A mouthguard that can tell when you're having a concussion

Science and technology are awesome. Okay, sure they make things like nukes and whatnot but sometimes there are things that come along which are really useful and we wonder why nobody thought of them before. You know, things like this mouthguard:

For anyone who's had a concussion before, you know those things aren't fun. Your vision is blurry, you can't make proper sentences and falling down is a constant thing. Ok, and of course there's also the fact you've got some kind of brain damage.

Mouthguards in derby are supposed to help prevent that to some extent--when you fall on your head the force of impact can be distributed and absorbed by your jaw and your mouthguard is there to reduce the injury to your body. But the problem is that there's little research on concussions in derby specifically--I mean, we've adopted our safety gear from other sports, and we're still in the early days of knowing how to protect ourselves in a way specific to our sport.

So, the next best thing from actually being able to protect yourself specifically for your sport is to be able to protect yourself generally, AND also get information about how these injuries are occurring. I'm a big fan of information gathering. Enter the FITGuard mouthguard, which has an indicator to tell you the likelihood of your having a concussion in a pretty foolproof way.

Here's an article on HuffPost about it. In particular, they say:

The FITGuard has a green LED strip on the front that turns blue when it detects a medium force impact and red when there’s an above-50 percent chance the athlete has suffered a concussion. The athlete can then use an app to download a data log showing why the guard is displaying a given color. The data will also be uploaded to a central database to help the FIT team improve the device.

Yeah, so that's a handy-dandy way to helping determine the injury. Plus one thing that's good is that you can tell without having to take the skater's helmet off (which might make things worse if they have some other injury, e.g. to their neck).


Plus it's a LED strip so you'd glow in the dark (maybe)!




It kind of reminds me of those stickers they put on things in Mythbusters to measure G Forces or whatever (for illustration, here's the Exploding Water Heater episode, the stickers are at 0:35 onwards but stick around for the explosions):

Yeah, I'm glad my head doesn't do that when I get a concussion. 

Intermission: San Francisco is set to break a world skatey record

Yeah, so I haven't updated this recently, mostly because of real life stuff. Long story short, I'm moving to Seattle for a whole bunch of new adventures! But if anyone is going to be in San Francisco next week, here's something fun that you can do: strap on some skates and break a world record!

Deets are: Sunday, June 8 at 11am. And it will be in Golden Gate Park on the Great Highway (the road running through GGP), which is super close to the skate place in the park. I think the old guy dancing on skates in this blog entry is going to be there, which is AWESOME because he has some mad skills.

Roller-Thriller in the park. This is what everyone needs.

Some of my friends from Sonoma County are going to be there, and it looks like all you have to do is do some kind of pace line but actually touching the person in front, and slaloming, which doesn't look too hard. Plus it's not every weekend that you get to go break some world records and get to do super awesome skatey fun stuff!

Disney princesses also get in on derby

I'm not a huge fan of the whole Disney princess thing, but I came across collection of disney princesses who are supposed to be derbified. I've previously seen DC and Marvel Superhero derby so hey, why not. This work is by Amanda Robinson. I'm digging her art style.

Okay, so it looks like Disney princesses with skates on, and revealing-er outfits. There's no pads, helmets or anything, and it looks like they're wearing those tall artistic skate boots.

That said, they're not your standard run of the mill princesses. They look like they can kick ass, and I have to say that the derby names are pretty incredible and creative. In a lot of cases it's a combination of the character's name and some pop culture-ish reference, in the way that derby names actually are made. So yeah, I think this gets most props for the awesome names.

You can see the full collection here.

The road to Funky Town is paved with meth

I've mentioned Breaking Bad a few times before on this blog, but here's a little bit of a throwback from before Walter White was Heisenberg (or Walter White, for that matter):

Apologies for the shonky quality of the video, but you get the idea. I approve of the fact that he is wearing appropriate safety gear and has some pretty good toe stop work.

Apparently there's an episode of Malcolm in the Middle where Hal (played by Bryan Cranston) has to teach Malcolm to skate for his roller hockey team, and then this comes out. Cranston did a lot of his own skate tricks, and even put on this lovely sequined number:

And if you want a BB mashup, there's also this, where Hank gets the wrong DVD:

Derby and race: 1. The whiteness of derby

So, as I outlined in this entry, I'm going to be looking at a couple of interrelated issues about race in roller derby. To start with, we can ask whether derby is predominantly white, and how that came about.

I think that, very roughly speaking, roller derby is a very "white" sport. That is, the vast, vast majority of people in the derby community seem to be white, although of course there are exceptions. Here are some of the team photos for the WFTDA teams that played at the championships (minus Gotham's, which I have already posted in the introductory entry):

  ...And you get the idea. 

They're predominantly white. Even Angel City, which of all the leagues' locations has the highest minority population, is made of up mostly white skaters. Notice, firstly, that all of these teams are either in the US or UK. I started looking down the WFTDA rankings for any teams ranked that were not from a western country, but I couldn't find any (although admittedly the list goes to 175 and there are plenty of non-WFTDA leagues out there, and given the stringency of the WFTDA membership process the lack of non-western WFTDA leagues might just suggest that leagues in non-western countries are not on the WFTDA wagon for some reason or another).

At my own league, there are what, 2.5 minority people (by which I mean, people who don't identify as white). Of course, I don't know if that's a good example though because hey, we're in southwest Virginia. But I've also skated in San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Melbourne and Canberra, and even though those places have more diversity among their populations, most people who do derby are still white. There's some variation though, so there were more Asians and Latina skaters in California, but it's still predominantly white.

Now here's the kicker: why is this the case? Why is derby so white?

A lot of discussion has been generated by this question at Elektra Q Tion's blog entry here, and there are several explanations provided. I'll touch on some of these below.

Visibility: One contributing factor which explains the ongoing whiteness of derby is that derby is seen to be white. What race you are is very, very visible in most cases, so you can see who is of a race similar to you almost right away just by looking at people.

And therin lies the problem. Suppose I go to practice and I'm fresh meat, and I don't see anyone like me. Maybe I will feel like I don't fit in, especially if there aren't that many other FM with whom I can otherwise connect to. Or I look in FiveOnFive or on DNN and see very few people that look like me. I don't know how much this really factors into it, but I've seen similar arguments made to explain the gender disparity in certain parts of academia. (For example, here's an article about the problems of visibility and academia.) The general idea is something like this: if I don't see people that look like me, I'm not going to connect as well or be as inclined to stay in derby.

As a result, the whiteness of derby also self-perpetuating in this way. If I am a minority skater and didn't feel like I was fitting in or relating well to the people around me, I might not stick around in the league. And then that'd make minorities less present, so that other potential minority skaters would also see less minority skaters in the league, and therefore be less inclined to stay, and so on.

(Elektra talks about this in her blog and in her post, Paris suggests that the minority skaters on a team have a responsibility to act and go out there and be visible. I'll talk about this in a few weeks' time when I talk about the role of minority and white skaters.)


Socioeconomics: There are some cases where we might have reason to think that race and socioeconomic status has a correlation. In particular, there is some good evidence that there is a disparity in the median net worth between whites and blacks (although the study I'm looking at only looks at the black/white difference; it might be interesting to see where Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans fit on the scale.

Here's a graph of wealth distribution across races:

Source: 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances

As you can see, even the wealthiest black and Hispanic families have much less wealth than white families, even when you compare blacks and whites within the same income groups. (Even in the bottom quintiles where you can barely see the wealth distribution, the white groups still do better.)

If we accept that there is a wealth gap between races, that might explain why we see fewer historically-poor races being represented. Derby gear is expensive! If you have a limited amount of money, then cost of gear and skates and league membership would have a higher likelihood of trading off against other things, like rent, student loans, groceries or whatever. Plus there are additional costs in things like travel costs on the car (gas, repairs, etc.) as well as time taken away from when one could potentially be working to earn more money.

Fresh meat packs run for several hundred
dollars usually. (And then there's also the
need to upgrade gear after a few seasons.)

Socioeconomics doesn't explain the race gap completely, though. On a small scale, leagues do often help with loaner gear or setting up payment arrangements for members who can't cover their membership dues right away. But if the wealth gap is something systemic, then the small-scale remedies might be of little help in changing the overall face of derby.

There's a similar argument for why ice hockey is so white; it's because a lot of historically poorer areas with minority kids didn't have access to rinks or equipment. (Football is also expensive, but schools will often provide gear.) And then, there's a lot of travel that has to go on since rinks are less common than fields or basketball courts. So parents would have to be free to drive their kids around further to practice, and at times that can impinge on work times.

So, by extrapolation, maybe that goes some way to explaining the whiteness of derby. One difference with derby is that it's mostly played by adults who can drive themselves, but with the advent of junior derby we might have another wave of whiteness coming in the next few years.

Blatant racism: And then one thing that might explain the whiteness of derby is when stuff like this still happens in other predominantly white sport, like hockey:

If you are a minority person, there's already enough difficulty with everyday racism, so why would you want to be subject to overt racism as well? I don't think that derby is as subject to outright racism as much as professional sports are (just because of the smaller scale on which leagues operate on), but racism isn't just contained in sport, and the potential for this would be pretty much a turn-off.

Next on race and derby: If (as I outlined at the beginning of this article) that pretty much all of the WFTDA leagues are western, then how does this affect the development of derby worldwide? I'll look at the the impact of culture on derby in non-western countries, and see if there's something about derby culture that lines up with western culture.

NRV in the news!

We had a scrimmage with Rocktown yesterday, and it was on the news!

Check out the story here! I'm in the jam that they show at the beginning, wearing my giant ass face shield, yay. I like how they start with the bit when the wall breaks :D

(Also, I need to be WAY lower :P)

Derby and Race: a 6 (or so)-part series

Over the next few weeks I'm going to explore the relation between race and roller derby. This was prompted by an interview I did with the lovely RayWoWW when, as a follow up question, she asked me, as a nonwhite person, what I thought the role of race in derby was. I ended up writing her a giant text wall of an email back, and I realized as I was doing it that there were all these issues that I couldn't really resolve for the purposes of telling her what I thought about race and derby.

Part of the reason that I'm interested in this is, obviously, because I'm a member of a racial minority. But at the same time, this semester I'm also teaching an awesome class on the Philosophy of Race and Gender, and it is really making me think about this stuff in my spare time. It's weird to just think about concepts like white privilege, for example, independent of any context. But then applying race theory to practice also brings out some interesting results.

Now, I know that there is an amazing blog entry by CRG's Elektra Q Tion on why derby is such a white sport. I think this is a really big contribution to the dialogue on race and derby, and what I'd like to do is build on some of the things that came out of that discussion, in addition to some other thoughts that have been rolling around in my brain.

Here's an example. New York City is a pretty racially diverse place, right? Well, here's a picture of Gotham's All-Star team from 2011:

And here's one from their 2013 team:

Hmm. So there are a few changes, but it still looks predominantly white. Why? I'm not asking that derby teams have to be proportionate to the diversity in the city's population, but what is it that makes nonwhite skaters less inclined to make the team? This might not be a problem, depending on how we think about the issues. I'm not sure what I'm going to be looking for here, but I think there are a LOT questions that need to be asked about what happens when race and derby collide.

So, in the next few weeks, I'll start where Q left off with asking about why derby is so white. But maybe that only works because whiteness is the norm, overwhelmingly, in western culture, where derby is predominantly played. So then another question comes up: what's the relation between derby and nonwestern culture? Does the role of gender and cultural norms have anything to do with it? And if there is a problem with racial underrepresentation in derby, what obligations do skaters (minority or not) have to make derby more diverse?

And down the rabbit hole we go...