Do Generic Fitness Assessments Predict Strength Requirements in Combat Employment Categories?

Friday, December 16th, 2011

The Australian military recently looked at whether its generic fitness assessments — max push-ups and chin-ups — actually predict how well soldiers can perform military tasks, and it found that a maximal box lift and place to 1.5 m better predicts performance on these five real-world tasks:

  1. “bombing up” an M1 (Main Battle Tank Crewman),
  2. repetitively loading an M777A2 (Artillery Gunner),
  3. dragging a casualty (Infantry),
  4. bridge building (Combat Engineers), and
  5. lifting a pack onto a the tray of a truck (1.5 m) (All Combat Arms).

The box lift was strongly correlated not only with the last task, but with all five, while push-ups and chin-ups were strongly correlated only with bridge building.

No One Hit Toy This Christmas

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

There’s no one hit toy this Christmas:

Retailers have cut down on toys overall — imports of toys in August and September, important months for building holiday inventory, dropped by 9.8 percent compared with last year, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Panjiva.

Yet not every product is being cut. Shipments of Legos into the United States in August, September, October and November rose about 155 percent from the same period last year, while those of Hot Wheels rose 43 percent and Barbie merchandise rose 17 percent, according to an analysis of Customs data by Panjiva.

Salisbury steak

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

So, just what is Salisbury steak?

Salisbury steak is a dish made from a blend of minced beef and other ingredients, which is shaped to resemble a steak, and usually is served with gravy / brown sauce. Hamburger steak is a similar product, but differs in ingredients. Salisbury steak was invented by an American physician, Dr. J. H. Salisbury (1823–1905), an early proponent of a low-carbohydrate diet for weight loss; the term “Salisbury steak” has been in use in the United States since 1897. The dish is popular in the United States, where it is traditionally served with gravy and mashed potatoes or noodles.

So, it was invented by a low-carb pioneer and is now “traditionally” served with mashed potatoes or noodles.

Anyway, nothing makes a food less appealing than reading its standards of identity:

The USDA standards for processed, packaged “Salisbury steak” require a minimum content of 65% meat, of which up to 25% can be pork, except if defatted beef or pork is used, the limit is 12% combined. No more than 30% may be fat. Meat byproducts are not permitted; however, beef heart meat is allowed. Extender (bread crumbs, flour, oat flakes, etc.) content is limited to 12%, except isolated soy protein at 6.8% is considered equivalent to 12% of the others. The remainder consists of seasonings, vegetables (onion, bell pepper, mushroom or the like), binders (can include egg) and liquids (such as water, milk, cream, skim milk, etc.). The product must be fully cooked, or else labelled “Patties for Salisbury Steak”.

The standards for hamburger limit the meat to beef only, and of skeletal origin only. Salt, seasonings and vegetables in condimental proportions can be used, but liquids, binders and/or extenders preclude the use of the term “hamburger” or “burger”. With these added, the product is considered “beef patties”.

Bootleg liquor kills 143 people in eastern India

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

In a village outside Calcutta — pardon, Kolkata — methanol-laced bootleg liquor has just killed 143 people:

Many of the victims — day laborers, street hawkers, rickshaw drivers — had gathered along a road near a railway station after work to drink the illicit booze they bought for 10 rupees (20 cents) a half liter, less than a third the price of legal alcohol, district magistrate Naraya Swarup Nigam said.

They later began vomiting, suffering piercing headaches and frothing at the mouth, he said.

Angry villagers later ransacked booze shops around the village of Sangrampur, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of Kolkata, the city formerly known as Calcutta.

Police arrested 10 people in connection with making and distributing the methanol-tainted booze and demolished 10 illicit liquor dens in the area, said Luxmi Narayan Meena, district superintendent of police.
[...]
Despite religious and cultural taboos against drinking among Indians, 5 percent — roughly 60 million people — are alcoholics. Two-thirds of the alcohol consumed in the country is illegal homemade hooch or undocumented liquor smuggled in, according to The Lancet medical journal.

The state of Gujarat, where all liquor is banned, just approved a death penalty for making, transporting or selling spurious liquor that kills people. The strict measures were proposed after 157 people died from drinking a bad batch of liquor in the city of Ahmedabad in 2009. At least 180 people died in 2008 around the southern Indian city of Bangalore from a toxic batch of homemade liquor.

The mass casualties came just days after a hospital fire in Kolkata killed more than 90 people and led to the arrest of the facility’s directors for culpable homicide.

Illicit liquor is a hugely profitable industry across India, where bootleggers pay no taxes and sell enormous quantities of their product, said Johnson Edayaranmula, executive director of the Indian Alcohol Policy Alliance, an organization that fights alcohol-related problems.

The bootleggers, working in homes, hidden warehouses and even in forests, can turn 1 liter of genuine alcohol into 1,000 liters of bootlegged swill with chemicals and additives that usually cause no harm, but on occasion can lead to tragedy, he said.

Every week, one or two people across the country die from tainted liquor, he said. In 2009, at least 112 people died from a toxic brew in western India.

I question that 1,000-to-1 ratio. I also question the wisdom of selling an outright lethal brew. That can’t be good for business.

History Of Dieting

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

Dan John shares a history of dieting — which wasn’t always about weight loss:

As you wander around the grocery store this week, notice that yesterday’s diet crazes are today’s staples. Oddly, some of the oldest “diets” were designed to battle not only corpulence but immorality. The remnants of these diets can be found on grocery store shelves even today.

In the 1830’s, Reverend Sylvester Graham believed that gluttony was the gateway to lust. Any such “venereal excess” was deemed evil. Graham thought men should remain virgins until age 30, and then should only have sex once a month after marriage. Masturbation was off limits too as that particular act leads to “a body full of disease” and mental illness.

To get rid of hunger, both sexual and nutritional, Graham prescribed a vegetarian diet that included a biscuit he’d created which later became known as the Graham Cracker.

Within a few decades of Graham, another noted dietician and full-time undertaker, William Banting, lost 50 pounds on lean meat, dry toast, eggs and vegetables. “Banting” became the verb for weight loss in America not long after the book, Letter on Corpulence, became a best seller.

At the same time, Dr. James Salisbury proposed a high protein diet of ground meat patties and hot water. He preached against “starches” and thought these would turn into poisonous substances during digestion. The solution was ground meat three times per day with limited amounts of vegetables, fruits and starchy foods. Today you can still order Salisbury steaks in most family restaurants.

The most noted of the pre-1900 health enthusiasts was enema enthusiast Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. Yep, the same guy who basically invented cold cereal and whose name probably appears on the cereal boxes in your cabinet. Kellogg invented Corn Flakes and an early version of granola to reduce sexual desire and curb the “epidemic” of masturbation.

He also recommended that small boys be circumcised without anesthetic so they would forever associate the penis with pain. Women should have their clitorises treated with carbolic acid to prevent what he called “abnormal excitement.” Yes, Kellogg was a real winner.

QVC Katana

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

If you’re going to buy a katana off QVC , you should realize that it’s not a Masamune original:

Ending the Global War on Drugs

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing links to a recent Reason video on the War on Drugs with these words:

Yes, I know: Cato = Charles Koch, but the Cato Institute’s position on drug prohibition is quite sane.

When Reinforcement Fails

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

Jonah Lehrer looks at when reinforcement fails:

To answer these questions, Tal Neiman and Yonatan Loewenstein at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem turned to professional basketball. More specifically, they looked at 200,000 three-point shots taken by 291 leading players in the NBA between 2007 and 2009. (They also looked at 15,000 attempted shots by 41 leading players in the WNBA during the 2008 and 2009 regular seasons.) The scientists were particularly interested in how makes and misses influenced subsequent behavior. After all, by the time players arrives in the NBA, they’ve executed hundreds of thousands of shots and played in countless games. Perhaps all that experience reduces the impact of reinforcement, making athletes less vulnerable to the unpredictable bounces of the ball. A make doesn’t make them too excited and a miss isn’t too discouraging.

But that’s not what the scientists found. Instead, they discovered that professional athletes were exquisitely sensitive to reinforcement, so that a successful three-pointer made players far significantly more likely to attempt another distant shot. In fact, after a player made three three-point shots in a row – they were now “in the zone” – they were nearly 20 percent more likely to take another three point shot. Their past success – the positive reinforcement of the made basket – altered the way they played the game.

In many situations, such reinforcement learning is an essential strategy, allowing people to optimize behavior to fit a constantly changing situation. However, the Israeli scientists discovered that it was a terrible approach in basketball, as learning and performance are “anticorrelated.” In other words, players who have just made a three-point shot are much more likely to take another one, but much less likely to make it:

What is the effect of the change in behaviour on players’ performance? Intuitively, increasing the frequency of attempting a 3pt after made 3pts and decreasing it after missed 3pts makes sense if a made/missed 3pts predicted a higher/lower 3pt percentage on the next 3pt attempt. Surprizingly, our data show that the opposite is true. The 3pt percentage immediately after a made 3pt was 6% lower than after a missed 3pt. Moreover, the difference between 3pt percentages following a streak of made 3pts and a streak of missed 3pts increased with the length of the streak. These results indicate that the outcomes of consecutive 3pts are anticorrelated.

This anticorrelation works in both directions. as players who missed a previous three-pointer were more likely to score on their next attempt. A brick was a blessing in disguise.

Email and Friendship

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

We exchange the highest volume of email with those people we know the least, a new study finds, but we don’t respond to them quickly:

What makes this study noteworthy is that the researchers had access not only to the complete email records of a midsize company — nearly 1.5 million messages sent by 1,052 employees over a six-month time span — but also to a detailed map of social relationships. (The employees were asked to list all of their personal contacts.)

By comparing these two data sets, Messrs. Wuchty and Uzzi developed an algorithm that let them predict the nature of a given relationship based solely on the details of an email exchange. “We didn’t need to read the messages or anything like that,” Mr. Uzzi says. “Just looking at the speed of a reply was more than enough.”

People reply to their close friends, on average, within seven hours of getting the email, the data show. Professional contacts take a bit more time: We don’t hit send for nearly 11 hours. But the biggest difference came when the scientists looked at those people we barely know. On average, it took us 50 hours to reply. In other words, there’s a surprisingly easy way to figure out how you feel about someone — just count the hours before you hit the “reply” button.

Stratolaunch

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s new venture, Stratolaunch, brings together Burt Rutan and Elon Musk to produce the largest aircraft ever flown — and the rocket it will launch into low-earth orbit:

Rampage in Liège

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Nordine Amrani, a “Belgian”, armed himself with grenades and a Kalashnikov an FAL and went on a rampage in Liège, attacking random folks at the bus stop at the busy Place Saint-Lambert at lunchtime.

Apparently it is not hard for a convicted felon to get weapons and to stay in the country:

Nordine Amrani was sentenced to 58 months in prison in 2008 after a search of his home in the rue Bonne Nouvelle in Liège discovered 9,500 weapon parts, 10 complete weapons and 2,800 cannabis plants.

The motive is unclear, and the attacker killed himself, but there are some obvious suggestions:

The attack came a day after the Belgian court sentenced four members of a Pakistani family to prison for the murder of their law student daughter and sister in the country’s first “honour killing” trial. The Daily Telegraph initially reported that the Karachi Post in Pakistan claimed that the attack was linked to a sentence in an honour killing case. It said the parents of Sadia Sheikh were sentenced on Monday when there had been a bomb alert in the court but this has not been confirmed by any Belgian authority or media, and the claim was not repeated in updated reports.

Addendum: Apparently Twitter user @Karachi_Post simply asserted the honor-killing angle. Also, Nordine does not appear to be Pakistani, but Moroccan, with Belgian citizenship.

Another addendum: It looks like he killed a cleaning lady before heading out for his rampage, armed with an FAL, a revolver, and some grenades.

Honduras shrugged

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

The Honduran government intends to approve two small special development zones, leading The Economist to quip, Honduras shrugged:

And two libertarian-leaning start-ups have already signed a preliminary memorandum of understanding with the Honduran government to develop them.

One firm goes by the name of Future Cities Development Corporation. It was co-founded by Patri Friedman, a grandson of Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate in economics, and until recently executive director of the Seasteading Institute, a group producing research on how to build ocean-based communes. The other is called Grupo Ciudades Libres (Free Cities Group) and is the brainchild of Michael Strong and Kevin Lyons, two entrepreneurs and libertarian activists.

Both share a purpose: to build “free cities”. Last April all three spoke at a conference organised by Universidad Francisco Marroquín, a libertarian outfit in Guatemala. In September they and Giancarlo Ibárgüen, the university’s president, launched the Free Cities Institute, a think-tank, to foster the cause.

The Economist dwells on past failures to create a new libertarian quasi-state, like Werner Stiefel’s Operation Atlantis, which Spencer Heath MacCallum describes in rather neo-cameralist terms:

His constitution for a free community was a radical departure from all political constitutions.

The need for such a construct arose because Werner was treating his “Galt’s Gulch” as far more than a literary device. He had set about to apply it in the real world. Unlike Ayn Rand, therefore, he could not ignore the question of how it would be administered. There seemed no easy answer. By 1972, he had reached a low point and almost despaired of the project, agonizing over the question of how Atlantis could be administered as a community and yet its inhabitants remain free. What form of government should he choose? Surveying all of history, he found no form of government that would not be prone to repeating the same tired round of tyranny the world had known for thousands of years.

At that point, he came upon the ideas of my grandfather, Spencer Heath, and saw their relevance. Heath had pointed out an advantage in keeping the title to the land component of a real-estate development intact and parceling the land into its various lots by land-leasing rather than subdividing. This creates a concentrated entrepreneurial interest in the success of the development, enabling it to be administered as a long-term investment property for income rather than selling it off piecemeal for a one-time capital gain. Those holding the ground title have an incentive to supply public services and amenities to the place, creating an environment the market will find attractive. To the extent they do so, they can recover not only their costs but earn a profit to themselves and their investors. Heath forecast that in time whole communities would be managed on this nonpolitical basis. He saw this becoming the future norm for human settlements, each competing in the market for its clientele. Community services, he thought, would thus become a major new growth industry.

Heath’s ideas brought into focus a vast and virtually untapped body of empirical data from the field of commercial real estate, namely, the emergence of multi-tenant income properties such as shopping centers, hotels, office buildings, business parks, marinas, and combinations of these and other forms. What all of these have in common is that title to the land underlying a development is not fractionated by subdividing but is held intact. While buildings and other improvements on the land might be separately owned or not, the sites are leased. This preserves the concentrated entrepreneurial interest in the whole development that enabled it to be planned and built initially, and this concentration of interest permits it to be operated as a long-term investment for income. The result is very different from a subdivision, such as a condominium or other common-interest development, which is likely to be governed by a homeowners’ association. A subdivision is an aggregation of consumers looking to their own purposes and not in any sense a business enterprise serving customers in the competitive market.

Spencer Heath spelled out his concept in 1946, in Citadel, Market and Altar. Murray Rothbard summarized it for a libertarian audience in 1970:

The Heathian goal is to have cities and large land areas owned by single private corporations, which would own and rent out the land and housing over the area, and provide all conceivable “public services”: police, fire, roads, courts, etc., out of the voluntarily-paid rent. Heathianism is Henry Georgism stood on its head; like George, Heath and MacCallum would provide for all public services out of rent; but unlike George, the rent would be collected, and the land owned, by private corporate landlords rather than by the government, and the payment therefore voluntary rather than coercive. The Heathian ‘proprietary community’ is, of course, in stark contrast to the scruffy egalitarian commune dreamed of by anarchists of the Left.

Thus, individual homes would not be freeholds but leaseholds, like the spaces in a shopping mall. Neither option’s quite ideal though.

Our ideal division of property rights would align incentives so that a tenant living in a house would gain a dollar by (wisely) investing a dollar (or a dollar’s effort) in the house and would lose a dollar by neglecting maintenance by a dollar (or a dollar’s effort), and the management company running the larger neighborhood or city would similarly gain or lose depending on how well it provides “public” services.

I suggest that we could achieve this by having the city sell semi-freeholds encumbered by a flexible tax-like rent, paid to the city — but this quasi-property tax wouldn’t be based on an individual plot’s value (with improvements). Rather, it would be based on the individual plot’s acreage (area) and the average price per acre of the surrounding land.

Thus, rents would go up as property values go up, but no one property-owner would face the disincentive that comes with ordinary property taxes — doubling his own property’s value through improvements wouldn’t double his property taxes; it would only increase his property taxes infinitesimally.

Institutional memory and reverse smuggling

Monday, December 12th, 2011

An engineer tells his tale of institutional memory and reverse smuggling:

Thus I landed the strange job of trying to explain to the company how its plant worked.

I could draw on several kinds of personal memory for this job. I remembered how some things worked, and the 30-year-ancient engineering practices were my own. More importantly, I had an idea of what was important and how the pieces fit together.

Perhaps equally importantly, I unofficially had some documentation. During our office moves and reorganizations, the document situation became increasingly dire. I would wait days to get something mailed to me, after tracking down a series of merged document libraries, some of which were halfway through the digitization processes. Paranoid corporate management also had rules about anything relating to trade secrets, which meant anything relating to the polymer process at all, which made it hard to work while visiting contractors’ offices.

So, we developed a don’t-ask/don’t-tell policy of making private copies of documents and carrying them around with us. Engineers, to generalize, hate waiting around for stupid reasons, and having documents meant that we could get to work. It also made us look better, since we got things done on time, instead of having to send out lame excuses that we’re late because we’re waiting on a fax.

My job now was to smuggle these documents back into the company. I would be happy to just hand them over. But that doesn’t make any sense to the company. The company officially has these documents (digitally managed!), and officially I don’t. In reality, the situation is the reverse, but who wants to hear that? God knows what official process would let me fix that.

No, the documents need to be brought back in to where they ‘already were’ unofficially. Physical copies are made and added to the local group library. Eventually they’ll probably work their way into the digital document management system, the next time someone canvasses and notices some documents with no inventory control tags. I hope they aren’t lost this time, because I won’t be around in another 30 years to smuggle them back in again.

Oh, and as an external consultant, I’m not allowed to know some of the trade secrets in the documents. The internal side of the team needs to handle the sensitive process information, and be careful about how that information crosses boundaries when talking to the external consultants. Unfortunately, the internal team doesn’t know what the secrets are, while I do. I even invented a few of them, and have my name on some related patents. Nonetheless, I need to smuggle these trade secrets back into the company, so that the internal side can handle them. They just have to make sure they don’t accidentally repeat them back to me.

We hear a lot about the spy-movie kind of corporate espionage. I’d love to read a study of reverse corporate espionage, where companies forget their own secrets and employees have to unofficially get them back. I’m convinced it happens more than you’d think.

(Hat tip to Ilkka.)

Tap or Snap

Monday, December 12th, 2011

I missed Saturday night’s UFC, but they’ve shared an x-ray image of Antonio Rodrigo “Minotauro” Nogueira’s arm, after Frank Mir broke it with a Kimura (or reverse ude-garami) arm-bar, and the experts at All Powers Physio have analyzed the damage:

The fight was a rematch following Mir’s KO victory against Nogeuira back at UFC 92 where he won the UFC Interim HW title for the 2nd time, and became the first person to KO “Big Nog”.

In a 1st round of heavy punches thrown by both fighters it was the ground game which proved the turning point for Mir. A sequence of sweeps and submission attempts started when Nogueira attempted to take Mir’s back. Mir slipped out, scrambled to the top position and latched onto Nogueira’s right arm and attempted a kimura shoulder lock.

A kimura is a submission attempt from side control or guard where the wrist of your opponent is stabilised with figure four grip and the arm is extended and internally rotated to the limits of soft tissue and joint congruency whilst stopping movement of the trunk. Also known as a medial or reverse key lock or in judo as a ude-garami, the usual injuries one suffers at the hands of this technique are a rotator cuff muscle tear and ligamentous or labral cartilage damage. However, with the potential force of a heavyweight grappler such as Mir, against an immovable object such as Nogueira who would always be reluctant to tap, the damage can obviously be more extensive.

The X-ray picture at the top of this post was tweeted by the UFC following UFC 140 and demonstrates the obvious fracture and dislocation of the humerus (upper arm bone) of Nogueira.

The pleading eyes of Mir to the the referee in this picture show that Mir obviously knew immediately the damage he had done, which was clarified following the event. Mir explained “When I locked up Nogeuira, I had a strong inclination he was not going to tap, So I took a deep breath and you guys saw what happened.” And what we saw was a devastating submission worthy of the $75K SOTN bonus, but an awful injury for one of the sport’s true legendary figures.

Obviously the dangers are inherent in Jiu Jitsu grappling but a word to the wise…

It is easier, quicker and a lot less painful to heal a bruised ego than it is to plate and fix a bone. Tap before Snap, always!

Rice University

Monday, December 12th, 2011

The history of Rice University began with the untimely demise of Massachusetts businessman William Marsh Rice:

Rice made his fortune in real estate, railroad development and cotton trading in the state of Texas. In 1891, Rice decided to charter a free-tuition educational institute in Houston, bearing his name, to be created upon his death, earmarking most of his estate towards funding the project.

On the morning of September 23, 1900, Rice was found dead by his valet, and presumed to have died in his sleep. Shortly thereafter, a suspiciously large check made out to Rice’s New York City lawyer, signed by the late Rice, was noticed by a bank teller due to a misspelling in the recipient’s name. The lawyer, Albert T. Patrick, then announced that Rice had changed his will to leave the bulk of his fortune to Patrick, rather than to the creation of Rice’s educational institute.

A subsequent investigation led by the District Attorney of New York resulted in the arrests of Patrick and of Rice’s butler and valet Charles F. Jones, who had been persuaded to administer chloroform to Rice while he slept. Rice’s friend and personal lawyer in Houston, James A. Baker, Sr., aided in the discovery of what turned out to be a fake will with a forged signature. Jones was not prosecuted since he cooperated with the district attorney, and testified against Patrick. Patrick was found guilty of conspiring to steal Rice’s fortune and convicted of murder in 1901, although he was pardoned in 1912 due to conflicting medical testimony.

Baker helped Rice’s estate direct the fortune, worth $4.6 million in 1904 ($112 million today), towards the founding of what was to be called the Rice Institute. The Board took control of the assets on April 29 of that year.