Links for 2011-07-13

"Recovering The Satellites is easily my favorite Counting Crows album, precisely because it's the record where Duritz went from wanting to be a big star (or so he sang in "Mr. Jones") to equating his celebrity with slow-motion drowning. This was not an uncommon sentiment for '90s rock bands, though by 1996 the music press was no longer sympathetic to guys like Duritz being so angsty all the time. While August was generally warmly received by critics, the backlash kicked in hard with Satellites, and this had a lot to do with Counting Crows being among the last of the big-selling grunge-influenced bands. The guitars on Satellites are appreciably heavier and screechier than the clean-sounding Americana of August--though today Satellites just sounds a lot like Wildflowers-era Tom Petty--and Duritz was obviously cut from the Eddie Vedder/Michael Stipe mold of brooding, sensitive frontmen that was just about to go out of style as the droogs of rap-rock waited in the wings. "

"Discretion relies on what Aristotle called "practical wisdom." In a recent book by that name, Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe outlined case after case in which fear-based rule-following led to obviously stupid outcomes, and used those cases to argue for a renewed appreciation of the role of discretion in decision making. "Zero tolerance" policies that result in a kid getting suspended from school for a week for carrying aspirin in her purse are direct results of a distrust of local discretion. The fear of arbitrary individual power leads, oddly enough, to arbitrary depersonalized power. Someone needs to be empowered to stop the madness.

Since it's difficult to specify in advance what the precise boundaries of discretion should be, courts have adopted a "disparate impact" standard. In other words, rather than trying to suss out what someone was thinking, they try to suss out the impact on the ground. "

While reading another nonsensical blog from an unnamed source I started looking around and found a statement from the Authors Guild against the 25% of net on books. The key piece of this press release was the model that a 15% royalty rate on hardbacks was fair, with fair being defined as a 50-50 split between the author and the publisher.  I could do something with this idea and I set out to determine what a fair Ebook royalty rate should be.  I then found Lee Goldberg's 2/3/11 blog which ran through the numbers of the 25% royalty rate. It is very good and I suggest you read it. I'll wait...

...While Lee showed the 25% rate to be unfair he did not tackle the question of what a fair rate should be. Thanks for leaving me something, Lee!

In what follows I lay out the philosophy (a 50-50 split between author and publisher as achieved in hardback sales), and my assumptions to determine a fair Ebook royalty rate .

When the time comes around to fight, the boys are like, "Oh wow, look at this thing that happened. Isn't that crazy?" while Hermione is like, "Idiots, I figured that out like 5 books ago. CAN YOU PLEASE FOCUS."
And after she saves the day and just about everyone in the entire book/series/magical world tells her that she's "The smartest witch for her age," is it Hermione who finally gets the fancy broom?
Of course not.
SWOOP IN AN STEAL THE GLORY AGAIN, HORRIBLE HARRY.

College basketball struggles to make a splash when its season begins and there's incentive to make early-season hoops more interesting to the casual fan. My idea is to turn over the first week of the season to my game generator, ScheduleMatic, which will schedule the first two opponents for every Division I team.
What's ScheduleMatic? It's an algorithm that finds competitive matchups among nearby teams, the types of games that generate interest among the die-hard and casual fan alike. ScheduleMatic accomplishes this by putting the 344 Division I teams in random order and then conducts an automated draft, matching nearby teams with a small difference in their ranking from the previous season. (In this case, I'll use my own ratings, but any system will do.) In a matter of seconds, ScheduleMatic produces a complete schedule of one home and one road game for each team.