[ed. Wolf of Wall Street. Turn it up.]
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Google Scholar: Making the World’s Problem Solvers 10% More Efficient
Anurag Acharya is the key inventor of Google Scholar, but the real origin of the project lies in his college years at the Khargpur campus of the Indian Institute of Technology. The IIT is India’s version of MIT and Stanford combined, and has produced a long list of now-celebrated engineers and executives at Internet companies here and abroad. But even in that elite school, it was difficult for students to get hold of relevant scholarly materials. For Indian high schoolers, it was nearly impossible. “If you knew the information existed, you would write letters,” he says, “That’s what I did. Roughly half of the people would send you something, maybe a reprint. But if you didn’t know the information was there, there was nothing you could do about it.” Acharya was haunted by the realization that the great minds were deprived of inspiration, and the wonderful works that did have the impact they would have because of their limited distribution.
The eventual solution to this problem would be Google Scholar, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this November. Some people have never heard of this service, which treats publications from scholarly and professional journals as a separate corpus and makes it easy to find otherwise elusive information. Others have seen it occasionally when a result pops up on their search activity, and may even know enough to use it for a specific task, like digging into medical journals to gather information on a specific ailment. But for a significant and extremely impactful slice of the population: researchers, scientists, academics, lawyers, and students training in those fields — Scholar is a vital part of online existence, a lifeline to critical information, and an indispensable means of getting their work exposed to those who most need it. (...)
Google Scholar was revolutionary for a number of reasons. Acharya and his team worked hard to get academic publishers to allow Google to crawl their journals. Since many of the articles unearthed by Scholar were locked behind paywalls, simply locating something in a search would not mean that a user could read it. But he or she would know that it existed, and that makes a tremendous difference. (Imagine setting off on a research project and finding out months later that someone had done the same work.) Google also pushed the paywall publishers to allow users to see abstracts of the work. The world’s biggest online archive of journal articles, JSTOR, offered only scans of articles, and had no way to separate the abstract from the whole piece. (Those accessing JSTOR through subscribing institutions could see full text.) So Scholar convinced JSTOR to provide its users to see the first scanned page of the article for free. “Often the first page has the abstract, or in older articles you have the introduction,” says Acharya, whose job title at Google is Distinguished Engineer. “That at least allows you to get a sense of it so you can decide whether you should put in additional effort.” Google Scholar will then provide the information that will help users get the complete text, whether online for free, downloaded for a fee, or in a nearby library.
(All Google users benefited from all that newly crawled information, too, as the company included those articles and books in its general search index.)
At launch, Google Scholar won wide acclaim, even from those generally skeptical about the company. Two well known library scientists, Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price wrote, “When big announcements come from Google and web engines, we often get nervous…. Not this time, however. This is BIG news and something that should have been around for years.” (There was some criticism, though. One complaint was that Google Scholar had no API to allow other services to access it. Others said that since Google didn’t share information like its ranking algorithm and all its sources, it fell short of a “scholarly” standard.)
Some in the research community favorably contrasted it to Google’s more controversial Book Search, which was launched at the same time. Scholar avoided the sort of copyright controversy that Book Search generated, despite the fact scholarly publishing world is a war zone, with an increasing number of academics lodging protests against powerful publishers who control the major journals. This is a conflict pitting profit against public good. It was the principle of open research that led Internet activist Aaron Swartz to download a corpus of JSTOR documents legally provided to MIT; the government prosecution of that act ended only with Swartz’s suicide. Google Scholar does not officially take a stand on the issue, but its implicit philosophy seems to endorse an egalitarian spread of information. In any case, when possible, Scholar tries to help negotiate around paywalls for non-subscribers by linking to articles in multiple locations — often, authors of paywalled works have free versions on their personal websites. (...)
Only at Google, of course, would the world’s most popular scholarly search service be seen as a relative backwater. Acharya isn’t permitted to reveal how big Scholar’s index is, though he does note that it’s an order of magnitude bigger than when it started. He can also say, “It’s pretty much everything — every major to medium size publisher in the world, scholarly books, patents, judicial opinions, small, most small journals…. It would take work to find something that’s not indexed.” (One serious estimate places the index at 160 million documents as of May 2014.) But like it or not, the niche reality was reinforced after Larry Page took over as CEO in 2011, and adopted an approach of “more wood behind fewer arrows.” Scholar was not discarded — it still commands huge respect at Google which, after all, is largely populated by former academics—but clearly shunted to the back end of the quiver. Not only was Scholar missing from the list of top services (Image Search, News, etc.) but bumped from the menu promising “more” services like Gmail and Calendar. Its new place was a menu labeled “even more.”
Asked who informed him of what many referred to as Scholar’s “demotion,” Acharya says, “I don’t think they told me.” But he says that the lower profile isn’t a problem, because those who do use Scholar have no problem finding it. “If I had seen a drop in usage, I would worry tremendously,” he says. “There was no drop in usage. I also would have felt bad if I had been asked to give up resources, but we have always grown in both machine and people resources. I don’t feel demoted at all.”
The eventual solution to this problem would be Google Scholar, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this November. Some people have never heard of this service, which treats publications from scholarly and professional journals as a separate corpus and makes it easy to find otherwise elusive information. Others have seen it occasionally when a result pops up on their search activity, and may even know enough to use it for a specific task, like digging into medical journals to gather information on a specific ailment. But for a significant and extremely impactful slice of the population: researchers, scientists, academics, lawyers, and students training in those fields — Scholar is a vital part of online existence, a lifeline to critical information, and an indispensable means of getting their work exposed to those who most need it. (...)Google Scholar was revolutionary for a number of reasons. Acharya and his team worked hard to get academic publishers to allow Google to crawl their journals. Since many of the articles unearthed by Scholar were locked behind paywalls, simply locating something in a search would not mean that a user could read it. But he or she would know that it existed, and that makes a tremendous difference. (Imagine setting off on a research project and finding out months later that someone had done the same work.) Google also pushed the paywall publishers to allow users to see abstracts of the work. The world’s biggest online archive of journal articles, JSTOR, offered only scans of articles, and had no way to separate the abstract from the whole piece. (Those accessing JSTOR through subscribing institutions could see full text.) So Scholar convinced JSTOR to provide its users to see the first scanned page of the article for free. “Often the first page has the abstract, or in older articles you have the introduction,” says Acharya, whose job title at Google is Distinguished Engineer. “That at least allows you to get a sense of it so you can decide whether you should put in additional effort.” Google Scholar will then provide the information that will help users get the complete text, whether online for free, downloaded for a fee, or in a nearby library.
(All Google users benefited from all that newly crawled information, too, as the company included those articles and books in its general search index.)
At launch, Google Scholar won wide acclaim, even from those generally skeptical about the company. Two well known library scientists, Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price wrote, “When big announcements come from Google and web engines, we often get nervous…. Not this time, however. This is BIG news and something that should have been around for years.” (There was some criticism, though. One complaint was that Google Scholar had no API to allow other services to access it. Others said that since Google didn’t share information like its ranking algorithm and all its sources, it fell short of a “scholarly” standard.)
Some in the research community favorably contrasted it to Google’s more controversial Book Search, which was launched at the same time. Scholar avoided the sort of copyright controversy that Book Search generated, despite the fact scholarly publishing world is a war zone, with an increasing number of academics lodging protests against powerful publishers who control the major journals. This is a conflict pitting profit against public good. It was the principle of open research that led Internet activist Aaron Swartz to download a corpus of JSTOR documents legally provided to MIT; the government prosecution of that act ended only with Swartz’s suicide. Google Scholar does not officially take a stand on the issue, but its implicit philosophy seems to endorse an egalitarian spread of information. In any case, when possible, Scholar tries to help negotiate around paywalls for non-subscribers by linking to articles in multiple locations — often, authors of paywalled works have free versions on their personal websites. (...)
Only at Google, of course, would the world’s most popular scholarly search service be seen as a relative backwater. Acharya isn’t permitted to reveal how big Scholar’s index is, though he does note that it’s an order of magnitude bigger than when it started. He can also say, “It’s pretty much everything — every major to medium size publisher in the world, scholarly books, patents, judicial opinions, small, most small journals…. It would take work to find something that’s not indexed.” (One serious estimate places the index at 160 million documents as of May 2014.) But like it or not, the niche reality was reinforced after Larry Page took over as CEO in 2011, and adopted an approach of “more wood behind fewer arrows.” Scholar was not discarded — it still commands huge respect at Google which, after all, is largely populated by former academics—but clearly shunted to the back end of the quiver. Not only was Scholar missing from the list of top services (Image Search, News, etc.) but bumped from the menu promising “more” services like Gmail and Calendar. Its new place was a menu labeled “even more.”
Asked who informed him of what many referred to as Scholar’s “demotion,” Acharya says, “I don’t think they told me.” But he says that the lower profile isn’t a problem, because those who do use Scholar have no problem finding it. “If I had seen a drop in usage, I would worry tremendously,” he says. “There was no drop in usage. I also would have felt bad if I had been asked to give up resources, but we have always grown in both machine and people resources. I don’t feel demoted at all.”
by Steven Levy, Medium/Backchannel | Read more:
Image: Talia Herman
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Copywrong
Rod Stewart is being sued over the rights to an image of his own head.
In 1981, a professional photographer named Bonnie Schiffman took a picture of the back of Stewart’s head, which was used, eight years later, on the cover of the album “Storyteller.” Now a different picture of Stewart’s head, also from the back, has been used to promote his Las Vegas act and world tour. Schiffman claims that the resemblance between her photograph and the new image is too close—the legal term is “substantial similarity”—and she is suing for copyright infringement. She is asking for two and a half million dollars.
A copyright is, first and foremost, the right to make a copy. The first products to be protected by copyright—the statutory history begins in Britain, in 1710, with the passage of a law known as the Statute of Anne—were books. Once you buy a book, you can legally do almost anything to it. You can sell it to someone else, you can tear the pages out, you can throw it on a bonfire. God knows you can print terrible things about it. But you cannot make copies of it. The right to do that belongs to the author of the book and his or her heirs and assigns.
As with any right, the right to make a copy is a lot less straightforward than it sounds. As the person who wrote this article, I own the right to make copies of it. Since 1976, in the United States, that right has been born with the article, and there are few formalities still required for me to assert it. The belief that you have irrecoverably forfeited your copyright if you have not sent a copy of your book to the Library of Congress, or put a © on it somewhere, is obsolete.
I have granted The New Yorker an exclusive license to the article for a limited period, after which the magazine retains certain privileges (including printing it in a collection of New Yorker writings and keeping it on its Web site). If, a year from now, someone else, without my permission, reprints my article in a book called “The Most Thoughtful and Penetrating Essays of 2014, ” I can complain that my right to make copies is being violated and, if the court agrees with me, legally suppress the book. Theoretically, the court could compel the publisher to pulp all the unsold copies. Although not the author of this piece, you, too, would likely feel that the publisher of “Most Thoughtful Essays” was a bandit, and you would share my sense of righteous indignation.
But suppose that a Web site, awesomestuff.com, ran an item that said something like “This piece on copyright is a great read!” with a hyperlink on the word “piece” to my article’s page on The New Yorker’s Web site. You wouldn’t think this was banditry at all. You would find it unexceptionable.
This is partly because of what might be called the spatial imaginary of the Web. When you click on a link, you have the sensation that you no longer are at a place called awesomestuff.com but have been virtually transported to an entirely different place, called newyorker.com. A visual change is experienced as a physical change. The link is treated as a footnote; it’s as though you were taking another book off the shelf. The Web reinforces this illusion of movement by adopting a real-estate vocabulary, with terms like “site” (on which nothing can be built), “address” (which you can’t G.P.S.), and “domain” (which is a legal concept, not a duchy).
Some courts have questioned the use of links that import content from another Web site without changing the URL, a practice known as “framing.” But it’s hard to see much difference. Either way, when you’re reading a linked page, you may still be “at” awesomestuff.com, as clicking the back button on your browser can instantly confirm. Effectively, awesomestuff.com has stolen content from newyorker.com, just as the compiler of “Most Thoughtful Essays” stole content from me. The folks at awesomestuff.com and their V. C. backers are attracting traffic to their Web site, with its many banner ads for awesome stuff, using material created by other people.
An enormous amount of Web business is conducted in this manner. Most Web users don’t feel indignant about it. On the contrary, most Web users would feel that their rights had been violated if links like this were prohibited. Something that is almost universally condemned when it happens in the medium of print is considered to be just how digital media work. Awesomestuff.com might even argue that no one is harmed by the link—that it is doing me and The New Yorker a favor by increasing our article’s readership at no cost to us. But the publisher of “Most Thoughtful Essays” could say the same thing, and the court would be unmoved.
This almost instinctive distinction between what is proper in the analog realm and what is proper in the digital realm is at the center of a global debate about the state of copyright law. Statutes protecting copyright have never been stricter; at the same time, every minute of every day, millions of people are making or using copies of material—texts, sounds, and images—that they didn’t create. According to an organization called Tru Optik, as many as ten billion files, including movies, television shows, and games, were downloaded in the second quarter of this year. Tru Optik estimates that approximately ninety-four per cent of those downloads were illegal. The law seems to be completely out of whack with the technology.
The point of Peter Baldwin’s fascinating and learned (and also repetitive and disorganized) “The Copyright Wars” (Princeton) is that the dispute between analog-era and digital-era notions of copyright is simply the latest installment of an argument that goes all the way back to the Statute of Anne. The argument is not really about technology, although major technological changes tend to bring it back to life. It’s about the reason for creating a right to make copies in the first place.
In 1981, a professional photographer named Bonnie Schiffman took a picture of the back of Stewart’s head, which was used, eight years later, on the cover of the album “Storyteller.” Now a different picture of Stewart’s head, also from the back, has been used to promote his Las Vegas act and world tour. Schiffman claims that the resemblance between her photograph and the new image is too close—the legal term is “substantial similarity”—and she is suing for copyright infringement. She is asking for two and a half million dollars.
A copyright is, first and foremost, the right to make a copy. The first products to be protected by copyright—the statutory history begins in Britain, in 1710, with the passage of a law known as the Statute of Anne—were books. Once you buy a book, you can legally do almost anything to it. You can sell it to someone else, you can tear the pages out, you can throw it on a bonfire. God knows you can print terrible things about it. But you cannot make copies of it. The right to do that belongs to the author of the book and his or her heirs and assigns.As with any right, the right to make a copy is a lot less straightforward than it sounds. As the person who wrote this article, I own the right to make copies of it. Since 1976, in the United States, that right has been born with the article, and there are few formalities still required for me to assert it. The belief that you have irrecoverably forfeited your copyright if you have not sent a copy of your book to the Library of Congress, or put a © on it somewhere, is obsolete.
I have granted The New Yorker an exclusive license to the article for a limited period, after which the magazine retains certain privileges (including printing it in a collection of New Yorker writings and keeping it on its Web site). If, a year from now, someone else, without my permission, reprints my article in a book called “The Most Thoughtful and Penetrating Essays of 2014, ” I can complain that my right to make copies is being violated and, if the court agrees with me, legally suppress the book. Theoretically, the court could compel the publisher to pulp all the unsold copies. Although not the author of this piece, you, too, would likely feel that the publisher of “Most Thoughtful Essays” was a bandit, and you would share my sense of righteous indignation.
But suppose that a Web site, awesomestuff.com, ran an item that said something like “This piece on copyright is a great read!” with a hyperlink on the word “piece” to my article’s page on The New Yorker’s Web site. You wouldn’t think this was banditry at all. You would find it unexceptionable.
This is partly because of what might be called the spatial imaginary of the Web. When you click on a link, you have the sensation that you no longer are at a place called awesomestuff.com but have been virtually transported to an entirely different place, called newyorker.com. A visual change is experienced as a physical change. The link is treated as a footnote; it’s as though you were taking another book off the shelf. The Web reinforces this illusion of movement by adopting a real-estate vocabulary, with terms like “site” (on which nothing can be built), “address” (which you can’t G.P.S.), and “domain” (which is a legal concept, not a duchy).
Some courts have questioned the use of links that import content from another Web site without changing the URL, a practice known as “framing.” But it’s hard to see much difference. Either way, when you’re reading a linked page, you may still be “at” awesomestuff.com, as clicking the back button on your browser can instantly confirm. Effectively, awesomestuff.com has stolen content from newyorker.com, just as the compiler of “Most Thoughtful Essays” stole content from me. The folks at awesomestuff.com and their V. C. backers are attracting traffic to their Web site, with its many banner ads for awesome stuff, using material created by other people.
An enormous amount of Web business is conducted in this manner. Most Web users don’t feel indignant about it. On the contrary, most Web users would feel that their rights had been violated if links like this were prohibited. Something that is almost universally condemned when it happens in the medium of print is considered to be just how digital media work. Awesomestuff.com might even argue that no one is harmed by the link—that it is doing me and The New Yorker a favor by increasing our article’s readership at no cost to us. But the publisher of “Most Thoughtful Essays” could say the same thing, and the court would be unmoved.
This almost instinctive distinction between what is proper in the analog realm and what is proper in the digital realm is at the center of a global debate about the state of copyright law. Statutes protecting copyright have never been stricter; at the same time, every minute of every day, millions of people are making or using copies of material—texts, sounds, and images—that they didn’t create. According to an organization called Tru Optik, as many as ten billion files, including movies, television shows, and games, were downloaded in the second quarter of this year. Tru Optik estimates that approximately ninety-four per cent of those downloads were illegal. The law seems to be completely out of whack with the technology.
The point of Peter Baldwin’s fascinating and learned (and also repetitive and disorganized) “The Copyright Wars” (Princeton) is that the dispute between analog-era and digital-era notions of copyright is simply the latest installment of an argument that goes all the way back to the Statute of Anne. The argument is not really about technology, although major technological changes tend to bring it back to life. It’s about the reason for creating a right to make copies in the first place.
by Louis Menand, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Thomas Burden
Drama. Ego. Protocol.
“Probably the most important single thing at a gala or dinner party is seating,” says Lucky Roosevelt, chief of protocol for the Reagans. “That determines whether or not people are going to have a good time.”
Who sits where is at the center of every social event in Washington — now in the thick of the fall party season — and the issue is complicated by titles, tradition and endless egos.
Roosevelt, who presided over the Washington National Opera’s season opener last month, spent weeks working with Kennedy Center officials on putting guests at just the right table. But a few people switched their seats at the black-tie dinner, which was a major breach of etiquette. “It’s an absolute no-no to change place cards,” she says.
That never stops the senator’s wife (no name for publication, of course, but notorious among hostesses) who used to call before dinners and demand to be seated next to the guest of honor. Most of the time she got her way, but not every time. Now she just combs the room during the cocktail hour to find her chair, then moves her place card to a better seat. And, according to event organizers who have watched her do it, she almost always gets away with it because . . . well, who’s going to tell her to get up and move?
by Roxanne Roberts, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Bill O'Leary
Friday, October 17, 2014
You See Sneakers, These Guys See Hundreds Of Millions In Resale Profit
Ince had no plans to wear the new Nikes. No, for the past two years, the 22-year-old basketball coach has been reselling the sneakers he waits for. And he thought he could double, triple, possibly even quadruple his money for this particular pair, getting anywhere between $500 and $900 for a sneaker that was selling for $250 retail.
“I’ve been here since Wednesday. I have to get it,” he said. “It’s going to be crazy in the morning.”
Ince thinks of himself as a small-time entrepreneur, but in reality he’s part of a complex, rubber-soled mini economy — one with “buyers, sellers, brokers, market-makers and third-party valuation services,” said Josh Luber, who founded Campless, a blog about sneaker data.
Luber, 36, understands this market better than anyone. Since 2012, he has compiled data on more than 13 million eBay auctions and posted his analysis on Campless, creating a price guide he calls the Kelley Blue Book of sneakers. The site tracks the prices of more than 1,100 pairs of collectible sneakers — that is, sneakers that sell on the secondary market above their primary market, or retail, price.
The markup can be astonishing. The average eBay price of the LeBron 10 What the MVP sneaker? $2,086. The Nike Air MAG Back to the Future? $5,718. How about the Air Yeezy 2 Red October, designed by Kanye West and released by Nike this year for $250 retail? It sold on eBay for an average price of $2,958, with almost two dozen people paying at least $8,000, Luber said.1
Luber — a fanatical sneaker collector himself, with 178 pairs on display in his home — says eBay’s sneaker business totaled $338 million in the last year, up 31 percent from the year before. Sneakers, he says, have become “boxes of cash” for many people. As soon as Foot Lockers across the country open each Saturday, thousands of pairs are on eBay.
None of this happens, of course, without the complicity of Nike, which is on track to hit $30 billion in sales this year. By inventing the concept of a limited sneaker, the company helped spawn a secondary market that puts money in the pockets of Ince and other investors.
It’s puzzling behavior for a money-making behemoth. So lately Luber has been fixated on a complicated question: Is Nike leaving money on the table — and giving up profits to the secondary market — by limiting the supply of certain lines of its sneakers? And if so, why?
by Lisa Chow, FiveThirtyEight | Read more:
Image:Nike New Balance MH998XNB via:
Dick Picky
Traditionally functioning as little more than late-night infomercials, often with hilariously utilitarian demonstrations of size, dick pics have been shared en masse on dating sites and social apps for years. The dick-pic economy is thriving, replicating a whole host of our cultural malaises in miniature: Aggressively insecure men harass women whose disinterest is irrelevant to them, blithely sailing past boundaries to demand that their manhood be looked at and validated; scornful women pass them on to girlfriends with less-than-smiling emoji. Dick pics are routinely shared the first time without consent on the part of the recipient and are widely loathed for this reason. Yet they’re also intimate, amateur portraits of the genitals of men, sometimes very lonely men, which gives rise to a kind of dual nature: The dick pic is hostile yet pitiable, aggressive but also acutely pathetic. They’re also almost invariably ugly. Dick pics are, on the whole, dull and artless, inexpertly captured and painfully unerotic.A year ago I started Critique My Dick Pic, a blog that is not safe for work unless your workplace is chill. The premise is simple: Men and other people with dicks send me photos thereof, and I critique the photos with love. I have a general policy of being gentle about people’s bodies, including their genitals (the blog’s motto is “100% ANON, NO SIZE SHAMING”), but I was also feeling particularly magnanimous toward dick pics the day that the blog was born. I’m often asked why I started CMDP, and the truth is that I woke up one morning to a dick pic so good that I felt inspired to change the others. That’s all it was—one excellent, well-planned pic from a person whose dick I explicitly wanted to see. I was jarred by how unnecessarily rare that move was and struck by the conviction that people with dicks could do better.
Determining a dick pic’s worth is partly intuitive, and the criteria can be hard to articulate. Still, I find myself repeating certain directives. Put some thought into the lighting, pose, and tone of your shot. Remove that pile of dirty laundry or half cup of moldy tea visible in the background, which usually constitutes a bulk of your photo and should therefore look nice and not distracting. Finally, divorce your preoccupation with the size of your member from its pictorial representation. An obsession with size is the key cause of mediocrity in dick pics. I get plenty of submissions from men who are painfully insecure about their size, but there’s also a subculture of submitters who are staunchly proud of their penises, no matter how small or large. That’s commendable, except that pride doesn’t always translate into virtue, and great dick pics tend to happen when you forget about length and focus on quality. The most important tip, though, is this: Spare some thought for the desires of the person at the receiving end of your dick pic, especially if that person is a woman, because historically she’s been excluded as a consideration in the exchange altogether. (...)
In other words, I wanted the site to promote the female gaze. That goal is still laudable and, one year on, I still think it matters: We live in a world that overwhelmingly values and prioritizes male pleasure, and our mainstream pornography treats male viewers as default, whether or not they’re straight, while glossy magazine articles ostensibly for women are all about how to please men (10 Tricks to Make Him Go Wild! Your Own Pleasure?! Who Cares!). Dated ideas about female sexuality linger in our cultural psyche, whispering to us that we simply aren’t visual creatures, that we prefer literary erotica and gently whispered romanticisms, and that most of us are the good type of woman who would fall apart at the sight of a gang bang. We need more sexual material that assumes a female audience, and we need more honest representations of female desire. But the longer I stuck with running Critique My Dick Pic, the less convinced I was that the female gaze is an adequate term.
by Madeleine Holden, TNI | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Lust for Lulu
How the yoga brand Lululemon turned fitness into a spectator sport.
Just five minutes on my mat and I’ve already broken one of the yamas, the founding commandments of yoga put down by the guru Patanjali 2,000 years ago. The yama brahmacharya prohibits lust, but it’s a very hard commandment to follow, particularly in Manhattan, particularly on this perfect summer Thursday night in Bryant Park, surrounded by 400 women, all in excellent health. They’re here for Lululemon Athletica’s twice-weekly open yoga practice, and most of them are in Lulu pants made out of formfitting Luon, a fabric celebrated mainly for its ability to shape and display the ass.
Lululemon, if you don’t know, is a brand of yoga apparel. The signature Lulu piece is the $98 Groove Pant, cut with all kinds of special gussets and flat seams to create a snug gluteal enclosure of almost perfect globularity, like a drop of water free from gravity. Lululemon makes tops too, racer-backed tanks in bright neon and stripes, as well as sports bras like the Ta Ta Tamer.
Lululemon has four stores in Manhattan and a brand-new one in Park Slope, and they’re reliably crowded. The company’s following is devout, weirdly so, and hundreds regularly turn out for its free yoga classes here in the park. If you pay any attention to tight pants in Manhattan, you’ve probably seen Lululemon’s logo, an iridescent little A that looks like an omega. As an on-again-off-again speculator in Lululemon’s hot little stock, I’ve been paying careful attention to tight pants in Manhattan, and I once purchased 100 shares after passing three women in a row wearing Lulu pants. (I’m out now, by the way.) Often, “Luluheads”—as Lululemon’s New York community-relations director calls the brand’s fans—wear Lululemon top and bottom, as in the case of the women to my left and right, who are also on special Lululemon yoga mats.
Music—sitar and bongo—accompanies the class, provided by a duo calling themselves Yoga Organix. Following instructions, all 400 of us lift our butts to the sky in yoga’s “downward dog” pose, under what must surely be the brahmacharya-busting gaze of 60 floors of corporate workers in the glassy towers all around.
“Don’t be shy,” intones Elena Brower, founder of Virayoga in Soho, who is leading the class. She’s got yogi voice, that special combo of ethereal satisfaction and perfect timbre that sounds like a massage. “Push up,” she says. “Push! So that you can feel the sassiest opening in your seat that you can feel right now!”
You can’t help but want to please a voice like that, so I push out even farther and open my sassy seat wider to the sky. (...)
Avril Lavigne wears Lulu. Brooke Shields wears Lulu. Felicity Huffman, Jennifer Garner, Courteney Cox, Kate Winslet, and Kate Hudson wear Lulu. There are Lululemon blogs with names like Lululemon Addict and hundreds of Facebook groups, many devoted to celebrating Lululemon’s ability to make butts look great, with evidentiary photographs.
Last, and perhaps most telling, some kind of turning point has certainly been reached when my wife finds she can easily sell her used Lululemon tops on eBay. These are not Prada blazers that don’t fit. My wife does hot yoga, sweating in a furnacelike studio, but her old tops still sell in just a couple of hours for about 60 percent of what she paid. This is a relative bargain compared with the bags, which are available free at the stores but go for as much as $5 on eBay.
Like my wife, most Luluheads believe the clothing is superior in every way to what else is out there; longer-lasting, more comfortable, and, yes, most flattering. All true, but socially speaking, Luluheads are much like sailors who wear their deck shoes in town—“Oh, what, these? Why, yes, I do happen to own a boat.” Tight yoga pants are a nice way of letting people know that you’re spiritual and healthy, can pay $20 a class for yoga, and are very flexible.
by Bryant Urstadt, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Summer Starling/Courtesy of Lululemon
Lululemon, if you don’t know, is a brand of yoga apparel. The signature Lulu piece is the $98 Groove Pant, cut with all kinds of special gussets and flat seams to create a snug gluteal enclosure of almost perfect globularity, like a drop of water free from gravity. Lululemon makes tops too, racer-backed tanks in bright neon and stripes, as well as sports bras like the Ta Ta Tamer.Lululemon has four stores in Manhattan and a brand-new one in Park Slope, and they’re reliably crowded. The company’s following is devout, weirdly so, and hundreds regularly turn out for its free yoga classes here in the park. If you pay any attention to tight pants in Manhattan, you’ve probably seen Lululemon’s logo, an iridescent little A that looks like an omega. As an on-again-off-again speculator in Lululemon’s hot little stock, I’ve been paying careful attention to tight pants in Manhattan, and I once purchased 100 shares after passing three women in a row wearing Lulu pants. (I’m out now, by the way.) Often, “Luluheads”—as Lululemon’s New York community-relations director calls the brand’s fans—wear Lululemon top and bottom, as in the case of the women to my left and right, who are also on special Lululemon yoga mats.
Music—sitar and bongo—accompanies the class, provided by a duo calling themselves Yoga Organix. Following instructions, all 400 of us lift our butts to the sky in yoga’s “downward dog” pose, under what must surely be the brahmacharya-busting gaze of 60 floors of corporate workers in the glassy towers all around.
“Don’t be shy,” intones Elena Brower, founder of Virayoga in Soho, who is leading the class. She’s got yogi voice, that special combo of ethereal satisfaction and perfect timbre that sounds like a massage. “Push up,” she says. “Push! So that you can feel the sassiest opening in your seat that you can feel right now!”
You can’t help but want to please a voice like that, so I push out even farther and open my sassy seat wider to the sky. (...)
Avril Lavigne wears Lulu. Brooke Shields wears Lulu. Felicity Huffman, Jennifer Garner, Courteney Cox, Kate Winslet, and Kate Hudson wear Lulu. There are Lululemon blogs with names like Lululemon Addict and hundreds of Facebook groups, many devoted to celebrating Lululemon’s ability to make butts look great, with evidentiary photographs.
Last, and perhaps most telling, some kind of turning point has certainly been reached when my wife finds she can easily sell her used Lululemon tops on eBay. These are not Prada blazers that don’t fit. My wife does hot yoga, sweating in a furnacelike studio, but her old tops still sell in just a couple of hours for about 60 percent of what she paid. This is a relative bargain compared with the bags, which are available free at the stores but go for as much as $5 on eBay.
Like my wife, most Luluheads believe the clothing is superior in every way to what else is out there; longer-lasting, more comfortable, and, yes, most flattering. All true, but socially speaking, Luluheads are much like sailors who wear their deck shoes in town—“Oh, what, these? Why, yes, I do happen to own a boat.” Tight yoga pants are a nice way of letting people know that you’re spiritual and healthy, can pay $20 a class for yoga, and are very flexible.
by Bryant Urstadt, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Summer Starling/Courtesy of Lululemon
A Field Guide to the True American Diner
Menus are oversized and presented as a single, huge laminated page with unavailable items taped over, or in a leather-bound binder. Everything in the “diet” section of the menu contains cottage cheese or is steamed. There are daily specials, and they come with soup or salad. Chicken Parmesan and mozzarella sticks must be available. Ketchup is served in bottles, not packets. The coffee is available and drunk at every meal; cups may even be set out on the table before patrons arrive. Refills are free and assumed to be always wanted, unless you indicate you want no more by turning the coffee cup over. Dessert is pie, and if displayed in a glass case at the end of the counter, it must rotate. We did not free ourselves from England's cruel yoke to have static pie. (...)
True American Diners exist in a bubble of no-nonsense egalitarianism; they exist outside socioeconomic distinctions, because there is something for everyone. There are always at least two retired people at the counter; they will never speak to each other or anyone else. Someone is on the run from the law; someone is the law. There are always at least two teenagers in a True American Diner and they are simultaneously talking about nothing and having The Most Important Conversation Of Their Lives. You wouldn’t go there for a special occasion, but you can always go there after one: proms, weddings, or funerals.
by John Leavitt, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Tony Fischer
Bank of America Made $168 Million Last Quarter, More or Less
- more than zero, or
- less than zero?
How did it make that $168 million or whatever? Well, you know, it's a bank, it makes loans and stuff, so it gets paid some interest. Specifically it got paid $12.9 billion in interest last quarter. Also it charges fees for credit cards and mergers or whatever; those fees probably came to around $8.1 billion. And it made about $2.9 billion in various trading-related ways, selling bonds and stuff, and other miscellanea. So total revenue was about $23.8 billion. So Bank of America's earnings, under generally accepted accounting principles, were about 0.7 percent of its total revenue.
Or put another way: Earnings is the change in value of your assets, minus the change in your liabilities. Bank of America has about $2.1 trillion of assets. (You gotta keep the m's and b's and tr's straight here.) So that $168 million of income was 0.008 percent of assets.
How much precision do you think that $168 million number has? Like, if I made $168 million, I would know about it. Depositing $168 million in my bank account would be a dramatic change to my bank account. If you asked me how much money I had in my bank account, I would say "$168 million!" though there would probably be more exclamation points. I would be wrong -- I have some money in my bank account now, so adding $168 million would produce a number that is ever so slightly more than $168 million -- but I'd also be close enough for any reasonable purposes. The money I have in my account now would be a rounding error.
Bank of America's earnings are a rounding error. If Bank of America's measurement of its revenue was off by one percent, then that would more than wipe out (or double) its net income for the quarter. If Bank of America's measurement of its assets was off by one percent of one percent, then that would more than wipe out (or double) its net income for the quarter.
Is it conceivable that Bank of America's measurement of its assets could be wrong? Well, as of June 30, Bank of America had $27.7 billion of "assets and liabilities where values are based on valuation techniques that require inputs that are both unobservable and are significant to the overall fair value measurement," a technical term meaning that Bank of America takes its best guess about how much those assets are worth. Again: If that guess was off by one percent, that would more than wipe out (or double) Bank of America's net income for the quarter.
Or: Bank of America has $891.3 billion of loans on its balance sheet. Some of those loans will go bad. Bank of America currently expects that about 1.69 percent of them, or $15.1 billion worth, will go bad, so it reduces its assets for accounting purposes by $15.1 billion. If in fact Bank of America should have increased that number to 1.72 percent, that would wipe out its net income for the quarter.
I submit to you that there is no answer to the quiz. It is not possible for a human to know whether Bank of America made money or lost money last quarter.
None of this is meant to make fun of Bank of America, really. This is true of every bank, every quarter, to a greater or lesser degree, though usually their earnings are a bit more distinguishable from zero. A bank is a collection of reasonable guesses about valuation. It is a purely statistical process. There is no objective reality. At best, there is a probability distribution, a reason to reject the null hypothesis with some level of confidence. If a $100 billion bank announces $5 billion of earnings this quarter, there is a high (not 100 percent!) probability that it made more than zero dollars. If a $2.1 trillion bank announces $168 million of earnings, that probability is like 50.1 percent. Did Bank of America make money last quarter? Maybe! It's an ever-so-slightly biased coin flip.
by Matt Levine, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Andrew Harrer
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Sea Change
You don’t need a weatherman
To know which way the wind blows.
– Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” 1965
Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
– William Shakespeare, The TempestDid you feel the economic weather change this week? The shift was subtle, like fall tippy-toeing in after a pleasant summer to surprise us, but I think we’ll look back and say this was the moment when that last grain of sand fell onto the sandpile, triggering many profound fingers of instability in a pile that has long been close to collapse. This is the grain of sand that sets off those long chains of volatility that have been gathering for the last five years, waiting to surprise us with the suddenness and violence of the avalanche they unleash. (...)
Shakespeare coined the marvelous term sea change in his play The Tempest. Modern-day pundits are liable to apply the word to the relatively minor ebb and flow of events, but Shakespeare meant sea change as a truly transformative event, a metamorphosis of the very nature and substance of a man, by the sea.
In this week’s letter we’ll talk about the imminent arrival of a true financial sea change, the harbinger of which was some minor commentary this week about the economic climate. (...)
Getting back to portents of winter, this week saw two side comments by Federal Reserve members that put a distinct chill in the air.
The first is from William Dudley, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a permanent voting member on the FOMC. In a speech at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he pushed back on the idea that it is time to raise rates. While acknowledging the relatively positive stance of the Federal Reserve in its forecast, he said:
While I believe that the risks around this consensus forecast are reasonably well balanced, I also believe that the likelihood that growth will be substantially stronger than the point forecast is probably relatively low. [my emphasis]He went on to cite weaker than expected consumer spending and the expectation that consumer durable purchases will be weaker in the future (by which I assume he means automobiles, which have been on a blistering, back-to-the-all-time-high pace due to supereasy credit, much of it subprime and with durations beyond five years.) He faults mortgage lenders for the substandard housing recovery, as if the last massacre of lenders was not enough to scar their collective psyche for decades.
(Sadly, he might have a point. Somewhat humorously, Ben Bernanke tells us he was turned down for a mortgage because his income is somewhat unsteady. He did not fit the “check-the-box” protocol of his local mortgage lender. I sympathize. I was turned down multiple times earlier this year before finding willing lenders who actually competed for my business. My business life does not accord with a standard check-the-box mortgage. I read about another business owner who noted that any of his 300 employees could get a mortgage, but he could not because his income was not stable enough. Go figure.)
Each of Dudley’s points was covered in long paragraphs. And then he delivered a short, throwaway line that caught my attention. He cited the growth in the exchange value of the dollar over the last few months as a reason for downside risk. Really? Go back and look at the chart above and see the relatively minor dollar moves of the past few months. Why should dollar strength show up in a list of reasons for upcoming weakness in the US economy?
The next day saw the release of the minutes of the previous month’s FOMC meeting. In the part labeled “Staff Review of the Financial Situation,” the staff mentioned “… responding in part to disappointing economic data abroad, the US dollar appreciated against most currencies over the inter-meeting period, including large appreciations against the euro, the yen, and the pound sterling.”
While there are precedents for the staff review to mention the dollar, it doesn’t happen often.(...) The strengthening dollar is clearly on the minds of the members and staff of the Federal Reserve. Hmmm…
by John Mauldin, The Big Picture | Read more:
NNT
Katherine Carpenter couldn’t sleep. For more than a week she’d been coughing herself awake every night and then hacking until she retched. Finally, she decided to see a doctor.
The physician suspected bronchitis and wrote Carpenter a prescription for heavy-duty cough medicine. She also suggested antibiotics. That’s pretty standard: Up to 80 percent of people who go to a physician for acute bronchitis are prescribed antibiotics. But Carpenter, an import entry agent for UPS, didn’t want antibiotics. She thought they’d stop working if you take them too often, and she suspected her symptoms were caused by a virus, which antibiotics don’t affect anyway.
She didn’t know it, but her hesitation had science on its side: A meta-analysis in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews looked at 17 trials on antibiotics for people with acute bronchitis, and concluded that they only slightly shorten the duration of the illness—if they have any benefit at all. (And of course there’s the issue of antibiotic resistance to consider.) In the end, Carpenter refused the prescription, and her bronchitis eventually cleared up. But the experience left her with the distinct impression that she was just one more patient on the medical assembly line. “I felt like a number,” she says.
Instead of being a number, Carpenter might have preferred to see a number, one that can help us weigh the benefits (or lack thereof) of a treatment. That number exists, and it’s called the number needed to treat. Developed by a trio of epidemiologists back in the ’80s, the NNT describes how many people would need to take a drug for one person to benefit. (The NNT for antibiotics in a case of acute bronchitis is effectively infinity, because the medicine is no better at curing the illness than a placebo.)
Consider a couple other examples: If your kid is throwing up and you take her to the hospital, she might get a drug called Zofran. The NNT for that is 5, meaning that only five kids need to take Zofran for one of them to stop throwing up. And if you look at Zofran’s “number needed to harm” (the number of people who would need to take a drug for one to have a bad side effect) the answer is … well, there really isn’t one—no one has a significant side effect.
Now, say you’re pushing 50. You’re healthy, but your doctor suggests you start taking a baby aspirin. Just in case, you know? That NNT is 2,000. That’s how many people have to take a daily aspirin for one (nonfatal) heart attack to be prevented. Statistically speaking: Not especially helpful.
It’s unfortunate, then, that the NNT is not a statistic that’s routinely conveyed to either doctors or patients. But you can look it up on a site that you’ve probably never heard of: TheNNT.com. Started by David Newman, a director of clinical research at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai hospital, the site’s dozens of contributors analyze the available studies, crunch the numbers on benefits and harms, and then post the results. While a low NNT is generally “good” and a high NNT is “bad,” you also have to consider the severity of both the illness and the drug’s side effects. Which is why the team added a color-coding system: Green for when a treatment makes sense, yellow for when more study is needed, red for when the harms and the benefits cancel each other out, and black when the harms outweigh the benefits.
Newman’s goal for the site is nothing short of a revolution in medical practice. He wants doctors to base their treatments on good scientific evidence, not tradition, hunch, and the fear that patients will see them as doing nothing. And he wants patients to start demanding such care. That’s the big picture, anyway. For now, he’d be happy if he could just get people looking at medicine in a different way. “People tend to think that if it’s a medical intervention, there’s science behind it,” he says. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case. “It is a lie to tell patients to do something without telling them, ‘You should know we’ve done lots of research on this and we can’t find any benefit to it.’”
The physician suspected bronchitis and wrote Carpenter a prescription for heavy-duty cough medicine. She also suggested antibiotics. That’s pretty standard: Up to 80 percent of people who go to a physician for acute bronchitis are prescribed antibiotics. But Carpenter, an import entry agent for UPS, didn’t want antibiotics. She thought they’d stop working if you take them too often, and she suspected her symptoms were caused by a virus, which antibiotics don’t affect anyway.
She didn’t know it, but her hesitation had science on its side: A meta-analysis in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews looked at 17 trials on antibiotics for people with acute bronchitis, and concluded that they only slightly shorten the duration of the illness—if they have any benefit at all. (And of course there’s the issue of antibiotic resistance to consider.) In the end, Carpenter refused the prescription, and her bronchitis eventually cleared up. But the experience left her with the distinct impression that she was just one more patient on the medical assembly line. “I felt like a number,” she says.Instead of being a number, Carpenter might have preferred to see a number, one that can help us weigh the benefits (or lack thereof) of a treatment. That number exists, and it’s called the number needed to treat. Developed by a trio of epidemiologists back in the ’80s, the NNT describes how many people would need to take a drug for one person to benefit. (The NNT for antibiotics in a case of acute bronchitis is effectively infinity, because the medicine is no better at curing the illness than a placebo.)
Consider a couple other examples: If your kid is throwing up and you take her to the hospital, she might get a drug called Zofran. The NNT for that is 5, meaning that only five kids need to take Zofran for one of them to stop throwing up. And if you look at Zofran’s “number needed to harm” (the number of people who would need to take a drug for one to have a bad side effect) the answer is … well, there really isn’t one—no one has a significant side effect.
Now, say you’re pushing 50. You’re healthy, but your doctor suggests you start taking a baby aspirin. Just in case, you know? That NNT is 2,000. That’s how many people have to take a daily aspirin for one (nonfatal) heart attack to be prevented. Statistically speaking: Not especially helpful.
It’s unfortunate, then, that the NNT is not a statistic that’s routinely conveyed to either doctors or patients. But you can look it up on a site that you’ve probably never heard of: TheNNT.com. Started by David Newman, a director of clinical research at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai hospital, the site’s dozens of contributors analyze the available studies, crunch the numbers on benefits and harms, and then post the results. While a low NNT is generally “good” and a high NNT is “bad,” you also have to consider the severity of both the illness and the drug’s side effects. Which is why the team added a color-coding system: Green for when a treatment makes sense, yellow for when more study is needed, red for when the harms and the benefits cancel each other out, and black when the harms outweigh the benefits.
Newman’s goal for the site is nothing short of a revolution in medical practice. He wants doctors to base their treatments on good scientific evidence, not tradition, hunch, and the fear that patients will see them as doing nothing. And he wants patients to start demanding such care. That’s the big picture, anyway. For now, he’d be happy if he could just get people looking at medicine in a different way. “People tend to think that if it’s a medical intervention, there’s science behind it,” he says. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case. “It is a lie to tell patients to do something without telling them, ‘You should know we’ve done lots of research on this and we can’t find any benefit to it.’”
by Sarah Fallon, Wired | Read more:
Image:Andrew Hetherington
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