Ultimate Fighting vs. Math: No Holds Barred

How the introduction of stats into MMA (mixed martial arts) will change how the matches are fought:

“For all that enthusiasm, however, the sport has had a weak spot: It can be surprisingly difficult to say with any specificity what makes a mixed martial artist great, or what makes one fighter better than another. In baseball, there are home run tallies and RBIs and countless more obscure measures of a player’s skills. In MMA, fans find it easy to call someone a force of nature, but historically, it’s been impossible to back it up with data. In some cases, it is frustratingly hard to tell who is even winning a match.

“That uncertainty can be traced back to the sport’s origins. When the Ultimate Fighting Championship was created in the early 1990s, the point was to give pairs of tough, bloodthirsty fighters an open venue in which to attack each other in whatever way they pleased. There were no standard measures of anything. There were barely any rules at all, and the only statistic anyone kept track of was who was still standing at the end.”

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Apr 9, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,138 words)

Where American Criminal Justice Went Wrong

William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed:

“Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before he died at age 52. The Collapse of American Criminal Justice was published the following fall. In it, Stuntz describes how America’s incarceration rate came to be the highest in the industrial world; how the country’s young black males came to bear the brunt of its increasingly harsh penal code; and how jury trials became so rare that more than 95 percent of people sent to prison never had their guilt or innocence deliberated in court.”

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Feb 26, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,264 words)

Little Noted or Known, They Bear Scars of that Day

9/11, ten years later: “This is where it began. Two flights, one airport. Everyone knows how it ended. Nearly 3,000 dead, families devastated, a crater in the earth. Back home, Logan reinvents itself. Around the airfield, a 10-foot-high concrete barrier, prison-camp thick, with razor wire on top. Inside, a new security force, full-body scanners, hundreds of cameras, liquids in bags, beltless travelers in socks. And unseen, scars unwilling to fade. They are the rarely noticed casualties of the terrorist attacks: the security guard, the ticket agent, the baggage handler on the ramp. They made it home that night, but with images they couldn’t shake, a pain uncomfortable to voice. They can’t believe it has been 10 years. They can’t believe it has only been 10 years.” #Sept11

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Sep 6, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,792 words)

Where Does Good Come From?

What E.O. Wilson is trying to do, late in his influential career, is nothing less than overturn a central plank of established evolutionary theory: the origins of altruism. His position is provoking ferocious criticism from other scientists. Last month, the leading scientific journal Nature published five strongly worded letters saying, more or less, that Wilson has misunderstood the theory of evolution and generally doesn’t know what he’s talking about. One of these carried the signatures of an eye-popping 137 scientists, including two of Wilson’s colleagues at Harvard.

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Apr 17, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,349 words)

Out of Options: A Surprising Culprit in the Nuclear Crisis

Japan’s reactors are “light water” reactors, whose safety depends on an uninterrupted power supply to circulate water quickly around the hot core. A light water system is not the only way to design a nuclear reactor. But because of the way the commercial nuclear power industry developed in its early years, it’s virtually the only type of reactor used in nuclear power plants today. Even though there might be better technologies out there, light water is the one that utility companies know how to build, and that governments have historically been willing to fund. Economists call this problem “technological lock-in”: The term refers to the process by which one new technology can prevail over another for no good reason other than circumstance and inertia.

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Mar 20, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,369 words)

The Pin Kings

Five young Massachusetts guys want to reignite competitive candlepin bowling. Can they pull it off?

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Apr 25, 2010
Length: 12 minutes (3,156 words)

For Walker, Financial Fouls Mount

Former Celtics star pursued by creditors as free-spending lifestyle drains his wealth

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Oct 25, 2009
Length: 8 minutes (2,116 words)

Why Capitalism Fails

The man who saw the meltdown coming had another troubling insight: it will happen again

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Sep 13, 2009
Length: 10 minutes (2,506 words)

Trapped

The plan was ambitious but simple: Build a 9.5-mile sewer tunnel hundreds of feet below the ocean floor to help clean up Boston Harbor. But 10 years ago this summer, five divers went deep, deep into the project for one final step — with deadly results. Their harrowing story has never been told, until now.

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Aug 9, 2009
Length: 21 minutes (5,411 words)

The Long Journey Home

Killed in a Brighton car accident, Fredy Zepeda was buried by the family he tried to lift from poverty but hadn’t seen for years

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Aug 2, 2009
Length: 7 minutes (1,807 words)