Good software for directing tournaments will help with registering the players, creating the pairings (including appropriate handicaps) for each round of play, grouping the players into “bands” (also called “flights” or “divisions”), and reporting on the place standings (and have a way to break ties among players with the same number of wins) for each band so you know how to allocate prizes at the end. It also should report the results in a format acceptable to your sanctioning organization (in my case, the American Go Association).

Paul Matthews’ AccelRat worked nicely under Microsoft DOS (or in a Microsoft Windows command line window). The last time I used it, it lacked an easy way to import a large list of players, and select a subset of them for registration. However, that has been fixed! The current version uses Microsoft Windows, and a clean and mostly intuitive interface with Microsoft Access (a database program) to take the AGA player list and sort it in columns. You search for a player’s name or AGA ID number, and click a check-box, and that’s it! This is much nicer than copy-n-pasting from a spreadsheet into a text file, saving the text file, then alt-tabbing to the command window to run the pairings. Unfortunately, AccelRat needs Microsoft software to run, and I use Ubuntu Linux almost exclusively; but I have a battered old laptop with Windows 2000 on it still. I expect that I’ll use AccelRat the next time I run a tournament.

Chuck Robbins’ WinTD also uses Microsoft Access to handle the player list and registration. In my experience though, it tends to be a little unstable. If I accidentally do things in the wrong order or make a misclick, a crash or system freeze is too often waiting in the wings — basically a problem of operator error combined with unhandled exceptions, I think. (I would guess that, since Chuck doesn’t use his own program improperly, the need to idiot-proof it wasn’t apparent when he was writing it.) And the interface is a little non-intuitive for me, so even though I’ve used the program several times, I estimate that 10 or 15% of the time, I had some kind of computer related tournament delay. It is feasible to use WinTD run a small, large, or very large tournament; but you definitely should rehearse first.

Christopher Gerlach’s MacMahon was the first tournament directing program I used. It was really nice — lots of features, well documented, and easy to use. However, it runs only under Microsoft Windows. Also, it does not output the results in the standard format for reporting to the AGA. Fortunately, it’s not that difficult to massage the data into AGA standard format. Still, even though MacMahon is a very nice program, ultimately I found that it was less work to use AccelRat and WinTD.

There are other programs for running Go tournaments. There is Chris Sira’s PyTD which runs on Python, and should be OS-agnostic, I think; but other Linux users have told me they haven’t been able to obtain an executable that works under Linux. I’ve heard of a couple of programs that work over the internet — “cloud-based” tournament direction, I guess it would be called. One is used by the Massachusetts Go Association (MGA GoTD), and another is written by Jon Boley and sometimes used at Seattle Go Center tournaments. I have used none of these, and can’t say much about them.

If anyone knows of a nice program that works with Linux for running Go tournaments, I’m very interested in hearing about it.

In other news, we got in some good snowboarding this past winter and spring, and I’ve played in three Go tournaments this year.

Here’s my favorite bit so far, from the bottom of page 4:

For purposes of clarity, this report depicts “mixes” as the predominant breed. For example, a boxer-mix is depicted as a “boxer,” a husky-mix is depicted as a “husky” and a pit bull-mix is depicted as a “pit bull.”

So, if a mixed-breed dog is known to be 50% Weimeraner, and 50% Chesapeake Bay Retriever — which is it “predominantly”? Secondly, if we accept that behaviors can be identified as characteristic of a particular breed — for instance, Retrievers characteristically chase stuff and bring it back — then why ignore data about the heritage that informs a mixed-breed dog’s behavior? In the case of our Weim-CBR example, does the dog’s behavior spring from the Weimeraner mother or the Chessie father — or from the synergy of the two? Identifying the dog by only a fraction of its breeding may serve the purposes of brevity, but it does not serve the purposes of clarity, unless by “clarity” one means “ignorance.”

But I have made a little progress on the “Fatal 88.”  I’ve decided I need two database files — one of the news stories, and another of the facts of the attacks gleaned from the news stories.  I expect that, for nearly every fatal attack, there will be several news stories to comb through.  As I thought about it, it became apparent that using only one data file would quickly become unweildy.

So, I have the beginnings of the database files set up.  But I need to bone up on OpenOffice.org “Base” a little.  Otherwise, in two or three weeks, I’m likely to have to start from scratch because I made some stupid blunder.

Meanwhile, another dog owner is independently working on the same project.  “TrainTrax” at PitBullForum.com reports:

So, after collecting all the pitbull fatality stories and ruling out the ones where breed could not be determined, attacks weren’t seen or other breeds were present, I have the final number of how many people were actually killed by pitbulls during the years of 2006-2009…

24

Yes, 24. Far less than the bogus numbers from dogsbite.org.

With the 47 attacks from other breeds and the 24 from pitbulls, that brings the confirmed total to 71. Adding the 12 stories where breed was not determined, attacks weren’t seen and other breeds present, that brings the total to 83. Which is pretty close to the 88 that dogsbite.org claimed happened.

(Dogsbite.org had published that 52 of 88 deaths were caused by Pit Bulls.  It seems that, in the case of deaths that were caused by dogs of undetermined breeding, they’re blaming it on Pit Bulls.)

On a related note — Terrierman’s challenge indicates a disbelief that, in this modern age, in industrialized America, a fatal dog mauling could go unreported in the mass media.  Initially, I would have agreed; yet StopBSL.com has an example of exactly that — an attack by a Great Dane was reported in Dallas newmedia (DallasNews.com and NBCDFW.com); but the victim’s subsequent death went unreported.  (See http://stopbsl.com/journalist-resources/writing-an-unbiased-article/ and scroll down about 50% to “How breed influences reporting.”)  Especially now that local newspapers are dropping like flies, and broadcast journalism is done from press releases at a central site, it would surprise me if there were not some dog bite fatalities that didn’t make it into the news.  All you need is a busy news day, a paucity of local pro journalists, a victim who is neither a child nor a photogenic young woman, and a dog that doesn’t happen to be a Pit Bull or a Rottweiler causing injuries that aren’t immediately fatal.  In fact, probably you need only three, maybe two, of those four factors.

So.  How many (delayed) fatalities are being caused by Golden Retrievers, Pugs, and Airedales, and not being reported in the mass media?

To do: Find official mortality figures for 2006-2008.  Maybe the Centers for Disease Control has that.  I’d like to know, from 2006 through 2008 — were there 88 fatalities, or 83?  Or some other number, like 90?

For those who do not already know, “BSL” is “breed-specific legislation,” typically some kind of restriction or even a ban on dogs of breeds reputed to be particularly dangerous.  (And as you might expect, StopBSL.com is an advocacy site opposed to BSL.)  It is a ridiculous knee-jerk approach to public safety, and it galls me that we spend so much time on it, instead of producing (and enforcing!) laws and policies that would genuinely prevent dog bite injuries and fatalities.  Simple things like, teaching children the proper way to interact with dogs — now that we’re not a nation of small farmers, most kids don’t learn these things at home, so it should be taught in the elementary schools, just like washing hands and stop-drop-and-roll. (See www.doggonesafe.com and www.thebluedog.org.)  Things like giving the local Animal Control organization enough of a budget to actually respond to neighborhood complaints before tragedy strikes.  (Dog owners, who love their pets and use psychological blinders to avoid seeing how bad things are getting, may be surprised when a dog “suddenly snaps,” but the neighbors who have been terrorized by the uncontrolled dog often are not.  But Animal Control gets a tiny share of the law enforcement budget — which makes sense in a way, since dog bites are not nearly as serious a problem as traffic accidents — so they end up doing triage instead of preventive maintenance.)

BSL reminds me of a story I once heard.  It’s night, and a man is searching the ground under a streetlight.  A passer-by stops to ask what he’s doing.  “I’m looking for my keys,” he answers.  “Where did you drop them?” asks the passer-by.  “Over there, I think,” answers the searcher, pointing to some bushes 40 or 50 feet away.  “Then why are you looking here?” asks the passer-by.  “Well, this is where the light is,” says the searcher.

My favorite analysis of BSL (and profiling in general) is by Malcolm Gladwell, published in The New Yorker 2006-02-06:  Troublemakers: What pit bulls can teach us about profiling.  It also talks about the proper way to catch terrorists and drug smugglers.

In other news — I’ve figured out what I’ll do with this blog, at least for a while. I’ve tentatively accepted a challenge to verify or repudiate the breed identifications in a collection of news stories about 88 fatal dog maulings in the U.S. over a three-year period (2006, 2007, and 2008), compiled by a pro-BSL advocacy group.  I figure it’ll take about six months.  I’ll leave a trail of breadcrumbs here.

One of the problems with banning a dog based on its breed is that breed identification is a difficult thing to do, in the absence of a registered pedigree (and sometimes even then, given how many breeders unwittingly have accidental breedings with stray dogs, or falsify pedigrees for financial reasons).  Even people who should be relatively good at visual identification of breed — dog show judges, for example — have trouble picking American Pit Bull Terriers (and the American Kennel Club variant, American Staffordshire Terriers) out of a line-up of other breeds. (See Survey of the ability of individuals to identify American Pit Bull Terriers at Matrix Canine Research Institute.  If you think you can do better, give it a try at PitBullsOnTheWeb.com and at Chako.org.)

And so, Pit Bull lovers have long suspected that many of the bites blamed on Pit Bulls were in fact commited by dogs of other breeds.  (After all, for some hundred years or more, depending on whose history you believe, the fighting ancestors of today’s Pit Bulls were culled if they bit a human, which some Pit Bull lovers see as an explanation for the breed’s stereotypically very friendly demeanor.)  This will be an interesting test of that hypothesis.  Given the demands on my time, I expect that it’ll take me about six months to answer the question, and quantify breed mis-identification in U.S. news media coverage of fatal maulings, to my satisfaction.

(Of course, this has no bearing on the separate question of whether some breeds inherently are more dangerous than others of similar size.  It is obvious that the most dangerous dog is the one owned by an irresponsible or negligent owner, and unfortunately, for some 25 years, Pit Bulls and Rottweilers have tended to attract the metaphorical 1% of owners who give the other 99% a bad reputation.  But humans are more difficult targets than dogs.)

Here’s a start:  “Breed-specific legislation,” or “BSL,” is bad.  It’s a quick-fix knee-jerk reaction when someone is mauled by a dog.  The problem is that banning a breed, or a number of breeds, does nothing to prevent irresponsible ownership of dogs; and every time a dog attacks a human, it is, at root, an outcome of incompetent or negligent dog ownership.

Check out www.StopBSL.com for more information.