W. P. Carey MBA - Executive Program - Arizona State University

Ranking pitchers

If you enjoy recording data while at baseball games, here is a new way to graph pitcher performance:

Colby Cash has created a 2-D projection of the K/Inn, BB/Inn and HR/Inn of each ERA qualifying pitcher from 2003. Basically, if you are in the upper left corner of the graph, you're very good.

Follow the link to see this graph large enough to read the details.

Here are a few comments from Baseball Musings on the pitchers in the graph:

-- Kevin Brown is located right between Clemens and Pettitte. He's a good replacement for either.

-- Vazquez is better than both Clemens and Pettite, so he should be an upgrade for NY.

-- The Yankees are the only team with three pitchers in the upper left quadrant.

And when the Diamondbacks traded Schilling, they traded the best pitcher in the game according to this graph.

Spring Training opportunity

If you only go to one Spring Training game this Spring, try to make it a White Sox game. But not just any White Sox game -- try to make it one where they are facing a National League team. The reason is that they have a new pitcher with an amazing side-arm delivery and they won't be using him against any of their AL opponents in Spring Training:

The White Sox are using an interesting strategy this spring. They are only using Shingo Takatsu against NL hitters:

With a funky, sidearm delivery, Takatsu has been baffling White Sox hitters during batting practice and his off-speed pitches have been particularly nasty.

"I don't want to pitch him against any American League team down here unless I have to,'' said Sox pitching coach Don Cooper. "I'd rather make it a complete surprise attack. Nobody's seen him, so let's keep him under wraps.''

The White Sox will play six exhibition games against the NL Arizona Diamondbacks this spring, and they also face the Colorado Rockies five times. If that's not enough to give Takatsu suitable work, the Sox have three "B'' games as another option.

What a difference 2.2 billion seconds can make

Here is a fascinating video of a woman aging 69 years (2.2 billion seconds), speeded up 200 million times so the whole process appears before your eyes in less than a minute.

This animation was created using a series of eight photographs, that were taken over the span of a woman's lifetime. A set of images, called key frames, was created from these photographs to show how she looked at different times in her life. The key frames gradually transform from one to the other through a process called morphing.

There are other amazing videos in their gallery (Playing With Time). Here's one showing changes during a pregnancy.

Maybe there is some cardio benefit

Have you ever wondered if those "push this button to cross street" buttons at busy intersections were really wired into anything? You can cease wondering, at least if you live in New York:

The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on, according to city Department of Transportation officials. More than 2,500 of the 3,250 walk buttons that still exist function essentially as mechanical placebos, city figures show. Any benefit from them is only imagined.

The dawning of neuromarketing

Remember when it was part of "modern" marketing techniques to get kids to recognize corporate logos before they could pick their own parents out of a crowd; or when people were worried that changing "scents" in the ventilation system would cause people to stay longer than they had intended at the slot machines; or, the worry over subliminal advertising planting desires in us through images only our subconscious could pick up?

The new steps in marketing make those techniques seem quite demur: Emory has lent its MRI equipment and psychiatrists to the study of the human brain so that Coca-Cola and K-Mart can better understand how best to incline us to spend our money at their places of business:

By now, most of us in the appropriately concerned corners have heard at least something about Emory University’s neuromarketing research center, the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences. The latest innovation in a never-ending quest to decode consumer behaviors, the institute uses Emory University Hospital’s Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) equipment to scan the brains of human subjects on behalf of corporate clients such as Coca-Cola, K-mart and Home Depot.

Next steps in "thought science" may be more direct: perhaps wireless electrode implants (free with a case of beverages) that set off minor seizures if you enter the "wrong" store; or cause involuntary nausea if you order the "wrong beverage"; or, won't allow you to say "charge it please" if you are ordering the "wrong product" from the "wrong place." Bawaaaahaaaaahaaaaaa ....

Crab dinner

But this time, it's not the crab. It's what the crab -- or crabs -- are eating. Ten million strong, these are not your "have them over for dinner" crustaceans:

The monster crabs, which can weigh up to 25lb and have a claw-span of more than three feet, are proving so resilient that scientists fear they could end up as far south as Gibraltar.

Energised by a mysterious population explosion a decade ago, whole armies of the crustaceans - known as the Kamchatka or Red King Crabs - have already advanced about 400 miles along the roof of Europe, overwhelming the ports of northern Norway.

They now number more than 10 million and have reached the Lofoten Islands off north-west Scandinavia, leaving in their wake what one expert described as "an underwater desert".

A plea for less pleonasm

The word of the day for leap-day.

Why CD sales are declining: another insight

Will the music industry's aggressive fight against downloading make major strides towards reversing the decline in CD sales? One argument is that it will have little affect. The reason can be seen in the graph on the left from Edison Media Research, as first shown in the eMarketer. According to this research, the largest influence on which CDs people buy is radio. Friends and relatives are a distant second. And the major trend in radio over the past three years has been consolidation:

Due to consolidation, today Radio plays a fewer variety of artists, and airs less songs. Consumers hear less music.

And they buy less. What should the RIAA do to increase the sales of CDs? Fight radio consolidation is one idea:

If the RIAA were smart -- and if you suspect by now I think they are not, congratulations, you've been paying attention -- they would hire a lobbyist to petition against pretty much everything Clear Channel Radio ever requests of Congress.

Is it really smart, though, to identify as your primary target the medium that lets the public know about your product? The trends in sales have brought levels back to what they were in the late 1990's -- perhaps it's too early to make any lasting enemies trying to reverse things immediately. And there's still no discussion about whether music is influencing the sales of music CDs.

The secrets of a successful media company

Here is an essay by the CEO of the Washington Post. The introduction:

At last week’s 2004 MBA Media and Entertainment Conference, keynote speaker Donald E. Graham, chairman and CEO of the Washington Post Company, quickly gave two reasons why he was an odd choice to deliver the address. First, a self-described "third generation inheritor of a 19th century business," his professional experience hardly reflected the entrepreneurial aspirations of members of the audience. And second, he said, "There are several trends in the media industry, of which the Washington Post Company participates in zero." One trend the company particularly eschews is the obsession with quarterly earnings reports.

More on outsourcing

A large controversy was set off this past week when one of President Bush's economic advisors said publicly that he thought the outsourcing of U.S. jobs was probably good for the U.S. in the long run. Since then, others have joined in the debate, including academics and consultants:

Experts at Wharton and the Boston Consulting Group point out that outsourcing is as old as the corporation. Increasingly, sourcing work overseas is no longer a tactical option that can help firms save a few dollars here and there; it is a strategic necessity for any company that cares about its long-term competitiveness.

An extended essay brings some content to this discussion, information that may have been obscured by the volume of the political debate earlier in the week.

UPDATE: Tom Peters has posted "16 Hard Truths" about what he calls "Off-shoring." Among several quotes that he includes are these:

"The world has arrived at a rare strategic inflection point where nearly half its population -- living in China, India, Russia -- have been integrated into the global market economy, many of them highly educated workers, who can do just about any job in the world. We're talking about three billion people." (Craig Barrett, CEO, Intel)

"The notion that God intended Americans to be permanently wealthier than the rest of the world, that gets less and less likely as time goes on." (Robert Solow, Nobel Laureate in Economics)