Great Snakes!

The United States is being invaded!! Hundreds of thousands of slimy aliens are slithering around the sacred homeland.

And so, the United States is defending itself. War has been declared on these intruders. Patrols are being mustered to track down these sneaky, elusive aliens. Beagles are being trained to sniff them out. Scientists are working on miniature airborne drones, like the ones used by the armed forces in Afghanistan, that can detect the heat given off by these aliens from the air. Open season has been declared, and from March 8 hunters can buy the right to shoot these aliens for a $29 fee. Officials are even training hunters on how to identify, stalk, capture and remove these aliens.

What crime have these aliens committed? Nothing more than trying to stay alive. They haven't even attempted to cross an international border illegally. Why so much fear and hatred?

The aliens I am sticking up for here are snakes, specifically pythons. Thousands of pythons have been imported into America as pets. Some were released by owners who bought cute little things a few inches long, and found they had more snake than they could handle when their tiddlers grew into 15 foot long giants. Some escaped when Hurricane Andrew ripped through Florida, destroyed a pet store's warehouse, and air lifted python hatchlings in their frizbee-like flat-pack plastic containers out into the Everglades. Most of the ex-pet snakes died. But enough survived in the warm, humid swamps of the Everglades, a climate which may not be all that different from the Asia they came from, to establish a breeding population. There are now an estimated 150,000 pythons in the Florida wilderness.

The campaign against pythons claims that they are dangerous. They are dangerous. A two year old sleeping in her crib was tragically killed by a python, which belonged to her mother's boyfriend. This incident has little bearing on the rights and wrongs of pythons in the wild, but it clearly is bad PR for pythons.

Some ecologists worry that pythons prey on endangered native species, like the Key Largo Woodrat. These same ecologists are also clearly aware of the media potential of a "foreign invader drives local species to extinction" storyline. Consider this New Yorker article, easily the most thoughtful piece I've read on this topic. It carefully refers to the python as the Burmese python at every instance, to emphasize its foreignness, even though the python's range extends from the Himalayas through Indonesia. I was appalled at the cynicism of this extract:

Skip Snow, a wildlife biologist at the Everglades national park, was dissecting a python that had been caught in Summerland Key, one of the southernmost of the Florida Keys. He unspooled the snake...lifted it on to the counter, stuck a scalpel in it, and unzipped it like a ski bag, and examined its guts....Snow's purpose, in this case, was mostly political. If he could prove that the pythons were eating endangered (native) species, it would be much easier to lobby for funds.

The question that is not addressed is why exactly the Key Largo Woodrat is more valuable than the python. And who is to say that the Key Largo Woodrat would not have died out anyway?

Yes, invasive species can destroy ecosystems. I had blogged earlier about a tiny aphid called the Woolly Adelgid destroying Eastern Hemlock stands in the Appalachians. The Red Lionfish, a native of the Pacific, has emerged as a super-predator in the Caribbean coral reefs, and is now threatening these (valuable) ecosystems.

There may well be a case for acknowledging the law of intended consequences, and drastically cutting down on the international trade in exotic species. Who anticipated that importing decorative water hyacinth from South America would choke the life out of South Indian waterways? But slaughtering hundreds of thousands of pythons is not going to stop that on-going global species trade.

In all likelihood, this war on the python will fail despite the beagles, the drones, the "open-season" hunters, and all the attendent cruelty. A case of shutting the stable door after the snake has bolted. Many of the scientists involved in python war acknowledge that "In one week we went from 'No problem at all' to 'You might as well give up'". Pythons are omnicarnivorous, they eat almost anything that moves. They breed fast, a single female python can lay up to a hundred eggs in a single clutch. They are already extending their range north, beyond the Florida peninsula. They could find climatic conditions that match their Asiatic range across all the Southern states, and portions of Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona and California (map below). Why not just accept the inevitable and embrace a new vision of an American future, one in which the python is as much a part of the American south as the alligator?

Its not what you drink, its how you drink

When is drinking good clean fun, and when is it dangerous and destructive? The dividing line is mostly about how you drink rather than how much you drink, according to this recent Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker.

For instance, recent Italian-American immigrants drink a lot. They drink with every meal, they drink with their families, they drink when friends come over, they drink while watching television. Italian-Americans think about drink as if it were food. Alcohol consumption follows the same quotidian rhythms as the consumption of pasta and cheese. So, alcohol-fuelled loutishness or alcoholism are almost unknown, despite the vast amount consumed. Similarly, the Camba of Bolivia drink a lot, within a well-defined social ritual, with no ill-effects.

Contemporary problems with alcohol are more cultural, related to the meaning associated with alcohol, than physiological. Good point.

Unfortunately, Gladwell concedes another myth which goes against the grain of his argument: the belief that alcoholism is genetic. Consider some of his phrases:

- Around the middle of the last century, alcoholism began to be widely considered a disease: it was recognized that some proportion of the population was genetically susceptible to the effects of drinking

- Philomena Sappio (an Italian-American whose alcohol consumption was studied) could have had within her genome a grave susceptibility to alcohol. Because she lived in the protective world of New Haven's Italian community, it would never have become a problem

This excellent paper Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth College tries to seperate the impact of nature and nurture on a number of life-outcomes by studying adpoted children. It compares Korean children adopted by American families with their non-adopted siblings. I like this paper because the data is so clean, certainly compared to most natural experiments in the social sciences. These adoptive parents can't choose the children they want. They meet their child for the first time at an airport, unlike, say, in India, where it is not uncommon to adopt from within the clan.

The paper's main finding about drinking is that adopted children behave no differently from biological children. This would not be the case if alcoholism were genetic. Alcoholism does run in families, but this probably has more to do with upbringing than the genome.

Sit down, I think I love you

A Buffalo Springfield classic just shuffled up on my iPod. It goes:

Sit down, I think I love you
Anyway, I’d like to try
I can't stop thinking of you
If you go, I know I'll cry...

...Oh you know what they say about the bird in the hand
And that’s why I ain’t leaving without you...

...So if you want someone to love you
Pretty baby, I’m your guy.

Really?

Experts like Dear Prudence clearly know more about matters of the heart than me. But even I can tell that Dear Prudence would not recommend “I think I love you, anyway I’d like to try” as the ideal declaration of undying love. You had to think about it? And having thought about it, you were so completely convinced that you were willing to “give it a try”? Dude… really...

And what’s the deal with “the bird in the hand”? Is the girl worth trying to love because she is a bird in hand? Or should the girl settle for you because you’re worth two in the bush?

These lyrics are by Stephen Stills, who also wrote "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with". Bit of a theme developing here.

Maybe Stephen Stills knows something that Dear Prudence and I don't. Maybe this ironic, laconic, self-deprecating approach really works. Real-romantik, a la real-politik?

Either way, great song. Click here to hear it on You Tube.

Were we ever #1?

Were we ever #1? This feels like a question worth asking after the whipping at South Africa’s hands in Nagpur. Maybe the ICC ratings don’t actually mean anything.

For several years I have trusted the Rediff ratings more than the ICC ratings. The Rediff ratings suggest that India never were #1. The latest Rediff ratings Google could find, published in December 2009, show India at #2 behind Australia.

The nice thing about the Rediff ratings is that they set more value on wins against better teams, and wins away from home. They were developed back in 2001 by two geeky cricket fans, one of whom was the Director of the Economics Department at Bombay University. The good professor might have felt the need to develop an intelligent ratings scale because the official ICC ratings developed earlier in 2001 were so bad. These ratings were designed by a panel of distinguished cricketers, like Sunil Gavaskar and Ian Chappell, and treated all test wins as equally valuable. This is not a bad attitude for a player, who should play equally hard against any opposition. But from a fan's viewpoint this original ICC scale is asinine. I thought this post was going to be a rant about the stupidity of the ICC ratings.

However, it turns out that over time the ICC have improved their ratings methodology. They have now incorporated the best idea from the Rediff methodology, that wins against stronger teams matter more. With that improvement, the ICC ratings are not meaningless. India topped a meaningful table in 2009.

There still are interesting differences between the Rediff and ICC scales. The ICC scale gives extra weight to test series outcomes, which is nice. It does not weight-up away wins, which is odd. But the biggest difference is that the ICC ratings give double the weight to wins in the last two years, while the Rediff scale treats an entire cycle of home-away tests as one equally important block.

For instance, the Rediff scale gives Australia’s 5-0 whitewash of England in the 2006-07 Ashes as much weight as the 1-2 loss in England in 2009. Rediff’s logic is that these are the two most recent home-away series. In the ICC ratings, the 5-0 hammering in 2006 gets only half the weight as the 1-2 loss in 2009, because the 5-0 hammering happened more than two years ago. Clearly, weighting-up recent matches makes it harder to apply a home-away factor, because very few pairs of teams will have both home and away matches in the most recent two years.

Neither approach is right or wrong, different scales serve different purposes. The ICC ratings will respond more quickly to changes in performance. It will therefore have more predictive power, will generate more rapid rating changes and therefore more news. The Rediff ratings are probably a more fair and comprehensive summing up of a complete block of historical performance. The swapping of ranks indicates that there probably is no real (statistically significant) difference in the performance of the best test teams since Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath retired.

Rediff ratings don’t seem to have been updated and published on schedule. The most current Rediff ratings don’t reflect South Africa’s drawn series against England, or Australia’s annihilation of Pakistan. Unfortunately, this might be for a good reason. As a profit maximizing brand, Rediff might not want to tell the Indian public things they don’t want to hear. Judging by the mean-spirited and jingoistic reader comments that were posted under the last Rediff update, this is a real concern.

Maybe the chest-thumping nationalism of a big chunk of Indian fans is much more worthy of a rant than the ICC’s rating methodology.

Follow your dream, not (2)

Building on the thread from the last post about following one's dreams...

Consider a fairly routine career choice facing a college graduate, say, advertising vs. IT. Neither job quite counts as living-the-dream, like playing cricket for India. But the college grad finds advertising more interesting than IT. The follow-your-dream school of thought would typically recommends taking the advertising job, since that initial interest is a sign that the grad will enjoy advertising, more and therefore be more successful. My hunch is that that initial interest in advertising contains no information about whether the grad will ultimately enjoy her job.

Post Grad, a movie I watched on a flight recently, broadly in the Reality Bites genre, illustrates the point. It is about a smart, spunky college grad who loves literature, and has dreamed her entire life of working in publishing. After many ups and downs, she finally gets her dream job at the top publishing house in town. Her boss is a jerk. The job sucks. She quickly moves on.

The factors that actually predict whether someone enjoys a job are profoundly situational. Things specific to a particular role, in a particular organization, at a particular time. Questions like: is her boss a good people manager? Does she get along with her colleagues? Does she have the right level of independence, the right support, and prospects for advancement? Does she get paid enough to cheerfully suck up the inevitable hiccups? Is the organization as a whole growing, and filling colleagues with a spirit of generousity? Or is it shrinking, and making colleagues mean-spirited?

Asking situational questions like these feels less pure than looking within and asking "Is this the real me?". But they probably matter more.

Follow your dream, not

"Follow your dream" is career advice I have frequently received. This is also advice I have given multiple times. I must confess that, on reflection, this is really bad advice. I don't feel too bad about having given this advice, I will pass the blame on to the omnipresent self-help management gurus, but it still remains really bad advice.

The only dream I've ever had that feels worthy of the name was to play cricket for India. My inner ten-year-old still believes that it is my destiny to open the batting in a test match at Chepauk, take strike at the Wallajah Road end, and drive the third ball of the day past extra cover for four. But, heck, that was not meant to be. Gautam Gambhir and Virender Sehwag are doing that job on my behalf; they're doing the job pretty well.

I shared this dream with tens of millions of Indian boys. The dream had some chance of coming true for about fifty of those boys. "Follow your dream" was excellent advice for that gifted fifty. What about the remaining tens of millions? Mostly, they've made peace with real life, and are getting on with their careers as Business Systems Analysts, or Sales Managers or tax lawyers.

Sure, the Business Systems Analysts and Sales Managers need direction, purpose, meaning and fulfullment in their work-lives too. But when an everyday professional is looking for direction, when she is at a career crossroads and asking herself what to do next, asking her to "follow her dream" is worse than useless. It provides no insight or intelligence that is relevant to the here and now, and makes mockery of her childhood dream to be a ballerina, or cowboy, or cricketer or whatever.

A colleague of mine came up with a much more useful formulation to provide direction to his own career, an outside-in view rather than the inside-out view of the "Follow your dream" merchants. His take was, "I try to put myself in a place where lots of good things are happening around me. If I do, chances are, good things will happen to me." It is hard to predict what those good things will be, except that it will not be an India cap. But, heck, maybe that is real life.

Diseased?

Tiger Woods is now a patient at Pine Grove, a Behavioural Health and Addiction Services clinic in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

He is on the Gentle Path program, which will help him regain freedom from the disease of sexual addiction. The treatment includes Exercise Fitness Therapy (aerobics, weight training and jogging) and a ROPES course: a combination of an obstacle course and group therapy among the pine trees surrounding Pine Grove. Tiger will also take part in Expressive Therapy, in which the collective mediums of art, movement, music and drama are combined, which should elevate self-esteem through discipline and accomplishment.

This is lovely for Tiger. If art, movement and a ROPES course give him the self-esteem and sense of accomplishment that winning seventeen majors did not, that is marvellous.

The part I find irritating about this story is the way in which meaning is being leached out of language by this psycho-babble. Addict used to mean something.

A hobo on crack whose body-chemistry has changed so much because of the drug that he can't bring himself to eat anymore, that's an addict. That hobo does need some serious medical and behavioural help to get his life back on the rails. A sports superstar sleeping with ten women over eight years? That's not addiction. That would have been unremarkable, if Tiger hadn't successfully cultivated such a wholesome image. Calling Tiger's affairs, or Serena Williams' shopping habit, addictions somehow feels disrespectful to real addicts. It is clearly attractive for PR consultants to present their clients as victims of some terrible disease, but that diminishes the seriousness of the disease itself.

What Tiger probably needs is not a cure from addiction, but penance. The rhythm of sin and atonement, paap and praayashchit in the Indian tradition, are as old as civilization itself. When Arjuna the Pandava broke the rules of his marriage, he sent himself into exile. When Henry II of England needed closure following the murder of Thomas Becket, he performed his penance by kneeling before Becket's tomb in Canterbury cathedral, while every priest or monk in turn struck him with a rod.

Ideas like ritual penance feel odd in our secular times, when it is tempting to medicalize essentially spiritual problems. But it would feel more honest to say that Tiger is doing his penance, rather than try to believe that art, movement and a ROPES course are somehow going to cure him of his libido.