Flu Trends

http://www.google.org/flutrends/ca/

Brilliant juxtaposition

same place - different century

http://torontobefore.blogspot.com/2009/10/yonge-street-slip-remix.html

walking in circles

Apparently we do, indeed, walk in circles when lost...

http://attilautab.blogspot.com/2009/09/walking-in-circles.html

http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2009/pressRelease200908171/genPDF.pdf

A Mugging on Lake Street - Chicago magazine - September 2009 - Chicago

Race, violence and youth in Chicago... Themost interesting component is his own self-examination.

Painkillers during a race or on a regular basis: a bad idea

All these years I've been oh - so wrong...

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/phys-ed-does-ibuprofen-help-or-hurt-during-exercise/

Painkillers during a race or on a regular basis: a bad idea

via Sweat Science by alex on 9/2/09

Gretchen Reynolds of the New York Times has a really excellent article on the "prophylactic" use of "non-steroidal anti-inflammatory painkillers (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen — popping them before or during a competition, or on a regular basis before workouts, in the hopes of dulling pain or preventing subsequent soreness and swelling. It's a must-read for everyone who does this.

In a number of studies conducted both in the field and in human performance laboratories in recent years, NSAIDs did not lessen people's perception of pain during activity or decrease muscle soreness later… Moreover, [Indiana University researcher Stuart] Warden and other researchers have found that, in laboratory experiments on animal tissues, NSAIDs actually slowed the healing of injured muscles, tendons, ligament, and bones.

I can't count the number of athletes I know, ranging from recreational to elite, who pop ibuprofen or equivalents on a regular "just in case" basis, hoping to avoid pain and soreness down the road. I really hope they read this article, and its conclusion:

When, then, are ibuprofen and other anti-inflammatory painkillers justified? "When you have inflammation and pain from an acute injury," Warden says. "In that situation, NSAIDs are very effective." But to take them "before every workout or match is a mistake."

RIP Ted Kennedy

"The Dream shall never Die" speech. Despite the controversial legacy, what a speech. Who up north could deliver an equivalent speech?

RIP Martin Streek

Alan Cross' memorial

Spirit of Radio

Liisa Ladouceur of Eye Weekly

Toronto Mike forum

The Star

CFNY's own - which is interesting as they laid him off in May from the only company he'd ever worked for. Awkward.

What Has the World Bank or IMF Ever Gotten Right?

One could find an analogous situation with industry analysts...

 

 

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What Has the World Bank or IMF Ever Gotten Right?

via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on 6/23/09

I ask this question in all seriousness: What non-trivial has the World Bank or IMF ever gotten right in their respective forecasts about global financial markets?

Assuming we can't come up with anything, it's worth wondering, is it not, why anyone pays any attention to the various and sundry regular economic reports from said institutions. It always strikes me as a textbook example of Philip Tetlock's classic Expert Political Judgment at work, or, better yet, the old joke about why economists make forecasts -- the answer being, of course, because people keep asking them.

 

 

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fallen princesses...

http://www.jpgmag.com/stories/11918

Sports science and management strategy

 

 

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Sports science and management strategy

via The Science of Sport by noreply@blogger.com (Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas) on 6/13/09

Science IN sport: Search for meaning and higher performance

This post is long overdue. It might even turn into a series, there is so much to say. But for the last week, every time I have sat down to work on this topic, I have discovered a form of writer's block, where I'm unable to properly express the point I would like to. So this is my latest attempt, and it will probably develop into a series, personal (even autobiographical) in nature. But it is my take on where science fits and contributes to high performance sport.

A series with a purpose

Many of these thoughts are inspired by my recent experiences with the South African Sevens rugby team, now the world champions, with whom I've toured in the last few months in a sports science and strategy consulting role. Their success was the result of a strategic plan developed by coach Paul Treu almost four years ago. It borrowed from business, science, strategy, philosophy and half a dozen other sports and represents the most complete, professional and advanced strategy put together for national sport in South Africa. It should (though it won't) serve as a template for other sports in South Africa (my local interest), but hopefully lessons from it will also be of interest to you reading this, regardless of whether you follow the sport of Sevens rugby or not!

I don't wish to dwell exclusively on this experience though, and will also share some of the insights gained from my other experiences in South African sport. Sadly, the Sevens success is an isolated one, a rare occasion where the expertise of people, from the coach down to players, was valued and implemented. For the most part, South African sport remains the domain of the fragile egos who recognize not expertise but process, not vision but individual incentives, and who reward mediocrity rather than excellence. But more on that later.

And then finally, I hope (without being presumptuous) that this series of posts can inspire each reader to strive for "higher performance", regardless of their occupation. A scientist, a marketing manager, a triathlete, a cyclist, or a runner - wherever you fit, hopefully you'll find this series relevant as a guide to how you can find the next 1% towards your own high performance goals.

Not science, but expertise

The very first, and perhaps most important principle about seeking higher performance, is that the answer lies not in science per se, but in expertise. And expertise is brought by people. So Principle number 1 is get the best intellect involved, and don't limit your search to scientists. So this series is not a punt for sports scientists to take the reins of high performance sport, not for you individually or for sport. And if you're a cyclist or a runner seeking to improve your own performance, don't be led into believing that sports science holds the answer simply because it is sports science.

The far more important factor is the expertise and the insight that underscores the application of sports science. This crucial logic means that simply "doing sports science" is not good enough. It also means that people with no scientific qualification CAN make a bigger contribution than those who do, because the stringency of their thinking and their insight adds the value, not the content of their knowledge. I have had the pleasure of working with consultants from the world of business, who have developed skills and tools that make them far more valuable to elite sport than their scientific counterparts often are.

Therefore, for the duration of this post and series, I will refer to "intellect" rather than sports science, for the simple reason that sports scientists do not necessarily bring world class intellect to the system!

I will never forget that a certain high performance athlete here in South Africa once went for a laboratory test at a certain high performance institute, only two months before the Olympic Games. The test consisted of the usual VO2max test, and the report which was given to the athlete's coach said the following: "The athlete displays a VO2max that lies in the average range. It is recommended that the athlete work on endurance in order to improve the VO2max and running ability".

Turns out that athlete was Mbulaeni Mulaudzi, who would go on to win the silver medal in the Athens Olympic Games only 2 months later! And yet scientists sometimes wonder why their work is not respected by coaches...

The "no compromise principle": Your Ferrari is not the same as my Toyota

What has happened in South Africa in the last year or so, since our disaster in Beijing (one silver medal), is that people have "recognized" the need for expertise in sports. That's the good news. However, they fail to recognize that expertise does not simply equal sports science for the sake of sports science. And so, much political lobbying and grandstanding has created a situation where everyone is following "sports science principles" (whatever that means). "Yes, we're doing sports science now", is the call from the executive authority. "We have roped in our sports scientists". The atheltes are all seeing dieticians, psychologists, having regular tests and assessments, doctors and so on. Problem solved then? Well, no, unfortunately not.

I drive a car - it has four wheels, a steering wheel, an engine, a gearbox and brakes. So does your car. But you drive a Ferrari, I drive a Toyota. In the world of SA sport and the application of sports science, they're the same car. Your Ferrari is the same as my Toyota, because "sports science is sports science", after all. This kind of logic, exposed as ridiculous by the analogy, is where we stand in SA today.

The competition principle for intellectual support to athletes

In elite sport, an Olympic Games competition between athletes is the culmination of many months or years of preparation. Science is part of that preparation, and therefore the quality of the intellectual support (which includes coaching and science) is heavily responsible for the standard of the 'finished product'. When that intellect is sub-standard, then the athlete takes to the line with little chance of success, regardless of their talent. And the epicentre of the system, the "sun in the solar system", is the coach, who incorporates the science in such a way that it adds value.

You cannot allow a situation (as we have in SA, or rather, which we are currently allowing), where the athletes sit on the start line behind the wheel of a Toyota (0 to 100 in 12 seconds), while the elite from around the world drive Ferraris, thanks to the level of intellect. It may have wheels, engines and gearboxes, but intellect, like all athletes, is not created equal.

This is not the case across the board, mind you. Some of our sports have some remarkable people driving them - rowing, for example, has set out in the right direction with the right people, and needs only the support of the funders to give those people every opportunity to succeed. That is because it has the best people already - support the best and they will deliver. In the famous book Good to Great, author Jim Collins explains how getting the best people on the bus is crucial to success.

That is what rowing has. Sadly, they are there only through the initiative of a few people, not the system. Isolated success is possible when the best people are involved. Sustainable success comes from getting the best people involved as part of a longer-term strategy. Either way, the best people must be involved, and all it takes is a strategy that ensures their ongoing involvement.

Unfortunately, for reasons that range from stupidity and incompetence to hidden agendas, the chances of this happening are slim mostly because those in charge at the top don't recognize the value of people and so isolated success rarely becomes sustainable. It's happened for SA Sevens, thanks to Paul Treu. Hopefully it will happen for rowing. Triathlon and canoeing are trying to do it, but the higher up you go, the less common it becomes. The "soldiers" may be worthy, but the generals often are not.

So Principle Number 2 in seeking higher performance is that compromise destroys performance, and "elitism" is crucial to success. This is true for athletes and for management, but mostly for coaches and those providing the "intellectual capital" in the elite sports system. Wherever there is competition, if you compromise on quality, you lose. If you fail to dedicate every single resource towards excellence, you lose.

And the take-home message for you reading this (unless of course you're an SA Sports administrator, in which case the take-home message should be obvious), is that whether you're trying to shave 1 minute of your 10km time, or trying to qualify for the Hawaii Iron-man, then you cannot compromise on the quality of the expertise you seek and use.

The scientific process: It's not WHAT you know, but HOW you learn it

The point is, the CONTENT of the science is far less important than the MEANS by which it is developed. It's not WHAT you know, but HOW you know it. I could list for you the ten enzymes involved in the glycolytic pathway that converts glucose into ATP, and I could explain to you the energetics underlying the enzyme reactions and why the re-oxidation of NAD+ is required to allow the process to continue, even though lactate forms as a result. Blah blah...that's not relevant to the high performance athlete in that form. Their coach will be able to work out exactly what training is required to improve the glycolytic enzyme capacity of the 1500m runner so that more energy can be produced, without such a level of "expertise" ever being involved.

So my point is this: The value of science lies not in the content it brings to the coach and athlete, though this is of course still valuable if applied correctly. What is infinitely more important is that the person who is applying content appreciates HOW they know what they know, because this gives them the ability to develop hypotheses and critically evaluate their observations.

And that is what good science TENDS to deliver and create in people - the ability to ask questions, measure variables and then answer the question. This SHOULD be a quality that good science adds to the athlete. Sadly, as we show in South Africa, it doesn't happen often, and the sports science we have created rather tells elite athletes that they are average because their VO2 max is not as high as it should be.

The model for integration

Where is all this heading then? Well, the model below is my illustration of where sports science fits into the elite sporting system. The key point in this whole system is that of "intellectual immersion" - you cannot relegate intellect to the role of a "service provider", to whom you outsource a few of the peripheral support functions. The best coaches bring their own level of intellect, which drives the whole pyramid and performance, precisely because it is immersed. The same should be true of those in the support team, from management down to sports scientists.

But in creating a support team, you must surround yourself with people who are excellent at what they do, and then simply step aside and let them do those things. That is true of business as well - small teams, working with freedom to innovate and grow will change the world. Boring old services, and the idea that "sports science is sports science" never will. It brings only failure, as we'll discover in SA over the next few years.



The SA Sevens Team have, in my experience, most closely achieved this model, and that's something that testifies to the value of having a coach who understands how important good people are. Paul Treu surrounded himself with scientists, management experts, business strategists, psychologists, and other experts, and then set about developing a strategy that would ensure sustainable success.

One of Treu's key mottos or principles is that "Better people make people better", and that's perhaps the take-home message of this whole post. There is a great deal to be said about what actually underscores the on-field performances of the players, and the mind-set that the high performance environment requires, but that's a topic for future posts.

The margins are too small not to care about this: A game of inches

Perhaps to end off, a video from the movie Any Given Sunday. I've no doubt that most of you have seen or heard this speech, but probably never connected it with sports science and high performance. Of course, there is a lot more to it, but it helps explain just how vital that expertise is. Some of the language is coarse (for sensitive readers), but the speech makes the point that "inches" matter. It inspires the players to seek inches, because those inches, when added up, "make the difference between winning and losing".

Sports science is involved in the quest for those inches, not necessarily on the field during the match, but in the training, during the hours of preparation, and the times when the cameras are not rolling. Consider that Michael Phelps won the 100m butterfly title by 0.01 seconds. Consider that the margin between winning and losing in shotput is 1 degree in the push-off angle. Consider that 9.69 seconds of 100m sprinting is the culmination of thousands of hours of training. Or that winning a Sevens world series, which might take 7 minutes of play in the final, actually comes down to thousands of hours of work, discipline and effort. Then you realise that if you fail to seek those inches, and if you fail to pursue every last millisecond, then whether you're an elite athlete or a marketing assistant at a shoe company, you're failing to achieve higher performance. Cue SA sport...

Next time - a new approach to sports science: Away from the VO2max: Lessons from the SA Sevens Team




A final somber word for a great player and a great person, who experienced a tragic turn of events in the last few weeks. Vuyo Zangqa was one of our great stars of the 2008/2009 Sevens season. He emerged and grew progressively as the season developed, and electrified the world of Sevens during the last four tournaments.

He's also one of the team's characters, a leader and an inspiration, and one of the most genuine, committed and passionate people I've had the pleasure of working with. Last week, while up in Johannesburg, Vuyo was involved in a car accident and received serious facial injuries. Two days ago, he underwent surgery to his left eye. At one point, the eye was going to be removed, but they are now holding out that it can still be saved. The implications of this are obvious for his playing career, but that is less important now than his general health and quality of life.

So here is to Vuyo Zangqa, a special player and person, please keep him in your thoughts and prayers, and we'll see you on the field bringing the magic in no time...

Ross

The Science of Sport Dr. Ross Tucker Dr. Jonathan Dugas

 

 

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Friday Fun: Tennis Serves and New Balls

 

 

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Friday Fun: Tennis Serves and New Balls

via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on 6/12/09

As a tennis fan I notice lots of nuances in the games, especially the ones that matter more to the pros than me. An example? This whole business about new tennis balls.

Every nine games in a pro match the serving player gets to use new balls, which are bouncier than the ones used for the previous nine games. Players think -- as John McEnroe said during last weekend's French Open -- that this is an advantage for the server as your serve gets a little more oompf and zip, leading to aces and thus points and thus games won.

The funny thing is, that seemingly isn't true. According to Wimbledon data analyzed by a pair of economists with a fondness for tennis arcana, first serve points are no more likely with new tennis balls than old ones. If anything, double-faults are more likely, implying it may be better to serve using older balls than newer ones. Take that Big Mac.

Here is the key table from the paper:

Source:

Magnus J. & Flaasen F. "Myths in Tennis." Statistical Thinking in Sports, Ed. Albert, J. & Koning, R.H.  (Chapman & Hall/CRC: 2007).

 

 

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What you don’t know about Lisa Raitt

Interesting.

 

 

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What you don’t know about Lisa Raitt

via Wellington Financial Blog - News, Views & Purviews by Mark McQueen on 6/10/09

I have lots of rules in life, and one of them is to not give media interviews about politicals stars that I've worked with over the years. Will all the attention that Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt has received over the past few months, that rule has had to be invoked more than a few times.

However, that rule doesn't prevent me from sharing a necessary backstory about her family background. When she's being accused of saying something about cancer that she didn't actually say, it is time to let the rest of the world know what many "back home" already do about her background.

Minister Raitt is a political star, having earned a thick skin during her years at the Toronto Port Authority (where we crossed paths). Having worked as a Special Assistant for cabinet ministers Pat Carney and Mary Collins (1988-91), I can tell you how rare it is to get a woman in her early 40s, who is a chemist, lawyer, CEO and mother of two to run for office.

As Christie Blatchford and Chantal Hebert have both pointed out this morning in their supportive columns, is it any wonder that most sane women with this pegidree would rather eat worms then run for federal office.

Here is the piece about Minister Raitt's history that the folks in Cape Breton already know, and will matter a great deal to the good people of Halton:

Minister Raitt's father was a municipal politician and her hero, and she is interested in politics because of him. She watched him die of colon cancer over an 18 month period. First he had a stroke and was paralyzed on his right side and lost the ability to speak. They couldn't afford a hospice so her mother and she (at the age of 10) converted their sitting room into his hospital ward. He slept on a couch and they did the things that families do: change his colostomy bag, feed and wash him.

Not something you ever forget, and it sure isn't "sexy".

Twenty years ago she was in the room as her brother died from lung cancer after suffering for 16 months. The day of his funeral Minister Raitt left for the Province of Ontario to ask a Professor who studied dioxins and PCBs (what killed her brother) if she could study with him. She earned her Masters degree and actually studied radioisotopes at a graduate level course in radioisotopes.

The fact that Minister Raitt has a burning desire to "fix the medical isotopes issue" is understandably a personal goal of hers. Why do people run for office in the first place? Hopefully to be able to make a personal difference. Is that "glory"? I doubt it. Who doesn't want kudos for doing a good job in the healthcare business?

There are two types of families in Canada. Those who have been touched by Cancer and those who haven't. Some of us get involved in hospital fundraising in an effort to make a small difference in the world. Others, like Minister Raitt, are in a cabinet role.

Based on her personal history, brains and devotion, Canadians are lucky she's prepared to put up with the cut and thrust of politics to be able to actually make a difference.

Few of us would. And no one is as well prepared as this woman to give it her all.

MRM

 

 

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Twenty Years Ago

I am Jack's sense of "he'll keep calling me"

 

 

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I am Jack's sense of "he'll keep calling me"

via kottke.org by jason@kottke.org on 4/29/09

More recent Ferris Bueller goodness from Metafilter: the Fight Club theory.

My favorite thought-piece about Ferris Bueller is the "Fight Club" theory, in which Ferris Bueller, the person, is just a figment of Cameron's imagination, like Tyler Durden, and Sloane is the girl Cameron secretly loves.

One day while he's lying sick in bed, Cameron lets "Ferris" steal his father's car and take the day off, and as Cameron wanders around the city, all of his interactions with Ferris and Sloane, and all the impossible hijinks, are all just played out in his head. This is part of the reason why the "three" characters can see so much of Chicago in less than one day -- Cameron is alone, just imagining it all.

Whoa. (via cyn-c)

Tags: ferrisbuellersdayoff  fightclub  movies 

 

 

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The Neighbourhood

Goodbye sweet denim couch! So comfortable, so smushy, so faded...

 

 

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The Neighbourhood

via furmy.com by Jesse on 4/27/09

The McA's have moved. Their neighbours are okay with it.

 

 

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interesting but long article on neuro-pharmaceuticals

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/04/27/090427fa_fact_talbot?printable=true

Re: Party at McArton's

Some of you may remember the denim couch. After hearing John reminisce about it on Saturday (and realizing that half the stains are from him spilling beer on it), Jesse & I decided the only fair thing was to donate it to them. "White Trash Party" anyone?

Perhaps donating it to the Bad Larrys for Gender Blender would be appropriate?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jesse
Date: Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 12:48 AM
Subject: Party at McArton's
To: Colleen & John McArton

The only thing better than your favourite pair of jeans is your favourite denim couch!

Life as expressed through Board Games

Brilliant imagery and math

U2 on tour

The Longest Run

How injuries affect performance

 

 

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How injuries affect performance

via From The Rink by James Mirtle on 3/22/09

I had some great stuff sent into me on the heels of this post earlier in the week on the man games lost to injury totals, including this chart from Kyle Joecken, a graduate student in mathematics at The Ohio State University: 

Essentially what this shows is the performance of teams and their injury totals from 2005-06 to 2007-08 (he did not include this season's projections). On average, teams during this period that had 100 man games lost to injury finished with about 10 more points than those that had 300.

And it's been virtually impossible to have a great season with more than 300 man games lost to injury. (This season's Capitals team will likely be only the second to top 100 points postlockout.)

Here's some geek speak from Kyle on this: "The equation for the line was y = -.0528x + 103.19. The R^2 value is .1018."

His conclusion based on this data (and ignoring the fact that some injuries are much, much more devastating than others)? 

"Basically, you lose one point for every 20 man-games lost."

Of course, that's all depending on averages, etc., and the correlation isn't that high, but if you apply that conclusion to a team rocked by injuries like the Islanders (on pace for an insane 566 man games lost to injury), they'd finish the season with about 28 more points than they're on pace for.

Or right about eighth or ninth in the Eastern Conference. 

 

 

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cool pix from high school experiment

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/03/scenes_from_30000_meters_above.html

Banff FF

Always gives me a happy, anticipatory feeling. Usually the trailer promises more than the local highlights deliver, but...

Writing like DFW

http://www.kottke.org/09/03/growing-sentences-with-david-foster-wallace

It's me!!!  Or rather, my writing style* was, at best, a pallid imitation combining the ellipses, non-sequitors, footnotes and densely packed allusions to other, better writers - who I may or may not have read, but how could you know, given the combination of ADHD and speed-reading gone unchecked by the familiar dyad of Ritalin and Adderall that spread virally throughout the 6 - 18 year old segment of the North American population or at least that part of the population with xy chromosomes - but then that particular style of mine was slowly extinguished under the oppressive weight of corporate reports, spreadsheets, marketing reports (such as a white paper (and why white, instead of ecru or the pale blue of bureaucracies past) entitled "Why Your Firms Requires An Enterprise Mobility Strategy Now!" paid for by a German software entity in support of an already out of date product launch) and a general turn towards Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" as a preferred stylistic exemplar.

* Warning - attempt at self-mockery follows. It may be funnier if you've ever read DFW. Or not.

Steamboat images

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Banking, Fishing and Gendor Roles

Fascinating article from Vanity Fair on the recent economic disaster zone that is Iceland. "Wall Street on the Tundra" Well worth reading.

Why haven't we been attacked again?

Interesting series

1. Terrorists Are Dumb? http://www.slate.com/id/2211994
2. The Near-Enemy Theory http://www.slate.com/id/2211995
3. Melting Pot Theory: http://www.slate.com/id/2211996
4. Burden of Success http://www.slate.com/id/2211997

more to follow.

Looks More Comfortable Than The CSM

Skiing Vermont's Catamount Trail From End to End

How Much Water Do You Need To Make One Latte

It's more than you think...

Nature's Great Events: now on Youtube

Just fascinating film making. I'd definitely sit down and watch this - like the Planet Earth series from a few years ago.

Their official site
There's more here

Dinner with a Stranger

Well this is a cool idea, although mighty quirky / weird

Re: The Moneyball of Basketball

Vindication!  I've been saying this for years...he is a team-defensive killa.

Interestingly enough, right now Jamario Moon is one of the top players according to that same stats methodology.  Every Raptor is a plus with him on the floor, and every Raptor except for Bosh and Calderon is a minus without him.  Despite people calling him a tissue on defense and terrible at shot selection, he has that same effect on the team....at least from a stats point of view.

We'll see if Marion meets or exceeds expectations.  And files his TPS reports on time.

dp

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Nigel <nigel.wallis@gmail.com> wrote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

The Moneyball of Basketball

While there's clearly some flaws to this argument (see Memphis wins pre/post Battier), it's still interesting.

Goodbye John Updike

How can you argue with a man who wrote like this:

"He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted 'We want Ted' for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters."

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

and yet his range went far enough to encompass The Witches of Eastwick.

Words I'd love to hear spoken

by dangardner on 1/23/09

Was this intended to be a whack at Michael Ignatieff? Or Canadians?

Any politician who actually stood up and said this in public -- especially with such evident disgust -- would have my vote and a monetary contribution as big as the law allows. Hell, I'd even put his sign in my front yard.

Best Inaugeral Opening Ever

Vaclav Havel, New Year's Day speech, 1990

by Paul Wells on 1/18/09

One of this week's subjects is inaugural addresses. From Havel we learn three things:

1. A good opening does half your work.
2. If you are presenting yourself as a change agent, make sure you change something.
3. The only way to say something real is to say it. You can't fake substance with fancy words.

My dear fellow citizens,
For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.

I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

The rest is here.

When Steve Jobs Said “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” He Did Not Mean This Fooli...

When Steve Jobs Said “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” He Did Not Mean This Foolish

by Kara Swisher on 1/15/09

The Stanford University commencement address in 2005.

Here's a video of the Jobs speech, as well as the full text after the jump.

The 2005 Jobs Stanford Commencement Address:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky–I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation–the Macintosh–a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30, I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down–that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me–I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up, so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called "The Whole Earth Catalog," which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of "The Whole Earth Catalog," and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Earth, observed

 

 

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Earth, observed

via The Big Picture on 1/14/09

The Earth Observatory is a website run by NASA's Earth Observing System Project Science Office (EOSPSO). Bringing together imagery from many different satellites and astronaut missions, the website publishes fantastic images with highly detailed descriptions, feature articles and more. Gathered here are some standout photographs from the collections in the Earth Observatory over the past several years. For more images and information, please visit the Earth Observatory site itself. (23 photos total)

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite captured this image of a dust storm as it swirled over China in April of 2001. A strong temperate cyclone spun counter-clockwise over China, pushing a wall of dust as it moved. The deep tan dust is not only thick enough to completely hide much of the land surface below, but it almost forms its own topography, with ridges of dust rising up below the clouds. The spiral arms of white cloud are approximately 200km wide. (NASA/Jesse Allen, Robert Simmon/MODIS science team)

 

 

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Mind vs Matter

 

 

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Mind vs Matter

via The Science of Sport by noreply@blogger.com (Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas) on 1/14/09

The Four-minute mile: The value of integration of physiology and mental aspects of performance

Yesterday's discussion on mind vs. matter, and the role of mental aspects to performance, left off with the short recap of a fatigue series that I wrote almost a year ago. It reminded us that the brain is ultimately in control of exercise, and that fatigue, or the decision to slow down during exercise is not taken because the muscles are failing, but rather because the brain is regulating the degree of muscle activation so that we are protected from physiological harm.

This was of course an extension of the somewhat philosophical argument of whether physiology or psychological is the key separator or differentiator between good and great athletes. The question "How important is the mind to elite performance?" forms the basis of this series, and specifically, I'm interested in understanding the integration, and overcoming the rampant over-simplification of this very complex argument that tends to infiltrate it.

The 4-minute mile

Perhaps the best illustration of both the good and bad aspects of this debate comes from the story of the 4-minute mile, which I'm sure is quite well known to many of you. I'm not going to recap the whole story here, there are plenty of good books that will do that for you (so no history lessons - it's not the point!), but will attempt to summarize the salient points into a relevant story, because it really does highlight both the importance of the mind, and the tendency people have to overstate that importance and hype it up.

Go back to 1945. The world record for the mile stood at 4:01.3, held by one of the great Swedish runners of that generation, Gunder Hagg. His performance was actually the culmination of a golden generation of Swedish runners, and in particular, Arne Andersson and Hagg were a dominant duo between 1942 and 1945. They set FIVE world records between them, taking the record down from 4:06.4 to 4:01.3 in the space of four years.

Inevitably, then, attention turned to the sub-4 minute mile. It was only a matter of time...

Turned out to be a long time. It was not for a lack of trying however, and the race to be the first to crack this magical barrier captured the world's attention. It co-incided, incidentally, with the race to conquer Mount Everest, which gives a nice illustration of how the achievement was being judged! Which was tougher - Everest or sub-4 minutes for one mile?

And the world waited. And waited. It would take a full 9 years before the record would fall (one year AFTER Everest was conquered, incidentally). This large gap is often cited as proof of the mental barrier, and we'll see shortly that this is only partly correct. However, it must be remembered that the world had just emerged from a war that claimed the lives of many young men, and also ruined the infrastructure and robbed athletes of training time required to produce decent performances (despite it being amateur back then). It would have taken a very unusual set of circumstances for a record-breaking performance during the aftermath of the war, given that the nations most likely to produce the athletes were also those affected most by it.

However, the action really started in about 1952. That was when John Landy started what would become an agonizing quest to crack the barrier. He would, over the course of a two year period, run the following sequence of times:
4:02.1 – 4:02.6 – 4:02.8 – 4:02.5 – 4:02.7 – 4:02.3

Points for consistency, yes, but not so much for the breakthrough everyone was waiting for.

After the last of those performances, in a race where he was on track to break 4 minutes until the final 100m, he was quoted as saying the following to journalists: "Frankly, I think the four-minute mile is beyond my capabilities. Two seconds may not sound much, but to me it's like trying to break through a brick wall. Someone may achieve the four-minute mile the world is wanting so desperately, but I don't think I can."

So that was to become Landy's "legacy" - that quote, and a string of so close, so yet far performances.

Then enter Roger Bannister, on 6 May, 1954, in Oxford, and a performance that stopped the clock at 3:59.4. The four-minute barrier was gone, and Bannister was the man, not Landy.

What happened next is the fuel behind the mind vs. matter debate. 46 days later, John Landy, who had said "I don't think I can", went out and ran not sub-4 minutes, not sub-3:59, but 3:57.9! A full 4 seconds faster than he'd ever managed before, his own sub-four minute clocking, and proof that the four minute mile was most definitely NOT beyond his capabilities, as he himself had suggested!

The interpretation - a bit of moderation required

Now, this story has some very obvious interpretations. Physiologically speaking, we have to ask what might have changed in 46 days for John Landy? There's not likely to be some difference in his training, in his physiological make-up that allowed this huge improvement. The answer most settle on, of course, is that Bannister had broken down Landy's mental wall. Having removed a mental barrier from Landy's mind, Landy's physiology was able to express itself and produce the time his physiology allowed.

I have no argument there. I suspect part of it, a much more mundane explanation, is that Landy may have learned from Bannister how to pace the effort a little better (let's not forget Landy had blown in the final 100m of his previous attempt while on course). I'd argue, however, that this is still a psychological effect, and Landy's improvement is down to his improved mental approach to how to structure the race.

The mental barrier removed, and belief drives physiological performance

But I also believe that Landy went into that record race freed of the pressure, the barrier and the expectation and was able to more closely run to his own physiological limit. Quite what it is that allowed this beats me. I'm sure there is a psychological theory for it. But in line with yesterday's post, I would propose that the ability to maximize this physiological talent is dependent on the right psychological, or mental attitude. Whether that is belief, confidence, anger, composure, fear, doesn't really matter right now (it's worth unpacking another time), but I would certainly propose that Landy was a case of a runner who under-achieved under the pressure, and once it was removed, and belief was provided by Bannister's example, he expressed his physiology far more effectively.

Overstating the presence of the mental barrier

Where I think the role of psychology has been over-hyped is the assertion that was soon made that the four-minute mile is a mental barrier. (Thanks to Simon for pointing this out in his comment to yesterday's post and for inspiring this story, incidentally.)

People were quick to jump onto the "mental barrier" bandwagon, and argued that the long delay between 1945 and 1954, followed by the Landy performance, was proof that breaking four minutes was mental, and a deluge was predicted. What is interesting is that there was no flood. Simon's words now: "the number of people subsequently getting through the "psychological" barrier after that were 3 in 1955, 7 in '57, 4 in '58, 1 in '59. 5 in '60 and zero/no one in 1961, and so on. Certainly no flood. (Figures from "Bannister and Beyond" by Jim Denison)."

So the flood never came, but the story has survived nevertheless. It's still a fascinating story, because I do believe it illustrates the value of belief, confidence and mental preparation (including composure and pacing), while highlighting how detrimental to performance things like self-doubt, anxiety and excess expectation can be. It seems that Landy was at the end of his tether when he spoke to the journalists after that last race - that frustration and self-doubt, once replaced by belief and a removal of the pressure, allowed him to find a performance that he himself thought impossible.

And therein lies what I believe to be the take-home message from this story. Not that the four-minute mile is a mental barrier, because it's clearly not - more people would have followed Bannister and Landy if it was. Even today, breaking four minutes is not a Jedi mind-trick that any determined athlete can pull off.

Rather, the message is that we can each improve within ourselves by reframing our expectations, by challenging our beliefs, by identifying our own mental barriers and then breaking them down. I really do believe that whether you're running a 4-hour marathon or a 32-minute 10km off the bike in a triathlon, you will find a benefit in performance if you assess your mental approach to racing and work at believing what is possible for you.

Linking in training - mental and psychological factors are forged in training

And then very importantly, perhaps most crucially of all, is that your mental approach to racing, your confidence, your belief, are not simply mental tricks. This is not about just hypnotizing yourself into running faster, into suffering a little more. It's an approach to training. Once again, in the words of Jamie from yesterday's post:

"Training responses are initiated, determined, and dictated by the brain. Without attention to the control of thought processes...or attention to the encoding of exact movement patterns, many athletes will be trained inappropriately."

So the point is, training is an act of physiology, but it's also an act of psychology, and it's in training that the thought patterns, the elusive concept of mental strength, the belief and the ability to regulate pace, are laid down.

So let me end with another bit of information about Bannister and Landy. Roger Bannister would go on to become a decorated neuroscientist - he was studying medicine when he ran his 4-minute mile, and specialised in understanding the very organ that may have provided his edge - the brain. Part of his training included a session of 10 x 400 m repeats, run at race pace (59 seconds), with a 1:30 recovery. He was preparing his brain, and his body, and his mind (for the brain is not simply a mind - it's an organ of physiology!), for the effort it would take. Of course, I can't account for Landy's training, but Bannister's career focused on understanding the physiology of the brain. I dare say he did the same in his training. The result? 3:59.4, and a place in history

Conclusion from this story: Integrate and understand

The conclusion then, apart from what I wrote above about how everyone one of you must examine your own belief, mental approach and potential "brick walls", is that if you want to be a better athlete (regardless of your sport), you must challenge yourself, both physiologically and mentally. It's not good enough to isolate one and train simply for fitness. Training must be thoughtful, it must have a purpose and it must be understood. I really do believe that the simple act of concentrating during your performances will add to your physiological ability. You'll be benefiting from your own understanding, and approaching your own limit.

Preview of what's to come - more on this debate, plus our first race of 2009

So that wraps up this little history lesson. It's something of a departure from what I had planned after last night, but Simon's comment inspired this "detour", which really is a great story. I have a bit more to say about this issue of mind over matter, and I'll do so next week.

However, before then, we have the first big marathon of the year, in Dubai on Saturday. Haile Geb is going for another time-trial, um, world record, on a course where last year, he broke 2:06 after going off ridiculously fast early on.

So we'll take a break from "philosophy of sport" for a little while, and Jonathan will do a preview of the race tomorrow, and we'll bring you the splits and reports as they come through this weekend!

Then next week, we'll resume this debate, and also get into some new territory!

Thanks as always!

Ross

P.S. Don't forget, if you enjoyed this article (or any other) feel free to use any one of the links below ("Email This", "Share on Facebook", "Stumble it!", or "Digg this!") to send it on to others who might enjoy it. Help us grow the readership!

The Science of Sport Dr. Ross Tucker Dr. Jonathan Dugas

 

 

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Four and a half years to go

Ontario's Forgotten Landmarks: Barber Paper Mill

 

 

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Ontario's Forgotten Landmarks: Barber Paper Mill

via blogTO by jonathan on 1/13/09

Astride the Credit River in Georgetown Ontario just north of the city, sits the ruins of the Barber Paper Mill. Originally established in 1823 by a former United Empire Loyalist, this was my first stop on a journey to some of Ontario's ghost towns with 2 friends several months back.

Among the many accolades of this hauntingly beautiful ruin's history is its pioneering use of hydroelectric power in North America, its being the first to use long-distance power, as well as its many contributions to almost every aspect of Ontario's paper industry.

More...

 

 

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Do Referees Get Down About Blown Calls?

 

 

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Do Referees Get Down About Blown Calls?

via ESPN.com - True Hoop - Blog on 1/13/09

Over at Basketball.org, former Pacer and Piston head coach George Irvine is talking about the heartache and second-guessing that players and coaches go through after tough games.

Then he wonders if referees feel the same way:

This weekend, I'm watching a very close game and a ref completely blows a call that directly prevented a team from winning the game, outright. If that ref had not made the call he made, the game was flat out over . As it turns out, the team that would have won, went on to lose the game, making some real mistakes. But, I go back to that bad call. The game would have and should have been over.

My question is: Do you think that referee feels any responsibility for the outcome of the game?

When the referee goes over the tape of the game, which he should do, does he feel any responsibility for the blown call, and the effect it had on the outcome? I doubt many refs look at this blog, but if one does, I would love a response. However, I do know what one supervisor of officials in a college conference once told me when I was in a discussion with him about officiating. He told me that, "no ref has every been responsible for winning or losing a game."

That statement has bothered me for a long time.

Too bad all referees won't admit to feeling bad. It seems so obvious: Everyone wants to be good at what they do, right?

I'm totally thrilled to report that I have heard two NBA referee-types address this issue, and both Bennett Salvatore and Bernie Fryer were passionate in admitting, at length, that blown calls are personally devastating.

Fryer even showed the assembled media slow-motion video of one of his worst calls, which probably decided a game incorrectly. I don't think he's acting when he says that kind of stuff ruins his day. And, like Irvine, I suspect a passionate desire to get it right has to come with some pain when you get it wrong. 

 

 

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Mind over matter?

Analyzing the impact of mental 'toughness.' Is it even possible?

 

 

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Mind over matter?

via The Science of Sport by noreply@blogger.com (Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas) on 1/13/09

Mind over matter? Another unanswerable question

Interesting times and debates over the last week, where we discussed the issue of nature vs. nurture. It stimulated a good response, and some divided opinion, though most will probably agree that truly great performances are the result of a combination of genetic potential meeting hard work. Few would suggest that great sporting performances are entirely the result of a genetic gift that requires no training, and very few (the hopeless romantics) would suggest that anyone can be successful, regardless of their "natural talent" (a loaded word, as I'm sure you've come to realise).

For our part, we lean more towards the talent side of things when it comes to "physiologically-determined sports" (a made-up concept, I confess) like sprinting, cycling, distance running. In these sports, success without some cluster of genetic and hence physiological advantages is highly unlikely. In sports where technical skills are crucial (golf, cricket, possibly soccer to a lesser extent), training probably becomes more important.

Perhaps the best summary of all was provided by Jamie in his comment, in which he said: "One thing I do know for certain is that talented athletes that don't work hard will be good but never excellent, and hard workers with little talent the same".

Well put.

A new topic - related, but no less answerable

An extension of that debate, and one which has little hope for an answer, is the debate around whether mind or matter is the crucial determinant of success? For example, here's a hypothetical situation to consider: There are thousands of long distance runners around the world with the capacity to run a 10km in under 29 minutes (half of them probably reside in East Africa). However (and I'm using round numbers here), of those 1,000, perhaps 250 can dip under 28 minutes, and only another 50 can go under 27:30. Then you get the "sharp end of the sword", where perhaps 10 men have the ability to break 27 minutes, and only one with the ability to run under 26:20.

The question is this: Is the difference between this man (Kenenisa Bekele) and the other 9/ 249/ 999, a physiological or a mental one?

Take the same question and apply it to a sport where the opinion might be easier to express. Is the difference between Tiger Woods and the other professional golfers a technical one, produced as a result of physiology, or is it psychological? (which would also express itself as a measurable technical output in the golf swing, incidentally)

And, perhaps most importantly, should we even care? Can we even care, given how interlinked these aspects are - psychology determines the training attitude, training determines the technical parameters of the swing or the physiological abilities of the athlete, and that in turn feeds back to the mental and psychological state of the athlete! All this of course, happens within the framework of an athlete who we assume has the natural "predisposition" to succeed in the sport (we're not talking about an endomorph trying to crack 27-minutes here)

So it may well be a moot question. But it's one worth considering, especially for the endurance sports, which is obviously our focus. So herewith begins the debate on mind over matter!

A little bit of both, a lot of one or the other?

Perhaps as you read the hypothetical and discussion above, you've already dismissed this particular argument as irrelevant, for the answer is so obvious to you that it's not worth discussing. And to a certain extent, I agree. It certainly does seem obvious that both are required, and that any athlete who lacks either the physiological ability (as a result of genetics or training insufficiency, doesn't really matter) or the mental toughness (for want of a better word) is destined to underachieve.

So let me open the debate with our conclusion, courtesy Jamie, but with edits:

One thing I do know for certain is that physiologically-gifted athletes who lack mental toughness and capacity will be good but never excellent. And athletes with mental capacity off the charts who lack physiological 'hardware' will be the same.

Now, having said that, I'll bet that you can once again come up with a few examples of cases that disprove my contention! For example, you may cite yourself as a case of an athlete who simply lacks the physiological tools to run a super-fast time, but you believe that you've achieved 99% of your potential thanks to your mental approach to training. A far more likely case is that you have colleagues or training partners who would be streets ahead if they could just "get their minds right".

So there is a case for every argument, and a counter-case to prove the counter-argument, such is the debate.

But a common question asked in this debate, one which I've heard a few times, is "What percentage of elite sports success is mental?" And people throw out the numbers. Some say 50-50, you need both equally. Others reckon that it's 90-10 in favour of the mental - if you don't have the mind, the body will never follow. A famous golfer, I forget who, was quoted as saying that the most important distance in golf is the 6-inches between the ears.

That kind of thinking is what this series of posts is designed to challenge. Not because it's wrong, but just because it represents such an over-simplified view of how the mind and the body interact. And I really do believe that if the coach and athlete can understand the interaction better, and appreciate how they form a positive feedback loop, then the value of training can be increased.

Some problems with oversimplification

There are, to begin with, a couple of problems with this kind of oversimplification. The first is that the measurement of physiology is much easier than the measurement of mental strength (again, I hate that word, but I am sure you follow what I mean). This has a few consequences.

Firstly, it creates a situation where it's relatively easy to attribute unexplained performance to mental strength. I've mentioned a few times on this site that sports science really has very few answers to the question of why one athlete will beat another one. We can measure VO2max, lactate thresholds, fibre types etc, but the outcome of races never tracks these measurements perfectly. In fact, in elite populations, the correlations is poor. So now enter the "mind", and you have an explanation. I don't buy it. I am more of the opinion that sports science is failing to measure things, either by not measuring them at all, or by measuring them in too low a resolution. That's not to say the mind isn't vital, it's just too easy to dismiss physiology because you can't find evidence. The default seems to be to explain the unexplained by bringing in the unexplainable!

Second, and on the other side of the coin, the fact that it's all but impossible to measure the mental aspect of sport means that people often disregard it. This has the exact opposite effect in that mental aspects are dismissed and emphasis is placed on things like fitness, flexibility, speed - parameters that can be tracked. The difficulty around designing an intervention to improve this mental aspect of sport is a barrier, when one can easily design a programme to improve strength or speed, and measure it and report back to the head coach/physiologist on the progress.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the two are interlinked so tightly that to debate them separately is, as I pointed out at the top, something of a doomed effort. The problem is that we see the achieving, winning athletes (like Lance Armstrong, let's say) and we see the athletes they beat (Jan Ullrich), and it's all to easy to say that the difference between them was Lance's toughness, his attention to detail and his never-say-die attitude. Problem is, none of those have ever been measured, nor are they really measurable, and so they are subject to human emotion, to propaganda and consequently, bias (by design or by accident).

The same goes for Tiger Woods - the "Lore of Tiger" speaks of his legendary training routines, his attention to detail, his mental toughness. So we believe it because he wins. I am sure you can think of others - as soon as they win, we find reasons why they are winners, in hindsight. And we're right - these stories, the backgrounds, the history are integral to any athletes' success, and can't be discarded. However, we attribute success to them, which again, is a gross undersimplification. And we never control for the fact that he might be a more gifted athlete. And we never ask the loser how tough he might have been, because we don't care - he lost, after all!

Apart from this, to suggest that one athlete beats another because of mental toughness can be incredibly disrespectful to the loser. Not always, because sometimes it is clear that an athlete loses because of some frailty in their mental armour. However, to suggest that Haile Gebrselassie beat Paul Tergat in five major 10,000 finals, including two Olympic Games, because he was tougher, is to say that Tergat didn't want to win. Unfortunately, this debate is often simplified down to the age-old argument, heard in pubs and bars around the world: "They won because they wanted it more". Rubbish. Having lost four races, did Tergat not eventually start wanting to win? Did Jan Ullrich start the Tour with the idea that he'd be satisfied with second? It just seems so simple to attribute success and failure to a difference in desire. Even if you believe mental is everything, you have to appreciate that there is more to it than this!

So, hopefully, the problem is clear: We cannot control for the absence of half the variables - physiology does not exist separate from mental aspects. In fact, they feed each other, so that the athlete who has both will end up being physiologically superior and mentally tougher. In that respect, the argument is somewhat circular.

The role of the brain in performance - not mind over matter, but matter over matter

However, before we get too philosophical here, let's just wrap up by saying where we are going with this.

About a year ago, I did a series of posts on fatigue. These posts are well worth a read for the current posts, because they'll come up next time again.

But the take-home conclusion from that series, is that fatigue (and ultimately, the limit to performance) is NOT a function of VO2max, muscles, lactate, glycogen, over-heating etc., but rather is a regulated process, where the brain collects all kinds of information from the body and then assimilates it into a perception of effort. The end result, which has been measured physiologically, is that the brain controls how much muscle we activate, and slows us down IF it calculates that we are in danger.

For example, when you exercise on a hot day, you don't slow down because you are too hot. Rather, you slow down because if you didn't, you would get too hot. The brain works out just what is possible and then regulates pace in order to achieve the best possible performance with the least possible risk.

Now, the obvious extension of this is that if your brain makes the decision, then you can "trick" the brain, or discipline it, into delaying that decision, which would allow you to run or ride faster before that point is reached. Instead of slowing down, you'll hang in there, guts it out, suffer through the pain, because your performance will be improved. It's classic mind over matter.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work, for much the same reason that people are not very successful at committing suicide by holding their breath! It doesn't matter much how badly you want to go, your physiology will win in the end.

However, there is no doubt that some people are able to get closer to this physiological limit than others. Perhaps, in the context of endurance sport, this is what we mean when we speak about "mental toughness" - the ability to approach that limit, either through desire, belief or any other complex collection of attributes and attitudes. Their brains regulate performance much more tightly than others, those who are "conservative" and finish the race with a much larger reserve. So therefore, we have a case of "matter over matter" - it's brain matter regulating body matter.

And since we're The Science of Sport, that's where the discussion kicks off next time - the physiology of performance, and the role of the brain in regulating our limits!

Ross

The Science of Sport Dr. Ross Tucker Dr. Jonathan Dugas

 

 

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If you ever need to inspire a crowd

Instant mashed-up speech here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6wRkzCW5qI

Map of the Week: Street racing (part one)

 

 

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Map of the Week: Street racing (part one)

via Map of the Week by Toronto Star on 1/8/09

Licence suspensions for street racing, September 30, 2007 to September 12, 2008, per 1,000 by postal area.

In the Greater Toronto Area, street racing (map) seems to be centred in the area of Peel between Orangeville and Brampton, spilling over into nearby areas of York Region around Kleinburg and Woodbridge.

The one standout exception to the general pattern is M5J, the postal area that takes in the waterfront condos downtown. This is, I hope coincidentally, the neighbourhood across Yonge St. from the Toronto Star. M5J has the third-highest rate in the GTA, and (not to give away next week's map) the fifth-highest rate in the province.

Other than M5J, there is no clear concentration in the 416 area code, other than M2L, in the Bayview and York Mills area.

One interesting thing is that this map doesn't have very much in common with the GTA impaired driving map. Accused street racers seem concentrated in one area, mostly, while impaired drivers are spread all over the GTA with higher numbers in more car-dependent areas.

Low-population L0L, along the 404 in Whitchurch-Stouffville, had only three suspensions during the period but is included on the map out of consistency.

---

Information was obtained from the Ministry of Transportation under access-to-information legislation.

 

 

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State of the World, 2009

Lengthy but quirky as always.

Caffeine vs. Naps.

Who wins?

Matthew Effect Part 2

 

 

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Matthew Effect Part 2

via The Science of Sport by noreply@blogger.com (Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas) on 1/6/09

Mulling over the Matthew Effect

Yesterday, I did a post describing something that has been called The Matthew Effect, as applied to sports performance and talent Identification. Briefly, it refers to the phenomenon where a disproportionate number of elite level sports people are born during the first few months of the year. This comes about as a result of a confusion between ability and maturity, and the selection of those children into regional or school teams based on their ability at a young age. Unfortunately, at this age, 10 months is a significant difference, and those who happen to be younger are soon left behind.

In response to the post, we received some really interesting and thoughtful comments, which you can read at the original article. I tried to respond to those comments, but it's worthwhile mulling over a few of the points raised. In particular, the big question is: Given this effect, and the fact that children born in later months are seemingly disadvantaged by their younger relative age, what should be done to ensure maximum talent "delivery" at the senior level?

The key point is that a scientist who is faced with the seemingly daunting task of selecting a squad of sportsmen from a completely random sample would be reasonably accurate simply by asking everyone born in January, February and March to stay behind, and sending home those born in the latter part of the year! This in turn means that all those who are born later in the year are placed at a disadvantage, and you create a vast pool of "unrealised potential".

It's important to note that by the time the national coach, or the head coach of a profession team makes his/her picks, it's already too late. The damage has been done, many years earlier. Similarly, a sports scientist who is doing talent ID assessments for a high performance programme at say Olympic level cannot be concerned with month of birth - their job is simply to pull out those people who display talent or ability to perform better than others. The problem is, most of those they pull out will have been born early in the year, thanks to a decision made many years earlier. The question is what one should do to ensure that up to half the population remain eligible for success for as long as possible?

A split in age-groupings?

And that is a question I was thinking about a great deal today, and must confess that no easy solution presents itself. In his book, Gladwell suggests the creation of a "split" in the age groupings, so that children born in the first half of the year compete in a separate league structure to those born in the second half. I'm not sure about ice-hockey (which is the example he uses), but this idea would be very difficult to implement for most other sports. For one thing, it would require twice the coaching time and expertise and would more than double some of the resources required for the participation of athletes in sport.

That is, the entire basis for the Matthew effect is that younger players who happen to be older by virtue of their earlier birth month are given superior coaching, competition and opportunity. The creation of a second, separate league for those born later in the year would not solve this problem, unless the quality of coaching provided to that second group of children was at least comparable. In SA, there are barely enough decent coaches for one team, let alone two, so I'm not convinced this would work. And that's apart from the administrative problem raised by Gladwell in his book.

Weight categories?

The second possibility is the creation of weight categories for young children. The rationale here would be that in sports where size, weight and strength (these are often, but not always, associated) are key determinants of performance, the early developers and the relatively older children enjoy a large advantage which manifests itself as improved ability, and which is the basis for the fateful selection of January births rather than December births.

The creation of weight limits would ensure that children only compete against those who are in the same weight bracket as they are, regardless of age. It has some advantage, but there are also a couple of problems. The first is the incentive it creates for children to make weight. That's not to suggest that the use of anabolic agents or diuretics (depending on which direction they wish to go) would be the obvious result, but it is a possibility.

More than this, it creates something of a perverse criteria against which children are measured, one which I'm not sure is healthy. It also starts to mix children of very different ages together, and there is an emotional and intellectual difference that is not controlled for. Suddenly a 10-year old is playing sport against 15 year olds, in a league that is, by nature, likely to be much more competitive than should be the case for a 10-year old.

Secondly, many sports actually require a separation in weight before specific skills can be acquired. Being South African, the sport that comes to mind is rugby, but for those in the USA, the obvious one might be American Football. In both sports, positions are very heavily influenced by body shape, size, strength and physical stature. As a result, so too are the skills required from the players in those positions. If players compete in age categories, then one would be delaying the acquisition of these skills.

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. Skills develop according to the situation presented to the player, and so a more all-round skill set would be the result if age-categories were adhered to, since no size advantage would exist for one player to easily dominate another physically. Late maturers would be rewarded, because they would develop skills that one would usually be found in the smaller, more nible players, and when they eventually "fill out" and bulk up, they'd carry through those skills, and remain skillful as "big men".

On the other hand, do you really want a team with all-round skills and reduced specialist ability? Once you reach the professional level, the very specific demands of playing each position would quickly expose weaknesses that have developed as a result of the lack of necessity to develop those skills earlier. It's a debatable one, for sure. It has been tried, that much I know - I believe that they tried weight groupings (mixed with age groupings) in Australia. I haven't had the chance to investigate that more thoroughly, so I'm open to input on that one.

Changing the focus of performance

Perhaps the best approach I can think of borrows from this principle that you want to discourage a form of play where size, strength and speed are the crucial factors that determine success. In this regard, many sports systems around the world are already making the effort, since they emphasize that younger children do not play contact forms of sport, play rather for fun and enjoyment and do not prioritze winning. The notion of play to play, rather than play to win, is the focus.

Recall that the Matthew effect develops when coaches select players and then begin to provide a superior coaching and competition environment. If those coaches are able to make their selection in such a way that ability is not confused with maturity, then younger players would remain in the system for longer, perhaps long enough that they could themselves develop and catch up to the older players.

The incentive (and the wisdom) of the coach is therefore the first element - they should not be driven to win. Unfortunately, in many sports, this is an unrealistic goal, and one can understand how coaches pick better players at such young ages - they are under pressure to perform. So the collective mindset of the team, the parents, the school and the club often must change before this happens.

Once it does, then the priority of the coach can become skill development, enjoyment and development of attributes where size, strength and speed are not solely responsible for performance. This will never completely remove the effect, but education, a change in mindset and a different set of priorities might go a long way to "rescuing" those younger players who are so quickly lost from the system. Ironically enough, this focus on play rather than performance at a young age is likely to help performance at an older age, through the creation of a larger body of "eligible" players.

An impossible puzzle to solve, I suspect. As I said, I'm actually going to be suggesting to a few sports federations here in SA that they look long and hard at this very phenomenon, and try to understand how young talent moves through the system. Part of this will be discovering where these "early developers" go, what happens to late developers, and what strategies might be effective in maximizing the available player pool. So we have the possiblity of a real-life "case-study" or two, and I hope to be able to report on that soon!

Ross

The Science of Sport Dr. Ross Tucker Dr. Jonathan Dugas

 

 

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Meanwhile, civilizations are still clashing

 

 

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Meanwhile, civilizations are still clashing

via Daimnation! by markc on 1/6/09

Reflections by Fouad Ajami on the last book by Samuel Huntington, who died December 24, 2008; I think Prof. Huntington's ideas have considerable relevance to Canada:

[...]

He wrote in that book [Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity] of the "American Creed," and of its erosion among the elites. Its key elements -- the English language, Christianity, religious commitment, English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals -- he said are derived from the "distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."

Critics who branded the book as a work of undisguised nativism missed an essential point. Huntington observed that his was an "argument for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture, not for the importance of Anglo-Protestant people." The success of this great republic, he said, had hitherto depended on the willingness of generations of Americans to honor the creed of the founding settlers and to shed their old affinities. But that willingness was being battered by globalization and multiculturalism, and by new waves of immigrants with no deep attachments to America's national identity. "The Stars and Stripes were at half-mast," he wrote in "Who Are We?", "and other flags flew higher on the flagpole of American identities."..

Prof. Ajami later describes a conversion:

In the 1990s, when the Davos crowd and other believers in a borderless world reigned supreme, Huntington crossed over from the academy into global renown, with his "clash of civilizations" thesis. In an article first published in Foreign Affairs in 1993 (then expanded into a book), Huntington foresaw the shape of the post-Cold War world. The war of ideologies would yield to a civilizational struggle of soil and blood. It would be the West versus the eight civilizations dividing the rest -- Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese.

In this civilizational struggle, Islam would emerge as the principal challenge to the West...

If I may be permitted a personal narrative: In 1993, I had written the lead critique in Foreign Affairs of his thesis. I admired his work but was unconvinced. My faith was invested in the order of states that the West itself built. The ways of the West had become the ways of the world, I argued, and the modernist consensus would hold in key Third-World countries like Egypt, India and Turkey. Fifteen years later, I was given a chance in the pages of The New York Times Book Review to acknowledge that I had erred and that Huntington had been correct all along...

Mark C.

 

 

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Do You Have a ‘Risk-Taking’ Brain ?

 

 

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Do You Have a ‘Risk-Taking’ Brain ?

via The Big Picture by Barry Ritholtz on 1/3/09

This time of year, many investors are looking at their asset allocation, and stock selection.

Perhaps they should be asking themselves, "How dense are my dopamine receptors?"

As it turns out, some people process the brain's "reward" chemicals differently, depending upon the number of receptors they have,

The BBC reported on a recent study by Professor David Zald
of Vanderbilt University. They noted:

"Scientists say they have found physical evidence of brain differences which may drive "thrill-seekers" to act impulsively or dangerously.

A small study from Vanderbilt University in the US found the biggest "risk-takers" processed a brain "reward" chemical dopamine differently. Scans spotted fewer "receptors" for the chemical on the cells which make it.

The Journal of Neuroscience study could help explain why some are vulnerable to drug abuse and other addictions. . . . Just as in animals, a propensity towards thrill-seeking, spending money freely, and spontaneity, could be linked to lower levels of autoreceptors.

As it turns out, the same cells that produce the dopamine also have a self-regulating system respond to rising levels of the hormone by reducing its production. Preliminary research now suggests that those of us with  lower levels of autoreceptors have tendencies towards greater risk taking — spending money freely, thrill-seeking, engaging in spontaneous actions.

What does this mean for investors and traders?

A few things. It goes back to one of our favorite trader admonitions: Know Thyself. All investors should have a good handle on their own personalities, and adjust their strategy and tactics to their own personality, risk tolerances, and natural tendencies.

Rather than make resolutions you won't keep, try something different this year. Figure out your own brain tendencies — including personality type. Don't try to become something you are not, and instead, adapt to your own physiology. If you are impulsive, map out an investment strategy that includes handling this part of yourself.

Some people have had success setting up a sequestered, smaller, "thrill" account for trading. Any impulsive trades should be in the fun account, measured in percentages, not dollars. Keep your dopamine-seeking trades here — put and call options, hail marys, shots in the dark — and make sure these trades remain separate from your long term retirement monies.

Your investment returns will thank your brain chemistry for it.

>

Previously:
Apprenticed Investor: Know Thyself
The Street.com, May 03, 2005
http://www.thestreet.com/_tscs/comment/barryritholtz/10221284.html

Sources:
Evidence of 'risk-taking' brain
BBC, 31 December 2008
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7802751.stm

Professor David Zald
Vanderbilt Faculty Home Page
https://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/site/js36bS

Midbrain Dopamine Receptor Availability Is Inversely Associated with Novelty-Seeking Traits in Humans
David H. Zald, et. al.
The Journal of Neuroscience, December 31, 2008
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/28/53/14372

Dopamine Transmission in the Human Striatum during Monetary Reward Tasks
David H. Zald, et. al.
The Journal of Neuroscience, April 28, 2004
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/24/17/4105

 

 

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Climate Change and Everest

Asia Society | China Green Projects

The Matthew Effect

 

 

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The Matthew Effect

via The Science of Sport by noreply@blogger.com (Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas) on 1/5/09

The Matthew Effect: Talent ID and sports science application

The first post of 2009 is inspired by a book I read over the break - Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. One of the very first things I recall learning when I started out my postgraduate studies was a tip from Prof Tim Noakes to read widely, and read outside your field. Sensible advice, and it informs much of what we are about here at The Science of Sport.

And in that light, Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, provides the latest inspiration for a somewhat novel look at sports science and talent ID (it's "somewhat novel" because it's actually a well-established phenomenon, but has not been published in sports science journals, but mainly social science journals). Gladwell is not entirely outside my field, it must be said, because much of it deals with economics, marketing, strategy etc. But, nevertheless, it's a different perspective on sports science, especially when it covers such obvious territory as the topic of today's post.

That territory, for those of you who have read Outliers, is called The Matthew Effect.

The Matthew Effect - lessons from ice-hockey, soccer and rugby

Today's post is really just a summary of what is described in the book, with the addition of an example from South African rugby that I've managed to do so far, and my own interpretations. There is much more to come, however, including more examples (some of which I hope you'll provide), as well as discussion of how different sports might be affected by this phenomenon, what might be done, and what the implications are for sports science and management.

But for now, forgive me for merely summarizing the data provided in the book, and take a look at the following set of pie-charts. What you are looking at are the breakdown of month of birth of junior players in four different high level sports teams. From top left, going clock-wise: A Canadian Junior Champion team from 2007, the Czech Junior Football/Soccer team from 2007, the Czech Junior Ice-Hockey team from 2007, and the 2007 South African Schools Rugby team.


What should jump out is the enormously high percentage of high-level players who are born between January and April. All told, out of the 91 junior players making up the above four teams, 55 of them (60%) were born in the first four months of the year, and only 13% in the last four months.

This is not an isolated finding, and is true across just about any sport at a high-level. It was reportedly first observed in the mid-1980's by a Canadian psychologist named Roger Barnsley. He noticed that a disproportionately high percentage of high-level ice-hockey players were born in the first few months of the year, and almost none towards the end of it. He expanded his study and looked at other sports like football and baseball, and even started to examine the effect of birth-month on things like academic achievement, suicide and self-esteem. You can read some of those studies here.

The reason - relative age, and a confusion of ability with maturity

We know you're pretty sharp, so it will probably come as no great surprise to learn that this finding is the result of the effect of RELATIVE age on sports performance, and the very easy mistake that coaches are lured into making. If you thought that it was the result of their star signs and some astrology, then I'm afraid you were on the wrong track! But, you might enjoy this website a little more...

Back to reality, and the suggestion that the reason so many elite athletes are born in the early months of the year is the result of the very large effect that 10 months difference in age can have on young children's ability to play sport.

An example: Ross and Jonathan

Let's take two 10-year olds, Ross and Jonathan. They are both 10 years old on the first day of January 2009, and so they compete in the Under-11 age group of their sport (soccer, let's say).

However, not all 10-year olds are created equal! Ross is 10 years and 11 months old on the first day of 2009 (his birthday is in February). Jonathan is 10 years and 1 month old (his birthday is in December), and so he is a full 10 months YOUNGER than the people, like Ross, who he is going to compete against.

At the age of 11, when skills and strength, and the other attributes required for sporting success are still developing, 10 months is an eternity. Think back to your own development, or better yet, to the development of your children, if you have them. Backyard games of catch or football or rugby or cricket change dramtically from one year to the next because a child at that age acquires skills and strength so quickly that they improve enormously from one month to the next.

This means that the 10-month advantage that Ross has, by virtue of being born in January or February, will manifest itself as a big performance advantage over Jonathan (obviously, I'm generalising here, you'll find exceptions. But the graphs above suggest that they happen infrequently).

Enter the coach, and the Matthew Effect is born

Now the coach enters the picture. He has a team of energetic, uncontrollable young 10-year olds to look after, and he picks his team, and allocates his time and attention to those who are deemed to have the most potential. However, he is unable to distinguish between capacity for performance and maturity. Maturity determines ability - Ross is older, and may possess more strength, speed, skill and therefore appear the star player in practice. Jonathan is yet to develop these attributes, but may have the talent.

However, the fateful decision made by the coach is to pick Ross ahead of Jonathan. What happens next determines the distribution you see in the graphs above. By virtue of having been picked based on his "superior" ability, Ross plays against higher quality competition, receives better coaching, more attention, and therefore improves MORE than Jonathan will. Their paths are determined from the outset, based on their selection, and the different journeys they will take are going to mean that one day, Ross is the better athlete or player, thanks to these advantages and opportunities he has received.

At the same time, Jonathan is far less likely to continue to play, because:

1. He is often smaller than the guys he competes against, and that's not likely to make his life much fun!
2. He becomes discouraged at the ever-growing gap between himself and the other guys who are being more heavily invested in

What we have then, is a self-fulfilling prophecy, where Ross is picked because he is better, and then ends up being better because he was picked, apparently vindicating the coach's early decision. The issue is this: Was his initial selection the result of his age, or was he genuinely the better sportsman? That is the challenge for talent identification. The figure below summarizes the process.


And why is it called the Matthew Effect, you may be asking? That name was coined by the sociologist Robert Merton, based on the bible verse from Matthew: "For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has well be taken from him" (Matt 25:29).

That means that success comes to those that are successful, thanks to their advantage, in this case, from their relative age.

Confounders and debate

There are of course debates and issues around this. The presence of athletes who are born between September and December (albeit a low 13%) suggests that exceptions do exist. What might be very instructive is to examine how those "outliers" (apologies, Malcolm) reach the level they do - they may be early developers, they may have parents who start them out by playing games at a younger age developing their skills "ahead of the normal curve", or they may have older siblings who drag them to a higher level of performance despite their younger relative age. All these options are intriguing and instructive for talent ID purposes, and for understanding how sporting success is determined.

The three elements required: Selection, streaming and differentiated experience

To dig into the effect a little further, the afore-mentioned Roger Barnsley suggested that three things are required for this effect to occur:

1. Selection - someone (in this case, a coach) must be selecting players based on ability
2. Streaming - once selected, players are placed into streams. These can be competitions, teams, training squads etc.
3. Differentiated experiences - very importantly, once in the streams, players receive different levels of coaching, competition and opportunity. This is summarized in the figure above.
   

Now, all three of these characteristics are found in what is called a meritocracy - wherever performance is rewarded through selection based on ability, and the pyramid of progress exists, you will generate this skewed distribution. Where there is no meritocracy, the effect is diminished, because the emphasis on the selection of the best players (regardless of age) is not as prioritized.

The lack of a meritocracy can be seen in the slightly more balanced distribution of the SA schools rugby team, by the way. In that team, "only" 44% were born in the first three months of the year, much lower than for the other three teams. So what, you ask? Well, that's because the SA school team was selected out of a mix of "traditional" and "non-traditional" rugby schools. Without going into the history and politics of our SA rugby, we have some schools that are very heavily based around performance, and have multiple teams at each age group, right down to junior level. Others are not as focused on age-group performance, and because of the selection policies in SA sport, the team is a mixture of the two. This dilutes the Matthew Effect. You'll find that whenever merit is NOT the primary factor for selection, this will occur.

Implications for sports science

Well, I'm running out of time (and so are you, probably!). This post has run over-time, but there's much more discussion on this topic to come. One area that interests me in particular is that talent ID often does not note this potential confounder of age. It is for this reason that the identification of talent, especially if that result is going to be used to "stratify" young sportspeople into different paths, should occur as late as possible.

What this suggests is that a sports scientist who plans to do some talent ID on a group of unknown sports people might as well make his first selection on the basis of date of birth! OK, that's being too extreme, but the point is, by the time a sports scientist tests a squad of potential athletes aged say 19 years, it's often too late to undo the effect that he measures, and which may have been created 9 years earlier. More to the point, the sport in question might be missing out on some of its best potential talent, which was lost 9 years earlier thanks to a wrong selection! At the senior level, the coach who picks the team may believe he is picking from the whole pool, when in fact, 40% of it has been lost through premature selection, 9 years previously! That should be a significant "flag" for people involved in high performance sport...

More to come...

Ross

The Science of Sport Dr. Ross Tucker Dr. Jonathan Dugas

 

 

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The Cover, Commenting on the work itself

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

A fun storey about clues in a custom house

Mystery on Fifth Avenue

Torture and the ticking bomb

A fascinating moral, ethical and legal question.

 

 

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Torture and the ticking bomb

via Citizen Katzenjammer by dangardner on 12/31/08

Five years ago, I travelled to Egypt, Turkey, and Uzbekistan to study torture. (Yes, it was depressing. Thanks for asking.) Out of that came a series of articles examining the issues from a number of angles.

 

One of these deals with the arguments in favour of torture in exceptional circumstances. "What about the ticking bomb scenario?" a reader asks in a comment to a post below. That's here. And much else.

 

(Apologies for the length of the post. The piece isn't available online so I can't link to it.)

 

A choice of evils.
The Ottawa Citizen
Friday, February 6, 2004
Dan Gardner
Series: The Face of Torture.

"Suppose a terrorist has hidden an atomic bomb on Manhattan Island which will detonate at noon on July 4," wrote philosopher Michael Levin. "Suppose further that he is caught at 10 a.m. of the fateful day, but -- preferring death to failure -- won't disclose where the bomb is. What do we do? If we follow due process -- wait for his lawyer, arraign him -- millions of people will die. If the only way to save those lives is to subject the terrorist to the most excruciating possible pain, what grounds can there be for not doing it? I suggest there are none."

Mr. Levin wrote this provocative passage in 1982. At the time, and for almost two decades after, the debate about whether torture may sometimes be justified was a popular exercise in moral philosophy classes but it was seldom heard anywhere else. Most people didn't imagine extreme situations such as Mr. Levin's ticking-bomb scenario. Torture was simply wrong. And that consensus was enshrined in the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture, which forbids the deliberate infliction of pain or suffering under any and all circumstances: Not even a ticking atomic bomb can legally justify torture.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks that day revealed to anyone with a television the depth of Islamist fanaticism and the terrible carnage that can be inflicted by people whose greatest desire is to kill and die. Suddenly, whether torture is always wrong was no academic exercise.

The first hint of the coming debate appeared in the media shortly after Sept. 11, when anonymous FBI agents were quoted saying they may need the authority to torture to prevent another catastrophe. Not long after, Alan Dershowitz, the renowned civil libertarian and law professor at Harvard University, received widespread attention for his suggestion that the law allow for "torture warrants" to be made available in extreme situations. Many others joined in to suggest that while torture may be awful, sometimes it is just. Even Richard Posner, an esteemed judge of the U.S. federal court of appeals, wrote in The New Republic magazine, that "if the stakes are high enough, torture is permissible. No one who denies that that is the case should be in a position of responsibility."

The revisionist talk even reached the various human rights bodies of the United Nations, says Malcolm Evans, a professor of international law at the University of Bristol in England. "This is deeply worrying, coming from these levels."

It seemed torture was creeping toward some degree of legitimacy in the Western countries which had firmly rejected and condemned it. Human rights activists were appalled and fought back. Arguments flared up repeatedly on television, in newspapers, book reviews and intellectual magazines.

Still, neither international nor domestic law has changed. Torture continues to be forbidden under any and all circumstances.

Should it be? Michael Levin's imagined scenario makes the issue seem simple and clear: If a terrorist bomb is ticking and torture is the only way to save a city, it's hard not to believe we must torture. Others, thinking of the Sept. 11 attacks, would go further: If we want to stop the terrorists from obtaining that bomb in the first place -- or preparing any other deadly plots -- counter-terrorism officials should be free to torture terrorists whenever necessary.

But quick conclusions would not be wise. More than two years after Sept. 11, the debate about torture has played out repeatedly, argument has been met with counter-argument, and the only thing that has become absolutely certain is that the debate is not simple and clear. Like torture itself, it is complex and troubling, no matter which side of the issue one takes.

- - -

Two arguments have been heard that would short-circuit the whole discussion. The first of these is the idea -- common to some schools of philosophy -- that an evil act remains evil even if it has very good consequences. Torture is always wrong and must always be forbidden, this reasoning goes, even if a particular act of torture were to save many lives. It's a view summed up in the Roman maxim, "let justice endure though the world should perish," and while that may be satisfying to some philosophers, it's not to the great majority of us who do consider the consequences of an act in deciding whether that act is right. So few people would stop the discussion here.

Another attempted short-circuit is the idea that so-called "stress-and-duress" interrogation techniques -- sleep and food deprivation, constant noise, forcing prisoners into awkward positions, etc. -- could be used. This shouldn't trouble us morally, some say, because these techniques don't cause enough suffering to be "real torture," as one writer put it. This argument is simply wrong -- stress-and-duress does inflict terrible suffering and it is torture. Also, stress-and-duress methods take time, so they would be useless in the classic ticking-bomb scenario. The debate cannot be dodged this way.

Alex Neve, secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada, suggests the starting point of the debate must be a very basic question: Does torture work? If the answer is no, after all, there's no reason to even consider using it. And Mr. Neve is certain the answer is no. "The notion that you can beat the truth out of someone in that kind of highly charged situation is false and misguided. When you start beating and torturing people they'll say anything to get the pain to stop."

This objection to torture dates back to ancient times and it was a key argument in the 18th century, when the modern anti-torture movement was launched. There is literally centuries of evidence to support it, the very latest example being Maher Arar, who insists that his confession during his Syrian imprisonment was a lie he told simply to stop his captors from beating him.

Similar stories are told by torture victims the world over. In an Egyptian case that recently came to light, torture caused a father to "confess" to the murder of his daughter, who later turned up alive and well. During an interrogation in Apartheid South Africa, a mixup in code names resulted in a tortured political prisoner admitting that he had murdered himself.

The tendency of torture to produce false information is so well documented no one seriously disputes it, but that doesn't prove that torture never produces valid information. In a ruling that forbade the use of stress-and-duress techniques, for example, the Israeli Supreme Court accepted that some terrorist attacks had been foiled by the use of the techniques in interrogations.

Alan Dershowitz says another success story is a case from the mid-1990s in which Filipino soldiers "arrested a Muslim terrorist who had on him plans, and they tortured him for 40-something days and they got him to admit there was a plan to kill the Pope and also a plan to blow up various western airliners going across the Pacific. They didn't believe him, as they should not," says Mr. Dershowitz, who agrees that torture often generates false information. Instead, the interrogators demanded the suspect provide proof of his claims or they would continue with the torture. "He led them to a tailor who was making the robe that was going to be worn by the terrorist that had pockets in it for the explosives and showed them the equipment that was going to be used to blow up the plane. When that happens, you believe it."

Torture can be effective, Mr. Dershowitz says, provided interrogators always insist on corroboration. "It has to be self-proving. He has to lead you to hard evidence."

Defenders of the absolute ban on torture also argue the debate is too narrowly focused, that it's not enough to say that the benefits of torture in something like a ticking-bomb scenario -- the lives saved -- outweigh the sheer inhumanity of committing torture. Any use of torture also carries the risk of hidden costs, and these have to be weighed against any alleged benefit.

"Torturing radical Islamists makes them more violent," Dr. Suzan Fayed, an Egyptian psychiatrist and human rights activist told the British newspaper The Guardian. The most infamous example is that of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian Islamist arrested and tortured following the murder of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981. Many who knew Dr. al-Zawahiri are convinced the torture radicalized his views: After his release, Dr. al-Zawahiri left for Afghanistan, where he met Osama bin Laden and ultimately became the No. 2 man in al-Qaeda.

Torture can also radicalize whole peoples, as victims become "living martyrs" for their cause and their families, clans and tribes are driven into opposition. Torture can convince moderates "that the regime deserves destroying because it does not respect the dignity of people," Hafiz Abu Sa'eda, the head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, told The Guardian. Many observers feel this is exactly what happened in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s: The French military successfully used torture to crack terrorist rings, but the brutality drove the previously passive Algerian population into mass rebellion.

Torture was similarly counter-productive in Turkey and Northern Ireland. "Whenever people are tortured," says Alex Neve, "that contributes to the ongoing cycles of violence and repression and grievance and revenge which fuel not only human rights violations, but lead to civil war and provide the fertile ground in which extremist groups take hold. It ultimately leads to men, women and children around the world being more insecure, not more secure."

Mr. Neve argues that for a Western government to even suggest that it may use torture would inflict another major cost. "It undermines the ability of the Canadian or American government to make clear and forceful representations to any other governments that may be engaged in torture. Representations that torture must come to an end are dramatically undermined if a government has taken steps to allow torture to take place." It wouldn't matter if we were to say our use of torture would be only in extreme cases of national security, Mr. Neve insists. "Those are precisely the kinds of excuses and justifications that repressive governments around the world use to justify their misdeeds and actions. (For Western governments) to use that same language and those same excuses will simply fuel and encourage that practice elsewhere."

Many fear this is already happening as a result of the published reports indicating the United States is using stress-and-duress techniques in its terrorism interrogations. An Amnesty International report called American behaviour "the threat of a bad example" and human rights activists interviewed by the Citizen in Egypt and Turkey unanimously agreed that the allegations about stress-and-duress has made it harder for them to fight torture in their countries.

Still, it can be argued, an exception to the ban on torture could be narrowly crafted to avoid at least some of these "hidden" costs. And in dire emergencies, we still may decide that even the hidden costs of torture do not outweigh the terrible loss of life that will happen if we do not torture. In that case, we would still demand an exception to the ban, although it would be a very narrow exception to be used in only the most extreme emergencies, such as an atomic bomb ticking in Manhattan.

Malcolm Evans says it's tempting to think such a narrow exception is possible, "but even in that ticking-bomb situation, once you accept the legitimacy of (torture), it spills out into society." This "spilling out" could happen several ways.

First, there's the problem of certainty. The ticking-bomb scenario assumes the police know with absolute certainty that there is a bomb and they have the man who placed it. But, says William Aceves, a law professor at California Western School of Law in San Diego, "the problem is you probably will never find a case where you know for a fact that that bomb is there or that this person has that information."

What's much more likely is a situation in which the police are fairly certain, although not 100-per-cent certain. Should they torture under those circumstances? "It becomes very easy to say, well, let's require an 80-per-cent chance that we have the right guy. That sounds reasonable. But what if it's 50 per cent? What if it's 40 per cent? What if it's five per cent? I think the reality of law enforcement is we are never sure of anything, and I think that if you justify torture at that one extreme, it becomes easy to lower the standard for when we are prepared to torture someone."

Another standard that risks dropping is the potential harm required to justify torture. In Michael Levin's scenario, millions could be killed. But in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the worst terrorist atrocities in history, around 3,000 died. Would torture have been justified in order to save those lives? And if 3,000, what about 300? Thirty? Three? If torture is deemed legitimate to save many lives, we may ultimately say it is legitimate to save even one life.

Alan Dershowitz cites a recent, troubling case in Germany in which police arrested a man believed to have kidnapped the son of an industrialist. "The guy admitted he was the kidnapper. There was no doubt about it. He just gloated and wouldn't tell them where the boy was. And they got (illegal) authorization to torture him, and as soon as they showed him the authorization, he told them where the boy was. Unfortunately, the boy was dead. But it started a great debate in Germany as to whether or not torture is justified in order to save one innocent life."

Alex Neve worries about another way that a narrow exception could spill out into something wider. "If it's OK to torture this person because you're pretty sure they know where the bomb is, does that mean that you should be able to torture the person you're pretty sure knows where to find the person you're pretty sure knows where the bomb is?

"Does it mean you're allowed to torture someone from their family, because certainly they'll have some information? Does it mean you're allowed to torture all members of their political organization? Or their religious faith? Some of these possibilities may start to sound extreme, but that's exactly the pattern of human rights abuses we see around the world."

Michael Levin understood that making an exception for something as extreme as a ticking bomb sets up a logic that pushes for more and more exceptions. In fact, he argued in favour of following that logic to its conclusion. "Once you concede that torture is justified in extreme cases, you have admitted that the decision to use torture is a matter of balancing innocent lives against the means needed to save them." Mr. Levin applied that calculation to less-extreme scenarios. By the end of his article, he concluded that torture should be used against the "obviously guilty" in any situation where it could save an innocent life -- even routine kidnappings.

Alan Dershowitz does not support such a radical position, despite many media reports to the contrary. "I would say 90 per cent of the articles that have been written about my position have totally and completely distorted my view and made me out to be a strong supporter of torture."

Mr. Dershowitz says he's not trying to resolve whether torture is morally right in some circumstances. "My position is that torture will, in fact, occur," particularly in a major crisis like a ticking-bomb scenario. "And for me, the issue is, if it's going to happen, is it worse to have it happen the way we're doing it in the United States now, surreptitiously, with deniability, in secret locations, without any approval? Or is it worse to authorize it by judicial or executive warrant, so there's accountability?"

Mr. Dershowitz's "torture warrants" would only be available in true ticking-bomb crises where there was "absolute certainty, the kind of certainty that is required to execute somebody." Having clear, fixed criteria for obtaining a warrant would keep it under tight control and ensure torture wouldn't spread, Mr. Dershowitz feels.

During the Middle Ages, both England and France permitted torture, Mr. Dershowitz says, "but England required a torture warrant and there was much less (torture) and it was much more subject to control. And when England decided to abolish it, it was much easier to abolish, because you just had to publish a rule saying no more warrants would be given."

Richard Posner thinks Mr. Dershowitz's argument is too narrowly logical and ignores how people really behave. "If rules are promulgated permitting torture in defined circumstances," Judge Posner wrote in The New Republic, "some officials are bound to want to explore the outer bounds of the rules." Even bright lines can be stretched.

Worse, wrote Judge Posner, torture warrants would legitimize torture, and one way or another, that will inevitably lead to more of it. "Having been regularized, the practice will become regular."

Israeli experience suggests Judge Posner is right. In 1987, Israel authorized its General Security Service (the Shin Bet) to use what are now known as stress-and-duress techniques -- including sleep-deprivation, forced awkward positions, and "a moderate measure of physical force" -- during interrogations. Guidelines detailed methods and carefully defined when they could be used, and a high-level committee monitored compliance. The ticking-bomb scenario was constantly cited in support of this change, but despite all the safeguards, the use of these techniques rapidly proliferated so that an emergency measure became something close to routine practice.

In 1999, the Israeli supreme court ruled that all the stress-and-duress techniques were illegal and their use declined.

- - -

It seems that defenders of the absolute ban on torture have been successful in showing that any exception to the ban would carry serious, even terrible, costs. But still they have to face the brutal scenario that began this essay. What if there is an atomic bomb ticking in Manhattan and the police know, with great certainty, they have the perpetrator under arrest? However bad the costs of torturing may be, surely, in these rare, extreme circumstances, they are outweighed by the costs of not torturing. So what should the police do?

Malcolm Evans sighs when he's asked about this ultimate choice between evils. "It would be a very brave person who could actually say with complete moral certainty that if they were put in that position that they would not be prepared to (torture)," he says. "I think one simply does what one does and then throw the case to the judgement of society. What else can one do?"

Under these circumstances, it's not likely a police officer would be punished for saving countless lives, writes Henry Shue, an ethicist at Cornell University who supports the absolute ban on torture. "If the situation approximates those in the imaginary examples in which torture seems possible to justify," he writes, "a judge can surely be expected to suspend the sentence."

But this expectation must never be turned into an official ticking-bomb exception, argues Slavo Zizek, a Slovenian social theorist. Only by keeping the total ban "do we retain the sense of guilt, the awareness of the inadmissibility of what we have done."

In its ruling forbidding stress-and-duress techniques, Israel's supreme court acknowledged the challenge of the ticking-bomb scenario, but suggested an officer charged with torture under those circumstance could claim the defence of necessity at trial.

Canadian law, too, has a defence of necessity under which a person is acquitted for doing something that's normally illegal if it was necessary to save lives -- such as a mother who robs a store because she was ordered to by a kidnapper who holds her daughter. Mercy can also be granted by the federal justice minister. Whether either mechanism would clash with the absolute ban on torture under international law is unclear.

But as Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, points out, this solution basically admits there are forms of "morally permissible torture." And if a trial actually resulted in an acquittal, a suspended sentence, or a grant of mercy, it would give "formal imprimatur" to actions that are supposedly forbidden. In other words, even this position risks legitimizing torture.

"There are no happy solutions," says Alan Dershowitz, which is probably the only thing that everyone involved in this debate agrees on.

"This is a choice of evils. And a choice of evils requires articulation. Bring it to the surface. That's what's important about this debate."

 

 

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Holiday Reading

Books I've read over the holidays:

• Numerati, by Stephen Baker. An easy introduction into the implications of data warehousing and BI on the varying spheres of life - from consumer to citizen.
  
• Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta. While I liked his efforts to explain and empathize with why people join evangelical churches, I didn't find the characters that believable. The story and plot, though, moved along fast.
  
• Survive! by Les Stroud. Yep, Survivorman in book form. It's what it is. As they say, if that's the sort of thing you like, then it's the sort of thing you'd like.
  
• All the Colours of Darkness, Peter Robinson. A Chief Inspector Banks mystery where Othello meets up with MI6 - or is it MI5? Either way, it delivers a reasonably satisfying mystery read, but not as good as his Dry Season.
  
• Killing Circle, by Andrew Pyper. A taut suspense/thriller/horror set in and near Toronto, with familiar landmarks - but is really quite creepy.
  
• Why Mexicans Don't Drink Molson, by Andrea Mandel-Campbell. While I was already aware of most of the anecdotes in the book, reading them over and over at one setting is a depressing litany of Canadian business failures, both abroad and at home. It's interesting, though, trying to parse the varying contradictions in the stance of pro-business advocates, from support (read: subsidize) us, to encourage mergers/no don't....
• The Rest is Noise, by Alex Ross. A history of 20th century classical music. Reading this is tough - not having the musical background meant I kept scurrying onto the Internet to find correct intro to the pieces he describes. While I haven't finished, it's satisfying trying to understand the linkages between, say, Strauss & Mahler. How one symphony is a rhetorical answer to the other Viennese composer's pieces.
• Richard Hofstadter, An Intellectual Biography by David S Brown. One of the great public intellectuals who stood between the American progressive movement and mid-century American liberalism, Hofstadter was also the author of an essay that inspired a course at Queen's - The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It's difficult to think of a comparably, more recent single essay doing that.
• The Turnaround, by George Pelecanos. Bad things continue to happen then and now in Washington DC, involving class, race and power. I think I liked the Night Gardener better.
  

Happy Holidays!

I was looking through some photos and found these.

Merry Xmas!

Let's Hope He Can Up Off His Knees

Payback time

Re: What are you doing today?

Looks like a smile?

Get back to work!!

I'm going back to sleep. 

On 22-Dec-08, at 11:48, "Paul Skafel" <paul@skafel.com> wrote:

Ironically... it looks like a smile too!!

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 11:34 AM, nigel <nigel.wallis@gmail.com> wrote:

So painfully true.

 

 

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What are you doing today?

via Indexed by Jessica on 12/22/08

 

 

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Re: What are you doing today?

Ironically... it looks like a smile too!!

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 11:34 AM, nigel <nigel.wallis@gmail.com> wrote:

So painfully true.

 

 

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What are you doing today?

via Indexed by Jessica on 12/22/08

 

 

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What are you doing today?

So painfully true.

 

 

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What are you doing today?

via Indexed by Jessica on 12/22/08

 

 

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Historicist: Worshipping in the Open Air

 

 

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Historicist: Worshipping in the Open Air

via Torontoist by Kevin Plummer on 12/20/08

Every Saturday morning Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

High Park Toboggan Runs, ca. 1906-1910. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 438."

After a month and a half of acrimonious debate, on February 19, 1912, City Council passed a by-law outlawing tobogganing in public parks on Sundays. Many councillors took their cue from the Lord's Day Alliance and similar organizations. They felt that the Sabbath was such a grave moral issue that public engagement in business, sporting activities, and other entertainments needed to be curtailed not only to encourage church-going but also to ensure workers had a day's rest. The city's labour movement, however, took exception to religious groups speaking for them and rallied to vigorously defend Sunday tobogganing. Despite a massive public outcry, however, the Sunday sledding ban was passed by a large majority at City Council with only Mayor George Reginald Geary and six aldermen dissenting. The controversy surrounding the issue reflected how, at the turn of the twentieth century, Toronto's social and religious establishment felt under siege in the rapidly growing city by the forces of industrialization and immigration and by the growing strength of the labour movement.

High Park Toboggan Runs, 1914. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 441A."

In the late Victorian era, an immigration-fuelled population boom dumped most newcomers and industrial workers into the city's crowded, squalid slums. Reformers raised concerns that a lack of recreational opportunities for residents of these districts might breed disorder, vice, and delinquency. From the late 1890s, city-run recreational programs and leisure facilities became important public issues.

With the two hundred yard drop to the valley floor in Riverdale Park and the massive hill in the undeveloped wilderness of High Park, tobogganing had been a favoured winter pastime for Torontonians since private operators had begun running toboggan slides at both locations in the 1880s. By the turn of the century, overcrowding had raised concerns about safety. Even after lights were added when the city assumed responsibility for the toboggan slides in the winter of 1906, some reformers still questioned whether the city was doing enough. When, in 1907, thousands of resourceful kids began to use the slopes just west of Queen's Park for sledding, they were chased away by University of Toronto officials. This prompted newspaperman and social reformer J.J. Kelso to call for an expansion of city-run free sliding facilities for children. In response to this and The Star's 1909 criticisms about safety at the park slides, the municipal government upgraded the slides and assigned police to supervise. As historian Gene Homel writes in his October 1981 article in the Urban History Review, by 1912 "Toronto now had a fancy new system of public tobogganing, and its residents flocked to the slides seven days a week."

The Beginning of the Toboggan Run, High Park, ca. 1906-1910. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 439."

In January 1912, the Ministerial Association took exception to the Sunday crowds on the snowy slopes and issued a proclamation condemning city officials for encouraging the desecration of the Sabbath by keeping the toboggan slides open. Initially, Mayor Geary and the Board of Control paid little notice, and the public continued to flock to the hills of Riverdale Park and High Park each week. But, as other religious and moral-reform organizations rushed to defend Toronto's Christian morality, City Council couldn't ignore the barrage of petitions they received demanding that the slides be closed on the Lord's Day.

Sabbatarianism was a well-established political force in Toronto. Based on the notion that, in a Christian society, all people needed one day of rest for their moral and spiritual well-being, Sabbatarianism had gained strength as a movement in the 1880s with the establishment of national church organizations and the Lord's Day Alliance. On a national level, they'd succeeded in petitioning the federal government to pass the Lord's Day Act in 1906, which prevented all non-essential and non-charitable Sunday activity. Locally, the Sabbatarians had led a long, protracted fight in the 1890s against allowing streetcars to run on Sundays, as recounted in Christopher Armstrong and H.V. Nelles's The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company (Peter Martin Associates Limited, 1977). With the support of the working class, the Sabbatarians won civic plebiscites on the streetcar issue in 1892 and 1893. But eventually labour leaders defected because, although a few people might now have to work, Sunday service presented the best opportunity for workingmen and their families to escape their unhygienic and over-crowded neighbourhoods for healthy recreation in the parks and suburbs. In a close referendum vote in 1897, streetcars were finally allowed to run on Sundays.

On the issue of Sunday sledding in 1912, labour and religious groups once again fell into opposing camps. In a January 16 deputation before the Board of Control, Presbyterian clergyman W.H. Rochester expressed the genuine religious sentiment fuelling the Sabbatarian cause. He argued that "the city is secularizing the day and the city enters into direct competition with the church, the Sunday school and the home." He also argued that the sledding could lead to commercial activities and therefore the seven day work week that some of Toronto's larger industries desired. An almost unspoken undercurrent to the Sabbatarian argument, however, was the desire for moral and social control. Newcomers, some felt, needed to be acculturated into developing proper Sabbath habits. Toronto's blue laws, Armstrong and Nelles argue, provided an institutional means for controlling immigrants, workers, and other "unruly elements in the community."

The case in favour of Sunday tobogganing was made before the Board of Control on the same day by prominent labour leader J.D. O'Donoghue. Sunday, the labour argument went, was the only day that workingmen could actually make use of toboggan slides in city parks. Closures would therefore be unfair and harmful for the very group who most required healthy recreational activity. More importantly, union leaders were incisively critical of the hypocrisy of the Sabbatarian position—an indication of the deepening schism between twentieth century labour and moral reformers—whereby the religious folk invoked working men's interests for their cause but thought nothing of engaging their own chauffeurs in Sunday work. The critiques of labour advocates towards Sabbatarians could therefore take a pretty biting tone. Phillips Thompson, a radical, called for workers to unite against "a few noisy fanatics...of this priest and parson-ridden city." A supportive newspaper opined that Sabbatarians had "just enough religion to miss all the fun in this world and get a lot of painful surprises in the next." Union leader L.H. Gibbons was more articulate. He argued that recreation and religion need not be in conflict because people "can worship in the open air or anywhere, as well as inside the four walls of a church."

High Park Toboggan Runs, ca. 1908-1912. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 440."

Newspapers were filled with letters supporting Sunday sledding. The Star reiterated that the safety of sledders was cause enough to keep the slides open because the by-law might drive winter enthusiasts from the specially designed slopes to more dangerous ravines and hills. Even business interests ardently opposed a prohibition on tobogganing—albeit because they didn't want to deepen class cleavages by antagonizing those who worked in their factories and workshops. Business leaders, according to a petition published in the papers, even recognized that the proposed prohibition was merely discriminatory "class legislation." While those against the Sabbatarian proposal were probably more numerous and agitated than during the streetcar debates, Homel argues, they weren't as united and lacked the organization and institutional weight of the church groups. Nor was there a single corporate entity, like the Street Railway Company, backing the opposition as there had been in 1897.

And so where the debate mattered most—in the council chamber—Sabbatarian-influenced councillors were not swayed by the popular outcry. One of the few dissenters, Alderman Samuel McBride twice failed in his attempt to have the city hold a plebiscite on the issue. On February 19, the new by-law was passed. It stated: "No person shall on the Sabbath in any public park, square, garden or place for exhibition in the City, slide upon or use any of the public slides constructed or maintained by the Corporation." Ironically, ever-resourceful Torontonians simply shifted their winter recreational activities to comply with the law. Rather than tobogganing, each Sunday thousands simply availed themselves of Grenadier Pond in High Park and the city's other skating rinks—which had grown in number from one or two in 1890 to over thirty in 1912.

Observance of the Sabbath remained so strong throughout the 1930s and 1940s—although restrictions were slowly diluted to allow the opening of the museum and art gallery—that the quirks of Toronto's notorious blue laws required repeated explanation in guidebooks. Organized games, team sports, and tobogganing in city parks continued to be banned on Sunday. Even after the park slides were phased out of existence in the 1940s and 1950s, the edict against tobogganing remained on the books until December 1961.

Image of Group on Toboggan, ca. 1911. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 478A."

 

 

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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

 

 

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Every Man has Leaned on the Past...

via The Torch by Babbling Brooks on 12/19/08

I was corresponding with one of my grandfathers by e-mail earlier today. He's a WWII veteran, with experiences in a Lancaster bomber that he cannot speak of even to this day. He was commenting on the family picture we sent to my grandmother and him, saying he never expected to make it to over eighty years old, and certainly didn't expect to meet his great-grandchildren, the eighth generation of Canadians in our line.

I reminded him that we're pretty proud of where we come from. When I was at Air Force Indoctrination school at CFB Comox more than fifteen years ago, our class was shown a poem. Much of it remained with me over the years, but I wanted to make sure I got it right before I sent it to him.

Luckily, I found it online. I suspect Miles Selby picked the poem up the same place I did:

Every man has leaned upon the past.
Every liberty we enjoy has been bought at incredible cost.
There is not a privilege nor an opportunity
that is not the product of other men's labors.

We drink every day from wells we have not dug;
we live by liberties we have not won;
we are protected by institutions we have not set up.

No man lives by himself alone. All the past is invested in him.

We stand on the shoulders of giants. If you're lucky enough, as I am, to still have some of them to visit with, make sure you do it this holiday season.

 

 

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SantaCorp Pleads Case For Bailout

Bunch of grinches!

More from the Big Picture

2008 in photographs (part 2 of 3) - The Big Picture

I'll bet Dean Kamen never thought of using Segways like that...

The best of the Big Picture, Pt 1

A website that never ceases to amaze me with its gorgeous views.

Bacteria. In Pictures.

Some gorgeous shots here.

Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008

Personally I like picture 4, but to each their own.

Immigration to the US

 

 

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Immigration to the US

via The Big Picture by Barry Ritholtz on 12/11/08

Fascinating animation:

Immigration to the US, 1820-2007 v2 from Ian S on Vimeo.

 

 

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The Return of a Worthwhile Canadian Initiative

Through iodinizing the world's salt.

Nice work if you can get it.

Another vacation well earned

NFB - Carts of Darkness

A fascinating trailer.

The end of the "Can I Make It to the Olympics" series

But still a fun read, and good for her to push that hard.

Happy Prorogation Day

 

 

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Happy Prorogation Day

via CalgaryGrit by calgarygrit on 12/4/08

(I'll be updating this thread if anything interesting happens today...)

I know every newscast these days has a constitutional expert citing precedence (that, and streeters with angry Albertans). But the fact of the matter is, this is unprecedented. Michaelle Jean is today setting the precedence future scholars will cite.

And, because of that, she needs to be very careful. Allowing a Prime Minister to escape a confidence vote in the House through prorogation allows a Prime Minister to govern without the confidence of the House. In my opinion, this breaks a fundamental rule of our parliamentary system.

What's worse, it sets a terrible precedence. Can you imagine Paul Martin proroguing in May or December 2005 to escape confidence votes? Who knows how this power could be abused in the future.

Because of this, I firmly believe that the Governor General has a duty to turn down Harper's request, and force him to face the House on Monday. That said, I won't blame her if she agrees to it, since Harper has placed her in a Kobayashi Maru by asking her to do something he should not have asked her to do.

But, from a principled perspective, the proper and responsible decision would be to deny prorogation until Harper demonstrates that he has earned the confidence of the House - something he clearly does not enjoy at this moment.

10:50 am: They've been in there for over 75 minutes now and still no word on what the hell is going on. I suppose it's a good sign that they're actually talking this over in detail, but I'm anxious to see how this horrifying experiment in democracy turns out.

11:45 am: CTV is reporting that Jean has approved Harper's request to prorogue.

12:25 pm: And thus concludes another productive session of parliament! See ya'll on January 26th.

I think I've been more than charitable to Harper throughout this entire ordeal. But any good will I had towards him has gone out the window with this move. You simply cannot govern in our system without the support of the House and that's what he'll be doing.

 

 

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Small schools face closure: TDSB chair

Some interesting schools in that pile that may be closed. Danforth Tech, a bunch in Etobicoke, etc. That won't bode well for home values, which won't bode well for trustee re-elections.

 

 

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Small schools face closure: TDSB chair

via Posted Toronto by Rob Roberts on 12/2/08

By Natalie Alcoba, National Post

The chair of Toronto's public school board says he will use his second term to push a controversial plan to close small schools in order to build new ones, and win over unhappy parents.

John Campbell, a five-year Etobicoke trustee who was acclaimed on Tuesday in his bid for reelection, said he is bracing for opposition from parents who cling to the "romantic" notion of a neighbourhood school. But he said too many buildings are sitting half empty and sucking the Toronto District School Board dry of cash.

An inventory of schools released in June showed 92 of 533 public schools in Toronto have an enrollment of less than 60% (see chart after the jump). Before it recessed for the summer, the board approved a plan that set a target size of 450 students in consolidated elementary schools, and 1,200 at the high school level. The plan also recommends phasing out middle schools. The TDSB has long suffered from declining enrollment; it loses about 4,000 students every year.

"What parents have to understand is that what we're trying to do is enable schools that have larger student populations and more programming options, and also cut down on costs so that we can afford to reinvest in better schools, and build new libraries and gymnasiums and additions to schools," Mr. Campbell said in an interview on Tuesday. The under enrolled secondary schools, some with only 300 students, can hardly offer a variety of programs, he said; many don't have basketball teams, there is no music teacher or Latin class.

"It all sounds very logical, the problem is when emotions get into play, tempers get frayed and people get a little irrational."

Those sentiments are already playing out in places like Oakville, the scene of a bitter battle over whether or not to close four schools so that a new one can be built. It has pitted parents against parents, neighbourhood against neighbourhood, and now the provincial government has stepped in to ensure local trustees followed the rules when they decided to shutter four schools.

Mr. Campbell expects parents to dig in their heels in support of neighbourhood schools in Toronto, too.

"It's not easy to get parents happy about the idea of closing schools, particularly if it's your own child's school," said Annie Kidder, executive director of People for Education.

"If you can offer parents something that is much better, there may be a way of getting parents on board."

She said enrolment is declining across the province, and there is no question that some schools will have to close in Toronto.

"To think it's not going to be controversial is maybe being a bit too optimistic," said Ms. Kidder, who is focusing her attention on how it will be done.
In some cases, it may make more sense for a board to admit up front that a particular school must close, and then invite parents to help brainstorm what they would like to see in its place. There are also other ways to deal with excess space, Ms. Kidder said, like the approach favoured by Toronto-Danforth trustee Cathy Dandy, who says schools could become hubs that house a range of other services.

At the end of the day, however, Mr. Campbell said the board has to sell property to be able to afford the kind of state-of-the-art schools that are sprouting up in
places like York Region, where enrolment is on the rise.

The process is a long one — it's unlikely the TDSB will shutter 15 or 20 schools in one fell swoop.

But if things go according to plan, Mr. Campbell would like to see the first one or two properties to close in the next year or two.

"It will be incumbent upon us to win the support of local communities and convince them that their students will be far better off in new learning environments."

 

 

 

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On the stupidity of torture...

I think the best sentence is "[the] benefits it delivers are purely tactical and short-term. The costs are strategic and lasting."

 

 

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The stupidity of torture

via Citizen Katzenjammer by dangardner on 12/2/08

The evil of torture should be clear to anyone with a functioning conscience, but far too many observers have managed to convince themselves that torture in a struggle against evil is acceptable. I don't think any argument will convince them otherwise. The human brain is a powerful rationalizer.

 

But the stupidity of torture may be another matter.

 

"I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans."

 

The author of that passage -- published this past Sunday in the Washington Post -- is Matthew Alexander, a retired air force officer who worked as a senior interrogator in Iraq at the height of the insurgency. It was Alexander's team that tracked down Al Qaeda's psychopathic leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- and they did it the way smart interrogators have always done it. 

 

"I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi."

 

In 2003, I travelled to Egypt, Turkey, and Uzbekistan to study torture. I expected it to be brutal and depressing. It was. But I wasn't expecting to discover that torture is the preferred method of the lazy and stupid.

 

In Egypt, the police routinely respond to crimes by going to the scene and sweeping up everyone they can get their hands on. These people are taken back to the station, beaten mercilessly, and ordered to give up more names of people who may or may not be involved. Those named are then arrested, beaten, and ordered to give up names. Eventually, the police decide, almost arbitrarily, that someone or other is guilty and that person confesses after an extra stiff dose of "investigation."

 

This is not the most efficient investigative method, at least not if one is concerned with accurately identifying the guilty parties. In a case that came to light around the time I was in Egypt, a young woman went missing. The police did their thing and the father of the woman duly confessed to murdering her. Then the daughter showed up and asked what all the fuss was about.

 

As tough-talkers like to say, torture really does work. Even a vicious terrorist will inevitably break down and talk. You want to hear about the plot? Sure. He'll tell you all about it. He'll also tell you about how he kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, framed the Rosenbergs, and shot JFK. And that's a problem.

 

The torturer may want to hear only the truth but the victim isn't interested in telling the truth. He wants to say whatever will convince the torturer to stop. Those two categories seldom overlap completely. In many cases, they may not overlap at all. 

 

So the torturer will get reams of information and no way of knowing what is true and what is a lie told by a man desperate to please his tormentors. In Apartheid South Africa, a mix-up with code names once resulted in a tortured suspect admitting that he murdered himself.

 

And this is to say nothing of the wider ramifications of torture. Whatever benefits it delivers are purely tactical and short-term. The costs are strategic and lasting. Torture radicalizes opponents and alienates peoples. It destroys the reputation of the torturer. As Matthew Alexander noted, these dynamics ultimately cost the lives of American soldiers in Iraq.

 

Alexander also demonstrated that the harm done by torture can come in subtler forms.

 

As a result of switching to more intelligent, less brutal interrogation tactics, "our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond."

 

Eventually, the brass did realize this and it became the basis for the current relative success in Iraq. But the delay cost thousands upon thousands of lives.

 

That's the stupidity of torture. And if the evil of torture doesn't convince us to reject torture absolutely, surely that will.

 

 

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The Banff Mtn Film Fest Trailer has arrived!

Boo-yeah! I love the slacklining.

 

 

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Banff Mtn. Film Festival tickets available now!

via Algonquin Outfitters web log by Gordon Baker on 11/29/08

Tickets are on sale now for the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour in Huntsville!

Please note there are two shows, on Tuesday, January 20 and Wednesday, Jan. 21. Different films are shown each night. I recommend going to both! No, I haven't picked the films yet but will in the next two weeks or so. Check this blog later for a list if you would like more details on the films being shown in Huntsville.

Tickets are available at the Algonquin Theatre box office at 37 Main St. E., on-line at algonquintheatre.ca or by calling the theatre box office at (705) 789-4975, or 1-888-696-4255, ext. 2352.

Here's a teaser - check out the always exciting World Tour Intro Video:

 

 

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Don't You Hate It When Your Own Words Come Bank...

 

 

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Memory Lane 2

via CalgaryGrit by calgarygrit on 11/28/08

April 18th 2005

On Monday, Valeri said he would cancel a Conservative opposition day motion because setting opposition days is the responsibility of the government, not the opposition parties.

That provoked outrage from Conservative Leader Stephen Harper who met with reporters Monday evening on Parliament Hill to denounce Valeri and the Liberal government.

"I think they are just signing their own death warrant," Harper said. "This is the kind of behaviour a government does when it is scared to death of the electorate.

"It is not up to the government in our system to decide whether an opposition motion is order or not. It's up to the Clerk and the Speaker. Our motion was in order. We don't have to get the approval of the government to express dissent.

"When a government starts trying to cancel dissent or avoid assent is frankly when it's rapidly losing its moral authority to govern."

About an hour ago:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has delayed for a week a confidence motion vote that could bring down his government.

 

 

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Harper plays chess... while Rome burns

finally, and about time, someone puts it right.

 

 

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Harper plays *chess...* while Rome burns

via inkless-wells « WordPress.com Tag Feed by Paul Wells on 11/28/08

Well, I looked. There's not a line about changes to political party funding in the risible excuse for a platform Stephen Harper released in the last few days of what I had been calling, perhaps prematurely, "the campaign of 2008," with no 's' on campaign. But then, the 2006 platform didn't have a word about senators in cabinet either. The immediate post-election period is Harper's favourite time for little surprises, so he can show everybody what a super-genius 3D Vulcan chess master he is.

But you know, it's a funny thing. I've heard from a lot of people since the election, I did Q&A sessions at two speaker gigs where people from politics and business asked a lot of questions about how Harper would handle the current economic storm. And not a one of them said, "Is he going to do something clever to wrong-foot the opposition? I sure hope he'll be clever. Our sales are collapsing and we can't get any financing, so please tell me, Paul, that we're going to get some o' that old Vulcan chess from the tactical genius." No, that's not what people have been asking for.

The stock market is a bit of a mess these days. Every week another massive pillar of American capitalism collapses. The OECD and Kevin Page say we're headed for a deficit and probably a recession, and I profoundly don't care if Jim Flaherty disagrees, because he's not in the credibility business, is he? There's a religious gang war in the streets of the world's largest democracy and the latest quarterly report from Afghanistan suggests, as cheerfully as possible, that that benighted country is slipping a little deeper into the drain despite the most heroic efforts of our best men and women.

So you'd really have to be Stephen Harper to survey all of this wreckage and tell yourself that this is another excellent buying opportunity.

It's bad enough, as Heather Scoffield points out, that much of the world is taking a different policy track from Canada. Harper would be free and might be well advised to take a different path. But even Angela Merkel, the poster child of the anti-stimulus set, passed a budget this week. Barack Obama, meanwhile, had three news conferences in three days to put serious, serious people in charge of economic policy.

And Harper has not led any kind of anti-Keynesian resistance. In Peru on the weekend he called deficits essential. So on the economy as on the war in Afghanistan, he is now in the full-time business of spinning like a weathervane. But then, wars and jobs aren't what Harper's in politics for, right? No, he just likes to play chess.

So, drawing his inspiration from Jo Moore, the Downing Street spin doctor who thought 9/11 would be a "very good day" to get some embarrassing news releases out, Harper decided an economic crisis would be an excellent cover to use for a little political kneecapping. What could be more clever? That'll show them he's a serious guy.

So the real outrage of yesterday's economic "update" is not that it seeks to impose on most parliamentarians a change to funding rules that most of them would never ordinarily accept; it's that it accomplishes nothing else. It's that in the most dangerous economic times Canada has faced in 20 years if not far longer, this prime minister can't wipe the smirk off his face and grow up a little.

What comes next is beyond my ability to guess. The forces facing Harper do not look more encouraging, for me as a taxpayer, than the forces arrayed around Harper. But so what? Too much of our politics in recent years has been given over to warring camps who don't care what their guy does as long as he's their guy and he wins. A lot of the rest of us care less about the colour of the winning team so much as they desperately hope that whoever it is, he might take the job seriously.

At least since September, we have not been so lucky. Stephen Harper is my prime minister and for all I care he can go on being my prime minister as long as he cares and can win the little fantasy confrontations that so excite him. But he is acting like an idiot and I am ashamed of his behaviour.

 

 

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Tech in the Soo

Neat stuff going on in the north.

 

 

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Tech in the Soo

via MaRS Blog - Innovation and Commercialization in Canada by Amie @ MaRS on 11/28/08

Filed under: Canada and the World, Emerging Science and Technology, Entrepreneurship and Business
November 28th, 2008 by Amie @ MaRS

mr. bon soo thinks tech in the soo is cool too

I recently visited the Sault Ste. Marie Innovation Centre and Science Enterprise Algoma to check out this small community of tech innovation. Flying into the city, you're immediately greeted by their massive wind farm. Operating since 2006, Brookfield Power's Prince Wind Energy Project comprises 126 wind turbines extending over nearly 20,000 acres, and a total installed capacity of 189 MW. Up until a couple of weeks ago (with the opening of the 199.5 MW Melancthon Grey Wind Project in Shelburne, ON) Prince was the largest project in Canada.

If there are some common themes that link the innovative opportunities in this region, it's the community's support and adoption of new technology opportunities and the absence of NIMBYism.

Renewable Energy
On the renewable energy front, we see this in a number of projects in addition to the wind farm:

• Algoma Steel's 70 MW co-gen plant
• PodGenerating Group's development of a 60 MW solar farm
• EnQuest Power's three tonne-per-day waste-to-energy pilot plant

In EnQuest's case, the Niagara-based company encountered too many obstacles to set up the test plant in that region, and so looked to Sault Ste. Marie. When the key step to commercializing technology like this is proof-of-concept and demonstration, the ability to do so for an early stage venture like EnQuest means everything to their commercial development.

Health IT
We also see examples of a collaborative and tech-friendly community in the health sector and its adoption of health IT solutions. The Group Health Centre's electronic medical records systems was one of Canada's pioneers in this space, building its initial system in 1997. Now the EMRxtra project extends this capability to pharmacists, better integrating the city's circle of care. These capabilities provide a platform for further development of the health informatics sector, and SSMIC, in collaboration with Algoma University, the Waterloo Institute for Health Informatics Research is working on assisting to build that capacity. Toronto-based start-up Infonaut now has a new "Saultellite" office in Sault Ste. Marie in order to better leverage the capacity of the Community Geomatics Centre in further developing its infection control tools, applying GIS to hospital health decision-making.

Forestry Bioproducts
While the gaming and IT sectors continue to develop as newer entities in Sault Ste. Marie, the region's strength in forestry science is not to be discounted. This is evidenced by two companies that I visited, SITTM (aka Forest Bioproducts) and BioForest Technologies. SITTM's Greenstar Biorefinery System is a mobile, fully automated 1M L/yr batch-type biodiesel production unit, where the uniqueness of the system comes from the ability for the end user to cost-effectively and safely produce quality biofuel at a small scale from a variety of feedstocks. With Greenstar, SITTM offers people in remote or rural areas and developing nations a way to independently create clean fuel. BioForest Technologies has developed an insecticide based on a natural chemical, the active ingredient extracted from the seeds of the neem tree, as well as a novel injection system in order to more safely and effectively counter invasive forest pests like emerald ash borer. The revitalization of the area's forestry industry is also reliant upon a new focus on the production of other high-value chemicals from the forest through green chemistry and biorefining, whether those are pharmaceuticals from yew trees, or precursors to bioplastics and biopolymers.

All in all, there's some pretty cool stuff going on out there in the Soo.

 

 

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Water in Toronto

I bought this - very informative and interesting read about what's flowing beside, around and under us in Toronto.

7 wonders of the modern world.

 

 

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7 wonders of the modern world.

via Indexed by Jessica on 11/26/08

 

 

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Is Swimming a Real Sport...

If nearly every record gets broken every year?

 

 

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Swimsuit controversy

via The Science of Sport by noreply@blogger.com (Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas) on 11/25/08

Swimming's credibility crisis: How FINA's blind eye is affecting the purity of the sport

The Beijing Olympic Games have come and gone. And with them, aided by technology including a uniformly deeper pool, improved wash-off areas, and high-tech swimsuits, so have 70 world swimming records this year.

In fact, swimming now suffers from such a dramatic credibility crisis that a race in which a world record is NOT broken is a disappointment. I dare suggest that you will be able to recall such a race in Beijing (though you may have to try hard, because there were not many). If an Olympic Gold was one without a world record being broken, it was met with rather disappointed silence.

Olympic fever - how bad was it?

The table below demonstrates just how easily records were broken in Beijing.

Out of a total of 32 events (16 men's and 16 women's), an incredible 21 events had world records broken a total of 25 times, and 66 Olympic records were set. Only ONE SINGLE Olympic record managed to survive for men and women. It was a complete clearing out of the Olympic (and World) record books.

That is, in my opinion, a problem for the sport of swimming - 70 world records in one year, and 66 Olympic records in one Games is not a symptom of a credible sport. I'm sure that some will disagree, but bear in mind that these 70 records are only the times of the WINNERS. There were races in Beijing where the first 5 finishers were swimming faster than the old world record! The South Africa 4 x 100m relay team, for example, swam almost a second faster than they swam only four years earlier to win gold in Athens, and they finished seventh!

Swimming records - an endangered species

Admittedly, there are other factors involved, and people will argue that this is a positive sign of progress. But consider the following:

The 100m freestyle record first went under 48-seconds in 2000. And then for eight years, 48-seconds was the magical "barrier" which only one man could break (Peter van den Hoogenband). Since the start of 2008, ELEVEN men have swum faster than 48-seconds. The result is that legends of the sport, whose position in all-time lists was secure, are suddenly line items in the swimming record books, forgotten and displaced almost overnight thanks not to improved swimmers, but improved technology.

That this should happen is not the problem - Paavo Nurmi and Jim Peters, two great long-distance runners from the past, can hardly expect to remain in the record books given the advances in technology over the last 50 years in their sport. The problem is the pace with which it has happened. Within one year, records have been forgotten, and the swimming world record is now an endangered species. And that is not good for the sport.

The lifespan of a swimming record

To look at this a little more objectively, I looked at the AVERAGE AGE (in days) of world records in the swimming events. The tables below show the age of men's and women's world records on the day that the Olympic Swimming events ended. The arrows on the left hand side show which events had their records broken in Beijing (these records are then "aged" zero days old for this analysis), while the red arrows on the right show the records that had stood for longer than 2 years going into the Beijing Olympics.



For the men's analysis, the average age of the swimming world records BEFORE the Beijing Games was 680 days. As a result of the carnage in Beijing's Water Cube, it fell to 382 days (because 11 events had their records reset to zero days). There are now only THREE records older than 2 years - the 100m Butterfly (Ian Crocker), the 400m Freestyle (Ian Thorpe) and the 1500m Freestyle (Grant Hackett).

On the women's side, it's even worse. The average age BEFORE Beijing was 921 days, though that was massively skewed by one record - that of Janet Evans in the 800m freestyle. That record was broken in Beijing (by Rebecca Adlington), and the result is that a female swimming record now has an average age of only 247 days. In other words, women's swimming records have on average been set in the last year. Only one record is older than 2 years - the 8 year old record of Inge de Bruijn in the women's 100m butterfly.

You may still believe this is not a problem, and that is, I guess, personal choice. The essence of the sport is the competition - the race - and so the times are the fineprint, you may argue. Does it matter that a gold is won in a time that does not rewrite the record books? Perhaps not. But as someone who comes from a track and field background, where world records are special and meaningful, swimming really does face a crisis of credibility. It can certainly not boast about a meeting in which 66 records are set - that's not progress. Rather, it makes a mockery of the past, or the present (depending on your point of view).

Who is to blame? FINA, quite simply

So the obvious question is who do we put this down to? And the answer, as we have actually been saying this whole year (this is a topic we covered extensively in the build-up to Beijing), is FINA, swimming's governing body.

FINA showed very weak leadership when first presented with the issue of the Speedo Swimsuit, and they have followed this up with even worse leadership on subsequent suits. You can read one such example here - it talks about the Rocketsuit, which very openly promises to make swimmers more buoyant. The article is well written and direct, and I agree entirely with its conclusion: "the sensible thing for FINA to have done would have been to call for a moratorium on suit approval so that sensible debate can ensue..."

The founder of the company that makes the Rocketsuit is quoted as saying "The Rocket Skin has already been used in triathlons for non-wetsuit legal races and we have seen performance advantages of up to 6 seconds per 100 meters and 1500 meter races done in 87 degree water with no issues of overheating". I feel safe in suggesting that this is probably marketing hype speaking, and we won't see a 42 second 100m freestyle in this suit!

But the point is, the technology exists, and FINA failed miserably to impose its admittedly weak laws on suit design back in April when they met about the suit. Now they must face the consequences. The trouble is, they don't seem to care.

Fortunately for swimming, some people do. The big nations, notably Australia and the USA, are actually pushing to have these suits banned, and hopefully, they'll carry enough clout to do something. Otherwise, every single time a big meeting is held, we'll see a repeat of the Beijing result, and swimming's world records will move from one meeting to the next with little chance of survival. Again, that may be fine with some. I find it hard to swallow...

Ross

P.S. Looking at those lifespans of the swimming world records raises some interesting thoughts, and perhaps you've already begun wondering how swimming compares to track and field? Never fear, I've done that analysis too, and I'll post on that next! And it throws up a few very interesting implications! So join us then!

The Science of Sport Dr. Ross Tucker Dr. Jonathan Dugas

 

 

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Deep Sea Diving... in a NYC Water Tunnel

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/nyregion/23tunnel.html?pagewanted=print

Map of the Week: Impaired driving, part 1

 

 

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Map of the Week: Impaired driving, part 1

via Map of the Week by Toronto Star on 11/20/08

This week starts our two-part series on impaired driving.

The map shows the top 20 of Ontario's 523 postal areas for driver's licence suspension for impaired driving in 2007. I excluded two low-population areas.*

There are several distinct clusters:

Northwestern Ontario stands out, with Sioux Lookout (#1 on the list), Kenora and Fort Frances all in the top 20.

Communities in the Muskoka-Parry Sound area have four places in the top 10.

Two postal areas in and around Brockville are in the top 20.

Both of Cornwall's two postal codes are on the list.

Preston and a nearby Cambridge postal code are #20 and #19, respectively.

The information was obtained from the Ministry of Transportation under freedom-of-information legislation. It is taken from the database that supports this program (scroll down to Immediate Licence Suspension).

Using the FOI process sometimes seems to imply some tension between a journalist and a branch of government. That is certainly sometimes the case. However, in this instance, the MOT very helpfully threw in the age and sex of the suspended drivers, data I hadn't thought to ask for.

Here is what we learn from this extra information:

The male-female ratio is about 7:1 (14,551 to 2,365).

The age graph is surprising. There are very few teenagers. The graph rises steeply at 20, peaks at 23, declines gently after that point, then starts to rise again at 40, hitting a second peak at 45. After that point, it shows a clear second decline.

Click on the chart to see the full image.

In part 2, which may or may not run next week, we will look at the impaired driving map of the GTA.

Map may display better in Firefox.

* L0H (Gormley), with five suspensions and a population of 713, and K1P (central Ottawa) with two suspensions and a population of 396.

 

 

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Backyard Trees Made Possible by LEAF

Free, custom-fitted trees

 

 

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Backyard Trees Made Possible by LEAF

via blogTO by joshua on 11/20/08

Toronto environmental non-profit LEAF (Local Enhancement and Appreciation of Forests, for those of you scoring at home) has been planting trees in people's backyards since 1996, but mostly under the radar of Toronto's best green services or organizations. Although known especially for their backyard tree planting, LEAF also runs workshops and training sessions, gives tree tours and organizes the popular Leslieville Tree Festival each year. But for those of us thinking about planting a tree - and the fresh white stuff on the ground sure makes it hard to think ahead to spring - LEAF is still doing consultations this year to get ready for next year's plantings.

The process is straight-forward, and the cost is minimal: $80-120 for most trees, all inclusive. Considering you pay more, often much more, at the typical tree retailer, the partially subsidized not-for-profit offerings from LEAF sound pretty good. Plus they send out a certified arborist to ensure your tree will succeed, and they strongly encourage native species. So you won't just have any tree in your yard, but a tree that was meant to be in your yard.

Fresh off a move to the new Artscape Wychwood Barns, passionate and certified arborist Sarah Lamon took some time to answer a few questions about LEAF, tree plantings and her favourite tree in the city.

More...

 

 

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Productivity is about to go waaaaay down

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGqX-tkDXEk

Monthy Python launches its own YouTube channel.

Save Jesse's Stache!!!

Jesse's got a 'stache.

and it's for charity. So chip in and he'll keep updating the image archives from silly to absurd.