This generational shift helps explain why single-serve coffee is the fastest-growing sector of the home market. According to a study from the National Coffee Association, single-serve coffee is now the second most popular method of preparation after conventional drip brewers, by far the dominant method. In 2011, 7 percent of the cups of coffee consumed in the United States were made with a single-serve brewer, up from 4 percent in 2010.
The premium that single-serve coffee commands makes it especially lucrative. Julian Liew, a spokesman for Nespresso, said single-serve coffee is 8 percent of the global market, but accounts for 25 percent of its value. It's likely that the number will continue to climb.
]]> Dining & WineBut eventually comics, who tend to talk and talk and talk, who often write their material by talking, recognized the springboard of a podcast as a beautiful thing -- Internet radio without the gatekeepers or, if you like, instant stage time in their down time. Half a decade into the trend, something like an establishment industry is starting to form, with little podcasting chieftains forming networks of shows under such banners as Nerdist, Earwolf and Ace Broadcasting, which belongs to the former radio host turned podcaster Adam Carolla. It's no coincidence that this is all happening in Los Angeles, where comics move to work in TV and movies and stay to become ironic, insular and defeated about it.
Magazine
Stand-Up Comedy Without the Stand-Up. Or the Comedy.
By PAUL BROWNFIELD
Published: February 3, 2012
Don't listen to podcasts by stand-up comics because they're funny. Listen to them because they're almost unbearably raw.
The Ungirthed 7″ is out now on Transparent records.
]]>But critics say the risk of gamification is that it omits the deepest elements of games -- like skill, mastery and risk-taking -- even as it promotes the most superficial trappings, like points, in an effort to manipulate people.
Ian Bogost, a professor of digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, refers to the programs as "exploitationware." Consumers might be less eager to sign up, he argues, if they understood that some programs have less in common with real games than with, say, spyware.
"Why not call it a new kind of analytics?" says Professor Bogost, a founding partner at Persuasive Games, a firm that designs video games for education and activism. "Companies could say, 'Well, we are offering you a new program in which we watch your every move and make decisions about our advertising based on the things we see you do.' "
Gamification may not sound novel to members of frequent-flier or hotel loyalty programs who have strategized for years about ways to game extra points. But those kinds of membership programs offer concrete rewards like upgrades, free flights or free hotel stays. What's new about gamification is its goal of motivating people with virtual awards, like a mayoralty on FourSquare, that have little or no monetary value.
What would Amy Jo Kim or Justin Hall have said ?
Business Day
You've Won a Badge (and Now We Know All About You)
By NATASHA SINGER
Published: February 4, 2012
More companies are turning to gamification -- offering games that let their customers win points for certain activities -- as a way to build both loyalty and a trove of data.
This shift is partly a result of the pressure that academics now feel to generate measurable output. According to the cold calculus of "publish or perish," in which success is often gauged by counting citations, three short articles can be preferable to a single longer one.
But some researchers contend that the trend toward short articles is also better for science. Such "bite size" science, they argue, encourages results to be communicated faster, written more concisely and read by editors and researchers more easily, leading to a more lively exchange of ideas.
In a 2010 article, the psychologist Nick Haslam demonstrated empirically that, when adjusted for length, short articles are cited more frequently than other articles -- that is, page for page, they get more bang for the buck. Professor Haslam concluded that short articles seem "more efficient in generating scientific influence" and suggested that journals might consider adopting short-article formats.
]]> Second, we challenge the idea that shorter articles are easier and quicker to read. This is true enough if you consider a single article, but assuming that there is a fixed number of studies carried out, shorter articles simply mean more articles. And an increase in articles can create more work for editors, reviewers and, perhaps most important, anyone looking to fully research or understand a topic.Third, we worry that shorter, single-study articles can be poor models of science. Replication is a cornerstone of the scientific method, and in longer papers that present multiple experiments confirming the same result, replication is manifestly on display; this is not always so with short articles. (Indeed the shorter format may discourage replication, since once a study is published its finding loses novelty.) Short articles are also more likely to suffer from "citation amnesia": because an author has less space to discuss previous relevant work, he often doesn't do so, which can give the impression that his own finding is more novel than it actually is.
Opinion
The Perils of 'Bite Size' Science
By MARCO BERTAMINI and MARCUS R. MUNAFÒ
Published: January 28, 2012
The pressure to publish short-format articles is bad for science.
Marco Bertamini and Marcus R. Munafò are psychologists at the University of Liverpool and the University of Bristol, respectively.
]]>The conversion of public or institutional buildings into upper-class housing has a long history in New York. The former police headquarters at 240 Centre Street is a condo building, as are the former Y.M.C.A. on West 23rd Street and several former school buildings around the city. The onetime New York Lying-In Hospital, at 305 Second Avenue, is the Rutherford Place condos.
To housing advocates, those conversions represent a victory for the wealthy. Jerilyn Perine, the executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, an advocacy group, said it was important that the city adopt regulations "so that denser housing, particularly for singles, has a fighting chance in the market." She added, "It's great to have people with a lot of money living here -- we need their taxes and spending power -- but the loss of density is tragic, especially where mass transit access is so great."
But at least in the case of the Village Nursing Home, the rich will not be the only beneficiaries. A few years ago, residents there were crammed into outdated rooms that averaged less than 300 square feet per person (current regulations require at least 500). VillageCare was able to build a more modern facility, the VillageCare Rehabilitation and Nursing Center at 214 West Houston Street, using money from the sale of the Hudson Street building. A spokesman for VillageCare, Lou Ganim, said residents remaining in the Village Nursing Home at the time it was sold were transferred to the new facility.
Indeed, sometimes preservation advocates look to condo developers as white knights. Since the Bialystoker Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation on East Broadway closed last year, Laurie Tobias Cohen, the executive director of the Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy, has been "extremely eager" for a developer to buy the historic building and convert it to co-ops or condos. The closing of the nursing home was a great loss, she said; the goal now is to prevent the demolition, or further deterioration, of the building. "What we don't want," she said, "is to lose any more of the built historic fabric."
]]> Real EstateInstead of foreclosing on the 39-story building, which stretches from 52nd Street to 53rd Street, the lenders agreed last month to reduce the principal and defer some of the interest payments on the interest-only loan and extend its maturity for two years, until February 2019. In exchange, Kushner and its powerful new partner in the deal, Vornado Realty Trust, agreed to pour tens of millions of dollars into the building to improve its leasing prospects. The 1.5-million-square feet office building is currently 30 percent vacant.
]]>Doug Bowen, a resident and senior vice president of CORE real estate, said the average house price last year was $975,000 or $395 per square foot, virtually unchanged from 2010. Andrea Yarrington, a vice president of the Corcoran Group, said houses took an average of 136 days to sell, versus 347 in 2010.
Ms. Yarrington added that 15 condos sold in 2011, for an average of $452 per square foot. A search on Streeteasy.com showed four co-ops, three condos and three town houses on the market.
]]> Real EstateRomney
Gingrich
Paul
Santorum ?
And do not forget Huntsman, stand-in for Vice President.
See also the Obama is Stupid meme deconstructed, and Obama Will Win the Long Game.
]]>This ETF was one of our picks for 2011, and delivered such an impressive return that we felt compelled to include it once again for the upcoming year. As the name suggests, HYD focuses on debt securities from municipal issuers that receive below investment grade ratings. Specifically, the underlying index consists of a 75% weight in below investment grade securities and a 25% allocation to Baa / BBB-rated bonds. Many of the securities found in HYD come from arrangements between municipalities and private corporations, which explains why about a quarter of the portfolio is dedicated to tobacco-related issuers [see High Yield ETFdb Portfolio].
Given the anxiety over the health of the muni bond market-especially high yield muni bonds with less-than-perfect credit ratings-it shouldn't be surprising that HYD can make a potentially attractive payout. For investors in the 25% tax bracket, the tax equivalent 30 day SEC yield is in the neighborhood of 7.7%; those in the top 35% bracket can get a return equivalent closer to 8.8%.
]]>
Big in San Francisco, California and NY.
"On Long Island, it's barely a living," said Steven R. Schlesinger, a lawyer and professional poker player. "In Plano, it's a living."
The cutoff for the 1 percent varies depending on how income is calculated. On the low end, an analysis of census data puts the cutoff at $380,000 for a household and provides a wealth of demographic characteristics that were used in this article. On the high end, the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, which uses a broader measure of income that includes capital gains, yielded a cutoff of $690,000 in 2007, the most recent year of data available. The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan group, makes projections based on Internal Revenue Service data and adjusts for people who do not file taxes. It puts the cutoff at $530,000 per tax return in 2011. Even by that gauge, though, $380,000 would still put a family well above the 95th percentile. There is little current data that would allow a measurement of the 1 percent by wealth.
The gap between rich and poor also varies widely. The 1 percent in Manhattan makes $790,000 or more, or 12 times the borough's median income. In Macon, Ga., the 1 percent is far less lofty. The cutoff there is $270,000, roughly six times the median income.
BUSINESS DAY
Among the Wealthiest One Percent, Many Variations
By SHAILA DEWAN and ROBERT GEBELOFF
Published: January 14, 2012
While the 1 percent has become a catch-all to describe the very wealthy, the members of this group are diverse, especially in where they live, what they believe politically and just how rich they are.
A number of factors have converged to heighten the health risk of practicing yoga. The biggest is the demographic shift in those who study it. Indian practitioners of yoga typically squatted and sat cross-legged in daily life, and yoga poses, or asanas, were an outgrowth of these postures. Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems. Many come to yoga as a gentle alternative to vigorous sports or for rehabilitation for injuries. But yoga's exploding popularity -- the number of Americans doing yoga has risen from about 4 million in 2001 to what some estimate to be as many as 20 million in 2011 -- means that there is now an abundance of studios where many teachers lack the deeper training necessary to recognize when students are headed toward injury. "Today many schools of yoga are just about pushing people," Black said. "You can't believe what's going on -- teachers jumping on people, pushing and pulling and saying, 'You should be able to do this by now.' It has to do with their egos."
In a 2003 article in Yoga Journal, Carol Krucoff -- a yoga instructor and therapist who works at the Integrative Medicine center at Duke University in North Carolina -- revealed her own struggles. She told of being filmed one day for national television and after being urged to do more, lifting one foot, grabbing her big toe and stretching her leg into the extended-hand-to-big-toe pose. As her leg straightened, she felt a sickening pop in her hamstring. The next day, she could barely walk. Krucoff needed physical therapy and a year of recovery before she could fully extend her leg again.
MAGAZINE
How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: January 5, 2012
Popped ribs, brain injuries, blinding pain. Are the healing rewards worth the risks?
MetLife, the nation's largest life insurer, announced Tuesday that it would close its home mortgage-origination operation, costing the company at least $90 million. Most of the 4,300 employees at the unit will lose their jobs.
"The majority will no longer have a position," said John Calagna, a spokesman for MetLife. Most of the workers at the business are based in Irving, Tex., Mr. Calagna said.
MetLife said in October that it was seeking a buyer for its mortgage unit after announcing plans to sell deposit-gathering operations to reduce federal oversight. The company reached a deal last month to sell about $7.5 billion of its bank's deposits to General Electric.
The Federal Reserve, which oversees MetLife because of its size and banking operations, rejected its plan last year to raise its dividend and resume share buybacks.
The insurer said affected employees include sales representatives and support staff members. The company has not begun dismissals and will give employees 60 days' notice, Mr. Calagna said. Workers can apply for other positions in the company, he said.
MetLife will continue to service current home-loan clients and offer reverse mortgages, the company said. The wind-down may cost as much as $110 million, according to the statement.