As always, it seemed like it went by in about a millisecond -- here's the little piece I just did at CNBC talking about display technology:
I'm just tickled that my feature story on Nike+ and the data-driven revolution in athletics is the cover story this month at Wired.
I think it's probably the best thing I've ever written -- the product of months of research, thinking, and draft after draft. Here's one of my favorite sections:
The Nike+ sensor consists of just three parts. There's an accelerometer that detects when your foot hits and leaves the ground, calculating that all-important contact time. There's a transmitter that sends the information to a receiver, one that's either clipped onto an iPod nano or built into the second-generation iPod touch. And there's the battery. That's what Nike+ is.
What's more interesting is what Nike+ isn't. There's no GPS that automatically tracks your routes—if you want to map your run, you have to do it manually on the Nike site. There's no heart rate monitor, so even though you know how far and how fast you've traveled, you don't know what level of cardiovascular exertion it required. "We really wanted to separate ourselves from that sort of very technical, geeky side of things," Tchao says. "Everyone understands speed and distance."
In other words, Nike+ isn't a perfect tool; it wasn't designed to be. But it's good enough, and more crucially, it's simple. Nike learned a huge lesson from Apple: The iPod wasn't a massive hit because it was the most powerful music player on the market but because it offered the easiest, most streamlined user experience.
But that simple, dual-variable tracking can lead to novel insights, especially once you have so many people feeding in data: The most popular day for running is Sunday, and most Nike+ users tend to work out in the evening. After the holidays, there's a huge increase in the number of goals that runners set; this past January, they set 312 percent more goals than the month before.
There's something even deeper. Nike has discovered that there's a magic number for a Nike+ user: five. If someone uploads only a couple of runs to the site, they might just be trying it out. But once they hit five runs, they're massively more likely to keep running and uploading data. At five runs, they've gotten hooked on what their data tells them about themselves.
Huge thanks to all the people at Nike who took time to talk to me, and everyone at Wired who made it a much better story -- especially Thomas Goetz, whose editing and advice was crucial in the story's success.
Had a fun conversation earlier today on CNN.com's "Blogger Bunch" about the launch of the iPhone 3G S and some of our favorite apps. Weird to do an interview over Skype, and had a couple of technical problems, which led to me not hearing some of the questions! Check it out below, or on CNN.com.
Chris Hardwick from G4 was up at the Apple Keynote speech yesterday, and I was one of the gadget talking heads he grabbed to sound off on Apple's announcements. Check the clip out!
A big week around here. First, last Thursday, Wired won three National Magazine Awards. We won General Excellence, Design, and Magazine Section, for the front of the book Start section. Here's a quote from the judges' comment on the GenEx award:
In its 16th year, Wired continues to evolve as the most innovative and sophisticated guide to how technology is changing the world. Ranging across business, entertainment, science and culture, its mix is surprising and intuitive, articulated with graphic attitude and old-fashioned reporting. Wired is sometimes hilarious, often ironic, relentlessly smart and always engaging.
I'm just so darn proud to work here, with such amazingly talented people. And getting recognized by your peers is really gratifying.
And if that wasn't enough, the Alinea cookbook, which I wrote for, won the James Beard Foundation Award for the best book about "Cooking from a Professional Point of View." We beat out the latest from Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal, which is hard to imagine.
Thanks to Grant and Nick for pulling me into the project, and for making it so fun and so rewarding.
I now have to come up with something for next week.
I did an interview with Evan Kleiman at KCRW a couple of weeks ago about the intersection of food and technology. The show's finally up online. I'm on at about the 15 minute mark.
You can follow both Evan and I on Twitter. She's @evankleiman, and I'm @markmcc.
In a sport built around years of tradition, one of my favorites in cycling is the rainbow jersey. Each year, a world champion is crowned in each discipline of the sport, from road racing to mountain bike to cyclo-cross. Beyond the prestige of being recognized as the world champ, the winner gets another honor -- the right to wear a special jersey for a year.
It's one of those cool things that gives cycling its character -- when you're a kid racing, it's easy to dream of someday slipping on a rainbow jersey (although, you soon learn that it's not going to happen. At least, that's what I learned).
Now, some companies will actually sell you a replica of the world champion's jersey, one that you can put on as you go out on your training ride. Call me cranky, but this legitimately bums me out. I actually feel like companies shouldn't even be allowed to sell them -- the only way you should be able to get a rainbow jersey should be to earn it by being the best in the world.
But beyond that, who on earth would buy one and wear it? There must be a market, but for me it's oddly disrespectful. The people who wear the rainbow stripe on merit have sacrificed much of their lives in pursuit of it; somehow, dropping $100 for a replica seems like the worst sort of cluelessness.
So, I was down at Sea Otter on Friday, driving into the parking lot on a back road. As I get closer to the venue, I see someone on a mountain bike, wearing a world champ's jersey. I start cursing under my breath, and pull alongside him, fully ready to shake my head ruefully at him.
And it's Christophe Sauser. The mountain bike world champion.
So, I guess that's OK if he's wearing one.
So, that game was a dog last night -- congrats to an utterly-dominating North Carolina team that just ran Michigan State out of the building. After five minutes, it was over. One final update on the NCAA picks I outlined at the start of the tournament. The high-risk, high-reward value method I advocated lived up to the high-risk part: it finished in just the fifth percentile nationwide in ESPN's contest.
Meanwhile, the picks based strictly on KenPom's ratings finished in the 60th percentile. Which is obviously good, but won't win you a thing in your pool.
The winning entry, by the way, missed five games total in the tournament, and had 15 of the final 16 teams correct, and was perfect after that point. Which is pretty damn good.
So, the strategy didn't work this year, but we'll do a little work in the McClusky math labs before next years tournament. Math will show us the way! I promise!
No, not Heaven's Gate. The Guiding Light premiered on January 25, 1937 on NBC Radio. Pending some last minute savior, the final episode will air on CBS television on September 18, 2009.
As of March 27, 15,638 episodes of the show have aired, which I'm reasonably sure makes Guiding Light the longest, most complex story that humans have ever told one another.
Back in my narrative theory nerd days in college, I spent a lot of time studying serial narrative, and the unusual demands that the form puts on the story. Nothing's been around as long as GL, and here's hoping that the producers can find some way to keep the story alive.
So, after the weekend, the Value Bracket in the 27th percentile nationwide -- and has lost two of the teams in its final eight: West Virginia and Arizona State. As a comparison, picking with the straight KenPom projections puts you in the 63rd percentile.
Also, a great comment on the original post about this way of picking teams, from my neighbor Ariel, who brings the math hammer down:
To add some hard numbers to this analysis: if you believe the nat’l bracket will put you in the 90th %ile, you have probability = .9^n of winning your bracket, assuming that your competition is drawn randomly from the national distribution of bracketologists, and where ‘n’ is the size of your tourney pool. If your pool has 25 contestants, your chances stand at .9^25 = 7.18% using the national bracket; with 100 contestants, your chances drop to .0026% (26 thousandths…). If using KenPom raises your performance to the 95th %ile, your odds rise sharply in a pool of 25 people to 27.73%! On the other hand, in a pool of 100 you’re still looking at .59%, which is a lot better than before, but which would still require playing in a LOT of pools to realize the edge reliably.
Thanks, Ariel!
I did say that the strategy I outlined for an NCAA pool was high-risk, and potentially high-reward. Unfortunately, risk is the clear winner right now. West Virginia, which was one of the most undervalued teams in the entire tournament, just lost their first-round game to the University of Dayton. Great news for the Flyers and their fans (like my grandfather, a Dayton native).
But bad news for the Value Bracket, which just lost one of its Elite Eight teams. So far, the Value Bracket is in just the 12th percentile nationally in the ESPN pool.
Ouch. But not a super shock to me.
Link to Google Docs spreadsheet for this post The financial industry isn't the most popular thing in the world these days, but if you're looking for an edge in your NCAA tournament pool, taking a tip from those dastardly hedge-fund managers might pay off.
Slate ran a great story yesterday taking about the problem, and opportunity, in most basketball pools. Generally, the collective wisdom will start to coalesce as the size of a pool grows. In ESPN's bracket contest, which gets millions of entries, you get a great representation of the widsom of the crowd when it comes the tournament (The crowd thinks that North Carolina is the choice to cut down the nets in Detroit).
The crowd, it turns out is pretty damn good at picking the bracket. In 2008, the national bracket finished in the 80th percentile in the ESPN contest. In 2006, it was in the 90th percentile.
But here's the thing -- if you make the same picks as the crowd, you have a very limited chance of winning your pool. Finishing in the 80th or 90th percentile is great, but doesn't win you the pool. If you stick with the crowd, you have little to no chance to score points that other players won't (Imagine a pool filled with identical brackets, to take the point to its illogical conclusion). What you need to do is make smart choices that are contrary to the broader wisdom of the market -- hence, the financial metaphor.
So, how do you do that? I've used the team rankings from the indefatigable Ken Pomeroy, the dean of college basketball stats geeks. Pomeroy's ratings use the concept of offensive and defensive efficiency -- how good they are at scoring each time they have the ball, and how good they are at stopping the other team from scoring on each possession -- to come up with a theoretical winning percentage (Read much more about Ken's ratings at his blog).
The idea is that you have a more objective view of a teams strengths and weaknesses, isolated from all the factors like the quality of their competition, where the games are played, their luck, etc. No statistical system is perfect, but Ken's is pretty darn good, and seems like the best place to start.
Now we can line up the probablity that the KenPom system gives a team to reach a certain round of the tournament with the probablity the crowd has assigned to it. Check the difference between them, and you start to see which teams are over-valued, and which are under-valued.
As I mentioned, the ESPN favorite is North Carolina, which is currently picked to win the national title on 27.9% of all entries. But Pomeroy only assigns the Tar Heels a 9.62% chance of winning the whole thing. That's an asset that's highly inflated.
On the other hand, take Gonzaga. Pomeroy thinks the Zags have a 7.26% chance of winning the tournament, while only 0.6% of ESPN players have picked them. That's an undervalued asset.
Of course, this is a high-risk, high-reward strategy. Stick with the crowd and you probably won't win, although you likely won't finish last. But if that 7% chance of Gonzaga winning the tournament pans out and you're the only one who picked them, you're almost certain to win your pool.
With the risk so low in a pool, there's no reason to play it down the middle -- as Chris Wilson writes in Slate, there's no difference in the payout in most pools between finishing fourth, and four-hundredth.
How do you do it? I've compiled a Google Docs spreadsheet comparing the KenPom numbers with the current ESPN numbers for every team and every round in the tournament. For each round, you'll see the percentage from both sources, and then the delta between them. Teams highlighted in green are undervalued in the ESPN pool compared to the KenPom ratings, and are worth a look (Huge thanks to ESPN and Ken for making all this data available).
I'll be entering a ESPN collective wisdom bracket in its pool, as well as a bracket that's built from this analysis -- we'll see which does better. You can subscribe to my Twitter feed, where I'll post updates throughout the tournament on how they're doing, and I'll post updates here as well.
Like I said, it's high-risk, high-reward. But it's worth a shot.
Good lord, sorry about the delay on this. At CES, I was interviewed for the NBC Nightly News -- if you like watching two month old news clips, you're in luck! Just wanted to archive a copy of it here....
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
When I got a call from my friend Carmella at Specialized Bicycles, asking me if I wanted to go for a mountain bike ride with Ned Overend, I struggled to explain to my co-workers what that meant. "It's like someone inviting you to go to the batting cage with Babe Ruth," I said, which helped some folks, but maybe another sports metaphor wasn't the solution.
Overend, for the non-cyclist, is one of the greatest mountain bike racers of all time -- hell, he's one of the greatest endurance athletes of all time. In 1990, he won the first-ever official mountain bike world championship in his adopted hometown of Durango, Colorado; that same year he was inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame.
"Ned wants to ride at Tamarancho," said Carmella. "You interested?"
Yes, yes I was. Never mind that this would be about my fifth mountain bike ride of my life -- when you get a chance like this, you take it, pride be dammed.
And thankfully, Ned was just about as nice a guy as could be imagined. I had met him earlier this year at Specialized's road product launch, but that was a big group setting. This would be just the two of us, banging along Marin County singletrack.
At the first, I struggled. Riding off-road, and on a mountain bike, it just super different than the road riding I've done for decades now. But I had (in a huge understatement) a very good teacher there in Ned, and he was kind enough to take it easy and try to help me learn.
What a lot of it comes down to is balance -- in fact, his top suggestion to getting better on a mountain bike is to practice trackstands. "You're moving so slowly some times that if you have better balance, you can pick a line and take your time," he said.
Over the course of our ride, things definitely got more fluid for me. One of the big things was just the chance to ride behind Ned, and see how he handled various sections of terrain.
I got this mountain bike to work on my technical skills for cyclocross, and I can tell it's going to be hugely beneficial. The terrain is just so much harder to deal with that if I can get decent at handling it, those skills should really help me next 'cross season.
Overall, just a super fun day. I'm realizing a couple of things as I sit here writing this. First, I've now ridden with a both a road and mountain bike World Champion cyclist, which is kind of neat.
Also, I'm hoping my friend Scot is reading this -- he's another MTB Hall of Famer, and I have to get up to Santa Rosa to ride with him ASAP.
So, the other day I decided that I was going to jump into this whole Twitter thing full force, and see how it goes. If you're up for random news and observation, you can check out my Twitter stream at: twitter.com/markmcc.
The Last RaceOriginally uploaded by liveplayride
So here we are at the end of the year, and with it, the end of my cyclocross season. I had thought that I might make it to a couple more races after the first of the year, but the schedule just doesn't make that look like it's going to work.
At the top line, I'm pretty happy with the results of my first year. I feel like I was competitive in most of the races I entered, and that every time I raced, I learned a little bit more about how to manage a cross race.
Here's how the numbers added up on all the data I collected durning training:
- Time ridden: 61:43:08
- Miles ridden: 1,284
- Calories burned (est.): 74,286
That's over the course of six months of tracked rides, a total of 59 rides and races. I think that's pretty good volume of training, although the milage isn't particularly high.
Part of that was from the strategy of using high-intensity interval training as the bulk of my work, and the results from the work I did at Endurance Performance Training Center were great. I raised my Lactate Threshold by 25 watts over the course of six months, which feels like very nice progress indeed. The top end power didn't have the same improvement, but that's also much harder skill to train.
So how did that translate to racing results? Here's a summary:
- 10 races
- 6 finishes in top third of field
- 3 top ten finishes
- Highest placing: 2nd
- Best percentage beaten: 88.7% (8th out of 70)
- Crashes: 6
- DNFs: 2
At the midpoint of the season, I was in the top ten in the standings for Mens C riders in the Bay Area Super Prestige Series -- the biggest cross series in the area. Unfortunately, I missed the last two races of the season with conflicts, which is a real bummer. I think that I would have easily stayed in the top ten for the series, and could have maybe found my way into the top five.
Season highlights? Best race for me was the BASP race at Candlestick Point. The rare rainy day made it feel like "real" cyclocross weather, and I had a blast. I also had my best race of the year, finishing 8th in a field of 70, and really riding well in tough conditions. I remember from my earlier racing days that I kind of liked riding in the rain, and that seems to have held true. Other highlights: podium in Livermore on the single speed. Meeting great teammates. Encouragement from a cool community of riders -- when someone like Josh Snead, who's one of the top riders in the area is posting advice on your blog, that's really fun, and helpful.
Lowlights? The early season festival of crashing, for sure. After abrading off a lot of my shin in my first race, totally jacking up my ribs in my second, and then sliding through a school courtyard in my third, it was apparent that I have a lot of work to do on the technical side. Crashing is always part of bike racing, but I was on the ground way too much, and those dings add up, not only in pain, but also in frustration.
A big part of what I hope to do this offseason is work on those skills. I'm going to do a lot of mountain biking if I can, so I can get a little more used to the uncertain traction that you face all the time in cross races. I think that if I can improve the technical skills this year that my fitness will allow me to be pretty competitive as I move up in class next year to the 35+ B category.
I owe a couple of huge thanks yous. First, to Claire McGowan, Charlie Livermore, Clark Natwick and especially Patrick Maher at Endurance Performance Training Center. Claire was kind enough to get me the chance to train there, Charlie and Clark were generous with their time and advice, and Patrick was the coach who got me through those three interval workouts a week. If you're a cyclist in the Bay Area with big ambitions but limited time, you owe it to yourself to check out Endurance PTC.
Also, big thanks to my colleagues at Wired for not making fun of my attire as I went out a lunch to ride, and to my teammates on Kaiser Permanente/Team Oakland who supported me at the races with advice and hand ups. Andrew Yee at Cyclocross Magazine was a great resource.
But the biggest thanks, as ever, to my wife Kristen, and our girls Kate and Paige. Thanks for letting me train and race, and for the cheers and signs. I can't wait for next season.
"There's nothing clever or smart about being too cool to care." --from Nathaniel Ward's super smart post about (amongst other things) hecklers at bike races.
Over the Barriers
Originally uploaded by liveplayride
OK, let's acknowledge right off the bat that there were only 5 guys in our race -- the singlespeed B/C race at the Livermore series this weekend. Not exactly a huge field to try and work one's way through.
But still. Second place. My first podium finish in a bike race in I don't know how long.
A very chilly morning out in Livermore when we arrived, in the mid-40s, which now that I'm an honorary Northern Californian seems like the Arctic. I had brought both my regular cross bike, as well as this super-cool new Raleigh Rainier singlespeed that the folks there sent me to try out (Thanks, Brian and Susan!). I decided that it was time to take the singlespeed plunge, and registered for that race.
Felt pretty good in the warmup, especially since all of us here at McClusky World HQ seem to have been fighting a cold since Thanksgiving. I didn't know what to expect racing a singlespeed, so I decided that I'd just gun it, and hold on as well as I could.
First two laps were good, as I was about 10 seconds ahead of the second place rider in the singlespeed field, my teammate Brian Birch. Brian's a super strong guy who just finished in the top five of the 55+ Masters series in the Bay Area, and who won two Masters rowing national titles last year. Basically, as I told him after the race, he's a walking lung.
Looking at my data from the race, I was very consistent in my laps throughout the race. Brian was able to bridge the gap up to me and pass me, but I jumped on his wheel for a lap and half, never able to find a place to jump past him. I felt good, but I was learning the importance of gearing in a singlespeed race. I was spun out in several spots on the course, and with a slightly higher gear, I think I could have put in an attack that would have challenged Brian.
It wasn't to be, however. My last chance was to get him right before the line, at a set of barriers followed by a slight hill, a right turn, and then the finish. I sprinted over the barriers, pulling slightly ahead, but as I tried to remount, I managed to land to the side of my saddle, and went down. Brian cruised in for the win, and I hopped back on the bike, and came in for second.
So, hey, first and second place for Team Oakland, which was nice.
Singlespeed is definitely a blast. I need to get a higher gear on the bike, but I'm thrilled to have it to play with, and to have gotten on the podium. Next week, I think I'm back out to Livermore to race the Men's C race, and there's not much left to the season after that....
So, what did you have for dinner Tuesday? Here's what Kristen and I ate:
The occasion was the final in a series of three dinners that Grant Achatz of Alinea and Thomas Keller of French Laundry and Per Se, held to celebrate the publication of their new books, Alinea and Under Pressure.
Now, you might have seen me mention about a jillion times that I helped write Alinea (which makes a great holiday gift!). One of the perks of working on the book is that Kristen and I were invited to attend the dinner, which is one of those moments where your work provides you with opportunities and experiences that you'd never imagine.
It was a pretty magical evening, one that the Mrs. has captured nicely over at her blog. (Of course, there's what happened after dinner with the kids, which you can also read about there.) There was such a buzz in the air, people just completely over the moon to be at TFL for the dinner, and all the front of the house staff and chefs just as excited as we were.
Some of the individual dishes were knockouts. Grant's new chestnut dish, with quince, chocolate, and a bacon doughnut, was spectacular, a perfect distillation of his ability to balance the savory and sweet in a way that very few chefs in the world can. Keller's beef dish, cooked sous vide of course, showed the power of the technique, resulting in a perfect medium-rare throughout, powerfully flavored and perfectly textured.
But in the midst of the meal, I started to realize that there's something lost when you combine the vision of two chefs like this. A meal at Alinea or French Laundry is a completely considered experience -- not just the food is meticulously prepared, but so is the room itself, the attitude of the wait staff, the lighting, the music, everything.
Alinea is about challenging you, throwing you off balance and then righting you. The French Laundry is much more comfortable, suavely sophisticated and welcoming.
So when you put food from one context into another, it felt a little weird. Maybe it's that I'm too inside the world of Alinea after all the time spent working with Grant on the book, but his food, coming to the table without the wit and snap of Alinea's servers, felt ever so slightly out of place to me. Delicious, but not quite the same as it is where it's created to be.
This certainly isn't a complaint, and the sense didn't diminish my appreciation of what will be one of the meals of my lifetime. But it was an interesting realization; I had never really thought about it quite that way before.
After dinner, we went back to the kitchen to hang out with the chefs, and with Alinea owner Nick Kokonas and his wife Dagmara. As we sat there sipping champagne, talking to these people who I've come to consider my friends over the past several years, I reflected on just how amazingly lucky I am to be part of this world, and to have these chances.
Kristen asked if I'd be embarrassed to ask Grant and Thomas to take a photo with us. Of course I wouldn't be -- I wanted to capture this moment as much as anyone:
From Jeffery Steingarten's review of Alinea:
You can read the whole piece online. I'm just totally over the moon, getting such a nice compliment from the dean of grumpy food writers.