During the Super Bowl, there will be two unusual voices talking in Doug Pederson’s headset.
.. These people are the middle men between Philadelphia’s analytics side and the coaches on the field.
.. “There’s a belief from a lot of the football people that some of the analytics or quantitative people lack the necessary football IQ,”
“In a lot of cases, they don’t trust these guys.”
.. The Eagles’ decision making has drawn praise this season and for good reason: They converted on 17 fourth downs, the most in the NFL during the regular season.
.. Pederson has a security blanket when he makes bold bets. He knows he has support from the person that controls his fate. Earlier this year, Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie praised that line of thought and said “smarter teams do it that way.”
.. All of Philadelphia’s five touchdowns in the NFC Championship were scored by players who weren’t on the team a season ago.
John Seabrook and the Modern Song Machine
Ever noticed a certain “sameness” to the pop songs you hear nowadays? A similarity in their structure, feel, and the voices you hear on the tunes? You’re correctly clued in.
.. The pop music running the airwaves today, those songs you seem to know but aren’t quite sure how you know them, are created in an interesting and deliberate way. Depending on your stance, the result is either horrifying or fascinating.
The method is called track-and-hook songwriting, and employs an entire industry of sub-specialists whose job is to put together pieces of a Frankenstein beast that ends up as a monster hit. Like many other industries, songwriting has been changed immensely by the Internet: With attention spans shorter than ever and avenues for music consumption unlimited and mostly free, hits are more important than ever, not less.
.. Chris Anderson, of The Long Tail fame, predicted that the Internet would lead to less hit-domination and more exploration of individual passions, writing in 2005: “If the twentieth century entertainment industry was about hits, the twenty-first will be about niches…This is not a fantasy. It is the emerging state of music today.”
.. The songs are engineered precisely to hook the listener as soon as possible and then re-expose them to a hook over and over. Attention spans are too short to allow “dead space” in a song:
.. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown explains. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge, too.” The reason, he went on, is that people on average give a song seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook them.
.. In today’s pop world, vocal quality no longer carries the importance it once did, nor does writing meaningful lyrical content.
.. Moneyball-style, the engineering of musical addictiveness takes an old pop-music concept — giving listeners heavy exposure to a song so it becomes familiar — and uses that to predict which songs will be hits
Harvard Admissions Needs ‘Moneyball for Life’
Specifically, our new model has helped us discover a strong positive correlation among three personality traits in children, and the creation of large fortunes, especially Wall Street fortunes. In brief:
1) Self-importance. From his public comments we have learned that Mr. Schwarzman, at age 17 or 18, was so certain Harvard had made a mistake in refusing him admission that he called the dean directly, to tell him.
.. The odds that a child will make outlandish sums of money when he grows up turns out to be strongly correlated with his willingness to challenge adult authority when that authority does not give him exactly what he wants. At bottom, he does not accept any authority higher than himself.
.. 2) An extreme need for external validation. We of course have screened for this in the past, but indirectly, by weighing heavily a child’s school grades. The trouble is that, while success in the classroom may indeed reveal a strong need for public approval, it can also result from sheer brilliance, or, worse, deep interest in the subject material.
.. The very qualities in children most likely to lead them to great financial fortune also render them predisposed, as adults, to giving those fortunes to rich universities, instead of, say, charitable organizations that actually need the money.
Statcast: A new tracking system could revolutionise understanding of baseball
It constantly logs the position of the ball and of every player on the field. It calculates the speed and curvature of a pitch, how rapidly the ball spins and around what axis, and how much faster or slower than reality that pitch appears to be to the hitter, based on the length of the pitcher’s stride. When the ball is hit, the system measures how quickly it leaves the bat and how its path is affected by atmospheric conditions. It then tracks how long fielders take to react before moving, and the efficiency of their routes to the ball’s eventual landing spot. And it takes just 15 seconds to crunch these numbers and integrate them with video recordings.