Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Low Levels of Radiation Exposure in Fukushima Residents

    I have been collaborating on some research to assess levels of internal exposure to Cesium in residents of Minamisoma, Fukushima prefecture, and today the results have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (paywalled), along with news reports in the Washington Post amongst other media outlets.

    Minamisoma is a small town located mostly just inside the 20-30 km “stay-indoors” zone around the Fukushima power plant, and is one of the closest towns to the plant that isn’t under a long-term evacuation order. Minamisoma Municipal General Hospital began to assess internal exposure to Cesium in August last year, and we report on the first year’s assessment of just over 8000 residents, finding most had no measurable levels of exposure (38% of adults and 16% of children). Those who were exposed had generally low levels of exposure. Although calculating the equivalent dose of internal exposure is a bit tricky and controversial, the lead author estimated the maximum at about 1mSv, and suggests this is about the equivalent of half a chest X-ray. The linked Washington Post article describes some other comparisons and gives the opinions of other experts in the field who know more about these kinds of calculations than I do. We also observe that the levels of exposure less than one year after the Fukushima disaster are much lower than those observed even several years after Chernobyl, despite the fact that supposedly similar amounts of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Our suggestion is that the combination of early evacuation and comprehensive food monitoring and control were key to containing the effects of the disaster.

    These results suggests that in many ways, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant explosion is far from the worst aspect of the disaster that hit Fukushima prefecture on the 11th March, 2011. I have visited Minamisoma before and previously put up a post describing the destruction at the seaside and some of the difficulties the town faces, and I hope that this research will serve to give some perspective to the severity of the various problems the town faces. I have now been given a two year grant by the Toyota Foundation to continue research (in collaboration with the local hospital), monitoring the radiation exposure of the residents and conducting a broader needs assessment of their health needs and the ways in which their mortality risks have changed since the earthquake. As I said in my previous post, the experience of these communities in Japan is of value to other countries with a similar aging problem that might experience similar disasters, including possible nuclear accidents, and it’s important both for the people of Minamisoma and for other communities at risk of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident that we more clearly understand the best potential policy both for preparing and responding to these kinds of disasters. Hopefully this research will benefit both the town’s residents, and policy-makers in other places who face the potential of similar catastrophes.

  • Campaign Setting: After the Flood

    In the novels Flood and Ark Stephen Baxter describes a natural disaster that leads to the complete inundation of the earth by a massive flood. This flood is not a global warming horror story, but a completely new disaster in which oceans of water leak out of fault lines in the earth’s crust, submerging the continents and ultimately all land on earth. The first novel ends with a gathering at the peak of Everest, as it finally sinks below the waves. Ultimately the new oceans stop about 7 or 8 km above the old sea level, and the earth has officially become a water world. I reviewed the first of these novels here.

    The survivors of this flood are mostly trapped on rafts and boats, bereft of any natural resources that might enable them to retain a civilized existence, and over the generations of the flood these survivors slowly change to a new and more primitive form of humanity, eking a subsistence existence from the sea and slowly forgetting all that they had been. The only remnants of civilization are a few arks, which Baxter envisages maintaining some semblance of the pre-flood societies. We only see three such arks in the novels: a replica of the Queen Mary cruise liner, an inter-stellar colony ship, and a deep-sea arcology.

    I think that these arks Baxter envisaged are interesting, and the deep-sea arcology essential to continuing survival of the human species, at least in the short term, but I think there would be other, better ways of surviving such a catastrophe, and the world that resulted from human efforts to survive would make an excellent setting for a post-apocalyptic water world campaign, perhaps played with d20 modern or some version of Stars Without Number. Particularly, I imagine that the post-flood world would be dotted with what I think of as pelagic kingdoms, remnants of pre-flood societies that had taken to arcologies floating on the ocean, but linked to deep-sea arcologies that serve as industrial and resource extraction centres. The effort of building these arcologies in the two generations over which the flood submerged the land would mean that they were tiny compared to their pre-flood societies, and many people in attempting to escape the flood would make their own societies – on rafts and ships and old oil rigs and all manner of makeshift homes – and in the eras after the flood these societies would slowly drift across the globe, creating whole new settings and strange encounters. Furthermore, the strange weather and new ecologies of a submerged earth, and unexpected remnants of the old world, would create mysterious and intriguing adventure scenarios and settings. In the next few posts I will describe what I think would be some of the more interesting elements of this world, but starting today I will describe the main remnants of modern civilization in the post-flood world: the Pelagic Kingdoms.

    Pelagic Kingdoms

    These central kingdoms of the flooded earth would be the lynchpins of human survival in the post-apocalyptic world, because they would have solved the three problems that inevitably beset any attempt to create a sustainable human society in a world without land. These three problems are access to natural resources, energy, and diversity of food supply.  In Baxter’s novels human society fails to solve these problems fully, instead fleeing to a new world where they can find the resources they need or settling into a remnant city on the sea floor, where they can survive but never prosper.

    I think that in the era leading up to the flood the biggest societies on earth would solve these problems, though the pressing time scale and the challenges of adaptation mean they would not do it well and only a tiny percentage of their population would escape the flood into these official post-flood kingdoms. To rescue one’s society in such an era of social, economic and ecological collapse, with rapidly diminishing physical territory and resources, would only be possible for the largest, wealthiest and technologically advanced societies. This is because to do so they would need to simultaneously create floating arcologies and a functioning deep-sea city, capable of existing permanently at 4-6 km beneath the surface, but able to extract resources from the sea bed and ship them to the surface to exchange for food with the arcologies. The result of this would be the new, pelagic kingdoms of the US, Europe and China/India – kingdoms composed not so much of physical territory as of a large number of scattered, floating islands orbiting just one or two seabed mining communities.

    The Arcologies of the Pelagic Kingdoms

    As society realized that the flood was going to consume the earth, they would move to desperate measures. Old ships would be turned into floating apartment blocks and set free to drift, dependent on the diminishing land for food and increasingly needing to grow their own in rooftop gardens or fish for their sustenance; some of these arcologies would be set up as research centres or industrial towns, to continue producing the needs of a rapidly shrinking population base. As the situation became more desperate, governments would realize the need to build specialized arcologies rather than converting ships – with increasing numbers of their own internally displaced populations needing to be accommodated in a shrinking territory, they would realize that they needed to start building land on top of the sea. Thus would begin the project of building real arcologies, purpose-designed to float like oil rigs but cover the area of small towns. Whatever size technology enabled, they would begin to build, far enough away from the encroaching flood to be completed in time to rise with the sea waters when they came. These arcologies would be designed to be at least partially self-contained, proof against storms and the ocean salt but containing in their centre at least some small farms, intensive agriculture of some kind, power plants, and even manufactories. These arcologies, once they floated, would be populated with the elite of the old world and left to drift amongst the converted hulks and jury-rigged floating hamlets of a previous generation. They would trade with each other, try their best to feed themselves and their fellows, as they circled the diminishing landscape of their old nation. Perhaps some, equipped with deep sea salvage equipment, would mine the abandoned cities of the old world for ever scarcer resources.

    The Deep-Sea Manufactories

    Once it became obvious that the land was going to be forever extinguished, the problem of sustaining these arcologies beyond the next two generations would obviously present itself. How can one repair a solar panel without sand? How can one supply a nuclear fission plant without uranium? Obviously the only realistic solution is to build a deep-sea mining base, somewhere with resources that can be harvested. Such a base would perhaps be built entirely underground, with just a few carefully-constructed entranceways to allow ships in and out. It might be built in the last high points of the nation – the Rocky Mountains or the Himalayas or the Alps – with docks carved into mountain sides and deep mine shafts stretching far enough down to give access to the key requirements of industrial society. These undersea bases would be designed to include manufacturies, so that crucial engineering equipment could be built, ore smelted, and perhaps even ships repaired. Robotic machines would travel far into the old world under the sea, scavenging the remaining organic detritus of the old earth, or digging up mud from the new seabeds to transport to the surface as soil for the arcologies. Perhaps they would build huge wave-power generators in the valleys of their old mountain ranges, entirely robotically made and controlled, to ensure that the world would have energy even after the uranium ran out.

    Society and Survival in the Pelagic Kingdoms

    The social order in the pelagic kingdoms would be harsh, built around keeping strict authoritarian control over population growth and resource use. Those people who floated out to sea in the first hulks, crammed together like prisoners in apartment blocks that offer little better opportunity than survival, would soon come to be judged as an expendable burden on the dwindling resources of their nation; even once the purpose-built arcologies floated and the undersea manufactories began to function, these people would be seen as a burden, first to suffer calorie restrictions as arable land disappeared, last to be allowed to breed, always required to do the hardest and nastiest work. They would spend much of their lives without energy, would be moved from hulk to hulk as the need arose and treated as a slave population in a world of harsh demands. These would be the slums of the floating world, where everyone vied for a chance to get out to one of the arcologies or to a specialist dormitory ship – one that sat near a resource zone or had some industrial or defense or cultural function. Otherwise the only work on these ships would be security, fishing, and farming shellfish or seaweed in the area around the ship.

    On the arcologies, life would be better, but still tough. Some arcologies might have a specialized industrial or farming purpose, others might play a mixed role providing energy, education and housing. These arcologies, being purpose built, would also be able to host proper docks and shipping, perhaps enabling them to trade between countries and with occasional visitors and develop a little real wealth. But even the largest arcology using the most advanced genetically engineered crops would only be able to grow a small amount of food, of which the entire surplus would be needed to keep the dormitory ships alive and functioning; life here might be better but it would still be harsh, and some of the chemical or industrial arcologies could be hellish indeed. In the world after the flood, no one would be allowed to rebel against their lot – find a way out, or be ground under.

    Despite the harsh life in the arcologies, these would be the wealthiest and the best places on the planet, and through their combination of resource extraction, limited agriculture, and energy production, the Pelagic Kingdoms would form the central component of the human race’s recovery from its near-extinction. Everyone else living outside of these kingdoms would view them with only three goals in mind: to live in them, to trade with them, or to raid them. In such a world the Kingdoms would always be seeking adventurers – as would their enemies. It would be this world that player characters would interact with – performing dubious missions for the masters of the arcologies, fighting raiders, or raiding them for specialized goods that make the difference between death and survival for the less fortunate peoples of the flood. These Pelagic Kingdoms would also hire adventurers to scour the ocean world hunting out old resources and finding new trade opportunities. In my future posts I will describe some of the other communities that live on the world ocean, how they survive and the adventuring opportunities they might offer.

  • What do the Olympics Tell Us About Aging Societies?

    The Olympics finish tonight in the UK, and if the 66kg men’s wrestling goes well Japan will equal Australia in gold medals and beat Australia in total medals. Japan has already achieved its best Olympic result for 38 years, and 80% of its current gold medals (5 out of 6) are in combat sports; if it wins tonight, 85% will be in combat sports. Japan doesn’t win medals in the kinds of sports that favour old people. This is contradictory, because Japan’s young population is famously shrinking, and it now is much smaller as a percentage of the population than it was 38 years ago. Furthermore, other competitors – notably China, which dominated in this Olympics – aren’t in the same position, so it’s not the case that Japan’s young population has shrunk less than that of other competitors. Of course, the other country that has had a record Olympics, South Korea, has the lowest birthrate in the world and has been watching the same phenomenon in its 20-35 age group. Yet it came fourth in the medal tally, with a population just under half that of Japan’s. This is its best ever performance, surely, and well above its long term rank (about 10th).

    So what’s going on? How can it be that countries like Japan and South Korea can have all-time record performances in a sporting arena that is obviously dominated by the behavior of the 20-35 year age group, even as the size of that age group as a proportion of their own (and the world’s) population is at an all time low? Even when their GDP is being demoted in ranks due to the ascension of China? Surely the first area of a nation’s social and cultural system to collapse will be that which is most closely tied to the size of its youthful population, its performance in elite sport at an international level?

    The answer, of course, is technology. As just one example, consider table tennis. Japan selects many of its sports people from the university sports system (its main feeder system outside of the martial arts), and the university system here is undergoing a slow and inevitable collapse as the declining number of new students causes third- and second-tier universities to enter death matches for the remaining students. Yet, Japan achieved its best table tennis result in history, winning a silver in the team event and actually taking a set from China in one competition. When asked how it felt to deliver silver to Japan for the first time in 44 years, Ms. Fukuhara (team leader) collapsed into tears and couldn’t answer, so profound was her achievement. This, despite collapsing numbers in university table tennis clubs across the land … but it turns out, the government has funded a research project to produce machines that replicate Chinese secret ball-spin techniques, and they have been used by this Olympic team. Furthermore, Ms. Fukuhara has been competing in the Chinese super-league since 2008, and speaks fluent Chinese. This is the power of education and technology to utilize dwindling resources more efficiently. Austalia’s swimmers, of course, have been competing well above their population size for years, and are well aware of the power of good training techniques and sports institutions to overcome the effect of small or declining populations.

    Another way in which Japan is overcoming its population deficit is through extending the lifespan of athletes. Ms. Fukuhara was recruited early and is seen as a child prodigy; at the other end of the lifespan, Hitomi Obara won Olympic gold in wrestling at the age of 31, and is clearly far from out of competitive power. She had to skip the 2008 Olympics due to injury, but has been dominating in a non-Olympic weight (51 kg) since 2000. This is a 12 year sporting career in an extremely demanding sport. Good rehabilitation medicine and training techniques, and a society that supports a longer range of healthy lifespan, make it possible for athletes to continue to compete long past the age when, in previous eras, they would have been wrecks. Thus it is that Japan completely dominated the wrestling events against countries like the USA, Russia and China with much, much larger populations. This is the effect of technology and organization in more efficiently mobilizing resources.

    Japan and South Korea’s Olympic performances are an example of how societies will cope with ageing. Better technology, better education, more efficient systems, better-run institutions, and extensions to the productive lifespan can more than offset population declines. Changes to our understanding of how long people are “young,” when “middle age” starts and what constitutes maturity, will enable us to extend periods of the life cycle (such as those that determine fitness to work or play sport) that were previously seen within quite rigid limitations. As our ability to utilize labour and productive resources increases, we can more than offset the effects of aging. It’s another example of how aging societies are not necessarily a bad thing. If it encourages us to find ways to lengthen our youth, extend our productive life cycles, and enjoy more diverse lifestyles, then the aging of our societies should be seen as an opportunity rather than a purely negative phenomenon. Certainly, Korea and Japan’s response to the challenges of mobilizing youthful resources for the Olympics shows us that we don’t need to go backwards as our societies age – we can use new technologies and training systems to improve on our current situation. Declining populations don’t have to mean declining opportunities or productivity, they can mean diversity and dynamism as well.

  • What’s So Special About Sprinting?

    The Olympic athletics are mostly done and dusted, and Usain Bolt, having won 100m and 200m gold, has proclaimed himself “the greatest athlete to live.” This status can’t have been earned through sheer numerical power, since on numbers alone Bolt would be well down the medal list – five gold medals at two Olympics is nothing special and certainly can’t eclipse Carl Lewis’s nine gold over four olympics. It can’t be the act of retaining a title over two successive olympics, since Ian Thorpe did that, and in any case it’s not really comparable with sports like Judo where one can only compete in one weight division at one Olympics. By the measure of defending golds in at least one event for which one is eligible to compete, Saori Yoshida and Kaori Icho are far superior – they have defended gold at three olympics and seven and nine world championships respectively, and Kaori Icho has not lost for 150 or more matches. It can’t be through achieving perfection in one’s sport, since Nadia Comaneci did that in 1976 when she scored a perfect 10 (in fact she won seven 10s in total in that olympics). Ms. Comaneci also went on to win five golds, defend her beam performance at the next olympics, is credited with her own special moves, and is the only person ever to receive the Olympic Order twice). It can’t be for being the youngest person to break a record – again, Nadia Comaneci did that and, according to her wikipedia entry, it’s now impossible to legally break that record. Bolt didn’t break any records until he was 21.

    I guess gymnastics just isn’t that special. That might explain why Japanese TV insisted on showing the 100m final even though no Japanese person was competing – imagine how little time they would have to showcase Japanese athletes if they had to broadcast the final of every event! In fact they don’t, so it must be that the 100m and 200m are really special.

    This confuses me. I don’t understand what’s special about sprinting. It’s obviously impressive and important – like all athletics – but does it compare with any of the other major events in the Olympics? Compare it with synchronized swimming, for example, which is a genuinely impressive sport in which great talent is combined with challenging physical technique as well as artistic merit. Could Usain Bolt sprint in perfect lockstep with the rest of his Jamaican team? Could he do push-ups while holding his breath? Could he hoist one of his other team members into the air for a perfect backflip with a peg on his nose after doing hold-your-breath push-ups for 30 seconds? Come to think of it, could he even complete a 100m race while maintaining a perfectly fixed smile? Synchronized swimming often gets a bum rap, but if you look past the rigid smiles and scary make up, it’s actually a sport that requires amazing talent, focus and attention to detail, and the women who do it obviously have impressive backgrounds in swimming, ballet and gymnastics.

    So what is so special about sprinting? Putting aside for the moment the fact that all of these sports are a complete waste of time and space, is there anything about sprinting that makes it different to weight-lifting, hammer-throwing or the marathon? Do you have to do it from childhood, like gymnastics? Does it require skills from multiple disciplines, like rhythmic gymnastics and synchronized swimming? Is there a risk of death if you do it wrong, as in diving, gymnastics or horse-riding? Does it require a special and intense team spirit to complete even the simplest of moves, like volleyball?

    I think the Daily Mash puts Bolt’s achievement into a little more historical perspective:

    Helen Archer, from Stevenage, added: “Usain Bolt just ‘practices’ running every day and, one assumes, eats a lot of macaroni and stays off the tabs.

    “Perhaps the Pope should commission a new ceiling from him. Let’s see what that does to his ego.

    “Once he’s finished, perhaps he could point at it in his trademark style.”

    I think that puts Bolt’s “legend” status into a little perspective. Imagine if Einstein, receiving his Nobel prize in 1921, had said “I’m the greatest scientist to live.” Even rock stars tend to eschew this kind of stupidity. Freddie Mercury just said “I always knew I was a star,” but he never managed to get to the point of observing the obvious truth, that he was the greatest performer ever to live.

    It’s probably a reasonable truism to live by, that if what you’re about to say outstrips Freddie Mercury, Oscar Wilde and Mohammed Ali in its arrogance, you shouldn’t say it. I’ll give you that tip for nothing, Usain Bolt. In exchange, could you tell me why I should value sprinting more than synchronized swimming?

  • What Language do Japanese Cats Understand?

    image

    Do Japanese cats understand cats from Australia?  Is feline a universal language? Do they understand “get off there you bastard” in any language? This birthday card from my cat to me shows he speaks the language of his household , though hiragana are visible if you squint. Perhaps he is bilingual but lacks the manual dexterity for kanji?

    Note also the single cat biscuit under the ribbon. Who says cats  can’t feel love?

  • Gender Equality in Games Participation in Japan

    Twelve days into the Olympics and 75% of Japan’s gold medals are due to women winning combat sports: one judo and two wrestling. One female wrestler, Kaori Icho, has completely dominated her sport for the last 12 years – she is the first Japanese woman to win three gold medals in a row, has won the world championships seven times, and has not lost a bout for more than 150 matches. During last night’s coverage the commentators were saying that they have never seen her lose, and don’t know how she would react.

    Given the popular image of Japan as a sexist place, it’s genuinely surprising to see women’s participation in sport and the acceptance of women in a wide range of activities that in the west are largely reserved for men. The degree to which this process is normalized, accepted or encouraged is most evident in the olympics coverage, because it’s not just that the women are given air time – the coverage of women’s sport has been excellent. When a Japanese woman is competing in a combat sport, they don’t just flick from some irrelevant men’s sport to cover her bout – they give uninterrupted coverage on the main channel for the entire tournament, which meant last night I watched two hours of uninterrupted wrestling, and I’ve seen multiple hours of women’s judo. Furthermore, they bring a female expert from the sport into the studio to do analysis and coverage, and the male commentators show obvious deference to her expertise. The women’s soccer (the biggest contender for gold number five) is covered on the national TV channel by an excellent woman (I haven’t caught her name) from a previous generation’s soccer team, who provides analysis and detailed commentary that would make Australia’s Craig Foster proud. The wrestling has similar coverage, from a previous champion, and the same applies to other sports where women are playing. Essentially, from the top of the channel down to ordinary people in bars and living rooms across the land, women’s participation in sport is shown the same respect as men’s – with, perhaps, the notable exception of the soccer federation, which oversaw a notable blunder in which the women’s team flew economy in the same plane that the men’s team (who are eternal losers) flew first class. This extends to participation in ordinary sports centres too – quite often my own kickboxing class in Tokyo will have as many women as men participating.

    It could be said that this is just an olympics sport phenomenon, reflective of the fact that the women are excelling in combat sports and combat sports are the Japanese public’s favourite activity. But it’s not limited to sport. On the train channels at the moment are a slew of adverts featuring pretty mainstream-looking non-nerdy women playing computer games, and computer gaming is seen as a completely reasonable activity for girls to engage in. It’s really common here to see young women fiddling with portable came consoles and fooling around in gaming arcades, and most gaming companies have developed games aimed at women, or are looking for ways to market their main games to a growing female market.

    Another area in which women’s participation is encouraged and accepted is that most macho of western domains, beer drinking. Advertisements for beer here are completely devoid of macho images of working men, but instead have couples enjoying time together, but beyond that there are a whole slew of adverts aimed purely at women: no men in the scene, no evidence that beer has anything to do with men. I recall reading years ago that John Singleton (a famous advertising mogul in Australia) said that there were three key things that had to be in a beer ad to make it successful: 1) a man, 2) a beer, 3) a man drinking a beer. Not so in Japan, not at all.

    But the most striking example of this equality of participation is in that most male-dominated of hobbies, role-playing. In my 5-10 attendances at conventions in rural Japan I noticed that about a third of the group were women, and I also noticed that women would GM games and would also be deferred to by men (including GMs!) as experts on a particular game – when I played Make You Kingdom the GM deferred regularly to a female player on rules issues. Recently, playing 13th Age in the Akihabara gaming shop Yellow Submarine, there were five or six gaming tables and every one except ours had at least one woman participating – except for one table, which was occupied by five women of about the same age as me playing Double Cross. Those women must have been in the hobby for as long as it’s been going on, which suggests that role-playing has always been popular with women. To the best of my knowledge this level of female participation in role-playing is unheard of in the west – in the UK when I gamed at a pub, there would be maybe 40 men and every couple of weeks one woman would turn up – and she would be stared at like a freak. It’s extremely hard to find women at any organized gaming events in the west, though you can get women interested if you recruit them through friendship circles, etc. But here in Japan it’s normal to see women playing. They’re still a minority, but not a tiny minority, and clearly their participation is seen as normal by the boys.

    When people comment on gender inequality in Japan they tend to overlook many facets and nuances of gender relations here, but it really frustrates me when they overlook this aspect of Japanese life, or when they single out a single event like the first class soccer controversy as evidence of some deep problem – especially when that kind of controversy happened in Australia too, where women would generally consider themselves to have very few equality issues still to resolve. But in sport, in nerd activities, and in beer drinking women’s participation is both encouraged and seen as normal in this country. For role-playing, particularly, this is a fascinating and eye-opening insight into how far western gaming still has to come in encouraging openness and diversity of participation. In both the nerdy and the sporting worlds, maybe Japan has something to teach the west about gender equality?

  • Problems with Presenting Graphics in Stata

    I’ve been burnt twice in the past two weeks by a strange graphics handling problem in Stata and Microsoft Office. In the spirit of presenting workarounds and warnings for obscure software problems that I stumble upon, I think I should report it here.

    The basic problem is simple and very nasty: charts produced in Stata and then exported into Microsoft proprietary formats don’t work properly across platforms and, possibly, across machines. The way in which they fail is insidious, as well, because it looks as if the operator has made an error: axis titles disappear, or parts of the graph are shaved off so that the graph doesn’t match the description one has written in text. Worse still, the person who originally made the chart can’t see the error, and it doesn’t appear in printouts from the afflicted person’s work. This means that you can’t easily convince the person at the other end that you’ve not done something wrong.

    As an example, consider this insidious cock-up from this week. One of my students sent a draft paper to a colleague last week, and he sent it back with the cryptic message “fix the charts.” We didn’t know what he wanted changed, so we changed a few things and sent them back. This week we received an angry reply, demanding that we fix the charts and specifically why did we forget the y-axis labels? The day that we fixed the charts, we were working on printouts, because we were rushing, and the y-axes were in the printouts – I had a distinct memory of correcting some text in the y-axes. So I asked my student to mail me the last version he’d sent to the colleague, thinking he’d stuffed up, and indeed I couldn’t see the y-axes in the charts. I asked him why he’d removed them after I painstakingly corrected them, and he told me he hadn’t, and he could see them – but by now he was overseas and I couldn’t check in person. So I forwarded the document to my partner, who works on a PC, and she could see them. What was going on? My colleague and I, on macs, couldn’t see the y axes, but my student and my partner, on PCs, could. Weird.

    I asked my student how he had put the graphs in word, and he told me he had copied the figures directly from Stata and pasted them into word, essentially following instructions that can be found all over the web (for example here) and also, I think, in the Stata help. I did some digging and discovered that when you do this, the file is converted automatically by Office into a new format – possibly .wmf? – and this can’t handle all of Stata’s graphics rendering; this leads to approximations in the encoding of some aspects of the graph. Mac graphics are handled in a different format – possibly .eps? – and the badly rendered parts of .wmf files are simply ignored when it opens them. One of the main things that the .wmf rendering stuffs up is rotated text – such as one finds in y-axis titles. When I realized this, I asked my student to redo the files by saving as .png, and everything was fine. The .png files looked hideous though so we redid them in .tiff format, but we could at least see the details of the axis labels now.

    I’m not sure, however that it’s just a platform issue. A few weeks ago I had a strange graphing problem with a journal, who mailed me to say that my text and the histograms I had provided didn’t match – specifically, parts of the range of values I had referred to in the text weren’t appearing in the histogram. I couldn’t understand this, because I could see the histograms clearly. I thought perhaps they were just being a bit weird, so I sent them hi-res images with an explanation, and they were fine. The original file had charts in it as .png files – I had included them as .png because they are low-res files, easy to produce, and a lot of journals like to receive low-res files until the production stage. But the hi-res files I sent were in .tif format. In light of what happened this week, I think that the same problem my student had also arose with the .png files in that article. I don’t know what platform the journal production staff were using, but I made the .png files on a mac. So it’s possible that the problem also arises in reverse using .png files, or it’s possible that it occurs across machines as well as platforms.

    The problem with this issue is that it is insidious, and when one works across email it’s impossible to work out what is happening. It also leads to questions about professionalism – leaving out y-axis labels is pretty shoddy undergraduate stuff – and those questions are exactly the kinds of issues that people try to blame on technical problems. It also creates conflict, because if you are repeatedly sending graphs that don’t work to a colleague (or a journal!) they start to get pissed. As do you, because you start to think they’re behaving like dickheads. The worst possibility is that, if everyone in your institution is working on word, and the peer reviewers are, but the production staff at the journal are working on macs, they may produce a final published version of your article that has no axis titles. Anyone reading that will think you are incompetent, when in fact it was purely a technical problem.

    The simple solution to this is:

    • never copy and paste from graphics to word (this also reduces the risk of loss of resolution)
    • don’t use .png or .wmf exports
    • only work with .tif or .eps files
    • if you get into a weird situation where you’re sure that you supplied the right file, don’t assume the other person is doing something wrong – check what platform they’re using and try sending a file in a different format

    Preparing charts for journals can be a real hassle, and journals can be both simultaneously picky about their figures and singularly unhelpful in advising non-experts on how to prepare them. This kind of cross-platform (and cross-format) silliness is really unhelpful in the production process, and it’s extremely difficult to find definitive information about it on the web. These problems don’t just arise from copy-paste laziness either, and understanding the details requires delving into the world of graphics rendering – a world that many people who work with stats and scientific data don’t know much about (nor should we have to).  Stata and Microsoft and Apple all seem to be fairly silent on the issue, too. So be aware of it, and be ready to defend your work on technical grounds when colleagues or journals seem to be talking about a graph or figure that you’re sure has no resemblance to the one you sent them.

    And if you’re reading this, Bill Gates – hurry up and move to a non-proprietary graphics handling format!

  • What’s Wrong with Judo?

    UPDATE 2 (31/7/2024): This post is getting hits again, which means the Olympics are on and people are again asking themselves “WTF?” about this sport. I just watched a few bouts and three bouts in a row were decided by the referee (two bouts by direct disqualification, one by the number of warnings). Boring! I also discovered that in 2023 Judo introduced (or updated?) a “head dive” rule in which you get disqualified for a throw in which you land on your own head. That’s right, you can get disqualified because when you pulled your move, you landed on your head – disqualified for doing something dangerous to yourself! I guess there is good reason for this but … wtf. I think I’ll wait for the wrestling …

    UPDATE (12/8/2016): The last few days this post has received a lot of new hits, the first time it’s been noticed in 4 years, and this is obviously because the judo is on at the Rio Olympics. I’d just like to say that this year there seems to be a lot less of the faffing I discuss below – a lot more victories on real points, lots of ippon, and few refereeing decisions. Also Japan has won a gold and lots of bronze, which is nice. So I guess sometime in the past 4 years the Judo authorities must have had a good long think about how to make their sport more interesting. I wonder if UFC forced them to reconsider …? Anyway, if you’re reading this post now, please bear in mind that some of these complaints don’t apply as much to the judo you’re watching – whatever reason you came here after watching judo at the 2016 olympics, it was worse in 2012!!

    On Thursday the Yahoo Japan news service began a countdown to the first Olympics ever in which no male competitor won Judo gold. Watching the olympics from Japan means I have been exposed to a feast of judo competition, and it has been very exciting. It has also, however, been extremely frustrating and at times boring, because there seem to be a few serious problems with the way judo bouts are conducted. The frustrations boil down to basically two main complaints: almost everyone wins on penalties rather than technique; and judge’s decisions are extremely opaque. There’s something vaguely wrong with winning gold medal because of accumulated penalties, rather than anything you actually did, and it’s also frustrating to watch someone hurled to the ground by a moderately well-applied throw, only to have it come to nothing. This is especially frustrating because one well-applied throw (ippon) wins the match no matter how many not-quite-so-good throws the opponent has applied, even if the effective results of the throws are in both cases essentially the same. In essence, the points awarded to a move are based not on how much it damages the opponent but on how well it was applied.

    Having a history in kickboxing, this seems like a very strange idea to me. You don’t win knockouts in kickboxing by kicking someone more beautifully than they kicked you. A knockout should be objectively determined by the opponent’s inability to continue fighting, not by a dubious judgment about whether the technique was better applied than the previous move. Also, one should be able to lose a fight through accumulation of minor infringements, especially since the minor infringements incurred during the Olympic bouts largely seemed to be “stalling.” It doesn’t just make the fights sometimes boring to watch, it makes the end of the fight frustrating, I don’t think it encourages players not to stall, it doesn’t reward the best players, it puts too much weight on split-second decisions by judges, and I think it reduces the amount of technique put on display. I think judo could be made more interesting and pleasurable to watch (and maybe better to participate in too), though enacting a few changes to make it flow a bit more like boxing…

    1. Move to multiple rounds: A single five minute round, with a subsequent three minute “golden score” round, simply encourages stalling and thus the accumulation of penalties. Wrestling for five minutes is enormously physically demanding, and attempting even one serious throw (or getting out of one serious attempt at a hold) can take it out of even the fittest of people. A 30 second break between two three minute bouts would discourage stalling, since it would enable the fighters to take a break after herculean efforts, but it would also give them an opportunity to consult with their coach, regroup mentally, and consider weak points in their fighting. This would make moves in the second round much more effective. Given most bouts go to a three minute golden round at present, all bouts could simply be set up as three, three-minute rounds with no golden score, and the audience would get to enjoy not just fresh fighters in the second and third rounds, but changes of tactic as the fighters consult during breaks
    2. Knockouts should be objective: It should not be possible to score a knockout win if the opponent is not actually knocked out. Holding someone down for 25 seconds, doing a particularly beautiful throw, all good things but completely irrelevant to victory. A knockout should be either a submission hold forcing the opponent to tap out, or a choke that knocks them unconscious. Anything else should just be points in the bag, and there should be no points for holding someone down for 25 seconds – what’s the purpose of that? Players should only be holding each other down on the ground for the purpose of getting a submission hold – if they can’t get one on after a judicious period of time the referee should break them up and restart the fight. That will stop this kind of silliness.
    3. Move to a boxing-style points system: Rather than having categories of points that don’t interact (ippon, waza-ari, yuko), throws and failed submission holds should be scored on arithmetically accumulating points (1 for a partial effort, 2 for a beautiful effort), and any bout that doesn’t end in a knockout should be judged on the sum of these points, like boxing. This shift, more than anything else involving penalties, will put an end to stalling, because if players know that two imperfectly-executed throws will count as much as one beautiful throw, they will try harder to use techniques instead of fiddling with one another’s collars for three minutes while they try to put on that perfect match-winning throw. It’s a simple fact of fighting that every attempted attack sets you up for a counter, and if you know that by putting yourself out there you make it easier for your opponent to win the match with just one throw, you won’t act until you’re certain. The result of all this faffing around is the accrual of penalties, and fights won on penalties. A point-style system won’t stop this kind of silliness, but it will at least encourage application of judo techniques during the actual bout.
    4. Penalties should not win fights: except in extreme cases, obviously, but penalties should only make the difference in a close fight (except perhaps safety penalties). I personally think penalties for stalling should not exist (except in the most egregious of cases), because fighting can be a thinking woman’s sport, and people shouldn’t be penalized for having a counter-attacking style or for taking their time against an opponent with longer reach or different techniques. No one wants to watch a fight with no moves being made, but no one wants to watch a fight where the competitors are going through the motions to avoid a penalty even though they’re both dead on their feet.
    5. Take the judging away from the referee: The referee can’t see all angles of the battle, but it’s the referee who currently decides whether a move is ippon or waza-ari or yuko. Sure, the ringside judges can interfere but to a large extent judging is currently done by the referee. I think this will just lead to bad decisions. A panel of three judges, watching from different angles, should decide all points-related issues, and the referee should adjudicate on the fighting stuff – whether to break up foes who have gone to ground, whether a move was unsafe, etc.
    6. Ditch the prissiness and bullying: Several times I watched a fight actually being interrupted so that the referee could tell a contestant to do up their belt. This seems amazingly prissy to me, and it’s a mark of a sport that is obsessed with its traditions. These athletes are at the top of their field in the world, they train really hard and work with extreme discipline to get into this event, where they get in trouble for even a few seconds of time wasting no matter how exhausted they are – but the referee can stop the fight to worry about their belts. I think that’s plainly quite insulting and it strikes me as a hallmark of the kind of bullying that is endemic in the “traditional” martial arts. I also notice that the ringside judges point at each other when they are discussing a disagreement, and some team coaches clearly have a very bad attitude towards discipline – I watched one telling scene where a French woman won her bout, and upon reaching the edge of the mat received a blistering earful of abuse from her coach. That’s not how you inspire athletes and its not how you make a sport into a spectacle. So ditch the fussing about uniforms and tradition, and treat it for what it is – a sport that should be conducted in a way that makes it fun for participants and viewers alike. Speaking of which …
    7. Mouthguards and groinguards should be mandatory: I watched a German woman in a state of panic after copping a hand to the face, because she wasn’t wearing a mouthguard. I can’t believe that she was allowed within reach of the olympic stadium without a full set of protective equipment, and the idea that she could be competing in a sport at this level with no protective gear is astounding. I can’t find the rules online but it appears that at least some federations have banned mouthguards, which is hard to comprehend. I’m pretty confident that this is unnecessary, and martial arts newsgroups certainly have reports of wrestlers who wear them in sparring (as do many judoka, I think). So why not in competition? This is another classic symptom of bullying in sport and it should be stamped out immediately.

    So in essence, move to boxing-style judging systems, make knockouts objective rather than subjective, remove the judging role from the referee, and ensure that the fighters get regular breaks and an opportunity to consult with their coaches. And don’t insult them by fussing about their belts – it’s childish and patronizing. Maybe with those changes judo can become as fun and engaging as the other great combat sports – boxing, kickboxing and mixed martial arts.

    And, speaking of which – today is the first day of women’s boxing in the Olympics, which is nice. But why aren’t kickboxing and MMA in there? If kickboxing became an Olympic sport, Thailand would be in the top 10 countries every time!

  • The Return of Fighting Fantasy

    Apparently Ian Livingstone has written a new Fighting Fantasy! adventure, entitled Blood of the Zombies. How appropriate! I discovered this fact through an article in the Guardian, which includes a suggestion that it will be mostly snapped up by 38 year old nerds reliving their childhood. Well, wrong, Grauniad! I turn 39 in a week!

    The article also contains a link to the entertaining site You Chose Wrong, which gives examples of entertaining death scenes from a wide range of choose your own adventures. I never realized they were so popular – GI Joe ones and fairy adventure ones and all manner of comic-based ones! There’s even a web-based Greek Default choose your own adventure, which is quite entertaining to play. They all have in common a wide range of grisly endings (though at least there’s a chance you can win Fighting Fantasy!, not so likely for the Greek Default adventure…)

    Since it’s my birthday next week I might buy this for myself. And I think Noisms at Monsters and Manuals should run us through it…

  • Drug Cheat or Sour Grapes?

    I’ve been enjoying the Olympics from the vantage point of my air-conditioned couch, and because I’m in Japan I’m getting to see only the sports that interest Japanese viewers, so at the moment it’s wall-to-wall Judo and swimming. Of course, having something of a soft spot for China I’m quite happy to see them coming up in the world of olympic sports, and this year’s sensation is Ye Shiwen, the 16 year old swimmer whose performance has sparked controversy. An American high up in swimming circles claims she must be a drug cheat, because not only did she beat a man in one leg of her medley (and not just any man – an American man), her times have improved rapidly in just a year or two, and her freestyle leg was just so much faster than her other legs.

    Of course this has pissed off the Chinese delegation and Chinese media no end, though to her credit Ye Shiwen has responded in a level-headed manner both in and out of the pool. But she might be surprised to hear that she has found some strong defenders in the Australian press. The Sydney Morning Herald has an article disputing all the main claims of the American coach, and suggesting that both Australian and American achievers could be accused of drug cheating if judged on their performance alone. About Ms. Ye swimming faster than an American man (Lochte) in her freestyle leg, he points out that she didn’t actually beat his medley speed overall, and in any case four other men in Lochte’s race did beat Ye’s time in the same leg – they were all swimming their hearts out to catch up with Lochte, which is what Ye had to do in her freestyle leg to catch the leader.

    John Leonard’s other big complaint is that Ye shaved five seconds off her previous best at this Olympics. The Herald’s article tears this complaint apart:

    It wasn’t an insinuation Rice had to deal with when she clocked her world record in 2008, which was at the time an absurdly fast result.

    Earlier that year, Rice shaved a startling six seconds off her personal best time to hit 4.31.46 at the Australian trials. American Katie Hoff reclaimed the mark a few months late before Rice countered at the Beijing Games, reducing it to below 4.30 for the first time. In contrast, people seized on the fact Ye reduced her PB by five seconds to claim the new mark of 4.28.43 as genuine grounds for suspicion.

    The article also points out that Leonard’s comparison of Ye’s times now with two years ago are unfair because of Ye’s age:

    To the wider sporting world, Ye is only now becoming a notable name. Yet to swimming diehards, she has been one of the rising stars for some years, even if her surge of form in London has caught most people by surprise. Beisel and Rice had been the favourites for gold.

    Ye won the 200m IM at the Asian Games in 2010 (2.09.37) and the 400m IM (4.33.79), all at age 14. At the time, she was listed at 160cm tall. Now, the official Olympic site lists her 12 cm loftier at 172cm. That sort of difference in height, length of stroke and size of hand leads to warp-speed improvement.

    To me these paragraphs also contain an insinuation of bad faith against Leonards: he clearly, as a swimming insider, knows that Ye’s times have grown with her age and body size, and should be aware of her history. So why is he making the complaints so openly now? Would he be happy to have them made against Michael Phelps or Stephanie Rice when they started their careers? Is it fair on Ye that her improvement should be immediately slated home to drugs? The accusations have already hit home, with the doping committee making an unprecedented release of her pre-olympic drug testing results to calm the waters, but it’s probably the case that the claims won’t die down.
    I think that she’s probably not a drug cheat (or if she is, she’s doing the same undetectable cheating as everyone else) and Leonards and others who insinuate that she is are well aware that her performance is natural. But these people are watching their nation’s long-standing dominance of this sport sliding out of their grip as China’s performance improves. There are also insinuations of “military-style training camps” (always a marker of repression when they do it, but of efficiency when we do it), tightly-controlled sporting worlds, etc. But in fact the Chinese swimming world is quite open and employs foreign coaches, one of whom wrote an illuminating opinion piece for the Guardian, indicating exactly why China is improving its performances so fast: hard work. This coach writes:

    Chinese athletes train incredibly hard, harder than I can explain in words and as a coach who has placed swimmers on five different Olympic Games teams, I have never seen athletes train like this anywhere in the world.

    They have an unrelenting appetite for hard work, can (and will) endure more pain for longer than their western counterparts, will guarantee to turn up for practice every single time and give their all. They are very proud of their country, they are proud to represent China and have a very team focused mentality.

    He adds that there is no special talent selection program, but that he just selects those players he sees and thinks are good. But he gives an interesting insight into the supposedly centrally-managed, state mandated programs that are always painted in such a negative light when they compete with Western athletics – in fact, like so much of Chinese “communism” they’re probably more free market than those in the West:

    Let’s also not forget that this is their only avenue for income; most do not study and sport offers them a way out or a way up from where they and their families currently live in society. If their swimming fails, they fail and the family loses face … my athletes are salaried and receive bonuses for performance; I am salaried and receive bonuses for performance. We all want performance, not mediocrity, not sport for all, but gold medals – and they are not afraid to say this.

    He also observes that China gives him all the funding he needs, and enormous freedom to manage his coaching programs:

    If I want a foreign training camp, money is available; if I want high-altitude training – money is available; if I want an assistant coach – money is available; if I want some new gadgets or training equipment, guess what? Money is available.

    I think this is the real threat that people like Leonards are worried about. As China becomes wealthy, it is pouring money into playing catch up not just industrially and economically, but in the cultural and scientific pursuits that have traditionally marked out the west as “advanced,” on the assumption that fast development in these areas will lead to results that will challenge western cultural hegemony. They don’t want to be pinned down to traditionally “Asian” sports that often have lower value (ping-pong, badminton, the traditional martial arts) but want to compete in areas that, by being traditionally western strongholds, often have higher cultural value attached to them: swimming, basketball, soccer and gymnastics. And by dint of their combination of rapid economic growth, rampant nationalism, and highly successful mix of central planning and free market ideas, they’re going to catch up fast. The doyens of a previous era of cultural and sporting superiority don’t want to accept it, just as a previous generation of industrialists couldn’t accept Japanese superiority in industry, and a previous generation of military planners couldn’t believe Japanese naval and air superiority.

    As China continues to improve its sporting prowess, I think we’ll see more of the same, allied at times with accusations of cheating and corruption. But I think, given the sour grapes China’s growth is producing in many areas in the west, we should approach many claims about their sports programs and sportspeople with a great deal of cynicism and caution.