Missives

May 21

abbyjean:

Can Timeouts Change the Outcome of Basketball Games?

In basketball, timeouts are believed to reverse the momentum of a game. However, here we show timeouts have no significant effect on the final outcomes of games. Moreover, we find that the timeout factor only appears to reinforce the game of dominant teams, meaning that only the most successful teams can find any positive benefit. We find no association with team payrolls, suggesting that richer teams are not particularly better at capitalizing on timeouts. Our findings support that strategic breaks have little impact on workplace performance and productivity.

“We adore OKC as front-office savvy at its sexiest and most effective, the sports equivalent of a peerless tech startup. In fact, it’s the Spurs who define business-like hyperefficiency, and they’ve been doing it forever. We begrudgingly hate the Heat for their success, and revel in their inability to conquer Earth, even though, for all we know, we’re better off under their reign. In fact, the Spurs are the superpower, the axis on which the world twirls, their influence immutable felt in all of our living rooms. To love the Thunder is to love the Spurs, and to hate the Heat is to hate the Spurs. Only the anomalous kids, hating OKC for the way their gears sometimes grind together, loving the Heat for how beautifully they play the game of basketball, truly understand San Antonio.” — The Spurs Are The Basketball Illuminati

May 17

Straight White Male, the game of life’s lowest difficulty setting

jkottke:

Using a video game metaphor, John Scalzi explains straight white male privilege for those straight white males who get hung up on the word “privilege”.

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.

May 14

“This juxtaposition confirms that colleges, like the financial services industry, have become increasingly extractive: whatever financial benefits accrue to getting an undergraduate education, they are more and more captured by the schools, though their ability to persuade students to go into hock to get a degree. And like late housing bubble borrowers, more are defaulting early on, meaning the loans were badly underwritten (ie, many should probably have never been made because it the odds of default were high)” — Colleges as Merchants of Debt « naked capitalism

good:

According to a new Pew study, increasing your earning potential may require literally moving on up: If you aim to climb the income ladder in the United States, your best bet might be to move north and east—and definitely stay out of the south.

so why has the greatest migration of population been from the NE to the south this last decade?

(via npr)

May 13

journo-geekery:

futuristgerd:

(via Facebook now ‘critical’ to online news traffic, says Pew study)

Details:

According to the study, Facebook alone drives up to 8 percent of traffic to some of the Internet’s top news sites. In turn, users are leaving these sites to go to Facebook, which the researchers say is an indication that the Facebook Share buttons provided on many news stories (like this one) are working.

While this may sound impressive, Facebook currently remains well behind the top three traffic drivers, which include Google, the Drudge Report and Yahoo. According to Pew, these “three sites ever account for more than 10 percent of the traffic to any one [major news website].”

Emphasis mine.  Those clicks to-from Facebook are tracked—why are social network referral stats only as solid as an “indication”?   Isn’t that skipping the (well-trod) question of whether there’s long-term value to such traffic?  I’m sure neither FB or news orgs wanting to share official statistics, especially with recent declines.  The growth of Facebook as a news referrer has a lot to do with the prominence of shared news in their frequently adjusted News Feed algorithm.  That—along with certain content themes like Entertainment news—drives the majority of the referral patterns I’ve seen over the past three years or more.  Facebook’s pace over other social sites is more a factor of its size and—until recently—its choice to strongly promoting news in their algorithm. 

Do those readers stick around?  Do the read more news once they arrive at a news site?  Anecdotally, the data I know is that they don’t.  A popular social network news story is either headline snacking or an isolated spike.

“Critical” is a very strong term for mere indicators—I’m reading through the full report today.  I’ll amend this if the headline, pulled quote and chart above (one of many) is backed up with a deeper investigation into social referral value to news orgs.

May 11

“When people talk of gift economies, often they talk about them as a replacement for the market economy. But gift economies and market economies have operated side-by-side for much of history. Child care, until recently, was exclusively a gift economy — neighbors would babysit one another’s kids. The creative arts and science have historically been gift economies, and to a large extent they still are. And today, free, open-source software sits alongside ad-supported and paid software.

To me, the most interesting examples of gift economies are when they exist alongside money economies within the same organization. I think this points to where the world is headed. Craigslist doesn’t charge for any of its services other than job postings. Google places advertisements on a small fraction of its result pages. Both companies understand that gifting most of their services leads to short-term costs, but long-term viability. But to think about it this way doesn’t do justice to the real story.

The real story is that their founders thought of the gift first, and the means of supporting it second.” —

Sep Kamvar, The Farmer & Farmer (via christmasgorilla)

Start from the customer and work backwards.

(via caterpillarcowboy)

(via caterpillarcowboy)

May 10

“

“We find the largest rise in American mortality rates occurred in 1999, the year Vioxx was introduced, while the largest drop occurred in 2004, the year it was withdrawn,” says Unz. “Vioxx was almost entirely marketed to the elderly, and these substantial changes in the national death-rate were completely concentrated within the 65-plus population…

“Perhaps 500,000 or more premature American deaths may have resulted from Vioxx, a figure substantially larger than the 3,468 deaths of named individuals acknowledged by Merck during the settlement of its lawsuit. And almost no one among our political or media elites seems to know or care about this possibility.”

(via llimllib)

“…any democracy that does not transfer income from rich to poor almost always ends up attending to the interests of the poor in other, far more costly ways.” — Robert Frank (via azspot)

(via rafer)

theatlantic:

What the U.S. Can (and Can’t) Learn From Israel’s Ban on Ultra-Thin Models

On March 19, the Israeli parliament passed legislation ubiquitously known in the country as the Photoshop laws. The new regulations on the fashion and advertising industry ban underweight models as determined by Body Mass Index and regulate Photoshop usage in media and advertising.  Abroad, the laws have opened new discussion on a government’s right to intervene in these two industries.

The legislation focuses on two elements of the fashion industry that have long drawn criticism for their effects on women and, especially, girls: ultra thin models and the use of Photoshop to make women appear impossibly thin in advertisements. The measure has been controversial within Israel for raising the question of where free speech bumps up against the fashion industry’s responsibility — and its possible harm — to its customers’ psychological wellbeing. It has also raised the question of whether other countries might consider similar measures to address what many activists consider a root cause of an epidemic of anorexia and other eating disorders.

Read more. [Image: AP]

(via journo-geekery)