Blazing new trails!

"The Blaze is experiencing a high load at the moment. Please be patient while we get things back up and running."

The Case Against College Football

It is September, which means that NCAA sanctioned intercollegiate football is about to begin a new season.  Each year at this time students, alums, and pundits eagerly await a new opportunity to experience the tradition and pageantry that is complaining about NCAA Football.

While there are as many differing complaints as there are teams, most of the loudest complaints revolve around the notion that the NCAA does not sanction a National Championship at the highest level of intercollegiate football.  Instead, a coalition of the six most powerful (read: richest) conferences (The Southeastern Conference, Pac 10, Big 10, Big 12, Atlantic Coast Conference, and the Big East)(Oh, and Notre Dame) has formed a scheme called the Bowl Championship Series, or BCS, to artificially create five post-season games involving (hopefully) the best 10 teams from those conferences.

Then, to make matters worse (or so goes the loud complaining), the BCS relies on a complex system that involves human polling (the USA Today/Coaches poll and the Harris Interactive College Football Poll) and six different computerized ranking systems (Anderson/Hester, Richard Billingsly, Wes Colley, Kenneth Massey, Jeff Sagarin, and Peter Wolfe) to create a ranking of the top 25 teams.  It is from these rankings that teams are selected to play in the five BCS post-season games.  The top two teams in the final version of the BCS rankings play in the fifth and final game which is known as the BCS National Championship Game.  It's also worth noting that, regardless of ranking, the winners of the six member conferences are automatically granted a slot in the five BCS games.

The reason any of this matters is, of course, money.  The BCS, thanks to it's shiny new TV contract with ESPN, will dole out about $143 million this year, mostly to its member conferences, with slightly under 20% going to any other conference lucky enough to get a team in.

Obviously this scheme does not make the members of the other, lesser, poorer conferences very happy, but even more obviously, the BCS and its member conferences don't give a damn.

All of this is cause for complaint, I'm told, because the BCS system doesn't generate an actual national championship.  There are several reasons given as to why this is so, but most of them revolve around the notion that no championship is valid unless some form of tournament was employed to determine the winner.  I say hogwash.

There is no need for a national championship in college football.  There's no need for a national championship in any intercollegiate sport.  The various institutions have, for mutual benefit, arranged themselves into conferences.  Each conference determines an annual champion according to rules agreed upon by the members.  In all cases those rules are based on the notion that each team in the conference plays a schedule of games each season against some or all of the other teams in the conference, and based on the win/loss records generated by those games a champion is determined.  This is a perfectly valid outcome.

Greed is the only reason there's any talk of a national championship in college football.  Greedy TV networks want to broadcast it so they can gouge their advertisers for more money.  Greedy stadium owners want to sell tickets and parking and hot dogs.  Greedy fans want to claim that their favorite team is better than some other teams.  The irony is that for all the hyperventallating about a national championship, it is greed that has kept the current system in place.

There are 120 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division 1-A).  If we assume, for the sake of argument, that there was a national championship tournament of eight teams, and that a committee (similar to the selection committee that selects the teams for the NCAA basketball tournaments) was responsible for choosing the participants, there would only be about 25 or so teams out of those 120 that would ever have even a remote chance of being included.  Which is to say that less than 25% of all the FBS teams would ever have a chance to play for the title.

Currently there are 35 post-season bowl games, which means that 70 teams have an opportunity to participate in a post-season game.  That's 58% of the 120 teams in the FBS.  Each of those games pays out money to the annual participants and to the participants conferences.  So, wisely, the presidents of the 90 or so schools in the FBS who cannot possibly hope to ever compete for a national championship have opted to keep the current system.  A system that generates revenue, that encourages participation, and that doesn't give a damn about a national championship.

Now you're blazing!

I can already tell that Glenn Beck's new website ("we hired some actual journalists"!) is going to be one of my favorites. Here's a sub-header from today:

"Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the Ground Zero mosque, claims to be a Jew, Christian, and a Muslim. But some say that's impossible."

Might just be crazy enough to work

Via Daring Fireball, I submit to you Google CEO Eric Schmidt (not pictured):

 “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

and..

"Would you prefer someone else [gather and store all this information about we the people]?” Schmidt shot back – to laughter and even greater applause. “Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?”

Gruber replies,

"Maybe the question isn’t who should hold this information, but rather should anyone hold this information."

Yeah, it's a little late for that. Despite the fervent wishes of some of this blog's reader's, it seems highly unlikely that we will reverse the penetration of the information age into our lives. First, more of us would have to want to. People gotta have their facebooks.

As I've been saying for some time, the task now isn't to try to stop the inevitable leaking of information, but to build social institutions and norms for coping with a world bereft of privacy.

"[Schmidt] predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites."

Gruber says this makes Schmidt "creepy," but at least it's acknowledging the real problem and proposing a solution.

I think that solution is somewhat fantastical and naive, but I'm sure the rest of you think that my hazily defined "politeness" standards are equally unrealistic.

What do you think? If you've got kids, do you want them avoiding adult embarrassment by changing their name  when they get out of high school (or, if they were like us, college)? And won't Google just create a widget for collating your two histories.

Episode IV, Now We're Really Screwed [Updated]

If you think about Star Wars episodes 1-3 (which I tried very hard not to do, because they were traumatic enough without me applying my brain) there are some serious inconsistencies between the back story alluded to in the original films and the same story revealed in the new ones.

Via Kottke, Keith Martin finds a way to reconcile the differences. And in his version, R2D2 and Chewbacca are master spies who are ready to assassinate either Luke or Leia without mercy if they show the slightest tendency towards sithiness.

On first seeing R2, Obi-Wan has a twinkle in his eye and calls him "my little friend". Well, he is. However, when Luke wakes up and says that R2 claimed to be owned by an Obi-Wan Kenobi, he blandly says "I don't seem to remember ever owning a droid." Ben has in fact owned several but the remark is aimed at R2 and translates as "You keep quiet. I'm not about to tell him everything just yet." Obi-Wan thinks fast and tells Luke a version of his past that does not involve a father who became a dark lord of the Sith. He wants to examine Luke a lot more closely before he risks telling him the real truth. 

img via


UPDATE: Here's the link

Son of Return of Dumb Games

Sorry for the lack of posting. I'm fixing it.

To get things going again, I invite you... GO TO HELL!

I brought in some marketing guys to whip up a social media strategy for this blog

... and here it is:
Increase organic growth by exposing audiences to the brand through breakthrough viral communications 

via WTF is my social media strategy? Making it up so you don't have to.

Also, my wife never answers her phone

Clive Thompson reports that we (we the people, not he and I) are making fewer phone calls, and the length of the calls is also going down. He explains this as follows:

This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die.

Consider: If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no idea why I’m calling. We have to open Schrödinger’s box every time, having a conversation to figure out whether it’s OK to have a conversation. Plus, voice calls are emotionally high-bandwidth, which is why it’s so weirdly exhausting to be interrupted by one. (We apparently find voicemail even more excruciating: Studies show that more than a fifth of all voice messages are never listened to.)

The telephone, in other words, doesn’t provide any information about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another. The other tools at our disposal are more polite. Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our bugging them, and texting lets us ping one another asynchronously. (Plus, we can spend more time thinking about what we want to say.) For all the hue and cry about becoming an “always on” society, we’re actually moving away from the demand that everyone be available immediately.[)]

Much of this has been so obviously true for some time that Thompson shouldn't need to write it and I should not need to blog about it. 

I'm interested in the next step here, though. Tons of my friends and virtually all of my coworkers have iPhones. But many do not like to enable instant messaging or their work email account on the phone. For them, it crosses a line in terms of their availability to the man. But having all of those tools available makes it so much easier for the rest of us to creatively cope with workload that depriving oneself of that flexibility seems absolutely insane to me. 

In old movies, people would take the phone off the hook when they didn't want to be reached. These days, we just don't answer every chat. 

What about you, dear readers? Does your smartphone keep you tethered to work, or help you get free?


img credit

Comment moderation has been turned on

... your comments will have a slight delay before they appear. I'm hoping to dissuade the five chinese gentleman from visiting my blog with their spammy non-sequiters. Once they are out of the habit of coming here, maybe I'll be able to un-moderate.

In the mean time, I've turned off word verification for the rest of you. We'll see how it goes.

Well that's just great. Just... great.

World's Stocks Controlled by Select Few

WASHINGTON -- A recent analysis of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries has revealed that the world's finances are in the hands of just a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. This is the first clear picture of the global concentration of financial power, and point out the worldwide financial system's vulnerability as it stood on the brink of the current economic crisis.

A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the "backbone" of each country's financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country's market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders.

"You start off with these huge national networks that are really big, quite dense," Glattfelder said. “From that you're able to ... unveil the important structure in this original big network. You then realize most of the network isn't at all important."

via livescience, img via spineyhead

Let's alienate some readers by talking about Doctor Who

Not the show, really, just the theme music. This video stitches together every Doctor Who opening theme since the 60s into one video. Woohoo!

The main takeaway for me is that the current theme music ranks amongst the tackiest of the versions.

Q. What do you read, my lord?

Answer is, obviously, "words, words, words."

Q. What's the matter? The matter is contained in the words. Not in the cover art. Not in the spine. And not in the typeface. Groooober says, about typeface:

So the knock against e-books, in my opinion, is that they’re not carefully dressed like print books are. They’re wearing generic uniforms.

Fair enough. But think back to your favorite book in the world. Do you have a strong association with the cover art? With the spine of the book? With the size or color of the page?

For me, the answer to the above is yes, but barely. Even the smell of an old book (which is a powerful and distinctive memory) is amazingly secondary to the matter of the words. The ability to read book after book after book on my (lightweight, always in my pocket) phone is, for me, an extraordinary evolution and enhancement of the written word.

What about you, dear reader? Do you like ebooks, or is your relationship with books less about the words and more about the paraphernalia?

You've got my vote, Mr. Greene

Greene spoke for about seven minutes, and reportedly told Jessica Yellin of CNN, who was in Manning, that his speech was "handwritten on double lined notebook paper."

He began by saying that he is the best choice for the Senate seat, and is "also the best choice for the Image Award next year."

TPM

Migrating birds can see the earth's magnetic field out of their right eyes

... but not their left eye. If the theory is correct, the magnetic field is represented by a dark shading over the rest of the visual image.

From a User-Experience standpoint (yes, I'm a nerd), that's friggin brilliant. I am looking forward to when I can get compass-equipped contact lenses.

source, img credit

This is why we don't let people guest blog on The Bellman

"The Trig obsession has also, I'm sad to say, damaged Andrew Sullivan's reputation. I'm stunned by the anger he's generating not just among random Tweeters but among people who've been online for years, part of the rough-and-tumble of blogging. They know that 99% of what Sullivan writes is challenging, smart, and addictive, and that he's very capable of honing in on bigger political and philosophical debates. People want him to take a deep breath and stop obsessing over this conspiracy theory. Count me among those people."


--  Dave Weigel, guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan

P.S., We do let people guest blog on The Bellman.

Taking the "P" out of "GDP"

Recorded in our humble blog of record:

The financialization of the American economy has been a disaster. Forget all that stuff about the hollowing out of our manufacturing base or increased global competition or waves of immigrants taking away our jobs. Those are all legitimate issues of one stripe or another, but the far bigger issue is that a gigantic chunk of our productive capacity — Wall Street — is deployed almost solely to make money for one sector of our economy: Wall Street. Until that changes, until the financial industry is focused primarily on providing capital and services toother people, we're always going to suffer from either (a) underperformance in the real economy or (b) an endless boom and bust cycle. Take your pick.

There's one key metric that will tell us whether financial reform is working: the size and profitability of the FIRE sector. (That's Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.) If it shrinks considerably, it means financial reform, despite all the watering down, has basically done its job. But if the FIRE sector remains enormous, it hasn't. We'll know in a few years. | Drum, emphasis mine |

It is an enduring mystery to me how we have sufficiently abstracted our economy to the point that a huge segment of our economy is devoted to producing exactly nothing. "Services" are a legitimate segment of the economy, but "services" are there to serve people, not rob them.

img credit

Instant replay rule for Soccer? Discuss.

[This is a repost from the last world cup. I thought it was even more appropriate today. Enjoy the finals this weekend, everyone!]

(Lady with cool contact lenses via CNN)

Sure, video evidence would slow the game down slightly, but not as much as the luddites would have you believe. The ball is only in play for 60-odd minutes anyway and double-checking, say, a goal-line clearance, penalty or offside appeal would add seconds not minutes. If there were any doubts at all about the TV replays, the referee's original decision would stand.

Introducing technology would also change the risk v reward debate that zips around a player's head: there'd be no incentive to dive for a penalty when someone in the stands could alert the referee, who would soon be waving yellow in your direction. And why pretend to be punched, when in 30 seconds' time you'd be receiving red for play-acting?

Clearly there's a balance to be struck between maintaining the flow of the game and making the right decision but if other sports can do it, so can football. Ultimately, it boils down to what is preferable: a 30-second delay in play, or the Hand of God? Getting it right, or allowing cheats to get away with it? Certainty, or random chance?

Guardian.uk (thanks, dad!)