Industrial Organization and the NBA

in ,

Via Marginal Revolution, a reference to a study of 11 NBA seasons that indicates that teams with one highly paid star and many lesser paid players win more games. 11 seasons doesn't sound like a large enough data set, but it is intriguing to wonder how the Miami Heat do this season with two alpha dogs, whether they will how and when to defer and how and when to lead. The Bulls benefitted all those years from Pippen being willing to play lieutenant to Jordan's general, and in crunch time there was never any doubt whose hands the ball would end up in (regardless of whether he chose to take the last shot or pass it off, as he did to Air Canada in his comeback double nickel game against the Knicks).


I'm not sure if it's a salary or talent issue as much as it's a personality issue. Salary is a symptom. Will Lebron and DWade be happy not being the guy to take the last minute shot for the win? Are they wired that way?


A player's mindset on his place in the pecking order can evolve. The year Jordan left the NBA to play baseball, Pippen wanted to step up to be the Man. The result was that a player that been the consummate glue guy for years on the Bulls melted down in the playoffs when Phil Jackson diagrammed the last shot for Toni Kukoc instead of him.


It was a black mark on his reputation, but I'm sympathetic. Most competitive people aren't wired to defer again and again, and it takes a special personality to play second fiddle for life (it's especially useful if your point guard is wired that way).


As of today, the Heat are 8-6, so the early returns are mixed. The center of their defense is a gaping hole. Lebron still should have gone to Chicago, he would have had a star in Derrick Rose who'd be willing to play sidekick and two guys in Noah and Boozer who could provide interior defense and scoring.


Well, I hear the weather in South Beach is nice this time of year.


Long run

in

I imagine reading about endurance athletes today is like reading about religious saints in ancient times. A mix of the mystical and masochistic, people denying themselves usual human comforts in an effort to push themselves to some superhuman level. Hearing about coaching in endurance running echoes stories of golf coaching: many biomechanical theories about optimal form, none having won anything near unanimous acclaim, mixed in with a generous dose of the mystical and psychological.


Two companion pieces worth reading on on Alberto Salazar coaching Dathan Ritzenhein and the future of U.S. running: CNNSI interview with Salazar, and a great Jennifer Kahn profile on Salazar and Ritzenhein in the New Yorker this week.


Count me curious as to how Ritzenhein does tomorrow in the NY Marathon.


Everything HDR

in , ,

A natural consequence of the convergence of video and still photography is that everything is going HDR (high dynamic range). Examples:



HDR was possible before video/still photography converged, but it was a hassle. You had to fix your camera in position, usually on a tripod, for multiple shots, and that alone is too much work for the vast majority of photographers.


But many still cameras can now shoot video at the same resolution as stills, and many digital video cameras have sensors that shoot each frame at resolutions previously reserved for still cameras, and following both those trends to the horizon point leads to the same HDR method: shoot two or more frames in rapid succession at different exposures, then blend them to produce a single HDR still. If the frame rate is high enough and the camera decently stable, you no longer need to lock the camera down. With convenience comes more use.


The Red HDRx mode takes that principle one step further and extends it to shooting video. Of course, with motion, consecutive frames of video won't match exactly, and so a new requirement is a software algorithm to blend the two frames. An unexpected benefit of this frame blending, according to early testers, is that motion in digital video now looks more film-like. If that's the case, and the HDR can extend the dynamic range of digital video 1 or more stops, that's a significant breakthrough.


The increased flexibility is great, it allows usable photographs in situations that were formerly kryptonite for digital cameras. I traded in my Nikon D3 body for a D3s for its increased light sensitivity. At my sister's wedding recently I put the D3s through its paces. It doesn't have an HDR mode, but it has am improved sensor that can see into the dark without introducing eye-bleeding digital noise. Though my sister held her wedding in a dark vintage furniture store with lots of hard lighting, I never used my flash once, and the results were astonishing.


Of course, as with most tools, higher dynamic range is just a tool, and not a universal positive. I ended up going into Lightroom for most of the photos and taking all that the camera saw in the shadows and removing a lot of it, crushing the blacks and reintroducing the high contrast that a higher dynamic range photo lacks. The irony is that just because you can see everything doesn't mean you should. High contrast often heightens emotional response to a photo, and that, more than resolution or dynamic range or any number of other factors, is what matters.




Interview with Matthew Weiner

in , ,

Lots of good nuggets for Mad Men fans in this interview with Matthew Weiner. In light of the Epstein interview I posted the other week, I thought this sentiment from Weiner was interesting.



The other aspects of things that are going on in entertainment right now are frustrating to me. I’ve been very disappointed with whatever has happened to the business model that has made the movies so incredibly unattractive to me. I’m so starved for things, for any kind of entertainment. The Oscar things are coming out right now – maybe they saved everything good for right then and there. But it’s been a bummer. It’s a bummer to see movie after movie where so many talented people get together and so much money is spent, and they’re just bland, lifeless, familiar, fake. I’m not a superhero, it’s not one of my interests. It’s O.K. for it to be a fraction of the entertainment that’s out there, but it can’t be everything. And I have four little boys so I’m seeing everything. And they’re tired of going to the movies.



Later:



It’s a bummer. But we have things we watch together. We still watch “The Simpsons.

Michelin Guide SF 2011: a new 3-star restaurant

in

The Restaurant at Meadowood joins French Laundry as the newest Michelin 3-star restaurant in the Bay Area, the only two outside of NY. That's the answer to one of the six storylines the SF Chronicle highlighted for this year's release of the guide.


The updated list of Bay Area restaurant starholders is below.


 


3 Star Restaurants (***):


French Laundry


Restaurant at Meadowood


 


2 Star Restaurants (**):


Coi


Cyrus


Manresa


 


1 Star Restaurants (*):


Acquerello


Alexander’s Steakhouse


Ame


Applewood


Auberge du Soleil


Aziza


Baume


Bouchon


Boulevard


Campton Place


Chez TJ


Commis


Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton


Dio Deka


Etoile


Farmhouse Inn & Restaurant


Fleur de Lys


Frances


Gary Danko


La Folie


La Toque


Luce


Madera


Madrona Manor


Masa’s


Mirepoix


Murray Circle


One Market


Plumed Horse


Quince


Redd


Saison


Sante


Solbar


Spruce


Terra


Ubuntu


Village Pub


Wakuriya


The music business...doing great?

in ,

The music business is dying. Or is it? If you look at all revenues, the pie may be growing. Maybe the music business isn't dying, it's just evolving, and recorded music is just becoming the loss leader that fuels the engine.



The longest, loudest boom is in live music. Between 1999 and 2009 concert-ticket sales in America tripled in value, from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion.


It is not that more people are going to concerts. Rather, they are paying more to get in. In 1996 a ticket to one of America’s top 100 concert tours cost $25.81, according to Pollstar, a research firm that tracks the market. If prices had increased in line with inflation, the average ticket would have cost $35.30 last year. In fact it cost $62.57. Well-known acts charge much more. Leading musicians have also, by roundabout means, seized a larger share of the mysterious “service

Stand and Deliver

in

This Washington Post article on standing up at work struck home for me because I recently got a motorized desk that allows me to stand up at my desk all day. The article cites experts on both sides of the debate, some in support of the health benefits of standing and others who think it's ridiculous.


Standing feels better though it's more taxing over long stretches. Until they settle the health debate, I'm standing until I can't anymore and then sitting for respite. It may seem like a hedge but it's just listening to my body.


How TV and Movies switched roles

in , ,

Edward Jay Epstein offers an explanation as to how TV become elite entertainment while movies became mass entertainment. What's interesting is that he attributes most of the switch to structural conditions and not creative choices.



This role reversal, rather than a momentary fluke, proceeds directly from the new economic realities of the entertainment business.


Consider what happened to Pay-TV. When HBO , now a subsidiary of Time Warner, initially signing up monthly subscribers in the 1960s, it provided the only way home viewers could see movies uninterrupted by commercials, and it (and Cinemax unit) eventually signed up through their local cable systems 40 million subscribers. HBO gets a fixed a fee– about $4.5 per month– for each subscriber, no matter how little or often they watch HBO. To continue to harvest this immense bounty, HBO has to perform a single feat: stop subscribers from ending their service. But since nowadays its subscribers can get movies cheaper and fast from other sources, such as Netflix, retail stores and the Internet, HBO needs a more exclusive inducement to keep them. And so, beginning in the 1990s, it began putting more and more resources into creating its own original programing that would appeal to the head of the house. Not restricted by the need to maximize the audience (it has no advertising), ratings boards (it has no censorship) or non-English speaking markets, it was able to create edgy character-driven edgy series such as Sex and the City, not only succeeded in retaining their subscribers but achieved surprising acclaim in the media. Other pay-channels followed suit. So did other networks so as not lose market share. The result is the elevation of television, or at least some tiers of it, to a medium of entertainment for the elite.



The descent of movies into mass entertainment, a glut of franchises, remakes, sequels, and comic book adaptations, is less mysterious given the rise of the multiplex and its dependence on brute force marketing and the need to create a differentiated experience versus the home theater DVD rental alternative.


The rise of TV as an outlet for elite entertainment is a bit more surprising to me. The ability to write for grown-ups on ad-free channels is certainly an attractive outlet, though it took some time for those channels to gain the scale to finance productions on the level of Band of Brothers, The Sopranos, and Boardwalk Empire, all of which had feature film size budgets. What also fascinates me, though, is the rise of cable as an outlet for serial dramas. A show like The Wire is perhaps the epitome of a type of entertainment that seems entirely impossible prior to the existence of HBO. No broadcast network could have aired that, and even if they had, it's difficult to imagine any broadcast network keeping it on air with its ratings as low as they were during its run on HBO.


The multi-season, multi-story-arc serial drama is a fairly new archetype in the TV world, and cable seems to be the best place creative people can paint on that broad a canvas. It's not just that I'm older, but a night in with a few episodes off of my DVR feels like a huge favorite versus a night out at the movies nine times out of ten these days because cable is where the most ambitious storytelling has migrated.



The Adjacent Possible

in ,

Steven Berlin Johnson adapts a portion of his upcoming book Where Good Ideas Come From for this essay in the WSJ.



The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas may seem logical enough, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas. Ironically, those walls have been erected with the explicit aim of encouraging innovation. They go by many names: intellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology, top-secret R&D labs. But they share a founding assumption: that in the long run, innovation will increase if you put restrictions on the spread of new ideas, because those restrictions will allow the creators to collect large financial rewards from their inventions. And those rewards will then attract other innovators to follow in their path.


The problem with these closed environments is that they make it more difficult to explore the adjacent possible, because they reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem, and they reduce the unplanned collisions between ideas originating in different fields.



Groupon and other deal sites - not great for business

in

These survey results confirms my suspicion that this current consumer craze for Groupon and the gazillion similar sites isn't all it's cracked up to be for participating businesses.


I don't argue with their popularity among consumers. I have friends who seemingly plan their entire dining and social calendars around deals obtained through one of the dozen or more daily deal services they subscribe to. Between last year and this year, these services have exploded in popularity.


The first issues is that businesses that participate in these deals immediately devalue their product. Sales in general set a new price anchor for consumers. If a restaurant offers me $50 for $25, their brand is immediately tarnished in my mind, even if subconsciously. Paying full price there won't ever feel comfortable again. Retailers that do annual sales train users to wait for those. I'll never buy a towel at full price from Restoration Hardware because I know once a year they have a bath sale (though they are some nice towels). I'll never pay more than 80% of the listed price at Bed, Bath, and Beyond because they have flooded the market with 20% off coupons.


The second and related issue is that these deals appeal most to price sensitive customers, not the type of loyal customers most businesses are hoping to be set up with.



Restaurants were the most unprofitable category, describing Groupon customers as "entitled," poor tippers, and definitely not repeat customers. Spas, on the other hand, were the most profitable (though their Groupon-using customers were still bad tippers).





...when asked whether they would run a promotion again, almost half (42 percent) said they wouldn't. That number includes one in five of the businesses that ran profitable Groupon promotions.


"There is widespread recognition among many business owners that social promotion users are not the relational customers that they had hoped for or the ones that are necessary for their business’s long-term success," reads the report. "Instead, there is disillusionment with the extreme price sensitive nature and transactional orientation of these consumers among many study respondents. "




Perhaps the worst aspect of these daily deal e-mails for me is the lack of targeting. Most of the deals seem to be targeted towards women. If I receive one more e-mail with an offer for a spa day or pilates or a facial...well, actually, I won't, because I just unsubscribed to most of these.


A day in the kitchen at French Laundry

in

Sophie Brickman works a night in the kitchen of French Laundry and writes about her experience.


 



Reservationists Google all customers who make a reservation, which is why you might get a candle in your dessert even if you don't tell anyone it's your birthday, or a glass of Champagne to celebrate that merger. Extras are all in an effort to keep a diner's experience as exciting as possible.


"Minimum" VIPs might be people who have visited many times - they receive a few extra courses in addition to the regular menu. Maximum VIPs, Hollingsworth said, "might be a chef coming in, or someone who is well regarded in their industry, someone we have a relationship with." If the kitchen has the time, these special guests get a completely off-the-menu menu, created that day especially for them. Julia Roberts had been in recently and stood in the kitchen waving at the television set to the cooks at Per Se, none of whom looked up. I asked Hollingsworth if she got an off-the-menu menu. "She was VIP, but not off the menu," he said, adding cryptically, "That was because of the party size."



 


I visited the kitchen of French Laundry after my one and only dinner there late last summer. We were among the last diners that night, and the kitchen was already nearly empty and immaculate, counters gleaming, everything put away, ready for the next day's endeavors.


Rex Ryan

in

I enjoyed this profile of Rex Ryan, the undisputed star (leaving aside Antonio Cromartie trying to recite the names of his eight kids from six women) of this past season's Hard Knocks, a big man both literally and figuratively, the charismatic antihero of the NFL. If you watched the show, the profile won't surprise you, but the writing makes it worth a return visit:



Wherever he wanders, Ryan is hard to miss. An immense man whose thick foothills of neck and haunch swell into a spectacular butte at the midsection, he possesses a personal geography that, from first-and-10 distance, assumes a form that follows his function — Ryan looks like nothing more than an extra-large football.



More:



Some people question why the profession requires 90-hour weeks; with men like Buddy Ryan, a game plan is their work of creation. Coaches say that on the best teams, only 10 percent of the time do all 11 players perform their roles as scripted. Every night all over America, sleeping badly on office air mattresses are overweight middle-aged men with faltering marriages.



So much depends on the second bottle

in

Alan Richman offers advice on how to choose the second bottle of wine at dinner.



I have a friend who believes the first bottle establishes your credibility as a wine person, whereas the second is about relaxation and enjoyment. I disagree. To me, the second bottle is the one that counts. The first douses thirst. The second descends, vaporizes, enriches, inflates. It must be better than the first, and only after it's admired can you relax.



But I was amused by his thoughts on the bottles beyond that as well.



The third? Irrelevant. By then, if it's just the two of you and you're drinking that much, it's love. If you're at a table of four, the topic of wine will have been supplanted by baseball or the stock market, subjects more easily understood. The fourth bottle, if there is one, should always be big, red, and inexpensive, because by then nobody will know what the hell he's drinking.



Nikon 85mm AF-S f1.4

in , ,

Ryan Brenizer reviews the new AF-S Nikon 85mm F/1.4G, which replaces the legendary 85mm f/1.4 AF-D, which is maybe my favorite Nikon lens ever. With the latter, I just open it up wide, walk around, and I always seem to find an interesting photo in the viewfinder. The 85mm length just feels like my preferred focal length for so many situations.


The new lens looks like a more than worthy replacement, though at $1,699, I can't justify it now. If I had some more free time for travel and photography, it would be at the top of my list.


This new 85mm lens, along with the recently released AF-S 24mm f/1.4G, AF-S 50mm f/1.4G, and the newly announced AF-S 35mm f1.4G, Nikon finally has a modern, updated, world-class lineup of primes at all the focal ranges I use the most.


Real photographers shoot prime.


Nikon glass was what first swayed me to Nikon over Canon, but for a couple years I was not an exception among Nikon people for wondering why the lens lineup wasn't being updated more quickly. Thankfully those days are past, and the only area where I have some Canon envy is on digital video, though in that space I'd just rather shoot with a dedicated video camera.