Crap versus Carp

I'm not sure how many people outside the Great Lakes Region are paying much attention to the Asian Carp battle. Currently, breeding populations  are about 100 miles from Lake Michigan. The Asian Carp has been all over the environmental wires because it could devastate native fish populations in the Great Lakes.  If you want to have a little fun and learn about this works play this game. I was addicted to it for about an hour or so this past Monday.

In December of 2009, Michigan sued Illinois arguing that the carp must be kept from the Lake. Michigan, and a few other states have joined the suit, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to force Illinois to close all of the connections between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River to keep the carp out of the Great Lakes Basin. Illinois would have to permanently close the locks of the Chicago River and block the canals on the Chicago's South Side. The interstate battle, of course, boils down to economics. Michigan is arguing that the carp would irreparably harm its ga-zillion dollar commercial fishing industry, and Illinois argues that a separation would harm its ga-zillion dollar shipping industry.

But to me this whole thing just got a lot more interesting on Wednesday. The USEPA and US Department of Justice reached a settlement with the State of Illinois regarding the combined sewage overflow problem in Chicago. When there's a big storm and the system is flooded, the sewers and storm sewers are combined. Normally, the Water Reclamation District can just fill up a series of deep tunnels to store the water temporarily before treating it. But sometimes, when storms are so big, like the three weeks of rain the Chicago area had last June, the District flushes water containing raw sewage directly into the Lake via the canals. YAY!

If the canals are forced closed by the "Separation," the District's options for moving the CSO water will be greatly limited. All of Chicago's poo will be sent to St. Louis. Chicago will literally be crapping on St. Louis. Take that Cardinal's Fans...a little payback for the Cubbies sucking so bad.

Actually, I'm being a little cynical. If you look at the press release and the details of the settlement there's a lot of talk about making sure that the storm water doesn't even hit the streams. So the approach will be to increase the storage capacity of the deep tunnels and to increase Chicago's green infrastructure and wetlands to increase the region's natural storage capacity. I know a lot of the details will need to be ironed out, but this is a good thing.

Mappemundi

I've been reading Norman Thrower's "Maps and Civilization" over the last several months. "Maps and Civilization" is a historical account of cartography starting in pre-historic era. For example, Thrower shares an example of "maps" which were used to navigate between Islands in the South Pacific. The maps charted the location of islands using wave patterns. Thrower continues with maps of classical antiquity - Greco-Roman examples of early cadastral and road maps, and moves through early Eastern and Asian mapping efforts. He also recounts the efforts of Islamic cartographers during the dark ages and the rediscovering of Ptolemy. We often think that mapping was invented by Western Civilazation during the Rennaisannce, but it was cartogaphers of Asia and Islamic cartogaphers of the middle ages who kept the science alive. For example, Thrower shows a map of the Chinese coast from the 12th Century (~1137 AD), which is alarmingly accurate when compared to a map of the modern Chinese coastline. Of course, most of cartography and geography owe a huge debt to the European Rennaisannce and the Enlightenment. Maps were crucial products of the explorations of the Drake's, Champlain's, Cortez's, Vespucci's, and Columbus's - in spite of all the ills cause by colonization and the Columbian exchange.

I've been trying to figure out how I could possibly incorporate Thrower's commentary on the history of mapmaking into my own research. I don't want to get too hung up on a historical materialist explanation of our current state, but I do have to regard history and the context it creates in the present to help understand the bigger picture. In this case, it seems that there are alot of reasons that mapping in the United States is so fragmented and why there are many more hurdles to "data interoperability" than folks working to integrate spatial data may realize. It seems that one of the keys for ecological and environmental planning is consistent data collected across scales. In the United States, because of the way mapping has been implemented, at least according to Thrower, it seems like data interoperatibility for geography may be a pipe dream. In other words, scaling planning efforts based on different boundaries may not be a useful endeavor simply because of the way mapping and spatial data collection in the United States has developed over time.

The small numbers problem

Getting good results out of a statistical analysis requires a large sample size. The so-called small numbers problem masks variability in the data.

Huh?

If there are only a few observations, and they're really close together; there isn't much difference between them. Think about it this way, there are about 9 million people in the Chicago region, with probably a huge difference in preference for what to put on a Maxwell Street Polish. If you ask three friends for their preference, you would hardly be able to claim that their responses accurately represent the diversity of tastes for Maxwell Street Polishes for 9 million residents of the Chicago Region. Therefore, you need to get a larger sample. As your sample (n) increases you get a better and better representation of the variability of taste for the entire population, and at a certain point they essentially become the same. In other words, for some stuff there's no reason to do a census. It's not that we don't care what people think; it's that statistically speaking, no new information would probably be added.

This brings me to the real point of this post: The Bowl Championship Series. I have a problem with the BCS, and before you start shouting for a playoff, finish reading the post! I have a problem with the BCS because it relies on such a small sample size to judge each team. Each team plays around 12 games in the Football Bowl Subdivision - hardly a large enough sample size to determine a teams performance variability. Therefore, it's really easy to trick a system that relies on such a small "n" to think that your a good team. In comparison, NCAA Division I Men's Basketball teams play about 30, which is funny because 30 is usually the sweet spot for statically useful samples - when your "n" hits 30 you can usually assume that your sample variability is pretty close to the population. The logical response, for College Football: "Well we obviously have to increase the number of games teams play by instituting a playoff." I can hear Kirk Herbstreit's whiny voice now. Does anyone see the problem with this?

I do.

The average rating for a 2010 bowl game was about 3.89. The max was 15.29 for the BCS Championship between Oregon and Alabama (BCS Ratings). Let's contrast this with Men's Basketball. The average television rating for a NCAA Tournament game was 6.00 (Tourney Ratings). If we assume just a 1 for 1 product switch here, the TV folks (read ESPN) would gain an instant 2 point bump on average by switching to a playoff format. But average would probably be a bad way to look at this. If I exclude the BCS Bowl games, the average rating for a "Run-of-the-mill" Bowl drops an entire point, so implementing a playoff could conceivably DOUBLE the ratings for games people aren't really watching. See where I'm headed? There's a reason so many football pundits are advocating for a playoff, and it ain't fairness or equity. It's dollars and cents. They're capitalizing on our deep desire for what can be billed as a clear, decisive, and just outcome, so they can make more money. They're telling us that a consensus national championship is what we want.

The problem with this whole picture is that it forgets that college football players are STUDENT-ATHLETES. The season historically ended in mid-November so that these STUDENT-ATHLETES could take their finals in early December. Now we have a college football season that ends in early December and a bowl season that actually extends into the Spring Semester for these kids (Remember…these are just kids in their early twenties!), and with a playoff how much longer into January will we stretch the season? All of it justified by the need for a consensus national champion, simply so a select few networks can increase their ratings, improve their ad-buys, and make more money. I'm not exonerating the BCS here either. This program is all about funneling dollars as well. The key question is where is the money being funneled. The problem, the real problem with the BCS, is that ESPN is getting cut out of lots of cash under the BCS. Ultimately the network folks don't really care who wins the National Championship.

In my opinion, if you want to fix the College Football National Championship problem, the whole paying the players problem, and reduce cost of college across the board, then all profits from any aspect of collegiate athletics should be immediately put back into the University or College. Not the athletic department, not ESPN, not boosters. It should be given to students. Do it and you'll see people come up with a solution in a jiffy. We'll get a national champion and not get robbed in the process. The real problem is in our almost pathologic need to know "who is the best" and the ability of a small group of people to capitalize on that need. Both of these come at the expense of a bunch of college kids - athletes or not.

I must catch up to them, for I am their leader...

A google scholar keyword search for leadership returns over 18,000 hits for 2011 alone. If I limit the search terms to entries where "leadership" is in the title, scholar reports about a third less (~6,000) total entires. I don't have the time to rifle through all of them, so I skimmed the results until I stumbled across this interesting article:

Klein, K. J., A. P. Knight, et al. (2011). "When team members’ values differ: The moderating role of team leadership." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 114(1): 25-36.

The one thing that I recognize is that teams are diverse, even those typically thought to be fairly homogenized. Within any given team, there are a range of opinions, values, and communication styles.  According to Klein and her colleagues, this increases conflict and reduces the effectiveness of the group to get things done. They argue that the ability of a group to get things done depends highly on the behavior style of the group's leader. They break this down into two broad types of leadership: person-oriented and task-oriented. They argue that person-oriented leaders allow for team members to express their diversity, but that could lead to greater conflict and reduced effectiveness. Conversely, a task-oriented leader limits individual expression which could reduce conflict. Overall, they suggest that the intra-group conflict mediates the effect of diversity and leadership on the group's effectiveness. They surveyed 845 people who were members of 100 different groups and assessed the values, leadership styles, and the group's effectiveness.  Between the two leadership types, they found that each was beneficial for reducing conflict and increasing group effectiveness, but for different reasons.


What does this mean? Basically, defining the right leader depends on the dynamics for the group, and when group diversity is high, it may be best for a leader to take a task oriented approach in order to reduce group conflict. I think that this may be too limited, however, because I get the sense that leadership in groups with a lot of conflict become an exercise in delegation. Delegation can be problematic for a number of reasons, especially, when group members are not always privy to the bigger-picture objectives of the group. They become a cog in the machine, mindlessly performing tasks. This may be the ideal fate for some, but it could lead to reduced group effectiveness when the overall project or goal requires a complex set of interrelated tasks. Even in highly "task-oriented" situations it is important to stress the common shared value of reliability. Team members need to be able to count on the capabilities of each other, and an effective leader can foster that kind of atmosphere whether they use a personal or task-based approach.

Miff-muffered Moof

I was scrolling imdb the other day and I stumbled across this gem:

Some might say I have a minor infatuation with the Lorax, but it's not my fault.  It all started a long, long way back when I was an outdoor education instructor at the Blue Ridge Outdoor Education Center. I had always liked the Lorax, but when I started sharing it with my students, I started to love the Lorax.  From then on, I carried a copy with me everywhere. As an instructor at Wolverine Camps in Northern Michigan, we would put on elaborate productions, and I would always narrate. I read it so many times, that now I pretty much have it memorized. Every once and a while now, I can be caught reciting it to my future nephews, and I have no doubt that this will be the first book I read to my kids. 

To be blunt, I'm not sure how I feel about a Lorax movie. They've changed the basic premise to a love story. Our doe-eyed boy who stumbles down the Street of Lifted Lorax is there because he wants to get a tree to impress a girl. Apparently, they live in a world completely devoid of real nature, and they're stuck with highly polished artificial nature, a simulacrum of paradise. Therefore, there is no other reason to go seeking "nature" besides a girl. In a world so vividly clean and suburban, who would want real nature mucking up the pristine, manufacture landscape. This to me is the biggest break and my biggest worry about this movie. Seuss, on the first page, paints a picture of a wasteland. One haggard Swomee-Swan hangs in the air and a few twigs stand are limply scattered across the hillside. This is no paradise. 

To me this perverts the entire message of the Lorax. It's not about staying true to the book in a strict sense, but it is about staying true to the message. The message is UNLESS you care about the environment, it will be destroyed. It's hard to see how living in a suburban world where nature is artificially reproduced would ever cause people to "care a whole awful lot." It's not something you can buy in a store; it's not something that can be manufactured. It's not even really something that you can buy with fifteen cents, and a nail, and the shell of a great, great, great grandfather snail. It's about stewardship stupid.