The difference between a smart person and a wise person is that a wise person knows how not to get into situations that a smart person knows how to get out of.

Google blog posted an article on “Strengthening the Study of Computer Science”.

It started with:

At a time when more and more digital technologies are becoming indispensable to millions of people, the field of computer science (CS) is in trouble. Enrollment and retention of CS students, particularly those historically underrepresented in the field (women, African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Hispanics) has declined sharply.

I think the sharp decline in enrollment is really an issue, but the inner-economist of mine keeps saying that there is something wrong with the argument that we are able to address the issue by promoting this major to underrepresented people.

I believe in the invisible hand theory of resource allocation. There was definitely an excess in supply of CS students during the bubble years, but then the students shifted attention to other desciplines. We only have certain amount of brain power in the society, and the flow of these brains to different industries is definitely a good thing for the society as a whole. If computer science proves to be playing an ever increasing role in the society, I’m sure the brains will flow back. Just reward these brains accordingly.

Overall, the marginal decision maker should be indifferent to choose between any major if the market is effecient and can reward the students through the market system.

Photo of Yang Yilin, One of the Gold Medal Winning Gymnast

After I wrote a post and complained about Levitt’s  un-scientific  way of making ungrounded statements, I received a comment from the original data analyst Chris Bourdon. To make the reply more visible, I put it here, and it gives a little bit more about how I look at this issue.

Chris, thanks very much for the comment. The original purpose of writing that blog post was to show my disappointment with Prof. L.  From your original analysis and your comment, I can say you are very scientific and possess the quality of an inquisitive thinker.

I did not spend too much time writing down my thoughts on this in the original post, here I’d like to add my two cents to the discussion.

There are two types of explanations on why gymnasts are smaller (in terms of size, not age) than their peers.
1. when young girls practice gymnastics, their bodies receive a trigger to stop growing (this may well be caused by injuries, etc.)
2. smaller girls enjoy an advantage in performing better.

Both explanations introduce some possible reasons that cannot be directly observed and verified in the Chris Bourdon analysis.

Explanation 1 may tell us that maybe due to the poor training conditions, etc. Chinese girls suffer more injuries than their US counterparts, and therefore look smaller. Or, maybe some special technique they use gives the necessary trigger to stop their growth.  Of course, simply by comparing the girls with the national growth chart does not give us enough evidence to suggest that they are smaller than they should be.  A better measure would be comparing these gymnasts with girls from other countries (Japan, Russia, etc.) and see if gymnast girls are also smaller in these other countries. Japan may give us a control for race (Asians), and Russia may give us a control for way of training (government supported intensive training).

Explanation 2 introduces an issue of self-selection. Those girls who are smaller enjoy a benefit, therefore, good gymnasts are smaller.  If you do better (and in the case of Olympics, you do exceptional), you are, by-definition, not average.  So compare these girls with the national chart is not the right way to control for this self-selection problem.  I’m not sure about the gymnasts, but from what I hear on TV, I know that one of the Chinese gold medalist for diving did not eat dinner for 3 years.  Her weight is only 28kg (61 lb). (Wang Xin: http://results.beijing2008.cn/WRM/ENG/BIO/Athlete/3/235963.shtml).

Also, think about SUMO wrestlers, if you do the same charting thing, they would appear awkwardly large compared to the Japanese average. It is simply determined by the profession, and you just cannot compare these athletes with the national chart to make any meaning inference.

Overall, I agree with you on that there should be no limitations on the age. But as there is such a de facto limit, out of academic prudence, I would hesitate to point fingers at these small girls before I have good evidence to suggest that they mis-report their ages.

Steven Levitt wrote a piece citing some graphical analysis done by a blog reader, I first quote his blog article, then discuss my observations.

Levitt wrote:

There has been endless speculation during the Beijing Olympics as to whether the Chinese gymnasts are old enough to compete under Olympic rules, which require participants to turn 16 in the year that they compete.
Blog reader Chris Bourdon decided to stop talking about it and actually do some interesting data analysis.

Here is the e-mail message that Chris sent me:
I thought it would be interesting, in the wake of the controversy over the ages of the female Chinese gymnasts, to see if the numbers would say anything about their ages. So, putting “looks” and official government age documentation aside, how do the sizes of the Chinese gymnasts in question compare to the general Chinese population? And how do Olympic gymnasts compare to their countrymen in other countries?

Attached, find charts for the Chinese and U.S. 2008 women’s gymnastics teams. The charts show [statistics for] each gymnast’s height, weight, and officially reported age [along with] overlaying growth data from each respective country. The Chinese growth charts are from 1965 and can be found here.

Fwcc.org has links to more recent charts but [they] lack underlying data points, which makes graphing inaccurate. Suffice to say that Chinese women have gotten bigger across each percentile over the last 40-plus years.

The U.S. charts are from 2000 and can be found at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention web site.

The statistics for each gymnast come from the official Chinese Olympic web site.

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A few notable observations:

• All the U.S. gymnasts are at the 3 percent mark or above in each category, except Shawn Johnson, who is significantly below the 3 percent mark in height and slightly below in weight.

• Four of the six Chinese gymnasts are below the 3 percent mark in height, and three of the six are below the weight [of the average Chinese person] in 1965.

• The smallest Chinese gymnast is the same height and weight as an average 11 1/2-year-old Chinese girl was in 1965.
The charts Chris made do an excellent job of reinforcing what commentators are saying: these Chinese gymnasts are incredibly tiny.

All this discussion and analysis raises the question of why there should be any minimum age requirement at the Olympics in the first place.

I suspect one justification for banning 13-year-old gymnasts is that perhaps they are thought to have an unfair advantage because they are smaller and more flexible.

I can’t really believe that is true, however. I challenge you to name any activity other than gymnastics (excluding obvious things that depend purely on being small in stature) in which someone who practices regularly between the age of 13 and the age of 16 wouldn’t be a whole lot better by the age of 16 than they were three years earlier.

Here is a comment from Travis Ormsby:

From a different perspective, the hieights and weights of the gymnasts from the two teams are actually quite similar.
The height and weight of Deng, the smallest Chinese gymnast, was that of an average 11.5 year old Chinese girl in 1965.

The height and weight of Johnson, the smallest American gymnast, was that of an average 11.5 year old.

The height of Cheng, the tallest Chinese gymnast, was the same as an average 14 year old Chinese girl. The height of Liukin, the tallest American gymnast, was that of an average 14 year old American.

The weight of Cheng, the heaviest Chinese gymnast, was the same as an average 15 year old Chinese girl. The weight of Memel, the heaviest American gymnast, was that of an average 16 year old American girl.

Has anybody checked out these Americans to make sure they are as old as they say?

And while Chinese people have gotten bigger since 1965, Americans, especially teenagers and preteens have also seen an increase in average weight since 2000. Without the more recent data, it’s quite difficult to determine how far off the gymnasts are from current averages.

Also, the original data for Chinese women appear to have been recorded by scientists from Hong Kong and cover only southern China, which may conveniently mean only Hong Kong. That would vitiate the argument made by #8 about the effects of central planning policies on height and weight.

Travis’ analysis is of much higher quality. Travis is using the Levitt way of looking at a problem. However, this time, Levitt simply follows the cliche and looks at the surface of the problem.  I have the feeling that Levitt is no longer a sharp thinker and he even makes ungrounded and unfair statements like this in this article:

“I have to believe that when a country with as much at stake in these Olympics as China sets its mind on finding ways to beat the anti-doping rules, they will succeed.”

If ordinary Americans can be easily (mis-)led by the media to make very biased statements that are rooted in political needs of the government, I’m truly disappointed by Prof. L’s comment here.  It is ironic that many of the medals won by the Chinese team require skills rather than energy. If higher stake pushes people to find ways to cheat, let me ask you a question about stakes.  Doping is more useful for whom: A gymnast or a swimmer?

During the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies, we witnessed the sheer power and brilliance of what it looks like when thousands of individuals come together for one purpose: to blow your f*cking mind. Throughout the event, I felt a mix of wonder, awe, surprise, joy, inadequacy, terror, and self-hatred - in other words, I was either whispering through tears “It’s just so…beautiful!” or I was sh*tting my pants.

I’ll admit it, it’s a little frightening to see what a country as big as China can pull off when they put their minds to it. I wondered what was responsible for such perfection: a culture of teamwork and self-pride? Or an authoritative regime with significantly more control over their people than we realized? Either way, I had a hard time imagining the U.S. pulling off something with such human precision, and half the time I felt like a fat, lazy slob. In the end, however, there’s no doubt, I’m JAZZED ABOUT CHINA! Who needs human rights when you can have human LIGHTS?

Here are the most pants-crapping moments from the ceremony:

IF GOD HAD A DRUMLINE…

…this is what it might look like. As 2,008 drummers beat on drums that were thousands of years old (outfitted with some space-agey lights), Matt Lauer noted that the men were told to smile, because they realized this could be mistaken for a Persian-Army-esque battle cry. MY FLAT SCREEN TV DOESN’T ROLL UP LIKE FABRIC

The ceremony featured several light displays, screens, and electronic surfaces that seemed to flow as smoothly as silk. The grandest of all these was a giant LED screen that unfurled like a scroll. Do you think Circuit City will be selling these any time soon? PIN ART ON A MASSIVE SCALE

Remember those little Pin Art things we used to stick on our faces? Imagine it the size of a football field. While watching this, I couldn’t tell how on earth they were doing it - it didn’t look real. It was too fluid for machines, but I couldn’t comprehend how people could be doing this. Given what we’d already seen, I should never have underestimated them. At the end of this segment, thousands of men popped out from the boxes, waving happily. MY CURVES CLASS COULD TOTALLY DO THIS

From above, the 2,008 men doing Tai Chi in unison looked like crop circles. Because let’s face it, only aliens could make circles this perfect. LITTLE GREEN MEN

These guys lit up like Peter Gabriel’s light bulb suit from the Sledgehammer video. They moved around the floor like swirling beads of water, eventually forming a beautiful bird. Then, they came together and formed a replica of the Bird’s Nest stadium, all standing on each other, for at least 3 minutes, while a small girl flew above them with a kite. Seriously, how did they HOLD THAT FORMATION for that long??? Communism, that’s how. THIS OAR ISN’T HEAVY AT ALL! SERIOUSLY, WE’RE FIIINE.

These oars were probably over 12 feet long each, but they waved them this way and that as if they were feathers. WHAT NOW? I KNOW! LET’S BRING OUT A GIANT GLOBE!

I kept wondering what the HELL was going on underneath the stadium - to house all these thousands of people, and giant structures like the globe. And I thought backstage at my college’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was chaotic! Then, during the song, pictures of children from all over the earth appeared above and on umbrella-like things held up by another hoard of people on the floor. Was it super cheesy? Yes. Was I sobbing uncontrollably? Maybe. TINY EARTHQUAKE HERO + GIANT BASKETBALL STAR = HEART BONER

NBA star and Chinese Olympian Yao Ming walked alongside a tiny boy, who had not only survived the earthquake, but had saved two of his classmates from his school, where most of the children died. It’s just. Too. Much.Needless to say, it was a grand, beautiful, and inspiring event that I’m pretty sure made London say “Well, f*ck.”

More pictures:

The torch bearer shows us a new sport: fly-running! Also, note that this happened at the 4 and a half hour mark on my DVR. Wouldn’t it be creepy if your saw yourself on one of those? The Tai Chi men do a move called “Collapse From Exhaustion.” Last time you checked, little Fei Yen was in the backyard flying her kite… I was at a party like this once in Prague. I feel like I am at the Electric parade in Disney World! Pop goes the army of two thousand men! How did they know when to stand up, and just how high to go??? It boggles the mind. At this point we heard the first of about 1 million references by broadcasters to the metaphorical “great wall” coming down in China. The torch burns bright, symbolizing China’s firey passion for perfection and pollution. We got the beat.
For some more pictures, check out BOSTON GLOBE.

Pierre Dac used to say : “Predictions are diffcult, especially when they concern the future.”

These pictures are based on words I used in an abstract of a paper. Bigger words have a larger voice.

Indeed, the paper is about pricing.

Among the 3150 signed, over 1500 are professors. I guess they don’t mind to have one more professor signing up.

Which segment are you in?

Looks like we should go to the creative class that represent less than 1/3 work force, but gets 1/2 the total money.

How can I not write something about it?

These days I’ve been watching TV from quite a number of stations for the coverage. Each time someone gets saved, I truly feel the joy, for the ones saved, and for their family/relatives/friends.

It is horrible even to imagine that the death toll jumped quickly to 20,000. According to some estimates, the final number will be at least 50,000. Indeed, an area of 100,000 square km (a little more than 10^12 square feet) is considered to be severely damaged, that’s one percent of the area of China.

Some villages in Sichuan got totally wiped out, a single village can have more than 1,000 death. Some schools have several hundred students burried alive. I don’t believe God, as no one would allow this to happen if he still claims to be a savior. I do hope there is God, as these innocent people will rest in peace in heaven.

Just now, someone was saved after spending 100 hours under ground. Despite my joy, I feel terrible about those who are still down there, hoping to be saved. Time is their biggest enemy now. In this country with a 1.3 billion population, at this moment, there is just no way to use the collective effort to save those people.

I’ve been thinking about how to help these days. Jade and I will donate money to the Red Cross, but other than that, there is really nothing I can help. You feel the frustration and hopelessness at this moment when your enemy is time.

Gandhi said: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” However, in this case, I don’t know where to start.

I remember sitting in front of the TV during Katrina, worrying about the lives in the dome. At the wrath of the nature, lives are so vulnerable. I remember feeling the same frustration when I saw the horrible pictures on TV. This time, I feel happy when Japan, Korea, Russia sent their team of experts to help with the rescue. It really does not matter how many people they can send over or how much money they can raise for this event, what matters is that they can witness and share this tragic moment with the Chinese.

I’d like to upload this picture from Katrina. That’s what I want to say to the earth quake.