Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
At the risk of getting lots of angry comments, Star Trek makes the top ten my best of 60s TV list. This spy-fi/proto-steampunk series makes the top five.
This episode of Marketplace had three stories I was thinking about blogging...
The business and business metrics of music and streaming about 10 minutes in. If nothing else, check out the chutzpah of Justin Bieber.
Wal-Mart will now deliver to your home while you're not there about 20 minutes in. It's not quite as creepy as it sounds but, with the tight margins of the grocery business, it's not easy to see how they expect to turn a profit. Given that the two big players in this are Wal-Mart and Amazon, I wouldn't rule out a purely anti-competitve play to drive smaller competitors out of business.
And finally the show ends with an interesting new hiring policy at the Body Shop retail chain.
RIYADH: A groundbreaking study will be conducted to build the world’s longest hyperloop track, the Ministry of Transport announced on Thursday.
It said an agreement with Virgin Hyperloop One (VHO), the world’s leading hyperloop company, would see a groundbreaking pre-feasibility study conducted on the use of hyperloop technology, laying the groundwork for a network of routes across Saudi Arabia.
The study is the first to be carried out anywhere in the world [I assume they mean the first on this scalee – MP] and will examine viable routes, expected demand, anticipated costs and explore the socioeconomic impact, such as the creation of jobs and environmental effects.
...
“We have a vision for the Kingdom, and that vision is of connecting it and the Gulf with the ability to travel from Riyadh to Jeddah in 46 minutes, to Neom from Jeddah in 40 minutes, from Riyadh to Dammam and Jubail in 28 minutes, and to go beyond the Kingdom, from Riyadh to Abu Dhabi, in 48 minutes.
“It’s not just about providing a future transportation system, it’s the ecosystem behind it. What we want to do is to be able to bring technology to the Kingdom to be able to share and develop that knowledge. We signed an agreement with King Abdullah Economic City in October last year specifically to look at manufacturing, how we can actually bring technology, and that is expected to create about 124,000 jobs.”
Saudi Minister of Transport Saleh Al-Jasser said: “Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has outlined the role of transport in shaping the future of the Kingdom’s economy within Vision 2030. As we enter a new decade, we intend to make rapid progress in building the infrastructure required to define mobility for the future, enabling the efficient movement of people and goods. With the transformative hyperloop technology, Saudi Arabia will not only unlock unparalleled benefits for its people and the economy but will continue to lead the region into an era of prosperity.”
This screen grab does a great job capturing so much of what’s wrong with the New York Magazine family and with business and entertainment journalism in general.
First off, there’s the article itself. Billed as an explainer, it’s nothing more than an especially embarrassing press release for a business model that makes WeWork look well thought out. It will take more than one post to explore the full awfulness of Quibi as an investment. For here, I’ll just say that this is possibly the stupidest proposal you’ll read involving the streaming industry, and that’s a high bar to clear.
Then there’s the sidebar. I’m sure I could think of a celebrity of comparable stature more despicable than Gwyneth Paltrow if I tried, but none come to mind (and, no, that’s not an invitation for suggestions. I already spend too much time thinking about horrible people). She uses the press’ sycophancy toward the rich and famous and fascination with lifestyle porn to push flaky and sometimes dangerous pseudoscience. The New York Magazine group has been playing footsie with quacks and new age charlatans for years (see here and here)
Finally there’s Netflix’s minor but still notable accomplishment of making the normal monthly cycling of shows in and out of rotation into a respectable news genre. Even HBO, which has long been extraordinarily good at working the press, was never able to get this kind of steady, extensive PR out of routine programming changes. We can’t exactly single out Vulture for this one but they certainly seem willing to play along.
Even more than normal for primary season, we've seen a remarkable amount of panic and wild shifts in assumptions, the latter often driven by nothing but noise.
We could debate the odds endlessly, but at this point no one really has any great insight into who's going to win either the Democratic primary or the general election. Neither side is doomed and anyone who tells you _____ has ______ locked up is probably not someone you should be listening to.
You get the idea. Every one of these candidates has serious potential flaws in the general because EVERY CANDIDATE has serious potential flaws. Because they’re human beings, not LARP fantasy figures.
And the problem is losing to Trump is not an acceptable option. Can’t happen. So none of these candidates is the right candidate because they have serious flaws so they could lose, and that can’t happen. So everyone is freaked out right now, and instantly focuses on how what can’t happen could very much happen if X is the candidate.
But the problem aren’t these particular candidates — not really. The problem is that when American political system combines with the contemporary American media environment and then the two of them meet the American voter, you get Donald Trump as president. That’s the problem. And that problem isn’t going away, unless we stop freaking out and do everything we can to make it go away, temporarily, no matter who gets the nomination. All of them could lose but all of them could also win, and if you think any of these people can’t win you’re just panicking. Don’t panic.
I was going to post just the trailer, but I
checked it out and it was absolutely terrible, a complete
misrepresentation of the film.
Of course, this was a
picture that needed considerable misrepresentation in 1951. Even by 2020
standards, it's a stunningly hard-edged, cynical, mean piece of work.
You can imagine the horror the PR department must have felt when they
first saw what they were supposed to promote.
The BBC has a list of oddball economic indicators centered around fast food. I was familiar with the Big Mac Index, and of course, I knew about the Waffle House Index. (I don't like to brag, but I grew up in a two WF town). The rest of these, however, are new to me.
Mars Bars
In 1932, a factory in Slough produced the
world’s first Mars bar. Fifty years later, Financial Times writer Nico
Colchester pointed out that the price of the confectionary in Britain
was neatly correlated with the buying power of pound sterling.
By measuring the cost of things in Mars Bars, Colechester noted how
graduate salaries had improved slightly in 40 years. Meanwhile, train
fares had become cheaper but roast beef dinners in pubs had gone up by
more than 60 percent.
Baked Beans and Popcorn
When financial experts are trying to determine
whether an economy is generally in good health, they often look to food
products. In 2009, the Odeon cinema company announced an “Odeon Popcorn Index”
that it claimed showed higher sales and therefore signs of economic
recovery in Britain following the financial crisis of 2008. And analysts
have also scrutinised sales of baked beans, popular when times are tough, as an indicator of how people are responding to periods of economic decline. When baked bean sales fell in 2013, some took it as a sign that the UK economy was in rude health.
French Fries
A fascinating article in the Oregonian in 1998 observed that sales of French fries could be a helpful indicator of trade between America and Asia.
This food “leads US industries into foreign markets” wrote Richard
Read, thanks to the fact that America exports so many of them (something
that remains true today).
And he added that consumption of French fries was also an indicator of
how well-developed an Asian economy had become. This meant that when
economic trouble in Asia was brewing in the late ’90s, farmers in the US
were hit hard.
We've been pushing this for a long time, but political journalists (at least the smarter ones like Marshall) are getting better about thinking through the implications of selection effects on polling data.
But there is another plausible explanation. Pollsters call it differential response. When one side gets enthused or energized their numbers go up but in an ephemeral fashion. The pumped-up side is a bit more eager to answer the phone or fill out the survey. The demoralized side is a bit less eager. This is a real and demonstrated phenomenon, not just a concept or speculation. It’s not necessarily an error per se in the polling. It’s picking up something real. It’s just ephemeral.
One example many of us likely remember came after the first general election debate in 2012. President Obama turned in a stiff and disconcertingly flat performance. The consensus was that Mitt Romney won the debate and for the first and last time in the cycle Romney briefly pushed into the lead.
There are good reasons to think that at least some of that is happening today — the President’s impending acquittal and Republican unity have been the driving news of the last two or three weeks. Republicans are energized and enthused by the certainty of President Trump’s acquittal. Many Democrats are demoralized by seeing an overwhelming and exacting case made for the President’s guilt and seeing it simply not matter.
Good. National coverage of Iowa and New Hampshire tends to set up unhealthy feedback loops and pushes them further into Keynesian beauty contest territory.
The NYT, WaPo and
CNN homepages all have essentially nothing above the fold about the
Iowa caucuses, which are in 2 days. It's still all
impeachment. (Although CNN does have a house ad up
for its show(!) about the final Des Moines Register poll tonight.) pic.twitter.com/dAeQvDP5TI
We're all nerds here. We might as well embrace it.
There's
arguably a Cretan's paradox aspect to 2016. If Trump won because
experts were wrong (thinking he couldn't win), then he would
have lost if they thought he could have won. https://t.co/FizJAzXyoX
Extraordinary
footage from the front-line of the Australian fires. Watch how an
apparently normal scene is transformed in 90 seconds into an inferno.
https://t.co/8sdOeWRncL
Classic
emperor's new clothes: Once the PR bubble pops, no aspect of a
company's former "genius" is not subject to
withering scrutiny, where it suddenly looks beyond ridiculous. https://t.co/vYsM3BehGr
Because nothing
enhances a sweeping epic like being chopped into 10 minutes chunks.
"Quibi tells Vulture it is working with
Vikings writer-producer Michael Hirst on Charlemagne, a biopic about the
historical icon Charles the Great." https://t.co/yYx3KcvS1o via
@vulture
"Crickets offer roughly the same amount of protein
as beef as well as significantly more micronutrients since
you're consuming the exoskeleton as well." https://t.co/u2z2XhfOxp
Still suspect that McConnell made the smart call for the party (not to be confused with the right call for the country), but it couldn't have been an easy calculation.
Support for
witnesses in the Senate impeachment trial in recent
polls: Quinnipiac 75 Monmouth
80 Reuters 72 CNN 69 AP/NORC
68 Quinnipiac 66 WaPo 71 Support
for witnesses even in positive territory among
Republicans. And these polls are almost all before
the Bolton story broke.
For those tuning in late (a callback to when media was something you tuned into), Netflix has always been a push-the-envelope when it comes to metrics and transparency, going back to the debut of House of Cards, when the company let pretty much every journalist on the East Coast report that the company actually owned rather than merely licensed their “originals.” (When business reporters finally caught on, the company started actually buying some of the rights, though still less than most people realize.) The narrative that has kept the stock flying high (P/E in the eighties last time I checked) depends on the business press not looking too closely at these details.
[See also here. I'll admit being a bit smug about "I have a feeling that Netflix's transparency is about to become a bigger part of this story."]
The narrative is even more dependent on the idea that Netflix is building a massive library of popular, highly valuable content. Putting aside the enormously complicated question of exactly who owns what with shows like She-Ra, it is also essential to remember the incentive that the company has in portraying their originals as successful, and how much it spends to push that impression.
The streaming wars opened up unprecedented floods of marketing and PR cash, with Netflix taking the lead. An astounding amount of money has been spent getting you to check out the Witcher, either through advertising, SEO, press junkets and interviews, and planting (sometimes ghost-written) stories in major news outlets. Except for SEO, there’s nothing new here – the practices go back to when United Artists meant Chaplin, Fairbanks, Pickford and Griffith – but the magnitudes are unheard of.
With that in mind, think about the difference between a metric that counts people who watched more than two thirds of a show and people who basically made it through the opening credits. Marketing and PR definitely build interest and curiosity, so we would expect the new metric to favor heavily promoted originals over old TV shows and familiar movie (none of which are central to the Netflix narrative and most of which are owned by studios that are starting their own streaming services and pulling their content).
Fuzzy stats. There
was a whiff of desperation in some of the data Netflix shared in its
letter Tuesday. The company announced it changed the way it counts views
on the service. Now, instead of counting a “view” as a subscriber
watching 70% or more of a show or movie, Netflix stops counting after
the first two minutes. The company said measuring views that way puts it
on par with other online video platforms like Google’s YouTube.
But
YouTube and other free video platforms are much different than Netflix.
Counting a view after two minutes makes sense for them because that’s
long enough for a viewer to get an ad served to them. Netflix doesn’t
have advertising, and relies on subscribers staying glued to their
screens for as long as possible. Even with the new counting method,
Netflix said views were up an average of 35%.
Then there was that odd Google Trends chart
Netflix plopped into the letter that was meant to demonstrate the
popularity of its new show “The Witcher” versus shows on new rival
platforms like Disney+‘s “The Mandalorian” and Apple
TV+’s “The Morning Show.” Putting aside the fact that a Google Trends
chart isn’t the best way to measure interest in a TV show, Netflix used a
global version of Google Trends to make its comparison, even though
Disney+ was only available in the U.S. and Canada. Netflix said 76
million member households watched “The Witcher” in December, but it’s
impossible to gauge how popular it really was if those views were based
on just a minimum of two minutes.
Competition affected domestic subscribers. It
looks like the November 2019 launches of Disney+ and Apple TV+ took its
toll on Netflix in the U.S. and Canada. Netflix said its recent price
increases and “competitive launches” in the quarter caused its “low
membership growth” for the quarter. (Netflix only added 550,000
subscribers in the U.S. and Canada versus the 1.75 million it added in
the year-ago quarter.)
That could spell trouble for Netflix as its rivals expand across the globe.
...
No “Friends,” no problem. Netflix’s
execs were asked on the earnings call Tuesday about the loss of
“Friends” to upcoming rival HBO Max. While “Friends” was believed to be
one of the most popular shows on Netflix, Chief Content Officer Ted
Sarandos said subscribers find other things to watch when a popular
licensed show leaves the service. (Although he didn’t provide any data
to back that up.)
The bottom line: Netflix’s
mixed earnings report showed the company is sticking to its strategy of
investing more and more in content, with the aim of growing its
subscriber base. But as the competitors start to light up their own
streaming services, it has a renewed pressure to prove it can compete.
I knew that CollegeHumor was a powerhouse, but I never realized what kind of numbers until I looked this up.
As of November 2019, The CollegeHumor YouTube channel has reached over 7.1 billion views, and over 13.5 million subscribers.
As many have noted, the economics of video are insane. Between dealing with monopolies like Facebook and Youtube and competing against VC funded unicorns, even an extraordinarily successful and apparently well managed company can find itself doomed.
I was going to segue into into mockery of Quibi, but I'm just too depressed.
“The Witcher” starts with Henry Cavill and his chiseled jaw battling a gurgling swamp monster. According to Netflix, 76 million member households watched at least this far.
Netflix counts people who watch the first two minutes of the show as viewers. So if you moved onto something else, you still boosted Netflix’s ratings.
“That two-minute period is enough of an indicator for them to [have a] very clear indication of people completing it,” said Courtney Williams, head of partnerships at Parrot Analytics. “So they don’t have to go all the way through.”
Here's the thing. You don't really need an indicator of how many people completed a show (even a very, very clear one), if you already know the actual number who did., No company has fetishized the collection of viewer data more than Netflix. They track how long you watched, when you paused, where you rewinded.
Though it's not the best measure of how many people have watched a show, the 2-minute warning does give us an excellent read on interest/curiosity level, how well your marketing and PR worked, how appealing your stars are, how much people listen to your recommendation engine.
And it produces really impressive numbers like 76 million.
In an industry where billions are spent every year on promoting content, there is a legitimate business need for these metrics, but they leave some people wanting more.
But Netflix still has investors who want to know who kept watching.
“It is proverbially grading one’s own homework, and there has to be a bit more transparency,” said Tim Hanlon, CEO of media advisory investment group Vertere.
Netflix probably knows how many people finished “The Witcher.” But unless investors press for more details, we never will.
Furthermore, even allowing for the worst possible case scenarios with environmental disasters and the best for terraforming technologies, earth will always be nicer than Mars.
One of those hurdles is radiation. For reasons unclear to me, this
tends to get pushed aside compared to other questions to do with Mars's
atmosphere (akin to sitting 30km above Earth with no oxygen),
temperatures, natural resources (water), nasty surface chemistry
(perchlorates), and lower surface gravitational acceleration (1/3rd that
on Earth).
...
The bottom line is that the extremely thin atmosphere on Mars, and
the absence of a strong global magnetic field, result in a complex and
potent particle radiation environment. There are lower energy solar wind
particles (like protons and helium nuclei) and much higher energy
cosmic ray particles crashing into Mars all the time. The cosmic rays,
for example, also generate substantial secondary radiation - crunching
into martian regolith to a depth of several meters before hitting an
atomic nucleus in the soil and producing gamma-rays and neutron
radation.
...
However, if we consider just the dose on Mars, the rate of exposure
averaged over one Earth year is just over 20 times that of the maximum
allowed for a Department of Energy radiation worker in the US (based off
of annual exposure). And that's for a one-off trip. Now imagine you're a settler, perhaps
in your 20s and you're planning on living on Mars for at least (you'd
hope) another 50 Earth years. Total lifetime exposure on Mars? Could be
pushing 18 sieverts.
Now that's kind of into uncharted territory. If you got 8 sieverts
all at once, for example, you will die. But getting those 8 sieverts
spread out over a couple of decades could be perfectly survivable, or
not. The RAD measurements on Mars also coincided with a low level of
solar particle activity, and vary quite a bit as the atmospheric
pressure varies (which it does on an annual basis on Mars).
Of course you need not spend all your time above surface on Mars. But
you'd need to put a few meters of regolith above you, or live in some
deep caves and lava tubes
to dodge the worst of the radiation. And then there are risks not to do
with cancer that we're only just beginning to learn about.
Specifically, there is evidence that neurological function
is particularly sensitive to radiation exposure, and there is the
question of our essential microbiome and how it copes with long-term,
persistent radiation damage. Finally, as Hassler et al. discuss, the
"flavor" (for want of a better word) of the radiation environment on
Mars is simply unlike that on Earth, not just measured by extremes but
by its make up, comprising different components than on Earth's surface.
To put all of this another way: in the worst case scenario (which may
or may not be a realistic extrapolation) there's a chance you'd end up
dead or stupid on Mars. Or both.
Once again.
academics prove the obvious: "The preferences of the rich have
more weight in the policy process than the preferences of the
poor." https://t.co/eovI8FWEZX
Current Affairs
has a .org domain, so this could really screw us, and would mean that if
we wanted to keep our site a private equity firm could gouge us out of
more of our subscribers' dollars and leave less left over to
make a magazine. https://t.co/5Lutb5rFlN
"Clearview AI said its facial recognition software
had been used by more than 600 police departments and government
groups, incl. the FBI. But in at least 2 cases, the company suggested it
was working with a police department simply because it had submitted a
lead to a tip line" https://t.co/b4I4KYddRl
"The
reason I'm about to do a cowardly contemptible thing is that I
am so offended at Adam Schiff for predicting that I would do a cowardly
contemptible thing."
1. There’s zero
chance she agreed to go off the record after the end of the recorded
part of that interview. 2. It’s worth a note here
that when Ari set up the interview on @npratc
last night, he made a point of saying it was airing in its entirety,
unedited. https://t.co/lWF2oJ3Gow
Senator James
Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, stepped up to a bank of microphones in
the basement of the Capitol to announce that he was not afraid of the
president*. https://t.co/JslkMnr2rD
This is really
the entirety of what you need to know about the President's
defense. "You will find that the President did absolutely
nothing wrong." pic.twitter.com/j3vddMBU6Z
After talking
about the MI Dem voters who left the presidential line on their ballots
blank, Michael Moore tells the Cedar Falls crowd:
"We're all going to vote for who the Democrat
is." He holds for applause. No boos. But he pivots to warn
against "compromise" candidates.
The framers
feared "a British-style parliamentary democracy" in
which the head of government serves at the pleasure of the legislature,
says @AlanDersh
. At the time the US Constitution was written in
1787, there was no such system.https://t.co/pDM8hgiJ5E
Since the 2010
election, 25 states have instituted new restrictions that make it harder
to vote. The measures include shorter voting hours; the shuttering of
polling places in minority neighborhoods; and new limitations on early
voting. https://t.co/7rlXpgLTeR
Let's not
kid ourselves, Jackie. They've been doing this for at least 16
years now - and I believe there's even a term for it! The first
step in fixing a problem is identifying it: They're not better
than this. https://t.co/8rr3t0zO02
Just a thought
but if you find yourself on national TV arguing that something the
president just said is probably not a death threat maybe you should
pause and reconsider your choices https://t.co/E5veeEcUub
I think that the underlying dynamics have, if anything gotten stronger since 2017. Trump's solid base of support is now, by any reasonable definition, a cult of personality. Republicans' ability to distance themselves the administration has diminished as Trump has grown less tolerant of dissent.
All of this raises interesting points about the next few days.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) predicted on Tuesday
that Republicans will split with President Trump within months unless
the administration changes course.0
"My prediction is he keeps up on this path...within three, four months
you're going to see a whole lot of Republicans breaking with him,"
Schumer said during an interview with ABC's "The View."
Schumer argued while most GOP lawmakers aren't yet willing to break
publicly from the White House, they are privately having "real problems"
with Trump's policies in his first month.
"A lot of the Republicans, they're mainstream people. ... They will feel they have no choice but to break with him," he said.
GOP leadership are largely dismissing any early signs of discord between
Congress and the White House as they slowly try to make progress on an
ambitious agenda.
So while it is hard to deny that Trump is amazingly unpopular for a new
president, unless his approval ratings trend farther down the way even
those of popular presidents typically do, his party may not suffer the
kind of humiliation Democrats experienced in 2010. For all the shock
Trump has consistently inspired with his behavior as president, there’s
not much objective reason for Republican politicians to panic and begin
abandoning him based on his current public standing. But in this as in
so many other respects, we are talking about an unprecedented chief
executive, so the collapse some in the media and the Democratic Party
perceive as already underway could yet arrive.
The relationship between the Trump/Bannon White House and the GOP
legislature is perhaps uniquely suited for a textbook game theory
analysis. In pretty much all previous cases, relationships between
presidents and Congress have been complicated by numerous factors other
than naked self-interest--ideological, partisan, personal, cultural--but
this time it's different. With a few isolated exceptions, there is no
deeply held common ground between the White House and Capitol Hill. The
current arrangement is strictly based on people getting things they care
about in exchange for things they don't.
However, while the relationship is simple in those terms, it is
dauntingly complex in terms of the pros and cons of staying versus
going. If the Republicans stand with Trump, he will probably sign any
piece of legislation that comes across his desk (with this White House,
"probably" is always a necessary qualifier). This comes at the cost of
losing their ability to distance themselves from an increasingly
unpopular and scandal-ridden administration.
Some of that distance might be clawed back by public criticism of the
president and by high-profile hearings, but those steps bring even
greater risks. Trump has no interest in the GOP's legislative agenda, no
loyalty to the party, and no particular affection for its leaders.
Worse still, as Josh Marshall has frequently noted, Trump has the
bully's instinctive tendency to go after the vulnerable. There is a
limit to the damage he can inflict on the Democrats, but he is in a
position to literally destroy the Republican Party.
We often hear this framed in terms of Trump supporters making trouble in
the primaries, but that's pre-2016 thinking. This goes far deeper. In
addition to a seemingly total lack of interpersonal, temperamental, and
rhetorical constraints, Trump is highly popular with a large segment of
the base. In the event of an intra-party war, some of this support would
undoubtedly peel away, but a substantial portion would stay.
Keep in mind, all of this takes place in the context of a troubling
demographic tide for the Republicans. Their strategic response to this
has been to maximize turnout within the party while suppressing the vote
on the other side. It has been a shrewd strategy but it leaves little
margin for error. Trump has the ability to drive a wedge between a
significant chunk of the base and the GOP for at least the next few
cycles, possibly enough to threaten the viability of the party.
The closest analogy that comes to mind is the Democrats and Vietnam, but
that was a rift in a big-tent loosely organized party. The 21st Century
GOP is a small tent party that depends on discipline and entrenchment
strategies. It's not clear that it would survive a civil war.
Given that, I suspect the next year or two will prove Schumer wrong. There is some evidence
that the president's polling has stabilized, perhaps even rebounded a
bit, but even if the numbers go back into free fall, Republicans in the
House and the Senate will be extremely reluctant to break from Trump
with anything more than isolated or cosmetic challenges.
This isn't just a question of not wanting Trump outside the tent pissing
in; this is a question of not wanting Trump outside the tent tossing
grenades.
