Is violence really down in the U.S.?

Perhaps to the public at large, it effectively has. However... 

...the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.

Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.

From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole. What Ayn Rand once called the “freest, noblest country in the history of the world” is now the most incarcerated, and the second-most incarcerated country in history, just barely edged out by Stalin’s Soviet Union. We’re used to hearing about the widening chasm between the haves and have-nots; we’re less accustomed to contemplating a more fundamental gap: the abyss that separates the fortunate majority, who control their own bodies, from the luckless minority, whose bodies are controlled, and defiled, by the state.

A bit more, emphasis mine.

In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

Here's the kicker: 

America’s prison system is a moral catastrophe. The eerie sense of security that prevails on the streets of lower Manhattan obscures, and depends upon, a system of state-sponsored suffering as vicious and widespread as any in human history.

All from a fascinating essay by Christopher Glazek, one well worth reading all the way through.  My quotes may make it seem very one-sided, and Glazek's view on the issue is clear, but the statistics make the tradeoffs clear, so where you fall on the issue is not a given. It's worth making the costs transparent, as in cases like Abu Ghraib, so we understand how we purchase our way of life.

The Horror

We’ve become more interested in the response than in the event that occasioned it. The emanations from the Miley performance very soon overtook the performance itself, and they were stranger and more interesting.

Sasha Weiss on reactions to Miley. 

All this time, we wondered what the guy in Edvard Munch's The Scream was reacting to. Munch saw all of this coming long before this year's VMA's. 

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Explaining Twerking to Your Parents

Every child dreads this day: sooner or later, your parents will come to you, innocently wide-eyed, to ask you about twerking. How you handle this difficult conversation is extremely important and could have a significant impact on the way your parents think about twerking for years to come. You may prefer to put off the big “twerk talk,” but remember that it’s far better for you to be the one to explain than for them to learn on their own by searching YouTube.

A critical first step is to acknowledge that twerking is a normal part of life and that there is nothing shameful in their questions. They’re parents, after all, and this is the sort of thing they hear about on NPR, and, well, they’re curious.

 Hilarious.

The ethics of Candy Crush Saga

A coercive monetization model depends on the ability to “trick” a person into making a purchase with incomplete information, or by hiding that information such that while it is technically available, the brain of the consumer does not access that information. Hiding a purchase can be as simple as disguising the relationship between the action and the cost as I describe in my Systems of Control in F2P paper.

Research has shown that putting even one intermediate currency between the consumer and real money, such as a “game gem” (premium currency), makes the consumer much less adept at assessing the value of the transaction. Additional intermediary objects, what I call “layering”, makes it even harder for the brain to accurately assess the situation, especially if there is some additional stress applied.

This additional stress is often in the form of what Roger Dickey from Zynga calls “fun pain”. I describe this in my Two Contrasting Views of Monetization paper from 2011. This involves putting the consumer in a very uncomfortable or undesirable position in the game and then offering to remove this “pain” in return for spending money. This money is always layered in coercive monetization models, because if confronted with a “real” purchase the consumer would be less likely to fall for the trick.

From The Top F2P Monetization Tricks by  Ramin Shokrizade. F2P stands for free-to-play and refers to games where you can start playing the game without paying. The most popular of such games, at least it certainly seems that way, is Candy Crush Saga. I know a few people who are struggling with a borderline addiction. When you add up the man-hours that have been dedicated to the game, it might be the most potent destroyer of productivity in recent human history.

Shokrizade makes a convincing case that Candy Crush Saga lulls the user into thinking they're playing a game of skill when in reality it's a game of luck (Shokrizade calls it a game of money, as noted in the excerpt below). Unable to make the distinction, players stuck on the more difficult levels later in the game end up making in-app purchases to keep feeding their addiction.

A game of skill is one where your ability to make sound decisions primarily determines your success. A money game is one where your ability to spend money is the primary determinant of your success. Consumers far prefer skill games to money games, for obvious reasons. A key skill in deploying a coercive monetization model is to disguise your money game as a skill game.

King.com's Candy Crush Saga is designed masterfully in this regard. Early game play maps can be completed by almost anyone without spending money, and they slowly increase in difficulty. This presents a challenge to the skills of the player, making them feel good when they advance due to their abilities. Once the consumer has been marked as a spender (more on this later) the game difficulty ramps up massively, shifting the game from a skill game to a money game as progression becomes more dependent on the use of premium boosts than on player skills.

Note that the difficulty ramps up automatically for all players in CCS when they pass the gates I discuss later in this paper, the game is not designed to dynamically adjust to payers. 

If the shift from skill game to money game is done in a subtle enough manner, the brain of the consumer has a hard time realizing that the rules of the game have changed. If done artfully, the consumer will increasingly spend under the assumption that they are still playing a skill game and “just need a bit of help”. This ends up also being a form of discriminatory pricing as the costs just keep going up until the consumer realizes they are playing a money game.

It's tough not to admire the skill with which Candy Crush Saga was built. Something about destroying tiny colored candies satisfies some reptilian instinct in people in the most addicting way possible. The guile with which the game entices users into forking over for in-app purchases makes me a bit squeamish, but no more than a casino should.

If you're going to give in to the temptation of CCS, just know that it's largely a game of luck, and resist the temptation to fork over dough when you get stuck unless you know what's being done to your brain and you're okay with it. 

Big Bang of body types

Tennis players have been getting bigger for years. When Lendl emerged as a force in the early 1980s, rare was the top-ranked man who was more than 6 feet. A decade later, Andre Agassi, at 5-11, and especially Michael Chang, at 5-9, were considered undersize overachievers.

In those days, Boris Becker, at 6-3, contended that men’s tennis was not only trending tall but would eventually be dominated by players well over 6 feet. While part of his prediction has not come true, it may be premature to say he was wrong.

Heading into United States Open, 9 of the top 32 men’s players were at least 6-5 — the tallest being Karlovic and the American John Isner, at 6-10. During this summer’s hardcourt season leading into the United States Open, del Potro defeated Isner in the finals in Washington. Raonic, a 22-year-old Canadian, made the final in Montreal, where he lost to Rafael Nadal. Isner upset No. 1 Novak Djokovic in the quarterfinals in Mason, Ohio, and outlasted del Potro in the semifinals before losing in two tiebreakers to Nadal.

“Every sport is going up and up,” Lendl said. “Look at basketball — and I don’t understand basketball — but I do know that the guys who were playing center before are playing wings now, or whatever you call them.”

More by Harvey Araton on how the average height of top men's tennis players has been creeping up. Patrick McEnroe discusses how he believes the sweet spot is from 6' 1" to 6' 4" just given the importance of agility and balance and footspeed and the difficulty of reaching low balls for someone of John Isner's height (6' 10").

A few years back a few of us from Hulu got tickets from one of our advertisers to go to the ESPY's in Los Angeles. At the event, Isner received an ESPY for Best Record Breaking Performance for his 11 hour 5 minute match against Nicolas Mahut at Wimbledon earlier that year. As Isner walked past us after he left the stage, I couldn't believe he was a tennis player, he was one of the tallest people I'd ever seen, as if Jeff Goldblum in The Fly had instead been mistakenly fused with a praying mantis or a giraffe. To serve from that height must be glorious, like hitting an overhead into a swimming pool.

In his great book The Sports Gene, David Epstein notes the gradual shift in each sport towards the optimal body type for that sport and away from a single ideal for the best human configuration. Sports scientists Kevin Norton and Tim Olds call it the "Big Bang of body types."

But, as Norton and Olds saw, as winner-take-all markets emerged, the early-twentieth-century paradigm of the singular, perfect athletic body faded in favor of more rare and highly specialized bodies that fit like finches' beaks into their athletic niches. When Norton and Olds plotted the heights and weights of modern world-class high jumpers and shot putters, they saw that the athletes had become stunningly dissimilar. The average elite shot putter is now 2.5 inches taller and 130 pounds heavier than the average international high jumper.

When they connected the dots from 1925 to the present for each sport, a distinct pattern appeared. Early in the twentieth century, the top athletes from every sport clustered around that "average" physique that coaches once favored and were grouped in a relatively tight nucleus on the graph, but they had since blasted apart in all directions. The graph looked like the charts that astronomers constructed to show the movement of galaxies away from one another in our expanding universe. Hence, Norton and Olds called it the Big Bang of body types.

It's not just body shapes but individual body parts that matter in particular sports. For some sports, it's better to have long legs and short torsos (basketball and volleyball). For other sports, it's good to have long arms and short legs (boxing). 

Body type can affect performance in different temperatures. Paula Radcliffe defies the generally accepted optimal body type for endurance runners. Most world class long distance runners are small and thin, giving them a larger skin surface area versus their body volume, helping them dissipate heat more efficiently. Radcliffe was a great runner in cool temperatures, but in her two highest profile races in heat, the 2004 and 2008 Olympic marathons in Athens and Beijing, held in 95 and 80 degree heat and humidity, Radcliffe was never in contention.

If you want your child to be world class in a sport, it really matters what type of body they have. You can read Epstein's book for a richer documentation of what some of those might be, but here's one hint: if your child is over 7 feet tall and reasonably coordinated, put a basketball hoop in your driveway.