UCLA loses 90-93 with a last second buzzer-beater in overtime after a tight game.
Holy crap that was a tight ending! Impressive showing by UCLA(11) against Gonzaga(1).
Tag: basketball
Two families, both making big investments of time and money to involve their kids in sports. But the investments they’re able to make are very different. In Part 5 of “Contested,” our series on sports, society and culture: Sports and the American Dream.
Composite Photo: Thomas Schmidt, left, video still by Ian McClerin, and Jalani (“JT”) Taylor, video still by Hannah Colton.
This is an awesome and eye-opening episode. The misconceptions about sports as a “way out” are apparently even worse than I thought they were. The statistics about becoming an elite physician being better than being a pro athlete are just stunning. The availability heuristic we’re given with relation to sports constantly on television and in the media is apparently heavily hampering a lot of people specifically and society at large.
Very few people really make any money through sports. Less than 5,000 men and women all-in make a living by doing it.
There are more black cardiologists in the US than there are black men in the NBA. The odds of getting an elite job by going to medical school are infinitely better than trying to get into professional sports.
More from suburban St. Louis, post-Ferguson, on the popular notion that sports unites communities. Can the camaraderie of a team sport make race and class status “disappear” for the kids involved or their parents? Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen hangs with a girls’ high school basketball team to test the idea. Photo: Pattonville High School basketball players
🎧 Episode 06 My Little Hundred Million | Revisionist History
Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History
In the early ’90s, Hank Rowan gave $100 million to a university in New Jersey, an act of extraordinary generosity that helped launch the greatest explosion in educational philanthropy since the days of Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefellers. But Rowan gave his money to Glassboro State University, a tiny, almost bankrupt school in South Jersey, while almost all of the philanthropists who followed his lead made their donations to elite schools such as Harvard and Yale. Why did no one follow Rowan’s example?
“My Little Hundred Million” is the third part of Revisionist History’s educational miniseries. It looks at the hidden ideologies behind giving and how a strange set of ideas has hijacked educational philanthropy.
The key idea laid out stunningly here is strong links versus weak links.
I’m generally flabbergasted by the general idea proposed here and will have to do some more research in the near future to play around further with the ideas presented. Fortunately, in addition to the education specific idea presented, Gladwell also comes up with an additional few examples in sports by using the differences between soccer and basketball to show the subtle differences.
If he and his lab aren’t aware of the general concept, I would recommend this particular podcast and the concept of strong and weak links to César Hidalgo (t) who might actually have some troves of economics data to use to play around with some general modeling to expand upon these ideas. I’ve been generally enamored of Hidalgo’s general thesis about the overall value of links as expressed in Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies1. I often think of it with relation to political economies and how the current administration seems to be (often quietly) destroying large amounts of value by breaking down a variety of economic, social, and political links within the United States as well as between our country and others.
I wonder if the additional ideas about the differences between strong and weak links might further improve these broader ideas. The general ideas behind statistical mechanics and statistics make me think that Gladwell, like Hidalgo, is certainly onto a strong idea which can be continued to be refined to improve billions of lives. I’ll have to start some literature searches now…
References
1.
Hidalgo C. Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies. New York: Basic Books; 2015.
🎧 Episode 03 The Big Man Can’t Shoot | Revisionist History
Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist HistoryThe basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain had only one flaw: he couldn’t shoot free throws. In 1962, Chamberlain switched to making his foul shots underhanded—and fixed his only weakness.
But then he switched back.
“The Big Man Can’t Shoot” is a meditation on the puzzle of why smart people do dumb things—why excellence is such a difficult and elusive goal, even for the best-intentioned.
I’m really addicted to this podcast now.
Good ideas and why they have difficulty spreading. Somewhat related to the ideas in Made to Stick.