Thursday, October 18, 2012
Standing Next to Greatness
In my parents’ living room in Boca Raton, Fla., there’s a collection of University of Florida Gators football paraphernalia they like to call “The Shrine.” They have the shrine because my brother Alex played on the team. Well, sort of.
Inside the shrine are framed photographs of my brother’s hand clad in championship rings and the back of his head meeting President George W. Bush. There’s a Plexiglas-encased 2007 BCS national championship pigskin, a game helmet and several laminated game tickets. There’s also a painting entitled “A Meeting of Champions,” that displays two alligators dressed in Gators football and basketball jerseys, shaking hands in a swamp. It commemorates the greatest year in Gator history, when the school secured national championships in both sports.
As a 5’9, 179-pound walk-on, my brother was all but ignored by the coaching staff, even though he was required to work out until he collapsed, attend all practices and take hits from huge guys on a regular basis. Alex rarely got to wear a uniform or travel, and he never did get out on that field during a game. Not for one minute. Not for one play. Not ever. For me, though, the most telling aspect of the shrine is a photograph of my brother and Tim Tebow standing next to each other in identical blue and orange football uniforms. If you look closely at the picture, though, you’ll notice that my brother isn’t even standing next to Tebow; there’s another player in between them. My dad snapped the photograph off our television screen at the exact moment the camera’s angle obscured the gap between my brother and the superstar.
Few people ever notice that. My brother’s tentative spot on the team elevated our family from relative nobodies into relatives of somebody who sometimes stood next to Tim Tebow. (...)
At the time, I was living in my parents’ house, having boomeranged back home for the second time since college. I saw first-hand what it meant to my parents that my brother had become a Gator.
One time I was shopping with my mom at Nordstrom, looking through racks of shirts, when a woman near us found a blouse she liked. “Oh, I’m so excited,” the shopper said to her friend. “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
My mother smiled and scooted closer. “No, I’m so excited,” she informed the strangers. Then she paused expectantly.
“Why is that?” one woman finally asked.
“My son’s football team is going to the national championship,” my mother said. "He plays for U.F. – the Gators.”
Although I got caught up in an interior debate on how to subvert my own genetics, I did catch snippets of the unfolding conversation. “That’s wonderful news,” the women were saying, and they seemed genuinely impressed. Apparently having a son that was a Gator – any Gator – permitted my mother to break the rules of social etiquette. What the hell was going on?
I had friends who attended U.F., and when they heard my brother made the team, they too went ballistic. They insisted that I attend the games to see what it was like to be among the 90,000 people packed into Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, which I was told to call “The Swamp.” Everybody would be wearing orange and blue (two colors I thought looked hideous together) and rocking together to "We Are the Boys of Ol' Florida" when the third quarter ended.
by Ashley Harrell, SB Nation | Read more:
Inside the shrine are framed photographs of my brother’s hand clad in championship rings and the back of his head meeting President George W. Bush. There’s a Plexiglas-encased 2007 BCS national championship pigskin, a game helmet and several laminated game tickets. There’s also a painting entitled “A Meeting of Champions,” that displays two alligators dressed in Gators football and basketball jerseys, shaking hands in a swamp. It commemorates the greatest year in Gator history, when the school secured national championships in both sports.As a 5’9, 179-pound walk-on, my brother was all but ignored by the coaching staff, even though he was required to work out until he collapsed, attend all practices and take hits from huge guys on a regular basis. Alex rarely got to wear a uniform or travel, and he never did get out on that field during a game. Not for one minute. Not for one play. Not ever. For me, though, the most telling aspect of the shrine is a photograph of my brother and Tim Tebow standing next to each other in identical blue and orange football uniforms. If you look closely at the picture, though, you’ll notice that my brother isn’t even standing next to Tebow; there’s another player in between them. My dad snapped the photograph off our television screen at the exact moment the camera’s angle obscured the gap between my brother and the superstar.
Few people ever notice that. My brother’s tentative spot on the team elevated our family from relative nobodies into relatives of somebody who sometimes stood next to Tim Tebow. (...)
At the time, I was living in my parents’ house, having boomeranged back home for the second time since college. I saw first-hand what it meant to my parents that my brother had become a Gator.
One time I was shopping with my mom at Nordstrom, looking through racks of shirts, when a woman near us found a blouse she liked. “Oh, I’m so excited,” the shopper said to her friend. “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
My mother smiled and scooted closer. “No, I’m so excited,” she informed the strangers. Then she paused expectantly.
“Why is that?” one woman finally asked.
“My son’s football team is going to the national championship,” my mother said. "He plays for U.F. – the Gators.”
Although I got caught up in an interior debate on how to subvert my own genetics, I did catch snippets of the unfolding conversation. “That’s wonderful news,” the women were saying, and they seemed genuinely impressed. Apparently having a son that was a Gator – any Gator – permitted my mother to break the rules of social etiquette. What the hell was going on?
I had friends who attended U.F., and when they heard my brother made the team, they too went ballistic. They insisted that I attend the games to see what it was like to be among the 90,000 people packed into Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, which I was told to call “The Swamp.” Everybody would be wearing orange and blue (two colors I thought looked hideous together) and rocking together to "We Are the Boys of Ol' Florida" when the third quarter ended.
by Ashley Harrell, SB Nation | Read more:
Iron-Dumping Experiment in Pacific Alarms Marine Experts
[ed. See also: The First Geo-Vigilante.]
The incident has prompted an investigation by Canadian environmental officials, and in the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it was misled into providing ocean-monitoring buoys for the project.
The entrepreneur, Russ George, said his team scattered 100 tons of iron dust in mid-July in the Pacific several hundred miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii, in northern British Columbia, in a $2.5 million project financed by a native Canadian group.
The substance acted as a fertilizer, Mr. George said, fostering the growth of enormous amounts of plankton that were monitored by the team for several months. He said the result could help the project meet what it casts as its top goal: aiding the recovery of the salmon fishery for the native Haida people.
But marine scientists and other experts said the experiment, which they learned about only in news reports this week, was shoddy science, irresponsible and probably in violation of international agreements intended to prevent tampering with ocean ecosystems under the guise of trying to fight the effects of climate change.
While the environmental impact of Mr. George’s foray could well prove minimal, they said, it raises the specter of what they have long feared: rogue field experiments that could upend ecosystems one day put the planet at risk. Mark L. Wells, a marine scientist at the University of Maine, said that what Mr. George’s team did “could be described as ocean dumping.”
Noting that blooms like those that the team observed occur regularly in the region, Dr. Wells said it would be difficult for Mr. George to demonstrate what impact the iron had on the plankton. And Dr. Wells said it was “extraordinarily unlikely” that Mr. George could prove that the experiment met another crucial goal of the project: the permanent removal of some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Plankton absorbs carbon dioxide and settles deep in the ocean when it dies, sequestering carbon. The Haida had hoped that by permanently burying carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, they could sell so-called carbon offset credits to companies and make money.
Iron fertilization is contentious because it is associated with geoengineering, a set of proposed strategies for counteracting global warming through the deliberate manipulation of the environment. Many experts have argued that scientists should be researching such geoengineering techniques — like spewing compounds into the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight or using sophisticated machines to remove carbon dioxide to combat rising temperatures.
by Henry Fountain, NY Times | Read more:
via:
How Can We Think About Evil?
So how can we think about evil? Perhaps we can't, or shouldn't. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote that we should remain silent about "that whereof we cannot speak" – a quotation beloved of lesser philosophers seeking a convenient way to end an academic paper. On a more practical level, most victims of evil will find that simply coping takes all their energy – and in the midst of their suffering, it may be difficult to disentangle the questions "why?" and "why me?" But the very familiarity of these questions suggests that there is something about evil that calls for thinking. And Wittgenstein's remark about remaining silent can be countered by Martin Heidegger's suggestion that the proper subject matter for philosophical thinking is precisely what is "unthought" and even unthinkable.
The Christian tradition offers huge resources for our thinking about the nature, origin and meaning of evil. This is partly because the history of western philosophy is intimately bound up with Christianity, so that supposedly secular debates on morality and human nature usually involve theological ideas even if these remain implicit. But more specifically, the Christian doctrine of creation makes the question of evil particularly pressing. If the world was designed and brought into being by a perfectly good, just and all-powerful creator, why does it contain evil at all? If God did not create evil, where did it come from? And why would God make human beings capable of extreme cruelty?
In this religious context, the concept of evil becomes elastic, encompassing much more than pure wickedness. The Christian believer comes under pressure to explain the existence of various kinds and degrees of suffering, unpleasantness, deviation and disorder. In their discussions of the "problem of evil", theologians have distinguished between the "moral evil" of human wrongdoing and the "natural evil" wrought by destructive events like earthquakes and tsunamis. They have also had to worry about the apparently imperfect conditions of life itself – our mortality, our finite knowledge, and our limited power – which are sometimes described as "metaphysical evil". Why didn't God just make everything better?
by Claire Carlisle, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
Local Hero and Donald Trump
I make things up for a living. I don't get out much and I haven't allowed a newspaper in the house for thirty years, so I truly live in a world of fiction. I've got by with Louis B Mayer's definition of a documentary being a film without girls in it, while a semi documentary has one girl. Recently however, I've been obliged to confront reality head-on in the form of the film You've Been Trumped.
It turns out that an old piece of fiction of mine, Local Hero, bears unavoidable comparison with real life events in Aberdeenshire where the property developer Donald Trump is building his "world class" golf resort, captured in Anthony Baxter's compelling work of factual observation. I watched the film recently at the Shetland Film Festival. So here's my report from the front, the border between fiction and fact.
Page one of the writer's handbook tells you that it's characters that make a story and not the other way about. This is certainly true of the local heroines and heroes in You've Been Trumped. Although they share a truly awful predicament, it's the special nature of each individual's developing reactions, revealed in measured intimate sequences, that delivers the true human dimension to the events.In a manifestly bleak scenario these human qualities start to show through. This isn't feel-good Hollywood stuff though; we're watching real lives and livelihoods mercilessly put to hazard by a malign concoction of egotistical bullying, corporate muscle flexing, craven averting of gaze by national politicians right to the very top and crass misreading of events by local authorities including police.
With the rest of the audience that day I came out into the daylight dazed and shocked, with a numb feeling of individual impotence. Our usually unchallenged feeling of smug security as citizens of a mature democracy had been rocked. (...)
This takes me to my very own villain, Happer, in my film Local Hero. Even 30 years ago as a young tyro writer (I wasn't even drawing arcs in those days) I had the nous to flesh out my baddie, to endow with him with enough personal facets to keep an audience interested, and to create for them at least the facsimile of a human being with which to engage.
For a start, there was his name; Felix Happer, Mister Happy Happy. In reality he was the man with everything but happiness. But I gave him interests and foibles; a fascination with astronomy, a love of the night sky, that, granted, became sadly a clinical obsession.
But crucially he had some personal insight. His instincts told him that his untrammelled ego needed a measure of outside control. So he had regular sessions with an expensive abuse therapist who on demand verbally assaulted him, but who by the end of the film was happily quoting for more physical sessions at an enhanced hourly rate.
by Bill Forsyth, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: David Moir/Reuters
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Neighbors
[ed. See also: The Long Shot.]
The planet is the lightest one ever found orbiting another star and — in the words of its discoverer, Xavier Dumusque, a graduate student at the Geneva Observatory — “it will surely be the closest one ever.”It is presumably a rocky ball like our own, but it is not habitable. It circles Alpha Centauri B, a reddish orb about half as luminous as the Sun, every three days at a distance of only about four million miles, resulting in hellish surface temperatures of 1,200 degrees.
So this is not “Earth 2.0.” Yet.
Astronomers said the discovery raised the possibility that there were habitable Earthlike planets right next door and that methods and instruments were now precise enough to detect them.
“Very small planets are not rare,” said Mr. Dumusque, who is the lead author of a paper being published on Wednesday in Nature. “When you find one small planet, you find others.” He and his colleagues discussed the results on Tuesday in a news conference hosted by the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany.
Astronomers were electrified by the news of the planet, but also cautioned that it needed confirmation by other astronomers, not an easy task.
by Dennis Overbye, NY Times | Read more:
Alex Rodriguez, All American
Rodriguez has had the tough part of immortality locked down for years—if he hadn't moved, without complaint, from shortstop to third base after joining the New York Yankees in 2004, he'd be regarded as the best shortstop ever to play the game; he probably is anyway. He has won three Most Valuable Player awards, five home run titles, and has a decent chance—he'd only need to hit 23 per season over the next five years—to hit more homers than any player ever to play baseball. Per Baseball Reference's formula, Rodriguez has been worth 111.4 Wins Above Replacement over his career; Albert Pujols, his nearest active competitor, has been worth 22.9 fewer. Rodriguez is not only one of the best prospects ever, he's one of the greatest baseball players in the history of baseball players. Everyone knows this, and it still doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter because whatever the other, ineffable things we seek in our all-timers are, Rodriguez not only lacks, but exemplifies their opposite. All-timers are allowed to be virtuous ciphers whose robo-hearts pump whole milk, but A-Rod, a buff android coated in marzipan and inauthenticity, can't even clear that low bar of dull verisimilitude—it's easy to imagine RoboCop (he works in private security now), John Tesh, and Mitt Romney chuckling together on Skype about how deeply inauthentic and distant and weird A-Rod seems when he's asked to answer even basic baseball player questions.
All-timers are also, under certain circumstances and within different generations' parameters for colorful-ness, allowed to be total weeping whiskey-filled garbage bags—from Babe Ruth to Mickey Mantle, the Yankees have had a special fondness for these sloshing four-finger pours of virtuosity. But, for all his travails—which include ill-advised dabblings in performance-enhancing drugs, a frosted-tip hairdo, and actual physical sex with Madonna—A-Rod can't quite pull that off, either. In all circumstances and in every way he comes off alien and affluence-perverted and so perversely and simultaneously self-regarding and oblivious that only the word "Miami" seems capable of summing it all up. His soul is upholstered in teal leather; his whole life is an overly air-conditioned and excessively security-guarded VIP section. This, for better or worse, is the best baseball player most fans presently alive have ever had the opportunity to watch play baseball.
In some ways, this is the fault of all those old, silly baseball biases—A-Rod has been simply too good at this sport, his mastery of it too transparently and transcendently fluent, for the necessary struggle to scan. He hits home runs, and the natural response, upon watching the swing that launched the bomb, is "of course." It was once this way with all those graceful gliding plays at shortstop; it was this way as recently as his outlandishly great 2007 MVP season, during which he was 31 years old. The first sin that Alex Rodriguez committed was an original one—he was born effortless, and fans have never quite forgiven him for that. This is almost a poignant thing, until Alex Rodriguez himself comes into play.
by David Roth, Vice | Read more:
Windows Pushes Into the Tablet Age
Microsoft is giving Windows its most radical overhaul since 1995 and even its most devoted users won't recognize the venerable computer operating system in this new incarnation, called Windows 8, when it appears Oct. 26.
The minute you turn it on, the difference is apparent. Instead of the familiar desktop, you see a handsome, modern, slick world of large, scrolling tiles and simpler, full-screen apps best used on a touch screen and inspired by tablets and smartphones.
This is called the Start screen and it replaces the Start Menu every Windows user knows. But it's not just a menu, it's a whole computing environment that takes over the entire display, with its own separate apps and controls. The old desktop and old-style apps are still there. But in Windows 8, the desktop is like another app—you tap or click on a Start screen icon or button to use it.
This is a bold move and in my view, the new tile-based environment works very well and is a welcome step. It feels natural, especially on a touch screen, and brings Windows into the tablet era. It may even mark the beginning of a long transition in which the new design gradually displaces the old one, though that will depend on how fast Microsoft can attract new-style apps.
Windows will now consist of two very different user experiences bound into a single package. The idea is it's a one-size-fits-all operating system, which can run on everything from older, mouse-driven PCs to touch-controlled tablets without compromise. Everything from a touch-based weather app to mouse-driven Excel will run on it. That's a big contrast to Apple's approach, which uses separate operating systems for its iPad tablets and more standard Mac computers.
Potential for Confusion
By adopting the dual-environment strategy, Microsoft risks confusing traditional PC users, who will be jumping back and forth between two ways of doing things. Both the new and old environments can work via either touch or a mouse and keyboard, but the former works best with touch, the latter best with the mouse or track pad.
There are even two different versions of Internet Explorer. And many functions are different. For instance, Start-screen apps typically lack the standard menus, toolbars, resizing and closing buttons at the top that older apps do.
The company is gambling that the confusion will be brief and will be offset by the ability, via the old desktop, to run traditional productivity apps like Microsoft Office, which can't be run on the iPad or its Android brethren.
by Walter S. Mossberg, WSJ | Read more:
Image: Microsoft
The minute you turn it on, the difference is apparent. Instead of the familiar desktop, you see a handsome, modern, slick world of large, scrolling tiles and simpler, full-screen apps best used on a touch screen and inspired by tablets and smartphones.
This is called the Start screen and it replaces the Start Menu every Windows user knows. But it's not just a menu, it's a whole computing environment that takes over the entire display, with its own separate apps and controls. The old desktop and old-style apps are still there. But in Windows 8, the desktop is like another app—you tap or click on a Start screen icon or button to use it.This is a bold move and in my view, the new tile-based environment works very well and is a welcome step. It feels natural, especially on a touch screen, and brings Windows into the tablet era. It may even mark the beginning of a long transition in which the new design gradually displaces the old one, though that will depend on how fast Microsoft can attract new-style apps.
Windows will now consist of two very different user experiences bound into a single package. The idea is it's a one-size-fits-all operating system, which can run on everything from older, mouse-driven PCs to touch-controlled tablets without compromise. Everything from a touch-based weather app to mouse-driven Excel will run on it. That's a big contrast to Apple's approach, which uses separate operating systems for its iPad tablets and more standard Mac computers.
Potential for Confusion
By adopting the dual-environment strategy, Microsoft risks confusing traditional PC users, who will be jumping back and forth between two ways of doing things. Both the new and old environments can work via either touch or a mouse and keyboard, but the former works best with touch, the latter best with the mouse or track pad.
There are even two different versions of Internet Explorer. And many functions are different. For instance, Start-screen apps typically lack the standard menus, toolbars, resizing and closing buttons at the top that older apps do.
The company is gambling that the confusion will be brief and will be offset by the ability, via the old desktop, to run traditional productivity apps like Microsoft Office, which can't be run on the iPad or its Android brethren.
by Walter S. Mossberg, WSJ | Read more:
Image: Microsoft
White out of Red
It's been twenty years since the first poster was created, but The Economist's iconic White out of Red ad campaign is now available to buy as a series of limited edition screen prints.
We're used to seeing illustrators and designers present their work for sale as prints, but this is the first time we've seen an advertising campaign presented in this way. Sonic Editions, founded by Russell Blackmore (a previous employee of The Economist), has formed a partnership with the newspaper to print some of the most iconic posters from their White out of Red ad campaign, with each iteration hand framed, and available in a limited edition of 250.
Originally created by Abbott Mead Vickers, the first poster in the campaign was "I never read The Economist", and the newspaper has continued to use this as an ongoing format.
via: Creative Review | Read more:
Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign
With a bit less than three weeks to go before the election, let's pause to think about a little-discussed element of today's high-tech campaigns. Consider the humble campaign yard sign. Is there a more retro and prosaic feature of American electoral politics?
One day, as our dog and I walked along a low-volume-traffic street in Newton, Massachusetts, I saw a "Scott Brown for Senate" sign that hadn't been there the day before. Within a week, the same block had two "Elizabeth Warren for Senate" signs pop up on neighbors' lawns. Then, in rapid succession, a couple more signs for Brown showed up.
I began to wonder what motivates people to engage in this particular form of political participation. Are they simply making a bold statement of preference for candidate or party? Are they hoping to persuade others to be like-minded?
Or is there something more aggressively oppositional happening? When the initial sign is quickly followed by a flurry of others, are the newer-sign folks essentially giving a middle-finger salute to the neighbors down the block? Oh yeah?! HERE's what I think of your Obama!
Political scientists haven't paid much attention to this whole question. That's sort of amazing to me, in light of both how long yard signs have been a staple of American campaigns and what a public form of political participation it is. But into this void have stepped two intrepid scholars, Todd Maske and Anand E. Sokhey, authors of a paper titled "Not in My Front Yard! The Displaying of Yard Signs as a Form of Political Participation." They surveyed people in Franklin County, Ohio, who posted yard signs during the 2008 campaign.
Their study confirms much of what one would intuit about the subject. Maske and Sokhey found that "partisanship, ideological extremity, and political activism are characteristics of most individuals who engage in yard sign posting" and that people who engage in this form of political participation believe in "the power of yard signs to convey messages and information."
The authors only obliquely address what I think of as the "F-U Theory" of Yard Signs. Their findings, dampening my fun, suggest that far more people (93 percent) feel that "showing pride" is an important motivation behind their sign posting than feel that "letting the neighbors know" where they stand (75 percent) is important as a motivator. But they also found that people who live in politically heterogeneous neighborhoods are more likely to say they're "letting the neighbors know," and that people "whose neighbors have a sign in their yard are more likely to cite this motivation, whether the neighbor displays a sign for the same or the opposite candidate."
One day, as our dog and I walked along a low-volume-traffic street in Newton, Massachusetts, I saw a "Scott Brown for Senate" sign that hadn't been there the day before. Within a week, the same block had two "Elizabeth Warren for Senate" signs pop up on neighbors' lawns. Then, in rapid succession, a couple more signs for Brown showed up.I began to wonder what motivates people to engage in this particular form of political participation. Are they simply making a bold statement of preference for candidate or party? Are they hoping to persuade others to be like-minded?
Or is there something more aggressively oppositional happening? When the initial sign is quickly followed by a flurry of others, are the newer-sign folks essentially giving a middle-finger salute to the neighbors down the block? Oh yeah?! HERE's what I think of your Obama!
Political scientists haven't paid much attention to this whole question. That's sort of amazing to me, in light of both how long yard signs have been a staple of American campaigns and what a public form of political participation it is. But into this void have stepped two intrepid scholars, Todd Maske and Anand E. Sokhey, authors of a paper titled "Not in My Front Yard! The Displaying of Yard Signs as a Form of Political Participation." They surveyed people in Franklin County, Ohio, who posted yard signs during the 2008 campaign.
Their study confirms much of what one would intuit about the subject. Maske and Sokhey found that "partisanship, ideological extremity, and political activism are characteristics of most individuals who engage in yard sign posting" and that people who engage in this form of political participation believe in "the power of yard signs to convey messages and information."
The authors only obliquely address what I think of as the "F-U Theory" of Yard Signs. Their findings, dampening my fun, suggest that far more people (93 percent) feel that "showing pride" is an important motivation behind their sign posting than feel that "letting the neighbors know" where they stand (75 percent) is important as a motivator. But they also found that people who live in politically heterogeneous neighborhoods are more likely to say they're "letting the neighbors know," and that people "whose neighbors have a sign in their yard are more likely to cite this motivation, whether the neighbor displays a sign for the same or the opposite candidate."
The Strangest Newspaper-Business Story I Have Ever Read
I really want to just tell you about this utterly strange business decision in the Seattle Times. But I thought it might be more instructive -- and more fun? -- to ask what you would do in their situation so that you can appreciate the severity of their challenge ... and the eccentricity of their decision.YOU ARE: a media company executive. You own the Seattle Times. Profits are endangered. Ad dollars are down. Political ad revenue is down, especially. Your job is to find a solution.
FIRST: Consider some obvious possibilities. You can hire more sales people to pitch advertisers, including political campaigns. You can ask your current sales team to try harder, target smarter, pitch pithier, innovate! You can pinch pennies and layoff expensive editors, cut your travel and reimbursement budget, stop publishing on certain days, shrink your circulation, that kind of stuff.
SECOND: Consider some slightly less obvious options. You can invest in a new section that concentrates on the software revolution to attract targeted advertising for a Seattle audience. You can supplement revenue with new business divisions that you think could be profitable in a year or so, like an events arm or an annual conference.
What do you DO?
While you're thinking, here's what the Seattle Times Company did. It bought two advertisements in its own paper on behalf of political campaigns. It's as if The Atlantic replaced a "house ad" for The Atlantic Wire with a square that said "Exxon: Just a great, great company." As Dylan Byers reports:
The ad is part of an independent-expenditure campaign with no coordination between the paper and the campaign, according to a statement from The Seattle Times. The ad appears on page B6 and says [Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob] McKenna is a "choice that will make us all proud" and praises the candidate's time as Washington state's attorney general. The advertisement states that "no candidate authorized this ad. It is paid for by The Seattle Times Company."Try telling an old, long-time Seattle Times reader that a Seattle Times Company endorsement in the Seattle Times is not in fact a Seattle Times endorsement but in fact an Seattle Times Company "advertising initiative." (Predictably, readers and journalists are angry.)
by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic | Read more:
Economies of Scale, Economies of Scope
Economies of scale and scope (and variety, though we won’t go there today) are both types of learning.
Economies of scope are the advantages that can result when similar processes are used to deliver a set of distinct products or services.
As a first approximation, you could say that economies of scale result from learning the engineering, while economies of scope result from learning the marketing. The first is primarily a one-front war between a business and nature. The second is primarily a two-front war where a business fights nature on one front, and market incumbents on another. As an aside, both kinds of learning are war-time learning: they proceed in an environment where failure equals death for the firm.
More on this after we look at the details of the two learning processes.
Learning in Scaling
The key to economies of scale is process learning of the sort that the consulting firm BCG codified with its experience curves in the 1970s. Amortization of fixed costs across many instances is merely what makes the learning worthwhile, but the work of scaling lies in the learning. Getting to repeatability in an engineered process takes conscious and deliberate effort.
You can also think of scaling as the process of proving a steady-state financial hypothesis in a specific case. In other words, the amortization argument, which does not include the learning costs in getting to the design scale, is a hypothesis that you must set out to prove by construction. The equation is only true once the learning is over (and as we’ll see, it is therefore a “peacetime” model of business that applies during periods of detente between periods of business-war). The unknown learning costs are what might kill you. And usually they do, which is why pioneers rarely own markets that they create.
The ingenuity involved, I am now convinced, actually exceeds the ingenuity involved in coming up with the unscaled idea in the first place. Why do I say this? Because people who come up with great product ideas are a dime a dozen. People who figure out how to successfully scale an idea are far rarer. We tend to lionize “inventors” but the real heroes are probably the “scalers.”
Why exactly is there learning involved in scaling at all?
Economies of scale are the advantages that can result when repeatable processes are used to deliver large volumes of identical products or service instances. Scaling relies on interchangeable parts either in the product itself, or in the delivery mechanisms, in the case of intangible services.
Economies of scope are the advantages that can result when similar processes are used to deliver a set of distinct products or services.
As a first approximation, you could say that economies of scale result from learning the engineering, while economies of scope result from learning the marketing. The first is primarily a one-front war between a business and nature. The second is primarily a two-front war where a business fights nature on one front, and market incumbents on another. As an aside, both kinds of learning are war-time learning: they proceed in an environment where failure equals death for the firm.
More on this after we look at the details of the two learning processes.
Learning in Scaling
The key to economies of scale is process learning of the sort that the consulting firm BCG codified with its experience curves in the 1970s. Amortization of fixed costs across many instances is merely what makes the learning worthwhile, but the work of scaling lies in the learning. Getting to repeatability in an engineered process takes conscious and deliberate effort.
You can also think of scaling as the process of proving a steady-state financial hypothesis in a specific case. In other words, the amortization argument, which does not include the learning costs in getting to the design scale, is a hypothesis that you must set out to prove by construction. The equation is only true once the learning is over (and as we’ll see, it is therefore a “peacetime” model of business that applies during periods of detente between periods of business-war). The unknown learning costs are what might kill you. And usually they do, which is why pioneers rarely own markets that they create.
The ingenuity involved, I am now convinced, actually exceeds the ingenuity involved in coming up with the unscaled idea in the first place. Why do I say this? Because people who come up with great product ideas are a dime a dozen. People who figure out how to successfully scale an idea are far rarer. We tend to lionize “inventors” but the real heroes are probably the “scalers.”
Why exactly is there learning involved in scaling at all?
The law of large numbers: the more you scale, the more you expose your operations to rare phenomena that are expensive to deal with. Scaling is about dealing efficiently with events that occur with a predictable frequency. Hard disk failures are rare catastrophes for individuals. They are an operating condition for data centers.
Staircase effects: Capacity increases follow a staircase curve, but demand changes smoothly. You can only buy one airplane at a time. You cannot buy half an airplane for an airline. So you’re constantly undershooting or overshooting your capacity requirements while scaling. A particularly severe (but non-commercial) example is scaling an ordinary navy into a blue water navy with aircraft carriers, a challenge China is currently taking on. You generally need 3 carrier groups to have one in deployment at all times, and it takes a couple of decades (or a very active war) to climb the three-step staircase.
Loss windups: When you are running a small bakery, if your oven is malfunctioning, you might lose one batch of cookies before shutting down to fix the problem. In a scaled operation, due to the larger distances between loci of problem creation and discovery, and the sheer speed of operations, huge losses can pile up before you intervene. Soft failure cases are predictable inventory problems. Hard failures? Think about events like the Firestone tire recall and various instances of contaminated food products being recalled.
Accounting illegibility: Chances are, while scaling, you are slashing prices as fast as you can to grab the largest possible share of a new market. Such phases are called “land grabs” for a reason. Margins may seem strong but that’s only because the accounting simply cannot model and track a growing and learning operation accurately. Effective margins, after factoring in risks and crisis response costs, may be much lower than you think. Contributing to this is poor financial governance during scaling phases leading to a lot of waste, both justified (getting a major new order by any means necessary) and unjustified (people taking advantage of the chaos to indulge in profiteering)
Process Design Evolution: There is an enormous amount of iterative process redesign involved in successful scaling. As quickly as you discover rare conditions, unexpected operational risks and other blindside phenomena, you need to bake the knowledge into the process. This process must not only proceed very fast, but it has to be very elegant. A bad process adaptation to handle a contingency (think TSA security procedures following 9/11) can end up being both costly and ineffective, and add entropy to the process without increasing its capability.
Human Factor Variances: If people are involved, such as in scaling a sales operation, you have to very suddenly turn tacit, creative knowledge in the heads of the pioneers into explicit knowledge that can very cheaply be imparted to the cheapest available brains capable of handling it. In the process you may discover that your tacit knowledge is simply too expensive to codify and scale. This training failure can kill your business.
Gravitational Effects: When you scale, you start to influence and shape your environment rather than merely reacting to it. When you launch a small satellite into space, you can ignore its effect on the earth in orbit calculations. When you are talking about the Moon, you get a proper 2-body problem. One manifestation of gravitational effects is litigation. Get to a sufficient size, especially in America, and you are suddenly worth suing. Another interesting gravitational effect is late-stage growth investment flooding in: dumb money with growth expectations that might be unreasonable/greedy enough to kill the company.
Lucy Effects: Think about the classic scene in I Love Lucy where Lucy is working on a chocolate assembly line that moves faster and faster. When she fails to keep up, she has to start stuffing her mouth with chocolate. As with fluid flows going from laminar to turbulent, process flows too, experience phase transitions. To keep them efficient (“laminar”) with increasing velocity, you may need to reinvent (or refactor) the process entirely. These hidden reinventions can sometimes be harder than the original inventions.
When you step back and think about all this, you realize that scaling is basically the equivalent of deliberate practice (the 10,000 hours idea) for companies. The COO is typically the unsung hero leading this scaling process (and often is promoted to CEO during the transition to a scaling phase).
By leaving the unpredictable learning costs out of the equation, Economics 101 professors tend to make scaling sound like a matter of so it shall be written, so it shall be done pronouncement. In practice, the outcome of scaling efforts is anything but certain, even for a wildly successful product. If you can find the right sort of talented people to drive the process the first time you attempt it, you will find that you can improve your process capabilities just slightly faster than you are increasing production volumes. Enough to deliver something approximating the cost lowering promised by the micro-economic calculations. The equation is only true if your learning costs come in under the hidden, assumed threshold. Otherwise you win a Pyrrhic victory, or get killed along the way.
If you succeed with one product, you’ve achieved something far more precious than that one product: an organization that has learned-how-to-learn the scaling challenge for a class of processes. The next time around, you can use your past (i.e., “experience curves” — now you know why they are called that) to learn faster, better.
Staircase effects: Capacity increases follow a staircase curve, but demand changes smoothly. You can only buy one airplane at a time. You cannot buy half an airplane for an airline. So you’re constantly undershooting or overshooting your capacity requirements while scaling. A particularly severe (but non-commercial) example is scaling an ordinary navy into a blue water navy with aircraft carriers, a challenge China is currently taking on. You generally need 3 carrier groups to have one in deployment at all times, and it takes a couple of decades (or a very active war) to climb the three-step staircase.
Loss windups: When you are running a small bakery, if your oven is malfunctioning, you might lose one batch of cookies before shutting down to fix the problem. In a scaled operation, due to the larger distances between loci of problem creation and discovery, and the sheer speed of operations, huge losses can pile up before you intervene. Soft failure cases are predictable inventory problems. Hard failures? Think about events like the Firestone tire recall and various instances of contaminated food products being recalled.
Accounting illegibility: Chances are, while scaling, you are slashing prices as fast as you can to grab the largest possible share of a new market. Such phases are called “land grabs” for a reason. Margins may seem strong but that’s only because the accounting simply cannot model and track a growing and learning operation accurately. Effective margins, after factoring in risks and crisis response costs, may be much lower than you think. Contributing to this is poor financial governance during scaling phases leading to a lot of waste, both justified (getting a major new order by any means necessary) and unjustified (people taking advantage of the chaos to indulge in profiteering)
Process Design Evolution: There is an enormous amount of iterative process redesign involved in successful scaling. As quickly as you discover rare conditions, unexpected operational risks and other blindside phenomena, you need to bake the knowledge into the process. This process must not only proceed very fast, but it has to be very elegant. A bad process adaptation to handle a contingency (think TSA security procedures following 9/11) can end up being both costly and ineffective, and add entropy to the process without increasing its capability.
Human Factor Variances: If people are involved, such as in scaling a sales operation, you have to very suddenly turn tacit, creative knowledge in the heads of the pioneers into explicit knowledge that can very cheaply be imparted to the cheapest available brains capable of handling it. In the process you may discover that your tacit knowledge is simply too expensive to codify and scale. This training failure can kill your business.
Gravitational Effects: When you scale, you start to influence and shape your environment rather than merely reacting to it. When you launch a small satellite into space, you can ignore its effect on the earth in orbit calculations. When you are talking about the Moon, you get a proper 2-body problem. One manifestation of gravitational effects is litigation. Get to a sufficient size, especially in America, and you are suddenly worth suing. Another interesting gravitational effect is late-stage growth investment flooding in: dumb money with growth expectations that might be unreasonable/greedy enough to kill the company.
Lucy Effects: Think about the classic scene in I Love Lucy where Lucy is working on a chocolate assembly line that moves faster and faster. When she fails to keep up, she has to start stuffing her mouth with chocolate. As with fluid flows going from laminar to turbulent, process flows too, experience phase transitions. To keep them efficient (“laminar”) with increasing velocity, you may need to reinvent (or refactor) the process entirely. These hidden reinventions can sometimes be harder than the original inventions.
When you step back and think about all this, you realize that scaling is basically the equivalent of deliberate practice (the 10,000 hours idea) for companies. The COO is typically the unsung hero leading this scaling process (and often is promoted to CEO during the transition to a scaling phase).
By leaving the unpredictable learning costs out of the equation, Economics 101 professors tend to make scaling sound like a matter of so it shall be written, so it shall be done pronouncement. In practice, the outcome of scaling efforts is anything but certain, even for a wildly successful product. If you can find the right sort of talented people to drive the process the first time you attempt it, you will find that you can improve your process capabilities just slightly faster than you are increasing production volumes. Enough to deliver something approximating the cost lowering promised by the micro-economic calculations. The equation is only true if your learning costs come in under the hidden, assumed threshold. Otherwise you win a Pyrrhic victory, or get killed along the way.
If you succeed with one product, you’ve achieved something far more precious than that one product: an organization that has learned-how-to-learn the scaling challenge for a class of processes. The next time around, you can use your past (i.e., “experience curves” — now you know why they are called that) to learn faster, better.
by Venkat, Ribbonfarm | Read more:
Will Privacy Go to the Dogs?
[ed. See also: Devices go nose to nose with bomb-sniffer dogs.]
This Halloween, the United States Supreme Court will devote its day to dogs. The court will hear two cases from Florida to test whether “police dog sniffs” violate our privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. These two cases have not yet grabbed many headlines, but the court’s decisions could shape our rights to privacy in profound and surprising ways.
The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people to be free from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Ordinarily, unless the police trespass or otherwise intrude upon a reasonable expectation of privacy, they need not have probable cause or a warrant to justify their investigative activity. For decades now, the court has struggled with what it means for a person to have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” — especially when the police investigate with sense-enhancing means or technology.
One of the new cases asks the court to clarify how accurate a dog must be in terms of its past identification of contraband — for, as Justice David H. Souter once warned in dissent, “The infallible dog, however, is a creature of legal fiction.” (...)
The second of the court’s new dog cases asks if the police may take a drug-sniffing dog to the front porch of a home to sniff for evidence of marijuana inside. The court has always accorded special privacy protection for people’s homes. In 2001, the court ruled, in an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, that police officers violated a homeowner’s privacy when they parked across the street from a home and, without a warrant, used a thermal imaging device to scan the outside of the house for signs of unusual heat inside that might be caused by high-intensity lighting, which is often used to grow marijuana.
If the police can’t thermal-scan your home from the street, why let them dog-scan it from your front porch? The government argues that a dog is alerted only by illegal contraband, while a thermal imager is set off more generally by “innocent” and “guilty” heat of all kinds coming from a home — whether from grow lights or from, as Justice Scalia noted in the thermal imager case, “the lady of the house” as she “takes her daily sauna and bath.”
But, arguably, this distinction is misplaced. If the court rules for the government in the home-sniff case, it is hard to see why the police could not station drug-sniffing dogs outside the entrances to every school, supermarket and movie theater as a routine form of drug interdiction. Dog sniffs would never involve a privacy intrusion and therefore would not trigger the requirement that the police obtain a warrant or have individual suspicion.
Moreover, today’s dogs will give way to tomorrow’s high-tech contraband-scanning devices that, under the reasoning pressed in the dog cases, would free the government to conduct routine scans of people’s homes or their bodies for all manner of contraband (or possibly for noncontraband, like marijuana grow lights, that are most commonly associated with illegality).
This Halloween, the United States Supreme Court will devote its day to dogs. The court will hear two cases from Florida to test whether “police dog sniffs” violate our privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. These two cases have not yet grabbed many headlines, but the court’s decisions could shape our rights to privacy in profound and surprising ways.
The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people to be free from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Ordinarily, unless the police trespass or otherwise intrude upon a reasonable expectation of privacy, they need not have probable cause or a warrant to justify their investigative activity. For decades now, the court has struggled with what it means for a person to have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” — especially when the police investigate with sense-enhancing means or technology.One of the new cases asks the court to clarify how accurate a dog must be in terms of its past identification of contraband — for, as Justice David H. Souter once warned in dissent, “The infallible dog, however, is a creature of legal fiction.” (...)
The second of the court’s new dog cases asks if the police may take a drug-sniffing dog to the front porch of a home to sniff for evidence of marijuana inside. The court has always accorded special privacy protection for people’s homes. In 2001, the court ruled, in an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, that police officers violated a homeowner’s privacy when they parked across the street from a home and, without a warrant, used a thermal imaging device to scan the outside of the house for signs of unusual heat inside that might be caused by high-intensity lighting, which is often used to grow marijuana.
If the police can’t thermal-scan your home from the street, why let them dog-scan it from your front porch? The government argues that a dog is alerted only by illegal contraband, while a thermal imager is set off more generally by “innocent” and “guilty” heat of all kinds coming from a home — whether from grow lights or from, as Justice Scalia noted in the thermal imager case, “the lady of the house” as she “takes her daily sauna and bath.”
But, arguably, this distinction is misplaced. If the court rules for the government in the home-sniff case, it is hard to see why the police could not station drug-sniffing dogs outside the entrances to every school, supermarket and movie theater as a routine form of drug interdiction. Dog sniffs would never involve a privacy intrusion and therefore would not trigger the requirement that the police obtain a warrant or have individual suspicion.
Moreover, today’s dogs will give way to tomorrow’s high-tech contraband-scanning devices that, under the reasoning pressed in the dog cases, would free the government to conduct routine scans of people’s homes or their bodies for all manner of contraband (or possibly for noncontraband, like marijuana grow lights, that are most commonly associated with illegality).
by Jeffrey A. Meyer, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Kelsey Dake
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