Me-TV adds seven new affiliatesAt the risk of putting too fine a point on a dead horse, this is consistent with a growing market and a sound business model.
Classic TV network now clears 89% of the U.S.
“The real question is a consumer question: Can you rightfully disenfranchise 50 million consumers?” he asked. “Is that what the preferred policy is?”Here's Salmon's dismissive response:
In the event that the networks did go through with it, he speculated that other programmers would be quick to replace them in the role of public broadcasters. “That spectrum is incredibly valuable. Somebody’s going to take advantage of that,” he said.
The 50 million number, by the way, should not be considered particularly reliable: it’s Aereo’s guess as to the number of people who ever watch free-to-air TV, even if they mainly watch cable or satellite. (Maybe they have a hut somewhere with an old rabbit-ear TV in it.)Here's a comment to Salmon's blog:
“The 50 million number .. is the number of people who ever watch free-to-air TV, even if they mainly watch cable or satellite. ” No! That is the number of people who rely exclusively on over-the-air TV without any cable or satellite. http://www.tvnewscheck.com/article/60230 /us-otaonly-tv-viewing-hits-178-of-hhs Also, far from being on the decline, this is actually one of the fastest growing segments of the market. I think it may have something to do with the digital switch and the accompanying radical improvement in visual quality of OTA TV. Exclusive OTA viewer estimates go from 42M in 2010, to 46M in 2011, to 54M in 2012. The reports of the death of bunny ears have been greatly exaggerated. But yes, it is true that OTA-only viewers rank low on the amount of political clout. They are disproportionally young adults and minorities.And here's what you get when you follow the link:
According to new research by GfK Media, the number of Americans now relying solely on over-the-air (OTA) television reception increased to almost 54 million, up from 46 million just a year ago. The recently completed survey also found that the demographics of broadcast-only households skew towards younger adults, minorities and lower-income families.I will be posting some arguments that some of the activity we've seen (see the terrestrial superstations post) support Kanojia over Salmon but those come from a completely different direction. I'll take another look at these numbers in the morning.
The 2012 Ownership Survey and Trend Report, part of The Home Technology Monitor research series, found that 17.8% of all U.S. households with TVs use over-the-air signals to watch TV programming; this compares with 15.0% of homes reported as broadcast-only last year. Overall, GfK Media estimates that more than 20.7 million households representing 53.8 million consumers receive television exclusively through broadcast signals.
ThisTV has caught on to the fact that the most interesting films are often on the far ends of the spectrum and has responded with a wonderful mixture of art house and grind house. Among the former, you can see films like Persona, the Music Lovers and Paths of Glory. Among the latter you'll find American International quickies and action pictures with titles like Pray for Death. You can even find films that fit into both categories like Corman's Poe films or Milius' Dillinger.Of course, the other great insight was that movies on the far end of the spectrum tend to be cheaper.
Movies! is an upcoming American digital multicast television network, that will feature an emphasis in its programming on feature films. The network will be a joint venture between Chicago-based Weigel Broadcasting and the Fox Entertainment Group subsidiary of News Corporation, and will be available in the United States through the digital subchannels of broadcast television stations, as well as on select cable systems. Movies! will broadcast 24 hours a day in 480i widescreen standard definition.I have limited this post to commercial, general interest, English language stations created specifically for digital broadcasting. That's a small sliver of what's available over the air but it does, pretty much conclusively, show that the model is viable and that, unlike so many recent tech and media fads, the more data comes in, the more interested serious players get.
On Monday, I wrote about long-term unemployment, and why it's a large enough problem that the federal government should be trying to do something about it. I got pushback along two lines: 1. Extended unemployment benefits probably caused the unemployment, by giving people an incentive to stay home instead of finding a job. 2. Regulations and taxes are making it too hard to hire people. I am sympathetic to the basics of each argument. (. . .)
However, I don't see these as viable explanaitons for the current employment situation. Regulations and taxes did not suddenly spike in the fourth quarter of 2008, but unemployment did. And while Obamacare certainly imposes taxes and uncertainty on businesses, I don't think that it, by itself, can have driven the natural rate of unemployment up by 3-5 percentage points. (. . .)
But six months is the current length of standard unemployment benefits. And if standard unemployment benefits cause very high long-term unemployment rates, how come they only started doing so in 2009? To sum up, unemployment benefits do cause some moral hazard, and taxes and regulation probably do somewhat depress the natural rate of employment in our country. But neither are an adequate explanation for the truly devastating conditions in the current labor market. Which means that--as much as I would love it to be true--we can't fix them by slashing taxes, regulation, and government spending.
Movies! is an upcoming American digital multicast television network, that will feature an emphasis in its programming on feature films. The network will be a joint venture between Chicago-based Weigel Broadcasting and the Fox Entertainment Group subsidiary of News Corporation, and will be available in the United States through the digital subchannels of broadcast television stations, as well as on select cable systems. Movies! will broadcast 24 hours a day in 480i widescreen standard definition.So we have Fox, NBCUniversal, Tribune, BounceTV, PBS and others betting (in some cases betting big) that digital broadcasting is growing, not dying.
While the world has no shortage of pie-in-the-sky renderings for floating cities, a new proposal by Silicon Valley start-up Blueseed is perhaps the first to invoke entrepreneurial spirit and the American Dream in its soapbox pitch. Looking for a way to give foreign-born tech entrepreneurs access to the enterprising atmosphere of Silicon Valley, the founders of Blueseed are hoping to revamp an old cruise ship to create a community, of sorts, 12 nautical miles off California's coast in international waters, so international techies could live within commuting distance without a work visa. With a simple business tourism visa, denizens of the vessel could take a 30-minute boat ride to the mainland once or twice a week. Of course, creating an inhabitable community on water—one that people would live on six months or a year at a time—requires some interior design finagling, including incorporating lots of light and open space.
Blueseed still needs $18M (of the $27M required, total) before any building can take place, but if this actually gets rolling, Mart imagines he'll charge organizations anywhere between $1,200 a month to house their employees in a shared cabin to $3,000 a month per person. Just what everyone wants to do: shack up with their coworkers!I looked at a few cruise ships on Wikipedia and where cost was given, they were all in the hundreds of millions (and sometimes much higher). Even done on the cheap with an old ship, between buying the damned thing and doing the kind of major refit described here, we've got to be talking nine figures.
No, I do not agree with everything he [Aquinas] ever wrote. On the other hand, neither do I agree with everything I ever wrote.
This raises another issue. Programming is getting easier and easier, but it’s hard to do well. Economics these days depends heavily on programming. It seems to problematic to me that we rely on economists to also be programmers; surely there are people who are good economists but mediocre programmers (especially since the best programmers don’t become economists). If you crawl through a random sample of econometric papers and try to reproduce their results, I’m sure you will find bucketloads of errors, whether the analysis was done in R, Stata, SAS, or Excel. But people only find them when the stakes are high, as with the Reinhart and Rogoff paper, which has been cited all around the globe (not necessarily with their approval) as an argument for austerity.It is the most generally applicable advice, in that it might well have prevented many of the other errors. But it is not a one directional attribution of responsibility. A careful analyst should have done sensitivity analysis for things like outliers and found the critical sensitivity of the results to the inclusion of New Zealand. Or compared the different weighting schemes. If you are going to try and understand a small dataset you need to be very thorough at looking at all of the ways that the data itself could be summarized.
Die Zwei, the German version of The Persuaders, became a cult hit in Germany. This was largely because the dubbing was substantively altered creating a completely different program.[11] In France Amicalement vôtre (Yours, Friendly) also became a popular show because it was based on the redubbed German version instead of the English original.
The German dubbing was "a unique mixture of street slang and ironic tongue-in-cheek remarks" and that it "even mentioned Lord Sinclair becoming 007 on one or two occasions".[18] Dialogue frequently broke the fourth wall with lines like "Junge, lass doch die Sprüche, die setzen ja die nächste Folge ab!" (Quit the big talk, lad, or they'll cancel the series) or "Du musst jetzt etwas schneller werden, sonst bist Du nicht synchron" (Talk faster, you aren't in sync any more).
Research from the University of Hamburg notes the only common elements between Die Zwei and The Persuaders! is they use the same imagery. Other than the "the linguistic changes entailed by the process of translation result in radically different characterizations of the protagonists of the series. The language use in the translations is characterized by a greater degree of sexual explicitness and verbal violence as well as an unveiled pro-American attitude, which is not found in the source texts".[19]
In 2006 a news story by CBS News on the German dubbing industry mentioned The Persuaders! The report discovered that many German dubbing artists believed that "staying exactly true to the original is not always the highest aim". Rainer Brandt, co-ordinator of the German dubbing of The Persuaders and Tony Curtis' dubbing voice, said "This spirit was invoked by the person who oversaw the adaption and also performed Tony Curtis' role: When a company says they want something to be commercially successful, to make people laugh, I give it a woof. I make them laugh like they would in a Bavarian beer garden." [20]
Other researchers suggest international versions of The Persuaders! were given different translations simply because the original English series would not have made sense to local audiences. For instance the nuanced differences between the accents and manners of Tony Curtis, the American self-made millionaire Danny Wild from the Brooklyn slums, and Roger Moore, the most polished British Lord Sinclair, would be hard to convey to foreign viewers. Argentinian academic Sergio Viaggio commented "how could it have been preserved in Spanish? By turning Curtis into a low class Caracan and Moore into an aristocratic Madrileño? Here not even the approach that works with My Fair Lady would be of any avail; different sociolects of the same vernacular will not do—much less in subtitling, where all differences in accent are irreparably lost".[21]
Neither Boston Medical Center nor Boston Emergency Medical Services have responded to queries about how tourniquets were used after the marathon bombings, so we can't yet confirm their effectiveness. It wouldn't be the first time, though, that killing abroad has saved lives at home: Wartime medical advances have long translated into civilian life (trauma centers full of specialists sprouted up in cities, for examples, after they’d worked to great effect in Vietnam). America's latest conflicts have also improved techniques to repair tissues and nerves that have prevented amputations in operating rooms around the country.This goes beyond tourniquets. As NPR reported a few years ago, techniques from the war have revolutionized emergency medicine:
That kind of research funding tends to dry up when the soldiers come home. But hundreds of thousands of people die from traumatic injuries every year, and Jenkins says that huge gaps still remain in our knowledge of how to treat them. The National Trauma Institute has been campaigning for more money to research trauma, which doesn't loom as large in the public consciousness as many diseases do.
The medevac choppers land and then taxi over to the gate just outside the emergency room, where gurneys are waiting. Nightfall has brought a bone-chilling wind, and a gang of nurses and orderlies rushes four patients into the warmth of the ER.It seems strange to discuss war in terms of research and data collection, but despite what you constantly hear, most big problems are solved by throwing large sums of money at them and one of the most effective ways of convincing a government to start throwing money is to get it into a war. I'm not saying that the means justify the ends or that we couldn't find a way to get better results without the horrific costs.
It's more than warm inside. In fact it's 100 degrees. It's the first clue that this hospital — the Joint Theater Hospital at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Field — is a little different. Through years of war, combat surgeons have learned that hypothermia is a big risk in patients with significant blood loss. Nine years of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought some grim benefits: a new wealth of knowledge about treating war wounds.
"At the beginning of this conflict, we were taking the best trauma medicine from the civilian sector, and we brought it to Iraq and Afghanistan," says U.S. Air Force Col. Chris Benjamin, the hospital commander. He says now his doctors tell him it's the other way around.
"Here we are seven, eight years later, taking what we've learned in these conflicts to teach them the advances that we've made with this data collection here in theater," he says.
It’s somewhat surprising to see Very Serious Researchers (apologies to Paul Krugman) using Excel. Some years ago, I was consulting on a trademark infringement case and was trying (unsuccessfully) to replicate another expert’s regression analysis. It wasn’t until I had the brainstorm to use Excel that I was able to reproduce his results – it may be better now, but at the time, Excel could propagate round-off error and catastrophically cancel like no other software!Followed by this assessment by Gelman himself:
Microsoft has lots of top researchers so it’s hard for me to understand how Excel can remain so crappy. I mean, sure, I understand in some general way that they have a large user base, it’s hard to maintain backward compatibility, there’s feature creep, and, besides all that, lots of people have different preferences in data analysis than I do. But still, it’s such a joke. Word has problems too, but I can see how these problems arise from its desirable features. The disaster that is Excel seems like more of a mystery.In contrast, here's James Kwak discussing Excel (prompted by news that an embarrassingly simple spreadsheet error contributed to the London Whale fiasco and, yes, the similarities have been noted):
Microsoft Excel is one of the greatest, most powerful, most important software applications of all time.** [** But, like many other Microsoft products, it was not particularly innovative: it was a rip-off of Lotus 1-2-3, which was a major improvement on VisiCalc.] Many in the industry will no doubt object. But it provides enormous capacity to do quantitative analysis, letting you do anything from statistical analyses of databases with hundreds of thousands of records to complex estimation tools with user-friendly front ends. And unlike traditional statistical programs, it provides an intuitive interface that lets you see what happens to the data as you manipulate them.To the extent there's a conflict here, I'm with Kwak on this one. For all their problems, I'm still a big fan of Excel and similar programs (such as the OpenOffice version I have on my laptop). They are indispensable in business for just the reasons Kwak lists.
As a consequence, Excel is everywhere you look in the business world—especially in areas where people are adding up numbers a lot, like marketing, business development, sales, and, yes, finance. For all the talk about end-to-end financial suites like SAP, Oracle, and Peoplesoft, at the end of the day people do financial analysis by extracting data from those back-end systems and shoving it around in Excel spreadsheets. I have seen internal accountants calculate revenue from deals in Excel. I have a probably untestable hypothesis that, were you to come up with some measure of units of software output, Excel would be the most-used program in the business world.
But while Excel the program is reasonably robust, the spreadsheets that people create with Excel are incredibly fragile. There is no way to trace where your data come from, there’s no audit trail (so you can overtype numbers and not know it), and there’s no easy way to test spreadsheets, for starters. The biggest problem is that anyone can create Excel spreadsheets—badly. Because it’s so easy to use, the creation of even important spreadsheets is not restricted to people who understand programming and do it in a methodical, well-documented way.*** [*** PowerPoint has an oft-noted, parallel problem: It’s so easy to use that people with no sense of narrative, visual design, or proportion are out there creating presentations and inflicting them on all of us. ]
