How to Become No. 1

Every country seems to be obliged to inform people of their performance in Olympics ("Naughty Korea" may be an exception though), hence medal ranking is unavoidable for media. But there is only one country that can top the list, therefore how to be that one becomes a challenge to every participator. In general there are two ways of ranking: either by the number of gold medals or total medals. China, who values gold medals much more than silver or bronze ones always go with the former. The US followed the same rule until 2008 when China won more gold medals and decided to rank by the total number of medals during Beijing Olympics.

London Olympics are somehow more interesting. China topped the list by gold medals for the first few days, but the US won more total medals. Thus most US media ranked by total medals instead of gold medals. But China soon started to collect more silver and bronze medals, while Phelps created a new history as a gold medalist. The ranking was reversed: the US surpassed China in gold medals but ranked 2nd by total medals. An interesting switch happened between US media and their Chinese counterparts with US media adopting a gold-medal ranking while China starting to use a total-medal one.

If two countries have exactly the same amount of gold medals, how will you rank them - by total medals or silver medals? Chinese newspapers and the US ones offered different answers to make their own country No.1 on the list. A more creative ranking was adopted by Yahoo which calculated the number of  "historic cumulative" medals since the first modern Olympics in 1896 to guarantee US' No.1 position.

China and the US are not alone. Other countries are also trying all sorts of means to rank higher. One way is to find allies. European countries believe that an union, though functioning poorly in addressing economic crisis, can work well on sports. So for the first time in history, we have EU on the top of the tally with 52 gold medals and 160 medals in all, leaving the US and China far behind. (See above) Unfortunately we can't find "ASEAN", "NAFTA", "CARICOM" or "SADC" on this list, which I believe should be included to make the comparison fair enough. Similarly, an Australian newspaper was amazed by their neighbor's performance in London and decided to establish an "Aus-Zealand" to squeeze Australia into Top 10. (See right) I wonder if they had asked New Zealand for the permission to do so, but I guess kiwi were probably not happy with this, that's why we soon find a new list offered by Australians who abandoned all traditional ways but ranked by silver medals. With 12 silver medals and 20 medals in all, Australia ranks No.4 on the new list. (See below)

That's not the end of the story. We soon find out there is a good reason for New Zealand to reject the free rider as they have their own way of putting Kiwi top on the list: they rank by medals per capita. With a population of less than 4.5 million and 9 medals from London, New Zealand well deserves the No.1 position on the medal tally.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. (Source: Mark Twain) It is interesting to see how creative people can be when they play with numbers, which also reminds me of the headache brought by dozens of different ways to calculate carbon emissions and allocate quotas across countries. But no longer trying to rank lower on the list, now they're competing for top positions instead. London Olympics have just passed the half-way to the end, we have good reasons to expect more novels standards such as medals per GDP or number of medal winners (football, I'm talking about you), or comprehensive indicators like "weighted" medals. When we're enjoying athletes fighting for new records of their own or the human kind, we should be grateful for these rankers who brainstorm for new ways of entertaining us.

The Bigger, the Better

Again I failed to resist the temptation of cheesecake and bought a 12-inch one from Costco (I told myself I need some calcium from the cheese.) The first piece did give me high utility, but it soon started to decline since the second one. Looking the rest 14 pieces, I don't know how long it will take me to finish all.

I was warned to order "half size" when dining in the US, which proves to be one of the most useful advice I've received. I don't know whether it's because people here really need that much food, or they simply like big plates and food chunks, restaurants are very generous in feeding you. Every time I have dinner outside, I do try to order "a full set" of appetizer, entree and dessert, but always give up after looking around, seeing how other customers fight against a mountain of food. If an adult only need 2,000 calories per day, they probably only need one dinner to meet the demand. In the end, I always end up with entree only, though fascinated by the inviting descriptions of appetizers and desserts.

The biggest surprise came from Texas. I once transferred in Austin with Gang. It was lunch time, and our flight was not leaving until two hours later, so we decided to grab a quick lunch. I bought two burgers, both of which were about three times the size of McDonald burgers (which by the way is pretty big already.) I brought burgers to Gang, looking as if I was carrying two bricks. We finished less than half of our burgers, and had to throw the rest away.

Businessmen here seem to embrace the idea of "the bigger the better." Bigger packages imply abundance, and no worriment about shortage. When items are sold in big size, the average cost per unit is reduced and customers may mistake it as a good deal. But lured by a deal like this may result in uneconomic decisions:

One concern is the wasting. (Think hard about famine victims in Africa when we talk about this point.) Food go bad if you can't finish them in time, power storage declines if batteries have passed expiration, and clothes can be out of fashion if staying closet for too long. We are sometimes too confident in our consumption capabilities.

The other concern is the negative externality on consumption of other items. For consumers, utility is reduced by the constraint on minimum consumption of each good. Because of the big size of entree, I can't diverse my consumption by including appetizers and desserts. According to economic theories, my utility is not maximized. Economists are always wrong, but this times they are right. For suppliers, they do not de facto sell more by offering larger packages because of the substitution effect. People consume more A at the cost of consuming less B. So if you think of total consumption of different goods, it's hard to tell whether merchants are able to increase sales or not.

Some people are good at consuming and successfully finish everything they have bought. That partly explains why the adult obesity rate increases to 35.7% in 2012 (Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), which is expected to continue rising over and reach 42% in 3020 (Source: fox news). Similarly the energy consumption per capita in the US also ranks No.7 in the world (Source: World Bank) for bigger houses and autos. Encouraged by merchants, people are justified to consume more than needed.

To rescue consumers from the guilt of over consumption, merchants have to further enlarge everything else to match up increasing sizes. One example is the change in clothes size. Banana republic renamed its size 0 with a new size of 00, thus consumers will feel better when they find themselves still able to fit in pants with the same size in spite of overeating. Of course the best solution is to change the definition of "obesity": by raising the threshold, we will find a reduction in obese population for sure.

We probably should be jealous of a country which can squander resources in such a common way. But when the world is facing scarcity, and current consumption level is inconducive to better lives, it is time to rethink of this business tradition.

Sports for Athletes or Sports for All

Olympics provide a great opportunity to show one's passion for sports. Millions of people sit in front of TV for hours, watching athletes' performance, guessing new gold medalists and expecting the creation of new records. Every time a new record is created, audiences stand up and applaud, cheering for the breakthrough in human being's limits. But I have different opinions. When Bolt refreshed his Olympic record of men's 100m sprint by 9’63”, I know it has nothing to do with me though it may be important to human beings as a whole. He shortened his record by 0.06 second in four years, but it probably takes me even longer to finish 100m today than before due to abundant desk works and lack of exercises in recent years.

It's hoped that Olympics can encourage people to do more exercise. But Olympics is more like a stage for professional athletes to show how marvelous they are, not for ordinary people to figure out how much exercise he/she should get to be healthy. Actually many sports are almost impossible for amateurs: even if you have strong legs and a soft body, how likely can you bounce into the air and roll 720 degree before jumping into the pool? You can't just do more exercise and then become an Olympian; instead you have to choose between becoming a professional athlete or staying in your original career track. I'm one of those who very much appreciate the beauty and strengths that athletes demonstrate in their performance, and seldom miss TV relays of Olympics, but never have the slightest idea of doing it by myself.

A more direct impact on the public's health by Olympics is even negative. Olympics keep more people sitting in front of TV for longer hours by its brilliant competitions, while they usually spend the time in gyms. For people living in different time zones from London, Olympics also keep them stay up late or get up early to watch live games, thus disrupting their biological clocks. The joy of watching Olympics and the illusion of being close to sports make people less aware of the fact that they are doing nothing but laying the coach, and watching TV with popcorn and beers.

Some Olympic hosting countries had claimed that newly constructed Olympic venues and infrastructure would involve more citizens into sports, which has been falsified already (see Beijing Beijing). People are more conscious of what exercises they're willing to do, and a simple increase in the access to sports facilities don't guarantee an increase in sporting. Stadiums of unpopular sports always fell into ruins in the end.

Olympics are good at arousing people's enthusiasm, but how to transfer this enthusiasm into lasting motivations remains in doubts. In countries which offer comprehensive PEs in primary and secondary schools, people are more likely to gain regular exercises once they've developed some interests and fundamental skills in a certain sport. Commercial sporting clubs and associations also help these interested individuals explore further. But in countries with clear cut-off between athletes and amateurs, it's more challenging to transfer exciting audiences into exercisers as they may soon realize how different they're from professional athletes.

Nowadays, it lacks efficient ways of advocating sports for all instead of those designed only for athletes, partly because the latter is more exciting and lucrative. But if money is only channeled to fancy opening ceremonies and stadiums, Olympics is nothing more than a fiction movie which shows things that never happen to ordinary people. Yes, athletes are running faster, jumping further and lifting heavier barbell, but Americans are getting more obese, and more Chinese are getting sub-healthy.

Rivalries

How lonely France would be if there were no islands across the straight in the world! There wouldn't be a country with terrible food and monotonous life styles to laugh at. And so is for Britain: their comedies would be much less fun without jokes about snobbish French people. Rivals can be a mirror, reflecting your values and mistakes. With a mirror in front of you, you gain better understanding of yourself, which helps you grow. Laughing together for hundreds of years, Britain and France probably know each other better than anyone else in the world.

Same principles apply to Harvard and Yale, Berkeley and Stanford. During the annual football game between Stanford and Berkeley, all sorts of "insulting" cartoons will be posted around the campus to attack each other. There is also rumor that a Stanford professor once gave a lecture in Berkeley wearing a "Beat-Cal" T-shirt. Correspondingly Berkeley made a statue for a football coach who led his team to defeat Stanford for successive five years. These two schools have been beating each other for decades, each having a point.

Rivals are different from enemies. Beating enemies stimulates national or regional sentiment, while losing to enemies brings strong frustration and arouses revenge. Victory over rivals also creates fabulous pride for one's alma mater, but failures do not hurt that much. This is the beauty of competition between rivals. Rivals, though reluctant to admit friendship between each other, view them more as friends rather than enemies. Losing to friends can be regretful, but not resentful. That's why failures to rivals can generate positive motivations out of negative results.

But there is no clear cut-off between rivals and enemies. If you only want to defeat someone, you're probably rivals; but if you want to smash someone, you're more likely to be enemies. When people's attitudes towards each other change, their view on the counterpart's role will change as well. Britain and Germany used to be enemies, but became more rival-like after WW2.

Thus in the same competition, people do feel different when they lose to different people. It's very interesting to think of Olympics in this way. Athletes all over the world compete against each other, and audiences cheer for their domestic players. If you have to lose, who you'd rather lose to? Losing to a rival is not fun, but you can attribute it to the marvelous progress that your rival has made since its last failure. Losing to an enemy is much worse, it may suggest a transfer of power from  "us" to "them".

Tolerance for Diversity

I went to see my OB at Berkeley yesterday. I'm a new patient to her, so she asked me a few routine questions before check-up.

"Are you sexually active?" She asked.

This is really straightforward. I thought to myself. When I was in Beijing, the MD there asked me "are you married?" to get the same information.

Her next question was even more unexpected. "Is your partner male or female?"

This is not a difficult question, but I've never been asked about this before. In China, we take it for granted that guys' partners are "wives", and women's are husbands. No one considers this improper. Gay couples don't correct mistakes like this either because it may trigger an endless debate over value judgement.

I remember about two weeks after my arrival in Princeton, I had a coffee with a friend from the same program after a long group discussion at night. We hardly knew each other at that time, so we asked about working experiences, research interests, family members, and then personal lives.

"Wow, so you are married!" He looked really surprised, "it must be tough to be so far away from your husband."

"I know! It is difficult. Thank god it's only two years." I forced a smile.

Then there was short silence. I felt like I should ask about him in return. "So, how about you? Do you have a girlfriend?"

He paused for a while, "no, I don't."

"Being single is cool, you have full control of your life."

"Actually," he said with a shy smile on his face, "I have a boyfriend."

The next five minutes were filled with my apologies. I suddenly realized that I had just committed a mistake which could be very offensive to some people. Later I noticed that my new classmates always asked about my "partner", instead of more specific terms like husband or boyfriend when we first talked about personal lives.

It is the details like this revealing how minorities are dramatically underrepresented in a unanimous society. Heterosexual chauvinism excludes gay groups from expressing their pride, nor using more inclusive language to describe their lives. Not only on sexual orientation, unanimous societies have uniform standards for almost every field. Students are supposed to study hard, get high grade in exams and go to good universities; workers have to work hard and follow the instructions from the above. Young people should get married before turning 30 with an apartment and a stable job, with a baby born in 3 years. If you are off the track, you are in trouble. Well, not only you, your parents will be suffering from social pressures as well.

Sometimes people can "correct" themselves to meet the standards, sometimes not. For the latter, it is painful to live under disguise. If you very unfortunately are one of the minorities in this society, the best way to protect yourself is to hide your uniqueness and act as majority. A documentary recorded the lives of "Tongqi" (gay's wife) in China. It's reckoned that about 1.6 million women are married to gay without knowing the true sexual orientation of their spouses, and their husbands choose to marry women only out of pressure from family and society. Families like this always end in tragedy as wives doubt their attractiveness while husbands cannot stay with their true love.

Everyone is born unique. But some people take it for granted that everyone else in the world should be the same as him/her otherwise there must be something "wrong". And even worse, they may want to correct the "wrongness". Conformité, que de crimes on commet en ton nom!

Rule-makers and Players

One day has passed since the disqualification of eight female badminton players from Olympics, but the controversy over it has not died out. It is the biggest frustration for the top three powers in this field ever since badminton's adoption by Olympics. No one had ever expected the No. 1 seed double players to end their Olympics in this way.

The accusation from the Badminton World Federation (BWF) was, as I quoted, that these players were "not using one's best efforts to win a match" and "conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport". The first charge is controversial - almost no one is using his best efforts to win a match until he has to. It makes perfect sense to preserve strengths before final. If we review Olympics games, it's quite common for swimmers to have better records in finals than in semi-finals. It's also not surprising if gymnasts choose easier movements to guarantee his qualification for finals, and go for more difficult ones later for medals. It's hard to define "best". You can't blame players on not making best efforts simply because they're not sweating to exhaustion, on contrary they're doing their best to win the match by using smart strategies.

The other charge is ambiguous: at least it's NOT clearly to me whether their manners are abusive or detrimental. Well, first I don't know what their manners are. If we assume the players are under the guidance of their coaches, then it should be their coaches' manner, not theirs. I don't think the BWF is ignorant of China's sporting system, and they should have some ideas on who's the decision maker on athletes' strategy. Ironically these BWF officials abused their powers over these poor badminton players while promising not to investigate the responsibilities of coaches - if you really want to defend Olympic values, do more investigation! Badminton Players who have been preparing for years for this moment, was scapegoated and helplessly found all their efforts in vain. And the person(s) in charge, successfully got away with it.

Secondly, it's also NOT clearly to me whether these players are happy to play in this way or their original intention was twisted by the change of rules. The BWF changed rules from  knockout rounds to a mixture of round robin and knockout  in Olympics even though they were warned of the potential damage - players can pick their opponents by changing their in-group rankings. Arrogant BWF didn't take it seriously, maybe because it was eagerly in search for a new rule to suppress Asia's dominance in badminton. Loop holes in the rules were so obvious that the best strategy was passive competition. If a player's best efforts will undermine his/her possibility of winning the championship, then it must be a problem with the tournament which is rule-makers' faults, not the players'.

Indonesia and Korea appealed right after the decision was announced. But Chinese Xinhua news, a mouthpiece of the government, soon released an announcement condemning Chinese players of violating Olympics values and supporting BWF's decision. I don't know how the deal was reached between BWF and Chinese sporting team, but the statement is shameless. A country who always claims itself a rising power and the second largest economy in the world, denied its responsibilities and passed the buck to two female athletes who actually had no choice but to follow the orders from their coach or even highers.

The BWF needed someone to be responsible for its stupid tournament to comfort the angry audiences and media when its officials were too arrogant to issue any apology, and the Chinese coach and his accomplice also needed someone to blame on to maintain their positions, which jointly made badminton players victims of the intrigue. The entire farce is an unfair-play between rule-makers and players, with the former denying their mistakes, and obliging eight innocent people to pay the price as high as their Olympics medals, professional reputations, and even career lives.

The Road to Peace or War

Olympics is always associated with peace. When Olympics were held in ancient Greeks, troops at war ceased fire to the end of the game. The truce, though temporary, gave people a glimmer hope of peace. When athletes from North and South Korea entered the main stadium hand in hand in 2000, audience hailed to them, believing this is exactly what the Olympics Spirit is: expanding understanding between rivalries, and promoting the course of peace.

However, as the most important competitive sports event, perhaps Olympics is leading its way to a different direction. Competition means winners and losers: athletes from one country winning the game, and the rest losing it. With a motto of "higher faster stronger" in mind, nothing else could look better than receiving medals on the podium. Thus competition is doomed to be superior to cooperation or hypocritical friendship. Since everyone - athletes, coaches and even audience - cares about the result, all means are exhausted to change  rankings. Instead of bringing peace, Olympics are triggering wars between rivalries.

A dramatic reversal happened at the end of Men's Gymnastics Team Final, when the Japanese top seed player Uchimura fell off pommel horse and his team's ranking dropped from the 2nd to the 4th. Britain, who historically won the 2nd place in gymnastics started to celebrate their biggest victory since modern Olympics held in 1896. Ukrain ranking the 3rd in the scoreboard was about to embrace a bronze medal and perk up in gymnastics since the collapse of Soviet Union. But seven minutes later, scores for the Japanese team were recalculated after appeals from Japanese coach, which raised its ranking to the 2nd. London audiences who had just celebrated this historical silver medal had to accept the fact that their silver medal was replaced by a bronze one about $5 worth. The audiences were obviously unhappy with the result, and their catcalls lasted for several minutes until awarding ceremony. Later on, many comments were found on twitter and micro-blog joking about "declaring a war against Japan" and how they "must have bribed judges for scores." Coincidentally a few days ago, China lost to Korea in the Women's Archery Team Final by one ring after Korean coach's appeal, which also aroused resentment within Chinese audience against Korea and doubts on the justice of the game.

Almost at the same time as the Gymnastics Final, a Korean female fencer appealed to the judge panel on her rival's last attack, which knocked her out in the semi-final. The appeal lasted half an hour and she declined to leave the stage when the result was not favoring her. The whole dispute took more than an hour. Her rivalry, a fencing superstar in German thus could not take a break between her semi-final and final, and ended up with a silver medal. The Germany media got very angry with the Korean athlete who delayed the competition and blamed her for disturbing the final. Furious netizens soon started lengthy accusation of the Korean girl of stealing the gold medal away.

The tension between badminton teams in China and Indonesia also escalated this morning when the Indonesian coach denounced Chinese players for starting the tradition of throwing their matches to face easier opponents in the next round in previous competitions and described Indonesian players as "victims" after the Badminton World Federation disqualified eight female badminton players from China, Indonesia and Korea from London Olympics a few hours earlier this morning. This coach's comment evoked wide anger within Chinese audiences who referred it as "outrageous and shameless."

Most furious resentment occurred over controversial disputes, when people believed it was due to some unfair subjective factors that their players lost the game. If this happened between countries with tense relationship - Britain and France, China and Japan, or Russia and the US, things could get worse. Patriotism can be easily translated into hostility against rival countries on such exciting occasions. Thank god we don't have athletes from Iran and Iraq competing for one gold medal, otherwise we may expect a nuclear bombing soon.

It sounds ridiculous to hope for peace when encouraging players from 204 countries to fight against each other fiercely. Perhaps Olympics can bring a transitory peace during wartime, but nothing more than trivial frictions when peace already arrives.