13 posts from December 2007

Last links of 2007:

Wow.  Devastating NYT editorial that sums up America in the Bush years.  This is us.  This is who we are...

At the beginning of the War in Iraq, columnist Christopher Hitchens challenged young people to put their ideals forward and fight for the cause of freedom.  A 21-year old man from California, inspired by Hitchens writings, did just that.  He died in Iraq, the result of an I.E.D.  Hitchens reexamines his beliefs.

Dennis Kucinich makes the argument for marijuana decriminalization.

Bob Baer examines the failed Bush doctrine of force-feeding democracy to the Middle East.

Cartoon that nicely sums up the flaw in abstinence-only education.

Adam Corolla's Movie Idea: Grand Theft Submarine.

Another great piece by Michael Lewis about Blaine Lourdes, a stock-broker who sold his soul.  And then got it back.  And beat the market in the process.  Here's a quote:

It wasn't exactly the career he’d hoped for. Once, he confessed to his boss his misgivings about the performance of his customers' portfolios. His boss told him point-blank, "Blaine, you're confused about your job." A fellow broker added, "Your job is to turn your clients' net worth into your own." Blaine wrote that down in his journal.

A nice photo of the winter solstice.

A well-written, in-depth, Washington Post article (part of a series on the DC public schools) that examines an inner-city high school, and the myriad of challenges faced by the teachers, in particular Frederick Willis, a young, African-American math teacher who is assaulted by one of his students:

Two boys appear outside the door. One has been kicked out of Cox's class for being disruptive. The other is a student of Willis's. They peer through the window and laugh. They bang on the door. Willis shoves the metal door open, and it hits his student. A knot swells on the student's forehead, and blood runs down past his eye.

A deep sense of inevitability descends on the afternoon.

"Why you hit me? Why you hit me?" the boy screams. "Look what the (expletive) you did to my head." The bell rings. Students file out. The boy continues yelling and cursing. He is stomping up and down. A crowd gathers, egging him on. You can't let him do that (expletive)! Steal him, son! kids yell.

The two boys push into Willis's class. Other students follow. The one who is bleeding turns over desks. He knocks over a computer. He tears apart the bulletin board that told them to respect themselves and their school.

All around, kids shout for vengeance.

Willis rushes out and down the stairs. The two boys follow him. The crowd follows them, 20 kids or more, running and jumping down the steps. Everyone is hollering. The last of the crowd gets to the first floor and rounds the corner.

Suddenly, kids are running back against the crowd. As he flees, one boy yells: "He put that nigga to sleep!" His voice echoes. Bodies blur in a rush. Seconds later, the hallways clear, the yelling grows distant and a surreal scene comes into focus.

On the floor, a few yards from the main office, Fredrick Willis lay crumpled. He is not moving.

Last, but not least, an award-winning GQ piece on Calvin Willis, an innocent man sentenced to life in Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) for the rape of an 10 year-old girl, and how a legal secretary named Janet Gregory took up his case as he spent year after year in jail for a crime he didn't commit.  Calvin grew up poor and black.  Janet grew up poor and white, in a racist and abusive household.  Cutting off all forms of expression is prison Calvin reveals himself only in his letters to Janet:

He tells her about being paid four cents an hour to pick cotton in the fields surrounding the prison, and how much worse this is than being paid nothing at all. He tells her what it's like watching the children of the guards, who live on the plantation grounds, grow up, and how strange it is to see young boys who once called "Hey, nigger!" to him as he worked the fields become guards themselves—yes, that much time is passing—with rifles in their hands and toothpicks in their mouths and absolute power over where he rests his eyeballs. He tells her he is losing his grasp on time, losing his ability to count, in a way; how during his first four years of imprisonment, at Caddo Correctional, time was still solid, still the bedrock of his reality, each day marked by a beginning and an end linked by a continuous line of being, but how at Angola, a place that cannot possibly be real (can it?), he has learned that a man's grasp on time is like his good health— something taken for granted until it dissolves. He tells her about the way a cell becomes a kiln in the summer, the air void of motion, 110 degrees at two in the morning, the way he will take a tin cup and splash the brown water from the tap onto the concrete floor, then lie in it face down, spread-eagled and naked, his nose and mouth filled with the ever present shitstink bubbling up from the drain, his ears filled with the baboon shrieks of men whose consciousness has been reduced to the purely physical, saying to himself over and over, for hours on end, I will not die in Angola.… I will not die in Angola.… I will not die in Angola.…

1,800,000,000.

That is the amount of money generated each year by Division One college football players.

0.

That is the amount of money college football players are paid.

1.

That is the percent of college football players who will go on to play football professionally.

Here is an interesting article, by the always interesting Michael Lewis, examining the question of whether college football players should be paid.

I have several thoughts on the matter.  But first, a question:

Is college football a business?

If the answer is yes, than I think that any right-minded individual would agree that a business should pay its employees.

Okay.  So what about other sports?  Should baseball players be paid?  Softball players?  The rifle team?  Should each athlete receive the same pay check?  If not, how is the pay scale determined?

And what about high school sports?  Don't schools make money off high school football?  Should they be paid?

Which leads me to the heart of the problem (and I speak as a former high school basketball coach).  The problem, ultimately, is that athletics and academics should not be mixed.  It is foolish to mix them, even at the high school level.  They are two completely different things.  Look at Europe, which has a club system (which has its own faults, the biggest being that 15 year-olds drop out of school to play sports full-time.  But hey, it's not like we don't have our own dropout problem).

The club system is not influenced by academics and academics are not influenced by the club system.  Every coach in this country has played against (or fielded) a team which included players who were not academically eligible.  Many teachers can recount stories where they were pressured to change a grade so the star player could play in the big game.  And that is just at the high school level, where most schools don't make a profit.  Although LeBron James' high school certainly made a mint off of him, what with televised games on ESPN.  And how much did ESPN make off of selling advertising blocks during those games?  Or, closer to home, several years ago there was controversy in Jackson over the eligibility of Renardo Sydney, who was attending Piney Woods, a 2A school that plays in the district of Rankin County.  Officially, the coach of Piney Woods was found to have recruited Sydney to play and, thus, Sydney was ineligible.  Unofficially, rumors swirled that the Jackson Public School District (where Sydney would have played) and the Mississippi High School Activities Association (the governing athletic body for Mississippi) did not want to lose out on the revenue that would be generated by having one of the best players in the country play in Jackson (as Monta Ellis, of Lanier High School, had done a few years before.  Lanier ended up moving a bunch of games to Jackson State University so they could sell more tickets ).

At the college level it is a different story, both in terms of preferential treatment and dollars.  Let's just look at the above-the-board money.  At a small school in a mid-major (Southern Miss and Conference USA respectively) college athletics is worth more than $50 million to the town of Hattiesburg, according to this article.   I imagine “OIe Miss” must at least double (and probably triple) that.  So, at the very least, college athletics is worth $100 million a year to the City of Oxford.

And what is the football team alone worth to the University of Mississippi?  The stadium has 60,000 seats.  Say $40 a ticket.  Another $20 per person in concessions.  That is $3.6 million each home game just on tickets and food.  Add in another $11 million each season from television revenue for playing in the SEC.  Apparel.  Donations to the athletic fund.  May be $40 million a year to the university (at the very least).  The entire university athletic budget is $25 million.

If the entire country moved to a club system, and people followed the local club team with as much passion and interest as they do for their college team (England suggests the answer to this question is a yes), then the local town would not see much impact in terms of revenue.  But the university would.  Ah, there’s the rub.  Given the amount of money that is generated each year to a university by athletics (revenue generated because the employees are not paid) why would a university (or an association of universities, i.e., the NCAA) want to give that up?  The answer, of course, is that they would not.  There is no meaningful economic incentive to change that system, regardless of the corruption that invariably comes with it.

Given that we, as a nation, are not moving to a club system any time soon, do I think players should be paid?  Actually, no.  I’ve argued for the last 15 years that all of the money should be taken out of sports, an idea that Lewis covers in his article:

If the N.C.A.A. genuinely wanted to take the money out of college football it’d make the tickets free and broadcast the games on public television and set limits on how much universities could pay head coaches.

That is exactly what I think should happen.  Of course, then CBS would lose out on the billions it generates from advertising revenue...

Two more interesting articles...

The first is a Boston Globe Magazine piece about how to raise a genius child.  It starts with a couple, the Andersons, and their 34 month year old daughter:

While other moms-to-be were dog-earing their copies of What to Expect When You're Expecting, Anderson spent her pregnancy searching for the best approaches to help boost her baby's brainpower. Through a Web search, she stumbled onto the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, a half-century-old operation outside Philadelphia more commonly known as the Better Baby Institute. The place was founded by Glenn Doman, a physical therapist who took what he learned helping brain-injured children recover function and applied it to well infants and toddlers in the hopes of accelerating their development. Anderson read about the Better Baby Institute's regimen of intense intellectual and physical stimulation for babies. She lingered over the organization's message that time was of the essence, since the rate of brain growth drops off precipitously after a child reaches age 6. And she took to heart the well-honed refrain from the avuncular, white-goateed Doman: "We are persuaded that every child born has, at the instant of birth, a greater potential intelligence than Leonardo da Vinci ever used."

The second is a New York Magazine article that looks at Mayor Bloomberg's controversial policy of offering cash incentives to families in poverty who do things like attend a PTA meeting, or have their children get a library card.  This article follows the Mieses, a family of six living on $20,000 a year in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn:

The Mieseses are poor—a family of six living on $20,000 a year—which qualifies them to become one of the approximately 5,000 families enrolled in Opportunity NYC, a two-year Bloomberg initiative begun in September that gives low-income families money when they complete certain activities, such as attending a parent-teacher conference, obtaining a library card, or taking a child for an annual checkup. The technical term for this approach is conditional cash transfers. Pay poor families to do things that are in their best interest, the thinking goes, and maybe their kids won’t be poor—the “intergenerational cycle of poverty” will be broken. Although the cash will undoubtedly help families pay bills, the real hope is to change behavior by adding an extra incentive to focus on long-term goals, which often get lost in the stress that characterizes a life lived from paycheck to paycheck. “Poverty,” as George Orwell wrote, “annihilates the future.”

If you click through to these articles you will note that each was published on October 30th.  As visitors to my humble abode know, I have a large pile of books, magazines, and printed articles piled up on my living room table.  I just now got around to reading articles that I printed out a month and a half ago...

What do all of those have in common?  They are all topics of interesting articles that I have read in the last few days.

Should college football players be paid?  That is the question asked by Michael Lewis in his NYT piece (and a question that is worthy of its own blog post, which I shall try to produce in the next few days).  Favorite quote:

College football’s best trick play is its pretense that it has nothing to do with money, that it’s simply an extension of the university’s mission to educate its students. Were the public to view college football as mainly a business, it might start asking questions. For instance: why are these enterprises that have nothing to do with education and everything to do with profits exempt from paying taxes? Or why don’t they pay their employees?

How much revenue does college athletics generate in Mississippi?  Some answers here:

Southern Miss football brings in about $2 million per game, adding to the $52 million annual economic impact of university athletics to the Hattiesburg area, said Scott Carr, associate athletics director for Southern Miss.

Does the SAT measure a fixed intelligence level?  Malcolm Gladwell's well-researched piece answers that question by starting with Stanley Kaplan.  This article also touches on the off and on talent debate that has taken place in these pages:

Some years ago, a group headed by the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a study of musical talent. The group looked at two hundred and fifty-six young musicians, between the ages of ten and sixteen, drawn from élite music academies and public-school music programs alike. They interviewed all the students and their parents and recorded how each student did in England’s national music-examination system, which, the researchers felt, gave them a relatively objective measure of musical ability. “What we found was that the best predictor of where you were on that scale was the number of hours practiced,” Sloboda says. This is, if you think about it, a little hard to believe. We conceive musical ability to be a “talent”—people have an aptitude for music—and so it would make sense that some number of students could excel at the music exam without practicing very much. Yet Sloboda couldn’t find any. The kids who scored the best on the test were, on average, practicing eight hundred per cent more than the kids at the bottom. “People have this idea that there are those who learn better than others, can get further on less effort,” Sloboda says. “On average, our data refuted that. Whether you’re a dropout or at the best school, where you end up can be predicted by how much you practice.”

Finally, "Success Without Ads" is the title of a nice piece about the magazine Consumer Reports, of which my father, Jim Guest, is President.   CR is proving to be one of the only print magazines/newspapers to be financially successful (knock wood) online.  This accomplishment is even more impressive in that CR does not accept advertisement (online or in print) of any kind.

I've linked to this short film by Kiri Davis in the past.  Kiri is a teenage filmmaker who read about an experiment done in the sixties asking black children to play with a white doll and a black doll, and then identify which one they liked better.  Kiri updated the experiment and videotaped the results.

Now, a local news channel has done a great piece about the film.  Check it out.

I've read two good articles recently.

The first is Malcolm Gladwell's piece on IQ and race.  This fits in nicely with the debate I've been having about talent, and whether people are born with certain gifts (more thoughts on that debate, and on Gladwell's piece, here).  The Gladwell piece is primarily about the Flynn Effect, which shows that IQ scores have been rising, across the board, over the last century.  To quote:

"And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded."

The second piece is a NYT profile of Roland Fryer, a 27 year old African-American who grew up dirt poor in Florida.  After embarking on a criminal career in his early teens, Fryer had two close brushes with the law.  He is now an economics professor at Harvard and a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard (sometimes called "Harvard's Harvard").  His research focuses on race and intelligence (and is, in this way, linked to Gladwell).  Fryer's goal as an economist: to create a unified theory of Black America.  The profile is written by Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame.

12/8/07
At Chicago
16-2

First Quarter:

Second game of a back to back.  Chicago, despite their awful record, is dangerous because of their rebounding ability.  As a former coach, I've always felt that rebounding is the most important component of the game.  If, as a team, you are rebounding well that indicates two things: you are playing good defense and you are getting multiple possessions on offense.  As Pat Riley famously said, "Rebounds equals rings."

The Bulls do not look good.  Their offense consists of trying to run the fast break and then, if the break is stalled, Gordon shooting off of various screens.  I don't think Scott Skiles is going to make it to the end of the season.

Big Baby is playing well, 6 points and 5 rebounds in 10 minutes so far, but I am still not sold on him becoming an effective player.  He does not posses NBA athleticism, nor NBA height (he's a 6-6 power forward) to offset his lack of NBA athleticism.  He has good footwork, but without size or explosiveness, the footwork is negated.  Right now he is getting by with a nice up and under move, but as soon as opposing players catch on and take away this move, Davis is in trouble.  And let me add, I certainly hope I am wrong about all of this.

21-18, C's, at the end of the first.

Second Quarter:

My boy Chris Duhon is in for the Bulls.  I attended Coach K's coaching clinic one year, when Duhon was a senior, and was impressed the way he lead the team through practice.  Coach K shared a story: after a lackluster practice Duhon, the only senior on the team, made the team come in at midnight for extra practice and conditioning.  No coaches.  That is leadership.

Man, I wish the C's had signed Joe Smith in the off-season.  He is doing a great job for the Bulls as their starting PF.  I still remember when he was at Maryland, along with Baltimore native Keith Booth (like Big Baby, an undersized PF who never did much in the league).  A year later my favorite Terrapin of all time showed up: LaRon Profit.

The C's biggest weakness is rebounding.  With the exception of KG, who is an exceptional rebounder (one of the top two in the league along with Dwight Howard) our next best rebounder is probably Rondo.  We have no one off the bench that can inhale rebounds (although Posey has been doing an admirable job).  This will be a factor deep in the playoffs (assuming we move deep in the playoffs) when every possession counts.

Rondo is having another fantastic game.  6 for 8 at this point.  He is one of the ten best PG's in the league, and one of the three best defensive points in the game.

Ten Best PG's in the League:

1.  J Kidd (like KG over the past few years, people have no idea how good he really is)
2.  Chris Paul (the new Kidd)
3.  Nash
4.  Deron Williams
5.  Tony Parker
6.  Jose Calderon (check his numbers)
7.  Baron Davis
8.  Chauncey Billups
9.  Jameer Nelson
10. Rajon Rondo

Three Top Defensive Points:

1.  J Kidd
2.  Rondo
3.  Harris or Darrell Armstrong

Third Quarter:

Rondo is playing out of his mind right now, hitting four straight shots and a nice kick-out to Ray for a three.

Big Baby also plays well, heading into the fourth with 11 boards.

Fourth Quarter:

Rondo starts the fourth with two turnovers: an offensive foul and not getting the ball across half-court within 6 seconds.

Defensive rotations look good.  Down the stretch C's go with their money line-up: Rondo, Allen, Pierce, Posey, and KG.

C's win.  Rondo finishes 9 of 13 from the field for 18 points, 7 rebounds, five assists.  Not bad.  The C's get three days rest.  Sacremento next.

Those Celtic throwback unis are nice...

Ray Allen