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FLIFF
November 30, 2006 08:43 PM
The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival was a nice event. I got to award the Mallen Prize to my former graduate student and colleague, David Walls, and give a little speech about him and the implications of his (and my) research. Few heard it as the audience was involved in their own conversations in the large room. All the speakers had this problem. No matter, David and a few guests near the front who mattered heard it.
I also met Jason Squire, the editor of The Movie Business Book, which has gone through several editions. I sold many issues in my Movie class at UCI. It was a pleasure to meet him and all the other new attendees of the Workshop at the Festival. You know which one of the two above is me.
Me giving my talk. A lot of hand waving. Where is the information on that slide?
LINK · The Movie Business · Comments (1)
The State of the World
The Spectator has a fine summary by Allister Heath of Goklany’s, The Improving State of the World, published by the Cato Institute (they published my [co-authored] book on electromagnetic spectrum years ago).
You must be subscribed to the Spectator to read the whole article, but subscription is free. Go to The Spectator to sign up.
Here is a brief part of Allister Heath's summary of the book. It reminds me of the Skeptical Environmentalist by Lumborg, which was the first to actually look at measures of health and well-being and draw the same conclusions.
For billions of people around the world, these are the best of times to be alive. From Beijing to Bratislava, more of us are living longer, healthier and more comfortable lives than at any time in history; fewer of us are suffering from poverty, hunger or illiteracy. Pestilence, famine, death and even war, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, are in retreat, thanks to the liberating forces of capitalism and technology.If you believe that such apparently outlandish claims cannot possibly be true, think again. In a book which will trigger intense controversy when it is published later this month, the acclaimed American economist Indur Goklany, former US delegate to the United Nations’ intergovernmental panel on climate change, demonstrates that on every objective measure of the human condition — be it life expectancy, food availability, access to clean water, infant mortality, literacy rates or child labour — well-being and quality of life are improving around the world.
A remarkable compendium of inform-ation at odds with the present fashionable pessimism, Goklany’s The Improving State of the World, published by the Cato Institute, reveals that, contrary to popular belief, it is the poorest who are enjoying the most dramatic rise in living standards. Refuting a central premise of the modern green movement, it also demonstrates that as countries become richer, they also become cleaner, healthier and more environmentally conscious.
Needless to say, Goklany has already been accused of naive Panglossianism by the doom and gloom merchants, to whom all must always be for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. This is deeply unfair to Goklany: like the rest of us, he is concerned at the shameful deprivation, disease and misery that continue to affect hundreds of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa, North Korea and all the rest of the world’s horror spots. But he argues convincingly that to recognise their horrific plight should not prevent us from also acknowledging our progress in liberating even larger numbers of people from extreme poverty.
We should be especially proud of the fact that humanity has never been better fed: the daily food intake in poor countries has increased by 38 per cent since the 1960s to 2,666 calories per person per day on average. The population of those countries has soared by 83 per cent during that time, so this is a stupendous achievement which puts the final nail in the coffin of Malthusianism.
Together with a 75 per cent decline in global food prices in real terms in the second half of the 20th century, caused by improved agricultural productivity and freer trade, fewer people than ever before are going hungry. The rate of chronic undernourishment in poor countries has halved to 17 per cent, compared with a little over a third 45 years ago. In wealthy countries, the cost of essential foods has collapsed, with the price of flour, bacon and potatoes relative to incomes dropping by between 82 and 92 per cent over the past century; similar trends are now visible in developing countries too.
There is still a long way to go; but never before in human history have so many people been liberated from extreme poverty so quickly. The number of people subsisting on $1 a day has declined from 16 per cent of the world population in the late 1970s to 6 per cent today, while those living on $2 a day dropped from 39 per cent to 18 per cent. In 1820, 84 per cent of the world’s population lived in absolute poverty; today this is down to about a fifth.
LINK · Everything · Comments (11)
Muscle Breakdown in an Elite Runner
From Tom, a reader in New Jersey, this story.
This is one of the mechanisms that diminishes muscle mass in runners. This case was more severe. The breakdown is a continuous process during a long exertion in any sport. But, it takes a large effort to go this far. There may also have been other elements, as noted in the story.
Of course, elite runners ask too much of themselves. But, so do many of us in other endeavors. I have learned to play and enjoy what I do, not push limits.
LINK · Endurance Training: Death, Injury, and Risk ~ · Evolutionary Fitness ~ · Sports · Comments (1)
Kettleballs and a Dumb Exercise
November 29, 2006 11:32 AM
Back from a trip.
For those of you who are interested in Kettleball training, here is a new source of equipment and routines Kettleballs
Not to be overly critical here, but here is a dumb exercise from the same source. So, be skeptical of what you read even from sources that claim to be "scientific" in their recommendations.
Do this exercise at your peril. I would never do it.
Dr. McGill's research shows that this exercise puts a load on your spine that is above any of the loads his lab calculated, and the highest of these were almost surely damaging.
This is the exercise that hurt Wonder Woman. Look at the long levers sending their loads directly into the spine. Add the weight of the ball and wonder why anyone thinks this is good for you. As McGill says, most exercises that are done to protect the spine damage it.
I do have some concerns about the spinal loads of some of the loaded reaching movements used by Kettleballers. Remember, the spine must compress to keep the stack of disks from slipping. Compression combined with flexion is the surest mechanism McGill found for producing disk herniation.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness ~ · Sports · Comments (10)
Diet or Exercise for Weight Loss?
November 25, 2006 09:36 AM
There has been a controversy over whether diet or exercise works best for weight loss. It has been a bit misguided, in my opinion, because it is caloric deficit or what I call negative energy balance that causes weight loss. I show this in my "Why We Get Fat" paper above under the Research link. Weight training exercise is the best way of all, but most weight trainers do not let themselves go into negative energy balance. This is because they are trying to add muscle mass. I think I may have convinced you that there is much that is wrong about theory and practice in body building, but the point applies with even more force when weight training is used to lose body fat.
Weight training that builds lean body mass when done in a manner that induces a negative energy balance is the superior way to lose fat and improve body composition. It is not a superior way to lose weight, but that is not the goal anyway. You do not lose as much weight because you build muscle, but you lose far more fat.
Improved insulin sensitivity, improved glucose clearance, and altered hormonal profile along with higher basal metabolic rate and improved exercise tolerance are the objectives of a weight loss program through weight training. And nothing works like Evolutionary Fitness in achieving those goals.
Here is one of the first studies to show that exercise is equally effective in weight loss and superior in hormonal action. Dr. Fontana, a member of the study team, was at the Caloric Deprivation conference where I also spoke. The clear goal of any exercise program is to induce negative energy balance and his protocol is the only one I know of that effectively does this in a well-designed experiment.
Here is the abstract and part of the introduction to the paper...
Read More »
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (5)
And Stay Away From Sugar this Thanksgiving
November 23, 2006 09:17 AM
I found this on Dr. Mecola's site. I am a bit skeptical of these dietary surveys and correlations with disease. But, this one has some physiology to back it up: increased insulin secretion promotes pancreatic cancer because it creates a proliferative response in pancreatic cells, particularly the islets. Read the article from AJCN.
And, in case you say "I will binge just this one day," note that the high insulin spike from a meal full of stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, and other starches and simple carbs will amount to a massive assault on your insulin sensitivity. The footprint of that meal will be there for a long time. You will be curiously vulnerable to carb temptations for some time after because your sensitivity is diminished and your circulating insulin will remain elevated. Bat Girl is going through that right now after a trip back east to see her Very Italian family.
The huge insulin spike will also send a signal to reroute blood to your stomach and make you feel sleepy. It will also release serotonin to further increase your drowsiness. Take a walk before you settle down to watch the football games after your nice dinner. And make sure the meal is a time to enjoy your friends and family and count your blessings. The food is secondary.
LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (2)
A Heavy Tale
One of the things to be thankful for today is to be freer of the risk of AIDS than in most other countries. But, even here, politics has interfered with science and prevented the knowledge we all require to protect ourselves and others from the risk of AIDS. I saw one of my best friends die of AIDS because of transfusions of untested blood. Ironically, he wrote a book on the subject and criticized then current policies of failing to test donors and failing further to test inventories of blood stocks for HIV/AIDS. I know my HIV/AIDS status (negative) because I donated blood often for his transfusions. But, I was not always around and he had several surgeries because his joints were damaged from his haemophillia. The failure to test killed him and many others. And it continues to be the weak link in the containment of the AIDS epidemic in Africa.
Here is an update and personal view by someone deeply involved in the battle against ignorance and political correctness, as true in Africa as here and among the charities, governments, and other NGOs, that even now hampers the battle against this fierce disease. From the Kenya Times.
LINK · Everything ~ · Uncertainty · Comments (0)
Marathoners and Skin Cancer
November 21, 2006 12:59 PM
From a reader named Scott comes this interesting article about marathoning and skin cancer. The remarkable thing is the dose-responsiveness of skin cancer to training time; those who trained more showed more cancerous and pre-cancerous skin cells.
It may not be only sun exposure. More likely it is the combination of chronic exposure with suppressed immunity. Free radicals are behind the skin cancer --- a half hour in the sun depletes the Vitamin C content of the epidermis. Marathoners generate a lot of free radicals from their aerobic activity and their glucose-heavy diet. The loss of peripheral circulation (caused by rerouting blood flow to the muscles) would also be a contributing factor because this denies antioxidants to the skin during training.
The list grows...
LINK · Endurance Training: Death, Injury, and Risk ~ · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (5)
Hitting Technique
One of the ignored contributors to home run hitting (and batting average) is technique. I happened across this older article from Sporting News that discussed the evolution of Mark McGwire's hitting technique and plate discipline.
Of course the top hand release works. Manny Ramirez, ARod, and Bonds use it. So do nearly all the premiere home run hitters. I use it in slow pitch softball and it seems to work well. I am hitting the ball farther than ever and top the ball far less now as well.
LINK · Sports · Comments (0)
Negatives, Protein Requirements, and Turnover
November 20, 2006 08:37 PM
An odd fact about exercise and protein requirements is this: aerobic exercise increases your protein needs. Anaerobic exercise decreases them. How could this be true?
The answer also explains why aerobic training diminishes muscle mass.
It isn't that hard, when you understand exercise theory at the Evolutionary Fitness level.
Aerobic exercise uses protein as an energy substrate; it burns protein to supply energy for aerobic exercise. It also diminishes the insulin response to protein intake. Anaerobic exercise induces protein sparing through the release of GH, the protein-sparing hormone. Consequently, aerobic exercisers require more protein than anaerobic exercisers do [W. Evans, Protein Nutrition, Exercise, and Aging: Review in Journal of American College of Nutrition, Vol. 23 (2004)].
Even older people, whose dietary intake of food is limited, require 1.6 g of protein per kilogram of body mass per day. Few, if any, take in this amount. The RDA for older people is half that. Pitiful, I say. Aerobic exercise at the RDA will lead to sacropenia, impoverished muscle mass and poor body composition.
A brief look at the evolutionary evidence would be enough to demonstrate this latest discovery of exercise and nutrition science. But, we already knew this. Our ancestors did little of what passes for aerobic exercise. They walked and engaged in intermittent, intense activities. They got plenty of rest and play. They did not jog or run 10Ks, except for fun and to demonstrate their fitness to others.
Since about half or more of their caloric intake was in wild animal sources, they had protein far beyond the RDA. If you combine aerobic exercise, and no anaerobic, high intensity activities...
Read More »LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (5)
Should My Daughter Run 10Ks?
November 19, 2006 04:48 PM
Mark Christensen (author of Supercar) asked if his daughter should continue to run 10Ks. She finished high among 1500 runners in her first race with only light training.
You might be able to guess my answer. I would say No, she should not continue to run them. Some reasons:
1. She did not collapse and, so, may not have a heart issue that will kill her. But, you may not know for sure. She ought to be screened.
2. Light training is OK, but her next step will be to increase training to do better. If it works, she will do better and then come back and train harder. This positive feedback loop is a non-linear path to ill health and much wasted time.
3. Why would she drop tennis, a beautiful and more healthful sport, for the drudgery and risk of long distance running? I don't get it at all. Any bragging rights she might earn are worthless.
4. It is a highly destructive activity. Ankles, knees, hips, and lower back all take a pounding. She will develop poor posture and progressively grow shorter as her spinal disks compress. Her vascular system will become inflamed and she may develop asthma from the LA basin air and high volume breathing. She will age more rapidly and compromise her immune system. Her stress hormones will elevate and her good hormones will decline.
5. She will become slower unless she adds sprinting into her mix. And she is likely to develop a higher level of body fat, particularly if she begins eating the pitiful foods runners eat.
6. The free radicals produced by running and the glucose heavy foods runners eat will expose her to high oxidative stress. Her mitochondria will take a beating and may eventually go into premature decline (though years later).
7. Her muscle mass will decline as the cells go into their suicide program from the heavy inflammation induced by excessive running.
8. The pretty, happy, and athletic young woman that is your daughter will become a fat, skinny, compulsive, overtrained and prematurely aged woman with a slight scowl on her face in place of that smile if she becomes a chronic runner.
9. Her risks of brain cancer will rise as will the likelihood she may be injured in traffic. Or accosted out on a run.
10. It takes too much time and is no fun.
What ever possessed people to do this? As I said in my Charles Staley interview, I believe jogging and running were encouraged by lab research that was seriously incomplete. Researchers were able only to do the lab testing on runners and cyclists because the methods were available for this and the models are far simpler than what is required to do anarobic research. Running is steady state work, power activities are non-steady state and far harder to model. Only now are tools for non-linear modeling of human activity becoming available.
LINK · Endurance Training: Death, Injury, and Risk ~ · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (21)
Charles Staley Interview
November 16, 2006 11:27 AM
Charles and I spoke for about an hour about Evolutionary Fitness. Many of you will know the content if you have been here for long. Newcomers may find it helpful. Charles was a well-informed and lively interviewer. I was talking out on the back patio having just come out of the office for a breather from preparing for my trip and talks.
You can hear the interview at this link Art talking about Evolutionary Fitness
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (4)
Fixed?
Maybe I have fixed my site. I found over 13,000 track backs cluttering my disk space and denying me access because I was over my limit. They were all junk, ads posted as though they were trackbacks. How crass of someone to do that.
To delete them I had to delete the entries where they occured. Otherwise it would have been tedious deleting the trackbacks individually. I would have been here all week doing that. So, I have deleted and then reposted these earlier entries. Track backs are now disabled.
Now, I can get to the body building thoughts next. I can assure an earlier commenter that he is wrong: it is the muscle micro tears that stimulate growth. And pain relievers reduce the building response. But, he is right, there is an easier way to stimulate growth. I have done it for years and the research now shows the wisdom of my strange practices (according to other people who learn from magazines and other people).
LINK · Everything · Comments (0)
Movie investors
A paradox in the movies is that their rate of return is around 4 percent and the risk is higher than most industries. Why are investors drawn to a business with such a poor return when the risk is so large? In his LA Times article, Chew, Spit, Repeat, Patrick Kiger draws on my research to talk about how Hollywood chews up new entrants and investors.
The high risk and low return go together quite naturally when you realize, as I show in my book Hollywood Economics, that the return distribution is dominated by a few huge movies. The returns probability distribution is a Pareto distribution. It has an infinite variance and the mean is up around the 75th percentile. This means most movies earn negative or small returns and a few high grossing movies earn the bulk of the positive returns. Thus, the expected value is far above the most likely outcome (the mode of the probability distribution) and the expected value has no predictive value (because the variance about the expectation is infinite).
The expected value is a large sample property that cannot be attained with the small number of movies an investor can produce, or that even a studio can produce in a single year. In these small portfolios, the most likely outcome dominates and it is located near zero.
Why then do investors still flock into the business? They may suffer what I called the "illusion of expectation" in my Journal of Business article: the expected return is dominated by about 6 percent of the movies and this gives a high expectation relative to the most probable outcome, which is the one most movies will earn. It is an error to base investment decisions in this business on the expectation. And, the infinite variance should be a warning to all that any sample statistics, such as the mean from past movies, is volatile and almost 'wild' in behavior. This means you can see anything you want to by selecting the time frame or movies in the sample.
LINK · The Movie Business · Comments (0)
My Harvard talk on extreme statistics in the movies and pharmaceuticals
The figure is a log log plot of the probability density of motion picture revenues; the log of probability density is shown on the Y axis and the log of motion picture revenue is shown on the X axis. This is a stable distribution with a tail weight of 1.33 and an infinite variance. Note the long tail to the right, where the blockbusters are located. These are low probability events of large magnitude that are so far out on the tail they could never occur in a Gaussian world (Titanic was about 20 standard deviations above the mean). They can and do occur in the Levy Stable world of the movies.
Pharmaceutical firms look for blockbusters, just as movie studios do. The Technology Management group at Harvard Business School noted this similarity and invited me to speak on modeling the wild statistics of the movies and what that might mean for the behavior and organization of the pharmaceutical industry. I gave a similar, but less lengthly and detailed talk at UCLA on the same topic. The slides for the talk are available as a PDF file. Unfortunately, it lacks many of the tables and graphics on the movies. But, it does have some fascinating statistical properties of pharmaceuticals that show dramatic similarity to the movies.
Looking through the slides you will find one that shows the growth (and decay) rate of pharma companies is Levy Stable distributed; the distribution is leptokurtotic and has infinite variance. It is known that the growth rate of pharma companies depends primarily on a blockbuster in their portfolio. This is true of the movies as well; a single movie can change the market share of a distributor dramatically. The downside of this blockbuster effect is that a firm's sales can plummet with the withdrawal of a single drug such as we have seen with Vioxx and Bextra.
Click here for the talk Hollywood Economics: Dealing with `Wild' Uncertainty in the Movies and Pharmaceuticals.
LINK · The Movie Business ~ · Uncertainty · Comments (0)
Review of Hollywood Economics
Orley Ashenfelter, Professor of Economics at Princeton and the former editor of the American Economic Review wrote a brief review of my book in Barron's (December 4, 2004). Here is the gist of what he had to say.
"This is a remarkable assembly of two decades of Arthur De Vany's efforts to study the movie industry using the tools of modern economics. Okay, movie lover, if that sounds dry, what about a hard-headed, dollars-and-cents answer to film critic Michael Medved's question: "Does Hollywood make too many R-rated movies?" De Vany's answer: a resounding "yes."
His answer isn't based on a red state versus blue state discussion, but on careful analysis showing that, at the production rates in the period he examined, G-rated movies had lower risk at each rate of return than did R-rated movies. From 1985 to 1996, De Vany found, Hollywood churned out more than 1,000 R-rated movies. If it had made more than a mere 60 (you read that number right) G-rated movies in that stretch, De Vany asserts, the industry would have been far better off economically.
Hollywood Economics brings to the movies what some call the New Economics of Art and Culture. A key ingredient in his approach is what he considers the industry's key characteristic, what screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, A Bridge Too Far) calls the "Nobody Knows Anything" principle. The basic idea: In Hollywood, a movie's revenues, costs-and thus returns-are extremely uncertain.
It appears that De Vany came to appreciate both the evidence supporting this proposition and the power of its implications only late in his academic career. (Earlier this year, I met him over dinner to discuss his work. A retired economics professor from the University of California at Irvine, De Vany, who's in the same age bracket as Clint Eastwood, looks a bit like that actor-and every bit as fit!)
The kind of risk De Vany describes is associated with the Stable Paretian hypothesis, in that once you know that revenue, costs or returns have reached level X, the expected value of future levels increases in level X.
Basically, it's about exponentials: The downside is called the "angel's nightmare." De Vany estimates, for example, that if you have spent $20 million on a film and are already over budget, you shouldn't expect to spend less than $32 million before you finish! The upside: Once you reach a certain level of revenue, you can expect even more, which leads to the virtually unimaginable financial success of movies like Titanic.
One of the most fascinating parts of Hollywood Economics is De Vany's analysis of superstar actors and directors. Due to the nature of the blockbuster phenomenon, a director like James Cameron (Titanic was his biggest hit) has made films with total gross revenues that equal those of movies by Ron Howard, who's made twice as many films.
On the other hand, De Vany shows that it's far more likely for a blockbuster movie to produce a superstar than for the presence of a superstar to produce a blockbuster movie.
He also argues that paying superstars a sum equal to the increase in revenues they're expected to generate usually means a movie won't be profitable. Indeed, in one chapter, he shows that not all superstars are worth such payments. Though Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise and Clint Eastwood may be; Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro or Bruce Willis may not be.
As venture capitalist Kip Hagopian (a/k/a B. Kipling Hagopian, producer of the blockbuster Ron Howard-Mel Gibson hit Ransom) told me last summer, the most difficult part of the Hollywood process is "to get the movie made."
My advice: Read this book before you try."
ORLEY ASHENFELTER is Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics at Princeton University.
LINK · The Movie Business · Comments (0)
Back
November 15, 2006 09:16 PM
As you may know, I have been gone for the past week. When I got back yesterday there were problems with the web site. I couldn't get access to it and many files were missing. I am growing a bit weary of fighting these issues, but I will plug away because I think the issues I discuss, particularly on health, are so crucial.
So, coming real soon now some new thoughts on muscle.
Also, when I hear from Charles Staley about the link I will link to his site for an interview I did with him just before I left.
LINK · Everything · Comments (1)
Another Glich to the Site
November 6, 2006 08:32 AM
My site became inaccessible to me for the past week. It is fixed now, but this has happened several times in the past few months. That is part of the explanation for the lack of activity. Another is that I am busy right now on a large project. And I am headed to the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival this week to give a talk and award the Mallen Prize for Motion Picture Research to my former graduate student and co-author David Walls. (I won the Prize 5 years ago.) I will have my portable with me in case there is something I wish to post.
LINK · Everything · Comments (0)
A Theory of Body Building
I don't think body building is well understood. If you are intent on building muscle mass, you can find a lot of instruction on how to work out or what exercises, sets, sequences and so on to do in magazines and on web sites. There is also a lot of advice on the nutrition side. Yet, none of the advice has any theory behind it. It is just simple empiricism; this works, "Do it" is what you will find. What is the overall concept or theory behind body building?
Individual body builders do offer a kind of proof of concept in that their mass and appearance show that something works to produce those results. But, it seems to me that there is almost no theory that puts existing practices on some kind of conceptual basis and explains what is going on.
Is it possible to remain in an anabolic state more or less continuously? This is one of the "mantras" of body building. Why does volume seem to be so important? What other adaptations are going on in the body that may affect one's state of health and well-being? How can the human body attain such dramatic increases in musculature? Aside from muscle volume and appearance, what other adaptations must the body make to sustain the energy and resources costs of an expanded musculature? How far outside the evolutionary model of human activity and body mass are the practices and mass of a modern, professional level body builder?
No one knows. I think all these questions are unanswered; they are not even asked for the most part. I will be putting some of my thoughts up over the next few weeks.
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