Well, it’s time for the LA AIDS Walk, once again.  As last year, I will be walking with Team Paramount to help raise money for this important cause.  I know that not everyone has the time and energy to participate, but hopefully you can spare a few bucks to sponsor me in the walk.  No donation is too small.  If you can do so, please consider donating via my personal fundraising page, here.  Thanks very much, in advance, for your generosity.

I’d like to take a minute to tell you all about a Kiva, a non-profit that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur across the globe. You have probably heard about this process, which is called "micro-lending" and for which Mohammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

You choose who to lend to – whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq – and as they repay their loan, you get your money back. It’s a powerful and sustainable way to empower someone right now to lift themselves out of poverty.

At first I was a little tentative to use the site and started out with a small amount of money, but I have now been using it for about 2 years and have successfully executed several small loans. Of the 5 loans that I’ve done, 4 have been repaid, and one was a loss, due to fraud on the part of the company responsible for dispersing the money locally. As I understand it, this is an extremely uncommon phenomenon and it has really only served to further convince me that the organization itself is doing legitimate work. (After all, lending is never without risk). You don’t just have to take my word for it, either. Here are some articles about Kiva:

• CNN.com
• Wall Street Journal
• More

Every time I lend, I put a little bit more money into the pool. When it gets paid back, I send it back out, and then wait. So far, so good. You can hook your account up to Paypal, which makes adding funds very easy.

I’m particularly fond of this process because it is sustainable. Instead of creating a cycle of dependency where people in developing nations are given handouts, which will inevitably need to be replenished, they are given loans that have real, substantial value and with which they are investing in the growth of their local economies. When the money is repaid, it can be re-loaned, which is a much more appealing cycle, if you ask me.

So, I encourage you to give it a try and consider spreading the word. If you do decide to participate, please be sure to tell them that I sent you when you register. My email address is: bhoyt47@hotmail.com. Thanks very much for your time.

This video was forwarded to me by my friend, Peter Oliphant, about a week ago.  It is a rather lengthy, but totally worth watching.  It’s a little old, I guess, but I had never seen it before.  As described at Google Video, where I saw it:

This is the breathtaking story of Daniel Tammet. A twenty-something with extraordinary mental abilities, Daniel is one of the world’s few savants. He can do calculations to 100 decimal places in his head, and learn a language in a week. This documentary follows Daniel as he travels to America to meet the scientists who are convinced he may hold the key to unlocking similar abilities in everyone. He also meets the world’s most famous savant, the man who inspired Dustin Hoffman’s character in the Oscar winning film ‘Rain Man’. (2005)

Hey everyone,

Just thought I’d take a moment to mention that I’m going to be participating in the LA AIDS Walk this Sunday morning.  If you’re willing/able to make a donation in support, it would be much appreciated.  You can find my personal fundraising page here.  Thanks, in advance, for your help!

My new brother-in-law (man, that’s still a little weird to say), Tyler Velten, was recently the subject of a very cool article in the New York Times.  Ty is in his second year as an architecture student at Yale.  He’s a great guy and I’m thrilled to have him in the family.   If you read the article be sure you check out all the photos.

(I contemplated posting a much more amusing photo of Ty from his Bachelor’s Party that I think does a better job of capturing his personality, but ultimately decided that this one from the wedding would be less likely to get me in trouble with my sister….)

Welcome to the final installment of my Olympic Medal Count Analysis series of posts.  With the Olympics now a good 2 weeks behind us, and the NFL season underway, this post feels as if it has lost its timeliness.  Nonetheless, I saved what I thought was the most interesting question for last.

If you’re not up to speed on the previous posts in this series, I suggest you review them.  In the first post I laid-out a scoring system for comparing each country’s performance (3 points for a Gold, 2 points for Silver, 1 point for a Bronze) and I addressed the question of whether China or the USA “won” the medal race.  In the second post I discussed the first of 3 myths (or at least pre-conceptions that I brought into the games) that were contradicted by the actual medal count data.  The third post addressed which country fared better in in Team events, versus Individual and Pairs events.

Today we will be focusing on…

Myth #3: “Despite China’s strong showing, it was the USA that brought the more well-rounded team to the Olympics.”

Reality: At first blush, this myth seems to be particularly likely to be true.  China made no secret of their “Project 119,” an effort to focus on winning the 119 Gold Medals available in Track & Field and Swimming events.  Moreover, we already know that the USA accumulated more medals than the Chinese did AND that the USA’s medals spread much more evenly across Gold/Silver/Bronze, a form of well-roundedness in-and-of itself.  Neither of these metrics, however, precludes the possibility that the USA won all or most of its medals in a narrow set of events.

Unfortunately, the IOC doesn’t seem to be particularly concerned with helping me answer this sort of question.  Instead of sorting the Olympic events into convenient categories, they have created a large number of events (somewhere between 28 and 39, depending on how you count).  Some events (such as baseball, soccer, softball, BMX Cycling) offer only 1-2 medals.  Others (such as swimming and track & field offer dozens).  The sheer number of events, combined with the disparity in possible medals, makes statistically significant comparisons very difficult.

So, the first thing that I did was sort the events into 7 Categories, as follows:

• Accuracy (Archery & Shooting)
• Acrobatics (Artistic & Rhythmic Gymnastics, Diving, Trampoline, & Synchronized Swimming)
• Athletics (Field Events including Decathlon/Pentathlon/Triathlon, & Weightlifting)
• Fighting (Boxing, Fencing, Wrestling, Judo, and Taekwondo)
• Net Sports (Beach & Indoor Volleyball, Tennis, Table Tennis, Hand Ball, & Badminton)
• Racing (Track Events, Cycling Events, Canoeing/Kayaking, Rowing, and Sailing Events)
• Team Spots (aka “Contact Sports” such as Soccer, Basketball, Water Polo, Hockey, Baseball & Softball)
• NOTE: The only sport that proved difficult to categorize was Equestrian.  Coincidentally, it is the only sport that involves another creature than the athletes.  Fortunately, between China and the USA there was only one Equestrian medal (a Silver, for the USA).  I counted it as a Racing medal.

Once the events have been grouped in this way we can easily apply our now-familiar scoring system and calculate what percentage of each country’s total score was derived from each event Category:

Interesting!  Not only does it become clear that the USA literally accumulated not just a plurality, but a true majority of its points in a single Category (Racing), but that China out-performed the United States in 5 out of 7 Categories!  This is certainly a strong argument against our assertion that the USA was the more well-balanced team.

Before we call this case closed, however, let’s take a closer look at the data.  After all, as we mentioned above, the total number of Olympic medals available in any given event varies rather wildly and, apparently, arbitrarily.  Thus, one could argue that if there are more medals available in a given event Category, then a well-rounded country should win more medals in that Category, and fewer medals in Categories where fewer medals are available. If we add a third set of columns, representing the % of the total medals/points available in each category, our chart looks like this:

From this new perspective the USA’s significant bias towards Racing events seems much less surprising.  After all, with fully 42% of the available points being awarded in these events, it makes sense that this is where the USA would earn the largest portion of its medals/points.  In fact, the percentage of points derived from any individual Category by the USA is closer to the overall distribution than China’s is, in 4 of the 7 Categories.

By this standard, it is fair to say that a country has “over-achieved” in an event Category if the % of its total score is greater than the % of the overall available points in that Category.  In other words, the USA “over-achieved” in Racing because Racing accounts for only 42% of the available Olympic points, yet represented 57% of USA’s total points.  Conversely, the USA “under-achieved” in Athletics and Fighting events.

Using these definitions, we can re-plot the same data to more clearly show in which Category each country over/under-achieved, and by how much:

Now, the argument in favor of the USA as the more well-rounded team becomes even stronger.  By definition, each country’s over/under achievements will balance each other out in a zero-sum game. Interestingly, the USA’s apparently single-minded focus on Racing events represents only a relatively modest over-achievement in this Category.  China, on the other hand, clearly compensates for a dramatic under-achievement in this largest of event Categories with very-strong performances in both Acrobatics and Net Spots.

It is the Absolute Value of these deviations, however, that is most telling.  Whereas USA’s performance in the various event Categories varies from the overall Olympic medal distribution by a total of 39 percentage points, China’s variance is fully twice as much, at 77 percentage points.  By this definition of well-roundedness, USA is the clear winner, with China proving to be extremely strong in some areas and equally weak in others.

Does China’s overwhelming dependence on some event Categories and it’s “no show” in others mean that our third and final Myth is not such a myth after all?  Or does the fact that China out-performed the USA in more Categories while also medaling in more events (25 to 22), make it the more well-rounded competitor?  Ultimately, it is the uncertainty of the answer to these questions that is most telling.

There are certainly countless more interesting questions that can be asked and analyzed based on the data that I have accumulated, but I suspect that my audience’s interest is waning even more than my own.  So, I shall bring my discussion of these most recent and most captivating Olympic games to an end.  If you are so inclined, however, please feel free to download my Excel workbook and use it as you see fit.  If you find errors (as I have no doubt that they exist) please let me know so that I can update my version and see if any of my conclusions are affected by them.

Last week I posted the first 2 parts in a 4-part series analyzing the medal results from the recent 2008 Beijing Olympics.  In the first post I laid-out a scoring system for comparing each country’s performance (3 points for a Gold, 2 points for Silver, 1 point for a Bronze) and I addressed the question of whether China or the USA “won” the medal race.  In the second post I discussed the first of 3 myths (or at least pre-conceptions that I brought into the games) that were contradicted by the actual medal count data.

In this, the 3rd installment in the series, I will be discussing…

Myth #2: The United States is a country that tends to glamorize strong, independent, and innovative, individuals over the group/collective.  China, a Communist country, prioritizes self-sacrifice, group discipline, and group organization/coordination over the individual.  Consequently, in the Olympics, one would expect American individuals to perform better than Chinese individuals and Chinese teams to perform better than American teams.

Reality:

In order to asses this assertion I grouped each Olympic event into three categories based on the number of participants involved:

• Individual – Events in which a single athlete competes on their own behalf. The vast majority of Olympic events fall into this category.
• Pairs – Events in which two athletes compete co-operatively.  Events in this category include: Synchronized Diving; Pairs Rowing; Doubles Tennis, Table Tennis, and Badminton; and Beach Volleyball.
• Teams – Events in which more than two athletes compete co-operatively.  Events in this category include some Rowing events, Basketball, Baseball, Soccer, Indoor Volleyball, Water Polo, Softball, Track & Swimming Relay Races, Synchronized Swimming, and Team Gymnastics.

Again, the data is quite counter-intuitive:

American individualism seems to be worth relatively little, at least when compared to China’s performance, in Individual events, where both countries performed quite comparably.  Meanwhile, contrary to the idea that the Chinese would excel in group activities, the United States dominated Team events.  Equally inexplicably, however, China showed a clear command of Pairs events.

I considered several possible explanations for the USA’s strong performance in Team Sports:

• Economics – Perhaps China doesn’t have the financial resources to develop the number of athletes that are necessary for large teams and instead has chosen to focus its efforts on events with fewer competitors.  This assertion seems easily dismissed given the scope of the resources spent  by China in preparation for the 2008 Olympics.
• Cultural Bias – Perhaps the USA benefits from high-profile, world-class leagues that have not had time to develop in countries such as China.  While this may be true of a few sports (Basketball, Baseball) it fails to explain USA’s strong performance in Water Polo, Volleyball, and Softball.
• Size & Strength – Since most of the Team sports are also contact sports, perhaps the American athletes are simply advantaged because they tend to be bigger and stronger.  This explanation is contradicted, however, by China’s strong performance in Weightlifting and many individual contact sports such as Boxing, Judo, etc.

Ultimately, I am at a loss and unable to come up with a solid explanation for why China, a country that demonstrated its ability to coordinate groups of people to stunning effect in the Beijing Opening Ceremonies was so roundly outperformed in Team Sports by a nation that worships individualism.  I am even more baffled by China’s strong performance (and the USA’s pathetic one) in Pairs events.  If you feel that you have a good explanation for either of these observations, please post a comment.

Otherwise, stay tuned for the 4th and final installment in this series, later this week…

A few days ago I allowed myself to indulge in a little bit of compulsive competitiveness as I proposed a metric for determining which country (China or the USA) “won” the 2008 Beijing Olympics.  In that post I laid-out a scoring system by which one can interpret each country’s performance, by assigning a “score” to each type of medal (3 points for a Gold, 2 points for Silver, 1 point for a Bronze).  (It is recommended that you read that post before proceeding.)

The initial analysis was quick and easy, based on each country’s total number of each medal (China won by a tiny 3-point margin, 223 to 220).  Unsatisfied with this conclusion (for obvious reasons), I decided to delve deeper, in search of some piece of data to help me feel better about being on the wrong side of that particular equation.  Armed with a slew of pro-American biases and prejudices I began thinking about the data from a number of perspectives.  What I found, however, proved most interesting because of the way in which it debunked many of those pre-conceptions.  In particular, I found that 3 assumptions that I had formed while watching the Games and had expected (hoped?) to validate with the data, were in fact, myths.

In order to minimize the chance of boring my readers to sleep with a single enormous post on this subject, I have decided to break this information into 3 separate posts; one for each Myth.  Tonight, we begin with…

Myth #1: The Chinese may be better than the US at events where the athletes are only competing against themselves, but Americans tend to do better in head-to-head events.

Reality:

In order to assess the validity of this statement, I assigned each event to one of three event “types”

• Asynchronous Events – Events in which the athletes perform completely separately from each other.  In other words, they take turns, with one athlete performing, followed by another.  Events that fit into this category include: Gymnastics, Diving, Field events, Weightlifting, Archery, Shooting, etc.
• Synchronous Events – Events in which the athletes perform at the same time, but are not supposed to be directly interacting with each other.  Events that fit into this category include: Swimming, Rowing, Track Events, etc.  Note: In reality, there is some minimal (but not necessarily insignificant) interaction between the athletes in these events, both in terms of strategy, as well as factors such as false starts, riding another swimmer’s wave (or getting caught in their wake), boxing another runner in, etc.
• Head-to-Head Events – Events in which the athletes directly oppose each other.  For one athlete to score, win, or succeed their opponent must lose or fail.  Events that fit into this category include: Basketball, Soccer, Volleyball, Water Polo, Tennis, Table Tennis, Badminton, Baseball, Softball, Beach Volleyball, etc.

The results of this analysis are quite interesting:

China clearly dominates Asynchronous events, whereas the United States succeeds in Synchronous events by an even greater margin.  Most interestingly, however, and counter to what many Americans would probably like to believe, the Chinese actually also control a clear margin of victory in Head-to-Head events.

This surprising fact is likely because most Americans tend to think of Head-to-Head events in terms of those sports that are most popular here in the US (men’s and women’s basketball, softball, baseball, indoor and beach volleyball, water polo, women’s soccer, etc.).  And, to be fair, the US performed overwhelmingly well in these events.  Unfortunately, however, they account for a very small number of medals.  At the same time, the Chinese were able to accumulate a significant number of medals in Head-to-Head events that are more culturally relevant (and popular) in China, while being largely overlooked by American audiences (badminton, table tennis, judo, taekwondo, fencing, boxing, and wrestling).

Stay tuned for Myth #2, coming soon…

Much has been made of the medal race between the USA and China during the recent Bejing Olympics. Every night Bob Costas would sign-off of NBC’s primetime broadcast with a summary of the “standings” that generally focused on the close race between these two dominant countries. Amusingly, his summary could pretty consistently be boiled-down to “well, the US is leading in the total number of medals won, but China is kicking ass in Gold Medals.” Given these two metrics, neither of which was clearly superior to the other, and which produced apparently contradictory results with regards to the question of “who is winning?” Costas seemed content to leave the answer conveniently ambiguous.

I, however, being competitive to a fault, became consumed with this issue. Not since the days of the Soviet Union had the United States faced a legitimate challenge in terms of overall Olympic Medal performance (at a Summer Games, anyway). I watched Olympics compulsively. For 2 weeks my life consisted of, in order of time spent on each: work, the Olympics, and sleep. I found myself not only cheering for every American athlete lucky enough to earn 5 minutes of tacit television coverage, no matter how slim their chances of medaling, but I also found myself taking perverse glee in every Chinese disappointment, every gymnastic stumble (of which there were FAR too few), every tragic injury, and every disappointing finish. My competitive nature, combined with my nationalistic pride, produced an irrational loathing of Chinese athletic success, even as I admired the beauty of their country, their graciousness as hosts, and the dignity and sportsmanship of their competitors.

When the games finally concluded Costas seemed just as flummoxed on the subject of the medal count as he had been all along. While Bob may have been content to call it “pretty much a tie,” I felt compelled to dig deeper. The first issue that needed to be resolved was the question of what metric should be used to determine the “winner.” To put all of the emphasis on Gold Medals, as those who favor the Chinese would surely advocate, begs the question of why Silver and Bronze medals are even awarded. Counting all medals equally, however, clearly fails to appreciate the fact that a Gold medal is, by its very nature, considered more valuable than a Silver or a Bronze.

Fortunately, this conundrum has arisen and been resolved before. As anyone who has played any legitimate amount of Mario Kart will tell you, there is a simple scoring system by which one can determine an overall winner based on the total number of Gold, Silver, and Bronze trophies (or in this case, medals) they have won:

• Gold Medal = 3 points
• Silver Medal = 2 points
• Bronze Medal = 1 Point

After a little time spent transcribing data from the Official Beijing Olympics website into Excel, creating some pivot tables, and few basic arithmetic functions, I produced some truly fascinating data. Using this system, here are the Scores for the Top 10 countries at the Beijing Olympics:

The result? China wins, but by the narrowest of margins: 223 points to 220 points. In other words, if EITHER of the American 4×100m Relay teams had gone on to win Gold instead of dropping the freaking batons, the entire Olympics would have resulted in a perfect tie between the US and China. Of course, this kind of hypothetical conjecture is completely unfair, as both countries have countless similar examples of medal near-misses , but it’s hard not to think about it.

So, hats-off to China. At least now we have an unambiguous answer to the question based on a straightforward and logical metric. What happens next? Will the US respond to the end of 16 years of total Olympic dominance with increased focus and determination? Or will China ride the tidal wave of momentum that allowed them to surge past the US to an even greater margin of victory? I cannot wait for 2012.

On a final note: stay tuned. Later this week I will post further analysis of this data that reveals some fascinatingly counter-intuitive trends regarding these two countries’ performance. In the meantime, I would very much like to hear any thoughts/conjecture that you readers might have regarding how and why China managed to beat the US, and what the significance of that fact might be…

It’s currently about 2:15am.  I just got home from Paul Lazear’s house.  While I was there, I had the privilege of viewing what may be the single greatest testament to passion and dedication that I’ve ever seen. 

If you’re like me, when you were a kid growing up, you and your friends had some fun with your parents’ VHS camcorder.  You might have borrowed it on the weekend, dressed up in silly outfits, grabbed your old toy guns or swords, and pretended that you were making a movie or tried to recreate scenes from one of your favorite films such as Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Well, apparently, starting in 1981 a group of 10-12 year-old kids named Chris Strompolis, Eric Zala, Kurt Zala, and Jayson Lamb decided to do just that.  Seven YEARS later, they completed a shot-by-shot recreation of the ENTIRE Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark film.  I kid you not.  With the exception of ONE scene, they captured the whole thing.  They set their parents’ basement on fire and jumped around in the flames to capture the bar fight in Nepal.  They found period cars and trucks.  They created their own costumes.  They did car chases with each other hanging off of the moving vehicles. 

The attention to detail was stunning.  They didn’t just deliver the vague semblance of the scenes.  They recreated the camera angles; they captured the timing and delivery of nearly every line; they found or created locations, props, and costumes that resembled those from the film.

I’m really kind of amazed that I hadn’t hear about this piece of work before.   I can’t decide if watching it was more exciting or humbling.  I feel like I should have had to pay admission just for the privilege of seeing it.

I realize that what I’m saying probably sounds hyperbolic.  If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I’d probably be pretty skeptical.  So, I’m working on getting a copy of the film in a digital format.  If I can, I’ll try to find a way to post it here, either for viewing or for download.  Stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you don’t believe me, or you’re just plain curious, here is some info from a few more "credible" sources:

1. A side-by-side comparison of a bunch of shots from both the original feature film, and "The Adaptation." 
2. The review by Harry Knowles of AintItCool.com, who first publicly screened it at a film festival in Austin, Tx.
3. A great article from CulturePulp that includes additional background info on the making of the film.
4. And this, a BBC report on it that includes a little bit of footage: