Continuous Productivity

Nate Silver Profile

A very good profile on Baseball Prospectus' Nate Silver at the University of Chicago Magazine. It delves into the usual's such as his background, how he got started, etc. But more interestingly, it explains the importance of statistics to baseball. In short, no statistics, no baseball:

From baseball’s earliest days, fans have sought to understand the sport by examining its statistics. More than a decade before the first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, emerged in 1869, newspapers printed box scores—tables listing players’ names, how many runs each player scored, and the number of hands lost, or outs, each player caused. “It was not particularly sophisticated,” says Alan Schwarz, a New York Times sports writer and author of The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics (Thomas Dunne Books, 2004), “but it was the first attempt to say what happened in the game.” By the turn of the 20th century the sport evolved into some semblance of modern-day Major League Baseball—team owners formed the National League; pitchers began throwing overhand standing 60 feet, 6 inches from the plate; batters walked after four balls and struck out after three strikes; and fielders wore gloves. Statistics also evolved, and newspapers started tracking pitchers’ innings pitched, hits, earned runs, walks, and strikeouts; and hitters’ batting averages, hits, and runs scored. In 1920, when Major League Baseball began requiring umpires to replace balls at the first sign of wear, fans and reporters reveled in the flurry of history-making records that stemmed from higher-scoring games.

The fascination with stats kept growing. In 1952 the Bowman Gum company and Topps Chewing Gum printed their first baseball cards, featuring players’ data on the flip side—info kids promptly memorized. As Schwarz wrote in The Numbers Game, “Topps baseball cards joined box scores as the major pipelines that fed statistics into young boys’ brains.” In 1961, when Bucknell University mathematics student Hal Richman compiled statistics into Strat-O-Matic, a tabletop game where players make strategic and personnel decisions, he spurred a generation of children and adults to think critically and scientifically about baseball.

Mind-Reading Class

Interesting Financial Times profile on up-and-coming University of Chicago professor, Nick Epley.  His focus seems to be on how people read each other:

His research looks at how people intuit others’ thoughts, how good they are at it and the consequences of what he calls “mind-reading mistakes”. The findings are revealing: first, people generally know less about others’ views than they think they do. “For example, in experiments where people are asked which of their co-workers like them, their accuracy is barely better than if they picked them at random,” he says.

His research has very interesting implications for leaders in the business world:

“It’s uncomfortable to give other people negative performance feedback, so difficult conversations that need to be had often aren’t. Employees usually think they’re doing the right things – if the boss thinks the employee is doing something useless, there’s likely to be a gap there. So people go in with positive evaluations of themselves, hoping to hear the best and when they’re told the best – because the boss has a hard time having the difficult discussion – they come out thinking they got valid feedback.” Prof Epley says the other party should summarise what has been said. He also says companies should collect more data. “They should act like a scientist would and run some experiments. Lots of big organisations could do that really easily.” Finally, he says, if you want to avoid ambiguity, never depend on e-mail.

Speechwriting for Ted Williams

A very good friend of mine, Snehal Mehta, recently forwarded this NY Times profile on Obama speechwriter, Jon Favreau.  Favreau is only 26 years old, but an integral part of the Obama team:

...Favs, as everyone calls him, looks every bit his age, with a baby face and closely shorn stubble. And he leads a team of two other young speechwriters: 26-year-old Adam Frankel, who worked with John F. Kennedy’s adviser and speechwriter Theodore C. Sorensen on his memoirs, and Ben Rhodes, who, at 30, calls himself the “elder statesman” of the group and who helped write the Iraq Study Group report as an assistant to Lee H. Hamilton.

Together they are working for a politician who not only is known for his speaking ability but also wrote two best-selling books and gave the much-lauded keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

“You’re like Ted Williams’s batting coach,” Mr. Favreau said.

How Rich is He?

Interesting New York Times profile on Sheldon Adelson, the third richest man in America.  What struck me was just how fast he became so wealthy:

The Las Vegas Sands went public in December 2004, and over the next two years his net worth soared by $17.5 billion. That works out to almost $1 million an hour, weekends, holidays and nights included. “He got richer faster than anyone else in history,” said Peter W. Bernstein, co-author of “All the Money in the World,” a book about the people on the Forbes 400 list.

Also, it's interesting to note, like many entrepreneurs, Adelson tried his hand at multiple businesses before finding one that paved the way to his current wealth:

Mr. Adelson started a business selling toiletry kits to motels, tried his hand at the mortgage broker business, and in the 1960s he joined Mr. Chafetz and another friend from the old neighborhood, Ted Cutler, in a charter tours start-up.

But it was not until he founded Comdex, the premier computer trade show through much of the 1980s and 1990s, that he hit on an idea that propelled him into the upper reaches of the wealthy.

Their growing trade show business led him into the casino business:

“The Sands had enough land to build a convention center,” Mr. Chafetz said. “That’s why we got into the casino business.” When it was completed, at the start of the 1990s, the Sands Expo and Convention Center stood as the largest privately owned exhibition center in the country.

In 1995, Mr. Adelson sold Comdex to Softbank of Japan for $862 million – giving him a personal payoff of just over $500 million. He and his partners were all in their 60s, but where the three other ‘‘boys” chose to semi-retire, Mr. Adelson made even bigger bets.

He demolished the Sands in a spectacular implosion (replete with an anticipatory fireworks show), borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars and in its place built the Venetian, which cost $1.5 billion and opened in 1999.