Business planning is about knowing where you want to get to, figuring out how you’re going to get there, and then self-correcting along the way.Why must planning include self-correction? Life.
Customers who purchased a pumpkin spice latte spent an average of $7.81, compared with an average check of $6.67 for party poopers who ordered non-pumpkin items.But wait, there's more [bold added]:
[Marketing researchers] conducted research correlating an increase in the frequency of visits....no wonder coffee chains and fast food franchises are constantly rolling out new limited-time offers and seasonal specialties. These items build excitement and draw in customers—who tend to spend more on each visit.Increasing both the number of sales and the average sales ticket is that rare marketing sweet spot.
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| Those who can't wait for Starbucks' fall introduction can buy the ingredients and make it at home. |
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| The shield-shaped metal button (top left) should be glued to the glass and cured for 12-24 hours before affixing the mirror. |
Getting things into 140 characters might be teaching young writers one of the most cherished virtues among those who deal professionally with writing: brevity.Excessive wordiness is learned [italics added]:
Why do people write more than they should, when most people find writing difficult? This may be because during their education, young writers are...told to write papers to minimum lengths.Say your piece. Use no more words than are necessary. Then get off the stage.
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| The mind's eye switches between the columns and the shadowy figures. |
The market’s recent moves have made Apple even more attractive on a valuation basis, even with today’s recovery. At 11 times forward earnings [blogger's note: price divided by next year's estimated earnings], Apple is well below both its 12.6 times historical average and the Standard & Poor’s 500, at 14.7 times. Moreover, as [Wells Fargo analyst Maynard] Um notes, the shares change hands at 7.9 times his 2016 free cash flow estimate, while Apple has historically bottomed between eight and nine times free cash flow.The principle of diversification prevents us from acquiring more AAPL, but we would be a buyer if it did not already comprise a significant part of our portfolio.
This comes as the shares’ yield is approaching 2%, and the company’s projected long-term earnings growth is 16.5%. [Blogger's note: Apple's "PEG" ratio--in this case 12 divided by 16.5--is less than 1.0, which is normally considered a strong buy signal.]
Investors are right to be concerned about China’s impact on Apple, as the nation accounted for more than a quarter of the company’s fiscal third-quarter sales. However, investors likely took the connection between Apple and China too far in recent days.
Update your blog at least once a week. If you do it every day and you really don't have anything to share it becomes like spam and may turn off readers.I resemble that remark!
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| Exploratorium exhibit |
What was once a trickle of media mentions has become a cascade. The Economist devotes this week's cover to CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). The Economist even uses the "G" word.
There are those who will oppose CRISPR because it lets humans play God.The gene-editing technology is remarkably easy to use, "like the find-and-replace function on a word processor."
By changing a gene in an early-stage embryo, or in the cell that makes an egg, you could ensure that the change is found in every cell in the adult body—including its own eggs or sperm, which would pass it to the next generation and thus on down through the ages. No one is pursuing such avenues in the clinic as yet.We can do more than Victor Frankenstein ever imagined: we can create the monster, who will beget another monster, who will beget...
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| Model of fruit fly DNA at San Francisco's Exploratorium: "Changing even one chemical 'letter' in an animal's DNA can sometimes cause major changes to its body." |
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| At 26th & Valencia (SF Gate photo) |
Al’s Place is just one of many great new restaurants in the city this year.....Amid a surge of new restaurants in San Francisco — many of them higher-profile and better-funded — Al’s Place has occasionally been lost in the mix.
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| Aaron London (A.L.) plating stone fruit curry and black lime cod (SF Gate) |
By the time I’d finished those pickled french fries—plus dishes of lightly cured trout with crispy potatoes in a strawberry gazpacho, asparagus in a currant soffritto, and pork belly with a galangal reduction—it was obvious that [owner Aaron] London had a knack for showcasing the flavors and textures of vegetables in very nonobvious ways. There was tons more going on in each dish than I got from reading the menu. The intensity of flavors was revelatory. It was almost as though I’d been eating vegetables in black and white my whole life, and then suddenly everything was in Technicolor.The foodie crowds will take a couple of years to dissipate to the point where the wait for normal diners might be tolerable. I just hope that Aaron London will still have his passion when we're seated in 2018.
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| Yes, she was up to something. |
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| Seven ducks in a box. |
We have been trying to keep a lid on some big news [ed: gotta sit down for this!] for the beloved Pumpkin Spice Latte, but with recipes and ingredients starting to ship to our stores, the buzz is building.In the other corner we have Panera Bread:
...espresso, perfectly steamed milk, warm fall spices with delicious flavor of pumpkin pie that reminds you of the cool, crisp days of autumn. So, with that great taste you know and love, the PSL returns this fall, and this time it will be made with real pumpkin and without caramel coloring .
Panera’s newly ‘clean’ pumpkin spice latte is made with select ingredients including milk, real pumpkin, whipped cream, spices and salted caramel sauce....“We’re offering a ‘Real Pumpkin Latte,’ made entirely without artificial colors, flavors, sweeteners or preservatives, and letting the goodness of real pumpkin, milk and spices do all the work.”Panera's release date is September 9th, while a Starbucks spokeswoman said, "it is coming soon." As one who didn't care or even know that this drink existed, I just have one reaction: isn't capitalism wonderful?
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| "The areas in blue represent low level of connectivity between thalamus and prefrontal cortex, while the areas in yellow show excess connections in those at risk of schizophrenia." (news.yale.edu) |
Schizophrenia usually develops late in adolescence or early adulthood but is often proceeded by some early warning signs such as mild suspicion, a perception that outside stimuli carry a special personal significance, or hearing a voice calling the individual’s name...We're a long way from being able to screen children widely for brain abnormalities, much less knowing what to do about them when they are found. The progress in neuroscience has been astounding, yet it can't come quickly enough for those who are afflicted by mental illness and their families.
Researchers developed whole-brain functional connectivity maps of 243 people who experienced early warning symptoms and 154 healthy subjects, and then followed them for two years. They found a decrease in functional connectivity between the thalamus and prefrontal cortex regions in the at-risk group that was particularly pronounced in those who went on to develop full psychosis. However, the at-risk group also had excess connectivity between thalamus and sensory areas of the brain.
many Amazonians who have worked on Wall Street and at start-ups say the workloads at the new South Lake Union campus can be extreme: marathon conference calls on Easter Sunday and Thanksgiving, criticism from bosses for spotty Internet access on vacation, and hours spent working at home most nights or weekends. [snip]The stimulus prompted CEO Jeff Bezos' response:
Amazon employees are held accountable for a staggering array of metrics, a process that unfolds in what can be anxiety-provoking sessions called business reviews, held weekly or monthly among various teams. A day or two before the meetings, employees receive printouts, sometimes up to 50 or 60 pages long, several workers said. At the reviews, employees are cold-called and pop-quizzed on any one of those thousands of numbers.
Explanations like “we’re not totally sure” or “I’ll get back to you” are not acceptable, many employees said.
The NYT article prominently features anecdotes describing shockingly callous management practices, including people being treated without empathy while enduring family tragedies and serious health problems. The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day. But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR. You can also email me directly at jeff@amazon.com. Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero.Intolerance will not be tolerated!
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| AMZN has blown past the averages over the past 5 years. Customers are happy. Investors are VERY happy. |
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| Frank, the organist, chatted with Betty this morning |
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| From 2009: Peggy, Betty, and Kay are irreplaceable |
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| (WSJ illustration) |
A blazer or a sport coat over an aloha shirt, dress pants and shined shoes are the foundation of the most appropriate outfit for executive men in the Hawaii workplace, according to fashion experts and dress-code minders.Don't believe what the experts say, just trust your own eyes....
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| Actor Jon Hamm as Don Draper in Mad Men (NY Daily News photo) |
researchers have already reversed mutations that cause blindness, stopped cancer cells from multiplying, and made cells impervious to the virus that causes AIDS. Agronomists have rendered wheat invulnerable to killer fungi like powdery mildew, hinting at engineered staple crops that can feed a population of 9 billion on an ever-warmer planet. Bioengineers have used Crispr to alter the DNA of yeast so that it consumes plant matter and excretes ethanol, promising an end to reliance on petrochemicals. Startups devoted to Crispr have launched. [snip]One of the most exciting--and alarming--aspects of CRISPR is its low expense:
Crispr....could at last allow genetics researchers to conjure everything anyone has ever worried they would—designer babies, invasive mutants, species-specific bioweapons, and a dozen other apocalyptic sci-fi tropes. It brings with it all-new rules for the practice of research in the life sciences. But no one knows what the rules are—or who will be the first to break them.
“Genome editing started with just a few big labs putting in lots of effort, trying something 1,000 times for one or two successes,” says Hank Greely, a bioethicist at Stanford. “Now it’s something that someone with a BS and a couple thousand dollars’ worth of equipment can do. What was impractical is now almost everyday. That’s a big deal.”CRISPR joins other powerful, cheap technologies, e.g., drones, 3D printing, that have arisen suddenly and are spreading like wildfire. Society will be transformed dramatically, but in what directions we don't know.
There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
---Buffalo Springfield
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| Burnt-out cars in Tianjin (PopularMechanics.com) |
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| 1950's IBM assembly (chipsetc.com) |
the tech has unique benefits. Because they have millimeter wavelength precision and higher amplitude, the signals from the vacuum tube powered devices are harder to jam. Beyond military uses, civilian communications devices can be improved, as well as electronics used by physicists and other scientific researchers. It allows devices to operate above the 75 GhZ radio line, utilized by radio astronomers, radar installations, and satellites.Vacuum tubes are less vulnerable to electromagnetic pulses and could be part of a defense against EMP attacks. Just as it's a good idea to keep a pre-2000 running automobile that can't be disabled by EMP or tracked (by GPS) or hacked (by WiFi), the virtues of old technology are being appreciated more and more.
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| Pork tenderloin roasted on skewers |
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| A few items from the salad bar |
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| Dan Ludeman at Covenant Theo- logical Seminary (Barron's photo) |
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| John Keast |
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| (Image from ABC News) |
Medical identity theft—in which someone fraudulently uses data to bill for medical services—affected 2.3 million adult patients in 2014 versus 1.4 million in 2009...Medical privacy laws, enacted to protect patients' welfare, make it difficult to disentangle the thief's records from one's own:
Thieves use many ways to acquire numbers for Social Security, private insurance, Medicare and Medicaid. Some are stolen in data breaches and sold on the black market. Such data are especially valuable, sometimes selling for about $50 compared with $6 or $7 for a credit-card number, law-enforcement officials estimate. A big reason is that medical-identification information can’t be quickly canceled like credit cards.
Federal medical-privacy laws bar a person’s access to someone else’s data, even if the information is in their own files, medical experts say.Despite the knotty problems, we are confident that medical identity theft will become much less of a problem: privacy laws will change, ID technology will improve, and the medical payments system will be overhauled. In the meantime, we are checking our statements and guarding our data.
The MIB II replaces phone-specific ports for phones with USB ports.I could list a hundred reasons for buying a car, and USB ports wouldn't be one of them.
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| The Tesla dashboard: the future is now (autoevolution.com) |
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| The Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall in 1945 and today, now nicknamed the A-Bomb Dome (AP Photo) |
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| (Image from careerealism.com) |
If you decide you want to behave this way, make sure you’re the company founder, you’re the smartest person in the room, you outwork everyone and that people love your products.....The number of individuals who check all those boxes is minuscule. Thomas Edison. Henry Ford. Steve Jobs. Elon Musk [Tesla, SolarCity, SpaceX]. Jeff Bezos [Amazon]. Travis Kalanick [Uber].Even the "nicest" leaders have to make decisions that hurt people's feelings---think hiring and firing, raises and promotions, pursuing and defending lawsuits, etc. But why aggravate a tough decision by being obnoxious about it?
For the vast majority of us I would say: Don’t go there. Being a jerk isn’t worth it. It will damage your heart and soul. It will hurt, not help, your teams. It will lead more often to poverty than to riches. Instead, follow B.C. Forbes’ advice: Produce happiness.
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| In 2007 we visited Heifer International's demonstration farm (now closed) near Modesto. |
our approach is more than just giving them a handout....Our animals provide partners with both food and reliable income, as agricultural products such as milk, eggs and honey can be traded or sold at market.One of the thorniest problems in philanthropy is finding "investments" that lift people out of poverty permanently without making them dependent on continued funding. It turns out that a modification to Heifer's approach has been supported by MIT researchers Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who found [bold added]
The core of our model is Passing on the Gift. This means families share the training they receive, and pass on the first female offspring of their livestock to another family. This extends the impact of the original gift, allowing a once impoverished family to become donors and full participants in improving their communities.
an anti-poverty strategy that works consistently, based on a seven-year, six-country study of more than 10,000 poor households. The secret, the economists argue, is to hand out assets, followed by several months of cash transfers, followed by as much as two years of training and encouragement. That formula seems to have made a lasting difference to the lives of the very poorest in countries as different as Ghana, Pakistan and Peru.The short-term cash transfers help the recipients resist the temptation to consume the farm animals they have been given.
Perhaps most important, when the researchers went back and surveyed households a year after the programme had ended, they found that people were still working, earning and eating more.The good can be made better.
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| Puunui Park: the steel bars I used to climb on have been replaced by this pretty and non-hazardous play structure. |
According to a press release from the [University of North Florida], the results demonstrated remarkable cognitive gains: “After two hours, participants were tested again, and researchers found that their working memory capacity had increased by 50 percent, a dramatic improvement.”As a kid I used to climb jungle gyms nearly every day, and my memory stayed pretty sound during my full-time working years. (Now, not so much.)
