Edward Tufte has collected some interesting links regarding information design and the presentation of information regarding the Columbia disaster. I recommend in general his Ask E.T. board, which has tons of well-written thoughtful commentary on design matters.
Population: One
Kevin Drum comments on an excellent post by Eugene Volokh on college sports. The core question: “Why should we be demanding that athletes who are getting an education in athletics pass muster under academic standards, or for that matter engage in academics at all?”
I feel obliged to observe that in many cases, we aren’t. Let’s look at the four major North American professional sports. Neither the NHL or MLB really care much about college educations. Not coincidentally, both of them have very good minor league systems, in which hockey or baseball players respectively can get fine educations in their sport. The NBA doesn’t have much of a farm league, and angsts a fair bit about kids coming straight to the NBA. Since there’s no way for a team to keep the rights to a player while sending him to the minor leagues to mature, this is no big surprise. The NFL is in the same boat.
It can’t be a coincidence that college basketball and football are big money, while college baseball and hockey are not. I think the connection is that the significant talents in the former two sports almost have to go to college; on the flip side, the best baseball players may not wind up in the college game. We Americans like to see the best and the biggest, after all.
This implies that one very practical road to reform for college athletics would be for the NFL and NBA to revise their draft rules such that it was possible to draft a player and keep his rights while he played in another league. Wouldn’t require any significant infrastructure investments, wouldn’t require any changes to NCAA regulations. It wouldn’t be necessary to affiliate minor league teams with the major league teams, although such affiliation is useful for other reasons. Just let teams keep the rights to people they draft for a couple of years.
I’ve sort of been putting off writing about Battle Royale on account of “Damn, I have no idea what to make of that.” But faint heart never won Oscar, or some such, so let’s see if we can make some sense out of the uber-controversial high school Series 7.
First off, the brief summary: a class of Japanese high school students are brought to an island, given random weapons, and they don’t get to leave till only one is left alive. If they don’t get to that point within a few days, they all die. This is theoretically part of a program to deal with juvenile delinquency. Carnage ensues.
It’s a tremendously bloody movie. I wouldn’t call it gory, but I would certainly call it violent. No worse than your average R-rated horror flick — which is kind of interesting, because those usually contain a hefty slice of violence directed at teenagers, but they don’t provoke the same kind of reaction as Battle Royale. It’s OK when it’s the monsters doing the slicing.
Taking a step back from the subject matter, and thinking of it purely as an action movie, it’s not bad. The tension is good, the acting is good, and the plot is decent. It’s not the be all and end all of action flicks, but it’s solid. Not too surprising, considering the director, Kinji Fukasaku, had been making movies for 40 years. But that’s the easy part of the analysis.
When I get closer to the subject matter, I just hit a wall. Series 7 is a satire and commentary on reality shows. This ain’t that; there’s no hint of the game show to it, although it’s clear the survivor will become a national hero. However, the event isn’t televised. So what can I make of it? What is Fukasaku getting at here?
The 1998 White Paper on Crime may be a relevant reference point. It’s particularly concerned with juvenile delinquency, which is covered beginning here. The crime rate among Japanese youth was up severely in 1998, and the nature of the crimes committed seems to have been fairly disturbing: “The survey results on juvenile offenders also indicated that in bodily injury cases, the number of those with motivations of ‘Passion’ has shown a remarkably higher percentage than ‘Grudge or Revenge’, while the results of the survey on characteristics of juveniles admitted to juvenile classification homes (hereinafter the ‘survey results on juveniles in juvenile classification homes’) showed that the motivation of ‘on the spur of the moment’ has been the highest in homicide cases.”
The White Paper seems to have been fairly prophetic, given this BBC report on the subject. Be sure to read the sidebar titled Japan Teen Attacks, and see also this article. I notice, in particular, that the kids are attacking not just each other but adults — which, understandably, is a matter of some concern. In contrast, the media-driven frenzy in the US focuses on self-directed violence in the form of school shootings.
(This shouldn’t be taken to mean that I think no US teens commit violence against adults, or that all Japanese teen violence is directed towards adults. I’m doing culture analysis here, so I’m interested in how teen violence is depicted.)
I’m thinking that Battle Royale has to be interpreted in the context of both Japanese concerns about juvenile delinquency and the generation gap (a la Speed Tribes). In that light, it’s an expression of angst and fear. It is, perhaps, a horror movie after all, but the monster is the generation gap.
Hey, lookie here! The legendary Nick Mamatas has gone and written the best LJ post ever. No. Strike that. Best post ever, anywhere. Don’t be thinking it only applies to LJers, either. It also applies to Condoleezza Rice.
The design for the Pentagon 9/11 memorial has been chosen. I like the sound of it; it includes trees. And getting this one right is as important as getting the WTC rebuild right.
CNN has a small picture of the proposal.
Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church has taken a stand against certain aspects of text messaging. They’re OK with prayer exercises over SMS, but you can’t confess your sins over cell phone. Which, I gotta say, seems reasonable.
I know everybody says this, but man, there are a metric boatload of pretty badly formed RSS feeds out there. I have most of an application written that trawls a blogrolling.com blogroll for RSS feeds and generates a “friends” page from whatever it finds. I even respect “Last-Modified” headers. Unfortunately, everyone kicks out bad RSS. Some people also have pretty flaky RSS autodiscovery bumpf — Atrios, for example, winds up pointing my l’il robot to an RSS feed containing the last few comments on his blog. Weird. I could work around that, though, although it would kind of kill the glorious automation purity I’ve got now.
What really gives me hives is the malformed feeds, though. Yeesh. Maybe I can steal some code from Amphetadesk, or maybe Mark Pilgrim has some useful stuff. Oooh, or wait, mt-rssfeed has a liberal parser module which does not require me to run Python. Hm.
The Observer has a story on US war plans:
America intends to depose Saddam Hussein by giving armed support to Iraqi opposition forces across the country… the plan, opposed by Tony Blair and other European Union leaders, threatens to blow apart the increasingly shaky international consensus behind the US-led ‘war on terrorism’.
It envisages a combined operation with US bombers targeting key military installations while US forces assist opposition groups in the North and South of the country in a stage-managed uprising. One version of the plan would have US forces fighting on the ground.
Despite US suspicions of Iraqi involvement in the 11 September attacks, the trigger for any attack, sources say, would be the anticipated refusal of Iraq to resubmit to inspections for weapons of mass destruction under the United Nations sanctions imposed after the Gulf war.
Well, there you go. Date: 12/2/2001.
The Turkish Parliament voted today on the motion to allow the US to base troops in Turkey for the war on Iraq. Initially, the motion appeared to pass by a thin margin of 264-251, with 19 abstentions. However, Speaker Bulent Arinc quickly announced that the motion failed because it failed to gain a majority of yes votes. I.e., the abstentions had it.
Bulent Arinc is a member of the majority Justice and Development Party, whose leader publicly backed the motion. The narrow margin along with his actions has to represent a fairly sizable division within the party, which is no surprise, but I’m sure Recep Tayyip Erdogan was hoping that it wouldn’t be quite this painful.
The Turkish Parliament has adjourned until Tuesday.
Salon has a little puff piece of a Cronenberg interview on line, of interest probably mostly to the fanatics like me, except for one excerpt which I will provide here.
When I did “The Dead Zone,” I was very happy with the film. I was very happy with the experience of mixing my blood with somebody else’s, in this case Stephen King. When you use someone else’s work as the basis, it’s something you would never do on your own, but something you really feel an incredible empathy for and connection with. The two of you mix together — why, it’s just like sex, I suddenly realized! — and you make something that didn’t exist before.
That says so much about how Cronenberg sees the world, doesn’t it? The easy natural metaphor: mixing blood. Working, creatively, with another human: “mixing my blood.” And then he realizes, yes! It’s sex! And he was very happy to be making love to Stephen King…
Via John Tynes.