Thursday, August 15, 2013
Same Old Chip
Before the second play of his first NFL game, Philadelphia's new head coach, Chip Kelly, a man who made his reputation as the architect of college football's most prolific offense — the Oregon Ducks' fast-break, spread-it-out attack — did the unthinkable: He had his team huddle. He followed this with another knee-weakening moment: His quarterback, Michael Vick, lined up under center, an alignment from which the Eagles ran a basic run to the left. For 31 other NFL teams, this would be as ho-hum as it gets. But this is Chip Kelly, he of the fast practices, fast plays, and fast talking. By starting out this way, Kelly, who repeatedly has said he doesn't do anything without a sound reason behind it, was no doubt sending some kind of message to fans, pundits, and opposing coaches waiting anxiously to see what a Chip Kelly offense would look like at the professional level. It was a message that was unmistakable: See, I can adapt to the NFL.
At least that’s what I thought at first. But after studying Philadelphia's game against New England, I came away with almost the exact opposite conclusion: While there were clear differences from what Kelly’s system looked like at Oregon, his Eagles offense looked a lot more like the Ducks offense than I ever anticipated.
Preseason game plans are often described as being "vanilla," and rightly so. The ostensible purpose of the preseason — other than as an opportunity to put more football on TV, which I'm not complaining about — is to evaluate talent as rosters get cut to 53 and players compete for starting spots. Given that preseason football is essentially practice with game uniforms, there is no incentive for a team to reveal its intentions for when the real games begin.
Yet in these vanilla preseason plans often lies some basic truth about a team's identity. In the regular season, the plan will be carefully tailored to the specific strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies of that week's opponent; in the preseason, the plan is stripped to focus only on the most basic, foundational concepts installed in the first few days of camp — the elements the coaches have decided are so essential that a player who cannot master them cannot be on the team.
And so, at the risk of sounding like Vincenzo Coccotti, Michael Vick may have said the Eagles only used about "a third" of their total scheme, but what Philadelphia did was show a lot about how Kelly and his staff will approach bringing his offense to the NFL. More than anything else, Kelly showed that he's not leaving behind what worked for him at Oregon.
Tempo
For years, Kelly's teams have been synonymous with one word: speed. Speed on the field, in practice, and, most famously, in how often they run plays. Known for a blistering, unrelenting pace, Kelly's teams at Oregon were perceived to have simply exhausted opponents, causing missed tackles and blown assignments as defenses cried out for help. This isn’t devoid of truth, but the idea that Kelly's teams always went at warp speed has been overblown, and since he became head coach of the Eagles, the myth that Kelly would go into every game trying to run as many plays as possible has been treated as established fact.
"It will be a weapon for us and a tool in our toolbox," Kelly said of the fast-paced no-huddle after the game, according to the team’s website. Even at Oregon, Kelly's offense had not one but three speeds: red light (slow), yellow light (medium: team gets to the line but quarterback can slow it down and change plays), and green light (superfast: get to the line and run the play). Good defenses will adapt to any pace, but a good no-huddle — whether it’s Kelly's Eagles, Peyton Manning's Broncos, or Tom Brady's Patriots — will vary the speed, using it strategically, waiting to put its foot on the gas pedal precisely when the defense has the wrong personnel stuck on the field.
At least that’s what I thought at first. But after studying Philadelphia's game against New England, I came away with almost the exact opposite conclusion: While there were clear differences from what Kelly’s system looked like at Oregon, his Eagles offense looked a lot more like the Ducks offense than I ever anticipated.Preseason game plans are often described as being "vanilla," and rightly so. The ostensible purpose of the preseason — other than as an opportunity to put more football on TV, which I'm not complaining about — is to evaluate talent as rosters get cut to 53 and players compete for starting spots. Given that preseason football is essentially practice with game uniforms, there is no incentive for a team to reveal its intentions for when the real games begin.
Yet in these vanilla preseason plans often lies some basic truth about a team's identity. In the regular season, the plan will be carefully tailored to the specific strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies of that week's opponent; in the preseason, the plan is stripped to focus only on the most basic, foundational concepts installed in the first few days of camp — the elements the coaches have decided are so essential that a player who cannot master them cannot be on the team.
And so, at the risk of sounding like Vincenzo Coccotti, Michael Vick may have said the Eagles only used about "a third" of their total scheme, but what Philadelphia did was show a lot about how Kelly and his staff will approach bringing his offense to the NFL. More than anything else, Kelly showed that he's not leaving behind what worked for him at Oregon.
Tempo
For years, Kelly's teams have been synonymous with one word: speed. Speed on the field, in practice, and, most famously, in how often they run plays. Known for a blistering, unrelenting pace, Kelly's teams at Oregon were perceived to have simply exhausted opponents, causing missed tackles and blown assignments as defenses cried out for help. This isn’t devoid of truth, but the idea that Kelly's teams always went at warp speed has been overblown, and since he became head coach of the Eagles, the myth that Kelly would go into every game trying to run as many plays as possible has been treated as established fact.
"It will be a weapon for us and a tool in our toolbox," Kelly said of the fast-paced no-huddle after the game, according to the team’s website. Even at Oregon, Kelly's offense had not one but three speeds: red light (slow), yellow light (medium: team gets to the line but quarterback can slow it down and change plays), and green light (superfast: get to the line and run the play). Good defenses will adapt to any pace, but a good no-huddle — whether it’s Kelly's Eagles, Peyton Manning's Broncos, or Tom Brady's Patriots — will vary the speed, using it strategically, waiting to put its foot on the gas pedal precisely when the defense has the wrong personnel stuck on the field.
by Chris Brown, Grantland | Read more:
Image: Drew Hallowell/Philadelphia Eagles/Getty Images
My Smartphone is Smarter Than Me
I just recently bought my first smartphone. I know, I know... welcome to the 20th century... wait...uh, 21st century (man, where do those centuries go?). Anyway, as expected, my smartphone is smarter than me. At least it has more functions than I'll ever use, many of which are truly awesome, probably. The thing about it though is this, I don't have enough patience to learn them. Yes, there's a nice 27 page manual (pdf) I could print off that would tell me everything I need to know about how to make my smartphone do all kinds of smart, cool tricks. But do I need all those things? Not much. I can't even imagine situations where they might come in handy, let alone remember how they might be used. Then there are the bazillions of apps (produced by the bazillions of tech startups that everyone seems to work for these days), each with it's own little universe of quirkiness. Like the camera app, one of the most basic and functional things you can do with a smartphone, right? It has a hundred different features (probably) that could make me the envy of National Geographic. Will I ever use them all? No. Will I use maybe even most of them? No. Will I at least be able to see them when I'm standing outside in broad daylight? No. Believe me, I've tried. The other day I got home and had a twelve minute video of the inside of my pocket. I thought I had taken an earlier snapshot but had apparently touched the wrong button (or slid it the wrong way, or something). I can't even tell when an app is still running, or not.Which brings me to the main problem I'm having in trying to be smarter than my smartphone: I have to operate on its turf. Somehow the glass interface with all its tapping, turning, sliding, pinching, circling, shaking, etc. etc. just does not seem very intuitive to me. Plus, I must have really fat fingers or something. I have this dissonant memory of trying to teach my mom about computers years ago. She couldn't grasp the analogy of files and folders, documents and desktops, let alone cut and paste, right click/left click and so on, so she'd write short instructions to herself on little post-it notes which were pasted all over her desk. She wondered why they couldn't just make computers more like cable tv. I'm more sympathetic now.
I read an article today about experience design with a quote that seems particularly apt to this rant/discussion:
Today, Buxton, who is principal researcher at Microsoft Research, says that the next challenge for experience design is to create a constellation of devices, including wearable gadgets, tablets, phones, and smart appliances, that can coordinate with one another and adapt to users’ changing needs. This focus on the totality of our devices stands in contrast to where we find ourselves today: constantly adding new gadgets and functions without much thought as to how they fit together. (For instance, anyone lugging around a laptop, iPad, and iPhone is also carrying the equivalent of three video cameras, three email devices, three media players, and probably three different photo albums.) Even as our devices have individually gotten simpler, the cumulative complexity of all of them is increasing. Buxton has said that the solution is to “stop focusing on the individual objects as islands.” He has come up with a simple standard for whether a gadget should even exist: Each new device should reduce the complexity of the system and increase the value of everything else in the ecosystem. (...)I guess the alternative would be more of the same (e.g. seven remotes scattered around the living room), or as my friend suggested when I told her about my phone issues: just go find a kid.
In the wrong hands, this is a dystopian prospect—technology’s unwanted intrusion into our every waking moment. But without the proper design, without considering how new products and services fit into people’s day-to-day lives, any new technology can be terrifying. That’s where the challenge comes in. The task of making this new world can’t be left up to engineers and technologists alone—otherwise we will find ourselves overrun with amazing capabilities that people refuse to take advantage of. Designers, who’ve always been adept at watching and responding to our needs, must bring to bear a better understanding of how people actually live. It’s up to them to make this new world feel like something we’ve always wanted and a natural extension of what we already have.
by markk
Image: markk (sans duck lips)
Dark Cloud
[ed. Forget that pesky old Fourth Amendment, it might be the bottom-line that really counts.]
Whether it's tech companies' fault or not—it's hard to fight against secret court orders, although some folks are—the PRISM scandal and related surveillance programs have dissolved any trust consumers could have in the privacy of US-based servers. That lack of faith comes with a cost: According to a new report from the the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the US could end up losing out on tens of billions of dollars in the cloud-based computing space.The cloud computing space has been growing steadily in past years, and is projected to boom even further in the next few, as shown by the ITIF graph at right. The United States, serviced by giants like Google and Amazon, has until now spent more money on cloud computing than the rest of the world combined, but that gap has closed considerably, with Western European markets expected to grow heavily in the next few years.
While Europe in particular has been open about trying to spur local cloud efforts, American firms still had a great opportunity to dive into a budding market. But with the US's great cloud computing secret now out in the open—American servers can be tapped whenever, in secret, with secret court orders—those firms are going to have a much more difficult time competing with upstarts like Iceland, where strict privacy laws have fostered growth in cloud computing and hosting services.
That the US's intrusions into data would have chilling effects on the data economy is no surprise. "It is often American providers that will miss out, because they are often the leaders in cloud services," Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for digital affairs, told the Guardian in July. "If European cloud customers cannot trust the United States government, then maybe they won't trust US cloud providers either. If I am right, there are multibillion-euro consequences for American companies. If I were an American cloud provider, I would be quite frustrated with my government right now. (...)
Based on its market analysis, the ITIF pegs the potential loss to US cloud companies over the next three years at between $21.5 billion and $35 billion. (These are report estimates based on a projected market share loss that's magnified as the global market grows.) And beyond those years, US companies' lost market share will continue to be a disadvantage.
by Derek Mead, Motherboard | Read more:
Image: NSA Security Operations Center, courtesy NSA
Dying of a Broken Heart
[ed. Wonderful serialized blog/book, with successive chapters posted on the right side of the page. This is Chapter One. Be sure to read the Prologue, too.]
It happened just over a week ago. I was lying on my med-bed on the third floor of the local Nashville nuthouse, waiting for the Ambien to amplify all of the other shit coursing across the blood-brain barrier: Zoloft…150 mg, a zonester of there ever was one…Ativan, a 10 mg mini-pill, clicking along the mellow mental interstate like an unloaded 18-wheeler dead-heading home…and my personal favorite, Risperdal, its 1 mg packing a punch like a lead-weighted glove aimed straight at the deepest wrinkles in the old medulla oblongata. Suddenly I saw them, in Technicolor on the insides of my eyelids, these words: I am dying of a broken heart.Don’t get me wrong. It had nothing to do with the drugs, and certainly nothing to do with checking myself into the nut for a much-needed life-recalculation and some chemical cell-tuning. No, it had been coming for a long, long time, and the only thing that had saved me until then was that tried and true foxhole fixation, Denial. I’ve been real, real good at it, Denial. After all, I’m a Truscott.
My grandfather, General Lucian King Truscott Jr., died of a broken heart. So did my father, Colonel Lucian King Truscott III. And so did my brother Francis Meriwether Truscott, who took his life with a Tokarev pistol taken from an NVA Major in Vietnam. The war finally got him, his wife Debbie told me on the phone the morning his body was found on the back steps of his local funeral home. Broken hearts in the Truscott family follow broken bodies and lost lives right to the bloody fucking end.
I’ve had friends, too, who died of broken hearts. Hunter Thompson, who shot himself in his kitchen when he finally realized that what he loved as much as life itself — the fun — was over. Gore Vidal, who died in his bed never having been able to bring himself out of the Final Closet: he was for the entirety of his life a terminal romantic who lost his first love and could never allow himself to love again. And Bill Cardoso, who died with a tall Dewars and soda in hand and his loving companion Mary Miles Ryan at his side, still raging against a world in which he had no place left to write, no place that would publish his marvelous wit which he wielded with a rapier, nearly intolerable ego.
The weird thing about lying in the dark full of drugs in a nuthouse realizing that you’re dying of a broken heart is how good it feels. It’s soft and psychically comfy to finally realize that where you are and what you are feeling has roots in family tradition, and looked at in that way, there’s really nothing wrong with you. You’re a Truscott. Of course your heart is broken. Of course you’re going to die. The two go together like gin and tonic. (...)
Life is full of love affairs and relationships and sadness and regrets and mistakes and joy and fights and reconciliations and you remember most of them fondly and without rancor, some painfully, and nearly all with love in your heart.
by by Lucian K. Truscott IV | Read more:
Image:Truscott family photo
by by Lucian K. Truscott IV | Read more:
Image:Truscott family photo
Cops Dealing Doritos at Post-Legalization Hempfest
[ed. I'm planning to do this, should be both historic and fun. Now if I can just find parking.]
The haze of pot smoke might smell a little more like victory, after Washington and Colorado became the first states to legalize marijuana use by adults over 21. Having won at the state level, speakers will concentrate on the reform of federal marijuana laws.
Oh, and the Seattle police — who have long turned a lenient eye on Hempfest tokers — don't plan to be writing tickets or making arrests. They'll be busy handing out Doritos.
"I think it's going to be a lot of fun," said Sgt. Sean Whitcomb, department spokesman and junk-food-dispenser-in-chief. "It's meant to be ironic. The idea of police passing out Doritos at a festival that celebrates pot, we're sure, is going to generate some buzz."
The idea isn't just to satisfy some munchies. The department has affixed labels to 1,000 bags of Doritos urging people to check out a question-and-answer post on its website, titled "Marijwhatnow? A Guide to Legal Marijuana Use In Seattle." It explains some of the nuances of Washington's law: that adults can possess up to an ounce but can't sell it or give it away, that driving under the influence of pot is illegal, and that — festivals aside — public use is illegal.
Organizers are expecting as many as 85,000 people each day of the three-day event, which begins Friday and is the first Hempfest since voters passed Initiative 502 last fall.
The vote legalized possession of marijuana and set up a system of state-licensed marijuana growers, processors and stores to sell taxed and regulated weed. Officials are still writing rules for the new pot industry, with sales scheduled to begin next year.
by Gene Johnson, AP | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
You Know Who I Am
I cannot follow you, my love,
you cannot follow me.
I am the distance you put between
all of the moments that we will be.
You know who I am,
you’ve stared at the sun,
well I am the one who loves
changing from nothing to one.
Leonard Cohen, You Know Who I Am
via:
Image: Lost in Translation (2003)
Google: Gmail Users Shouldn't Expect Email Privacy
[ed. Is it any wonder there's an aversion to cloud computing and storing all your personal items/information on unsecured servers?]
Gmail users have no "reasonable expectation" that their emails are confidential, Google has said in a court filing.
Consumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that uncovered the filing, called the revelation a "stunning admission." It comes as Google and its peers are under pressure to explain their role in the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of US citizens and foreign nationals.
"Google has finally admitted they don't respect privacy," said John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's privacy project director. "People should take them at their word; if you care about your email correspondents' privacy, don't use Gmail."
Google set out its case last month in an attempt to dismiss a class action lawsuit that accuses the tech giant of breaking wire tap laws when it scans emails in order to target ads to Gmail users.
That suit, filed in May, claims Google "unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people's private email messages." It quotes Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman: "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."
"Unbeknown to millions of people, on a daily basis and for years, Google has systematically and intentionally crossed the 'creepy line' to read private email messages containing information you don't want anyone to know, and to acquire, collect, or mine valuable information from that mail," the suit claims.
by Dominic Rushie, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Walter Bieri
Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Awesome Sex
There’s a piece of twaddle going around the internet called 10 Rules For Dating My Daughter, which is packed with “funny” threats like this:
“Rule Four: I’m sure you’ve been told that in today’s world, sex without utilising some kind of ‘barrier method’ can kill you. Let me elaborate: when it comes to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you.”
All of which boil down to the tedious, “Boys are threatening louts, sex is awful when other people do it, and my daughter is a plastic doll whose destiny I control.”
Look, I love sex. It’s fun. And because I love my daughter, I want her to have all of the same delights in life that I do, and hopefully more. I don’t want to hear about the fine details because, heck, I don’t want those visuals any more than my daughter wants mine. But in the abstract, darling, go out and play.
Because consensual sex isn’t something that men take from you; it’s something you give. It doesn’t lessen you to give someone else pleasure. It doesn’t degrade you to have some of your own. And anyone who implies otherwise is a man who probably thinks very poorly of women underneath the surface.
Yes, all these boys and girls and genderqueers may break your heart, and that in turn will break mine. I’ve held you, sobbing, after your boyfriend cheated on you, and it tore me in two. But you know what would tear me in two even more? To see you in a glass cage, experiencing nothing but cold emptiness at your fingers, as Dear Old Dad ensured that you got to experience nothing until he decided what you should like.
You’re not me. Nor are you an extension of my will. And so you need to make your own damn mistakes, to learn how to pick yourself up when you fall, to learn where the bandages are and to bind up your own cuts. I’ll help. I’ll be your consigliere when I can, the advisor, the person you come to when all seems lost. But I think there’s value in getting lost. I think there’s a strength that only comes from fumbling your own way out of the darkness.
“Rule Four: I’m sure you’ve been told that in today’s world, sex without utilising some kind of ‘barrier method’ can kill you. Let me elaborate: when it comes to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you.”All of which boil down to the tedious, “Boys are threatening louts, sex is awful when other people do it, and my daughter is a plastic doll whose destiny I control.”
Look, I love sex. It’s fun. And because I love my daughter, I want her to have all of the same delights in life that I do, and hopefully more. I don’t want to hear about the fine details because, heck, I don’t want those visuals any more than my daughter wants mine. But in the abstract, darling, go out and play.
Because consensual sex isn’t something that men take from you; it’s something you give. It doesn’t lessen you to give someone else pleasure. It doesn’t degrade you to have some of your own. And anyone who implies otherwise is a man who probably thinks very poorly of women underneath the surface.
Yes, all these boys and girls and genderqueers may break your heart, and that in turn will break mine. I’ve held you, sobbing, after your boyfriend cheated on you, and it tore me in two. But you know what would tear me in two even more? To see you in a glass cage, experiencing nothing but cold emptiness at your fingers, as Dear Old Dad ensured that you got to experience nothing until he decided what you should like.
You’re not me. Nor are you an extension of my will. And so you need to make your own damn mistakes, to learn how to pick yourself up when you fall, to learn where the bandages are and to bind up your own cuts. I’ll help. I’ll be your consigliere when I can, the advisor, the person you come to when all seems lost. But I think there’s value in getting lost. I think there’s a strength that only comes from fumbling your own way out of the darkness.
by Ferrett Steinmetz, GMP | Read more:
Image: Stewart Black/Flickr
A Day in the Life of the Ku Klux Klan, Uncensored
by David Rosenberg, Salon | More photos:
Image: Anthony S. Karen
America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
A molecule? That sounds crazy. What molecule could be responsible for a steep and sudden decline in violent crime?
Well, here's one possibility: Pb(CH2CH3)4.
In 1994, Rick Neven was a consultant working for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on the costs and benefits of removing lead paint from old houses. This has been a topic of intense study because of the growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with a whole raft of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities.
But as Nevin was working on that assignment, his client suggested they might be missing something. A recent study had suggested a link between childhood lead exposure and juvenile delinquency later on. Maybe reducing lead exposure had an effect on violent crime too?
That tip took Nevin in a different direction. The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.
Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.
So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.
And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to "fill 'er up with ethyl," they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.
It was an exciting conjecture, and it prompted an immediate wave of…nothing. Nevin's paper was almost completely ignored, and in one sense it's easy to see why—Nevin is an economist, not a criminologist, and his paper was published in Environmental Research, not a journal with a big readership in the criminology community. What's more, a single correlation between two curves isn't all that impressive, econometrically speaking. Sales of vinyl LPs rose in the postwar period too, and then declined in the '80s and '90s. Lots of things follow a pattern like that. So no matter how good the fit, if you only have a single correlation it might just be a coincidence. You need to do something more to establish causality.
by Kevin Drum, Mother Jones | Read more:
Image: Gérard DuBois
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