Dark horse National League MVP

Jared Cross had a great article over at ESPN (behind the ESPN Insider paywall, which I find a solid investment) about a dark horse National League MVP candidate who derives a ton of value from a skill most MVP voters don't consider: pitch framing.

No, it's not Yadier Molina, the oft-acknowledged best defensive catcher in baseball, though he is one of the leaders. No, it's actually Jonathan Lucroy of the Brewers (I would have kept that a secret but it's in the title of the article and the URL so I'm not giving away too much). 

According to Dan Turkenkopf , each extra strike a catcher gets for his pitcher is worth .133 runs, and since Lucroy ranks as the number one catcher in terms of getting extra strikes through pitch framing, with 293 extras strikes thus far this year, the 33 runs he saved his team gives him a higher Wins Above Replacement than even Andrew McCutchen!

Another reminder that a lot of properly valuing people is figuring out exactly how to measure contribution. In the business world, it's still amazing how fuzzy the contribution of people is measured across a vast majority of jobs. Ironically, the higher in an organization a person is, the harder it tends to be to measure their contribution with both accuracy and precision.

Why we sign our emails "Thank you"

...the need for those sorts of rituals remains important, particularly in electronic communication where tone is hard to read. We end our communiques with “talk later,” “talk 2 u tomorrow,” or even simply “bye.” “Thanks” and “Thank you” have worked their way into this portion of the formula particularly in emails. More traditional valedictions have been replaced with “Thank you” so subtly that it’s now a common sign-off in this medium. But what does it mean? And why is it more acceptable than “Sincerely” or “Yours truly”?

It is in part be a reflection of our times. Email offers a speedier means of contact than an actual letter (and in some cases, a telephone), but that speed also means we’re sending more messages through this medium both for personal and professional reasons, and reading and responding to these messages requires a commitment of time. So it’s more important that the sender recognize the burden that they’ve placed on the recipient. In a time when letters took time to write, send, and respond to, it was important for the sender to attest to her reliability. Responses and actions were not so easy to take back. “Sincerely” and “Yours truly” which were meant to build trust between communicants. Credibility was an important determinant of whether a response would be issues. Today, as the web enables stranger to contact each other with little effort, credibility is less of a factor in determining responses (SPAM mail aside) when weighed against time.

From Scientific American.

I disagree with the end of the article, though, in which the author argues that affectionate closings are "vital to the continuation of the relationship."

The line between email and messaging (SMS, Facebook, Twitter DM's, WhatsApp, etc.) has blurred. In professional settings, you're taught that shorter emails are better, and that has removed one thing that differentiates email from messages. Since no one puts valedictions or even greetings in messages, they're starting to disappear from emails as well. Most of the email I receive no longer begins with a greeting like "Eugene", and most of them don't even end with a signature since it's clear from the From: line who the email is from.

Entertainment as export

Apparently Pop Coreano, or Korean Pop, is quite popular. 

That niche — an amalgamation of spectacular entertainment and relentless optimism — resonates with teenagers in South American nations. The values these stars represent are almost “Confucian,” says Professor Patrick Messerlin, a French economist who has produced an economic analysis of K-pop and who earlier this year addressed a cultural forum in Seoul on the music’s globalization. In his research, Messerlin found that “K-pop performers deliver a sense of modesty and restraint,” and “insist on working hard and learning more” during public appearances, something Western pop artists do not do. Their music represents a “new, colorful and cheerful start,” and not “an old order,” something that will easily appeal to millions of young Central and South Americans, living where economic challenges are rife and nondemocratic regimes common. K-pop’s positive energy is a world away from the introspective, jaded and at times downright depressing style of much Anglophone rock, indie and emo. “[The Koreans] say, ‘We understand your problems,’” Messerlin explains, “‘We went through it too,’” referring to the Korean War and the economic crash of the late 1990s.

For the fans, there is no contest. K-pop songs “are beautiful, are decent,” says Jenii Ramirez, an 18-year-old K-pop fan from Colombia, where TV station Caracol has been broadcasting a K-pop talent show and where K-pop concerts in the capital, Bogotá, lure audiences of at least 5,000. The singers, Ramirez says, have “dedication and are taught to fight in life, understanding that dreams are attainable.”

Unintended consequences

In 2003, fearing that overworked medical residents were committing errors due to fatigue, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education put limits on how many consecutive hours residents could work on a shift.

Now, ten years later, it's not clear the change has had the desired effect. 

One study, led by Sanjay Desai at Johns Hopkins, randomly assigned first-year residents to either a 2003- or 2011-compliant schedule. While those in the 2011 group slept more, they experienced a marked increase in handoffs, and were less satisfied with their education. Equally worrisome, both trainees and nurses perceived a decrease in the quality of care—to such an extent that one of the 2011-compliant schedules was terminated early because of concerns that patient safety was compromised. And another study, comparing first-year residents before and after the 2011 changes, found a statistically significant increase in self-reported medical error.

While these studies suggest the complex nature of patient safety—that manipulating one variable, like hours worked, inevitably affects another, like the number of handoffs—there is another tradeoff, more philosophical than quantifiable. It has less to do with the variables within the system and how we tinker with them, and more to do with what we overlook as we focus relentlessly on what we can count.

Caveat: this essay by Lisa Rosenbaum in the New Yorker is a bit short on data for my liking, the above study feeling like just one insufficient data point. 

But the meta point about unintended consequences and complexity is worth noting. The increase in handoffs of patients, the decrease in time any one doctor spends with a patient, these all have consequences that work against the quality of healthcare, even as I believe more well-rested residents are a good thing, many of my doctor friends having been put through grueling rotations.

Is violence really down in the U.S.?

Perhaps to the public at large, it effectively has. However... 

...the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.

Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.

From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole. What Ayn Rand once called the “freest, noblest country in the history of the world” is now the most incarcerated, and the second-most incarcerated country in history, just barely edged out by Stalin’s Soviet Union. We’re used to hearing about the widening chasm between the haves and have-nots; we’re less accustomed to contemplating a more fundamental gap: the abyss that separates the fortunate majority, who control their own bodies, from the luckless minority, whose bodies are controlled, and defiled, by the state.

A bit more, emphasis mine.

In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

Here's the kicker: 

America’s prison system is a moral catastrophe. The eerie sense of security that prevails on the streets of lower Manhattan obscures, and depends upon, a system of state-sponsored suffering as vicious and widespread as any in human history.

All from a fascinating essay by Christopher Glazek, one well worth reading all the way through.  My quotes may make it seem very one-sided, and Glazek's view on the issue is clear, but the statistics make the tradeoffs clear, so where you fall on the issue is not a given. It's worth making the costs transparent, as in cases like Abu Ghraib, so we understand how we purchase our way of life.