Wednesday, October 10, 2012
The Problem With High Frequency Trading
One of the many consequences of global warming is that it’s now, for the first time, possible to drill under the sea bed of the Arctic ocean. The oil companies are all there, of course, running geological tests and bickering with each other about the potential environmental consequences of an oil spill. But they’re not the only people drilling. Because there’s something even more valuable than oil just waiting to be found under the Arctic.
What is worth so much money that three different consortiums would spend billions of pounds to retrofit icebreakers and send them into some of the coldest and most dangerous waters in the world? The answer, of course, is information.
A couple of days ago, I called a friend in Tokyo, and we had a lovely chat. If he puts something up on Twitter, I can see it immediately. And on the web there are thousands of webcams showing me what’s going on in Japan this very second. It doesn’t look like there’s any great information bottleneck there: anything important which happens in Japan can be, and is, transmitted to the rest of the world in a fraction of a second.
But if you’re a City trader, a fraction of a second is a veritable eternity. Let’s say you want to know the price of a stock on the Tokyo Stock exchange, or the exact number of yen being traded for one dollar. Just like the light from the sun is eight minutes old by the time it reaches us, all that financial information is about 188 milliseconds old by the time it reaches London. That’s zero point one eight eight seconds. And it takes that much time because it has to travel on fiber-optic cables which take a long and circuitous route: they either have to cross the Atlantic, and then the US, and then the Pacific, or else they have to go across Europe, through the Middle East, across the Indian Ocean, and then up through the South China Sea between China and the Philippines.
But! If you can lay an undersea cable across the Arctic, you can save yourself about 5,000 miles, not to mention the risk of routing your information past a lot of political flash points. And when you’re sitting in your office in London and you get that dollar/yen exchange rate from Tokyo, it’s fresh from the oven, comparatively speaking: only 0.168 seconds old. If everybody else is using the old cables and you’re using the new ones, then you have somewhere between 20 milliseconds and 60 milliseconds when you know something they don’t.
Those are periods of time so short that humans can barely notice them. This essay, for instance, is about 900,000 milliseconds long, and it takes me hundreds milliseconds just to say the word “cable”. Which is a word with more than one meaning. To you, it probably means some kind of wire. But to City traders, it means 1.6254, or something very close to that number. Because in the City, “cable” means the pound/dollar exchange rate. And it’s named that after a transatlantic cable which was used to telegraph the exchange-rate information from London to New York as far back as 1858.
So what we’re talking about here is nothing new, in terms of kind. Nathan Rothschild built a significant chunk of his fortune by using a system of couriers who told him the result of the Battle of Waterloo a full day before anybody else in London knew it. And my own employer, the Reuters news agency, was founded on sending financial information between Brussels and Aachen using carrier pigeons.
What’s new is that billions of pounds can be made by having access to information not a day in advance, or an hour, or even a second, but even just a millisecond or two. Stock exchanges aren’t physical places where human beings bargain with each other any more: they’re racks of computers in places like Mahwah, New Jersey, where the cables are carefully measured to be exactly the same length so that no one has an infinitesimal advantage thanks to the amount of time it takes information to travel an extra few millimeters down a wire. (...)
Most of the trading on US stock exchanges is done by something called algobots, these days. These are algorithms: they’re computers which are programmed to put in orders, take out orders, trade in big size, trade in small size – all according to very sophisticated rules, called algorithms. And one of the ironies about the flash crash is that it was actually caused in large part by algobots not trading. The US has over a dozen different stock exchanges, places where stocks are bought and sold. Most of us have only ever heard of the listing exchanges, the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq. But there are many more you probably haven’t heard of, with names like Arca and BATS, as well as sinister-sounding things called Dark Pools. What happened in the flash crash is that when the trading got completely crazy, the algobots just switched themselves off. This was something they weren’t used to, they didn’t know how to react, and so they just went away. And there was suddenly no liquidity in the market. No one was offering to trade. And with no one offering to trade, the prices just plunged, all the way down to one cent. Because there were no bids in the market any more.
The algobots can be very useful, on a day-to-day basis. If a normal person like me buys a few shares in some company or other, that trade doesn’t even happen on any stock exchange at all. It just happens directly with a broker, an algobot, who’s happy to take the other side of my trade because small individual investors like me are normally pretty stupid, and tend to buy high and sell low.
In any case, if any given stock exchange is an incredibly complicated thing, the fragmentation of the stock exchanges has created a much more complex system yet. Most big banks and stockbrokers — and the algobots they control — have access to all of the different exchanges, and they trade wherever they think they can get the best prices. Since the best prices tend to be found wherever the most traders are trading, you end up with something a bit like six-year-olds playing football: everybody’s running towards the ball at the same time. And the result is these huge waves of activity, where traders move en masse, from one stock exchange to the next, in very unpredictable ways. If you layer that unpredictability on top of the complexity inherent in any system of multiple stock exchanges, you end up with something which will almost certainly break in a pretty catastrophic manner at some point. We don’t know how, and we don’t know when, but there’s an ironclad rule of any system: the more complex it is, the less predictable it is, and the more likely it is to fail catastrophically in some unforeseeable manner.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Can Marissa Mayer Really Have It All?
Page had taken over the running of Google’s day-to-day operations from Eric Schmidt, the company’s longtime CEO, in April 2011, and immediately launched a major renovation of the company’s structure and priorities. Mayer was bruised in that reshuffling. For about a dozen years she had presided over “search”—which is to say everything the user saw, felt, and experienced when navigating Google—but now she was shunted away from that core business and put in charge of “local”—maps, restaurant recommendations, and the like. This was arguably a demotion and at best a lateral move. And when Page overhauled the operating committee, or “OC,” Mayer’s reduced status was made both explicit and public. The committee was renamed “the L-Team,” after the boss, and he pushed Mayer off in order to make room for a handful of others, including Android and YouTube masterminds Andy Rubin and Salar Kamangar. “She was not included,” says her friend Dylan Casey, who left Google last year. The L-Team is Google’s Sanhedrin, a group of insiders that decides strategy and vets acquisitions. If you’re on it, you have a hand in shaping Google’s future—and, therefore, the future of global technology. If you’re not—well then, you have Google on your résumé and a net worth estimated at $300 million.
Mayer was not happy, according to people who know her. “Marissa is very, very, very driven,” says Brian Singerman, a former Googler who is now a partner at Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm. But at the office, she kept her cool. “She was a trooper,” is how someone familiar with the situation described her. “She worked through it.”
Google loyalists said the move was part of the reorg, plain and simple. “That was what Larry thought was best for the company,” says Casey. Others said it was political, a punishment for Mayer’s inability to play nicely with other VIP Googlers, and bloggers began to wring their hands anew over the larger question of sexism in tech. Two other people removed from the L-Team were also women; one of them, Shona Brown, who ran business operations, “is a freaking Rhodes scholar,” says a former Googler, “another one of these rock stars.”
Then there was the delicate matter of Mayer’s public but never widely reported relationship with Page. (“Most local journalists know the gossip, relish it,” vented Nick Denton on Gawker in 2006, but “wouldn’t dream of working it into an article,” so anxious are they to protect their access to Google’s top tier.) Although some of Mayer’s former colleagues insist the affair had no bearing on their friend’s corporate profile, others disagree, pointing to the hard facts: Under Schmidt, Mayer was on the committee; under Page, she was booted off. “It’s got to have some impact,” says Dave McClure, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who knows Mayer slightly. “It gave her access to strategy and thinking at the highest levels. And it probably made it more difficult for her to advance. I don’t know too many other senior female executives who went out with the CEO who were still there after they stopped going out.” Page got married in 2007. Two years later, Mayer married the investor and lawyer Zachary Bogue.
She may have been stymied at Google, but Mayer, at 37, was already one of the most visible tech personalities in Silicon Valley. “She is, for all intents and purposes, famous,” says Casey. She was popular with the press for her accessibility in an industry notorious for its reclusive, or stammering, geniuses. She threw parties at her penthouse atop The Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco, to which everyone yearned to be invited. And throughout Silicon Valley and among the groupies drawn to its idiosyncratic nerd glamour, she was as well known for her hobbies—notably a taste for high-end fashion and a large collection of Dale Chihuly handblown glass—as she was for her tech cred. In a world still struggling to leave behind that age-old bias—girls can’t do math—Mayer was everyone’s favorite exception, fully girl and fully geek, a former ballet dancer who stayed up all night writing code. And one who seemed driven to make her own path when the men around her wouldn’t oblige. Frustrated at Google, she did what any strategically savvy executive in her place would do. She publicly shored up her brand while privately contemplating her next move. She tweeted her whereabouts from Davos and Vail as she kept things going at work (notably, overseeing the acquisition of Zagat listings). She got herself a seat on the board at Walmart. And she checked a big item off her Life List, one that might have been a professional obstacle for another kind of woman: She got pregnant.
Now, less than a year after news of her being sidelined at Google, Mayer arrives at two auspicious milestones virtually at once. Twelve weeks ago, she was named president and chief executive officer of Yahoo Inc., making her one of twenty female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and the only one to take the job while pregnant. At Yahoo, Mayer has her work cut out for her. Yahoo is a foundering brand suffering from a dramatic talent drain and years of chaos on its board and in its upper ranks. Its second-quarter results were grim, with U.S. search queries down 17 percent from a year ago and time spent on its content pages down 10 percent. The Yahoo stock price has been bumping along all year between $14 and $17 a share, about half of what it was five years ago. Mayer has to turn this around—and fast.
And last week, on September 30 at 10:22 p.m., her first child was born, a boy, weighing nearly nine pounds. “Name TBD,” she wrote in an e-mail she sent to a large circle of friends. “Suggestions welcome!” The e-mail was signed, “With love and happiness, Marissa & Zack.” It is, perhaps, a blessing that she doesn’t think much, she has said, of the high-achieving mother’s mantra, “balance.”
In celebration of the new arrival, Mayer’s friend Craig Silverstein, Google employee No. 1, who also left the company this year, is thinking about building Mayer a homemade diaper cake: three tiers of diapers in three different sizes, stacked around an empty cardboard tube and decorated all over with toys, onesies, and burp clothes. Mayer has made them for many of her friends’ babies and once showed him how, Silverstein says. “She had a whole recipe. She helped me make one. We went to five different places to get the right toys. You spend all night putting it together.” At the tippy top, Mayer likes to put a plush toy octopus. Silverstein calls the diaper cake “the perfect Marissa baby present”: “It has usability at its core.”
by Lisa Miller, The Cut, NY Magazine | Read more:
The Young Man's Guide to Geezer Style
[ed. Ahh...sweet vindication. It was only a matter of time.]At GQ, we picked up on the suiting trend we call geezer style because it's right under our noses. Both guys on this page are on the GQ staff: 24-year-old editorial assistant Mark Anthony Green and 27-year-old fashion editor Justin Doss. It's counterintuitive, but these young guns and their stylish friends are all obsessed with old-school suits, mostly Italian. They know the minutiae of fit, fabric, and construction. And when they're raving in the hallways about someone with sick style, it's not, like, Ryan Gosling. It's some old dude they saw on the subway eating a tuna sandwich and wearing a threadbare suit from 1964 with a pair of New Balance 574s.
As we'll see, there are lots of ways to get your geezer on, but this look starts with the suit. The jacket's shoulders should be natural, meaning almost no padding. And when it comes to style and fabric, let it rip: Go double-breasted or with a Caddyshack plaid. The only real tweak is in the fit—the young guys keep it super slim. To learn how to fast-forward your own style, read on.
by Will Welch, GQ | Read more (if you dare):
Photo: Taghi Naderzad
No Filter: Inside Hipstamatic’s Lost Year
If Lucas Buick's company Hipstamatic is on the verge of bankruptcy, you couldn't tell by the dinner spread. It's mid-September and we're at the Isola restaurant in the Mondrian Soho, an expensive hotel-cum-lounge where you're never quite sure you're wearing the right style of Warby Parkers. Under the airy space's glass ceiling and sparkling chandeliers, Buick and "director of fun" Mario Estrada knock back espresso martinis and old-fashioneds, while digging into tuna and pine nut crudos and fennel sausage pizza with herbed ricotta--delicious fare just begging to be photographed, filtered, and shared with friends.
"This is it. We're clearly falling apart," says Buick, laughing. "If this is the last supper, then I wish we had a bigger table."
Despite a rough couple of weeks, the Hipstamatic cofounder and CEO is in good spirits. In late July, over lobsters and bottles of Prosecco, Buick told me he wanted Hipstamatic, a $1.99 photo app that takes analog-style photographs on your iPhone, to become the "Kodak for the digital era." He envisioned a time when his company could be the industry leader for selling digital lenses, films, and flashes, as well as providing third-party camera and printing services.
But then just 16 days later, Buick laid off five of his employees, roughly half the company’s workforce, including its entire developer team and social media and office managers. The decision sparked a swath of bad press and ex-employee backlash, and led many to question the San Francisco-based startup's viability. "Suddenly I was getting calls from friends asking, 'Do you still have a job?'" Estrada recalls. "We're going bankrupt? When did all this happen?"
“It got a little ugly,” admits Buick, who turns 30 this week. With a doughy face and ginger scruff, the former graphic designer carries a soft, seemingly happy-go-lucky demeanor, which juxtaposes his otherwise serious look: black G-Star jacket, black shirt, and black-framed glasses. "I didn't even like coming to work,” he says. “When you're the guy who built the company and you don't even want to work there yourself, something just isn't right."
Hipstamatic's journey over the past year has been tumultuous, to say the least. As Fast Company has learned from speaking to more than a dozen players involved, Hipstamatic has wrestled with ever-growing social competition, internal tensions, and a lack of product vision--not to mention juggling acquisition interest and worsening term sheets in a post-Facebook IPO world.
But what the startup has most struggled with is remaining relevant in an unforgiving app market dominated by one of the hottest spaces in tech: photos. Photos are considered the killer app of any platform, web or mobile. They're the driving force behind Facebook's social success, and the reason for its blockbuster acquisition of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram, which recently surpassed Twitter in U.S. smartphone engagement. They're why Marissa Mayer is said to be rethinking Flickr as she takes up the reins at Yahoo; why Google recently bought Snapseed; and why a slew of hot Internet startups from Tumblr to Pinterest to Camera+ have gained popularity. Even Apple introduced photo-stream sharing capabilities in its latest version of iOS.
Hipstamatic was one of the first startups to crack the photo formula in the mobile space--then it watched similar services gain ground and eventually blaze by. The company’s experience proves that no startup can rest on its laurels in the age of the iPhone, when the time between innovation and disruption is ever shortening, and when IPOs and fast exits are valued over establishing long-term viable businesses. And perhaps most significantly, Hipstamatic proves that no modern startup can ignore the siren call of social, even if at its own peril.
"This is it. We're clearly falling apart," says Buick, laughing. "If this is the last supper, then I wish we had a bigger table."Despite a rough couple of weeks, the Hipstamatic cofounder and CEO is in good spirits. In late July, over lobsters and bottles of Prosecco, Buick told me he wanted Hipstamatic, a $1.99 photo app that takes analog-style photographs on your iPhone, to become the "Kodak for the digital era." He envisioned a time when his company could be the industry leader for selling digital lenses, films, and flashes, as well as providing third-party camera and printing services.
But then just 16 days later, Buick laid off five of his employees, roughly half the company’s workforce, including its entire developer team and social media and office managers. The decision sparked a swath of bad press and ex-employee backlash, and led many to question the San Francisco-based startup's viability. "Suddenly I was getting calls from friends asking, 'Do you still have a job?'" Estrada recalls. "We're going bankrupt? When did all this happen?"
“It got a little ugly,” admits Buick, who turns 30 this week. With a doughy face and ginger scruff, the former graphic designer carries a soft, seemingly happy-go-lucky demeanor, which juxtaposes his otherwise serious look: black G-Star jacket, black shirt, and black-framed glasses. "I didn't even like coming to work,” he says. “When you're the guy who built the company and you don't even want to work there yourself, something just isn't right."
Hipstamatic's journey over the past year has been tumultuous, to say the least. As Fast Company has learned from speaking to more than a dozen players involved, Hipstamatic has wrestled with ever-growing social competition, internal tensions, and a lack of product vision--not to mention juggling acquisition interest and worsening term sheets in a post-Facebook IPO world.
But what the startup has most struggled with is remaining relevant in an unforgiving app market dominated by one of the hottest spaces in tech: photos. Photos are considered the killer app of any platform, web or mobile. They're the driving force behind Facebook's social success, and the reason for its blockbuster acquisition of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram, which recently surpassed Twitter in U.S. smartphone engagement. They're why Marissa Mayer is said to be rethinking Flickr as she takes up the reins at Yahoo; why Google recently bought Snapseed; and why a slew of hot Internet startups from Tumblr to Pinterest to Camera+ have gained popularity. Even Apple introduced photo-stream sharing capabilities in its latest version of iOS.
Hipstamatic was one of the first startups to crack the photo formula in the mobile space--then it watched similar services gain ground and eventually blaze by. The company’s experience proves that no startup can rest on its laurels in the age of the iPhone, when the time between innovation and disruption is ever shortening, and when IPOs and fast exits are valued over establishing long-term viable businesses. And perhaps most significantly, Hipstamatic proves that no modern startup can ignore the siren call of social, even if at its own peril.
by Austin Carr, Fast Company | Read more:
Photo: Shutterstock
Monday, October 8, 2012
Daredevil Sets Sight on a 22-Mile Fall
Whatever the leap means for mankind, it should definitely be one giant step for a man.
Felix Baumgartner, a professional daredevil, plans to step off a balloon-borne capsule 22 miles above Earth on Tuesday morning and plummet for five and a half minutes until opening his parachute a mile above the New Mexico desert. If all goes as planned, he will do a series of barrel rolls in the near-vacuum of the stratosphere and then plunge headfirst at more than 700 miles per hour, becoming the first sky diver to break the sound barrier.
Mr. Baumgartner, 43, a former Austrian paratrooper who became known as Fearless Felix by leaping off buildings, landmarks and once into a 600-foot cave, said that this was his toughest challenge, because of the complexity involved and because of an unexpected fear he had to overcome: claustrophobia. During five years of training, he started suffering panic attacks when he had to spend hours locked inside the stiff pressurized suit and helmet necessary for survival at the edge of space.
But he persevered with the help of psychological conditioning and a mentor, Joe Kittinger, a retired Air Force colonel who has held the altitude and speed records since 1960, when he jumped 19 miles from a balloon during a research project (after nearly dying in a practice jump). Mr. Kittinger, now 84, will be the only voice on the radio guiding Mr. Baumgartner during the two-hour ascent to the stratosphere.
“Felix trusts me because I know what he’s going through — and I’m the only one who knows what he’s going through,” Mr. Kittinger said on Sunday at the mission-control center here.
And just why would anyone want to go through this? Both men like to stress the science to be learned, but there are, of course, other motives.
“All of my life I have been looking for unique goals, things no one has accomplished,” Mr. Baumgartner said.
Mr. Kittinger knew just what he meant. “From the beginning of mankind, the boys want to go higher, faster, lower,” he said. “It’s a fascinating part of human nature. We’re never satisfied with the status quo.”
Previous attempts to break Mr. Kittinger’s records have cost a Frenchman nearly $20 million and claimed the life of an American, Nick Piantanida, a New Jersey truck driver who died from brain injuries after his suit depressurized in 1966. Mr. Kittinger said he joined this project, called Red Bull Stratos, after the energy drink, because he considered it the first with the resources to do the job properly, thanks to the scores of aerospace veterans hired by Red Bull.
For Mr. Baumgartner, the dangers will start as soon as his pressurized capsule lifts off. To reach such thin air requires an enormous yet lightweight balloon, 55 stories high, built of a polyethylene plastic that is one-tenth the thickness of a sandwich bag.
If the fragile plastic ruptures below 4,000 feet — the Dead Zone, as the project’s engineers call it — there will not be enough time for a parachute to deploy, forcing Mr. Baumgartner to make a crash landing.
Mr. Kittinger used a much smaller balloon to rise 102,800 feet in 1960. “It’s a phenomenal view,” he recalled. “The sky is black, and you see the curvature of the Earth, and the colors are beautiful. But you’re also aware that if anything happens to your pressure suit, you’re dead.”
The Red Bull helium balloon is supposed to climb more than 120,000 feet. There, Mr. Baumgartner will perform an exquisitely rehearsed bunny hop designed to keep his body from spinning out of control.
“In a regular sky-dive, you use your hands against the air to stop from tumbling, but there’s no air to use up there,” he said. “If you start to tumble over, you carry that tumble all the way down.”
The worst-case outcome is the kind of spinning that nearly killed Mr. Kittinger during a training jump in 1959. He went into a flat spin, blacking out as his body whirled at 120 revolutions per minute. He regained consciousness only after his emergency parachute opened automatically.
After the bunny hop, Mr. Baumgartner hopes his body will slowly rotate so that he descends headfirst and breaks the 614-m.p.h. speed record held by Mr. Kittinger. After 34 seconds, engineers calculate, he will have fallen to 102,000 feet and accelerated beyond the speed of sound, which at that altitude is close to 690 m.p.h. (the exact figure depends on the temperature).
“I expect him to reach 720 miles per hour, about Mach 1.1,” said Art Thompson, the technical director of Red Bull Stratos and a former designer of the Stealth bomber. Mr. Baumgartner should remain supersonic for 20 seconds, until he reaches an altitude of 92,000 feet. Then the thickening atmosphere should slow him to subsonic speed, and eventually to a terminal velocity of 120 miles per hour.
Engineers and physicians are not sure what will happen if Mr. Baumgartner goes through the sound barrier. They realize he could be battered as parts of his body go supersonic or subsonic at different times, but the impact is expected to be manageable because of the thin air at that altitude — or so the engineers and Mr. Baumgartner hope.
Felix Baumgartner, a professional daredevil, plans to step off a balloon-borne capsule 22 miles above Earth on Tuesday morning and plummet for five and a half minutes until opening his parachute a mile above the New Mexico desert. If all goes as planned, he will do a series of barrel rolls in the near-vacuum of the stratosphere and then plunge headfirst at more than 700 miles per hour, becoming the first sky diver to break the sound barrier.Mr. Baumgartner, 43, a former Austrian paratrooper who became known as Fearless Felix by leaping off buildings, landmarks and once into a 600-foot cave, said that this was his toughest challenge, because of the complexity involved and because of an unexpected fear he had to overcome: claustrophobia. During five years of training, he started suffering panic attacks when he had to spend hours locked inside the stiff pressurized suit and helmet necessary for survival at the edge of space.
But he persevered with the help of psychological conditioning and a mentor, Joe Kittinger, a retired Air Force colonel who has held the altitude and speed records since 1960, when he jumped 19 miles from a balloon during a research project (after nearly dying in a practice jump). Mr. Kittinger, now 84, will be the only voice on the radio guiding Mr. Baumgartner during the two-hour ascent to the stratosphere.
“Felix trusts me because I know what he’s going through — and I’m the only one who knows what he’s going through,” Mr. Kittinger said on Sunday at the mission-control center here.
And just why would anyone want to go through this? Both men like to stress the science to be learned, but there are, of course, other motives.
“All of my life I have been looking for unique goals, things no one has accomplished,” Mr. Baumgartner said.
Mr. Kittinger knew just what he meant. “From the beginning of mankind, the boys want to go higher, faster, lower,” he said. “It’s a fascinating part of human nature. We’re never satisfied with the status quo.”
Previous attempts to break Mr. Kittinger’s records have cost a Frenchman nearly $20 million and claimed the life of an American, Nick Piantanida, a New Jersey truck driver who died from brain injuries after his suit depressurized in 1966. Mr. Kittinger said he joined this project, called Red Bull Stratos, after the energy drink, because he considered it the first with the resources to do the job properly, thanks to the scores of aerospace veterans hired by Red Bull.
For Mr. Baumgartner, the dangers will start as soon as his pressurized capsule lifts off. To reach such thin air requires an enormous yet lightweight balloon, 55 stories high, built of a polyethylene plastic that is one-tenth the thickness of a sandwich bag.
If the fragile plastic ruptures below 4,000 feet — the Dead Zone, as the project’s engineers call it — there will not be enough time for a parachute to deploy, forcing Mr. Baumgartner to make a crash landing.
Mr. Kittinger used a much smaller balloon to rise 102,800 feet in 1960. “It’s a phenomenal view,” he recalled. “The sky is black, and you see the curvature of the Earth, and the colors are beautiful. But you’re also aware that if anything happens to your pressure suit, you’re dead.”
The Red Bull helium balloon is supposed to climb more than 120,000 feet. There, Mr. Baumgartner will perform an exquisitely rehearsed bunny hop designed to keep his body from spinning out of control.
“In a regular sky-dive, you use your hands against the air to stop from tumbling, but there’s no air to use up there,” he said. “If you start to tumble over, you carry that tumble all the way down.”
The worst-case outcome is the kind of spinning that nearly killed Mr. Kittinger during a training jump in 1959. He went into a flat spin, blacking out as his body whirled at 120 revolutions per minute. He regained consciousness only after his emergency parachute opened automatically.
After the bunny hop, Mr. Baumgartner hopes his body will slowly rotate so that he descends headfirst and breaks the 614-m.p.h. speed record held by Mr. Kittinger. After 34 seconds, engineers calculate, he will have fallen to 102,000 feet and accelerated beyond the speed of sound, which at that altitude is close to 690 m.p.h. (the exact figure depends on the temperature).
“I expect him to reach 720 miles per hour, about Mach 1.1,” said Art Thompson, the technical director of Red Bull Stratos and a former designer of the Stealth bomber. Mr. Baumgartner should remain supersonic for 20 seconds, until he reaches an altitude of 92,000 feet. Then the thickening atmosphere should slow him to subsonic speed, and eventually to a terminal velocity of 120 miles per hour.
Engineers and physicians are not sure what will happen if Mr. Baumgartner goes through the sound barrier. They realize he could be battered as parts of his body go supersonic or subsonic at different times, but the impact is expected to be manageable because of the thin air at that altitude — or so the engineers and Mr. Baumgartner hope.
Secret Golfing Life of Barack Obama
Obama's favorite game is basketball, a love affair that began at age 10 when the father he barely knew gave him a ball. But by his third year in office, golf has become his most cherished escape. The press corps is forbidden from following the president from hole to hole or even taking his photograph on the course. For a man who laments that he "misses being anonymous," the golf course has become the one place he can disappear.
On this morning, Obama calls it quits after nine holes, a curious turn for a golfer who typically insists on 18 holes during rounds that last as long as six hours. No explanation is offered to the media. The lone pool reporter is forced to guess at the reason, blaming the somewhat "chilly weather and rain."
Back at the White House, Obama, still clad in a white golf shirt, khaki pants and a navy blue windbreaker, doesn't return to the residence, as he usually does after a round. Instead, he strides to the Oval Office, swaps his black-and-white cleats for dress shoes, hustles downstairs and takes a seat inside the Situation Room. Here the president, still dressed for a Sunday round, watches a monitor as Navy SEAL Team Six storms a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and kills Osama bin Laden.
***
For more than a century, golf has ranked as the favorite pastime of American presidents. Fifteen of the past 18 chief executives have played the game -- most joyously (Eisenhower, Ford, Clinton), a few grudgingly (Coolidge, LBJ, Nixon) and nearly all dangerously risking duck-hooking a drive into a gallery. The presidential golf tradition began ignominiously when William Howard Taft -- all 320 pounds of him -- ignored the counsel of his political mentor, Teddy Roosevelt, who had once declared "Golf is fatal" to any political man. Despite that warning and newspaper cartoons lampooning his buffoonish swing, Taft kept right on playing the gilded game, all but admitting that he preferred golfing to governing. Taft was a one-term president.
But in the century since Taft, no president has been more vilified for his love of golf than Obama. And perhaps not surprisingly, no president has done more to keep his game a secret. During the 104 rounds Obama has played as president, photographers have been permitted only five times, according to White House pool reports. Even then, they've had to use telephoto lenses from 40 or 50 yards and only for a few moments. Reporters accompanying Obama are usually banished far from the first tee; at Andrews, they are quarantined inside the base's food court. The last golfing president to ban photographers was John F. Kennedy. In the half century since, many presidents have held impromptu news conferences on the first tee. George W. Bush infamously told reporters in 2002, "I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive."
by Don Van Natta, Jr., ESPN | Read more:
Photo: Pete Souza
The Patent, Used as a Sword
When Apple announced last year that all iPhones would come with a voice-activated assistant named Siri, capable of answering spoken questions, Michael Phillips’s heart sank.
For three decades, Mr. Phillips had focused on writing software to allow computers to understand human speech. In 2006, he had co-founded a voice recognition company, and eventually executives at Apple, Google and elsewhere proposed partnerships. Mr. Phillips’s technology was even integrated into Siri itself before the digital assistant was absorbed into the iPhone.
But in 2008, Mr. Phillips’s company, Vlingo, had been contacted by a much larger voice recognition firm called Nuance. “I have patents that can prevent you from practicing in this market,” Nuance’s chief executive, Paul Ricci, told Mr. Phillips, according to executives involved in that conversation.
Mr. Ricci issued an ultimatum: Mr. Phillips could sell his firm to Mr. Ricci or be sued for patent infringements. When Mr. Phillips refused to sell, Mr. Ricci’s company filed the first of six lawsuits.
Soon after, Apple and Google stopped returning phone calls. The company behind Siri switched its partnership from Mr. Phillips to Mr. Ricci’s firm. And the millions of dollars Mr. Phillips had set aside for research and development were redirected to lawyers and court fees.
When the first lawsuit went to trial last year, Mr. Phillips won. In the companies’ only courtroom face-off, a jury ruled that Mr. Phillips had not infringed on a broad voice recognition patent owned by Mr. Ricci’s company.
But it was too late. The suit had cost $3 million, and the financial damage was done. In December, Mr. Phillips agreed to sell his company to Mr. Ricci. “We were on the brink of changing the world before we got stuck in this legal muck,” Mr. Phillips said.
Mr. Phillips and Vlingo are among the thousands of executives and companies caught in a software patent system that federal judges, economists, policy makers and technology executives say is so flawed that it often stymies innovation.
Alongside the impressive technological advances of the last two decades, they argue, a pall has descended: the marketplace for new ideas has been corrupted by software patents used as destructive weapons.
Vlingo was a tiny upstart on this battlefield, but as recent litigation involving Apple and Samsung shows, technology giants have also waged wars among themselves.
In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years — an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.
Patents are vitally important to protecting intellectual property. Plenty of creativity occurs within the technology industry, and without patents, executives say they could never justify spending fortunes on new products. And academics say that some aspects of the patent system, like protections for pharmaceuticals, often function smoothly.
However, many people argue that the nation’s patent rules, intended for a mechanical world, are inadequate in today’s digital marketplace. Unlike patents for new drug formulas, patents on software often effectively grant ownership of concepts, rather than tangible creations. Today, the patent office routinely approves patents that describe vague algorithms or business methods, like a software system for calculating online prices, without patent examiners demanding specifics about how those calculations occur or how the software operates.
As a result, some patents are so broad that they allow patent holders to claim sweeping ownership of seemingly unrelated products built by others. Often, companies are sued for violating patents they never knew existed or never dreamed might apply to their creations, at a cost shouldered by consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer choices.
“There’s a real chaos,” said Richard A. Posner, a federal appellate judge who has helped shape patent law, in an interview. “The standards for granting patents are too loose.”
Almost every major technology company is involved in ongoing patent battles, but the most significant player is Apple, industry executives say, because of its influence and the size of its claims: in August in California, the company won a $1 billion patent infringement judgment against Samsung. Former Apple employees say senior executives made a deliberate decision over the last decade, after Apple was a victim of patent attacks, to use patents as leverage against competitors to the iPhone, the company’s biggest source of profits.
Apple has filed multiple suits against three companies — HTC, Samsung and Motorola Mobility, now part of Google — that today are responsible for more than half of all smartphone sales in the United States. If Apple’s claims — which include ownership of minor elements like rounded square icons and of more fundamental smartphone technologies — prevail, it will most likely force competitors to overhaul how they design phones, industry experts say.
HTC, Samsung, Motorola and others have filed numerous suits of their own, also trying to claim ownership of market-changing technologies.
While Apple and other major companies have sometimes benefited from this war, so have smaller partners. In 2010, Apple acquired Siri Inc., the company behind the software of the same name. The stock price of Mr. Ricci’s company, Nuance, which had by then become Siri’s partner, rose by more than 70 percent as iPhone sales skyrocketed. Some former executives at Vlingo, Nuance’s old rival, remain bitter.
“We had spent $3 million to win one patent trial, and had five more to go,” said a former Vlingo executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because he had signed confidentiality agreements. “We had the better product, but it didn’t matter, because this system is so completely broken.” (...)
At a technology conference this year, Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, said patent battles had not slowed innovation at the company, but acknowledged that some aspects of the battles had “kind of gotten crazy.”
“There’s some of this that is maddening,” he said. “It’s a waste; it’s a time suck.”
The evolution of Apple into one of the industry’s patent warriors gained momentum, like many things within the company, with a terse order from its chief executive, Steven P. Jobs.
For three decades, Mr. Phillips had focused on writing software to allow computers to understand human speech. In 2006, he had co-founded a voice recognition company, and eventually executives at Apple, Google and elsewhere proposed partnerships. Mr. Phillips’s technology was even integrated into Siri itself before the digital assistant was absorbed into the iPhone.
But in 2008, Mr. Phillips’s company, Vlingo, had been contacted by a much larger voice recognition firm called Nuance. “I have patents that can prevent you from practicing in this market,” Nuance’s chief executive, Paul Ricci, told Mr. Phillips, according to executives involved in that conversation.
Mr. Ricci issued an ultimatum: Mr. Phillips could sell his firm to Mr. Ricci or be sued for patent infringements. When Mr. Phillips refused to sell, Mr. Ricci’s company filed the first of six lawsuits.
Soon after, Apple and Google stopped returning phone calls. The company behind Siri switched its partnership from Mr. Phillips to Mr. Ricci’s firm. And the millions of dollars Mr. Phillips had set aside for research and development were redirected to lawyers and court fees.
When the first lawsuit went to trial last year, Mr. Phillips won. In the companies’ only courtroom face-off, a jury ruled that Mr. Phillips had not infringed on a broad voice recognition patent owned by Mr. Ricci’s company.
But it was too late. The suit had cost $3 million, and the financial damage was done. In December, Mr. Phillips agreed to sell his company to Mr. Ricci. “We were on the brink of changing the world before we got stuck in this legal muck,” Mr. Phillips said.
Mr. Phillips and Vlingo are among the thousands of executives and companies caught in a software patent system that federal judges, economists, policy makers and technology executives say is so flawed that it often stymies innovation.
Alongside the impressive technological advances of the last two decades, they argue, a pall has descended: the marketplace for new ideas has been corrupted by software patents used as destructive weapons.
Vlingo was a tiny upstart on this battlefield, but as recent litigation involving Apple and Samsung shows, technology giants have also waged wars among themselves.
In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years — an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.
Patents are vitally important to protecting intellectual property. Plenty of creativity occurs within the technology industry, and without patents, executives say they could never justify spending fortunes on new products. And academics say that some aspects of the patent system, like protections for pharmaceuticals, often function smoothly.
However, many people argue that the nation’s patent rules, intended for a mechanical world, are inadequate in today’s digital marketplace. Unlike patents for new drug formulas, patents on software often effectively grant ownership of concepts, rather than tangible creations. Today, the patent office routinely approves patents that describe vague algorithms or business methods, like a software system for calculating online prices, without patent examiners demanding specifics about how those calculations occur or how the software operates.
As a result, some patents are so broad that they allow patent holders to claim sweeping ownership of seemingly unrelated products built by others. Often, companies are sued for violating patents they never knew existed or never dreamed might apply to their creations, at a cost shouldered by consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer choices.
“There’s a real chaos,” said Richard A. Posner, a federal appellate judge who has helped shape patent law, in an interview. “The standards for granting patents are too loose.”
Almost every major technology company is involved in ongoing patent battles, but the most significant player is Apple, industry executives say, because of its influence and the size of its claims: in August in California, the company won a $1 billion patent infringement judgment against Samsung. Former Apple employees say senior executives made a deliberate decision over the last decade, after Apple was a victim of patent attacks, to use patents as leverage against competitors to the iPhone, the company’s biggest source of profits.
Apple has filed multiple suits against three companies — HTC, Samsung and Motorola Mobility, now part of Google — that today are responsible for more than half of all smartphone sales in the United States. If Apple’s claims — which include ownership of minor elements like rounded square icons and of more fundamental smartphone technologies — prevail, it will most likely force competitors to overhaul how they design phones, industry experts say.
HTC, Samsung, Motorola and others have filed numerous suits of their own, also trying to claim ownership of market-changing technologies.
While Apple and other major companies have sometimes benefited from this war, so have smaller partners. In 2010, Apple acquired Siri Inc., the company behind the software of the same name. The stock price of Mr. Ricci’s company, Nuance, which had by then become Siri’s partner, rose by more than 70 percent as iPhone sales skyrocketed. Some former executives at Vlingo, Nuance’s old rival, remain bitter.
“We had spent $3 million to win one patent trial, and had five more to go,” said a former Vlingo executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because he had signed confidentiality agreements. “We had the better product, but it didn’t matter, because this system is so completely broken.” (...)
At a technology conference this year, Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, said patent battles had not slowed innovation at the company, but acknowledged that some aspects of the battles had “kind of gotten crazy.”
“There’s some of this that is maddening,” he said. “It’s a waste; it’s a time suck.”
The evolution of Apple into one of the industry’s patent warriors gained momentum, like many things within the company, with a terse order from its chief executive, Steven P. Jobs.
by Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr, NY Times | Read more:
How to Die
One morning last month, Anthony Gilbey awakened from anesthesia in a hospital in the east of England. At his bedside were his daughter and an attending physician.
The surgery had been unsuccessful, the doctor informed him. There was nothing more that could be done.
“So I’m dying?” the patient asked.
The doctor hesitated. “Yes,” he said.
“You’re dying, Dad,” his daughter affirmed.
“So,” the patient mused, “no more whoop-de-doo.”
“On the other side, there’ll be loads,” his daughter — my wife — promised.
The patient laughed. “Yes,” he said. He was dead six days later, a few months shy of his 80th birthday.
When they told my father-in-law the hospital had done all it could, that was not, in the strictest sense, true. There was nothing the doctors could do about the large, inoperable tumor colonizing his insides. But they could have maintained his failing kidneys by putting him on dialysis. They could have continued pumping insulin to control his diabetes. He wore a pacemaker that kept his heart beating regardless of what else was happening to him, so with aggressive treatment they could — and many hospitals would — have sustained a kind of life for a while.
But the hospital that treated him offers a protocol called the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient, which was conceived in the 90s at a Liverpool cancer facility as a more humane alternative to the frantic end-of-life assault of desperate measures. “The Hippocratic oath just drives clinicians toward constantly treating the patient, right until the moment they die,” said Sir Thomas Hughes-Hallett, who was until recently the chief executive of the center where the protocol was designed. English doctors, he said, tell a joke about this imperative: “Why in Ireland do they put screws in coffins? To keep the doctors out.”
The Liverpool Pathway brings many of the practices of hospice care into a hospital setting, where it can reach many more patients approaching death. “It’s not about hastening death,” Sir Thomas told me. “It’s about recognizing that someone is dying, and giving them choices. Do you want an oxygen mask over your face? Or would you like to kiss your wife?”
Anthony Gilbey’s doctors concluded that it was pointless to prolong a life that was very near the end, and that had been increasingly consumed by pain, immobility, incontinence, depression and creeping dementia. The patient and his family concurred.
And so the hospital unplugged his insulin and antibiotics, disconnected his intravenous nourishment and hydration, leaving only a drip to keep pain and nausea at bay. The earlier bustle of oxygen masks and thermometers and blood-pressure sleeves and pulse-taking ceased. Nurses wheeled him away from the wheezing, beeping machinery of intensive care to a quiet room to await his move to “the other side.”
Here in the United States, nothing bedevils our discussion of health care like the question of when and how to withhold it. The Liverpool Pathway or variations of it are now standard in most British hospitals and in several other countries — but not ours. When I asked one American end-of-life specialist what chance he saw that something of the kind could be replicated here, the answer was immediate: “Zero.” There is an obvious reason for that, and a less obvious reason.
The obvious reason, of course, is that advocates of such programs have been demonized. They have been criticized by the Catholic Church in the name of “life,” and vilified by Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann in the pursuit of cheap political gain. “Anything that looks like an official protocol, or guideline — you’re going to get death-paneled,” said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the bioethicist and expert on end-of-life care who has been a target of the rabble-rousers. (He is also a contributing opinion writer for The Times.) Humane end-of-life practices have quietly found their way into cancer treatment, but other specialties lag behind.
The British advocates of the Liverpool approach have endured similar attacks, mainly from “pro-life” lobbyists who portray it as a back-door form of euthanasia. (They also get it from euthanasia advocates who say it isn’t euthanasia-like enough.) Surveys of families that use this protocol report overwhelming satisfaction, but inevitably in a field that touches families at their most emotionally raw, and that requires trained coordination of several medical disciplines, nursing and family counseling, the end is not always as smooth as my father-in-law’s.
The less obvious problem, I suspect, is that those who favor such programs in this country often frame it as a cost issue. Their starting point is the arresting fact that a quarter or more of Medicare costs are incurred in the last year of life, which suggests that we are squandering a fortune to buy a few weeks or months of a life spent hooked to machinery and consumed by fear and discomfort. That last year of life offers a tempting target if we want to contain costs and assure that Medicare and Medicaid exist for future generations.
No doubt, we have a crying need to contain health care costs. We pay more than many other developed countries for comparable or inferior health care, and the total bill consumes a growing share of our national wealth. The Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — makes a start by establishing a board to identify savings in Medicare, by emphasizing preventive care, and by financing pilot programs to pay doctors for achieving outcomes rather than performing procedures. But it is barely a start. Common sense suggests that if officials were not afraid of being “death-paneled,” we could save some money by withholding care when, rather than saving a life, it serves only to prolong misery for a little while.
But I’m beginning to think that is both questionable economics and bad politics.
The surgery had been unsuccessful, the doctor informed him. There was nothing more that could be done.“So I’m dying?” the patient asked.
The doctor hesitated. “Yes,” he said.
“You’re dying, Dad,” his daughter affirmed.
“So,” the patient mused, “no more whoop-de-doo.”
“On the other side, there’ll be loads,” his daughter — my wife — promised.
The patient laughed. “Yes,” he said. He was dead six days later, a few months shy of his 80th birthday.
When they told my father-in-law the hospital had done all it could, that was not, in the strictest sense, true. There was nothing the doctors could do about the large, inoperable tumor colonizing his insides. But they could have maintained his failing kidneys by putting him on dialysis. They could have continued pumping insulin to control his diabetes. He wore a pacemaker that kept his heart beating regardless of what else was happening to him, so with aggressive treatment they could — and many hospitals would — have sustained a kind of life for a while.
But the hospital that treated him offers a protocol called the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient, which was conceived in the 90s at a Liverpool cancer facility as a more humane alternative to the frantic end-of-life assault of desperate measures. “The Hippocratic oath just drives clinicians toward constantly treating the patient, right until the moment they die,” said Sir Thomas Hughes-Hallett, who was until recently the chief executive of the center where the protocol was designed. English doctors, he said, tell a joke about this imperative: “Why in Ireland do they put screws in coffins? To keep the doctors out.”
The Liverpool Pathway brings many of the practices of hospice care into a hospital setting, where it can reach many more patients approaching death. “It’s not about hastening death,” Sir Thomas told me. “It’s about recognizing that someone is dying, and giving them choices. Do you want an oxygen mask over your face? Or would you like to kiss your wife?”
Anthony Gilbey’s doctors concluded that it was pointless to prolong a life that was very near the end, and that had been increasingly consumed by pain, immobility, incontinence, depression and creeping dementia. The patient and his family concurred.
And so the hospital unplugged his insulin and antibiotics, disconnected his intravenous nourishment and hydration, leaving only a drip to keep pain and nausea at bay. The earlier bustle of oxygen masks and thermometers and blood-pressure sleeves and pulse-taking ceased. Nurses wheeled him away from the wheezing, beeping machinery of intensive care to a quiet room to await his move to “the other side.”
Here in the United States, nothing bedevils our discussion of health care like the question of when and how to withhold it. The Liverpool Pathway or variations of it are now standard in most British hospitals and in several other countries — but not ours. When I asked one American end-of-life specialist what chance he saw that something of the kind could be replicated here, the answer was immediate: “Zero.” There is an obvious reason for that, and a less obvious reason.
The obvious reason, of course, is that advocates of such programs have been demonized. They have been criticized by the Catholic Church in the name of “life,” and vilified by Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann in the pursuit of cheap political gain. “Anything that looks like an official protocol, or guideline — you’re going to get death-paneled,” said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the bioethicist and expert on end-of-life care who has been a target of the rabble-rousers. (He is also a contributing opinion writer for The Times.) Humane end-of-life practices have quietly found their way into cancer treatment, but other specialties lag behind.
The British advocates of the Liverpool approach have endured similar attacks, mainly from “pro-life” lobbyists who portray it as a back-door form of euthanasia. (They also get it from euthanasia advocates who say it isn’t euthanasia-like enough.) Surveys of families that use this protocol report overwhelming satisfaction, but inevitably in a field that touches families at their most emotionally raw, and that requires trained coordination of several medical disciplines, nursing and family counseling, the end is not always as smooth as my father-in-law’s.
The less obvious problem, I suspect, is that those who favor such programs in this country often frame it as a cost issue. Their starting point is the arresting fact that a quarter or more of Medicare costs are incurred in the last year of life, which suggests that we are squandering a fortune to buy a few weeks or months of a life spent hooked to machinery and consumed by fear and discomfort. That last year of life offers a tempting target if we want to contain costs and assure that Medicare and Medicaid exist for future generations.
No doubt, we have a crying need to contain health care costs. We pay more than many other developed countries for comparable or inferior health care, and the total bill consumes a growing share of our national wealth. The Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — makes a start by establishing a board to identify savings in Medicare, by emphasizing preventive care, and by financing pilot programs to pay doctors for achieving outcomes rather than performing procedures. But it is barely a start. Common sense suggests that if officials were not afraid of being “death-paneled,” we could save some money by withholding care when, rather than saving a life, it serves only to prolong misery for a little while.
But I’m beginning to think that is both questionable economics and bad politics.
by Bill Keller, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Nicholas Blechman
Sunday, October 7, 2012
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‘‘The. Polls. Have. Stopped. Making. Any. Sense.’’
Once upon a time, polls came and went without much fanfare or even notice. That time is gone. Today, a good portion of Americans plan their lives—or at least their Twitter feeds—around the latest political numbers. As every good political junkie knows, each day at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time, Rasmussen Reports releases its daily national tracking poll; three and a half hours later, Gallup comes out with its own. Wednesdays are typically when Quinnipiac University, the New York Times, and CBS unveil their “swing state” polls; on Thursdays, it’s NBC, The Wall Street Journal, and Marist College’s turn to share their “battleground state” polls. And Sunday nights are for PPP—a three-person public-opinion-research firm in North Carolina that produces upwards of 800 polls a year. “Sunday’s a dead news day,” Jensen says of his poll-release strategy, “so people who are living and breathing this presidential election are just sitting around all day nervously waiting for PPP’s latest poll to come out.” (...)
The acknowledged master and leader of this analytical effort is Nate Silver. On his FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York Times website, Silver tried to make sense of the PPP poll, and scores of other ones, as he converted their numbers into one of his own: his trademarked FiveThirtyEight forecast that puts a specific numerical value on Obama’s and Romney’s chances of victory in November. On the morning after PPP showed Obama leading by five points in Ohio, and several other state and national polls found similarly positive results for the president, Silver put the president’s chances of reelection at 80.7 percent: “[T]he polling movement that we have seen over the past three days represents the most substantial shift that we’ve seen in the race all year, with the polls moving toward Obama since his convention,” he wrote.
And yet, for all the data constantly streaming in from polling firms, and all the data analysis being spit right back out by people like Silver, the polling industry has never been less confident in its ability to reduce a series of interviews to a number that is an accurate reflection of the opinions and future behavior of the populace. Some days, the polls—which are conducted by scores of firms, from established multimillion-dollar corporations to Podunk PR shops with P.O. boxes—present such wildly varied numbers it’s as if they’re examining two different countries. Other days, the results do align, but with clarity come accusations of bias by whoever happens to be shown to be losing. Mostly, this fall, that has been Romney, causing many Republicans to heatedly call into question the entire polling enterprise.
PPP’s number was quickly buried under piles of new numbers, which displayed an alarming inconsistency. Silver’s crystal ball grew cloudier. He started to downgrade Obama’s chances—to 78.6 percent, then to 76.2, then to 72.9. Finally, on a Wednesday afternoon in late September—a day on which more than twenty national and state presidential polls were released—the normally sober Silver seemed to morph into Howard Beale as he tried to reconcile the results of two new polls, one from Marquette University showing Obama beating Romney 54 to 40 in Wisconsin and the other from Rasmussen showing Romney beating Obama 48 to 45 in New Hampshire. “There is no plausible universe in which Mr. Obama wins Wisconsin by fourteen points but loses New Hampshire by three,” Silver later wrote. “Following the polls on Wednesday reminded me of the aphorism: ‘If you don’t like the weather in Chicago, wait five minutes.’ ”
Hence Silver’s mad-as-hell tweet at 1:27 that afternoon: “The. Polls. Have. Stopped. Making. Any. Sense.”
After Obama, Silver may have been the biggest winner of the 2008 elections. A statistician who hadn’t yet turned 30 (and who, for his day job in Chicago, wrote and edited for Baseball Prospectus), Silver began the campaign as one of the hundreds of anonymous, unpaid “diarists” on the Daily Kos website. There, writing under the pseudonym “poblano,” he dissected the political polls in meticulous, downright obsessive detail—sorting the good ones from the bad ones and bringing a level of empirical rigor to his analysis that was heretofore unknown in the world of political punditry. Where most commentators were content to frame the Democratic primary as a contest between Obama’s call for change and Hillary Clinton’s appeal to experience—and made their predictions as to who would prevail based on which message they felt was more potent—Silver was offering up stuff like:
“The basic technique here is multiple regression analysis. I took a look at a whole number of independent variables, and tried to gauge their effect on one dependent variable: Obama’s two-way vote share. By ‘two-way vote share,’ I mean the proportion Obama got of the (Obama + Hillary) votes; essentially we’re throwing the Edwards, Richardson, Biden, etc. votes out. So in New Hampshire, Obama’s two-way vote share is 48.3 percent, and Hillary’s is 51.7 percent—much higher than their multi-way vote share.”
And using it to make uncannily accurate forecasts—projecting, for instance, that Obama would win 833 Super Tuesday delegates, which was just fourteen delegates off Obama’s actual haul that day. It was an approach that resonated with a new group of young, web-savvy political junkies who favored charts and graphs over platitudes and clichés (and many of whom, like Silver himself, favored Obama over Hillary). “Poblano” gained enough of a following that, in March 2008, he abandoned Daily Kos, and eventually his pseudonym, to start his own website, FiveThirtyEight.com (538 being the total number of votes in the Electoral College). He also came to the attention of the Obama campaign, which, as Sasha Issenberg reveals in his new book, The Victory Lab, shared its internal polling with Silver, who signed a confidentiality agreement with the campaign so that he could analyze the data. Before long, there was a Silver-worshipping Facebook group—There’s a 97.3 Percent Chance That Nate Silver Is Totally My Boyfriend—and TEAM NATE SILVER T-shirts. If Shepard Fairey’s HOPE posters spoke to the Obamanauts’ ids, Silver’s regression analyses tickled their superegos. His legend only grew when, on Election Night, he accurately predicted the results in 49 states and Obama’s popular vote within 1.1 percent.
by Jason Zengerle, New York Magazine | Read more:
Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos
The acknowledged master and leader of this analytical effort is Nate Silver. On his FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York Times website, Silver tried to make sense of the PPP poll, and scores of other ones, as he converted their numbers into one of his own: his trademarked FiveThirtyEight forecast that puts a specific numerical value on Obama’s and Romney’s chances of victory in November. On the morning after PPP showed Obama leading by five points in Ohio, and several other state and national polls found similarly positive results for the president, Silver put the president’s chances of reelection at 80.7 percent: “[T]he polling movement that we have seen over the past three days represents the most substantial shift that we’ve seen in the race all year, with the polls moving toward Obama since his convention,” he wrote.And yet, for all the data constantly streaming in from polling firms, and all the data analysis being spit right back out by people like Silver, the polling industry has never been less confident in its ability to reduce a series of interviews to a number that is an accurate reflection of the opinions and future behavior of the populace. Some days, the polls—which are conducted by scores of firms, from established multimillion-dollar corporations to Podunk PR shops with P.O. boxes—present such wildly varied numbers it’s as if they’re examining two different countries. Other days, the results do align, but with clarity come accusations of bias by whoever happens to be shown to be losing. Mostly, this fall, that has been Romney, causing many Republicans to heatedly call into question the entire polling enterprise.
PPP’s number was quickly buried under piles of new numbers, which displayed an alarming inconsistency. Silver’s crystal ball grew cloudier. He started to downgrade Obama’s chances—to 78.6 percent, then to 76.2, then to 72.9. Finally, on a Wednesday afternoon in late September—a day on which more than twenty national and state presidential polls were released—the normally sober Silver seemed to morph into Howard Beale as he tried to reconcile the results of two new polls, one from Marquette University showing Obama beating Romney 54 to 40 in Wisconsin and the other from Rasmussen showing Romney beating Obama 48 to 45 in New Hampshire. “There is no plausible universe in which Mr. Obama wins Wisconsin by fourteen points but loses New Hampshire by three,” Silver later wrote. “Following the polls on Wednesday reminded me of the aphorism: ‘If you don’t like the weather in Chicago, wait five minutes.’ ”
Hence Silver’s mad-as-hell tweet at 1:27 that afternoon: “The. Polls. Have. Stopped. Making. Any. Sense.”
After Obama, Silver may have been the biggest winner of the 2008 elections. A statistician who hadn’t yet turned 30 (and who, for his day job in Chicago, wrote and edited for Baseball Prospectus), Silver began the campaign as one of the hundreds of anonymous, unpaid “diarists” on the Daily Kos website. There, writing under the pseudonym “poblano,” he dissected the political polls in meticulous, downright obsessive detail—sorting the good ones from the bad ones and bringing a level of empirical rigor to his analysis that was heretofore unknown in the world of political punditry. Where most commentators were content to frame the Democratic primary as a contest between Obama’s call for change and Hillary Clinton’s appeal to experience—and made their predictions as to who would prevail based on which message they felt was more potent—Silver was offering up stuff like:
“The basic technique here is multiple regression analysis. I took a look at a whole number of independent variables, and tried to gauge their effect on one dependent variable: Obama’s two-way vote share. By ‘two-way vote share,’ I mean the proportion Obama got of the (Obama + Hillary) votes; essentially we’re throwing the Edwards, Richardson, Biden, etc. votes out. So in New Hampshire, Obama’s two-way vote share is 48.3 percent, and Hillary’s is 51.7 percent—much higher than their multi-way vote share.”
And using it to make uncannily accurate forecasts—projecting, for instance, that Obama would win 833 Super Tuesday delegates, which was just fourteen delegates off Obama’s actual haul that day. It was an approach that resonated with a new group of young, web-savvy political junkies who favored charts and graphs over platitudes and clichés (and many of whom, like Silver himself, favored Obama over Hillary). “Poblano” gained enough of a following that, in March 2008, he abandoned Daily Kos, and eventually his pseudonym, to start his own website, FiveThirtyEight.com (538 being the total number of votes in the Electoral College). He also came to the attention of the Obama campaign, which, as Sasha Issenberg reveals in his new book, The Victory Lab, shared its internal polling with Silver, who signed a confidentiality agreement with the campaign so that he could analyze the data. Before long, there was a Silver-worshipping Facebook group—There’s a 97.3 Percent Chance That Nate Silver Is Totally My Boyfriend—and TEAM NATE SILVER T-shirts. If Shepard Fairey’s HOPE posters spoke to the Obamanauts’ ids, Silver’s regression analyses tickled their superegos. His legend only grew when, on Election Night, he accurately predicted the results in 49 states and Obama’s popular vote within 1.1 percent.
by Jason Zengerle, New York Magazine | Read more:
Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos
Peoria (4)
Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lambsquarter, cutgrass, saw brier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butterprint, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads nodding in a soft morning breeze like a mother's hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.
[ed. First paragraph of The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace.]
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