Category Archives: Society

Importance of Age Cutoff Dates in Sports

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The boys at Freakonomics have come up with another interesting point.  In this one they posit that we’ll probably see a disproportionate number of players born in January and February in this year’s World Cup.  Their reasoning has to do with FIFA’s adopting a January 1 cutoff date for determining eligibility on national youth soccer teams which should have a ripple effect throughout the rest of the players’ careers.

Upon further review they decided that since different countries use different dates for their own "in country" purposes that the World Cup might not be the best example.  So they looked at the NHL and found a very strong relationship between birth months early in the year and participation in the league (hardly any players were born between September and December).

I was one of those kids with a September birthday that could make me either the oldest kid or youngest kid in the class.  My mom was told that if I was held back I’d probably get bored and become a troublemaker so she opted for me to be the youngest, which wasn’t really a problem until 8th and 9th grade.  I was a late bloomer so when I got out of 9th grade I was barely 5 feet tall which didn’t help my athletic or romantic prospects.

For 10th grade I transferred to a small private school (85 students) and by default all the boys played every sport.  That coincided with my first growth spurt so by the time I was through 11th grade I was 5’8 and getting some playing time on the soccer field and basketball court.  My senior year I was 6 feet tall and weighed in at 150 pounds (I couldn’t put weight on no matter how hard I tried) and I averaged 16 points a game on the varsity basketball team.  I often wonder what kind of high school career I would have had if I was held back a year.  I put 20 pounds on my freshman year of college and I can only imagine I would have had a pretty good senior year.

No regrets though;  I might have been good enough to get a scholarship to a small school which would have changed the course of my whole life.  I wouldn’t have gone to GMU, met my wife and as happy as I am now I wouldn’t do anything to change those eventualities.

Back to the original point: in my mind there is absolutely no doubt that the arbitrary cut-off dates that youth sports leagues use has a huge impact on kids’ level of success.

Benevolent Inventor?

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There’s a neat little personality test out there called PersonalDNA.  It’s a little like the Myers/Briggs but it utilizes new web technologies that allow you to use ranking sliders and charts instead of answering multiple choice questions.  What’s really different about this one is that you can invite your friends and family to evaluate you using the same test.  In other words instead of answering the questions about themselves they answer the questions as they see you.  Could be creepy, but I think it could also be really informative.

I took the test and it says that I’m a "Benevolent Inventor."  Here’s a link to my full report. I have to say that the one thing that bothers me in looking at my 13 personality traits was when I saw the "femininity" and "masculinity" scores.   According to this 60% of the 3200 people who have taken the test have scored a lower "femininity" score than me and only 52% have scored a lower "masculinity" ranking.  Does this mean I’m some kind of girly-man?  Is this why I really don’t want to see Brokeback Mountain?

I’m going to invite some people I respect to evaluate me as well, and hopefully I’ll have my fears put at ease.

Go here if you want to take the test yourself.

Should You Spy On Your Kids Without a Warrant?

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The Winston-Salem Journal’s Ken Otterbourg wrote a blog post about how reporters are using personal blogs and journals on sites like myspace.com and facebook.com to build profiles of people in addition to or in lieu of personal interviews.  One of the stories he highlights is that of the suicide of James Dungy, the son of Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy.  Reporters used his comments on myspace.com to get a sense of the young man that even his parents and friends didn’t have before his death.

Reading this got me to thinking about my own kids. Kids have always had, and always will have an altnernative persona to that which they show at home.  To me that’s healthy, but it’s also scary.  Does their alternate persona put them in danger (hanging out with gang-bangers, unprotected sex, buying drugs, etc.) or is it simply a matter of different language, dress, etc?  I’ll do anything I can to make sure I know the answer to that question.

As far as I know my kids’ only online activity right now is playing Runescape, but honestly I’m not sure. When and if they do start to blog or set up a page on myspace or whatever I’m going to be their most avid reader. They’ll probably know this and they’ll probably try to set up a secret, anonymous presence somewhere, but if and when they do I’ll do my damndest to make sure I find it. Let’s put it this way: I’m thinking of putting something on their computer to track their activity.

Is this "warrantless spying"?  Yep.  Is it wrong?  Nope, because I’m not a public servant. I’m a father and I want to make sure I know what’s going on with my kids.  Now if I’m stupid I’ll find out their doing something I don’t like, say listening to rap and IMing nasty comments to friends, and then ride their case about it.  That would totally defeat the whole purpose.  I’m keeping an eye on them to make sure they aren’t hurting themselves.  If I call them on every little thing I’ll just alienate them and alert them that I’m watching them like a hawk.  On the other hand if I take the attitude that kids will be kids (silly, crude, arrogant, petty, etc.) and reserve intervention for serious matters (secret liaisons with 19 year-old college students, drug buys, etc.) then I’ll be doing what a father should be doing: acting in the best interest of his kids.

Now you might argue that this is the equivalent of reading my kids’ diaries.  First, diaries are truly private.  Posting something on myspace is the equivalent of taping a diary page to the outside of your bedroom door and if you do that I’m going to read it.  Second, if I think something serious is going on with one of my kids I have no problem with cracking their diary to see if I can find out what’s going on.  Not to catch them at something, but to prevent them from getting hurt.  If I don’t find anything like "Yesterday I met Mr. XXX my gym teacher in his office and he kissed me" I’ll put it away and try not to ever let them know I was there.

To put this succinctly I’ll say this: My kids have the right to a perception of privacy, but until they turn 18 they have no rights to real privacy whatsoever. I’ll be polite and knock on their door before I enter their room, but if they say "Go away, I’m busy", I’ll kick the damn thing in without a second thought if I want to.  When you come down to it kids are not-yet-fully-formed human beings.  They can be incredibly naive and it never seems to occur to them that bad things can actually happen to them.  As a parent it’s my job to help them survive long enough to become fully-formed human beings (I’m 39 and I’m still working on it) and I’ll use whatever tools I can to do the job.

Reading List September 2, 2005

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  • Destroying FEMA (The Washington Post) – The Post looks at what the Department of Homeland Security is doing to FEMA.
  • Book Publishing and Management: Still Working Out the Kinks (The Post Money Value) – Book publishers are dinosaurs.
  • Katrina Heroes (Reveries.com) – What some people are doing to help Katrina relief cause.  Notable number: as of noon on Aug. 31 about $100 million had been raised from the private sector, and $70 million of that was raised by the Red Cross.

Critical Thinking a Critical Skill

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Anyone with kids can tell you what a challenge it is to teach your kids how to discern "truth" from "advertising."  My kids went through a phase where every product they’d seen a commercial for was the "best" or the "coolest."  It got really annoying when they would suggest a solution for a problem based on an ad that they’d seen.

"Dad, you should use Exxon for gas because it puts a tiger in your tank," my oldest said when he was about seven or eight as we hurtled down the road with fumes spewing from under my hood thanks to an oil leak.  I haven’t liked Exxon since.

The problem has moved beyond advertising since the kids started doing projects for school.  The first stop for any research is the web, and take it from me you don’t want to know what passes for historical information these days. 

As an adult whose done a fair amount of research in my day it is relatively easy for me to separate legitimate info sources from the crackpots, but to a child operating without the same points of reference the job is imminently more difficult.  I can look at a web page and within moments know that it’s a mainstream or "quality" source.  But my kids don’t know Merriam Webster from a hole in the wall so they will give "Joe’s Dictionary Blog" the same weight as the venerable Webster.

Amazingly my kids’ frame of reference has grown exponentially in a very short time.  I think my wife and I have succeeded in giving them an appropriately jaundiced view of the world (i.e. all advertisements are lies, and any product that appears on Nickelodeon the Cartoon Channel or any other kid station most likely causes cancer).

But the kids aren’t the only ones who sometimes struggle with the "truth vs. BS" question these days.  With the kudzu-like spread of information sources beyond traditional media outlets we adults are also learning that we need to re-calibrate our own BS meters.  That means we need to hone our critical thinking skills, and an article I read today called "Media/Political Bias" (Rhetorica) provides a great starting point.

I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

"There is no such thing as an objective point of view.

No matter how much we may try to ignore it, human communication always takes place in a context,
through a medium, and among individuals and groups who are situated
historically, politically, economically, and socially. This state of affairs is
neither bad nor good. It simply is…

Critical questions for detecting bias

  1. What is the author’s / speaker’s socio-political position? With what
       social, political, or professional groups is the speaker identified?
  2. Does the speaker have anything to gain personally from delivering the
       message?
  3. Who is paying for the message? Where does the message appear? What is the
       bias of the medium? Who stands to gain?
  4. What sources does the speaker use, and how credible are they? Does the
       speaker cite statistics? If so, how were the data gathered, who gathered the
       data, and are the data being presented fully?
  5. How does the speaker present arguments? Is the message one-sided, or does
       it include alternative points of view? Does the speaker fairly present
       alternative arguments? Does the speaker ignore obviously conflicting
       arguments?
  6. If the message includes alternative points of view, how are those views
       characterized? Does the speaker use positive words and images to describe
       his/her point of view and negative words and images to describe other points
       of view? Does the speaker ascribe positive motivations to his/her point of
       view and negative motivations to alternative points of view?"

The author goes on to dig more specifically into the current debate on bias in the media, and makes a very strong argument for the fact that there is both liberal and conservative bias in the media (it depends on who you talk to), but that the stronger biases in media are commercial bias, temporal bias, visual bias, bad news bias, etc.

Anyway you might want to keep these questions in mind as you try to parse through the white noise that is modern info-communication and wonder whatever happened to Walter Cronkite and the certainty of "That’s the way it was…"

Today’s Reads: July 19, 2005

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Proof That Your Boss Probably IS a Lying, Cheating Bastard

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The London Times printed an excerpt from Freakonomics that is pretty interesting.  A former economist for the US Government went into business providing bagels to companies each morning and leaving a box for the companies’ employees to put money in if they ate a bagel.  He also provided a suggested price for them to pay.  After that he relied on the honor system for his payment.

Being an economist the guy kept detailed data about his sales.  He was able to track the payment rate (or cheating rate if you want to be negative) on a company-by-company basis.  At one company he was even able to track the cheating rate of the executive suite vs. the lower level employees.  Here’s a quote:

He also believes that employees further up the
corporate ladder cheat more than those below. He got this idea after
delivering for years to one company spread out over three floors — an
executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service, and
administrative employees. (Feldman wondered if perhaps the executives
cheated out of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. What he didn’t
consider is that perhaps cheating was how they came to be executives.)

The excerpt also has some interesting comparisons of small companies vs. large companies, the  effect of weather and other factors.  Definitely a fun read.

FYI, I’m in the middle of reading Freakonomics (which is excellent) and I’ll probably be posting observations about it here in the future.

Secular Humanism

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Dana Blankenhorn writes a long piece on secular humanism that touches on many topics of interest in America right now.  Intelligent design, the separation of church and state, science vs. belief, etc. As usual I don’t agree with some of what he says, do agree with much of it, and think alot because of it.

A couple of paragraphs really grabbed me.  Here’s the first:

Faith is meaningless if it is compelled. If a soup kitchen feeds you,
then demands you pray to its God in order to take that soup, is your
prayer really worth anything? If a school demands your child recite a
specific prayer, to a specific God, at a specific time, in a specific
way, where is the God in that? Where is the faith in that child?

This paragraph provoked a tangential thought process that helped me articulate my problem with evangelism. It is this:

If you need to tell me, repeatedly, why your religion (notice I said religion, not God) is so great then my first instinct is to look for its weakness.  On the other hand if while having lunch together I hear you talk about the wonderful experiences you’ve had while volunteering at your church’s soup kitchen, see your eyes light up when you talk about the great people you’ve met while building homeless shelters, sense the community you feel whenever you chaperone your church’s youth group trips, I see you as a representative of all that is good with your religion.  I may not join (do I really need to for you to have fulfilled your evangelistic mission?) but I will come to believe that your church is a true community of good, of doing what God put you, us, on Earth to do.

The next part of Dana’s post that grabbed me was this:

America is also a nation of 10,000 faiths, all actively practiced, all loudly proclaimed.

We have Bahai and Buddhist temples, Shiite, Sunni and Black Muslims.

We have Maronite and Roman Catholics, Russian and Greek Orthodox. We
have Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jewish temples. We have a
wealth of faiths invented right here – Mormons and Southern Baptists –
as well as churches that get by merely on their ministers’ brand name…

America is the most religious nation in the history of the planet.
We’re a Christian nation, but we are also a Buddhist one, and a Muslim
one, and a Hindu one. When God hears the prayers of America, he or she
hears dozens of languages, a great cacophony. And then there are the
atheists and agnostics who either don’t know God or don’t care.

All this is worth cherishing. All this is worth savoring. All this
is worth protecting. This is our legacy, it’s what makes us special.

My thought tangent here diverted to the damage that the exclusionary aspect of many religions is doing to our society.  If you’re not with us then you’re against us.

Those same people who stand there and proclaim the greatness of their religion also preach that their’s is the only way.  If I, or you, do not join them we will not be saved.  I will be excluded.  I am an outsider.

This kind of thinking is human in that almost all people surround themselves with people like themselves.  We fear people who are different. Unfortunately many leaders understand how to take advantage of this fear. They use this fear to manipulate us for their own ends, whether it be the furthering of their particular ideology or the gain of power and influence in the secular world.

As Dana points out, the true power of America is that we accept all faiths under our umbrella.  We recognize each individual’s right to believe in their own religion, or to not have a religion.  We are inclusive, not exclusive.   We have overcome our natural fear of "others", although it has never happened quickly (ask the Irish and Italian immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century).

America is definitely a nation of economic haves and have nots, but it is also a nation that has led the way in offering personal liberty.  It is by nature an inclusive society.

My fear right now is of those leaders that would claim America for their particular faith.  America is NOT a Christian nation, nor a Muslim nation, nor a Hindu nation.  It is a nation that accepts all of these faiths and more.  It is a scaffold that supports all religions and none.

To close the loop let me say this:  I do not want to evangelize for America, for the same reason that I don’t want someone to evangelize their religion to me.  I want to lead my life so that I can be a representative of what is good about America.  I want my actions to speak for my belief.

Overkill Defined

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This story in the Winston-Salem Journal just blows my mind:

A man stole a TV ($140 value) in North Carolina in 1970 and was convicted of second-degree burglary and sentenced to life in prison. The law has since been changed so the most you could get now for the same crime is three years.

Apparently this guy wasn’t a model prisoner so his parole was denied 25 times.  His 26th parole application was approved after some lawyers heard about his case and got involved.  Now at age 64 he’s out of prison and heading home to Georgia.

Here’s a fun game:  in 1996 the average cost for housing an inmate in North Carolina was $58.58  per day (it’s up to $65.80 now).  For arguments sake let’s say that the average cost-per-day over this guy’s stay in the prisons was $35.  That works out to $434,350…for a $140 TV set.  And I suspect the $35 average is probably low.

And people wonder why we have overcrowded prisons, and budgetary crunches.