Stanford Football — beating the odds

According to Stanford’s own Athletic Director, only about 400 out of the 3,500 players who join Division I teams every year have a chance at getting by Stanford’s admissions department. How could Stanford compete with the elite when the majority of the nation’s best recruits were ineligible to attend?

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Trying to build an elite college football program at Stanford is a bit like moving a NFL team to Burlington, Vermont. Elite teams like the University of Texas, Ohio State, and Michigan have student bodies of 40,000 plus students and can command the loyalty of entire states or regions. Stanford enrolls under 20,000 students (7,000 undergraduates) and can’t command the loyalty of the Bay Area. Stanford Stadium seats 50,000 fans to Michigan’s 100,000. 

As a result, Stanford brings in much less revenue than schools with comparable records. A Wall Street Journal article notes that Stanford’s $9.7 million in football ticket sales in 2012 compares poorly with the $27 million average of the four teams ranked higher than Stanford at the time. Stanford’s merchandise sales are similarly bleak. 

Good Priceonomics article on what Stanford had to do to build a nationally competitive football team. A lot of it came down to raising more money.

The normal revenues Stanford receives from football are so low, in fact, that its 36 varsity sports teams depend on something no other school has, or would dare rely so heavily on: an athletics-only endowment worth between $450 million and $500 million that pays out at 5.5% each year, people familiar with the matter said.

Stanford needed alumni to cover the difference, and they rose to the occasion. Since Jim Harbaugh took over as coach and led Stanford onto the national stage, donations for Stanford athletics increased “53.4% and new gifts and pledges have increased by 215%.” One alumnus (the son of a wealthy Saudi businessman) pledged $500,000 because he had such fond memories of rushing the field when Stanford beat its rival Cal in 2007. Stanford benefactor John Arrillaga built coach Harbaugh a $50,000 private bathroom next to his office. Few universities endow coaching positions, but Stanford’s head coach and top assistant coach positions, as well as every scholarship for its football players, are endowed to thank donors. The head coaching position is endowed in the name of a former Stanford football player and current private equity founder who pledged $1.6 million in 1989.

It's fun if your alma mater has a good college sports program, and I'm glad Stanford's football team is nationally competitive this season, but it all feels a bit arbitrary and ridiculous to be many years out of college and still living and dying by the record of a team you have nothing to do with.

Despite the infusion of cash into the program, I'd love to hear more about non-cash strategies that have helped Stanford given its annual position as a recruiting underdog, though teams are notoriously close-lipped about any strategic advantages they may have hit upon in recruiting and player development. Those would be more broadly instructive, though.

Looking at Stanford's personnel over the years, it seems like team speed has always been underrepresented on the team and so the team has sought an advantage in size on both the offensive and defensive lines. Without easy access to a broad set of data, that's just a hunch, though.

Now that I'm older, I've tried, with some success, to become a more antifragile sports fan. Like a venture capital investor, I seek to be minimally impacted when my preferred teams lose, but maximally happy when my teams do well. Being a Cubs fan, emotional antifragility is almost a necessity. That's how I think of Stanford Football and the Cubs, for example. If they lose, it's expected and I don't pay it much mind. If they win, it's an emotional bonus.

I had briefly considered not rooting for any particular team for life as it is an entirely irrational behavior. I have nothing to do with the team, it seems ridiculous or even sick to leave my emotional state to something completely out of my control.

However, with my new antifragile approach to sport fandom, the downside is given a reasonable floor, and victories offer nothing but happiness upside. The dramatic thrill of having a rooting interest in a sporting contest amplifies one's thrills from watching, that is some free consumer surplus for a fairly low investment. Even if you don't have a hometown team to root for, you can earn a similar benefit simply by putting down a small wager on one side or the other. It's the reason I will usually enter a March Madness pool even though I don't really like college basketball all that much.

Back to Stanford: if they're going to play, I'm glad they at least choose to play at the big boy table. According to Sagarin ratings, Stanford played the 4th toughest schedule in the nation this year behind just Washington State, Arizona State, and Utah, and the Sagarin ratings have Stanford as the 3rd best team in the nation behind Florida State and Alabama.

The college football season is so short anyhow, every game might as well count, including non-conference games, so fans have more high stakes games to watch. The number of blowouts in college football is ridiculous. I don't know who won when Ohio State walloped Florida A&M 76-0 this year, but it wasn't the fans.

Of course, if Stanford wins 76-0 in the Rose Bowl tomorrow, I won't complain.

UPDATE: One example of a look at a strategic advantage that Stanford might have: its strength and conditioning program, devised by Shannon Turley.

And there was Shannon Turley, the architect of a training regimen among the most distinct in college sports. He is Stanford’s director of football sports performance, and for years, he felt it necessary to write letters to N.F.L. scouts to explain the Cardinal’s nontraditional approach. He stopped that practice this year in the wake of Stanford’s success.

Turley’s impact speaks as much to availability as ability. The coaches recruit speed and size and talent. He believes the best players, the ones most on the field, who sustain the most collisions, also carry the most injury risk. His first priority is to keep them on the field.

From 2006, the year before Turley arrived on the Farm, as Stanford’s campus is known, through last season, the number of games missed because of injury on the two-deep roster dropped by 87 percent. In 2012, only two Cardinal players required season-ending or postseason surgical repair; this year, only one.

In an era in which injuries are more scrutinized than ever, this has made Turley something of a celebrity strength coach. Counterparts from other colleges visited. As did N.F.L. personnel. As did Australian Rules football teams. The student newspaper wrote a three-part series about Turley. Bleacher Report compiled a big article. The National Strength and Conditioning Association named Turley its strength and conditioning coach of the year in 2013.

All together now

The Chris Ware cover for this week's issue of The New Yorker is fantastic. Having just attended my niece and nephew's holiday shows while in Chicago, I can't match this with 10,000 words.

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This is the first cover of The New Yorker for 2014. Ware also drew the first cover of 2013 for the magazine, and he wrote about his inspiration for both.

Steve Jobs, along with whatever else we’re crediting to him, should be granted the patent on converting the universal human gesture for trying to remember something from looking above one’s head to fumbling in one’s pants pocket. I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that most pre-industrial composers could creditably reproduce an entire symphony after hearing it only once, not because they were autistic but simply because they had to. We’ve all heard Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos hundreds of times more than Bach ever did, and where our ancestors might have had only one or two images by which to remember their consumptive forebears, we have hours of footage of ours circling the luxury-cruise midnight buffet tables.

Sometimes, I’ve noticed with horror that the memories I have of things like my daughter’s birthday parties or the trips we’ve taken together are actually memories of the photographs I took, not of the events themselves, and together, the two somehow become ever more worn and overwrought, like lines gone over too many times in a drawing. The more we give over of ourselves to these devices, the less of our own minds it appears we exercise, and worse, perhaps even concomitantly, the more we coddle and covet the devices themselves. The gestures necessary to operate our new touch-sensitive generation of technology are disturbingly similar to caresses.

Ugh

I said I'd try to write one post a day for the month, but I missed the past two days. In my defense, I've been really sick, unable to stand up because I'm woozy and feverish, my sinuses so congested with mucus it's like trying to breathe through a straw submerged in wet mud. It has felt worse than normal because staring at bright screens and trying to focus on them has been giving me a headache so I'm consigned to listening to music in my headphones. Not being plugged in to information is very difficult, this must be what addiction feels like.

It does strike me that the same way the digital signs that tell you how long until the next train or bus comes makes the wait more tolerable, if not perceptually shorter, some device I could stick my finger into that would tell me what ailed me and an estimate of how long until my immune system would overcome it would make this whole ordeal more tolerable. Even if it were a wild guess on the part of the device, just spit out of a random number generator, the placebo effect would probably have some beneficial effect.

Plant intelligence and the Turing Test

The New Yorker unlocked Michael Pollan's latest piece for them and it's a good one. The Intelligent Plant offer much more of interest than to just plant lovers.

Researchers have observed plant behavior which looks to be intelligence. Accompanying the article is a video of a bean plant that seems to sense a metal pole a few feet away that it can wrap itself around. Like Adam and God reaching out with their fingertips in Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, the plant casts its outermost stalk to and fro like a fishing line, trying to make contact with the pole. Later in the video, we see two bean plants reaching for the same pole, and once one reaches it, the other bean plant seems to turn away as if realizing it has to find another vertical column to call home.

Many scientists dispute the concept of plant intelligence because plants have no brain, but perhaps that's just a human-centric view of intelligence.

No one I spoke to in the loose, interdisciplinary group of scientists working on plant intelligence claims that plants have telekinetic powers or feel emotions. Nor does anyone believe that we will locate a walnut-shaped organ somewhere in plants which processes sensory data and directs plant behavior. More likely, in the scientists’ view, intelligence in plants resembles that exhibited in insect colonies, where it is thought to be an emergent property of a great many mindless individuals organized in a network. Much of the research on plant intelligence has been inspired by the new science of networks, distributed computing, and swarm behavior, which has demonstrated some of the ways in which remarkably brainy behavior can emerge in the absence of actual brains.

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In Mancuso’s view, our “fetishization” of neurons, as well as our tendency to equate behavior with mobility, keeps us from appreciating what plants can do. For instance, since plants can’t run away and frequently get eaten, it serves them well not to have any irreplaceable organs. “A plant has a modular design, so it can lose up to ninety per cent of its body without being killed,” he said. “There’s nothing like that in the animal world. It creates a resilience.”

Indeed, many of the most impressive capabilities of plants can be traced to their unique existential predicament as beings rooted to the ground and therefore unable to pick up and move when they need something or when conditions turn unfavorable. The “sessile life style,” as plant biologists term it, calls for an extensive and nuanced understanding of one’s immediate environment, since the plant has to find everything it needs, and has to defend itself, while remaining fixed in place. A highly developed sensory apparatus is required to locate food and identify threats. Plants have evolved between fifteen and twenty distinct senses, including analogues of our five: smell and taste (they sense and respond to chemicals in the air or on their bodies); sight (they react differently to various wavelengths of light as well as to shadow); touch (a vine or a root “knows” when it encounters a solid object); and, it has been discovered, sound. In a recent experiment, Heidi Appel, a chemical ecologist at the University of Missouri, found that, when she played a recording of a caterpillar chomping a leaf for a plant that hadn’t been touched, the sound primed the plant’s genetic machinery to produce defense chemicals. Another experiment, done in Mancuso’s lab and not yet published, found that plant roots would seek out a buried pipe through which water was flowing even if the exterior of the pipe was dry, which suggested that plants somehow “hear” the sound of flowing water.

Given that Alan Turing has just been given a royal pardon, I couldn't help but think of the Turing Test while reading this piece. Recall that Turing found the question of whether machines are intelligent to be “too meaningless.” That is, it's not a question that offers any concrete goalpost or test to prove or disprove itself. Instead, he proposed a question that could be answered in the form of a test:

Suppose that we have a person, a machine, and an interrogator. The interrogator is in a room separated from the other person and the machine. The object of the game is for the interrogator to determine which of the other two is the person, and which is the machine. The interrogator knows the other person and the machine by the labels ‘X’ and ‘Y’—but, at least at the beginning of the game, does not know which of the other person and the machine is ‘X’—and at the end of the game says either ‘X is the person and Y is the machine’ or ‘X is the machine and Y is the person’. The interrogator is allowed to put questions to the person and the machine of the following kind: “Will X please tell me whether X plays chess?” Whichever of the machine and the other person is X must answer questions that are addressed to X. The object of the machine is to try to cause the interrogator to mistakenly conclude that the machine is the other person; the object of the other person is to try to help the interrogator to correctly identify the machine.

What's often missed is one of the most profound and generous aspects of the Turing Test. By proposing what's often referred to as an Imitation Game, Turing recognizes that there may be forms of intelligence that we don't recognize. It's difficult to read Turing's proposal for the test and not think of his own life history, including his persecution for his homosexuality, a vicious intolerance that many believe led to his suicide (though in the past year there has been some dissent). He spent much of his life trying to pass for straight, and that subtext always hangs in the room when contemplating the Imitation Game.

It's this broad interpretation of intelligence that I thought of as reading Pollan's article on plant intelligence. One of the central debates surrounding the Turing Test is the same one raised in Pollan's article: does intelligence require consciousness?

Perhaps the most troublesome and troubling word of all in thinking about plants is “consciousness.” If consciousness is defined as inward awareness of oneself experiencing reality—“the feeling of what happens,” in the words of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio—then we can (probably) safely conclude that plants don’t possess it. But if we define the term simply as the state of being awake and aware of one’s environment—“online,” as the neuroscientists say—then plants may qualify as conscious beings, at least according to Mancuso and Baluška. “The bean knows exactly what is in the environment around it,” Mancuso said. “We don’t know how. But this is one of the features of consciousness: You know your position in the world. A stone does not.”

In support of their contention that plants are conscious of their environment, Mancuso and Baluška point out that plants can be rendered unconscious by the same anesthetics that put animals out: drugs can induce in plants an unresponsive state resembling sleep. (A snoozing Venus flytrap won’t notice an insect crossing its threshold.) What’s more, when plants are injured or stressed, they produce a chemical—ethylene—that works as an anesthetic on animals.

In the article I linked earlier on the Turing Test is this passage on the consciousness objection, from Sir Geoffrey Jefferson's Lister Oration (1949):

Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain—that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants.

Now hop back to Pollan's article:

The central issue dividing the plant neurobiologists from their critics would appear to be this: Do capabilities such as intelligence, pain perception, learning, and memory require the existence of a brain, as the critics contend, or can they be detached from their neurobiological moorings? The question is as much philosophical as it is scientific, since the answer depends on how these terms get defined. The proponents of plant intelligence argue that the traditional definitions of these terms are anthropocentric—a clever reply to the charges of anthropomorphism frequently thrown at them. Their attempt to broaden these definitions is made easier by the fact that the meanings of so many of these terms are up for grabs. At the same time, since these words were originally created to describe animal attributes, we shouldn’t be surprised at the awkward fit with plants. It seems likely that, if the plant neurobiologists were willing to add the prefix “plant-specific” to intelligence and learning and memory and consciousness (as Mancuso and Baluška are prepared to do in the case of pain), then at least some of this “scientific controversy” might evaporate.

Indeed, I found more consensus on the underlying science than I expected. Even Clifford Slayman, the Yale biologist who signed the 2007 letter dismissing plant neurobiology, is willing to acknowledge that, although he doesn’t think plants possess intelligence, he does believe they are capable of “intelligent behavior,” in the same way that bees and ants are. In an e-mail exchange, Slayman made a point of underlining this distinction: “We do not know what constitutes intelligence, only what we can observe and judge as intelligent behavior.” He defined “intelligent behavior” as “the ability to adapt to changing circumstances” and noted that it “must always be measured relative to a particular environment.” Humans may or may not be intrinsically more intelligent than cats, he wrote, but when a cat is confronted with a mouse its behavior is likely to be demonstrably more intelligent.

Slayman went on to acknowledge that “intelligent behavior could perfectly well develop without such a nerve center or headquarters or director or brain—whatever you want to call it. Instead of ‘brain,’ think ‘network.’ It seems to be that many higher organisms are internally networked in such a way that local changes,” such as the way that roots respond to a water gradient, “cause very local responses which benefit the entire organism.” Seen that way, he added, the outlook of Mancuso and Trewavas is “pretty much in line with my understanding of biochemical/biological networks.” He pointed out that while it is an understandable human prejudice to favor the “nerve center” model, we also have a second, autonomic nervous system governing our digestive processes, which “operates most of the time without instructions from higher up.” Brains are just one of nature’s ways of getting complex jobs done, for dealing intelligently with the challenges presented by the environment. But they are not the only way: “Yes, I would argue that intelligent behavior is a property of life.”

Emergent or network-based intelligence does have the advantage of not being dependent on some central brain. The concentration of human intelligence in one area has always been a core vulnerability of humans.

The same can be said of organizations. The more intelligence can be distributed throughout the organization, the less vulnerable it is to the departure of any one person. The larger the organization, the more critical it is to codify more of that intelligence in processes, culture, rituals, and habits. 

Dyadic friendships

Previous literature on friendship suggests that there are prominent differences between boys’ and girls’ networks. One study showed that, in general, girls’ same-sex dyadic friendships tend to be more exclusive than those of boys (Eder and Hallinan, 1978). There is also evidence that compared to males, females maintain stronger relationships and share higher levels of disclosure (Billy and Udry, 1985). The development of exclusive and stronger relationships among girls may make friendships between girls more conversationally intimate than friendships between boys. On the other hand, compared to girls, boys tend to have a more open network that is less intimate, more volatile, and more likely to include new friends over time (Belle, 1989). In a study of early adolescents, Phillipsen finds that girls report more support in their friendships and have less conflict than do boys (Phillipsen, 1999). A recent qualitative study reports that, although its effects are not totally oppressive, boys’ peer group culture poses obstacles in the development of close friendships because boys feel “the need to protect their vulnerability, prove their masculinity, and preserve their integrity when among their male peers” (Chu, 2005:12). The evidence does not imply that young males do not want to have intimate friendships; rather, they struggle more than girls in their efforts to achieve them.

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Having a best friend has been linked to desirable developmental outcomes (e.g. Hartup, 1993). However, does not only having a perceived friendship, but an actual reciprocated one have further consequences on the well-being of the adolescent? The answer to the question is yes, and in a consistently positive manner. Consistent with Hypothesis 7a, we found strong and consistent effects of reciprocity on feelings of school belonging. Moreover, and in support of Hypothesis 7b, we find strong evidence that adolescents with reciprocated friendships enjoy higher levels of educational outcomes than those whose friendships are not reciprocated. We find that reciprocal friendships as well as those friendships that share more activities have independent and significant effects on students’ GPA. Although a direct effect of reciprocity and grades may be spurious, this suggests that youth who are isolated from peers can suffer dire consequences not only through the lack of peer support, but also through weak ties to their school.

From a study on friendship reciprocity among adolescents and its effect on social outcomes. Click through and scroll down for the conclusions of the study.

Here's hoping Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift have at least one true reciprocated friend, if we learned anything from Entourage it was the value of an intimate posse.