Final NCAA Update

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!

NCAA picks update

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!

Risk v. Reward in NCAAs

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.

Play your NCAA pool like a broker

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.

NBC Nightly News

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

What Happened to Me Last Week

1) Flew to NYC to host a discussion between Chef Grant Achatz and former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold at the New York Public Library. Wired co-sponsored the event, timed to the publication of the Alinea cookbook, which is available for your holiday gift-giving pleasure at Amazon, or at your local bookstore. 2) Looked out into the audience to see a cross-section of the New York foodarati: Tim and Nina Zagat, Jeffery Steingarten, April Bloomfield, Alex and Aki from Ideas in Food, Ed Levine from Serious Eats, and Ruth Reichl.

3) Had a great conversation on stage with Grant and Nathan about cooking, philosophy, and why New York is a tough town for avant garde chefs. Ed Levine called it "a lively, informative, and, as you can imagine, extremely heady panel." Woo! You can listen to our discussion right now; I'm told that video will be available on iTunes before too long.

4) Went out to dinner at WD~50 with Grant and Nathan, Steingarten and Reichl, and some other friends and family of all. 14 courses and many glasses of wine later, we rolled out at about 1:30 AM, having had not only a lovely meal, but a rollicking good time. At one point, I called Kristen to say good night, and told her that she'd never believe who I was sitting next to at dinner: Ruth Reichl. "What are you doing on the phone with me," Kristen said. "Get back in there!"

5) Woke up just hours later to get on a plane home, where I got to see my wonderful wife and two little girls.

It really was just a spectacular couple of days, the sort of experience that you'll never forget. I've been lucky in my career to work with and meet some pretty amazing folks, but this really will go down as one of the highlights.

NYPL Live with Grant Achatz and Nathan Myhrvold

On October 29, 2008, Wired and the New York Public Library will host an event called The Cutting Edge: Tales from the Culinary Frontier.

James Beard-award winning chef Grant Achatz and sous vide guru Nathan Myhrvold will explore the ways that science and technology are transforming our notions of food. Using new tools and techniques, top chefs are creating dishes that range from the simply delicious to the otherworldly, challenging both the mind and palate. Kitchens, once the home of stoves, food processors and not much else, are becoming more like laboratories, stocked with centrifuges and canisters of liquid nitrogen.

Grant Achatz is the chef and owner of Alinea restaurant in Chicago. Nathan Myhrvold is the CEO of Intellectual Ventures and former CTO of Microsoft.

I'll be moderating the discussion, which should be terrific. I've written about both of these guys for Wired, and can't wait to get them together.

Tickets are on sale today!

Week One of Training

(Cross-posted from Bike Geek at Wired.com)

Workout data, 6/16/08 Workout data, 6/18/08 Workout data, 6/20/08

So, the first week of my classes at Endurance is over.

Wow.

Seriously, just wow. I like to think of myself as in decent shape, but doing really intense interval training is a completely different animal than heading out to just tool around on the bike for a couple of hours. That's the point, of course -- training right below and right above your anaerobic threshold is how you get better at riding at it, but it's hard.

It doesn't help that I've been sick for going on two weeks now with some sort of mutant cold that I can't shake. I think it's a fact of life that when you have small kids in the house that there's just going to be a higher level of germ circulation than you might like.

One thing that has become clear is that I need to be religious about stretching and doing other body work outside of class. Boosting my intensity this quickly might not be the smartest thing I've ever done (although so far, I feel pretty decent). But my muscles are definitely tight, especially my IT band, which can be a bugaboo for cyclists as well as runners. Last night, I spent 30 minutes trying to loosen it up with a foam roller, one of those activities that's squarely between helpful and excruciating.

Today's class was particularly tough, especially the last interval set, which was meant to simulate the dreaded Seven Sisters, a particularly annoying set of rolling hills that sit on Ridgecrest Road in Marin County. If you check out the data from the workout, and especially that sawtooth pattern for my heart rate, you can see how I waver back and forth just over and just under my threshold heart rate. Brutial, but no doubt effective.

Before that last interval, I actually felt like I was handling the intensity slightly better than earlier in the week. One benefit of riding indoors is that you can really focus on technique, and making sure that you're activating your hamstrings and glutes as well as your quads as you pedal. I've been concentrating on that.

The other day in class, I had an interesting thought. I was looking around the room, and even though I was dying, it occurred to me that other people in the class felt even worse.

It's perhaps not nice, but their pain somehow made me feel better, and like I might actually be a competitve racer by the time this process is over.

Bike Geek

I've started a series of blog posts over at Wired.com called Bike Geek -- I'll be charting my progress in a cycling training regimen designed to get me ready to race this fall. To read all the posts, you can go to the Bike Geek home page. I'll also try and remember to post links to individual posts here. Here's the start of the first entry:

I used to be a pretty good bike racer. Not a world beater, but competitive at a state-wide level. But that was many years ago. Since then, things like a job and a wife and two kids have cut into my cycling hobby. I used to ride 300 miles a week. Now, I'm lucky to ride a third of that.

But last winter, after over 15 years away from competitive cycling, I tried a cyclocross race. Cross, a melding of road racing and off road racing, is kind of like steeplechase on a bike. You ride, but you also have to carry your bike up steep climbs and over unrideable obstacles. It's kind of absurd, really hard, and an insane amount of fun. One race, and I was hooked.

I decided that I wanted to race cyclocross for the 2008-09 season, and I wanted to be competitive. But with the aforementioned job and family commitments, my time is limited. That means that every moment of training that I do has to be very, very focused on exactly the kind of fitness I need to race; I just don't have any time to waste.

When I raced before, heart rate monitors were just entering the mainstream. Today, the advent of power meters which measure exactly how much work you're doing on your bike, combined with GPS and heart rate, can provide an incredibly detailed portrait of your workouts. In combination with fitness testing, this lets you target your weaknesses exactly, and spend all your time doing exactly what you need to do to improve quickly.

So here's the challenge I've set myself. By the start of cyclocross season in September, I want to be ready to be competitive.

Read the rest at Wired.com.

Worst Gadgets Ever From Wired's Fetish

Brian Lam, the editor of Gizmodo and former Wired gear ninja, writes about our look back at the Worst Gadgets Ever From Wired's Fetish. I'm glad to see he liked it!

Roku Netflix Set Top Box

The big gadget news today is the release of Roku's Netflix movie streaming box. You can check out my review at Wired.com

NPR's Science Friday

Was on NPR on Friday, talking about Google and their cell phone plans. We had a fun discussion -- you can check it out at NPR's website.

NPR: Talk of the Nation

Spent a little time on the phone with NPR yesterday, talking about the collecting and hording instinct that leads to all the crap I have downloaded and saved. Check it out, if you like.

Dick Pound Story in Wired

The new issue of Wired just hit the streets -- it includes a profile I wrote about Dick Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency. The story is also available online.

First things first: There's one factual error in the story which made it way in there during the editing process. The story reads, "Tour winner Floyd Landis tested positive for abnormally high testosterone," which is incorrect. As those who have been following the Landis case closely know, Floyd didn't have abnormally high testosterone; he had an abnormal ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone. In fact, the absolute levels of testosterone in Lansis's system, by my reading of the lab data, were in the normal range. I regret the error made it into print, and we'll get it fixed online after I get back from the holiday.

Now, onto the reaction, and some more thoughts.

Over at Trust but Verify, the essential clearinghouse blog about the Landis case in particular, they write:

Wired runs a long story by Mark McClusky about Mr. Pound, including Landis. It's a double edged article. Email to us about it splits between views that it puffs Pound, vs. it being reasonably fair. It appears to us that it accepts the idea of WADA, but is skeptical of Pound's ability to lead with credibility, highlighting many of his ethically challenged utterances.

I'm surprised to hear that there was email viewing the story as a puff piece about Pound. I think that to read it that way, you have to be utterly convinced that Dick Pound is evil incarnate, and that any attempt to understand the man and his career is puffery.

That's simply not the case. Pound's an easy man to demonize, but in person, I found him sharp and funny and easy to be around. And I think it's important to acknowledge his achievements. They really don't make them like Pound these days. He's a throwback to a different time.

Spinopsys makes this point well in his post about the story:

Pound is entrepreneurial in the old fashioned sense of the word, something seen in his negotiations with the networks and rights holders - the kind who used to build railroads and newspapers - hardheaded, idiosyncratic, demanding, full of bluff and bluster, and not afraid to crack a few heads or eggs in the process of building something new.

I find there's a lot to admire in that sort of drive and determination. But as I hope the story makes clear, there's a difference between being the visionary who can wrangle an organization like WADA into existence, and being the right man to lead it going forward.

Rant Your Head Off takes a moment to analyze the construction of the story:

The article strives for a certain balance between Pound’s legitimate accomplishments, and his inability to live up to the rules he, himself, created. To analyze the reporting a bit, one common technique in journalism is, rather than inject your own opinion, let the subject, him/herself, do the job of pointing out their own foibles. Dick Pound fell right into that trap.

Pound's public statements really are a mystery to me. It seems clear that he thinks that the lawyerly disclaimers he throws in at the start of an interview are enough -- I don't know why he doesn't realize that, from a perception standpoint, they aren't nearly enough. As he says in the article, he views his role as prosecutorial, and that's clear from what he says and how he says it.

And I think that's the clear failing of WADA under Pound. It's turned the system into a adversarial process. I don't know that there's anyone who's happy about the use of performance enhancing drugs in sports, from administrators, to fans, to clean athletes. And I do think that WADA can provide a framework to help decrease the problem.

But right now, the athletes don't trust the system. They see it as arbitrary, and out for blood. Until you have some sort of system that athletes buy into, I don't know that you'll ever get anywhere.

There's also more discussion at the Daily Peloton Forums, where I'm gratified to see that most folks seem to think it was a solid story.

NPR Morning Edition

It turns out that of all the media I've done recently, the one that my colleagues listen to is NPR -- at least seven folks here at work today have told me that they heard this interview, about the limited lifespan of gadgets. Check it out.

One More Interview

This one was radio -- the NPR station in Boston, WBRU, gave me a ring for more hot gadget talk. If you're Real Player-enabled, you can listen to the archived audio.

CNBC Morning Call segment

The McClusky media tour continued on CNBC, where I talked with Liz Claman about some of the best gadgets for the holidays this year. And it turns out, she loves us at Wired magazine, which is nice to hear.

More Media: Attack of the Show

I just want to say, no one told me that the guy I was on with had a mohawk. Because, trust me, I would have said something. Anyway, a fun discussion about the Microsoft Zune media player.

The Today Show!

Yesterday, I spent about a hour talking to the Today show, doing a bunch of shots, b-roll of me sitting at my desk working intently, the whole thing.

Behold, the results! Seven seconds of yours truly, starting at 2:10 if you're impatient.

Seriously, though, it was a lot of fun to learn more about how a segment like this is put together, and to be part of it.

Everybody Loves Orcs

I somehow neglected to post this link earlier: I had a short, hopefully amusing piece in the April issue of Wired. We had put together a special issue, edited by Will Wright, about the world of Games; my very modest contribution was a look at the protypical videogame villian, the orc. This is what happens when you have a silly idea in a meeting one day and mention it to your boss.

Dungeons & Dragons, 1974
Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson included orcs in their tabletop role-playing system. From D&D, orcs go on to overrun nearly every fantasy RPG despite their -2 penalty on charisma.

More links coming soon to online versions of two stories I wrote for the May issue of Wired.