Wednesday, December 4, 2013
The Dirty Secret of Black Friday 'Discounts'
When shoppers head out in search of Black Friday bargains this week, they won't just be going to the mall, they'll be witnessing retail theater.
Stores will be pulling out the stops on deep discounts aimed at drawing customers into stores. But retail-industry veterans acknowledge that, in many cases, those bargains will be a carefully engineered illusion.
The common assumption is that retailers stock up on goods and then mark down the ones that don't sell, taking a hit to their profits. But that isn't typically how it plays out. Instead, big retailers work backward with their suppliers to set starting prices that, after all the markdowns, will yield the profit margins they want.
The red cardigan sweater with the ruffled neck on sale for more than 40% off at $39.99 was never meant to sell at its $68 starting price. It was designed with the discount built in. (...)
Here's how it works, according to one industry consultant describing an actual sweater sold at a major retailer. A supplier sells the sweater to a retailer for roughly $14.50. The suggested retail price is $50, which gives the retailer a roughly 70% markup. A few sweaters sell at that price, but more sell at the first markdown of $44.99, and the bulk sell at the final discount price of $21.99. That produces an average unit retail price of $28 and gives the store about a 45% gross margin on the product.
Retailers didn't always price this way. It used to be that most items were sold at full price, with a limited number of sales to clear unsold inventory. That began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, when a rash of store openings intensified competition and forced retailers to look for new ways to stand out.
Stores will be pulling out the stops on deep discounts aimed at drawing customers into stores. But retail-industry veterans acknowledge that, in many cases, those bargains will be a carefully engineered illusion.The common assumption is that retailers stock up on goods and then mark down the ones that don't sell, taking a hit to their profits. But that isn't typically how it plays out. Instead, big retailers work backward with their suppliers to set starting prices that, after all the markdowns, will yield the profit margins they want.
The red cardigan sweater with the ruffled neck on sale for more than 40% off at $39.99 was never meant to sell at its $68 starting price. It was designed with the discount built in. (...)
Here's how it works, according to one industry consultant describing an actual sweater sold at a major retailer. A supplier sells the sweater to a retailer for roughly $14.50. The suggested retail price is $50, which gives the retailer a roughly 70% markup. A few sweaters sell at that price, but more sell at the first markdown of $44.99, and the bulk sell at the final discount price of $21.99. That produces an average unit retail price of $28 and gives the store about a 45% gross margin on the product.
Retailers didn't always price this way. It used to be that most items were sold at full price, with a limited number of sales to clear unsold inventory. That began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, when a rash of store openings intensified competition and forced retailers to look for new ways to stand out.
by Suzanne Kapner, WSJ | Read more:
Image: Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal
Welcome to the Memory Hole
What if everything a whistleblower had ever exposed could simply be made to go away? What if every National Security Agency (NSA) document Snowden released, every interview he gave, every documented trace of a national security state careening out of control could be made to disappear in real-time? What if the very posting of such revelations could be turned into a fruitless, record-less endeavor?
Am I suggesting the plot for a novel by some twenty-first century George Orwell? Hardly. As we edge toward a fully digital world, such things may soon be possible, not in science fiction but in our world -- and at the push of a button. In fact, the earliest prototypes of a new kind of “disappearance” are already being tested. We are closer to a shocking, dystopian reality that might once have been the stuff of futuristic novels than we imagine. Welcome to the memory hole.
Even if some future government stepped over one of the last remaining red lines in our world and simply assassinated whistleblowers as they surfaced, others would always emerge. Back in 1948, in his eerie novel 1984, however, Orwell suggested a far more diabolical solution to the problem. He conjured up a technological device for the world of Big Brother that he called "the memory hole." In his dark future, armies of bureaucrats, working in what he sardonically dubbed the Ministry of Truth, spent their lives erasing or altering documents, newspapers, books, and the like in order to create an acceptable version of history. When a person fell out of favor, the Ministry of Truth sent him and all the documentation relating to him down the memory hole. Every story or report in which his life was in any way noted or recorded would be edited to eradicate all traces of him. (...)
Google Search...
In a sense, Google Search already “disappears” material. Right now Google is the good guy vis-à-vis whistleblowers. A quick Google search (0.22 seconds) turns up more than 48 million hits on Edward Snowden, most of them referencing his leaked NSA documents. Some of the websites display the documents themselves, still labeled “Top Secret.” Less than half a year ago, you had to be one of a very limited group in the government or contractually connected to it to see such things. Now, they are splayed across the web.
Google -- and since Google is the planet’s number one search engine, I'll use it here as a shorthand for every search engine, even those yet to be invented -- is in this way amazing and looks like a massive machine for spreading, not suppressing, news. Put just about anything on the web and Google is likely to find it quickly and add it into search results worldwide, sometimes within seconds. Since most people rarely scroll past the first few search results displayed, however, being disappeared already has a new meaning online. It’s no longer enough just to get Google to notice you. Getting it to place what you post high enough on its search results page to be noticed is what matters now. If your work is number 47,999,999 on the Snowden results, you’re as good as dead, as good as disappeared. Think of that as a starting point for the more significant forms of disappearance that undoubtedly lie in our future.
by Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch | Read more:
Image: via:
Circling
All of which makes Shark Tank, now in its fifth season, a little hard to consume simply as entertainment, though it’s often highly entertaining on a week-to-week basis. On the show, adapted for American television from a Japanese reality format, inventors, creators and small-business owners try to extract money from a panel of venture capitalists, known on the show as “sharks,” in exchange for some percentage of ownership. The sharks hear from teenagers and MDs, parents and cowboys, beat cops and football players, and barefoot runners and homeless women. Each makes their case, describes their product or service with as much sales brio as they can muster, and waits hopefully for a shark to make an offer. Perhaps half the time, or maybe a bit more, people walk away with nothing. When the sharks do make a deal with a contestant, it’s usually in return for a much greater share of equity than the contestant was hoping to part with. Businesses that are already successful tend to attract investments. Businesses that have yet to prove themselves typically don’t get cash. Money, in short, goes to where money is, a rule of thumb that’s unlikely to surprise anyone.
You’d expect the show to get boring once you pick up on this pattern, but it doesn’t.Shark Tank shows people using their brains, in an SAT sort of way, much more than the average reality show. Every time the sharks hear a new pitch, they cross-examine the contestant on two fronts. First come the questions about the product itself: How does it work? What makes it different? Might that power cord pose a safety hazard to kids? Couldn’t a competitor just nail some boards together like this and make a cheaper version? If the contestant gives answers that satisfy the sharks, then the number grilling begins. What are your sales to date? How much did you net? What does it cost to acquire new customers? What’s your plan for growth? We get to see both the sharks and the contestants thinking on their feet, and along the way we learn about royalty structures, franchising strategies, the different categories of intellectual property, and other MBA-ish topics that we might have missed during our undergrad years reading Jane Jacobs.
Another pleasure of Shark Tank is the never-predictable nature of the business proposals themselves. Here are some of the hundred or so products pitched over the course of the fourth season: A tiny spatula with which you can dig uncooperative makeup out of the bottle. An ’80s-style arcade game console with a tap on the side that dispenses beer. A home tattoo removal kit that purports to break down the ink in your skin with halogen lights. An individually packaged waffle, to be sold at convenience stores, that contains as much caffeine as three cups of coffee. On Shark Tank, some ideas are good, some are bad, and some utterly mystify, but it’s heartening just to see so many ideas, presented back to back and by people who believe in them completely. (...)
You don’t need to watch too many scenes like this to realize that the sharks themselves are one of the less compelling aspects of Shark Tank. They’re certainly not as interesting as the producers seem to think. The sharks are the one element that’s constantly foregrounded, from the title on down: each episode begins with a montage explaining who they are and how they made their millions, and it’s not uncommon, following an emotionally charged pitch, for the camera to linger on the sharks’ bickering and bantering, rather than following up with the contestant who may have just made or lost the most important deal of her life. This emphasis on the house millionaires is one of the show’s greatest errors, because the fortunes and feelings of the sharks can never be a real engine of drama. Each shark, every episode, starts out rich and ends up the same way.
by Alex Eichler, N+1 | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Grade Inflation at Harvard
[ed. If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.. F. Scott Fitzgerald.]
The median grade at Harvard College is an A-, and the most frequently awarded mark is an A, Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris said on Tuesday afternoon, supporting suspicions that the College employs a softer grading standard than many of its peer institutions.
Harris delivered the information in response to a question from government professor Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 at the monthly meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
“A little bird has told me that the most frequently given grade at Harvard College right now is an A-,” Mansfield said during the meeting’s question period. “If this is true or nearly true, it represents a failure on the part of this faculty and its leadership to maintain our academic standards.”
Harris then stood and looked towards FAS Dean Michael D. Smith in hesitation.
“I can answer the question, if you want me to.” Harris said. “The median grade in Harvard College is indeed an A-. The most frequently awarded grade in Harvard College is actually a straight A.”
by Mattew Q. Clarida and Nicholas P. Fandos, Harvard Crimson | Read more:
The median grade at Harvard College is an A-, and the most frequently awarded mark is an A, Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris said on Tuesday afternoon, supporting suspicions that the College employs a softer grading standard than many of its peer institutions.Harris delivered the information in response to a question from government professor Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 at the monthly meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
“A little bird has told me that the most frequently given grade at Harvard College right now is an A-,” Mansfield said during the meeting’s question period. “If this is true or nearly true, it represents a failure on the part of this faculty and its leadership to maintain our academic standards.”
Harris then stood and looked towards FAS Dean Michael D. Smith in hesitation.
“I can answer the question, if you want me to.” Harris said. “The median grade in Harvard College is indeed an A-. The most frequently awarded grade in Harvard College is actually a straight A.”
by Mattew Q. Clarida and Nicholas P. Fandos, Harvard Crimson | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
The Secret Life of Grief
Eulogies ought to begin with a laugh, I decided, so this is how my eulogy began: with the story of how I learned that parents grow up, too.
My mom died on July 18, 2013, of pancreatic cancer, a subtle blade that slips into the host so imperceptibly that by the time a presence is felt, it is almost always too late. Living about 16 months after her diagnosis, she was "lucky," at least by the new standards of the parallel universe of cancer world. We were all lucky and unlucky in this way. Having time to watch a loved one die is a gift that takes more than it gives.
Psychologists call this drawn out period "anticipatory grief." Anticipating a loved one's death is considered normal and healthy, but realistically, the only way to prepare for a death is to imagine it. I could not stop imagining it. I spent a year and a half writing my mother a goodbye letter in my head, where, in the private theater of my thoughts, she died a hundred times. In buses and movie theaters, on Connecticut Avenue and 5th Avenue, on crosswalks and sidewalks, on the DC metro and New York subway, I lost her, again and again. To suffer a loved one's long death is not to experience a single traumatic blow, but to suffer a thousand little deaths, tiny pinpricks, each a shot of grief you hope will inoculate against the real thing.
A boundless black terror is how I imagined life without my mom. The history of grief, or what we know of it, is written by its greatest sufferers and ransacked with horror stories, lugubrious poetry, and downward-spiraling memoirs plunged in sadness. For some people, the death of a loved one is truly life-stopping, and I worried it would stop mine.For many of us, grief is something else: Resilience.
Then, in the weeks after she died, something strange happened. I did not plunge. Life did not stop. Instead, I felt something so unspeakably strange, so blasphemous, that I wondered if I could talk or write about it, at all. I felt okay.
Even stranger, I discovered, is that I wasn't strange, at all. Despite the warnings that grief would drag me through the prescribed five stages and discard me in a darker place, bereavement researchers have recently learned that we've been wrong about loss for centuries. For some, grief is a dull and unrelenting ache that fades—or doesn't. But for many of us, grief is something else. Grief is resilience.
If George Bonanno's office were discovered underground by a group of archaeologists, they would think they'd found a tomb. Volumes about death and mourning fill the wall-sized bookcase. Terra cotta figurines, excavated from Chinese burial sites, line the shelves, facing inward. At the center of the room, there is a full-size standing skeleton.
One afternoon in October, I visited Bonanno, perhaps the most renowned grief researcher in the United States, at Teachers College, Columbia University, to talk about his research. His lab might be trailblazing, but the mission is classically conservative. By studying grief like any other psychological condition, he has exposed the history of bereavement research to be a thread of fables."The more people engaged in their most intense emotions, the longer they would grieve. Laughter and smiling led to quicker recovering."
For centuries, grief has lived a secret life, hiding in plain view, even from our experts. Sigmund Freud coined the phrase "the work of grief," and ever since, there has lingered an idea that mourning is homework to do before we move on. The first systemic study of grief in the United States, by the Harvard psychiatrist Erich Lindemann, in 1942, described a horror show, marked by restlessness, hostility, hallucinations, and an overwhelming preoccupation with the dead. Lindemann had gathered a group of bereaved people—many of whom had lost friends in a recent night-club fire—and recorded his observations, motivated by the conviction that traumatic loss was a medical problem. Grievers who seemed normal in the weeks after, he claimed, were victims of dangerous repression.
Twenty years later, in the 1960s, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of loss would tattoo themselves onto the collective conscious of Americans. Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist, interviewed patients at a Chicago hospital about the experience of dying. She devised a theory of five periods, from anger to acceptance, with each stage serving an essential part in the mourning process. Her book, On Death and Dying, became a national bestseller, but it wasn't just a mess of shoddy science. It was shoddy science based on people who were dying, not people who were grieving.
Bonanno's work, which has redefined the science of grief research, revealed that Freud was wrong about work, Lindemann was wrong about repression, and Kubler-Ross was wrong about everything. The deepest grief is powerful, but sometimes short-lived, and most of us are wired to compartmentalize our most heart-breaking tragedies, even if it makes us feel ashamed to feel all right in the face of expectations that we feel terrible.
We are, both tragically and indispensably, born to grieve.
My mom died on July 18, 2013, of pancreatic cancer, a subtle blade that slips into the host so imperceptibly that by the time a presence is felt, it is almost always too late. Living about 16 months after her diagnosis, she was "lucky," at least by the new standards of the parallel universe of cancer world. We were all lucky and unlucky in this way. Having time to watch a loved one die is a gift that takes more than it gives.Psychologists call this drawn out period "anticipatory grief." Anticipating a loved one's death is considered normal and healthy, but realistically, the only way to prepare for a death is to imagine it. I could not stop imagining it. I spent a year and a half writing my mother a goodbye letter in my head, where, in the private theater of my thoughts, she died a hundred times. In buses and movie theaters, on Connecticut Avenue and 5th Avenue, on crosswalks and sidewalks, on the DC metro and New York subway, I lost her, again and again. To suffer a loved one's long death is not to experience a single traumatic blow, but to suffer a thousand little deaths, tiny pinpricks, each a shot of grief you hope will inoculate against the real thing.
A boundless black terror is how I imagined life without my mom. The history of grief, or what we know of it, is written by its greatest sufferers and ransacked with horror stories, lugubrious poetry, and downward-spiraling memoirs plunged in sadness. For some people, the death of a loved one is truly life-stopping, and I worried it would stop mine.For many of us, grief is something else: Resilience.
Then, in the weeks after she died, something strange happened. I did not plunge. Life did not stop. Instead, I felt something so unspeakably strange, so blasphemous, that I wondered if I could talk or write about it, at all. I felt okay.
Even stranger, I discovered, is that I wasn't strange, at all. Despite the warnings that grief would drag me through the prescribed five stages and discard me in a darker place, bereavement researchers have recently learned that we've been wrong about loss for centuries. For some, grief is a dull and unrelenting ache that fades—or doesn't. But for many of us, grief is something else. Grief is resilience.
If George Bonanno's office were discovered underground by a group of archaeologists, they would think they'd found a tomb. Volumes about death and mourning fill the wall-sized bookcase. Terra cotta figurines, excavated from Chinese burial sites, line the shelves, facing inward. At the center of the room, there is a full-size standing skeleton.
One afternoon in October, I visited Bonanno, perhaps the most renowned grief researcher in the United States, at Teachers College, Columbia University, to talk about his research. His lab might be trailblazing, but the mission is classically conservative. By studying grief like any other psychological condition, he has exposed the history of bereavement research to be a thread of fables."The more people engaged in their most intense emotions, the longer they would grieve. Laughter and smiling led to quicker recovering."
For centuries, grief has lived a secret life, hiding in plain view, even from our experts. Sigmund Freud coined the phrase "the work of grief," and ever since, there has lingered an idea that mourning is homework to do before we move on. The first systemic study of grief in the United States, by the Harvard psychiatrist Erich Lindemann, in 1942, described a horror show, marked by restlessness, hostility, hallucinations, and an overwhelming preoccupation with the dead. Lindemann had gathered a group of bereaved people—many of whom had lost friends in a recent night-club fire—and recorded his observations, motivated by the conviction that traumatic loss was a medical problem. Grievers who seemed normal in the weeks after, he claimed, were victims of dangerous repression.
Twenty years later, in the 1960s, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of loss would tattoo themselves onto the collective conscious of Americans. Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist, interviewed patients at a Chicago hospital about the experience of dying. She devised a theory of five periods, from anger to acceptance, with each stage serving an essential part in the mourning process. Her book, On Death and Dying, became a national bestseller, but it wasn't just a mess of shoddy science. It was shoddy science based on people who were dying, not people who were grieving.
Bonanno's work, which has redefined the science of grief research, revealed that Freud was wrong about work, Lindemann was wrong about repression, and Kubler-Ross was wrong about everything. The deepest grief is powerful, but sometimes short-lived, and most of us are wired to compartmentalize our most heart-breaking tragedies, even if it makes us feel ashamed to feel all right in the face of expectations that we feel terrible.
We are, both tragically and indispensably, born to grieve.
by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Arkadiusz Benedykt/flickr
The Period is Pissed
Say you find yourself limping to the finish of a wearing workday. You text your girlfriend: “I know we made a reservation for your bday tonight but wouldn’t it be more romantic if we ate in instead?” If she replies,
we could do thatThen you can ring up Papa John’s and order something special. But if she replies,
we could do that.Then you should probably drink a cup of coffee: You’re either going out or you’re eating Papa John’s alone.
This is an unlikely heel turn in linguistics. In most written language, the period is a neutral way to mark a pause or complete a thought; but digital communications are turning it into something more aggressive. “Not long ago, my 17-year-old son noted that many of my texts to him seemed excessively assertive or even harsh, because I routinely used a period at the end,” Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, told me by email. How and why did the period get so pissed off?
It might be feeling rejected. On text and instant message, punctuation marks have largely been replaced by the line break. I am much more likely to type two separate messages without punctuation:
sorry about last nightThan I am to send a single punctuated message:
next time we can order little caesars
I’m sorry about last night. Next time we can order Little Caesars.And, because it seems begrudging, I would never type:
sorry about last night.“The unpunctuated, un-ended sentence is incredibly addicting,” said Choire Sicha, editor of the Awl. “I feel liberated to make statements without that emphasis, and like I'm continuing the conversation, even when I'm definitely not.”
next time we can order little caesars.
Other people probably just find line breaks more efficient. An American University study of college students’ texting and instant messaging habits found they only used sentence-final punctuation 39 percent of the time in texts and 45 percent of the time in online chats. The percentages were even lower for “transmission-final punctuation”: 29 percent for texts and 35 percent for IMs. The same is likely true of Twitter, where the 140-character limit has made most punctuation seem dispensable.
“In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all,” Liberman wrote me. “In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like ‘This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.’”
by Ben Crair, TNR | Read more:
Image: uncredited
#Oz
The Tin Woodman, raising his ax, ran toward the little man and cried, “Who are you?” The little man trembled, “I am Oz, the Great and Terrible!” Our friends looked at each other in surprise and dismay. “I thought Oz was a Great Wizard,” said Dorothy.
“I did, too,” said the Scarecrow.
“How did you do it?” asked the Lion.
“How are you Oz, the Great and Terrible?” asked the Tin Woodman.
“Two words,” said the little man. “Personal branding.”
Dorothy glanced at the Tin Woodman in confusion. At last she addressed the man quietly. “Are you not a Great Wizard, then?”
The little man laughed. “Why, I’m the Great Wizard.”
He added, “Good branding makes your target market see you as the only choice, not just the best choice. I’ve spent years researching and developing my distinctive yet authentic ‘Wizard’ brand.”
There was a long pause. “I think you are a very bad man,” said Dorothy, finally. “Well, I’m trending, so it really doesn’t matter what you think,” said Oz.
The Scarecrow wiped a tear from his eyes. “But how shall I ever get my brains?”
“Your brains are the least of your problems,” said Oz, “for your personal brand is as fresh as the hay in your coat sleeves! You need a major overhaul—I can’t tell if you’re going for faux-hipster ironic Brooklynite or ‘young conservative’ urban farmer-chic.”
The Scarecrow tugged self-consciously at his coat sleeves.
“Forget about the brains and focus on the wardrobe, the style, the message. Personally, I see you in a dirty wife-beater and Ray-Bans— playfully self-aware about your country roots, but with a sense of cool detachment.”
“Wife-beater, Ray-Bans,” repeated the Scarecrow to himself. He felt an oddly intuitive understanding, for not having a brain put him at a great advantage in the world of branding.
by Ethan Kuperberg, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty
Amazon Drones Could Face Some Grief from FAA
Say what you will about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, he does have an ability to think outside the proverbial box: his company is prepping to deliver packages to customers via airborne drone.
If the FAA approves Amazon’s airborne delivery (something the latter anticipates won’t take place until 2015 at the earliest), the company will use the drones to place items on residential doorsteps within 30 minutes. As detailed in a video posted on Amazon’s Website, workers at Amazon Fulfillment Centers (a corporate synonym for “warehouses”) will load each new item into a hard case, which the drone will lock to its undercarriage before flying off; once it lands at the target address, it will leave the case with the item inside. Amazon’s calling the service “Amazon Prime Air,” which suggests it’ll be a perk for Amazon Prime members willing to pay a premium.
“The FAA is actively working on rules and an approach for unmanned aerial vehicles that will prioritize public safety,” read an accompanying note on Amazon’s Website. “Safety will be our top priority, and our vehicles will be built with multiple redundancies and designed to commercial aviation standards.”
Despite those assurances, several questions remain. For starters, it’s extremely likely that the FAA will require a human pilot or supervisor for each drone flight. If that’s the case, Amazon will need to hire hundreds of new employees to guide the aircraft, in addition to building new systems capable of monitoring variables such as local weather and air traffic—for liability’s sake alone, it’s virtually certain the drones won’t fly unless conditions are ideal. (...)
Domestic drones also come with physical dangers, as well. In October, a small helicopter drone tumbled out of the sky over midtown Manhattan, crashing to the sidewalk near Grand Central Station; on the way down it almost hit a businessman, who plucked out the video card from the wreckage and handed it over toa local television-news station. In the video, the drone (a Phantom Quadcopter) buzzes some skyscapers before the pilot—clearly inexperienced—crashes it against the side of a building. Drone enthusiasts and engineers blamed the Quadcopter’s poor performance on the pilot’s possible reliance on GPS mode in an area with tall buildings, which block GPS signals, potentially leading vehicles disastrously off-target.
by Nick Kolakowski, Slashdot | Read more:
Image: Amazon
Russell Wilson, Makes Case For MVP
[ed. I'm probably biased but Russell Wilson is one of the most exciting and talented quarterbacks I've seen in a long, long time.]
It's OK. We all were, really. Even the Seahawks passed on the Wisconsin quarterback twice before taking him off the board with the No. 75 overall pick in the third round of the 2012 draft.
It's a shame, too. Wilson's only crime as a prospect was his height. No quarterback could stand at 5'11 and compete with the best quarterbacks in the NFL. We didn't care about his compact throwing motion, rocket arm or uncanny ability to sense and avoid pressure in the pocket while keeping his eyes downfield. What does any of that matter? He's short, remember?
If we only knew then what we know now, maybe we wouldn't have been so shallow. Maybe we would have looked beyond the measuring stick and realized that a future star was sitting right in front of us. It's not like he was hiding. Wilson played for Wisconsin, albeit for only a season after transferring from N.C. State, where Mike Glennon took over for Wilson while he was pondering a professional baseball career. Wilson was in the spotlight.
Not only were his obvious passing tools on display in one of college football's biggest conferences, but so to was his charismatic personality and leadership qualities. His relentless attitude on the field was there, too. He attacked every area of the field with his arm and made defenses pay with his legs.
But when it came time to evaluate Wilson as an NFL prospect, he was too short. He didn't fit the mold of traditional pocket passer. That was the end of the story. Drew Brees, after all, was the only short quarterback to reach the coveted "elite status" in the NFL. Nobody considered that Wilson could succeed at a similar level. Nobody considered that in just his second season, Wilson would be better than Brees. (...)
Just face it, you were wrong about him. You didn't think a 5'11 quarterback would ever be considered one of the best in the NFL. You didn't think he would enter the league and help the Seahawks win 10 games by more than 15 points, a number only bested by Manning and the Broncos. And you certainly didn't think, out of all the talented quarterbacks in the 2013 class, that Wilson would be the one making a case to be the NFL's Most Valuable Player in just his second season.
by Matthew Fairburn, SBNation | Read more:
Image: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
Monday, December 2, 2013
Coding Kids
The doorbell rings, and Katie Wenger, 13, leaps up from the family dinner table and throws open the front door. On the stoop of her family’s building in Chelsea stands a 26-year-old Yale graduate named Allison Kaptur. Formerly a financial analyst, Kaptur quit to teach herself how to program and now works as a facilitator at Hacker School, a “writers’ retreat for programmers,” with a sideline as a coding tutor. The two descend the stairs to a basement study, and Katie shuts the door. “I’ve got exciting news,” she says. “I’m going to launch a start-up! It’s called Let Us.”“What will it do?”
“It’ll be like Chatroulette, but connected to Facebook.” Katie describes her concept for an online environment in which strangers can randomly meet and either just chat or interact educationally as student and teacher. Kaptur nods. “Okay,” she says. “A little later, we can talk about the pieces we would need to make that work.”
For most people, software programming’s social cachet falls somewhere between that of tax preparation and autism. But it’s catching fire among forward-thinking New York parents like Katie’s, who see it as endowing their children both with a strategically valuable skill and a habit for IQ-multiplying intellectual rigor. According to WyzAnt, an online tutoring marketplace, demand for computer-science tutors in New York City has doubled each of the past two years. And if one Silicon Alley–backed initiative pans out, within a decade every public-school kid in the city will have access to coding, up from a couple of thousand.
Down in the Wengers’ study, Kaptur flips open a MacBook Air. “For now, let’s work on a hangman game.” Lines of Python code fill the screen. On a piece of paper the two begin sketching out a stick figure and a flow diagram to figure out how the program will render it. Katie breathes a sigh. “This is more complicated than I thought it would be,” she says. “This is going to take more than an hour.” Sure enough, by the time Kaptur packs up to go, they haven’t yet gotten around to rendering the stickman’s arms, let alone plotted out the next billion-dollar app.
Back upstairs, the parents are lingering over a long dinner. Katie’s mother, Susan Danziger, runs a web-video start-up; her father, Albert Wenger, is a managing partner in the VC firm Union Square Ventures, an early investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, and Kickstarter. The couple started Katie and her two brothers on programming when they were 7 or 8. “The goal isn’t necessarily for everyone to become a computer-science engineer, just as when you teach people how to write English, the goal isn’t for everybody to become an author,” says Wenger. “The point is that it’s a very important way of analyzing the world, thinking about the world, interacting with the world, and manipulating the world. It is a fundamental enabling skill that is applicable across the widest imaginable set of domains.”
by Jeff Wise, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Brian Finke
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