The Runner’s WOD

The most important skill in the early days of human development is catching prey or getting away from a predator — running. This statistical investigation takes apart the anatomical components of running and looks at the variables which make or break a good runner. In my previous post Weightlifter’s Normative I came upon some athlete data… let’s start at the bottom.

Deadlift

8,635 men, 2,380 women. ±5% jitter. Original data clipped to 25kg – 300kg, 40s – 150s.

This amorphous cluster tells us that men, as a group, are faster than women; fastest women deadlift around 125kg, fastest men around 180kg; and that higher deadlift seems to correspond to faster running but, up to a point.  Further analysis is complicated by the fact that our data is sparse, kidney-shaped blob.  To extract [more] quantifiable insights, the analysis must internalize the functional meaning of these exercises. Namely, what matters for survival is that you outrun your fellow cave(wo)man to get the food, or outrun her while bolting from a sabertooth, thus not becoming the food.  Whether you are ahead by one second or one minute is irrelevant.  Consider the following experiment:

• Two individuals sprint 400m.
• If the winner’s deadlift is greater than the loser’s
  • record it as [win-win, |deadlift difference|];
• If the winner’s deadlift is less than the loser’s
  • record it as [win-lose, |deadlift difference|];
• Repeat for every pair of individuals.

Plot win-win percentage vs. |deadlift difference|. In other words: plot the victory probability of a stronger athlete vs. his/her [leg] strength advantage. This [computational] experiment produces an impressive amount of data because there are 8,635 men and 2,380 women available for this calculation. Any two individuals constitute a valid race: 37 million male pairs and 2.8 million female pairs. Recall that the number of pairs in n elements is given by n(n-1)/2.  The plot below encompasses 40 million races.

±5% jitter is added to counteract rounding and recording biases.  Mean filter with a radius of 3 points applied to the results. Transparent bands indicate uncertainty of a population measurement (a.k.a. standard error), mostly proportional to n^-½. Translucent, inverted semi-parabolas are logarithmic counts of the number of races for every deadlift difference, corresponding to the axis on the right.

The trends deteriorate and can no longer be trusted after the race count drops below 5k or so. Removing all data generated from less than 5k races yields:

8,635 men, 2,380 women. ±5% jitter. Original data clipped to 25kg – 300kg, 40s – 150s; results clipped to 5,000 races or more.  3-point radius mean filter applied to the results.

First feature to note is that both trends begin at (0, 50%). This desirable characteristic indicates that the samples are random and unbiased: if two athletes of the same gender have identical deadlifts, ignoring all else, neither has a statistical advantage in a 400m race.

As the deadlift difference between two athletes increases, so does the stronger athlete’s chance of winning the race. One may wonder why the curves aren’t steeper: why, for example, does a 100kg deadlift advantage only corresponds to a ~ 20% victory probability increase for men? Three answers: athlete height, body mass liability, and the fact that running isn’t entirely below the belt; in ascending order of importance.

Athlete Height

Athlete height is a correlate of leg length. Longer legs = longer stride = more distance covered per breath and heartbeat. Common wisdom suggests that taller athletes are better sprinters. Does this assertion stand up to mathematical scrutiny? Kind of…

8,760 men, 2,403 women. ±5% jitter. Original data clipped to 135cm – 250cm, 40s – 150s; results clipped to 5,000 races or more. 3-point radius mean filter applied to the results.

For women, height correlates to a modest increase in sprinting speed. Height appears to be irrelevant for men; which is peculiar and deserves an explanation.

If I am magically lengthened by 10%, the taller me will be able to keep up with the old me only if he is endowed with the amount of muscle commensurate with his new mass, which increases by ~ 33% because volume is proportional to length cubed. It is safe to assert that when it comes to running, men in this data set scale proportionally, while women scale super-proportionally. Meaning that as men get taller, on average, they are just strong enough to keep up with their shorter cohorts. Women’s strength increases at a rate greater than necessary to merely keep up, women get much stronger with increased height; again, on average.

Body Mass

For the most part, body mass is not a runner’s friend. However, it doesn’t appear to matter much up to a difference of ~ 30lb, acts as a handicap thereafter, especially for women.

8,821 men, 2,275 women. ±5% jitter. Original data clipped to 40kg – 150kg, 40s – 150s; results clipped to 5,000 races or more. 3-point radius mean filter applied to the results.

Upper Body Strength and Endurance

Put your hands in your pockets; now run. Primates don’t swing their arms while walking and running because it looks cool, we do it because bipedal locomotion is little more than a series of controlled falls. To control these falls, we must constantly control our center of mass. The faster we run, the more adjustments are needed per unit time. Every movement of the leg is countered by, or synchronized with, a movement of the arm and a slight twist of the torso.  If the arms and the torso can’t move as fast as the legs, upper body imposes a speed limit regardless of the leg strength.

A kipping pull-up encompasses the coordination of the upper and the lower body, core strength, arm strength, and cardiovascular endurance.

6,621 men, 1,548 women. ±5% jitter for the sprint time, none for the number of pull-ups. Original data clipped to 1 – 100 (athletes unable to do one kipping pull-up are excluded from this analysis), 40s – 150s; results clipped to 5,000 races or more. 3-point radius mean filter applied to the results.

Ignoring all other athlete parameters, unbroken kipping pull-ups appear to be a better predictor of sprinting ability than a deadlift maximum.

Correlation vs. Causation

One will be wise to question whether the correlations presented are meaningful. Would it not stand a reason for more experienced athletes to be able to lift more weight, do more kipping pull-ups unbroken, and run faster? If so, then we are merely looking at the athletes’ temporal progression. Much like plotting a person’s height vs. vocabulary: both grow naturally but, aren’t caused by one another. [Artificially] increasing one will have no effect on the other.

Chicken vs. Egg

If we assume that deadlift, kipping pull-ups, and running are anatomically related, in which direction is the causation arrow pointing? Are we looking at athletes who can do a lot of kipping pull-ups because they’re great runners, or athletes who are exceptional runners because they deadlift a lot of weight?

Part of the answer can be gleaned from the origin of the data: CrossFit. Sprinting, or running of any kind, is not emphasized in the CrossFit community to the same extent as, say, kipping pull-ups. CrossFit athletes are rarely instructed on proper speed or distance running techniques. Therefore, sprinting performance in the CrossFit community is at least in part an effect of the CrossFit training, and not a component thereof.

A more convincing piece of evidence are the contour plots of the 400m sprint victory probability as a function of the deadlift and the kipping pull-up differences:

Women’s 400m Sprint Victory Probability

Men’s 400m Sprint Victory Probability

6,490 men, 1,516 women. ±5% jitter for the sprint time and the deadlift, none for the number of pull-ups. Original data clipped to 1 – 100 (athletes unable to do one kipping pull-up are excluded from this analysis), 40s – 150s, 25kg – 300kg; results clipped to at least 5% of the maximum number of races per cell measuring 1s by 1kg.  10-point radius mean filter applied to the results. Thick contour is the 50% mark, the contour of no statistical advantage.

Non-trivially slanted contours are strong indication of the deadlift and the pull-up differences contributing to the sprinting speed, as opposed to solely correlating with it.

Consider the violet reference points. For women, being able to deadlift 70kg more than her opponent and do a few more kipping pull-ups provides the same statistical advantage, 70%, as being able to do 24 more kipping pull-ups than her equally-deadlifting opponent. For men, 70% statistical victory can be achieved by being able to do 25 more kipping pull-ups or just 12 more with a 100kg deadlift advantage.

The data clearly shows that when it comes to running, the upper body can compensate for the shortcomings of the legs and vice versa. This is so because the speed of bipedal (and quadrupedal) locomotion depends on two variables: stride length and frequency. If an athlete has strong legs, (s)he can make long strides not requiring as much coordination of the upper body. Athlete with lacking leg strength can take shorter strides at a higher frequency. Stride length is mostly limited by the muscles in the legs, stride frequency is mostly limited by the upper body strength and endurance.

Conclusion

Short of, or in complement to actual running, it would behoove anyone aspiring to lower sprint times to practice kipping pull-ups and deadlifts, in that order. Especially the former, because it much easier to get 10 more kipping pull-ups than deadlift 100 more pounds. As it pertains to sprinting, an increase of one kipping pull-up is equivalent to ~ 7kg deadlift increase for men; ~ 4kg for women:

∆

1 kipping pull-up

≈ ∆

10 15

lb deadlift

for women for men

A Word Of Caution

When one looks at, for example, the victory probability vs. height graph and notes a flat line for men, the takeaway is not that height has no effect on sprinting speed. The correct interpretation: it is not possible to use a man’s height alone to place a wager on his performance in a 400m race. Such interpretation is only valid for the data analyzed, and neither necessarily extends nor rules out its relevance to the entire population of Earth.

Weightlifter’s Normative

The Question

I once asked my weightlifting coach about a correlation among typical lifts. If I can Deadlift 300lbs, how much should I be able to Back Squat? I’m not talking about Olympic athletes whose records are public and who were as much born to be the best as they have trained to be so. I’m referring to an average human being who decided to play around with a barbell.  My coach was not able to answer my question definitively.  I found a website here and there with scant numbers and lacking citations but, nothing solid.

The Data

There’s a relatively large community of weightlifters who share their achievements publicly: CrossFit. Athletes create profiles such as this one and update them regularly.  I wrote some code to download the profile of every athlete on one of the CrossFit Open rosters, all 132,355 of them.

The Analysis

Back Squat vs. Deadlift

Consider the plot of the athletes’ Back Squat maximum vs. Deadlift maximum (hereafter the terms maximum and one rep max shall be omitted and it shall be understood that all quantities discussed are such).

The plots are made up of 13562, 30284, and 43846 samples respectively. Jitter is added to the data and opacity to the dots so that the plots are easier on the eyes. The jitter is necessary because the weights are multiples of five and if plotted as are create a caustic image; opacity helps to ignore the outliers.

Deadlift and Back Squat are two of the least technical lifts. Correlation between them is therefore likely entirely due to the athletes’ physical characteristics, as opposed to skill. The plot has a few stark features worth noting.

• The correlation is linear.
• The correlation does not depend on gender.
• Amateur athletes are typically able to Back Squat ~ 81% of the Deadlift, the solid line through the middle of the data.
• There appear to be sharp upper and lower bounds for the bulk of the data.
  • The upper bound is — suspiciously exactly — the line y = x.

Both lifts derive vast majority of the power from the legs. The same set of muscles is engaged in the same exact directions. There are, however, key differences.

• Back Squat requires one to lower and raise the bar in a controlled fashion. Athletes lower the bar sans control and sometimes even drop it after a Deadlift, thus dispensing with a significant fraction of the work.
• Athlete’s hip crease must drop below their knee during a Back Squat. It is more difficult to stand up from than position than from the bottom of the Deadlift, where the athlete’s legs aren’t nearly as bent (more on that later).

The points above hint as to the linearity of the correlation — identical muscles pulling in identical directions — and provide some insight into why an athlete can Deadlift more than (s)he can Back Squat — differing range of motion and the amount of work. Let’s now look at the apparent upper and lower bounds.

Deadlift ~ Back Squat

Given an uninjured athlete, there are three explanations for the case of one’s Deadlift and Back Squat approaching one another.

• An athlete is not squatting low enough during the Back Squat, not breaking parallel with the ground. His/her Back Squat maximum is exaggerated and must be lower if the exercise is performed properly.
• An athlete is placing an undue amount of the load on his/her back during the Deadlift, not using enough legs during the drive phase of the exercise. His/her Deadlift can increase with improved form.
• An athlete is taller than the average, requiring him/her to almost go into a full squat to grab the bar for the Deadlift. Shorter athletes are closer to the bar at the start of the exercise and need not drop into a full squat to pick it up. The lower is the squat, the harder it is to stand up from it. Little can be done to increase the Deadlift to Back Squat ratio for taller athletes.

Deadlift ≫ Back Squat

With the same assumptions as previously, there are three explanations for the Deadlift to significantly exceed the Back Squat.

• An athlete is not keeping his/her back erect enough while descending into the bottom of the squat, i.e. face too close to the knees, thus limiting the amount of weight (s)he can raise from that position. His/her Back Squat can increase with improved form.
• An athlete is descending too much during the Back Squat, thus limiting the amount of weight (s)he can lift from that position. His/her Back Squat can increase with improved form.
• An athlete is shorter than the average, allowing him/her to barely bend the knees at all to pick up the bar at the start of the Deadlift and lift significantly more than a comparably-developed, taller athlete.

At the time of writing of this post, Richard Froning‘s Back Squat is 83% of his Deadlift. Julie Foucher‘s ~ 82%.

Clean & Jerk vs. Back Squat

In the order of ascending difficulty, the next lift is the Clean (& Jerk). Consider the plot below (40,191 samples).

Clean & Jerk is a compound lift involving both raw strength, vast majority of which is provided by the same muscles as in the Back Squat and the Deadlift, and skill. Timing, shoulder strength and stability, coordination, which are all but absent from Back Squat and Deadlift, play an important role in Clean & Jerk. Two physically identical athletes max out at two significantly different weights depending upon their skill. The data places an average Clean & Jerk at ~ 69% of the Back Squat.

Whereas Richard Froning fell almost squarely into the average performance on his Deadlift vs. Back Squat, his Clean & Jerk is 78% of his Back Squat. This is so because the Deadlift and Back Squat are more about raw strength than skill. As an experienced weightlifter, Mr. Froning is expected to perform in the above-average skill range for the Clean & Jerk.  Julie Foucher’s Clean & Jerk is 76% of her Back Squat, also above average as expected.

Snatch vs. Clean & Jerk

The Snatch is the most technical lift. Consider its correlation to the Clean & Jerk (38,847 samples).

Requiring even more training and skill, the Snatch averages ~ 76% of the Clean & Jerk. Richard Froning’s ratio is ~ 82%, Julie Foucher’s is 85%; comparable to the modern Olympic weightlifters.

A Note About Olympic Lifts.

For the Clean & Jerk and the Snatch, athletes of above-average skill are expected to be above the average ratios, those of lesser skill are below. If an amateur athlete is significantly below the average ratio on one or both of the lifts, it could signal underdeveloped or insufficiently mobile shoulders and/or lack of coordination.

Conclusion

Table of average relationships between the lifts analyzed, column divided by row.

	Snatch	Clean & Jerk	Back Squat	Deadlift
Snatch	1	1.32	1.92	2.38
Clean & Jerk	0.76	1	1.45	1.77
Back Squat	0.52	0.69	1	1.23
Deadlift	0.42	0.56	0.81	1

Notes

An astute reader will notice that each plot shows less variance than the one before it. The thinning of the correlation is primarily caused by the fact that the athletes attempting more complicated lifts such as the Snatch are typically more skilled and therefore fall within a narrower distribution than novice athletes who primarily train with Deadlifts and Back Squats. This is a common phenomenon. If 100 individuals’ 1mi run time is sampled at random, the spread is likely to lie between 5min and 20min due to the variance in natural predilections and lifestyles. If said individuals receive one year of comparable training, the dispersion will shrink markedly. An extreme example of this effect are Olympic athletes, who often win by mere (milli)seconds and kilograms.

A trained eye may also notice that the intercepts of the plots are not zero. The analysis enforces zero intercepts to simplify the interpretation of the results, which are approximate a priori. Allowing the intercept to be derived from the data does not meaningfully alter the conclusions.

Future Work

These scatter plots represent a fraction of the data. More analysis is coming soon.

Privacy Lost

One year ago I wrote an article discussing the issues associated with Google Glass’ and Augmented Reality Devices’ (ARD) inevitable facial recognition capability. It is a short read, I highly recommend it. Recently, I learned about NameTag, an application with about half of the functionality I postulated. Namely, capture and run the face through the criminal records and — from the NameTag website — “a user can simply glance at someone nearby and instantly see that person’s name, occupation and even visit their Facebook, Instagram or Twitter profiles in real-time.” NameTag currently allows individuals to opt-out of the service. Let’s forget about NameTag, which aims to be a legitimate business entirely at the mercy of Google, and treat it as proof of concept:

• ARDs are capable of aiding facial recognition.
• Despite any restrictions imposed by the ARD manufacturers, they can and will be hacked for the worst.
• A wearer of an ARD can, in some cases, look at you and learn your name against your will and/or communicate with unregulated databases to learn much more.

One might argue that your identity/age/marital status, etc. are known to at least few others. All I have to do is find and persuade them to talk. If that does not concern you, why would a device on my head? That’s a good point, except it will not stand up in court. In a ruling against a similar argument, the courts have decided that placing a GPS tracker on a vehicle [by the police] without a warrant is illegal, while merely following a vehicle is not. The sheer magnitude of increased surveillance in both cases renders such arguments invalid.

One may submit that you are walking on a public street where you can be legally photographed sans your consent, and that you have voluntarily posted your photo and name on the Internet making it available for facial recognition bots. True, except one can hardly avoid public streets, and not posting pictures of oneself on the Internet partially defeats the purpose of the Internet. Many companies, for example, require their employees to maintain public profiles.

Consider websites like http://www.exgfpics.com, where images are uploaded without the subjects’ knowledge to servers located outside of every jurisdiction that cares.

Yelp-like human rating databases are of even greater concern. Smart-off to a barista, cut in line, dispense a less-than-appropriate tip… your rating is now two and half stars. Who cares about your name if thirty-seven people have rated your face as Douche Extraordinaire.

It Gets Worse…

A group of ARD wearers can connect to the same database thus creating a hive mind, much like a series of CCTV cameras except in the private hands. Individuals’ and vehicles’ locations are tracked in real time: where they went, with whom they have spoken, etc. A member of the arXiveMind (dibs on the name) can get alerts like these:

• “This individual visited three gun stores today.”
• “This individual has not been seen before — new to the city.”
• “This individual has visited a bank, an attorney, and a realtor in the past two days. Divorce?”
• “Your spouse visited three gun stores today.”

It has been suggested that the witness protection program in its current form will be rendered ineffective with the proliferation of such technology.

We are monitored in real time by our cell phone providers and by pretty much anyone who can afford a cheap tracking device. The difference is that you can leave your phone at home, you cannot leave your face at home. And while many of us are slowly learning to live with less privacy than our parents, few will be pleased to be under their neighbor’s watchful eye.

What is The Next Step?

The question is how to deal with this inevitability. Do we redefine privacy? Stop posting our photos? Outlaw third party upload of personal data, create an <optout></optout> HTML tag, legally obligate bots to respect it, create a national out-out registry, legally obligate all facial recognition services to respect it, and… legislate against illicit database access? Completely outlaw public access to personal data? Create a wearable opt-out device? Wear Lucha Libre masks in public? Neither of these solutions by themselves are compatible with our understanding of privacy, freedom, and Internet. What is known for sure is that the public and the lawmakers must be throughly educated on the issue. Everyone from Pat Robertson to Jon Stewart should be debating it.

To date, there have been a few encouraging legislative and judicial steps and a minimal public outcry but, not nearly enough to address the assured rebellion of the masses against an impending de facto requirement of wearing name tags. The industry’s response to the concerns of the lawmakers typically sounds like this: “Don’t worry, we got this. Hakuna matata. Here’s a free ARD.”

From my previous article: The law is not ready for this technology, and neither are we ready to give up the last sliver of privacy we have. Without an active collaboration legal, legislative, and technology professionals we may one day find ourselves playing out one of Philip K. Dick’s short stories, and we will not like it.

Physical Resilience – First Step to Becoming a Badass

Physical resilience can make or break a person. It can open doors and make friends for you. It can even save your life. On average, least resilient are the citizens of developed nations: probably you. Not because we don’t know how to collect rainwater and slaughter a wild boar but, because we are slaves to our bodies. Badassery has less to do with knowledge and more with conditioning and mindset. Below are guidelines on how to be less like Kim Kardashian and more like Les Stroud.

Food.

If you absolutely have to eat at certain times, you are not a badass. Traveling with you is a never-ending planning session around your meals. What if I told you that you can train yourself to eat whenever the food is available, not when your sugar/salt/fat addiction circuits fire? I am not suggesting one should always eat at random — that’s unhealthy — rather have the ability to do so if necessary. Break your food dependence by skipping meals from time to time; forego breakfast and have a glass of OJ; munch on an apple for lunch; go to bed hungry; ingest nothing but water for twenty-four hours. A healthy adult can last three weeks without food. Mechanical or chemical, your body should be able to take a hit and keep going.

Water.

If you carry a water bottle, you are not a badass. Eight glasses of water per day is a myth, anything beyond that is harmful. An average person can survive about three days without water; unless you drink your piss, then it’s longer. A glass or two per day is enough. Needlessly pushing liquids through your system will do only one thing: desalinate your body, making you slower, dumber, and tethered to within five minutes of a toilet. De-train yourself from this awful habit.

Water II.

If you only drink bottled water, you are definitely not a badass. Bottled water is no better than tap water in the United States, Canada, most developed nations, is an environmental disaster, and an ingenious scam. Here is a mild-mannered doctor expressing her noncommittal view in a traditional voice of defensive medicine, here’s Gizmodo, and here are Pen And Teller (requires Hulu+).

Stimulants.

If you cannot go through your day without coffee, tea, or an energy drink, you are not a badass. Coffee is beneficial in reasonable quantities. Caffeine, which you may or may not have in your liquid fuel, is addictive. Regular use can lead to withdrawal symptoms if consumption is interrupted; most notable of which are sleepiness, headaches, and inability to concentrate. If you regularly indulge in stimulants, abruptly stop for a few days to learn how your body reacts. Definitely stop before embarking on a trip to a place where said magical substances are not readily available.

Shelter.

If you can only function at some set temperature, you are not a badass. Your ancestors have survived the Ice Age and the Sahara while being awesome. You have all of the necessary genetic material to function in pretty much any Earthly weather. Only one thing is stopping you: your whining! Turn off the air conditioner/heater once in a while. Learn how you feel and act in those conditions, then resolve to ignore the discomfort. As an added perk, thermodynamic comfort is inversely proportional to the amount of calories you burn.

Clothes and Grooming.

If you’ve never gone a few days without showering and wearing the same set of clothes, you are not a badass. Unlike thirst, hunger, and the desire to be warm, cleanliness is more learned than innate: look at children. Frequent showering is not healthy anyway. Clean clothes are even less accessible than caffeine, don’t depend on them.

Medicine.

If you dip into a bottle of medicine for every headache or muscle pain, you are not a badass. If you are regularly in pain, don’t medicate it away — your body is telling you that you are abusing it and should probably change your lifestyle or consult a physician. Numbing every non-regular ache and treating every scratch with modern medicine leads to addiction, bacteria resistance, and the loss of badass status. The biggest reason for conditioning oneself to tolerate pain and injury is the relative scarcity of medicine. You can find food and water in a city, a forest, even a desert; aspirin or amoxicillin are a different story. Even securing a gauze can be a chore in an unfamiliar setting.

Sleep.

Good sleep is more important than good food (Google it). However, it is prudent to be able to function without it. Your time in college on [insert psychoactive drug] doesn’t count. You are alone, in the wilderness, you need to keep walking for two days with little to no sleep: can you do it? Grab a buddy, go to the nearest national park, embrace your inner caveman, and hike through the night without food! You have a few days before you’re too dumb to read a map.

Sleep II.

If you can only sleep in total darkness, with earplugs, on a cushy mattress, you are not a badass. Once again, the times you passed out on the floor while partying your ass off in college do not count. You will not always have the luxury of all of the above, so call a buddy and go camp in a national forest. Be sure you can fall asleep in all of your street clothes, on a couch, in a downtown apartment, preferably next to a light rail stop.

Epilogue.

I preemptively caution the detractors to interpret this guide as list of things to try, not a list of things to do every day. It is healthy to eat at the same time, drink water, and clean yourself. However, your health and discipline are borderline useless if you can’t function a few days without the amenities of the developed world. Exercise, although painful and uncomfortable, makes one stronger. Treat these recommendations as chemical exercises. Reconnect with your neanderthal roots and be happier.

The Cost of Old-School Hiring in the Twenty-First Century

I lost my job. Not recently – at some point in the past. After once again joining the ranks of the employed, I was able to reflect on everything learned during the job search: it alarmed me. My verdict is summarized in three lessons intended for employers.

Lesson One: GPA is a false metric.

GPA? Seriously? I have a Ph.D. from one of the top research institutions in the country. I can conduct independent research, teach, write scholarly papers, and defend my findings against accomplished academics whose sole job and desire is to tear me to pieces; and you are asking for my GPA? You do know that the eye color is a better predictor of job performance than GPA, right? Do not judge an individual on the ability to memorize and regurgitate which, let’s be honest, is the bulk of the undergraduate GPA. Do you weigh the GPA based on candidates’ Alma Mater or difficulty of the courses? No, you do not. Are you aware that students engage in “GPA preserving behaviors,” enrolling in classes with positively skewed grade distributions and withdrawing from courses at a slightest hint of a bad grade? I doubt it. Are you familiar with the tier system and nonuniform grade inflation? Do you know which colleges have a Grade Forgiveness Policy? How can you tell if the 3.95 GPA is representative of an individual’s academic aptitude, or is merely a consequence of the test bank at his/her fraternity/sorority? You cannot. Which is why not only must you not consider GPA in your hiring process, you must not even ask for it. I understand that for many (under)graduates GPA is the only distinguishing characteristic, in which case limited use of this misguided statistic is somewhat permissible. However, considering the GPA of a candidate who has graduated years ago is much like appraising a house by its pictures from when it was first built. The degree to which academic success translates into professional success is left untouched, it shall be explored later.

Lesson Two: If you ask about my employment gaps, I cannot take you seriously.

A fraction of employers firmly believe that a gap in employment signifies unexpected dismissal, lack of planning, performance-hampering problems of unspecified nature, e.g. jail, illness, rehabilitation, etc. Some employers refuse to interview candidates with employment gaps [sometimes] claiming candidates’ skills have degraded, others will question candidates about it. First, if you cannot verify expertise during an interview – reevaluate your interview practices. Second, there are many kosher reasons for interrupted employment – parental leave or, more commonly, a year at an undisclosed location studying the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. Ultimately, however, it is none of your business. Continuous employment is a choice, not a requirement. If you are hiring someone on an “at will” basis, you have no right to demand an explanation of their discontinuous employment. Would you tolerate candidates inquiring about your turnover rate? Your layoff practices? Or why you appear to be hiring half of a department worth of staff only a few months after making the national “Top Ten Layoff Leaders” list? You can fire me at any time for any/no reason, why must I pretend that I will work for you until I die?

Lesson Three: If you reject all but the perfect candidates, you will be understaffed forever.

If you tell me that I fit seventy-three criteria for the position, but unfortunately have five years of experience instead of the required six – I will recommend that you replace your head of recruiting. With companies’ products and services becoming ever more narrow/specialized, it is ever more difficult to find an applicant who has already had a similar job somewhere else, and therefore possesses all of the skills/knowledge required. If you refuse to train new employees all the while complaining about your inability to find qualified candidates, burden on your current employees will increase, they will feel the pressure of 60-70hr weeks and eventually quit. Now you’re helpless because you can’t train newcomers even if you wanted to.

Epilogue.

The lessons are derived from facts on the ground and garnished with hyperbolae for easy digestion. Feel free to amuse yourself at the hyperbolae, do not ignore the facts. Superficial criteria increase both false negatives and false positives thus diluting the applicant pool. Which means that either the caliber of your average hire decreases, or the time required to hire a competent employee increases, or both.

New Diet: Turn Off Your Heater.

Environmental controls affect weight gain but, to what extent? Outsourcing your thermodynamic equilibrium to a heater reduces the work your body must do to achieve it; much like outsourcing your motion to a car. Whether a house is heated by a furnace or a human body by chemical reactions, the principle is the same: to sustain a certain temperature, the heat (energy) expenditure must equal heat outflow.

where m is the mass of the object, c is the specific heat capacity, ΔT and ΔQ are changes in temperature and energy respectively. Let’s compute the energy required to maintain normal human body temperature (~ 37°C). To that end, a couple of naïve yet reasonable assumptions are made:

• The human body is basically water. Specific heat capacity of water is 1 cal/g/°C;
• The body is not receiving significant heat from direct sources, e.g. the Sun, fire place, another body.

Last piece of the puzzle: temperature change. How many degrees, say, per hour, does a human body lose and must therefore burn chemical fuel to compensate? Don’t know. We do know how many degrees a dead body loses per hour, approximately. We know this because forensic science measured it. A chemically dead body stops producing heat, therefore its initial heat loss is roughly the heat required to keep it alive. Quick search reveals the temperature difference associated with said loss to be ~ 1°C per hour under normal conditions (forensic science is not Accounting, normal means the [dead] body was not found at the North Pole or the engine compartment of the Titanic). Consequently, the energy required to just keep a 70kg (154lbs) body at the correct temperature is ~ 70 food calories per hour, ~ 1,680 food calories per day (1 food calorie = 1,000 calories = 1 kcal). This is not far from the recommended daily intake of 2,000 kcal, because vast majority of us don’t do much but keep our bodies at the appropriate temperature.

What’s In It For Me?

So we spend an obscene amount of energy maintaining thermodynamic superiority over our environment; how is this illuminating? It can be shown using Newton’s Law of cooling that if the normal temperature (20°C, 68°F) is lowered by 5°C (9°F), one’s body has to expend ~ 30% more energy to stay alive (60% for 10°C, relationship approaches linear). For a 70kg individual: additional 20 kcal per hour, almost 500 kcal per day, which is equivalent to a one hour jog.

In natural sciences, this is known as the Spherical Cow Analysis, making unrealistic assumptions to approximate the reality. Because the human body is not all water suspended naked in still air for twenty-four hours on a cloudy day — values derived here are estimates and may differ from reality by a factor of three or so in either direction. That said, they represent a good quantitative conclusion. The less [thermodynamically] comfortable you are, the more energy you burn. That extra amount is not marginal, it is significant and measurable.

Backup Food Supply (a.k.a. fat) → $$$

Want to lose excess fat – turn off your heater and wear less clothes in cold weather. It should be noted that cooling a human body (i.e. sweating) takes a non-trivial amount of energy – so turn off your A/C as well.

Google Glass And Augmented Dystopia

You are in line for Google Glass 5GS (hereafter as Augmented Reality Device or ARD): yours for only $599.99 and your soul for the next two years. Assume that the technological hurdles of energy and bandwidth consumption have been overcome. Assume that a relatively simple application is streaming live video from the ARD to the cloud for face processing. In fact, those are not assumptions, we already have that technology. We just can’t mount it on spectacles and sell it to millions of people… yet.

One of the first face recognition applications will search the registered sex offender database, police mugshot database, and the rest of WWW and display the relevant information near the individual. It will store all faces in your private database: “You saw this dude a year ago in NY. Would you like to name him Creepy Kyle?” Because the ARD knows where and when it is, you may get a message like this: “Ginger Jenny visits the Snowflake Cafe between 6pm and 8pm except Saturdays.” And yes, people do voluntarily check into establishments on Facebook and Yelp and FourSquare but, the technology in question will track you sans your knowledge and consent. Remember, The Constitution protects the people’s privacy from the government; the regulations — what little of them we do have — from corporations. We have no legal framework to protect our privacy from each other. I can legally spy on you 24/7. Like no other before it, this technology greatly enhances my ability to do so.

CCTV-style systems are capable of this today. The difference is that an ordinary citizen will be in voyeur heaven that fits in his/her pocket. Fundamentally, we have no right to privacy while walking on the [public] street. Arguably that’s because at the time “reasonable expectation of privacy” doctrine was established, we had no idea that one day every bit one’s dirty laundry shall be found on one’s forehead. Not only will the augmented reality effectively attach a name/history tag to everyone, it will encourage creation of rating databases, Yelp for people so to speak: “86 reviewers found this person to be a jackass, 5 reviewers found this person to be a cheater.” This is not your typical Crystal Cox affair, this is defamation lawsuits on a scale intractable to existing law enforcement and judicial systems. Ratings are opinions however, these opinions are now etched on your face, forever. It is one thing to look at a business establishment and see a list of its political contributions, it is another to walk past a girl on a street and see her photos from http://www.exgfpics.com.

There is no question of whether the technology will get there, only a question of whether the law can catch up. Should the law require ARDs to recognize an “opt out” signal broadcast by the bearer’s phone or ARD? An “opt out” signal broadcast by an appliance in one’s residence or business? A wearable “opt out” device? Or perhaps go guerrilla and wear earrings with infrared LEDs blinding the cameras? Wear masks in public, which is illegal in France? Come to think of it, who needs your face? A picture of your hand is even better: “FingerPrint v3.6, now with international databases!”

The law is not ready for this technology, and neither are we ready to give up the last sliver of privacy we have. It is unclear what changes ARDs will bring. What is clear is that without an active collaboration of legal, legislative, and technology professionals we may one day find ourselves playing out one of Philip K. Dick’s short stories, and we will not like it.

Don’t get me wrong: I love technology. And am neither advocating for draconian regulation nor technological restraint. I merely wish to address the other edge of this sword. The weapon of productivity we shall all soon no doubt embrace.

I abstain from discussing how this technology alters the standard operating procedures of law enforcement, for this subject is far and wide and requires a tome or two to do it proper justice. Some of the more traditional applications of augmented reality are depicted in this short video.