For Your Consideration

The Academy can save some money on greenscreening Seth MacFarlane's head popping up out of Noomi Rapace's stomach for the Oscar opening number. They can just play this video and then cut to Anne Hathaway for reaction shots, for which she'll be well-rehearsed, I'm sure.

Full disclosure, I have not yet seen Les Misérables [please read that with French pronunciation, dear readers]. After watching the above video 60 times on loop, with no break, I feel like I have, though.

It will be hard for her to escape these accusations of disingenuous surprise given how much want she exudes. However, on Oscar night, if Hathaway suddenly breaks into song during her acceptance speech and spends three minutes singing a rehearsed thank you speech, managing to harmonize with the orchestra's shoo-off music at the same time as she completely ignores it, I will be the first to lead the standing ovation.

♫ Do it for me ♫

♫ Anne with an E ♫

Sell Out

Simon Rich's comic novella Sell Out is being serialized in the New Yorker this week. It's about a guy who falls into a vat of pickle brine and is miraculously preserved for 100 years. When he wakes up, he meets his great great grandson, Simon Rich, in Brooklyn.

“Please,” I say. “I must know. What path have you chosen for your life?”

Simon smiles proudly at me.

“I’m a script doctor,” he says.

I shake my head with astonishment.

“That is so wonderful,” I say, my eyes filling up with tears. “I am so proud. I cannot believe my descendant is medical doctor.”

Simon averts his eyes.

“It’s actually just a screenwriting term,” he says. “ ‘Script doctor’ means I, like, punch up movie scripts.”

I stare at him blankly.

“ ‘Punch up’?”

“You know, like, add gags.”

“What sort of gags?”

He clears his throat.

“Let’s see.… Well, the script I’m working on now is about a guy who switches bodies with his pet dog? So I’m adding all these puns, like ‘I’m doggone mad!’ and ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you!’ You know, things like that.”

A long time passes in silence.

“So you are not medical doctor.”

“No,” Simon admits. “I am not.”

That's from Part One of Four. Here are Parts Two and Three. Especially wonderful if you live in Brooklyn:

He leads me down Atlantic Avenue. We pass many strange peoples wearing tight pants and circus mustaches.

Vertical integration versus modularity

James Allworth places some of the blame for Boeing's 787 Dreamliner problems on Boeing's decision to modularize its production and design so early on.

In the creation of any truly new product or product category, it is almost invariably a big advantage to start out as integrated as possible. Why? Well, put simply, the more elements of the design that are under your control, the more effectively you're able to radically change the design of a product — you give your engineers more degrees of freedom. Similarly, being integrated means you don't have to understand what all the interdependencies are going to be between the components in a product that you haven't created yet (which, obviously, is pretty hard to do). And, as a result of that, you don't need to ask suppliers to contract over interconnects that haven't been created yet, either. Instead, you can put employees together of different disciplines and tell them to solve the problems together. Many of the problems they will encounter would not have been possible to anticipate; but that's ok, because they're not under contract to build a component — they've been employed to solve a problem. Their primary focus is on what the optimal solution is, and if that means changing multiple elements of the design, then they're not fighting a whole set of organizational incentives that discourage them from doing it.

Conversely, if you're trying to modularize something — particularly if you're trying to do it across organizational boundaries — you want to be absolutely sure that you know how all the pieces optimally work together, so everyone can just focus on their piece of the puzzle. If you've done it too soon and tried to modularize parts of an unsolved puzzle across suppliers, then each time one of those unanticipated problems or interdependencies arises, you have to cross corporate boundaries to make the necessary changes — changes which could dramatically impact the P&L of a supplier. Lawyers will probably need to get involved. So too might the other suppliers, who could quite possibly be required to change the design of their component, also (chances are, you've already contracted with them, too). The whole thing snowballs.

I just returned from Asymconf, and one of the things Horace Dediu likes to say is that vertical integration is the optimal strategy up until a product is good enough. Once it's good enough, then it's more ideal to modularize, or to start outsourcing more pieces of production.

Apple would seem to be taking the reverse approach with production of the iPhone. Earlier models were assembled from parts from a variety of suppliers, but for competitive reasons, especially vis a vis Samsung, Apple has started to bring more of the parts production in-house. Allworth believes the difference is that Apple "has mastered the art of managing design as an integrated process, while still utilizing outsourcing." It's also a strategy deeply ingrained in Apple's DNA.

One other company comes to mind, one that also takes a consistent vertical integration approach to their production in an industry in which the dominant model is more one of breaking production up. It is related to Apple and also located in the Bay Area. Any guesses?

Yep: Pixar.

You are not alone

I dig this live leaderboard of popularity of articles across all of Gawker's properties (the Big Board). It updates in close to real-time with a simple reader count. Clicking on any article brings up more information on engagement with that article.

Back when I was at Amazon.com, we had tinkered with the idea of making shopping on Amazon seem less lonely and more social, like shopping in the real world at a mall. That was back in an age before social networking services like Facebook and Twitter whose live feeds give one the sense of other people online alongside you as you browse. The Gawker implementation is another way for sites that aren't inherently social to achieve the same feeling.

Nowadays, with most of the studios licensing their movies to a whole slew of channels across the cable dial, movies seem to loop endlessly. Something's always playing on some channel. However, when I was in elementary school, back in the age when we only really had the three major networks on TV, back before DVRs and VCRs, ABC would occasionally air a James Bond movie, and it felt more momentous because I felt the presence of all the other viewers in the country watching that movie at the same time. No time-shifting, no DVD version to pop in at a later date. If you wanted to watch the movie, you had to sit there with everyone else in the country, and we were all watching the same moment in that movie. The attentional synchronicity felt magical, even if I'd never want to go back to that age of strictly scheduled entertainment.

At Hulu, when we were tinkering with design concepts for a next generation programming guide for television, we had played around with offering a channel/programming sort based on the volume of viewers at that very moment, with extra weight given to those programs being watched by your friends (according to your social network of choice). The Gawker Big Board reminded me of some of those concepts.

The best at what they do

The thought experiment is to compare players across sports. I.e., are basketball players better at basketball than, say, snooker players are at playing snooker?

Unless you count being tall as one of the things NBA basketball players “do” I would say on the contrary that NBA basketball players must be among the worst at what they do in all of professional sports. The reason is simple: because height is so important in basketball, the NBA is drawing the top talent among a highly selected sub-population: those that are exceptionally tall. The skill distribution of the overall population, focusing on those skills that make a great basketball player like coordination, quickness, agility, accuracy; certainly dominate the distribution of the subpopulation from which the NBA draws its players.

...

When you look at a competition where one of the inputs of the production function is an exogenously distributed characteristic, players with a high endowment on that dimension have a head start. This has two effects on the distribution of the (partially) acquired characteristics that enter the production function. First, there is the pure statistical effect I alluded to above. If success requires some minimum height then the pool of competitors excludes a large component of the population.

There is a second effect on endogenous acquisition of skills. Competition is less intense and they have less incentive to acquire skills in order to be competitive. So even current NBA players are less talented than they would be if competition was less exclusive.

That's Jeff Ely on whether basketball players are better at basketball than other athletes are at their sports (h/t Marginal Revolution). Click through to see which sports he considers to have the best at what they do.

It's commonly said that one reason the U.S. can't field a world class soccer team is that our best athletes go into football and basketball instead because they are more glamorous sports in the U.S. That might serve as an additional complicating factor.

The equivalent in the tech world seems to be that design talent disproportionately flocks towards consumer rather than enterprise apps and services, or so it's often said. Based on my experience using enterprise apps as compared to consumer apps, it certainly feels like the crucible of competition has run hotter on the consumer side, resulting in superior user experience.