fascinating). Mormonism, Islam (excl Sufism), Judaism, and Christianity are all pretty different theologies -- roughly equidistant from one another in some multi-dimensional doctrinal space. Hinduism is an order of magnitude away from the those four, as are Bahai, Unitarianism, Shinto, etc.

There's no way to paper over those differences, and they are disastrous for American fundamentalists. The world is moving on, and American politicians want those Hindu, Jain, Bahai, Buddhist, Shinto votes ...

[1] After reading the EB article it's not clear that "Hindu" is a theologically meaningful label, but I'll stick with it for this post.

Obesity: correlation, not causation

Wailing. Gnashing of teeth. Rending of garments.

That's my reaction to the continuing inability of even semi-informed humans to remember the distinction between correlation and causation, of fully informed specialists to "forget" the distinction ...

Find Yourself Packing It On? Blame Friends - New York Times:

.... The answer, the researchers report, was that people were most likely to become obese when a friend became obese. That increased a person’s chances of becoming obese by 57 percent. There was no effect when a neighbor gained or lost weight, however, and family members had less influence than friends.

It did not even matter if the friend was hundreds of miles away, the influence remained. And the greatest influence of all was between close mutual friends. There, if one became obese, the other had a 171 percent increased chance of becoming obese, too...

...Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator in the new study, said one explanation was that friends affected each others’ perception of fatness. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.

“You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you,” Dr. Christakis said....

Christakis knows better of course, but he also knows how to play the game. He's discovered an interesting correlation in the Framingham data set, and no doubt he thinks he's "controlled" for confounders like education, smoking, socio-economic status, exercise, hobbies, and attitudes towards food. All factors that may play a role in both friendship and obesity (and all of which are affected by genes, which is another topic).

Grr. If the NEJM had better editors they'd publicly slap the hand of researchers who pretend to be unable to tell the difference between causation and correlation. No wonder the media gets confused.

We have a long history of studies like this that demonstrate our ability to control for confounders is weak -- no matter what statisticians say. (Why it's weak is an interesting question.) I am very much doubt that a true study (impossible to do), one that randomized people to be "friends" would find any correlation.

Update 7/27/07: Other variables plausibly correlated with both obesity and friendship include term pregnancy, child rearing, and marital-equivalents. There are likely several others ...

Addiction and disease: My comments on the TIME Science blog

Here's a fragment from Lemonick's blog post:

Addiction is NOT a Disease??? - Eye on Science - Science Blog - Michael D. Lemonick - TIME

A couple of weeks ago, Alice Park and I wrote a cover story about addiction. In it, we kept talking about the fact that addiction is a disease of the brain.

Silly us. While that's admittedly the view of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the vast majority of addiction specialists, we forgot to talk to Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld. If we had, we would just have said "never mind." Yesterday, this dynamic duo published this essay at Slate.com, in which they set the record straight.

Satel and Lilienfeld, a psychiatrist and a psychologist, respectively, explain that addiction is no disease. It's a habit. "But like other bad habits," they write, "it can be broken." Which is to say, it's kind of like picking your nose in public, evidently, except that it's more expensive...

And here's my comment:

This is a deeper topic than you're suggesting. The past twenty years of neuroscience have been putting a tighter and tighter box around what "free will" can be. Much of what we are and do is determined by our genes, and the rest is pretty much set in-utero (the primary environmental component). The next 5-10 years may add another 10-15% of variation, and we don't have much control over that, do we?

After age 10 we're pretty much on cruise control -- or so it seems.

So the contrarians aren't really arguing about addiction, they're arguing about the fundamental basis of responsibility. If all we are and do is determined by our genes and uterine residence, then what does punishment mean?

So their arguments are nonsensical, but their anxiety is completely understandable. If our civilization survives I am reasonably certain that within 40 years our concepts of punishment and responsibility will be dramatically different.

Torturers may not sleep well ...

Libya imprisoned and tortured innocent people because they were convenient scapegoats for a disastrous HIV outbreak. Libya received a $400 million ransom to free them.

The torturers, however, may not always sleep so well ...

Freed medics describe Libyan captivity - International Herald Tribune

...Asked if they were ready to testify in a Bulgarian court in a future case against her torturers, Valcheva said calmly, 'Yes, we are ready.'

The courts will grind on. One day, a small semblance of justice will be done.

I wonder if Cheney ever thinks about the day he gets off a plane in Germany and finds handcuffs waiting for him ...

Please don't buy an iPhone. Yet.

Apple's iPhone may not have launched quite as well as Apple might have hoped. I like that. Apple is more likely now to second guess some of their mistakes, like a headphone jack that, for no sensible reason, doesn't fit most headphones. Maybe they'll even create a task list, enable notes synchronization, open the phone to signed Cocoa apps, put FileMaker Mobile on the phone, provide synchronization to Google Calendar, fix the broken Outlook synchronization (255 character contact notes?!?!) etc, etc.

On other side of the iPhone equation, AT&T may rethink pricing, and in particular rethink how much an iPhone is worth given their weak coverage and demonstrably slow and unreliable data support.

So if you've been thinking of buying an iPhone, please hold off a bit. I very much want to buy an iPhone, but I want Apple and AT&T to suffer enough to bring it a bit closer to what I need. (Voice dialing and GPS wouldn't hurt either, but I can live without them.) If you're still feeling tempted, contemplate this list of iPhone v1.0 Bugs (AppleHound). There, don't you think you can wait another three to five months?

You can wait a bit longer ... really. Apple's got tons of cash -- they're not going away. We just want them to suffer a bit. Heck, if the share price drops 20% you can make a good investment too ...

Iraqi feelings theoretically meaningful?

The very latest research suggests to some that Iraqi feelings should be treated as meaningful, even human ...

Study: Iraqis May Experience Sadness When Friends, Relatives Die

CHAPEL HILL, NC— A field study released Monday by the University of North Carolina School of Public Health suggests that Iraqi citizens experience sadness and a sense of loss when relatives, spouses, and even friends perish, emotions that have until recently been identified almost exclusively with Westerners.

"We were struck by how an Iraqi reacts to the sight of the bloody or decapitated corpse of a family member in a not unlike an American, or at the very least a Canadian, would," said Dr. Jonathan Pryztal, chief author of the study...

... "We are, in truth, still a long way from determining if Iraqis are exhibiting actual, U.S.-grade sadness," Mayo Clinic neuropsychologist Norman Blum said. "At present, we see no reason for the popular press to report on Iraqi emotions as if they are real."

The Onion has produced another bitter classic. I would applaud any newspaper that routinely followed "3,500 US dead" with "and over 300,000 Iraqi dead" .... (Thanks FMH)

Let us not mention this to our space alien visitors ...

There's really no need to bring up this sort of thing ...

Damn Interesting: The Thugs of India

...Their extreme secrecy combined with their mastery of murder made the Thugs the deadliest secret society in all of history. In the early 19th century they were credited with 40,000 deaths annually, stretching back as far as anyone cared to count. Some estimates put the overall death toll as high as 2,000,000, but with the cult potentially operating for more than 500 years before formal records were kept, the true number is impossible to determine.

Flatline - escaping the hideous smiley face of junk

I remember the hideous smiley faces of the 1970s. For years they haunted boomer dreams, but now we're trapped in the pit of the smile, deluged in cheap junk that's worth less than nothing ...

Gordon's Notes: Riding the dragon - Fallows on China

James Fallows .... The curve is named for the U-shaped arc of the 1970s-era smiley-face icon, and it runs from the beginning to the end of a product’s creation and sale. At the beginning is the company’s brand: HP, Siemens, Dell, Nokia, Apple. Next comes the idea for the product: an iPod, a new computer, a camera phone. After that is high-level industrial design—the conceiving of how the product will look and work. Then the detailed engineering design for how it will be made. Then the necessary components. Then the actual manufacture and assembly. Then the shipping and distribution. Then retail sales. And, finally, service contracts and sales of parts and accessories.

The significance is that China’s activity is in the middle stages—manufacturing, plus some component supply and engineering design—but America’s is at the two ends, and those are where the money is. The smiley curve, which shows the profitability or value added at each stage, starts high for branding and product concept, swoops down for manufacturing, and rises again in the retail and servicing stages. The simple way to put this—that the real money is in brand name, plus retail—may sound obvious, but its implications are illuminating....

So how can one escape the smile and restore "balance to the force"? One approach is fundamentally Darwinian. Strong brands invest in defect analysis and early detection, eliminating suppliers who deliver flawed product. Consumers forget about commodity products and invest in brands. Consumers miraculously develop a memory for what brands fail...

Oops. The memory part is the problem. Do you remember what companies had melamine in their dog food? Do you think you'll remember a year from now? Diethylene glycol in the dime store toothpaste? The DVD player that broke after one month? The wireless home phone that always crackled? The noisy fan, the sloppy wrench, the flimsy toaster ....

What other strategies are there? How else can the curve be balanced between design, brand, manufacturing and retail? How can costs be shifted from retail and brand to invest in better manufacturing and design -- anywhere?

I think we need to look for new options. What if an insurance company were to provide insurance policies guaranteeing devices performed to spec on delivery and for two years post sale? The policy would include a large rider to cover recalls, including a prize to anyone who found a recall qualifying defect. Anything that qualified for coverage would be able to display an appropriate and meaningful "seal of approval". Consumers could choose to get the insurance or not, some might decide the "insurable" measure was enough by itself. Vendors would, of course, have to pay for the "seal".

Perhaps this would produce a kind of "meta-brand", allowing manufacturers to outsource branding and shift investments to design and manufacturing - flattening the hideous smiley.

Dyer: Five new essays

Dyer has five new ones:

2007

July 1 Perspectives on Terrorism
July 3 The United States of Africa
July 6 The End of Cheap Food
July 10 The New York Times vs. Reality
July 14 North Korea: Five Wasted Years

I'm puzzled Dyer doesn't have a larger blog profile. It's true that his web technology is medieval, but I suspect it's simply a lack of big name attention. Now if Brad were to start reading Dyer ...

The best time to buy a plane ticket

Buy your plane tickets on a Wednesday ...

The Big Picture | The Cheapest Days to Buy Certain Items

Great article in Smart Money that fits in well with recent Retail Day: how and why certain pricing strategies occur...

Airplane Tickets
When to Buy: Wednesday morning.
Why: 'Most airfare sales are thrown out there on the weekend,' says travel expert Peter Greenberg, a.k.a. The Travel Detective1. Other airlines then jump into the game, discounting their own fares and prompting further changes by the first airline. The fares reach their lowest prices late Tuesday or early Wednesday....

Of course if everyone were to follow this advice the advice would become worthless ...

No End in Sight: Fallows rave review

I almost never watch television. This has its benefits, but I miss a great deal. I know America's disastrous war only through print. I would like to see this documentary:

James Fallows

...Next week Charles Ferguson's documentary No End in Sight opens in DC and New York, followed in August by "select other cities." It is worth making time to see this film...

... It covers almost exactly the same terrain, including many of the same sources and anecdotes, as did my book Blind Into Baghdad. But rarely have I seen a clearer demonstration of how much more powerful the combination of pictures, sound, music, real-people-talking, etc can be than words on a page... there are times when the experience of seeing, for instance, chaos on the streets of Baghdad transcends any mere verbal description of it....

(I wanted to embed a clip of the movie, but they'd set it up to start playing on page load. That's obnoxious so you'll have to visit the site if you want to see it ....)

Riding the dragon - Fallows on China

James Fallows, one of my favorite writers, returned to China a year or two ago to feel the beating heart of the new world. He's digested a portion of his experiences in an essay for The Atlantic. After reading the essay, I think I understand why there's been so little response from the economists I respect to recent problems with just about everything we buy, eat and use (emphases mine):

China Makes, The World Takes, James Fallows, The Atlantic July/Aug 2007

... One facility in Guangdong province, the famous Foxconn works, sits in the middle of a conurbation just outside Shenzhen, where it occupies roughly as much space as a major airport. Some 240,000 people (the number I heard most often; estimates range between 200,000 and 300,000) work on its assembly lines, sleep in its dormitories, and eat in its company cafeterias... From the major ports serving the area, Hong Kong and Shenzhen harbors, cargo ships left last year carrying the equivalent of more than 40 million of the standard 20-foot-long metal containers that end up on trucks or railroad cars. That’s one per second, round the clock and year-round—and it’s less than half of China’s export total...

...But what is of intense interest to him, he said, is a company that has built up a brand name and relationships with retailers, and knows what it wants to promote and sell next—and needs to save time and money in manufacturing a product that requires a fair amount of assembly. “That is where we can help, because you will come here and see factories that are better than the ones you’ve been working with in America or Germany.”

Here are a few examples, all based on real-world cases: You have announced a major new product, which has gotten great buzz in the press. But close to release time, you discover a design problem that must be fixed—and no U.S. factory can adjust its production process in time.

The Chinese factories can respond more quickly, and not simply because of 12-hour workdays. “Anyplace else, you’d have to import different raw materials and components,” Casey told me. “Here, you’ve got nine different suppliers within a mile, and they can bring a sample over that afternoon. People think China is cheap, but really, it’s fast.” Moreover, the Chinese factories use more human labor, and fewer expensive robots or assembly machines, than their counterparts in rich countries. “People are the most adaptable machines,” an American industrial designer who works in China told me. “Machines need to be reprogrammed. You can have people doing something entirely different next week.”....

... You are an American inventor with a product you think has “green” potential for household energy savings. But you need to get it to market fast, because you think big companies may be trying the same thing, and you need to meet a target retail price of $100. “No place but China to do this,” Mr. China said, as he showed me the finished product...

... Casey’s PCH has a Google Earth–like system that incorporates what he has learned in 10 years of dealing with Chinese subcontractors. You name a product you want to make—say, a new case or headset for a mobile phone. Casey clicks on the map and shows the companies that can produce the necessary components—and exactly how far they are from each other in travel time. This is hard-won knowledge in an area where city maps are out of date as soon as they are published and addresses are approximate. (Casey’s are keyed in with GPS coordinates, discreetly read from his GPS-equipped mobile phone when he visits each factory.) If a factory looks promising, you click again and get interior and exterior photos, a rundown on the management, in some cases videos of the assembly line in action, plus spec sheets and engineering drawings for orders they have already filled. Similar programs allow Casey and his clients to see which ship, plane, or truck their products are on anywhere in the world, and the amount of stock on hand in any warehouse or depot. (How do they know? Each finished piece and almost every component has an individual bar code that is scanned practically every time it is touched.)...

... Even some newly built facilities leave to human hands work that has been done in the West for many decades by machines. Imagine opening a consumer product—a mobile phone, an electric toothbrush, a wireless router—and finding a part that was snapped on or glued into place. It was probably put there by a young Chinese woman who did the same thing many times per minute throughout her 12-hour workday....

... It is conceivable that bad partnerships, stolen intellectual property, dilution of brand name, logistics nightmares, or other difficulties have given many companies a sour view of outsourcing; I have heard examples in each category from foreign executives. But the more interesting theme I have heard from them, which explains why they are willing to surmount the inconveniences, involves something called the “smiley curve.”

The curve is named for the U-shaped arc of the 1970s-era smiley-face icon, and it runs from the beginning to the end of a product’s creation and sale. At the beginning is the company’s brand: HP, Siemens, Dell, Nokia, Apple. Next comes the idea for the product: an iPod, a new computer, a camera phone. After that is high-level industrial design—the conceiving of how the product will look and work. Then the detailed engineering design for how it will be made. Then the necessary components. Then the actual manufacture and assembly. Then the shipping and distribution. Then retail sales. And, finally, service contracts and sales of parts and accessories.

The significance is that China’s activity is in the middle stages—manufacturing, plus some component supply and engineering design—but America’s is at the two ends, and those are where the money is. The smiley curve, which shows the profitability or value added at each stage, starts high for branding and product concept, swoops down for manufacturing, and rises again in the retail and servicing stages. The simple way to put this—that the real money is in brand name, plus retail—may sound obvious, but its implications are illuminating.

At each factory I visited, I asked managers to estimate how much of a product’s sales price ended up in whose hands. The strength of the brand name was the most important variable. If a product is unusual enough and its brand name attractive enough, it could command so high a price that the retailer might keep half the revenue. (Think: an Armani suit, a Starbucks latte.) Most electronics products are now subject to much fiercer price competition, since it is so easy for shoppers to find bargains on the Internet. Therefore the generic Windows-style laptops I saw in one modern factory might go for around $1,000 in the United States, with the retailer keeping less than $50.

Where does the rest of the money go? The manager of that factory guessed that Intel and Microsoft together would collect about $300, and that the makers of the display screen, the disk-storage devices, and other electronic components might get $150 or so apiece. The keyboard makers would get $15 or $20; FedEx or UPS would get slightly less. When all other costs were accounted for, perhaps $30 to $40—3 to 4 percent of the total—would stay in China with the factory owners and the young women on the assembly lines....

So today, my mother can't buy a phone that works. I can, but I use research tools unimaginable ten years ago to find the one model available for sale at the moment that will work reliably for at least two years (A Panasonic phone was my last answer). On the other hand, I've given up on finding a DVD/VCR that's reliable, or a toaster that I can trust. In those cases, I just do without.

It doesn't matter, and neither do the calls I and others make for more oversight, more financial consequences. After reading Fallows one fact cannot be ignored -- we are riding the dragon, and nobody in particular is steering anything. We're not getting off until the beast is full.

Those evil Russians - good thing we outed 'em

 Of course you know how this goes ...

Glenn Greenwald - Salon

In February, 2001, the Bush State Department issued a highly critical report documenting Russia's human rights abuses, both domestically and with regard to its treatment of foreign detainees. I found the document randomly today while searching for something else. Among the Russian moral outrages we protested...

Yeah. We do all of 'em now. Routinely.

One bright side of the GOP regime is that our righteous diatribes now cause hilarious laughter instead of irritation or embarrassment. Well, it's a bright side for people like Putin.

John Edwards: Another man the media dislikes

It's increasingly clear that the US media dislikes John Edwards almost as much as they disliked Al Gore. Digby draws some conclusions (via DeLong):

Digby on the media and John Edwards

...Ambinder says right out that "fairly or unfairly" the press can't stand John Edwards and so they are going to bury him. This is, of course, not unprecedented, since we saw what they did to Al Gore for the same reason. The matter-of-factness of his statement still made my head spin a little, but I appreciate the candor. At least we now know what we are dealing with. (And there is no question about whether it's fair. It most certainly isn't.)

Now, I am not especially surprised that the press corps doesn't like John Edwards. Many of these people probably didn't like guys like him in high school either and one thing we know about the political press corps is that they have never matured beyond the 11th grade. (See: chilean bass stupidity.) But I have to ask, once again, just who in the hell these people think they are and why they think they are allowed to pick our candidates for us based upon their own "feelings" about them? I don't recall electing them to anything. (But, hey, maybe we should just poll the kewl kidz and find out which candidate they "like, totally, like" and we can cancel the election and save a lot of time and money.)

This is exactly this kind of thing that makes people like me laugh when I get lectured by professional journalists about "objectivity" and "ethics." At least I put my political biases up front. These phonies hide behind a veil of journalistic conventions so they can exercise their psychologically stunted desire to stick it to the BMOC, or the dork or whoever these catty little gossips want to skewer for their own pleasure that day. Please, please, no more hand-wringing sanctimony from reporters about the undisciplined, unethical blogosphere. Their glass houses are lying in shards all around their feet.

Each time they've pulled this puerile nonsense in the last few years, it's resulted in a mess that's going to take even more years to unravel. And they learned nothing, apparently, since they are doing exactly the same thing in this election. If the press really wants to know why they are held in lower esteem than hitmen and health insurance claims adjusters, this is it.

Krugman had a similar rant a while back. I don't think the '11th grade' is the full story; we need an insider to figure this one out. I do agree that the US media have about as much right as the GOP to be sanctimonious. Their star hangs low.

Update 2/2/2010: Maybe I should have given the press more credit.