Category Archives: Learning and Ideas

Articles I Like: The Lottery Hackers – The Huffington Post

The PolyBlog
March 2 2018

Usually when you see an article or some link about “beating the lottery”, you know it’s going to be a scam site, so there’s no point in clicking on it. You can’t beat the lottery, you just can’t. Right?

That’s certainly the popular wisdom, and the attached article (I used to hate the Huffington Post, but it’s become a little less sleazy and irresponsible of late, I find) walks through some of the history of how it is just a tax on the poor, the underrepresented, etc. And if someone found a way to “beat” the system, it would be illegal, right?

Well, apparently not. Based on some articles that ran in the Boston Globe, a down-home, blue collar guy in a white collar job (working for a cereal company on packaging), was fond of puzzles. And he loved math, so he would read, take courses, constantly learning new things. And then, one day, he was reading an ad for a new state lottery when he noticed something odd. It was your standard “pick-six” numbers out of a possible 49 for up to a $5M pay-off. Nothing unusual there. But they were adding a feature — if the big prize wasn’t won, it would roll-over, and roll-over (similar to most lotteries) BUT with one key difference — after a few weeks, if the big prize wasn’t won, they would do something called a “roll-down”. They would take all that big prize money and pro-rate it across all the smaller prizes. So, for example, the smallest prize of $5 could win $50 that week, if nobody won the big prize.

While that seems like no big deal, it drastically alters the math for your “return on investment”. So if you think of your chance of winning $10 in a game that only has ten tickets that cost a $1 each, then your expected return for your dollar “bet” is only $1. How does that work:

Expecting winnings = the prize money x the likelihood of winning = $10 x 1 in 10 = $1

So, statistically speaking, if you played over time, you would come out even. You would pay a $1 and expect to get a dollar back. Even Steven. And lotteries take that into account when they design the games. The math is NEVER in your favour. For example, your normal “return” calculation would look like this:

Expected winnings = HUGE prize x low odds of winning = $50M x 0 = $0

It isn’t zero, admittedly, but it is so low, it doesn’t change your payout calculation other than to say your return would be somewhere around one-thousandth of a penny. Over time, you would be guaranteed to lose money. Lotteries are rigged so the house always wins and suckers can’t game the system.

However, the rolldown would change that calculation, if for example, every sixth game, the payout was $20:

Expected winnings = $20 x 1 in 10 = $2

Or, put differently, if you could buy all ten tickets for $1 each for $10, your guaranteed payout would be the $20 and you’d be up $10. The math works because the winnings that week are NOT based on your normal return, they add in winnings from previous weeks that went uncollected. This means the state isn’t losing money — they already got their take. This is more like previous people didn’t win, so you can win THEIR money as well as the money from this week.

The problem though, in a state lottery, or any lottery where there are millions of combinations of tickets and millions of players, you can’t buy all the tickets, of course, but you also can’t buy enough tickets to even out random chance. So in the above example of $20, if you only buy 1 ticket, then your odds of winning don’t change, and it could take ten times before you “hit” — on average. But it could be 20 times or 2 times…if it is only twice, you’re way ahead. If it is 20, you come out down $10. The example in the article is with coin tosses, but the basic idea is that you need enough tickets to offset the random fluctuations of chance so that your investment matches the statistics (i.e. you need enough coin tosses for statistics to prevail).

How many tickets? The more you buy, the more it evens out the fluctuations. The main guy in the article starts at $3500 on $1 tickets. And he lost $150 or something. Next time, he went larger, $10K, $15K, etc., and evened it out. So he was making almost 50% return. Then he took on investors and jacked it up to $100K and more.

But the time investment was huge — he had to stand at a terminal all day long printing tickets. And only for “roll-down” pots. It wsa the only time the payouts were in your favour. And over time, the lottery officials would notice and kill it.

So he started playing another similar game in another state, and the newspaper article profiles other “investor” groups who noticed the same design flaw. However, to be clear, they weren’t cheating. They were just doubling down their bets when they knew the odds and payouts were more favourable. They weren’t rigging the game (although one group did that a bit, albeit not illegally). They weren’t cheating. They also weren’t anonymous — the lottery knew what they were doing and wasn’t stopping them. Because they were playing like everyone else — press the button, buy some tickets, take your chances. They were just doing it on a MASSIVE scale. Which the lottery officials didn’t mind because 40 cents of every bet was going into revenue for the state. The tax part of the winnings.

Overall, a really cool article. Even if the HP is mostly piggy-backing on stories written elsewhere, it’s decent reading.

Articles I Like: Dread accompanies me through life

The PolyBlog
February 24 2018

Firefox has this little feature when you pull up its built-in home page with a search engine box — just below the box is your recently viewed webpages, nothing unusual there, but between the search and history are three articles that Firefox thinks might be of interest to you. I have no idea if they are actually using an algorithm of the web history and past searches, or just curating interesting stories, but I often find one or more of the stories worthy of clicking. I figured initially that it was just clickbait, but most of the time, when I’ve actually clicked, the article has been worth the click.

Take for instance one from today. The article is written by a philosophy professor and revolves around anxiety. It starts with some powerful events — the death of his parents — that are not powerful in terms of trauma but in their normalcy. He then talks about how it impacted his sense of safety, life, religion even. His view of the universe. And then talks about his journey to understand anxiety from a personal, psychological, even existential perspective, informed by the works of philosophers and psychologists.

While it doesn’t end as strongly as it starts, and it veers into philosophy and psychology in ways that will bore a lot of people, it is a very compelling cerebral contemplation of anxiety. Here are some of my favourite highlights:

I had imagined that with my father’s death, the world had exacted its pound of flesh, a tax so terrible it would be levied only once. But in 14 years, death came calling again. One God – a child’s God, mythical and compassionate – died with my father; another – an adult’s God, a God of reasonableness, the one that ensured this world would not do excessively badly by you – died with my mother.

[…]

Prompted by the production of new traumas and losses in our lives, anxieties can interact and recombine like viruses to form newer ‘strains’ that course through us, surprising us with their ferocity and visceral feel. We should not expect our anxieties to remain the same as we age; by paying close attention to their nature, their ‘look and feel’, we can track changes in ourselves and our ‘table of values’.

I learned that I respond with anxiety to this world’s offerings. I’m a better person for this knowledge of myself.[…]My trajectory through the world is thus informed, at every step, by the anxieties that afflict me.

[…]

Our anxieties rush into the mental spaces we leave open, reminding us of all that can go terribly wrong.

Dread accompanies me through life but it is not without consolation | Aeon Essays

Reading “Big Box Reuse” by Julia Christensen – Chapter 2

The PolyBlog
February 14 2018

Chapter 2 takes us to a suburb of Austin that grew into its own as the town of Round Rock. This is closer to the type of “re-use” I was interested in when I started reading the book — a building that was previously a Walmart and was / is now being used as something else.

The really interesting part of this chapter is the interplay with Walmart as the continued owners of the land. They bought the land initially, built their store, operated it for awhile, and it was successful. Dell located its HQ in the area, things started to rocket in the local economy, and they decided to build a super-centre across the road, leaving the old location empty. While there were lots of suitors looking to buy and use the land, Walmart was happy to let it sit empty unless the deal included a lot of restrictions on what could be put there for the future — basically eliminating any business that would compete with Walmart.

Then came a proposal to use it as an indoor race track for super go-karts / low-power racing cars. Ten cars at a time, racing around the indoor tracks, with racing league nights, conference rooms (mainly for Dell to rent out for corporate events), and early adoption of wifi in the lobbies. With no competition against Walmart, the deal was done, with a local developer buying it and the race track leasing it for awhile.

Initially, the deal looked awesome, mainly because the race track people were looking for a large empty warehouse structure to race around in. They didn’t care about the location; although it was great, they mainly cared about the structure. However, that same “deal” had a built-in ticking bomb…eventually, when some of the lease restrictions eased, it was more profitable for the landlord to lease to companies who wanted the location bad enough to pay a premium for being there. And so it eventually out-stripped the race track’s revenue stream, and they rented to a gym, tanning salon, barbershop, smoothie store, and a health food place.

Whether it was Walmart’s “holding out” for the right initial deal, or the subsequent developer “holding out” for the right leasee, or even later selling it to the right buyer for more than 3x the original purchase price, all of the owners used it as a “land bank” — they bought it up and held on to it, thus controlling future developments while others built up around it.

What I also found interesting was that the racetrack found ways to even use the parking lot — for motorcycle courses and mini-races, antique car shows, carnivals, etc. … almost none of it particularly “revenue generating” so much as just straight marketing and cross-promotion.

I found this chapter had a lot of great variables that raise some interesting questions. Do most of the “land banks” generate future profits? Does it require the first Walmart to still be nearby to draw extra infrastructure? Was it just because the whole area continued to boom? Lots of big box stores like K-Marts and Zellers in Canada did not “accrue” interest acting as land banks, as the areas were essentially dying. They sometimes find alternate users, but usually at a far cheaper rate than the land bank would suggest. Equally, it raises the question of timeframe for re-use…if you looked at this one in the early days, it looks like a giant success story. Five to ten years later, the racetrack is gone, the developer got its profits, and the location seems to have been broken up some, although the gym is still there.

Again, though, like the predecessor, it is just “different retail” in a retail space. While the raceway was interesting, maybe even iconic, the ultimate reality is simple retail use. Out with one vendor, in with another.

Reading “Big Box Reuse” by Julia Christensen – Intro, Chapter 1

The PolyBlog
January 8 2018

A few weeks ago, there was an article in one of the U.S. newspapers about old big box bookstores i.e. Barnes and Noble’s stores being converted into other uses. In a forum that I follow, someone suggested someone should write about a book about this, and someone else pointed out that it had been done — Julia Christensen wrote “Big Box Reuse” back in 2008.

The idea fascinates me for a number of reasons. Initially, the article interested me because I follow the rise and fall of various aspects of the book business — from brick and mortar stores to digital e-books to wax and waning aspects of public libraries. And with so many of the bookstores with large overhead and full retail pricing losing out in the U.S. in particular to the ubiquitous options of Amazon, there are lots of bookstores closing.  Not as gentle a world as the “You’ve Got Mail” scenario of romantic small bookstore owner against the big box store retailer nearby, more like economic crushing by a faceless entity that can literally financially obliterate you by drone.

Secondly, I have a passing interest from a business operations side. I am fascinated not only by what some people think will be a functional, well-earning business (i.e. fancy sock stores); what will function in a specific environment (i.e. non-franchise coffee shops opening in the SAME location that three other coffee shops have failed previously — do the new people figure that they can survive on a 1% savings on supplies?); or businesses that seem to do most things right but just fail to connect (i.e. thousands of restaurants every year).

Finally, I’m attracted to stories of economic revival, particularly for downtown areas, but also in areas where a strip mall loses its main anchor and what happens to the store after that event. I’ve seen a couple of malls where it has lost a big anchor, and I thought, “Oops, that one is going to die”, only for it to attract another anchor store and keep going. And then lose that one, prompting a similar expectation from me, and yet they find either a third store or go in a different direction yet continue. I’m also fascinated by the small stores that remain in the same malls and how they can possibly remain open with such little foot traffic.

So the book attracted my attention, and lo and behold!, it was available for free through the public library. How could I say no?

Introduction

The intro is mostly about introducing some of the concepts for the rest of the book. First and foremost is the identification of what constitutes “reuse”. While there are multiple elements discussed, for me, I like the idea of “reclamation” and the process of change i.e. it was used for one purpose initially, then there is a definite dormancy period, and then there is a new function. The example I gave above where a mall keeps attracting other big box stores to try their luck isn’t really the same type of reuse she envisions.

I also like the idea that box stores tend to be utilitarian in design — you can usually tell what the store was previously just by the design. Similar to restaurant chains too, you often see an empty one and can immediately think, “Oh, that used to be a McDonald’s”. But it also means they are also quite bland once the logos and stuff are removed — after all, it WAS a “box” store. 

I confess I’m a bit disappointed too with the scope of the book in two areas. In designing the case studies, she focused on K-Mart and Walmart stores only. While that allows for identification of some common factors, it also limits the study/book to only looking at stores with very specific styles of footprints — literally a large one-story box with a large parking lot.

I’m only a chapter in, but the book also seems to be lacking much in the way of other context. It isn’t just stores that are being converted…entire neighbourhoods are going from factories to residential, for example. And how do historic buildings fit into the equation when someone converts an old house in the downtown core into a doctor’s office? The issues are quite different, but are they similar in category? Hard to see the parallels without the broader context. I’d especially like to see comparators with historic buildings being adapted into residential or commercial space, and with conversions of schools and churches.

When approaching the book, I hadn’t given much thought to the definitional challenge of “what is a big box store?”. It seemed relatively obvious. Except the definition depends not on some national or international definition of square footage, layout or sales, but on local ordinances. I was also expecting it to be mostly abandoned buildings when stores closed…I didn’t expect it to be about stores closing because it was so successful that it “expanded” nearby with a whole new store, leaving the old building an empty shell (because it was cheaper to build a whole new separate store than shut down the old one temporarily during renovations).

Chapter 1 – Bardstown, Kentucky

I feel cheated by the first case study. The basic premise is that it is a historic old town, and Walmart located on one side of it. Then they abandoned that building to open in a new larger building on the other side of town. And not for nothing, did so again farther out with a huge superstore. But it isn’t really about two abandoned buildings finding other uses.

In the first instance, the courthouse relocated to the site, which sounds kind of odd and she references the weirdness of “corporate justice” trickling down. But it’s based on rhetoric more than reality. She does a great job of describing how the local town is so protective of its Kentucky heritage, and deep almost philosophical discussions about how to handle moving the courthouse. But in the end, all they are doing is moving to the space — they razed the building and built a new courthouse. That is not reuse in any fashion that has anything to do with the Walmart that was there before, all it really is about is the location of land close to the city and outside the downtown core. And while it suggests that it is all historic across from the old Kentucky home plantation, Google Streetview shows the reality — it’s next to a cheap stripmall with hair salons, tanning beds, a small credit union, etc, across from a McDonald’s and next to a bunch of small residential areas. It’s a far cry from a protected heritage site of Colonial history.

What I did find interesting is how the local city council learned from their earlier dealings with Walmart. When they built the first one, there were no real restrictions placed on what could be done with the old building. Similarly for the second one. But for the third one, they put limits on the construction that would allow for easier adaptation in the future if it ends up empty — more doors so that it could be subdivided into multiple stores, and a requirement for Walmart to tear it down if it sits empty and unused for a certain number of years. I’ll be curious to see what future chapters have as “civic lessons learned”.

Understanding Video Games – Week 7 – The culture of video games

The PolyBlog
December 29 2017

It has been some time, eighteen months in fact, since I viewed any of the materials for the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) called “Understanding Video Games”. It was hosted by Leah Hackman and Sean Gouglas through Coursera and affiliated for credit with the University of Alberta. I say “was” because the course was removed from Coursera’s offerings at some point during that last 18 months. I’m not sure when exactly, but when Coursera changed their website some time ago, and the links were all going to change, I downloaded all the videos to make sure I didn’t lose them and I wanted to enable offline viewing anyway. However, it was fortunate I did because when the course offering disappeared, so did all the materials. This means while I still have all the remaining videos, and they’re probably sufficient for my purposes, I don’t have the syllabus outline or the extra reading materials for the week. Sheesh, hard to believe that a course I started two years ago isn’t automatically still available to my free-loading audit viewing, right? 🙂 I don’t even have the official title for the week either, so from here on in, it is more my “estimated” title.

Week 7 started with an explanation that up until now, most of the discussion was about “what” constituted a game. And there was a surprising amount (to me) of solid academic theory in there. Actual rigour in fact. However, this week relies heavily on cultural studies approaches, trying to look at “who” plays video games, and I found the limitations of the approach is as much about the content as it is about the limitations of cultural studies in general.

I went to Trent University, and it has one of the biggest and best cultural studies programs in Canada (at least, I think it is still one of the biggest and best…at one point, it was the only REAL program that had a full offering of courses as a specialization instead of a minor). And some of my administrative and policy studies courses were cross-listed with cultural studies courses, so the cultural studies approaches were often woven into the curriculum.

So here’s the rub for me. Cultural studies, like history or anthropology, have to mainly observe from outside of the culture. The obvious rationale is that this is a good thing, an ability to see broad themes by having a more distant and objective perspective. However, for me, that is also an extreme limitation. If you aren’t part of the culture, immersed in it, and explaining things within that culture, the best you can do is an abstraction. That’s not limited to cultural studies, of course, any academic study requires some abstraction to hold everything else steady while you look at a couple of key issues or variables, but I find it difficult to accept the cultural studies one as readily. Partly because interpreting another culture only works if you first understand the culture well enough to step back, and that act of stepping back hides meaning, particularly when it is then combined with a translation process to “transcode” those observations into something those not of the culture can understand.

Take for example a situation where you’re observing the interactions between genders in a village. It’s easy to misunderstand hierarchies if you assume that hearth and home are “lesser” responsibilities than breadwinning employment — it is almost impossible to avoid some bias in the interpretation process. Descriptions are easy, interpretation and translation are best guesses as to why or for what significance.

I really liked the description the hosts give to the culture at the beginning i.e. that the culture includes not only the members themselves, but a specialized language, sense of community, identity representation of self and others, and how they relate to each other. Right down to defining who is “in” and who is “out”. As well, they talked about how you might look back at the history of gaming consoles and group them or “rank” them…would it be by the amount of memory, type of graphics, simplicity or complexity of controllers, the addition of narratives, etc.? And thus it is incredibly important to understand something within the context.

However, I don’t think they go quite far enough in critical analysis of the tool (cultural studies). If you accept that you need to understand within a context, and that you need to speak the language to understand the context, then any translation outside that context will necessarily involve at least some loss of meaning. To me, that sometimes moves the analysis into the realm of subjectivity or simple descriptive relativism. One analyst could argue it means X, another could argue it means Y, but neither one really knows if that is an accurate translation. As with all languages, some words have no direct counterpart, and idioms / symbols / signs are the hardest to translate at all.

In the videos for the week, they had a pretty solid opening to describe the culture of first-person shooters for example. And the definition of what those who play video games would describe as a “gamer” (time spent, frequency, places, platforms).

However, there were three areas at the end that I found were lost opportunities for deeper dives. The first was the role of “modding” in the culture. How extensive is it? Does it represent 2% of the so-called gamer community or 20%? There was very little indication of scope, and so as an artifact of the culture, the modification of hardware and software, or the motives for doing so from total conversion to patches, from remakes to demakes, from cheat codes to plugins, remain just artifacts…descriptive, not analytical.

Equally, the description of the change in commercial distribution channels with the growth of Indies has some amazing parallels with the music industry, Kickstarter campaigns for inventions, and self-publication through Amazon, yet received a pretty light touch without much comparative analysis. Even more definitive mapping out some of the changes in distribution vs. new production techniques vs. simple evolution (shareware to apps) would have been helpful.

Last, but not least, I find it difficult to understand their limited analysis and coverage of COS players. If you want to understand a culture, one of the most basic tools of cultural studies is to look at ways in which they express themselves for both artistry and identity. And the physical embodiment of a video game character would seem to be the ultimate form of that expression. For some, it is simply a creative challenge — can you make a costume or do the makeup? For others, it is an opportunity for role play and to experience the game in a different way, not by actually immersing oneself into the game’s reality, but by bringing that reality into the broader world. And for some, it is simply Hallowe’en costume play. Yet there are people who can do it for a living — they’re booked and paid to attend in various costumes at ComicCon, they pose as models for photographers, they travel around the world doing it. And yet it is only a throwaway topic in this week’s videos, which I found a bit disappointing. It’s a dangerous area for mass misinterpretation, but still, I would have liked to see more on it.

I can’t help but agree with the hosts. In the end, it feels like we tend to have more of a corporate history of gaming rather than a social or cultural history of gaming.