Let me guess, it's like Netflix but with Legos

This is what a few million in start-up capital and  a good PR firm can get you, people all over the internet slightly paraphrasing then posting your press releases for you (or in the case of Businessweek, going the above and beyond and writing an unadulterated puff piece in exchange for a couple of exclusive quotes).

Pleygo’s Near-Perfect Pitch: It’s Like Netflix for Lego (Businessweek)


Pleygo Is Basically Netflix for Legos (Time)


Pleygo is to Lego what Netflix is to movies (Gizmag)


Pleygo: Netflix for LEGO (Tehnabob)


Pleygo, A Netflix-Style Rental Service For LEGO Sets (Geekologie)

What none of these articles mention is that, other than both products being relatively durable -- almost none of the reasons why DVDs-by-mail was a good idea apply to Legos-by-mail, but that's a post for another time.

The topic for the moment is the way products and businesses generate buzz. Right now journalists mainly seem to rely on the circular "We talk about it because it's important"/"It's important because everybody's talking about it." One of the many problems with that line of reasoning is that it's really easy for people with money and influence to get that cycle going by appealing to journalists' laziness, greed, vanity and herd instinct.

Much of the effectiveness of PR comes from the fact that, compared with traditional advertising, it hits us with our defenses down, We tend to assume that the writer has uncovered something interesting and dug up the relevant details. That was never entirely true, but these days, with a flack-to-hack ratio approaching 9:1, you should generally assume the opposite.

Social epidemiology of who does not get vaccinated

This post on who is actually refusing vaccination for their children is interesting indeed.  Consider:

 As Seitz-Wald explains, the unvaccinated kids are clustered in some of the wealthiest schools and neighborhoods, particularly in California, where some extremely expensive private schools have vaccination compliance rates as low as 20 percent. Anti-vaccination sentiment has been stereotyped as a mindless lefty cause, but in reality, Republicans are slightly more likely to oppose vaccination than Democrats. The real correlation is between having a lot of money and class privilege and opposing vaccination.

 This puts the whole issue of selfish behavior in a completely different context.  Especially as failing to vaccinate an older child can result in the infection of younger children.  So people with the most resources are deliberating deciding not to support the social good of reducing the burden of infectious disease among children? 

The speculation about reasons is unclear, but the most grisly possibility is that it is a status symbol showing that a special class of people should not have to follow the rules.  There is very little public health justification for exempting people because they want to feel special and like the rules do not apply to them.  We did not create special person exemptions with the prohibition of dumping raw sewage on the streets or dropping your garbage into city parks, we should not do it here. 

Climate change and air travel

I have heard this argument from Megan McArdle before:

The question answers itself, doesn’t it? Giving up air travel and overnight delivery is much more personally costly for the public intellectuals who write about this stuff than giving up a big SUV. If you live in one of the five or six major cities that contain virtually everyone who writes about climate change, having a small car (or no car), is a pretty easy adjustment to imagine. On the other hand, try to imagine giving up far-flung vacations, conferences, etc. -- especially since travel to interesting locales is one of the hidden perks of not-very-well remunerated positions at universities, public policy groups, nongovernmental organizations, and yes, news organizations.

But I tend to credit it as having at least a little bit of truth.  It would personally cause me a great deal of grief if it were to become a social norm, given how far away from my family that I live.  But it is true that air travel is a very tough source of carbon emissions to remove, given the need for high energy density fuel.

But I think that this fits in well with how nice it would be to improve train travel, which is a very carbon-friendly mode of transportation.

Government secrecy

It is fashionable right now to see people who leak government secrets as being some sort of hero.  It is true that secrecy in government action can be subject to significant abuse.  But Eric Posner points out that transparency is not all good in a democracy:

Thus, the debate is not “democracy vs. security,” as the press has invariably framed it. It is, paradoxically, “democracy vs. democracy.” The secret ballot is the most famous illustration of the essential role that secrecy plays in a democracy. The secrecy of the ballot protects people from intimidation so they can vote sincerely, but it also enables a dishonest government to manipulate elections since people’s votes are not publicly verifiable.

Commentators always emphasize the importance of openness to democracy, forgetting that secrecy is just as essential. Often they treat secrecy as a disagreeable golem that lurks unwanted in our democracy, whose claims must be entertained but should be treated with the utmost skepticism. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy, for example, celebrates Snowden (and Manning) for generating huge gains in public accountability, while discounting the government’s claims that he caused serious harms to national security by revealing methods to enemies who can henceforth evade our spies.

I think that the secret ballot is a very good example of a case where transparency could actually prove counter-productive.  The potential for intimidation in revealing the specific voting decisions of people who need to work with the next government (think of government bureaucrats or people who contract with the government) is actually pretty huge.  I also wonder if the focus on victimless crimes doesn't lead to more problems than it is worth, leading to a huge need for secrecy about matters that are usually adult decisions.

I am not sure I completely agree with the decision to go with lower levels of government transparency there is clearly a trade off here.  But I have to agree that Posner brings up a good point that there is a point where openness could actually create more problems than benefits. 

Infrastructure that requires no new tech

Matthew Yglesias on low tech solutions:

It's no hyperloop, but here's one way we could make the trip from New York to Washington, DC much faster. It's called a "passenger train" and all you need to do is instead of relying on existing tracks build whole new tracks that go more or less straight. And instead of slowing the train down by stopping in Baltimore and Wilmington and Trenton and such you'll just traverse a bunch of jurisdictions without actually providing them any service.

What is ironic is that these jurisdictions that are bypassed may still be better off.  All you need to do is have small express trains to either Washington, DC or New York (whichever is closer).  Two fast trains may well be better than one slow train that is always stopping.  It even fits the Mark P principle that it can be done now with currently available technology.  No need to hope that technological break-throughs will continue at a historical pace to allow the technology to become viable one day . . .

Film history for fools -- box office disasters

Consider this a footnote to the previous Motley Fool rant.

There's an old and very common saying in Hollywood that the biggest money-losing film ever was the Sound of Music. The joke here is that though the film did rather well...

Upon its initial release, The Sound of Music briefly displaced Gone with the Wind as the highest-grossing film of all-time; taking re-releases into account, it ultimately grossed $286 million internationally. Adjusted to contemporary prices it is the third highest-grossing film of all-time at the North American box office and the fifth highest-grossing film worldwide.

... The films it inspired lost a lot of money. That's a bit of an oversimplification. Music was just the last of a string of hit musicals in the early Sixties ( West Side Story, The Music Man, My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins) but it was the biggest and it suggested an upward trend and, to the extent that it was responsible for what followed, it might well justify that money-losing title. 

The commercially and/or critically unsuccessful films included Camelot, Finian's Rainbow, Hello Dolly!, Sweet Charity, Doctor Dolittle, Star!, Darling Lili, Paint Your Wagon, Song of Norway, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Man of La Mancha, Lost Horizon and Mame. Collectively and individually these failures crippled several of the major studios.

I don't want to push the analogy with comic-book movies but there are similarities, particularly regarding the budgets and the stories executives told themselves to justify them. 

And I'm pretty sure if Motley Fool had been around in, say, 1967, these upcoming movies would have generated lots of optimistic exclamation points.

Because that's the way it is with hot trends, they just keep getting bigger and bigger forever!

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DC Comics Turns to an Anti-Hero in Its Time of Need

As part of researching a couple of ongoing threads, I've been reading more Motley Fool than is good for me lately and it's brought home just how much of a scam MF and most of its ilk is. They've mastered a reassuring, knowing tone despite displaying only the most superficial knowledge of the industries they're discussing.

What's worse, each tired piece of under-researched conventional wisdom is presented as a reason to call your broker. Netflix is going places since it grabbed House of Cards (never mind that they probably overpaid, particularly since they didn't even get syndication rights); Hold it, Netflix might be in trouble because their new kids' show is a spin-off of the flop Turbo (never mind that the Turbo show was part of a much larger Dreamworks deal that involves hits like Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon or that historically spin-offs of hit kid's movies like Disney's Hercules, Lilo and Stitch and even the Lion King haven't been notable hits on their own so it's not clear how much difference a good opening for Turbo would have made).

The truth of the matter is that very few of us should try to pick stocks and if you find yourself frequently saying "I didn't know that" when reading Motley Fool posts you are definitely not one of those few.

Weekend blogging -- Anthromorphic Theater

This cartoon from the aftermath of the meltdown had been lying forgotten in a corner somewhere since it first came out. It's less topical now but it's a nice snapshot of a part of the crisis some people mey have forgotten.

Owning a business in Russia can be tricky, it seems

This story cited by Tyler Cowen really shows the problem of private or corruptible police:

Most of the imprisoned are not there for any political reason. Their incarceration has to do with the nature of Russian corruption, said Elena Panfilova, the director of the Russian branch of Transparency International, a nonprofit group that studies corruption around the globe. Run-of-the-mill bribery schemes, practiced from China to Mexico, usually involve the police, fire inspectors or other regulators asking for payments on the side to allow a business to operate. In these instances, the interests of the business owners and corrupt officials are aligned — both ultimately want the enterprise to succeed.

But in Russia, the police benefit from arrests. They profit by soliciting a bribe from a rival to remove competition, by taking money from the family for release, or by selling seized goods. Promotion depends on an informal quota of arrests. Police officers who seize businesses became common enough to have earned the nickname “werewolves in epaulets.”

This type of problem really points out why you need a state that is strong and well functioning.  Because there is a bad equilibrium for a police force to shift into (see above), it is critical that there be an external check on the shift into these equilibrium.  It also tells us just how valuable a tradition of "good government" is and how deeply we should prize it. 

The word 'metacognitive' is usually a bad sign

Lucy Calkins of the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College has an article on something I should probably be paying more attention to.

In April, hundreds of thousands of children in grades 3-8 in New York State took Pearson’s version of the totally new Common Core aligned literacy exams. The students’ scores on those tests have yet to come out, but the New York State Department and Pearson’s scores have been accumulating as well, and accounts of how well they’ve done on this test are not good. Each week, another journalist produces a blog or a column that begins, “I recently obtained a bootlegged copy of the New York State English Language Arts (ELA) exam…” and then the article proceeds to critique the exam. One recent journalist, for example, wrote, “I received full copies of each of the sixth, seventh and eighth grade tests…” before going on to ponder the implications of this iteration of the test (andreagabor.com). More than a month ago. The Post distributed copies and quoted excerpts of the 5th grade exam.

Ironically, it feels as if the only people who are studying the test and writing their responses to it are teachers and principals. Because this is a closed test, educators risk losing their jobs if they obtain and speak out about boot-legged copy of standardized tests. Still, it is possible for the world to hear the observations and concerns that educators have about the test. The day after the ELA, the organization I lead – the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project – opened a site (http://elafeedback.com) on which educators could post observations made during the test, and thoughts and concerns about the test. More than a thousand responses have been entered onto that site, and altogether, the responses show that teachers, principals and superintendents from both high achieving and high need schools have deep concerns about New York State’s test. Elafeedback.com gives a window into what educators are concerned about in regard to these tests. Now the question is – is anyone listening?

...

It is entirely likely that this test will be influential (even controlling) in decisions about how reading and writing are taught. It is especially likely that the exams will become curriculum in any state or city in which standardized tests have become deciding factors in whether teachers are hired or fired. In NYC, the scores that students receive on Pearson’s tests determine whether students have access to selective middle schools and secondary schools, allowing the tests to take on inordinate importance. On top of that, in NYC, teachers are ranked by name in newspapers based upon the scores their students receive, and this, again, means that the tests become an all-important measuring stick.

In the online posts at elafeedback.com, you’ll find a few issues that are raised again and again. One of these addresses the interpretation Pearson makes of close reading of nonfiction. For most teachers, the goal of teaching kids to read nonfiction successfully is to teach in such a way that students can learn from the nonfiction they read. That is, if they read an article on the Pony Express, the goal is that they learn quite a bit about that topic. If you look at the Common Core standards themselves, this reading work would encompass standards 1-3, which asks students to determine central ideas and supporting details, and analyze their development in the text, as well as standards 7-9, which asks students to synthesize and integrate, compare and contrast, and weigh and evaluate, ideas suggested by texts on the same subject.

Yet the Pearson exam seems to have asked few or no questions that addressed standards 7-9, as they chose to present students only with isolated texts rather than text sets, and many questions on standards 4-6, that ask students to analyze the craft and structure of texts. “Which term best describes the structure used in paragraphs 4-6?” “Why did the author include the image of….in line 12 of paragraph 5?” This sort of highly metacognitive, analytical reading-writing connection work is not usually the primary reading lens of nonfiction readers. Teachers are getting the message that their instruction should no longer channel students to read lots of nonfiction in order to expand their knowledge and grow ideas about a topic. Teachers are gathering that what counts to Pearson and New York State is that even children as young as nine year olds read nonfiction texts in order to analyze the author’s craft. This work has been propagated through the Publishers Criterion, a document offered by two authors of the Common Core, after the CCSS was ratified. As one poster, Sandra Wilde wrote, “ the items are constructed in a very narrow way, not from the standards themselves but from a narrow set of ideas - based on the Publisher's Guidelines”

I wish I had time to spend on this issue. It's too complex to discuss without doing your homework (which I haven't done), but I do have a few brief observations:

1. The reform movement has always been based on an odd alliance of that saw a chance to advance their generally well intended but otherwise disparate goals. One of these groups is theorists who wanted to try different pedagogical approaches and were running into resistance from the teaching establishment.

2. Though reform is often presented as a return to common sense basics, some of these pedagogical approaches, particularly those involving reading and writing, seem quite arcane. From first and second grade, a great deal of time is spent on fairly obscure concepts like the distinction between perspective and point of view.

3. If the tests we use to evaluate students, schools and teachers incorporate these ideas, then these approaches will become the standard.

and

4. While I don't want to dismissive of these approaches, I have a very different view. Kids are amazingly intelligent and inquisitive. If you give them the ability to read with little effort and good comprehension and you get them to read widely and deeply and to write clearly and thoughtfully, they will teach themselves better than you ever could.

Tech companies may lie to you but we never do

Item number 5 from The Worst Lies Tech Companies Tell You:

Cord cutters, pay attention: There is no such thing as an HDTV antenna. Or to put it another way, any TV antenna you've ever used, ever, is an HDTV antenna. Yes, all of them.

Check out the update on this post from 2010 or this post from 2011. (I've actually grown more suspicious of  some other aspects of that 2011 story, partly because the account conflicts with some things I've observed and partly because the New York Times has a record of serial inaccuracy on the OTA story.)

Jon Chait has to be pranking us?

I say this because of this review he posts of a book that seems deeply ahistorical:

The new right-wing book of the moment is American Betrayal, by Diana West, which offers the thesis that American foreign policy under presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower was secretly controlled by the Soviet Union. If this sounds like the sort of tract that would be written by somebody who thinks Joe McCarthy was absolutely right about everything, well, that’s exactly what Diana West does believe. She’s also quite the birther.

and

West argues not just that there were communist spies in the government or that American foreign policy failed to take a strong enough line, but that the Soviets controlled the American government in the way they controlled, say, East Germany. For instance, West argues that America provoked Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor — an American working for the Soviets “subverted relations between the US and Japan by inserting ‘ultimatum’ language into the cable flow that actually spurred the Japanese attack.”

So the downfall of the communist US government was due to John F Kennedy, lion of the right wing?  Who managed to squeak out a victory over Soviet pawn Rich Nixon (Eisenhower's Vice President, after all)?  Making JFK and Lyndon Johnson leading the only actual American led government in this 40 year period of subjugation?  Making the Great Society what a non-communist government would introduce in opposition to the communism of Richard Nixon? 

I am not saying that these things aren't possible in the sense of "logically possible".  But the Korean war and the Berlin blockage seem like odd policy decisions if the United States was a soviet satellite in the sense of East Germany.  Look what happened to Hungary in 1956 when it decided to buck Soviet control!  Now, this is completely separate from a claim that these presidents were rabid socialists or a competing strain of communist (kind of like China was).  It is the direct control from Moscow that seems to beg for a very high level of evidence.

So I guess I prefer to believe that Jon Chait got his facts wrong rather than actually imagining anybody would posit this theory of US history. 

The Epidemiology of Laughter

No, really. This post by famed sitcom writer/producer/director Ken Levine illustrate how infectious laughter follows some of the same rules as other infectious phenomena.

Comedy plays better in confined spaces. Laughs are louder when they don’t drift away.

Now you may say this is a superstition and I just want to be near that massage parlor, but (1) they don’t give group on’s, and (2) being in close quarters amplifies the laughter and laughter is infectious.

Whenever a sitcom episode goes into production the first order of business is a table reading. Several large tables are set up, the actors sit across from each other and read the script aloud as the writers and executives sit around them. Many shows I’ve worked on just hold their table readings right on their cavernous sound stages. On shows I’ve produced I insist we hold the table readings in conference rooms. Yes, it’s a little cramped, and chairs are pushed up against walls, but the difference in the reaction is startling. Laughs are so much bigger when you’re not at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  Jokes are so much funnier when they don't echo.

Lest you think it’s just me, the table readings for CHEERS, FRASIER, WINGS, THE SIMPSONS, and BECKER were all held in conference rooms.

Levine also addresses the question of whether you should initially test a concept under overly friendly or overly hostile conditions.

Do we get an unfair reading as a result? Do the scripts appear funnier than they really are? Sometimes. There are producers who won’t change jokes later if it worked at the table reading. I’m not one of them. If a joke doesn’t work when it’s on its feet I cut it.  Table readings can always be deceiving.

But way more often, I’ve seen bad table readings done on the stage then gone back to the room and changed the shit out of the script. Later that day we'd have a runthrough of the original table draft and 70% of the stuff we planned to cut suddenly worked.

I’d rather err on the side of the table reading going well. Especially since you have the network and studio there as well. The less nervous they all are about the script, the better it is for all concerned.

The Totem Pole

Via Andrew Gelman, Gary Rubinstein has a very good post on what he observed while visiting a KIPP school in NYC (part of a larger series). I'll be getting back to the big issues Rubinstein raises soon, but first I wanted to take a moment on this side issue.

One thing that I see in schools a lot is the most experienced teachers getting to teach the high level class while the newbies have to teach the ninth grade remedial classes.  I suppose that this is some kind of reward for longevity, but it really is unfair.  If it really is about ‘the kids’ the new teachers should teach some of those easier classes.  I’m sorry to report that at KIPP they seemed to have the same sort of totem pole going on.  In the ninth grade wing is where I saw the most first year TFAers.

We hear a lot of complaints about how soft things supposedly are for long-time teachers, but the one place I've actually seen extensive evidence of this is an area that almost no one mentions (except, of course, for Rubinstein).

As a rule, first year teachers are best suited for advanced classes both in terms of strengths and weaknesses. New teachers tend to take a while to stop thinking in college terms. They are generally weak in classroom management and in those special communication skills needed for to handle lower level classes. Talking about concepts with peers and professors is very different from discussing those same concepts with bored ninth graders running behind grade level.

On the plus side, those concepts are fresher for just-out-of-college teachers and they inspire more passion. New teachers generally have more energy and are better able to keep up with classes of academically advanced kids. On top of that, college bound students often respond better to teachers they see as part of the college experience..

There is, as always, a context of bigger issues here, but for now, if you're looking for a reform to get behind, you could do worse than  tearing down that totem pole.

At this point, seeing even inaccurate coverage of OTA television seems like a triumph

This Marketplace story does leave a bit to be desired in terms of accuracy and completeness. In the audio version, the reporter, Sally Herships, like almost everyone covering this story, seems confused by digital versus amplified antennas and TV antennas versus satellite leading her to greatly overstate the price range of the equipment -- think under $10 if you don't need amplification (if not cheaper) -- and she failed to mention that the picture quality is actually better for free TV or that, in the region being discussed, you can get close to one hundred channels over the air or that with an adapter you can watch and digitally record those channels on you laptop.

All of that aside, this is still a story about doing without cable (or at least certain channels on cable), airing on one of the biggest and most respected financial news programs and it lists rabbit ears as the first option. I've been following this story closely for years now and I honestly can't recall this happening before. There have been a few voices in the wilderness on the subject -- Rajiv Sethi being perhaps the first and most notable -- but that was the blogosphere. A story like this in mainstream media is a very promising development, particularly given that the last time I heard the topic broached on Marketplace it was immediately dismissed by their guest expert (from the NYT, of course) who claimed that you can only get "a handful of channels" with an antenna in LA.

The story digital broadcasting has always come down to the question of whether the superior technology could establish a foothold before regulatory capture and the huge imbalance of hype drove it out of business. In that context, this is a good day for the medium.