#this answer is a bit less organized than this analysis probably deserves

[xenoblademisadventures]

read the tags on your post about ripping apart xc2 and i gotta say. same dude. i loved the game but that one cutscene on the cliffs of morytha where rex like hallucinated pyra is the worst cutscene ive ever seen. especially when it cuts to the vision of aion and pyra/mythras like "this is our power. as your sure this is what you want" and im just like yeah actually, its a cool fucking robot what reason have you given me not to want it. its not even what mythra used to accidently destroy torna in the prequel that was siren

Yeah. That cutscene actually singlehandedly soured my enjoyment of the game so much that I can't bring myself to play it anymore. This will be fun to elaborate on. Tw: suicide mention.

I truly despise this cutscene entirely due to it brushing off the suicide plot in favor of giving Rex an anime power up.

"The reason we wanted to go to Elysium was to beg our father to let us die."

"Listen, I swore to you, we're going to Elysium. Together."

Like, no. No. Fuck you. The writers above all else. This was the single most important part of Pyra's and Mythra's character arc to get right the they didn't even try. It's been thoroughly established that they want to die because they see themselves as a threat to the world and will inevitably irreparably harm everyone that they love. Mythra is coming from an abusive (or at least, extremely toxic) background where she was both treated as an unwanted burden everyone had to carry around and as a potential ticking time bomb who will kill everyone while being bullied for random shit in between. Pyra is coming from the background of being the face of Mythra's self hatred. Mythra literally already attempted to kill herself by creating Pyra. Rex's piffy nonsense should not have been enough to make her not suicidal.

Here's the problem from a character writing perspective "you have friends who love you" and "my existence is a burden and I will hurt everyone I love" aren't mutually exclusive ideals. And besides the promise to reach Elysium also being the suicide condition, sometimes making commitments isn't enough to stop people from killing themselves and leveraging those commitments over their heads is cold and unhelpful.

I hate how dismissively the writers treated Pyra and Mythra being suicidal when that plot point most mattered.

Alongside that, they chose to establish that Jin is suicidal in a really stupid way. You can't just look at someone in the eyes and ping them as suicidal. People who are suicidal don't flag it like that.

Besides that, Jin would be the second Xenoblade character where they're suicidal and Monolith decides to depict that as being a danger to the people around them. The first being Lao. Lao works better because, first there's an answer for why he doesn't just kill himself and why it had to be everyone else's problem, and second, Elma isn't concerned with Lao's wellbeing and that makes for some interesting scenes. But the larger issue for both of them is that they emphasize how suicide impacts the people who aren't suicidal. They're both depicted as uncontrollable, beautiful, and dangerous. That's not a good.

It's also bad that Pneuma, Lao, and Jin all end their arcs by heroically sacrificing themself (Lao accidentally fell into a vat tube but same difference, the character dies sort of).

Anyways the reason why this part of this scene ruins the entire game for me is that it perpetuates certain stereotypes about suicide that, at best, can make people who know someone who killed themself feel worse and, at worse, push someone further into a suicidal mindset.

Like, Rex just knew the right words to make Pyra and Mythra not suicidal? Imagine if a loved one killed themself and you believed that it was all because you didn't say the elusive magic right words to save them? Imagine if you feel suicidal and you want someone to say something that will drag you out of that mentality but that doesn't happen? Rex leverages his friendship with Pyra and Mythra and that works. Imagine a close friend killed themself. Was it because you just didn't love them hard enough? No. Imagine you are suicidal. Maybe you think you don't have those friends or never will. Maybe you think that you're only making things worse for your existing amazing friends. Both of those conclusions can make things worse.

Stories absolutely should not talk about suicide without having a giant ass content warning. Like, I don't think anyone's going to play Xenoblade 2 and immediately kill themselves for it, but it does reinforce common myths about it that absolutely can make things worse for people.

It doesn't help that this is when the story starts being like "humanity sucks we're philosophical."

There are a lot of other things wrong with that scene and the game as a whole. Despite what I said at the beginning, this scene alone didn't make me hate the game. But it was the final major blow to my ability to enjoy the game. I went from "the game's decent but nowhere near as good as it should be, I want to dissect it" to "fuck at least one of the writers" over time.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

This story was produced in collaboration with ABC News and Ballotpedia.1

On the afternoon of July 18, President Trump tweeted his “full and total endorsement” of Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a candidate in the state’s closely matched Republican gubernatorial primary runoff. Kemp’s opponent, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, had strong conservative chops — he enjoyed the endorsement of the National Rifle Association and the support of popular outgoing Republican Gov. Nathan Deal. But after the president’s tweet, the race began to look very different. Within days, Kemp surged in the polls and won in a landslide.

The Republican Party is a coalition of overlapping factions — pro-business types, libertarians, evangelicals, populists, single-issue advocates and more — but to whom does it really belong? To many, the answer is clear: Donald J. Trump. And the success of Trump-endorsed candidates in the Republican primaries this year seems to bear that out — but, according to our research, that’s only part of the story.

Between Feb. 27 and Sept. 13,2 774 people appeared on the ballot this year in “open” Republican primaries — those with no Republican incumbent3 — for Senate, House and governor. Like we did with Democrats earlier this year, FiveThirtyEight, Ballotpedia and ABC News teamed up to look at every single one of those candidates and see which GOP-affiliated people and organizations supported which candidates. Using campaigns’ financial filings, endorsement information from various interest groups and, of course, Trump tweets, we attempted to quantify which wing of today’s Republican Party best reflects the preferences and mood of rank-and-file voters.4 Here are some of the biggest takeaways.

Almost all candidates Trump endorsed won their primaries

How candidates endorsed by selected people and groups fared in open Republican primaries for Senate, House and governor in 2018

Candidates endorsed Total Winners Share that won Donald Trump 17 15 88% Koch network 21 18 86 Republican Main Street Partnership 17 11 65 Chamber of Commerce 8 5 63 Tea Party Express 16 10 63 Club for Growth 21 13 62 National Republican Congressional Cmte. 41 28 62 National Rifle Association 14 8 57 Susan B. Anthony List 23 12 52 House Freedom Fund 14 7 50 No Labels 2 1 50 Right to Life 74 33 45

Open races are those that do not feature a Republican incumbent.

Sources: Ballotpedia, secretaries of state, Associated Press, candidate websites, listed organizations’ websites, Federal Election Commission, Twitter, news reports

The Trump card

Let’s start with the kingpin of the Republican Party, the president himself. Trump endorsed 17 candidates in open Republican primaries this election cycle, and 15 of them won. That 88 percent win rate is the highest of any person or group we looked at. In early August, Trump tweeted, “As long as I campaign and/or support Senate and House candidates (within reason), they will win!” It was a bit of an exaggeration, but his success rate has certainly been high so far.

But the evidence is mixed on how much credit Trump deserves for actually driving those primary wins. On the plus side for Trump, in the GOP primary for Florida governor, state Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam led in most polls before June 22 — but then Trump tweeted his full endorsement of then-U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis (who resigned from the House this month). DeSantis surged into the lead, and he topped practically every poll the rest of the way. On the other hand, in California’s gubernatorial primary, Republican John Cox polled about equally well both before and after receiving Trump’s endorsement. Cox averaged 16.5 percent support among voters of all parties — in California primaries, candidates of all parties appear on the same ballot5 — in four polls taken the month before Trump’s May 18 endorsement. Cox averaged 17.7 percent in three polls taken after the president’s endorsement.6 But the role Trump played in the Georgia gubernatorial primary is less clear-cut: We have some evidence that some, but not all, of Kemp’s rise was due to Trump. An Opinion Savvy poll that happened to be in the field when the president gave his endorsement found that Kemp was already outperforming his previous polling even before Trump tweeted.7 But the same poll also found that Kemp polled even better after Trump’s endorsement.

Trump’s win rate may also be inflated by the type of candidate he endorses. For example, several of the candidates he endorsed didn’t face truly competitive primary opposition, including U.S. Senate candidates Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Mitt Romney, who is running in Utah. Other candidates he backed are less firebrands in Trump’s own image and more straitlaced establishment types with broad appeal. Trump has repeatedly cautioned Republican primary voters to “remember Alabama” — where a Republican Senate candidate lost to a Democrat in a deep-red state after the GOP nominee was embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal involving minors — and vote for a candidate who can win a general election.

The old guard

But the Republican establishment isn’t leaving it all up to Trump. For example, the National Republican Congressional Committee’s “Young Guns” program steers donors toward the GOP’s strongest candidates in swing congressional districts by naming them to any level of their “Young Guns” program.8 The NRCC named 63 candidates to their Young Guns program; 39 advanced to the general election, for a 62 percent win rate. One caveat, multiple candidates running in the same district can be named to Young Guns. This lowers the NRCC’s win rate because only one GOP candidate per race appears on the general election ballot in most states. We couldn’t find any endorsements from the NRCC’s Senate counterpart.

A handful of groups that explicitly endorse more moderate or pragmatic Republicans have also had some success this cycle. The pro-business U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its state-level affiliates endorsed eight candidates in open Republican primaries; five of them won, for a win rate of 63 percent. The moderate Republican Main Street Partnership, which styles itself as the “governing wing of the Republican Party,” had a 65 percent win rate (11 wins out of 17 endorsements). And the bipartisan centrist group No Labels had a better record in Republican primaries than it did in Democratic ones: The two Democrats the group endorsed both lost, but of the two Republicans No Labels explicitly supported, one prevailed.9

The conservative diehards

But the establishment wing’s endorsements were frequently at odds with those of an old nemesis: tea party-style conservatives. Starting in 2010, hard-right Republicans won primaries under the banner of the tea party movement, and a number went on to win their general elections as well; today, many of those successful tea partiers wield significant influence as members of the House Freedom Caucus, and together they have successfully shifted legislation to the right in recent years. But despite this faction’s success in Congress, its popularity with the public is dwindling: Support for the movement peaked at 32 percent in 2010 but had fallen to 17 percent by 2015. Perhaps as a result, the Tea Party Express — one of the original and most influential organizing groups of the tea party movement — today issues fewer endorsements than it has in the past.10 But according to our data, the relatively small group of candidates backed by the Tea Party Express didn’t do too badly. They won 10 out of 16, or 63 percent, of open Republican primaries they ran in this year. The House Freedom Fund — the unofficial electoral counterpart of the House Freedom Caucus — did a bit worse, endorsing 14 candidates, seven of whom ended up winning (50 percent). In a trend that may indicate Americans are losing interest in the tea party, the House Freedom Fund lost six of the eight primaries in which it went head-to-head with the Republican Main Street Partnership.

Although the tea party appears to have largely gone out of style, we’d be remiss if we didn’t look at the endorsements of the individual power brokers most closely associated with the movement: the Koch brothers. Charles Koch (his brother David has retired) and groups affiliated with the Koch family, like Americans for Prosperity, continue to spend money and political capital on candidates who support their limited-government priorities. And it looks like they still have plenty left in the tank: This year, the Koch political network backed 21 candidates, 86 percent of whom won their races. That’s especially interesting given the Kochs’ opposition to Trump’s trade policies and Trump’s public feud with the brothers. In fact, Trump has bragged on Twitter that the Kochs’ “network is highly overrated, I have beaten them at every turn.” But at least in the open primaries we looked at, the two have not supported opposing candidates this year. By contrast, they’ve actually supported the same candidates in eight open races.11

The issue scorecard

Since its founding in 1999, the Club for Growth hasn’t been shy about spending money to elect fervently anti-tax Republicans. (The group says it is “focused on conservative economic policy, and does not take positions on social issues or on the immigration/borders debate.”) We identified 21 candidates endorsed by the Club for Growth; 62 percent of them won their races. That makes the club roughly as successful as the Tea Party Express, whose goals and endorsements often overlap with the Club for Growth’s.

The NRA is currently more popular among Republicans than it has been at any point since Gallup began asking Americans about it in 1989; 88 percent of Republicans have a positive view of the group. Puzzlingly, however, candidates who won the NRA’s endorsement in this year’s primaries are finding only middling success. The NRA endorsed 14 candidates in open Republican races, but only eight — or 57 percent — won.

If Republicans have an equivalent of Emily’s List, which strives to elect pro-choice Democratic women, it’s the Susan B. Anthony List. Its mission is to elect pro-life politicians, especially women. But if Republican primary voters are driven by the issue of abortion, it’s not showing up in the Susan B. Anthony List’s track record. The group has a win rate of just 52 percent (12 wins out of 23 candidates). The batting average of National Right to Life,12 another anti-abortion advocacy organization, is even worse — 45 percent, or 33 out of 74 — despite endorsing more than three times as many candidates.

So what have we learned? Generally, it doesn’t look like Republicans are single-issue voters or care much about identity politics; the Susan B. Anthony List, National Right to Life and the NRA had some of the lowest win rates of any group we analyzed. The conservative purists endorsed by the likes of the Tea Party Express and Club for Growth have fared about as well as the pragmatists backed by the likes of the Republican Main Street Partnership and the NRCC, although the House Freedom Fund is performing notably worse than other purists and the Koch network is performing notably better. (Perhaps access to money explains why the Koch network has outperformed the House Freedom Fund.) But the candidates with the best chance of success are currently those who have attracted the support of the president — so, in whichever direction the causation may run, an endorsement from Trump himself remains the most valuable prize in a Republican primary.

[vanaera]

Aera, hi! first of all let me tell you that looking forward to My time. and like, How are you? i read that uni is giving u a hard time, is everything good? i hope so. You asked me about what i think of HHA MBTI and let me tell you what happened hehe. I already had an idea and usually i take a guess based on the vibe lol. But, i really wanted to give a legit answer. So I spent the past few days restudying the theory intensely and rereading HHA which is funny because at the end what happened..1

was that i complicated things cuz I wanted to get the most accurate answer, until i convinced myself to just say what i think of lol. So, I haven't done this before and i hope to improve my analysis skills in the future but i wish my analysis will at least entertain you :D lets start with y/n since she came "clearer" to me. Initially, I thought that she gives a ESTJ/ENTJ vibes. What I'm so sure of is that she definitely has the (Te) function either as a dominant or auxiliary function...2 

Which gave me 4 choices, ESTJ, ISTJ, ENTJ, INTJ. In short, what made me think y/n have Te function aka extroverted thinking, is that it's about conveying thoughts using reason and logic while being unmoved by emotional appeals. Te loves to organize and structure and achieving goals oriented. Extroverted thinkers are assertive, direct, objective, have well researched arguments and would like to convince others of their thoughts. we can see all of that in y/n right? I would've loved to explain..3 

Let me tell you first that i decided that y/n is probably an ENTJ. I would've love to tell (in details, why) but knowing myself it's gonna be so long and messy. So, I'm just gonna explain (Why) lol. let me tell u one of the reasons why I eliminated ESTJ. This type generally when making decisions, they'll make it considering what's important at the moment while ENTJ will consider what's important in the long run. I don't know but y/n strikes me as a big picture person...4 

ESTJs have (Si introverted sensing) as their second function which is a one that's concerned with long term memory, organizing, duty, traditions, routine and learning through past experiences (not experimental). Honestly, this one caused me a lot of confusion of weather y/n is estj or entj. because, for entj, because of the absent of Si in their function set they tend to forget who they were in the past and because they're so focused on the future. while i view y/n as the big picture person...5 

I don't view her as the one to be disconnected from her past self. BUT, i don't know if she is Si user, she doesn't strike me as person that values traditions and routine so much. (I'd like to ask you more about this) what made me also think she's ENTJ is because of the other functions in the set (Te, Ni, Se, Fi) we talked about Te, Ni users (introverted intuition) often described as people with vision of what they want to bring to life. Se-extroverted sensing-is about learning through senses..6 

Se function is about learning through senses so people with this function in their dominant will be eager to experience all kind of stuff in life. In ENTJ case however, this function comes third indicating it's underdeveloped, but it's there, so it'll appear more later in life while entj is still growing up and experiencing more. my clue to find this function in y/n was the Bar scene:D. I think i'm gonna stop here with y/n cuz we still have Yoongi. but i wanna say that i spent one more day.. 

Thinking weather y/n is an ENTJ or INTJ.. I had clues in the story for both and since I'm not skilled/knowledgeable enough my head got messed up lol. So i decided to go with my gut feeling and the first choice that occurred to me which is ENTJ =) So, yeah. That's it -kinda- for our dear y/n. and now, for our yoongi, honestly i was a bit lost lol. He has a vibe, correct, but to several types based on my understanding of them lol So here's how it went....I forgot the number i stopped on*face palm*

perceiving functions (Sensing, intuition) tells you how do you perceive reality, while Judging functions (Feeling/ thinking) is how do you interact with the world and take action based on what you learned. So, if you're a judging type with J in the last it means that the "first extroverted" function in your set is either F/T 

Thinking or feeling. it is "the first extroverted function" because that either can be the dominant function or the second one and it's "extroverted" because that's what the others see from you. Okay I'm getting sidetracked here. what i want to say is that if someone is a P type, it means that his/her first extroverted function that orients them in the world is either Ne/Se which aren't about taking action, but gathering information. That's why P people appear as laid back while J people as.. more of an action takers. Okay, yoongi strikes me as a p type. So, the 8 types that ends with J are eliminated. what remains are ENFP, INFP, ESTP, ISTP, ENTP, INTP, ESFP, ISFP. right off the bat esfp, estp, entp, enfp are eliminated. I have a decent understanding of these types and i can tell yoongi isn't one of them. at least based on what i know. also, when i look at the functions, he's neither intp nor istp, so what remains are ISFP & INFP and i believe he's an ISFP... Also, i'd like to say that my elimination of the previous types was also based on what i read in HHT. Anyway, ISFP have (Fi, Se, Ni, Te) while INFP (Fi, Ne, Si, Te) quite close right?.. what made me decide immediately he's an isfp in the beginning is because of the "Se". the scene in particular that led me to it is when he was describing the prom. he seemed to take things through his senses. and somewhere in the story he said "I like learning the actual stuff in real time" which seems to me Se. Fi, introverted feeling is concerned with values, individualism, seeks inner harmony and strong sense of self, it is "what's important". yoongi appears to me to be all that. Also, for hi, being an isfp, in the general description of ISFP type, it quite describes yoongi. They're quite mysterious, can be difficult to get to know on the deep level. listeners, emotional individuals, sensitive, warm. What sets infp from isfp for me, is that infp appears to be more concerned with world problems.. may be more developed especially yoongi since i view him as pretty much matured and more in tune with himself. and yeah i studied the persona theory. psychology is pretty much an interesting field, and i love the way i see its impact in your stories. one of the reason why your stories are special to me. and of course i would notice what i noticed. there's more and i feel like i could talk to you about it all day lol. This ask box is too small :p.. anyway, stay safe and healthy! and good luck! 3>

Oh my god, Aseel, you did a very in-depth MBTI analysis of The Heart Holiday!Yoongi and OC! This freaking shook me up 🤯😲. I don't know much about doing MBTI analysis. I just effing answer quizzes bc I love answering personality quizzes asdfghjkl. So thank you for this quick crash course about this! I love it and omygod I learned so much from you!! 😆😍😚 I had to google more about the MBTI functions bc of this! (sorry I'm not that much of a smart bean yet)

First off, your analysis of THH!OC and Yoongi are so good! You hit Yoongi on point being an ISFP! He's laidback, a good listener, and has a strong sense of his self! He can be mistaken as an extrovert bc of how well he does with people, too. You're also right about THH!OC having NTJ as her dominant functions! However, I think she's more of an introvert than an extrovert! Hinted by the fact her only friend in the office before the whole arrangement with Yoongz was Mina and that OC is very awkward in dealing with other people (the scene with Yoona, Jeff, and Seojoon while she waits for Yoongi to finish work and the lunch scene with the 3 goofballs). And to answer your q, THH!OC values traditions! With the way she's appalled by Yoongi's "makeup" date with her at a streetfood stand, to the fact Y/N is a hell of a conformist (she's The valedictorian of their HS and A cum laude in uni **me lowkey be like "Y/N, teach me your ways"**). But anyway, you still manage to get INTJ for this baby and omg you're so good!!!

I've never really put much thought in my character's MBTI types bc I just practically sprinkle a bit of my characteristics, desires, fears, and insecurities among them. I'm an INFJ, myself, and I couldn't believe some parts of myself could make ISFP and INTJ characters! What I only do know as when I was writing THH, I was inspired to make a story of two fumbling introverts. I usually come across romance stories with characters who are polar opposites of each other. Although there's nothing wrong with that (and omg I have a vERY weak, WEAK spot for this dynamic), I wondered what would it be like if I wrote about two introverts with so much similarities yet also a lot of differences with each other? So boom trulala, The Heart Holiday was born. Jk, there's actually more factors that led me into writing THH than just that, I think I'll go over them next time bc that is gonna be another massive text post.

Anyway, to have my stories be special to you...is an HONOR, ma'am 🥺. When I started writing here, I didn't expect anyone will actually read the things I write, much less let them occupy some place in their hearts. So having you impressed, much less touched, by my stories is a dream come true, hon 🥺. You're right, this ask box is too small bc I want to give you a massive thank you message much grander than this and I don't think tumblr's ask box can hold it (and also bc I wanna hug you, but bc we're kinda timezones apart, here's a virtual hug instead 🤗💗). Thank you for all the love and support, Aseel. Even if I don't think I deserve them, your words help me believe that I can 💕💞

[dontshootmespence]

Coercion - Epilogue

@coveofmemories @reiding-and-writing @myxomatosis-s @skeletoresinthebasement @passionate-hedgehog @camigt1999 @eideticenticement @ultrarebelheart @remember-me-forever-silent-angel @mishamgos @matthewgublers @tinyplanet-explorers

P.S. Thank you so much for reading everyone! This fic has been my baby. I think it’s probably been my best so far and I am sad to leave my reader and this fic behind, but I feel it’s run it’s course, and I want to reel you in with something else. I hope you’ve enjoyed as much as I have. Thanks again. :) <3

                                                               ----

In the months following the BAU’s capture of Bentley Ashton and the killing of famed pimp and drug dealer, Rocco Mitchell, you’d made a host of life changes.

“Baby, we’re gonna be late,” you called into your bedroom. 

Nearly a month after catching and killing Rocco, Spencer had asked you to move in with him. “We’ve been through so much,” he’d said. “And I know we still have a way to go, but I want to be by your side while we get there.” Immediately, you’d said yes, feeling more grateful than you ever thought possible for the man at your side.

Spencer stumbled out of your bedroom, shirt half buttoned and still hanging out of his pants. Your alarm had fucked up, leaving you both less than a half hour to get ready to get to work on time. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he laughed, giving you a kiss before running into the kitchen to gulp down a glass of orange juice. “Damn alarm.”

You giggled under your breath, grabbing his hand as you both ran down the stairs to head to work. After a whole lot of reflecting, daily therapy, and conversations with your boyfriend and teammates, you made a choice you never thought you’d make. As you were working toward your goal of joining the BAU, you never imagined you’d want to do anything – and you didn’t, at least not totally. You wanted more. You wanted to advocate. After all you’d been through, it seemed the best way to help others and heal yourself. 

Twenty years after fighting your way up to work with the Bureau day-in and day-out, you downgraded your status to consulting team member, so that you could lend your services whenever you weren’t traveling across the country to speak out – telling your story and advocating for others in your position.

In addition to speaking on behalf of the Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation section, you traveled all over, speaking to downtrodden young women who were still in, or just recently out of the lifestyle that plagued you for that one dark year. Today was a Bureau day, which you were thankful for after your speech for the Rape, Abuse and Incent National Network. 

According to your therapist, speaking at conferences and centers would be extremely painful at first, but you seemed to be healing through divulging your story. Eventually, it would become less painful to talk about, but for now, each time you recounted your story, you felt emotionally and physically exhausted afterwards.

On your way into work, you got a call. Now that you were a known advocate, you got calls constantly to come speak on behalf of a given organization. “Hello,” you said, motioning for Spencer to turn towards the coffee shop. You’d be a couple minutes late, but you in desperate need. “This is Y/N Y/L/N. Can I ask who I’m talking to?”

“Hello, Ms. Y/L/N, this is Sarah M. Buel, director emerita of the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence.” 

“Hello, Ms. Buel. How can I help you?” Spencer stepped out of the car, mouthing your normal order and you nodded your head. Through all of this, Spencer had been nothing short of spectacular. Although your advocacy had you away from home frequently, you did your best to make sure you scheduled speeches for when he was away with the Bureau. Even though it was hard, this new schedule of speaking at conferences and working with the Bureau was exactly what you felt you should be doing. For the first time in your life, you truly felt at peace with who you were and what you were doing.

Ms. Buel started off by telling you a bit about the organization, all of which you already knew. When you first started considering your current path, you looked up a plethora of different organizations, including the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence. “If you are able,” she continued, her voice soft and calming, “We would love if you could speak at a conference we have coming up in a couple of weeks.” 

While Spencer was grabbing your coffee, and apparently a chocolate-covered rainbow-sprinkle donut for himself, you ironed out the details with Ms. Buel, agreeing to speak at one of their annual conferences in three weeks time. “Thank you, Ms. Buel. I look forward to meeting all of you.”

“Another conference?” Spencer asked, his voice laden with pride as he handed you your coffee.

Softly, you smiled at him, leaning over to kiss him before taking a sip of your coffee. “Yea. This time for the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence.”

On the way into work, you sat in silence, pondering how you would start off your speech this time. The words tended to change, but the message was always the same – circumstances don’t define you, how you react to them does. But you were ripped out of your thoughts as soon as you got to work. Spencer parked the car and walked over to your side, pulling it open and extending his hand. When you were on the street, you never imagined having a man show you any respect, no less have one that treated you like a princess – you would be forever grateful.

He pulled you up flush against him and kissed your forehead, saying nothing for a moment. “I know I’ve been saying it a lot lately,” he said, his pink lips forming a smile as he caressed your cheek with his thumb, “But I’m really proud of you.”

As the tears welled up in your eyes, you wondered if there would ever come a time when you wouldn’t cry hearing that. “You have said it lately. This morning in fact. But I’ll never get tired of hearing you say it. I never thought anyone could ever be proud of me again after what I’d gone through, but because of the team and you, mostly you, I do actually believe it  - in my bones, and I’ll never be able to thank you enough for it.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said, taking your hand. “I love you.”

You wiped the tears from your eyes and tangled your fingers in his as you went up the elevator. There was no case yet; it was just a regular work day, but after everything, you were thankful for a boring day every now and then.

Nearly nine months earlier, when you’d first gotten into this mess, you never imagined you’d be where you were now. You and JJ had started going to dinner once a week to try and rebuild your friendship, and Will had even started to come along. The only thing he wasn’t comfortable with yet was leaving the boys alone with you, which although hurt, you understood. One day, he would see that loved those kids and this team with all your heart; you could never hurt them.

Morgan had made both you and Penelope Hank’s godmothers. Hotch wished you luck and sent you off with a smile every time you left for a conference. Rossi, who never took a day off for anything, took off along with Spencer to accompany you to your first ever speech, greeting you with open arms afterwards as you sobbed. And Emily and Garcia would be coming to one soon. 

Spencer gave you a kiss and headed to his desk, leaving you to get lost in your thoughts for a moment. You had a mountain of paperwork to get started on, but your impending speech brought on a wave of ideas, so instead, you pulled out a pen and started to write.

I was convinced. My life was over. With parents gone, no source of income, no self-esteem, and one friend, I had nothing left. Every night was fraught with fear, wondering if that particular client would kill me, give me an STD that would kill me down the road. Every night was fraught with pain – bones were broken, legs shaking in agony from the assault I endured. Every night was fraught with thoughts of ending it all. And then one night, a friend was murdered in front of eyes, because she offered to take a client for me. That night I attempted to talk my own life, escape it all, see my parents and friend again, but for some reason I woke up. I still don’t understand why I did. But when I did, I took it as a sign that I was meant to do something, so I stood up and I ran as hard as I could, leaving my past behind and becoming someone new.

For 20 years, I worked to become a member of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. I begged on street corners, I obtained two jobs, paid my way through school with the help of a few grants for which I applied, and eventually earned my dream job. Then again, my life was turned upside down and when someone came out of the shadows with knowledge of my past. I won’t go into the dirty details of that particular case, but it ended well. The man who blackmailed me is now in prison and my former pimp, Rocco Mitchell, is dead, never to hurt another young woman like myself.

What I mean to say by telling my story is this. If you’ve lost hope, I’ve been you. If you feel like you can no longer go on, I understand. But there is hope, you are not alone, and you don’t have to suffer by yourself.

A common question I get asked is how my past affects my life now. ‘Do you still feel tainted by your past? Does the self-doubt come creeping back? Do you feel deserving of all you’ve achieved?  Do you feel that your past dictates everything you are now?’ And after months of daily therapy, conversations with people who I’ve come to love and who love me, and many, many years of asking myself these same questions, I can give you some answers. Do I feel tainted by my past? Sometimes yes. Sometimes I feel that I got where I am because of my past rather than in spite of it, but then I remember my boss would never hire someone out of pity. If he hired me, it was because I earned it. Does the self-doubt come creeping back? Every damn day, and I’m pretty sure it always will. Back then, I’d allow it to overtake me, because I didn’t believe that I had anything or anyone else, but now, I give myself a few moments of pity, and then ask my boyfriend to remind me how far I’ve come. Do I feel deserving of all I’ve achieved? The answer there is yes. I have worked, begged, and scraped for what I have, but I earned it – and I’m proud. And finally, do I feel that my past dictates who I am now? No. I don’t make decisions because of my past. I make them based on who I am now. I may have a past, but my past does not define me, and it doesn’t need to define you either.

The National Center on Domestic and Sexual Abuse is here for you, in any capacity you may need. Remember, you do not have to suffer anymore. I am with you. My name is Kayla Connors. My name is Sierra Cheverie. My name is Y/N Y/L/N. I am my past, present and future. I am��not alone and I have not let my past define who I am. You don’t have to either.

Thank you. 

As you set your pen down, you looked around at the smiling faces of your colleagues, feeling like you fit in somewhere for the first time in 20 years. Nothing was perfect. But you never expected perfect. All you ever wanted was a group of people to call your own and a path carved just by you and for you. 

And now you had it.

[ismokeitsite]

Do bongs really filter out THC? A scientific analysis

Do bongs really filter out THC? A scientific analysis

A note to the reader: I started this project originally as a response to a commenter, but gradually came to feel that it deserved its own post. I am a chemist with a passion for cannabis, and I hope that this post is educational to at least a few of you out there. I think a lot of cannabis articles are lacking grounding in scientific analysis, and would love to change that.

There’s some particularly dense calculations midway through that ultimately yield a less than satisfying answer. I debated removing them, but I believe that it is more honest to include them. Part of science is learning and discovery, and if I can help teach a little bit then I’ve been successful. Moreover, it shows where some of the gaps in our knowledge currently are, and hopefully inspires someone to pursue further exploration of cannabis-related fields.

With that said, let’s take a scientific look at the claim “Bongs filter out THC”.

The abstract of this paper notes that maximum THC solubility is 2.8 mg per litre of water, at 23°. My average bong fill is ~750 mL, based on the water bottle I use to fill it. Thus the maximum amount of THC to form a saturated solution would be 2.1 mg.

Let’s say you smoke half a gram of some good, dispensary quality cannabis— the lab report says there is a total available THC level of 20% by mass. You pull out your favorite grinder, and prep half a gram for your session. That’s a total of .1 grams, or 100 mg, of THC. You load your first bowl, and take a hit. Sadly, some of the THC does get absorbed by the water... a whopping 2%! So yes, technically you are correct in observing that “bongs filter out THC”.

Or are you?

There’s a common joke among physicists involving perfectly spherical cows in a vacuum. (You can read more about this joke on its Wikipedia page.) We’re engaging in a similar error here, by simplifying reality into just a few back of the envelope calculations. In actuality, gasses become less soluble in solution as their temperature increases. This is contrary to what is conventionally taught in high school chemistry classes, which teach that increasing temperature increases solubility (and for high school level problems dealing with the solubility of salts in solutions, this is true.)

Let’s take a quick moment to learn about entropy. Entropy is the tendency of the universe to proceed from a state of order to a state of disorder. A solid that dissolves in a liquid does so because it is energetically favorable to proceed to a state of disorganization. Imagine a Jenga tower on a wobbly table. As the table wobbles, the tower is liable to fall down and scatter pieces across the table. Likewise, a solid (like salt) will be ‘shaken’ by the water, and broken down into individual blocks (ions).

But what if you took each of those Jenga blocks and scattered them around the house? No matter how much you shake the table, the room, or even the building, those blocks aren’t going to move themselves across the house back onto the table.

Gasses (like vaporized THC!) have so much energy in the form of heat that they bounce around akin to the Jenga blocks in the previous example. It takes an incredible amount of energy to try and force them into some sort of order. The state of being solvated by a liquid is one of more organization than being free to bounce around wherever in the atmosphere. This is part of the reason that opening a can of soda produces bubbles which escape into the atmosphere. Solvated CO2 would rather be free in the air than confined with water. It’s like moving to Washington, because while you may be able to smoke in your Montana, there’s a heck of a lot less resistance from law enforcement pushing back on you in a legal state like Washington.

That’s a lot of theory. Can we quantify this for our calculations?

Let’s try anyway. Henry’s Law states “the amount of dissolved gas in a liquid is proportional to its partial pressure above the liquid.” Thus, [Dissolved THC]/[Vapor Pressure] is equal to some constant dictating solubility. Analyzing this equation provides the following statement: ‘Less THC is able to be dissolved as the concentration of THC in the air above it decreases’. This is going to get rather complicated, so I want to draw our attention back to the soda can example one last time. A sealed can of soda has a small pocket at the top of it, composed of pure carbon dioxide. As soon as you open the can, the gas pocket is replaced with atmospheric air, which has far less CO2 in it. Because there is less CO2 in the air, less carbonation can remain in the soda, and gas bubbles out. That’s Henry’s Law in action.

According to the NIH, Henry’s Law constant for THC is nearly 4.2 million mol / (atm*m3) at 25°. (The source reports 2.4X10-7 atm-cubic meters per mole, but the units are reversed from what we’re looking for. Therefore, I just took the reciprocal of the constant.) I found frustratingly little information about the final temperature of a bong hit, save for this Reddit post in which one user claimed it to be approximately 100° C. The NIH published another study which provides data (see fig. 4 in source) suggesting that the vapor pressure of 100° THC vapor is approximately ~0.8 pascals. This is equal to 0.00000789538 atmospheres of pressure.

That’s incredibly small. Let’s see how our math works out.

4170000 (Henry’s Law Constant) * 0.00000789538 = 32.9 moles soluble per cubic meter of liquid. One cubic meter = 1000 litres, 32.9 * 0.000750 (from our 750 mL of water in the bong) = 2.50 * 10^-4 mol THC Molar mass THC = 314.5 g/mol therefore 0.0786 grams = ~79 mg 100° gaseous THC soluble in 750 mL of bong water

Wait, that’s more than a factor of 39 times what we said the ballpark maximum solubility would be! As is often the case with science, conflicting results need to be explained, and further research conducted. Specifically, the number cited by the EPA for Henry’s Law’s Constant was generated by a computer model operating under an assumed 25°, and was used to calculate off-gassing from THC contamination in the soil (pick up your roaches, y’all!). The general trend for Henry’s Law’s constants is that they decrease as temperature increases; that is, dissolved gasses are less soluble at higher temperatures. Clearly, a more accurate value for the constant is necessary. There are very few software packages available to calculate Henry’s Law’s constants, and it doesn’t look there are any in existence (as of yet) that provide predictive capabilities at variable temperatures. In the words of one reviewer, “at present, the overall capability of predicting Henry's law constant from molecular structure is significantly inferior capability of predicting [other molecular data].”

Well, I guess we’ve reached a dead end with that approach. Spherical cows and theory once more.

Based on what we’ve established, we can conclusively say that 2.1 mg is the maximum amount of THC soluble in a 750 mL bong filled with room temperature water, based on experimental evidence. This supposes solid THC crystals at standard temperature and pressure. However, application of Henry’s Law suggests that the solubility of vaporized THC will decrease as the heat of your smoke increases. Moreover, Henry’s Law is dependent on the partial pressure of the gas above the liquid. This Quora post investigates how much of a vacuum one person can draw with their mouth, concluding that at most they were able to create an environment that was 56% that of atmospheric pressure. (I couldn’t find any results in Nature for ‘How Good Dat Succ?’ so this Quora post is the best source available for now.) We obviously aren’t hitting bongs hard enough to give ourselves bruises on our lips, but we could conservatively estimate a pressure reduction down to 80% that of the surrounding atmosphere. Therefore, the partial pressure above the bong water goes down even further, reducing solubility of THC in the water.

So 80% of 2.1 mg leads us to 1.6 mg of THC dissolved in solution, which is further reduced by application of the temperature differential in Henry’s Law’s constant. It is by no means unrealistic to suggest that less than 1% of your THC for that session is being left in the bong. As a reminder, the overall ‘efficiency’ of cannabis inhalation as a drug delivery mechanism is approximately 40%. Is shifting your consumption from 40 mg of THC to 39.6 mg liable to make any difference? Probably not.

As such, I would say that the idea that bongs filter THC is thoroughly disproven. Any further stretching of the definition of ‘filtering’ leads to the realization that your fingers serve equally well as a filtering device, causing you to lose minuscule amounts of THC when you pack your bowl.

As legalization continues, I hope that we can generate common-sense legislation based on science. Unfortunately, there’s still lots we don’t know about cannabis, from its chemical properties to how it effects the human body. I strongly encourage y’all to support ongoing research, and hope that it leads to benefits for federal legalization in the long run.

Submitted May 24, 2019 at 10:38AM by VibraphoneFuckup via reddit

[martechadvisor-blog]

Conversion Rate Optimization — Best Strategies to Optimize your Website for Conversions

Nishant Maliakel Oommen of Cloudnix Software Labs Pvt. Ltd. shares effective hacks to engage online visitors, boost conversion rates and optimize your website.

The world is dominated by digital technology. Technology that is way smarter than an average person (yes we are venturing into a  world of sentient humanoids with general artificial intelligence). Over the decade, the rapid pace in technological outburst has been extolled across media. Technology has eased the process,  ubiquitous connectivity with the digital world has beguiled a large no: of the populace to actively engage on digital platforms. Opening a new realm for marketers to reach out to customers, as business happens on platforms people engage. 

These opportunity invites businesses to explore the digital realm. Scouting for chances that could extrapolate into a sale. As the early adopters started to gain the market, alternate business solutions started to recognize the scope. The linear growth in demand has forced the market to optimize their business around customer experience. Over the years, portable devices have shown a significant increase in customer engagement. The shift in displays comes with its own toll, as a business you need to make sure that your business entity is optimized to meet the demands across varying displays.    

A customer-oriented strategy is developed when a business entity triumphs to create a business model that roots under certain values that empowers the customer. The customer is placed at the center, and all the marketing activities that take place tend to inspire the customer to interact with the business entity. As the market is introduced with multiple alternates, offering more or less the same features, it boils down to one question. What’s the best strategy to win customers? The answer is, provide the best possible experience. 

Also Read: What is CRO and Why Should We Take It Seriously?

Nobody is interested in ordinary experience. Your customer deserves the best.

Think about it this way, you are on a hunt to find the latest edition of “Louis Vuitton Handbag”. Your pursuit to find the rare edition made you land a website. Albeit the fact that you find the product listed on the website, upon scrutiny you are alarmed with the authenticity of the website. For a premium product like Louis Vuitton, the customers come with a set expectation. There are multiple reasons that could alarm the customer. Scaling from the lack of bearing a professional demeanor to a 404 error page. 

Conversions are hard to come by (whether its a micro/ macro conversion). Never give your customer a reason to click the small red button located on the top right corner. The best strategy is to make sure that every visitor who lands on the website finds value with the business. Don’t let your platform compromise a potential sale. 

Optimize to Convert

It’s all about optimizing the website the way your customer wants it. Everyone has expectations. In most cases, when it comes to digital commerce, the human interference is limited. There isn’t a personal chauffeur guide your or to take you to your destination. When our customers are on the platform, they are on their own. Every element they interact should add meaning to their customer journey. If your customer click on a drop-down menu, visits a category page just to find that there are only two products listed on the platform, then there is a high chance it could raise concern. The customer could raise few concerns like, Is it a genuine platform? Why do they fail to list more products? Why did people fail to find value engaging on the platform? so on. 

Multiple studies conducted by business research organizations stress upon the point, how CRO can increase the overall effectiveness of your online campaigns.    Tweak your landing pages to best convert the leads on the page. Remove all elements and features that distract the customer. Incertitude on a landing page could lead to cognitive dissonance. Second thoughts and biases that could affect the buyer's journey. Capture the attention and focus them to activities that deliver results.   

Create a Result Oriented Strategy

As a business, your primary objective is sales and conversion. Raw traffic is not going to add any value to your business. In several cases, a business invest/incentivize their prospects just to visit the website. The best you could do is to make sure that the prospect finds value with your website and decides to convert on the website. The conversion can be as simple as sharing their email or placing online order.  

With a huge volume of spam emails hitting our inbox, it's often a concern for people whether to share their personal information with a business or not. Most people are a bit wary about how a business will use their personal information. Think about the average cold calls we receive in a day. You need to give your online visitors a genuine reason to share their email id or phone no. Cordially assuring customers that their information is safe with your business entity.    

With conversion rate optimization you can motivate the website visitors to take action on the website. Building trust and giving them enough reason to say yes. Let’s consider the retail sector, there are lots of window surfers, how you display the offers and discounts can increase the foot traffic, later the in-house experience could materialize into a sale. Here the business owner has optimized the store in such a way that every interaction increases the probability of conversion. 

With Conversion Rate Optimization you get to reduce your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and capitalize on your existing traffic.  

Quantitative Data Analysis - Key to Optimize Your Website

Almost all interactions with the digital systems are recorded. Every time an individual interacts with a digital system he or she leaves behind traces of information. There are multiple tools and solutions that enable an entrepreneur to make use of this information and figure out how a visitor engages on the website. An in-depth understanding on the customer behavior will help a business optimize their digital platform and deliver spiffy customer experience. 

Tools like Inspectlet and LuckyOrange tracks the user behavior on individual web pages and allow data analyst/ digital marketers to make strategic decisions. These tools help gather crucial insights on how individual elements on the website is contributing to conversion and what factor’s obscure the visitors from moving down the buyer's funnel.  

With quantitative analysis, digital marketers will be able to make data-driven decisions. Once you have pooled enough data then you could analyze the data sets and then drive efforts to streamline the overall conversion journey. 

Let’s consider an example:- Data from Google analytics indicates that there is a significant traffic drop in the add to cart section. The increase in exit percentage is a clear indication that the page needs to be tweaked a bit. So that a seamless experience is made available to customers. 

Design A High Converting Landing Page

Intrigued to know the secret.

Understand your objective. Visualize the buyer’s journey. Make sure you know what action to expect on the landing page.

Each page on your website should have a definite purpose. The context and intent with which a page is designed can differ at a great extent. A blog article may have multiple conversion metrics whereas you could create specific landing pages with a definite purpose. 

Anatomy of a high converting landing page

Start with above the fold part. Above the fold is the top portion of a website you first notice when you try to load a webpage. A crappy above the fold part could alarm concerns and derail the customer from interacting further with the webpage. 

Page Loading Speed

Think about it think way, you clicked on a link and it took 15 sec to load the webpage. Great example of a failed business strategy (you just ambushed your customer experience). 

In an instant gratification world, your customers don’t have the time or patience to wait long enough for a page to load. By default people expect your web page to load the second they try to open it. A positive first impression is important. 

CTA - Place it Where The Customer Sees It

Every CTA you create needs to be placed intelligently. Make sure CTA’s are kept in places where the people most likely to click and engage. You can always conduct a multivariate test and then use the data to make your final decision on where to place the CTA. 

Psychology of Colours When designing a Landing Page   

Do a small A/B testing to find how tweaking your website on a minor scale can increase the online conversion. Colors can significantly influence our psychology. That is one good reason why colors like red and orange trigger a sense of arousing, whereas dark blue often leads to passivity.

Make use of Visual Graphics

Rather than textual chunks, visual media could greatly influence people. That is one good reason why people tend to prioritize testimonials that are in the form of videos (10-15 sec max) than textual chunks. Adding testimonials to a landing page could invigorate trust among online visitors. Also when integrating testimonials make efforts to mention their social accounts (LinkedIn should be Ideal). 

Mention your Achievements, Awards

Listing your achievements, recognition, and awards can help root your credibility among online visitors. How do you think visitors will pursue your identity if you integrate a video giving an interview with Forbes. What about you mentioning that you have been featured in Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, etc. 

Use Positive and Inspiring Words

Be cautious with the language that you use on the website. Sales happen through positive and inspiring words. Better to restrict the sentences. Use simple language, highlight what benefit/ advantages the end user will get in return to the information they share. 

How to Mention an Offer/ Discount

It’s never an ideal practice to mention a lame offer/ discount on your website. Every offer/ discount that you mention on your website should be correlated to a reason. The customer should understand why the business is running this offer. Rather perceive it wrongly as a continuous offer. In that case, the online visitor fails to understand the urgency and fail to see that the offer was time bound. 

Few Hacks to Effectively Engage your Online Visitors  

A Bonus Trial Period

Let's consider that you own an e-commerce website builder who caters to a specific niche. On an average, you get around 1000 trial stores created on your platform. Currently, you provide a 7 day trial period. In the sales meeting if has been brought to your notice that almost 75 to 80 people request the sales team to extend the trial period. Giving them more time to explore and make an informed decision. Rather extend the trial period for free, won’t you think you could use this opportunity to motivate the users to share your e-commerce establishment with their social followers and in return get an additional 7 more days. So that the prospect will get a total of 14 days to fiddle around and make sure that the platform is the right fit.    

Robust AI-driven ChatBots and Callback Tools

AI-driven chatbots have shown significant scope when delivering high customer satisfaction. Stats published by Harvard Business Review clearly indicates that business that contacted the lead within one hour of the query were 7 times more likely to qualify the lead than a business that contacted the lead after one hour. Responding to the leads at the earliest can increase the likelihood of conversion. The prudent response from a support team addressing the concern/ query will most likely create a positive assiduity among customers. It clearly shows the effectiveness of the brand as a whole and root a sense of credibility. A real time callback tool gives the whole online engagement a human context. Where a salesperson from the backend could pick up the cold lead and qualify the customer.

Ensure that Proper Certifications are Integrated

Let’s take the example of a pre-owned apparel store. The pre-owned online fashion industry is plagued with first copy. For a premium luxury brand, it's important to establish trust within their target market and make sure to establish that all the products they sell are authentic. One amazing strategy to adopt is to display a bill of purchase (in most cases the receipt won’t be available) along with the products. In case if you don’t have the purchase receipt then you can display a certificate from a licensed agency ensuring the authenticity of the product. 

Also Read: CRO for B2C brands - 5 Basic Tactics for Best Outcomes

Parting Note:- With increasing market competition and dropping attention span it’s important for a business to optimize their digital presence to provide an effective customer experience. Higher the customers find value with the website greater the chances for increased online conversion. Understand the target demographic that you are planning to allure and optimize your website to meet their expectation. 

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

[titheguerrero]

Dander Up, Down, and All Around

Today's topics: VA health care politics; a clear-eyed and sane report from a bastion of managerialism, with related observations on innovators trying to create real bottom-up value.

It's the last day of the year, so let's get this done. Owing to various largely unforeseen challenges, happily now largely behind us, this "Dander" series was interrupted for some time. Apologies to anyone who noticed. In any case, to refresh: as Chief Blogger and FIRM president Dr. Poses has indicated often enough in these pages, health care developments raising our dander are still everywhere, all the time, and on the increase. Nothing particularly new here. Certainly not new since the 2016 election.

Except that in our current situation--inter-woven social (read: inequality) and political (read: everything inside the Beltway morphing from mere swamp to crazed greased pig trough)--the health sector is triply hard-hit. Really, it gets old to keep on playing nay-saying Cassandra. It's not normal.

Thus today in America the patient can't catch a break. For health care probably more than in any other first world country where budgets are still overstretched not to mention much lower, and where technology is just as uncooperative. Will the yellow-vests to come out on the streets over it, as they recently did over social engineering from the folks who gave us Freedom Fries? (Maybe up to three guys: John Roberts and Trump's two new USSC nominees, as ACA makes its way to them yet again.)

No need to hyperlink the following examples. Everyone's immersed in them.

Obamacare imperiled by twisted politics and jurisprudence, even though its recent mild decline in enrollments probably means little or nothing and the body politic wants it.

Ultra-right wingnuts flexing muscle by urging the dismissal of the capable (and quite religious) head of the National Institutes of Health. Why? Stem cell research, a promising technology that's run afoul of some ideological right wing evangelical cant.

Net-net, IT's impact on health care, coming as much from the well meaning elitist left as from the elitist right, still negative. It enriches tech- and health-organizational CEOs while patient satisfaction, provider satisfaction and life expectancy all three tank. (I know, it's complicated--we also got that opiate crisis.)

Corruption in government, tech, hospitals and big pharma: can you spell "conflict of interest"? Read pretty much any recent posting in Health Care Renewal.

I could waffle on and on. But instead of that let me focus today on one thing that's got my dander up and another that's actually tamped it down a bit.

The VA, yet again. No doubt, forever. Or, Why's the VA Such a Punching Bag?

Dr. Poses has been feeding me troves of data and news about the VA. I'm happy now to report just a few highlights. Oh, wait: lowlights. Dreary as ever. Ever since our Fearless Leader fired the capable David Shulkin, the question rings ever louder, "how bad can it get?" We now know the answer seems to be: bottomless pit.

Here are some of the lowlights. Bear in mind that, rightly or wrongly (we think mostly wrongly), Shulkin is now being blamed for all these deficiencies at the VA. Despite the facts that he was hamstrung from the get and that the VA was, like the EPA and others, one of the places where tge White House allowed chaotic privatization to run amok. We're in a fun-house mirror version of Ronald Reagan's "government is the problem."

Suicide Watch. Under this administration, while suicality remains rampant among veterans of recent Forever Wars, the VA has fallen down grievously on the job of addressing it. Last month's report from the government's own GAO confirms this.

Privatization Writ Large. Privatization initiatives, so dear to the hearts of cronies and lobbyists, are already in big trouble. Trump's own hand-picked successor to Shulkin recently had to admit to Contress the “The [VA] was taken advantage of because of the hasty nature that took place when the program was put together." Not budget dust, either: the agency paid out nearly $2B-with-a-'B' in unnecessary fees for these private booking "services." (In fairness let's put a little parenthetical note in here. As a former employee I know the VA itself causes unnecessary care delays. Service-connected disability ratings impede scheduling, as do salaried physicians' myriad ploys for putting the brakes on their own performance.)

Privatization Writ Small. Still, this privatization thing is a great example of two-wrongs-don't make-a-right. ProPublica informs us that what's "actually happened in the four years since the government began sending more veterans to private care: longer waits for appointments and, a new analysis of VA claims data by ProPublica and PolitiFact shows, higher costs for taxpayers." Can the VA claim better outcomes using any parameter at all? I think not.

Mar-A-Lago. Lots more VA stories are leaking out. None are especially edifying. But in some ways the most alarming and tawdry among them is that surrounding the troika of unelected Florida golfing buddies. For months or more now they've been calling a lot of that agency's shots. Direct line to the White House, demonstrable responsiveness on the part of VA apparat. Maybe the crowning glory in this administration's reputation for cronyism, this group--comics mogul Ike Perlmutter (you can't make this stuff up), Palm Beach MD Bruce Moskowitz and lawyer Marc Sherman, collectively known as the "shadow rulers"--have pushed a lot of policies and expenditures for the VA with zero expertise. Unless a lousy golf handicap counts as expertise. Democrats have vowed a response in the new Congress, and we can only hope Speaker Pelosi prioritizes that. I think when it comes to Pelosi versus Ike's Marvel Avengers, the lady wins hands down. The conservative (and probably still somewhat Moonie) Washington Times reports this will happen in the first half of 2019--both from the GAO and the House Oversight Committee. These guys are super bad COI news, having weighed in with their scant expertise on way too much down to VA job candidates.

The worst-of-the-worst for this poor agency is how the Shadow Rulers have gummed up its use of technology, especially IT. A little background: the VA was the one organization within the entire US Government that developed, back in the day with its VISTA technology, a fairly creditable in-house electronic medical record. VISTA, along with DOD's AHLTA (get it?) were supposed to play nice together but, despite billions in earlier expenditures, never did. VISTA might have survived but, starting with Shulkin (and probably predecessors) got deep-sixed by the bogus attractiveness of private-side EMRs. GE had its hands in there for a while: it deserves what it got. Now Cerner, the main vendor rival to the privately-held Wisconsin cult vendor Epic, has the inside track for crafting a workable EMR for the VA. But the Boys from Mar-A-Lago want to micro-manage this? Why? Earlier this month ProPublica disclosed part of the reason based upon FOIA-obtained emails. The doc among the troika has his own mobile app. Here's how it went down.

[N]ewly released emails also detail Moskowitz’s effort to get the VA and Apple to adapt his app. As a VA IT official described it in a May 2017 email, 'We are utilizing the native iOS mobile app, Emergency Medical Center Tracker, that Dr. Moskowitz developed.' VA health officials offered their own ideas for how a collaboration with Apple could benefit veterans, such as working on credentialing, data exchange and analytics, and suicide prevention research. But Moskowitz rejected the VA doctors’ ideas in favor of his own. 'These are good areas but not the emergency ones which my group of experts have identified,' he said in a May 2017 email. 'I sent an email to outline the recommendations.'

 'Nuff said. As someone who cared for thousands of veterans, I can't begin to describe how galling this is, even if the new guy, Wilkie, says he's trying to right the ship. While blaming his predecessors. If these gentlemen from Florida--that bastion of fair elections and cost effective medicine--were instead gumming up Medicare, threatening the health of parents and grand-parents of business leaders, dot-commers, millennials and trust-funders, we'd have heard a lot more hue and cry about the VA and its shadow rulers. Now I Pat Down my Dander. Soothing Words from Unlikely Places.  Oddly enough, the worlds of IT--absent the shameful events described above in connection with the VA--and management are beginning to pull themselves out of their torpor. Under the dual impact of the HITECH and ACA enactments, the IT and management communities strove for years to accommodate to this brave new world of individual mandates and EMR meaningful use, and the result was rather anechoic. One heard little complaining about the baleful effects of the IT pall dropped into the doctor-patient relationship. That's changing now, and the signs are everywhere, though sometimes hard to parse. Nailing down the how and why of this change can be difficult, but the effects of "unusability" are emerging into a vocal majority consensus. "Thought leaders" such as Robert Wachter and Donald Berwick have exerted part of this impulse to call a spade a spade in the interest of QI, citing, among other things, generational change. Smartphone users and tech-savvy students and house staff are much less likely to tolerate the Some of those properly impatient young innovators--and I don't mean the septuagenarian Moskowitz--went on to found start-up companies that are starting to move tecnology out of its old, enormously dreary meaningful-use rut. They're bringing patients--"engagement" the new meme--back into the narrative. What is this new narrative. The rather staid and managerialist health IT society, HIMSS, has this to say, couched in classic bureau-speak jargon, in its 2019 conference agenda, "6 Health Information and Technology Topics to Immerse Yourself in at HIMSS19." Translations into English follow.

Strategic Patient Experience Improvement (help the doctor with her workflow)

Aim for Secure Accessibility (make everything more secure)

Mapping a Vision to the New Consumer Landscape (improve revenue cycles)

Moving Precision Medicine into Primary Care (make "precision" medicine, whatever that is, or at least AI, work better--maybe with smart guidelines--for primary care providers)

Contextualizing AI for Healthcare (ok, we know that AI is really important)

Exploring the Pharma-Provider-Payer Relationship: the Last Step to True Value-Based Care (get everybody working together better now that fee-for-service care is giving way to bundling)

Stripping away the cant, these are actually pretty lofty goals and show HIMSS coming into its own. Charge capture, upcoding, and dashboards for managers watching 30-day readmission tallies begin to sound so 20th century. Care coordination from the bottom up, not just the top down, begins to appear more attractive as studies start to show that top down doesn't always work all that well. (Caveat: read the whole piece, not just the online abstract. JAMA is behind a paywall.) And the leadership is coming in some cases from outside classic health IT vendor-land, notably from innovation centers cropping up among many providers and payers.

Meanwhile, on just about a daily basis I learn about a new start-up addressing these issues, often based on newer concepts and approaches to workflow as ecological reflection of a unified community-wide integrated health care system.

Moving from encouraging specifics about health care realities and IT start-ups addressing them, to the more general and philosophical matter of why it's taken so long to get to this place, I conclude by drawing the reader's attention to some recently emerging, and highly salutary, public intolerance to bullshit. (Can this be a result of the clearly emerging disgust with insufferable politicians broadly speaking?)

The problem of obfuscation using bullshit, though it goes well back into the mid-20th century, was most famously addressed in the elegant short book On Bullshit published well over a decade ago by emeritus Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt. The latest incursion of vocal objection to nonsense in health care comes from a source that some might've considered heretofore unlikely: a couple of senior Wharton management professors. Though Lawton Burns and Mark Pauly barely mention their Princeton forebear in a secondary footnote, they nonetheless deserve an enormous shout-out for bringing attention to Detecting BS in Health Care. No paywall: use the link and download it now.

Burns and Pauly bring out all the other B's: to start with, buzzwords, bullets (silver), best (practices) and bandwidth. Lots of others. The one B they like: bottom-up. So do I. Hard to know how firmly the Burns and Pauly tongues were planted in the Burns and Pauly cheeks, but by cracky they surely know they're right about this. Common sense solutions so clearly and frequently give way to self-dealing and managerialist me-tooism in health care. Those who benefit from such nonsense have been called out often in this blog. But we can hope they now know not only are a few doctors now on to them, but some clearer-headed individuals from the management establishment as well.

Article source:Health Care Renewal

[junker-town]

Phil Kessel trade rumors seem baseless, which makes them pointless for now

Beliefs are opinions until they have sources.

This is how it starts.

Without Phil Kessel, the Penguins probably don’t win back-to-back Stanley Cups. Less than two months after that incredible feat, Pittsburgh columnists are floating the idea of a Kessel trade.

Dear, dear readers: don’t fall for this.

The most recent, and most egregious, was this column from Ron Cook of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette titled “Don't be surprised if the Penguins trade Phil Kessel.” A fascinating premise, no? Cook used Penguins assistant coach Rick Tocchet’s departure for Arizona as a springboard for a “this is the end for Kessel” theory.

The problem? None of it was sourced, and therefore much of it is reckless. With all due respect to Cook and the Post-Gazette, this deserves the Fire Joe Morgan treatment.

Shall we? We’ll start a few paragraphs into it.

I believe Phil Kessel will be traded. It might not happen this week or this month or even this offseason. But I believe it will happen sooner rather than later.

I know “fake news” is all the rage right now, but I think most people would agree that “sources” is more trustworthy than “I believe” when it comes to reporting.

It was clear in June, by the end of the Penguins’ second consecutive Stanley Cup run, that the organization wasn’t thrilled with Kessel.

Oh, wow. That would certainly be something! What makes that clear?

He scored 23 goals in 82 games during the regular season, not nearly enough for a player with his marvelous shooting skills. He had a huge goal — one of the most significant of the postseason — to beat Ottawa, 1-0, in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference final but scored just two more goals in the final 11 playoff games. Even though he had 23 points in the 25 postseason games, it was hard to find anyone in organization to say he was playing well.

Cook has no quotes from “anyone in the organization” to back that up. Even an anonymous quote from a front office source saying “I don’t think he was playing well” would’ve sufficed.

I wrote this in a column on the internet, so I am to be believed. Share this with many people. Spread my narrative.

We have yet to find anything here that is not solely Cook’s opinion.

My belief is Evgeni Malkin wasn’t thrilled to play on the same line with Kessel. And Sidney Crosby? Sullivan acknowledged Crosby and Kessel have no chemistry together. None.

There’s that “belief” again. It irks me when columnists write about how a player feels about a teammate without direct quotes or evidence. Are we supposed to believe that Cook FaceTimes Malkin after games?

And if so, why are these not available for public consumption? They would be great!

As for that last point, here’s some actual quotes from Sullivan after Crosby and Kessel started clicking in February 2016. From Cook’s own paper, no less!

“It was more, I think, my gut feeling that maybe this might work,” coach Mike Sullivan said Friday after practice at Consol Energy Center. “Sometimes, when players don’t play together for a while and you put them together there’s a spark. Our hope was that that would occur.

“Phil, obviously, is a goal-scorer. He can really shoot the puck. I think regardless who Sid plays with, he is a guy who is going to make everybody around him better. That’s the nature of his game. So, we felt that the time was probably right, given the fact that we struggled to generate goal-scoring a few games in a row. Maybe if we tweaked it a little bit, we might get a spark?”

Maybe that magic dissipated this season. I’ll grant you that. But Cook saying Sullivan believes the two have no chemistry (NONE!!!!) is intellectually dishonest.

It’s no secret that Kessel often drives Sullivan crazy.

If it’s no secret, where’s the public evidence to back that up? When you’re covering a player or coach, you can’t just toss out what they think of one another into the public sphere without proof. If you’re going to abandon good journalistic faith to serve a narrative, though, at least try to hide it by saying “I’ve heard” or “those close to the team say.”

I’m just trying to help you, Ron.

I’m guessing he has produced the same reaction all the way up the company ladder, from Jim Rutherford to Mario Lemieux.

YOU’RE GUESSING? THEN DON’T PUT IT IN YOUR COLUMN, RON.

It’s no secret that Kessel hates puppies. In fact, I’m guessing Kessel hates all kinds of babies. Human babies. Kittens. Bear cubs. Tadpoles. I wrote this in a column on the internet, so I am to be believed. Share this with many people. Spread my narrative. Vindicate my opinions and sense of self-importance in this market.

Cook goes on to talk about how Rick Tocchet was quite close to Kessel, and how important he was to Kessel’s success in Pittsburgh. And here, he does use quotes. Convenient how he uses actual reporting when it serves his narrative.

And, to be fair, there’s a decent argument in here. If Kessel struggles, it’ll be worth asking him if he misses Tocchet. Then we can hear his answer and let that speak for itself.

Instead, we’re going to judge this whole situation months ahead of actually having results to judge. Cook ends Sullivan’s quote with a note about Kessel and Tocchet as proof he’s onto something here.

“In particular, he has a real good relationship with Phil. They spend a lot of time together.”

Tocchet didn’t just help keep Kessel’s head in the game. He served as a buffer between Kessel and Sullivan.

Don’t underestimate the importance of that role.

I won’t, and neither should fans. But let’s not overestimate it, either. Not without some concrete evidence that Tocchet was the only thing keeping Sullivan and Kessel from butting heads. I see none of that here.

The last part of Cook’s column is actually important. Kessel might be moved because of his contract. That’s a legitimate reason to think about this scenario. It has facts behind it. He makes $6.8 million a season. Malkin and Crosby already take up a ton of cap space, and soon the Penguins will need to sign Matt Murray. GM Jim Rutherford has never been one to hold onto players when he can move them to improve the present and future (see: the James Neal trade).

It is more than likely Kessel doesn’t live out his contract in Pittsburgh (it ends in 2021-22, after all). The only concrete reason to think that, though, is financial roster practicality. Not the personal relationships between Kessel and his team.

That’s nothing but speculation resting on the flimsiest of bases.

Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

Good luck to the Penguins trying to move him.

Good luck to the team continuing to have to deal with him without Tocchet.

I think they’ll be fine on both counts, Ron.

Columnists are different than beat reporters. Beat reporters usually stick to the facts they’ve corroborated with sources. Columnists offer opinions. Sometimes the two professions cross paths, but not often.

I don’t know Cook personally. I’ve never heard of him before now. He might be a nice man who just wrote a bad column. But he writes for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a reputable newspaper that also employs the likes of Sean Gentille and other reporters who do good work with sources and fact-based analysis. Stuff like this does those people a disservice.

It is, unfortunately, all-too common in the sports world. A quick Google search for “Phil Kessel Toronto media” will show how this exact scenario played out before he was run out of the Leafs’ organization. Or just look at the numerous articles that assassinated Tyler Seguin’s character before the Bruins traded him to Dallas.

The personality sniping as P.K. Subban’s run in Montreal came to an end were arguably worse. “Reports” said Max Pacioretty was basically conspiring against him and a radio host in Montreal cited locker room conversations that were relayed to him as proof Subban was a bad teammate. Just floated out there.

In each of those three examples, you’d find pockets of fandom that stood behind the team’s decision to move on. Many of them fall back on these “reports” about personality, teammate infighting or general drama.

Columnists, beat writers, radio hosts — their voices are wielded as truth by much of their audiences, regardless of the actual reporting behind their words. It takes one column like this from Cook to plant the seed of negative public opinion against Kessel. Whether he intends that or not (and I don’t think he does) is beside the point.

So I (hopelessly) wish these people would wield their words more carefully. Or at least frame their opinions as such instead of shrouding them in phrases like “believe” or “guessing” that kinda-sorta imply you might know something your readers don’t. And if you do, then say so.

Have a little respect for the people you cover and the audience who places their trust in you.

[flauntpage]

An Experiment That Changed Baseball: The Moneyball Draft 15 Years Later

"The Moneyball draft, for better or worse, is kind of a line of demarcation between the way things had been done and the way things are done now. We were kind of unwilling participants in a science experiment of sorts, I guess, to see if it would work or not." — Stephen Obenchain, one of the Oakland Athletics' seven first-round picks in 2002

In 2003, author Michael Lewis published Moneyball, a chronicle of the Oakland A's groundbreaking analytical approach to player evaluation. At the heart of the book was Oakland's preparation ahead of the 2002 amateur draft, the first time the A's would use these new techniques on a grand scale to draft and sign amateur talent.

The book revolutionized baseball. Eventually, every team in the majors adopted some or all of the concepts that Lewis outlined. By the end of the decade, "Moneyball" became the term used to describe a statistical-based approach in all of sports.

What follows is an oral history of the Moneyball draft and its impact on the game of baseball, as told by the many people involved or affected by it. Players are listed by their drafted position, college, and pick round and number. All non-playing personnel are listed by their job titles at the time of the 2002 Major League Baseball draft.

Billy Beane, photographed here during in the 2005 amateur draft, believed that the draft could be Oakland's way to compete with bigger market clubs. Photo by Michael Zagaris /MLB Photos via Getty Images.

In 2002, Billy Beane was heading into his fifth major league draft since succeeding Sandy Alderson as Oakland's general manager. This one would be different. For one, his top lieutenant and director of player personnel, J.P. Ricciardi, had left to manage the Blue Jays. For another, Beane believed that, after years of development, a new, analytic-based approach to scouting players was ready to debut. For the A's, who had long operated on a shoestring budget, the experiment could pay dividends. All Oakland had to do was commit to it.

J.P. Ricciardi, General Manager, Toronto Blue Jays: I think Sandy deserves a lot of the credit for laying the groundwork, and Billy took the ball and ran with it. I think as soon as we realized we were definitely going to be a very small market club, we had to buy into a different way of doing things.

Jim Pransky, Area Scout, Oakland Athletics: Things don't happen overnight. Sometimes a thought process goes on for several years. You're looking at the draft, checking the results of the draft. I don't think it was a haphazard thing thrown together. Sandy put the foundation down and Billy worked with him, J.P. worked with Billy.

Ricciardi: I hired Paul [DePodesta, A's assistant general manager, 1999-2004].… In Paul's case, I knew his dynamic would fit what Billy and I were all about. I played with Billy, I'd been with Billy a long time. I knew what missing piece we needed in the front office and Paul was the perfect guy for that.

Chris Pittaro, National Field Coordinator, Oakland Athletics: Paul DePodesta said it best. He said, If we hadn't already been doing it this way, would we be?

Stephen Obenchain, Starting Pitcher, University of Evansville, Pick 1s.37: Their payroll was miniscule compared to most teams and compared to the top teams it was definitely miniscule, and they're trying to make the playoffs and win a World Series. Money was not going to solve the problem, so they had to find another way to do it.

Pittaro: We had to find an area where we could compete and it obviously was not the free-agent market, where we weren't as attractive a destination as New York or L.A. for whatever reason—money, prestige, whatever you want to call it.…

When Paul came in, I started to see things move in a different direction in terms of we needed to find a way to compete. How? What are the answers? I don't think we really had any answers. We just tried to find an area that we felt like was not so much our niche, but here's where we can maybe get a leg up on somebody else. We started to think a little bit differently, outside the box, in terms of a non-traditional type of scouting. It was kind of our way to be relevant or to stay alive in the game.

Beane and his staff came to believe that the amateur draft could be that advantage. At the time, teams were awarded two early draft picks for every major free agent lost. For Oakland, a team that routinely had its players poached by bigger-market clubs, the draft was the only sphere where they had a bevy of resources to work with.

After the 2001 season, the A's lost first baseman Jason Giambi (to the Yankees), center fielder Johnny Damon (Red Sox), and closer Jason Isringhausen (Cardinals) in free agency. That gave them a staggering seven first-round picks: four in the proper first round, plus three more in the draft's supplemental portion.

Pransky: It became pretty clear-cut when we first got there [in 2002, before the draft] that there was certainly a lot more emphasis on the college guys, more so than ever. And also there was a still a group of people in the organization that were still [saying], Let's not eliminate the high school guys. Let's not do that, there are still some exceptions out there.… I don't think Billy thought there were any exceptions. He didn't want any exceptions. He didn't want to talk about exceptions. He was really set on, This is the best route we could go and it's probably easier to have this one route instead of looking for a possible detour. There are no detours. This is the way we're going. This is the direction we're going.

Pittaro: The cost of being wrong was prohibitive for a team like us. When you draft 50 guys and two or three get to the big leagues, sometimes that's considered a pretty good draft. Now, when your first-rounder doesn't get there and you paid $1.8 million for him back then or whatever it is, or a million and a half dollars and you only had a budget of $3 million or $4 million, that was prohibitive for us. We were trying to find a better way to get a return on our dollar. That's all we were trying to do.

John Sickels, Lead Prospect Writer, ESPN.com: They realized that the statistical analysis of players at the college level was something that, while it had been utilized, it had not been utilized enough and they could gain a competitive advantage by doing that more often.

Pransky: I think that's where some of the mistakes were made in earlier drafts, where [they] were projection-based too far. Automatically, you say, The guy is going to get bigger, he's going to get stronger, the guy's going to throw harder, he's going to hit the ball farther. And that doesn't always happen. Some guys are going to throw as hard as they ever do at 16 and that's it. They're not going to throw any harder down the line.…

Once you've gone with the college route, you've gone with the older player. So you've got guys anywhere from three to four years older, so the projection is lessened dramatically.

Pittaro: We still loved guys with tools and upside, but … sometimes the college player was more attractive to us because we had a little better history on them and there was a little less guesswork. Sometimes that means a little lower ceiling but, again, the cost of being wrong for us is prohibitive.

Sickels: Scouts were always aware of what the players were doing. The hard part is, This player is ripping up college, can he continue to do that in pro ball?... There was always some distortion in college because of the aluminum bat, and a lot of times a player who was really impressive in college would maybe get downgraded a little bit because scouts weren't sure how that was going to translate into pro ball. What happened with the Moneyball thing, is Oakland had realized, OK, yeah, college stats can be misleading but there's ways to adjust for that.

Pittaro: I think we just told [our scouts], listen, you go in and you see a player on any given time and it's kind of like taking a snapshot, whereas the statistics and numbers will tell the whole story of a year. They'll give you the film. So which one is more likely to be what the player is? No one ever said, Hey, you've got to go in and like this guy because he's hitting .400 with 20 home runs. That wasn't the purpose of anything. It was, Hey, maybe you need to give this guy another look.

Sickels: There were trends that were already there and the whole thing with the Moneyball draft was the Oakland staff under Billy Beane. They just took it further and in a more intense direction.

Pransky: We had the extra picks that year, too. Which if you're going to try something out, and try something that's somewhat unique and different, you might as well as do it when you've got the numbers to try it. And we did.

Pittaro: If we're wrong, it sets us back in ways that it doesn't set other teams back.… I can remember turning to [director of player development] Keith Lieppman and saying, Either we're going to look really good or we're going to have an organization full of Double-A players, tops.

Nick Swisher became the face and star of Oakland's Moneyball class. Photo by Tom Szczerbowski-USA TODAY Sports.

The 2002 draft began even better than expected. With their first pick, at 16th overall, the A's selected Ohio State star Nick Swisher. Eight picks later, they chose University of Kentucky right-hander Joe Blanton. Each was a consensus first-round prospect, players who passed both the analytics and eye tests with flying colors. No one in the baseball world batted an eyelash at either selection.

From there, the analytics kicked in and Oakland's new strategy became evident. Instead of focusing on a player's raw ability or body type, the A's turned their attention toward skill sets. For hitters, it was on-base percentage. For pitchers, they prized polished arms over punishing velocity. And in both cases, the college stats were of supreme importance.

The result? A collection of names that, on aggregate, stunned the baseball world. In many cases, the people caught most off guard by when they were selected—and by whom—were the players themselves.

Obenchain: I spoke with the Cardinals, and the area scout said, I think we're going to try and take you at 55. It took a while to sink in. He's not saying 55th round. He's saying 55th [overall]. That doesn't make sense. Me? I'm not that good.

I really hadn't spoken to Oakland and, a day or two before the draft, my advisor—who turned into my agent—said, Oakland is looking to take you 35 or 37, would you sign there? I'm like, Uh, yeah! I'm just hoping to have a team pick me, and when he said top 30-something, yeah I'm interested!...

It was kind of a whirlwind because I'm just a no-name guy from not a baseball powerhouse program... I went to the University of Evansville. We're known for our basketball team that wore sleeves and that Andy Benes pitched for us.

Steve Stanley, Center Fielder, University of Notre Dame, Pick 2.67: In my junior year, I was drafted in the 50th round, the last round of the draft. The Florida Marlins drafted me in the 50th round and it was a favor of a pick because of my coach at Notre Dame.…

The next year, my senior season, [I figured] that I would get my degree, get drafted somewhere in the 10th to 20th round because I was a safe pick.… Those were my expectations heading up to the draft.

Two days before the draft occurred, my coach called me and said, Hey, are you sitting down? I said , Yes, who died? I thought it was bad. He said , No, nothing's wrong. I got a call from Oakland. They want to draft you in the second round for $200,000. Of course my jaw drops, I start to scream excitedly. At that time I was married—we were married for about six months. The neighbors called the cops because they thought my wife and I were in some sort of horrible fight.

Drew Dickinson, Starting Pitcher, University of Illinois, Pick 28.848: I never talked to the Oakland A's, nor did I ever fill out a questionnaire from them, when I literally had filled out every single other club.… The two clubs I talked to the most were the Dodgers and the Angels.…

It was getting late. At that time, 2002, you're listening on your computer—simulcast, broadcast, whatever. It's the 28th round and I'm actually frustrated by that point. I know I'm going to get drafted but by that round, I'm kind of disappointed. So I hear Angels, nothing. Dodgers, nothing. So I get up out of the chair and I'm starting to walk down the stairs to get something to drink, and literally I'm halfway down the stairs and I hear my name.

Ben Fritz, Starting Pitcher, California State University, Fresno, Pick 1.30: Things changed throughout the year. I think junior year, it was top ten [rounds]. As things progressed and got better, you started hearing third to fifth, then started hearing before the third. I think my mindset was more second.

By the time we got to the draft, to obviously have your name called 30th and be the last pick of that first round, it was awesome.… There definitely wasn't a whole lot of dialogue with [Oakland].… Honestly, I had no clue going into the day.

Mark Teahen, Third Base, St. Mary's College of California, Pick 1s.39: As the draft got closer, I was expecting go in the top five rounds.… Before the draft, John Baker and I had a workout at the Coliseum where it was just him and I, so I figured they must have a good amount of interest.

John Baker, Catcher, University of California, Berkeley, Pick 4.128: I was definitely expecting to go back to school, graduate and I was going to go to law school, and I was going to be suing people or something.

Anyway, I get a really weird phone call a few days before the draft from Will Shock, who was a Cal guy himself who was an A's scout at the time. He says, Would you be willing to go to the Oakland Coliseum and take batting practice for our scouts? You have to realize, I'm a kid who grew up an A's fan.… The whole time, I'm trying to hit a homer, because who the hell wouldn't do that? I did, too, with a wooden bat. I was fired up after that. I didn't care about getting drafted after that, to be honest. I was just pumped I got to take BP at the Oakland Coliseum.…

They called me and said, We feel like we're going to take you in the fourth round if you're available. And I'm laughing, because I'm like, Nobody's going to take me before that. Of course I'm going to be available.

Teahen: I was at my parents' house in Yucaipa, California, with my family. We are watching the draft online. At that point I knew the A's were supposed to take me at the 39th pick. There was a huge time gap between the first round and the supplemental round and I remember being nervous throughout that time that they might change their mind. Thankfully they didn't.

Baker: The actual draft day, I went with my girlfriend at the time—who I'm now married to—we went to downtown Walnut Creek and we had crepes when it was happening. This is before TV, all that stuff. Further, and I hate to say this, but I still didn't believe anybody.… I didn't even believe [the A's], necessarily. I'm sitting there eating crepes and I got a phone call. Hey, we took you in the fourth ground, congratulations. And I went, Oh, wow, this is real. That's amazing.

Lloyd Turner, Second Base, Kennesaw State University, Pick 16.488: I remember there was a high school all-star tournament at my college. In hopes that I would get drafted, I said , Let me go and get some practice in the batting cage at the ball field. I'm walking up with my bat and my workout gear on, there's a lot of scouts at the game watching the game, and as I'm walking through the stands down the left-field line, I saw these guys. I didn't know who they were but they said, Hello, great job this year. I said thank you and I hope I can continue my career. I'm just going to work out. They said, You shouldn't have anything to worry about, you're a good ballplayer. I said, Thanks, that means a lot. I went on about my business, got drafted by Oakland, obviously, and my first spring training, I'm a new face, I'm walking through the clubhouse and walk outside, and I see this guy. The first thing he says is, Hey Lloyd. I told you [that] you didn't have anything to worry about, didn't I? It was [Oakland director of scouting] Eric Kubota.

John Baker (center) and Jeremy Brown (right) were each selected in the Moneyball Draft. Baker would play seven seasons in the majors, while Brown would leave the game abruptly at age 28. Photo by Michael Zagaris /MLB Photos via Getty Images.

All told, eight members of the A's 2002 draft class would play in the major leagues. Gradually, two players established themselves as the faces of the group. One was the very first pick in Oakland's draft, Swisher. The son of former major leaguer Steve Swisher, he was a rare combination of power and patience, packed inside a muscular six-foot frame. But his play on the field was only part of his appeal. No 'Moneyball' draftee had more tools than Swisher, and no one had a bigger personality, either.

Baker: The first day I got to professional baseball, we had a team meeting. We were in Salem, Oregon, and the manager says, Hey we've got a team meeting, new players signed, that sort of thing. We're all sitting around, he's talking and talking, he starts looking around and is like, Somebody's missing. And out of the laundry basket, like a jack-in-the-box, Nick Swisher, who's been hiding, pops up screaming something incoherent. That was my first meeting of Nick, him scaring me and somebody in the room by popping up like a jack-in-the-box. I go, Who's that? Somebody turns to me and is like, That's the first-rounder. That figures. That's what I thought first-rounders were supposed to be like. It was perfect.

Stanley: He was a combination of everything the scouts wanted and everything Billy Beane wanted in Moneyball. He was the perfect science experiment. It was a lot easier to buy into Nick Swisher because of his power potential. You could basically say, We're going to invest our time, money, and potential in Nick because that's not such a far-fetched proposal.

Pittaro: If Moneyball had never come along, I think Nick would still have been a guy we were extremely, extremely interested in. He absolutely would have been that guy, and his career proved that out, too. He was a Team USA guy, a center fielder at a major college program that had success at a major college conference. That's a thing where we weren't smarter than anyone else.

Teahen: Swisher did become the face of our draft class and he wouldn't want it any other way. He has a ton of personality and I remember right after the draft there was a conference call with me and John Baker, because we were the local guys drafted by the A's, and Nick Swisher, because he was the first pick. On the conference call, John Baker and I each answered one question quickly and the rest of the call was Swish talking.

Dickinson: Swish had been acting like a big leaguer since he was 12. That's just how he was. We called him 'Big League Swish.'

Teahen: I do laugh once in a while when I see Swisher on TV in a suit, because during our first instructional league, Drew Dickinson had to take him to the mall to show him how to buy collared shirts.

Baker: He grew up in a major league locker room. He acted like a major leaguer when he wasn't, and truthfully it pissed off a lot of people. A lot of people got pissed off by his act. But baseball is so complicated with those things, because how many people are angry because they're jealous he's a first-rounder who got more money, and how many people are really annoyed with the stuff that he does? Because when I look back at all my experiences with Nick, even batting behind him in Double-A and getting hit when he would pimp homers and they wouldn't go over the fence—I would get hit for him, it happened multiple times—when I look back at Nick Swisher as a teammate, I always laugh and it always brings a smile to my face.

The second face of 'Moneyball' was far more reluctant to be in the spotlight. Jeremy Brown, the fifth of the Athletics' seven first-rounders, was a record-setting catcher from the University of Alabama. He was also, by conventional wisdom, not a first-round talent. That made him the unwitting embodiment of the 'Moneyball' ethic. No draftee had more ink spilled about him in Lewis's book, or more screen time devoted to him in the eventual movie adaptation. For a different player, it would have been the opportunity of a lifetime, but according to many of those closest to Brown, the attention weighed on him like an anchor. It would become a major catalyst in his premature retirement from the sport at age 28.

Sickels: The only one that I thought, at the time, was a real surprise was Jeremy Brown. He was seen more as a fourth- or fifth-round guy. And, of course, the story is that he had really great college numbers but a bad body, not a guy who was a real pure athlete and somebody who traditional scouts didn't like. And I think that was very true. He was basically the first one [who made people] say, Oh, wow, why'd they pick that guy?... He was the one a lot of the attention ended up getting focused on.

Pittaro: Having seven [first-round] picks was great. Affording seven picks was another issue. Jeremy Brown allowed us to draft the rest of the draft. He was a senior. We got him for a senior signed slot and it freed up money to do other things. Mainly, draft the rest of the draft.

Dickinson: The ultimate nicest guy. At the time, always trying to buy and pay for everything. I think he got the least amount of those seven first-rounders, like $350,000, but he'd try to buy you dinner and buy you drinks all the time. He was just that guy. One of the nicest humans you've ever met.

Brian Stavisky, Outfielder, University of Notre Dame, Pick 6.188: Nick really likes the spotlight and he shines in it, really enjoys the attention on him but deflecting it on other people, too. Jeremy is kind of the opposite.

Joe Blanton, Starting Pitcher, University of Kentucky, Pick 1.24: If you watch the movie, the attention wasn't the most enlightening attention, either. I don't think the book did this, but the media after that kind of took their own spin and was more into, Oh, look, he's not a normal draft pick who is 6-3, 5 percent body fat, 220 pounds. He didn't fit that mold but he was a great baseball player.

Dickinson: I thought Jeremy Brown would be a big leaguer. Jeremy Brown was so good.… He actually hit for power, and as a pitcher, he was always so invested in you. You knew, Hey, this guy's got my back. He's not back there thinking about his four at-bats or what he could do to be about himself. He did what big-league catchers do. Big-league catchers run the pitching staff, and he did that.

Baker: I think if people dive deeper into that story and get to the bottom of him leaving baseball, I think the pressure became too much. Because it is unfair, to come from a place that is that small and to have so many people expect so many things of you. Even to be put in places where you're not baseball-wise ready, thrust into the big leagues or moved ahead when you shouldn't have been moved ahead because you have these expectations.

Pittaro: I know people are going to say that, Oh, he played there because Billy got him. Well, the guy did play in the big leagues.… When you go out to play and you have to try and prove everybody else wrong or everyone else right, it's a very difficult game to do that. Unfortunately for Jeremy, he was made almost into a caricature of himself and his abilities. I don't think it was fair to the kid.

Fritz: We lived together on a couple of different occasions throughout the minor leagues and if he had trouble dealing with it, he dealt with it himself. It wasn't verbalized by any means. I think all of us were a little shocked when he decided to stop playing. Especially when he's about to get this big-league job, backing up in the big leagues. The timing of it all was shocking to me, for sure, but we don't always know what goes on behind closed doors. The guy did a good job of masking whatever it is he had going on, and that's what caused him to step away.

Dickinson: Jeremy just had all the off-field stuff and it kind of brought him down and he never had the big-league career I thought he would have had. At the very least, he would have been a Henry Blanco–type, a lifetime 15-year backup type. That's how good he could have been. I always feel bad he never got to do that.

Tabitha Soren, Photographer and Journalist, Wife of Moneyball author Michael Lewis: He doesn't really like being away from home. He likes living in Hueytown, Alabama. He likes being with his family. He doesn't need to be on a world stage. He loves baseball, he would love to be someone who owns an indoor facility where he could train kids year round and have sort of like a mini-university for baseball in Hueytown. Instead, he went back and got paid really well and got amazing medical benefits to be a coal miner in Alabama with his dad and work the night shift.… If his personal life hadn't imploded, I think he would have stuck around. He says he doesn't have any regrets. He seems happy.

J.P. Ricciardi, left, and Sandy Alderson, right, each helped Beane build the foundations of Moneyball. Both men are now in the New York Mets front office. Photo by Rich Schultz/Getty Images.

On June 17, 2003, a little more than a year after the 2002 amateur draft, Lewis's 'Moneyball' hit shelves. It was an immediate commercial sensation, rocketing up best-seller lists and revered by casual and hardcore baseball fans alike.

Within the game, however, the book was far more divisive. Beane and many in his front office came off as strident, sometimes to the point of downright arrogance. It was one thing for a front office to espouse new ideas. It was another to spit in the face of tradition. Inside baseball, many in the scouting community regarded the book as the latter. In some cases, they even wondered if Oakland's real mission was to eradicate their livelihood.

Pransky: I didn't know a thing, to be honest with you, until I was in a CVS or a pharmacy or something, maybe in October or November. I saw a copy of Sports Illustrated on the shelf and one of the captions on the cover was something about the A's Moneyball draft or something like that. Well, of course that got my attention. I think they ran a couple chapters, a couple excerpts.

I sat down in my recliner and I read those chapters and I said, Uh oh. This is going to get some attention… This is going to hit the news and this is going to be something big. And you knew that some people weren't going to like it, just some of the things mentioned in there. Some people just weren't going to see it the way other people saw it.

Ricciardi: I think the biggest misconception was the scouting community looked at anyone associated with the A's as basically the guys with the black hats, that we were going to get rid of scouting, we were going to do the draft differently. They totally had a misconception about what we were going to do and what we were all about, and nothing could have been further from the truth. But it was a shock to the industry because it was a different mindset, and it got a lot of paranoia up among traditional scouts—and a lot of traditional writers who were friends with scouts, who got all of their information from scouts.

Eddie Bane, Special Assistant to the General Manager, Tampa Bay Devil Rays: I think old-time scouts, whether they said that or not, felt threatened by it. Because a lot of times, we didn't understand it and when you don't understand something, you always feel threatened by it. I think the old-time scouts, hopefully not including me, but even the middle-age guys thought people were trying to cost them their jobs. So that's why people got so fired up about it, I think. Wow, you're threatening my livelihood. Which I don't believe at all.

Pransky: Initially Moneyball was so dramatic and had so much press and stuff that automatically you kind of divided the camps a bit between the old school and the new school. That went on for several years afterwards. You had that, Oh we don't needs stats, we don't need this, and you had the other ones saying, We need all these stats. When in reality, you really needed to know right down the middle a little bit. You needed a bit of both. You needed scouts' understanding and you needed the numbers to do these things. For a while, there was definitely, no doubt about it, it was old and new school. There was no way around that. I couldn't walk into a ballpark without somebody mentioning Moneyball or the draft and You guys think you're better than me.

Pittaro: I felt the cold shoulder many times walking into a ballpark.… People didn't talk to you. In particular cases, I can remember, a guy didn't talk to me for a couple of years. That was part of the blowback. I think when you go in and challenge someone's view of themselves, it can be startling, obviously.

Ricciardi: I've had people say to me, You're an analytics guy. Well, nothing could be further from the truth: I was an area scout almost ten years. I signed ten big leaguers myself, non-drafted players, free agents. My whole background was scouting but all of a sudden I became a nerd.

Bane: Especially when the book came out, there were some people who made fun of them—or not made fun of them, that's the wrong word for it, but thought they were on the wrong track and they were taking it too far. But there were a lot of other people thinking, OK, we already kind of do this and they're just getting more attention for it.

Pittaro: Billy Beane didn't write the book. The Oakland A's didn't write the book…. Did we open the door a little too far? Yeah, probably. I think if you ask most of the people, Do we regret saying some things or letting some things [go]? Yeah, sure, probably. I just think there was probably more access given than we would have liked at the time. A lot of it was just locker room talk that came out in the book. I can't speak for Billy or anybody or else, but I don't know, if we were given the opportunity to do it over, we would have done it again.

Mark Teahen became one of three Moneyball first-round picks to carve out major league careers. Photo by

Jerry Lai-USA Today Sports.

Unlike the men who drafted them, the members of the 'Moneyball' draft class had little interest in changing how the game was played. " It's not like any of us said, 'Hey, we want to be a part of this fun thing,'" says Obenchain. "We all said 'Hey, we want to play professional baseball.'… They picked our name and we said 'Heck yeah, we'll play.'"

Nevertheless, it didn't prevent some of the front-office enmity from spilling over onto the field itself. Occasionally, it was malevolent. More often, it was innocuous. It all added up to the same thing: the 'Moneyball' draft class were marked men, and not just outside the organization.

Baker: It was the next year in spring training when people found out that a book was coming out. The previous draft class, the kids from the class in front of us, you could feel their eyes. They felt that they could now blame every non-call-up or pass over on us being a part of this Moneyball draft class. That we're going to get special treatment because we're in some book. I definitely think some of us did and some of us didn't.

Teahen: Lots of other prospects and players definitely knew we were part of the Moneyball draft. People that didn't read the book would make comments once in a while because all they heard was the stuff about walks and scouts not being as important as they once were. Obviously, the book was much more complex than that. For the most part, people were very supportive, but early in my career I noticed some people from other organizations possibly cheering against my draft class in hopes that Moneyball would look bad.

Stavisky: The Moneyball guys were at the lower levels but they changed the whole minor-league system to where they were trying to emphasize walks and on-base percentage. I think we probably were looked at as "the Moneyball guys" by the Double-A, Triple-A guys at the time, the new guys coming in once everyone knew what Moneyball was.

Fritz: You definitely heard the term "Moneyballer."

Baker: We were up with the Dan Johnsons and the previous year's class, and they really thought we were being shot through the system without any merit. It felt like that to me at certain times. Not that anyone was overly malicious, they just actually said that stuff out loud. I'm not saying I felt a vibe but they'd be like, Oh yeah, I wish I were drafted one year later because then I'd be in Double-A right away. That's just a natural element of baseball players and insecurity in a game inherent with failure.

The unique circumstances in which the 'Moneyball' draft class came together and how they started their careers forged an unusual bond. It was also aided by the writer who made them all famous. In the years after 'Moneyball,' Lewis mulled over the idea of a sequel, called 'Underdogs,' that would chronicle the players' lives since the draft. Meanwhile, his wife, Tabitha Soren, began photographing each of the players at the onset of their professional careers and continued for the next 15 years. It resulted in a book entitled 'Fantasy Life: Baseball and the American Dream,' for which several members of the draft class contributed essays.

Well after most groups break up and go their separate ways, the 'Moneyball' draft's closeness endured along with their reputation.

Stavisky: The numbers really don't measure personality and character and things like that, but either something must have gone into that, in addition to the numbers, or the numbers just produced a bunch of guys who really could get along that well.

Fritz: In my experience still being in the game as a coach, I think it was a uniquely tight group.

Baker: Everybody was 21 or so when we started our first season, 22, and everyone had gone through three years of college baseball where you develop how to be a teammate. And they drafted players that were thoughtful about their approach in baseball, so we had that common ground. And you add the element of everybody thinks you're only getting promoted because you're part of this special draft class. So you have something that links everybody.

Teahen: I think there was a bit of a sense that a lot of people throughout baseball weren't exactly cheering for our success, so we stuck together and pushed each other to continue to improve and grow as players.

Blanton: I don't think it was intentional but obviously seven first-rounders is quite a few and we all kind of moved together along the way for the most part. We all, I feel like, from '02, '03, '04 there were at least a few of us playing together on every team. So you play with the guys for a few years.

Fritz: [Tabitha] was there every spring and it was that whole draft class, so it wasn't just a select few or five guys she was taking photos of. It almost created a tighter bond between that group of guys because you were doing stuff together after the fact where she's doing a photo shoot at sunset and you're all coming back for it. There's 30 dudes out there for it.… Off-seasons come around and you're still in contact because of certain things with Tabitha and Michael.

Dickinson: With the Moneyball stuff, it was having Tabitha keep doing stuff and emailing us. It's allowed us to, when we may not have kept in touch as much, we talk more through email or something like that. Even that is nice to bring up a story when we played together. It's the stuff you never forget.

Today, Joe Blanton is the last active player remaining from the Moneyball draft class. To date, the eight signees who played in the major leagues combined to gross 41.2 wins above replacement, more than three quarters of which come from Blanton and Swisher. No baseball draft class is more famous or more influential, but is it actually an on-field success?

Stanley: It definitely would not have had the impact that it did had we not had a couple of players that really had success. Nick being one of those, Joe being another one that made an impact.

Pransky: I don't think Swisher and Blanton were guys that weren't on other people's lists. They were going to go in the first round to somebody. I think once you get past those guys, that's when the other stuff pops in, the other aspects of it pop in.

Ricciardi: I think it was a little bit out there in the sense that they took some guys most people wouldn't take and they over-drafted some guys most people wouldn't take.

Sickels: But even back then, it was not as different as everybody thought. It wasn't like they were drafting people that nobody had ever heard of in the first round. Swisher, Blanton, Fritz, McCurdy—these guys were all legitimate first-round picks by either scouting or statistics.

Pransky: Now it's 15 years later and now people can go back to that draft and you can analyze it. And you know what? You're going to get arguments on that.

Sickels: So basically, seven guys at the top, two of those guys became major league regulars—Swisher and Blanton, who had long major-league careers. A third, Teahen, was a decent role player. That's three out of seven right there, which is really good considering how difficult these kinds of things are. If you look at history, a lot of times when teams have multiple picks, there are many examples of teams that had multiple early-round picks and none of them panned out. So overall it's a successful draft. There's no question about it in my opinion.

Bane: Joe Klein told me one time—and I think it was brilliant, when he was my GM in Cleveland—that you get your first-round pick to be a good major-league player, you get one of the two-through-fours to be a good major-league player, one of the five-through-tens to be a good major-league player and you hit on one other guy after that. If you did that, you had a really good draft.…

Grading off the scale that I always use, it's not a successful draft. You need to produce more major-league talent out of a draft than that. In [the Angels'] 2010 draft, we got Kole Calhoun and Cam Bedrosian.… We had five picks in the [first] 80 or something like that and I didn't consider that a successful draft.

Ricciardi: There was some unconventionality to it but in our game, if you don't try things, how are you going to find out things? Look, if I came away with Joe Blanton and Swisher, and the rest of the guys didn't work out because they took chances, I wouldn't sit here and say that was a failure. I would say it was an exercise in trying to figure out something and if it didn't work, then I move on to something else.

Pransky: I think there's more argument about how the draft came out than, Should they even have done it this way?

Ricciardi: Moneyball is a way of surviving for teams that don't have money. I don't think it's going to be the end all, be all of you're going to win it all because history has told us in the last 20 years, it's been the teams with the top seven payrolls in baseball that win it. The Moneyball aspect is you're always going to have deficiencies but you're probably going to make yourself as good as you can on a limited budget.

I think that was lost on a lot of people. They come back with, Moneyball, it doesn't work, they don't win the World Series. Well, it's tough to win the World Series on a $50 million payroll. What you're trying to do is put out the best product you can and be as competitive as you can within the budget that you have, and I think that's where a lot of the scouting community missed out and were quick to pass judgment, and a lot of the writers were, too. Oh, how good are the A's? They can't get out of the playoffs. I don't think they realized how hard it was to make the playoffs on that type of payroll. And I think that was one of the biggest misconceptions that was out there.

Bane: Guys would always point to, Well, what's Oakland ever won? How many titles have they won with this group? That's the way people approach things when they're threatened by something: Nah nah nah nah nah, you didn't do this or you didn't do that. Instead of looking at the whole picture and saying, Hey, they've got some good ideas here, we need to start thinking about this.

Joe Blanton, the 24th overall pick in the 2002 Draft, has pitched 13 seasons and counting in the major leagues. Photo by Kyle Terada-USA Today Sports.

Fifteen years later, baseball has done much more than consider the ideas 'Moneyball' wrought. It has implemented them across the board; every team in the sport has changed the way they hire, scout, draft, and construct their organizations. Meanwhile, Oakland's 'Moneyball' class distinguished itself as the most recognized group to ever come out of the Rule 4 Draft. All told, a draft day born of desperation became one of the most influential moments in baseball history.

Stavisky: It's kind of neat that after all those years that the organization has existed, and the organizations that draft every year, this is the one draft class that kind of stands out with a title.

Fritz: I don't think they can name people but when you say Moneyball, they say "Oakland, 2002."… Even players now, when somebody mentions it, Oh really, you're Moneyball? They couldn't mention names but just Moneyball draft, you know Oakland, 2002. You at least know it was something beyond the norm.

Sickels: Fans of a specific team would remember certain drafts.... But baseball fans in general, I think the Moneyball draft is the one that gets remembered most often for logical reasons. I also think that back then, 15 years ago, there was not much attention paid to the draft in general. I think that's changed now, and the rise of the internet has made it a lot more visible. MLB has done a lot of work to get the draft more attention … and I think the Moneyball draft feeds into the increasing amount of attention that the whole draft process has received over the last few years.

Pransky: It hasn't just been the last 15 years. You take the 15 years before that and there wasn't anything of that note, I think, as far as the baseball draft. There wasn't anything that ever rivaled the attention.

Sickels: Statistical analysis for us, for draftees, is looked at a lot more now than it was 15 years ago, but that change can be exaggerated. Teams did look at it 15 years ago. I think Oakland maybe did it more, but it wasn't as big a change as, say, Hollywood would want you to think.

Blanton: On the stat side, there was probably a little bit going on before that, but [the 2002 draft] brought it to the forefront.… That's kind of where everyone started talking about analytics and this is how they do it and what it's turned into today. You're talking about spin rate, perceived velocity, exit velocity, launch angle, you're talking about so many things and that was the start of it, with on base plus slugging.

Baker: Baseball is always a sport I feel like is a little bit behind, even working in it now. It's a little bit behind and always catching up on that progressive front. What they did absolutely changed the game, not necessarily their particular methods but their way of viewing things and realizing that we need to dive deeper into this information.

Bane: We needed to get pushed into this century and that philosophy kind of helped.

Ricciardi: If you look at where the game has come in the last 15 years, I think if you talk to a lot of those scouts, they're a lot more open-minded today about what the numbers are. I think any time you can have a hybrid between scouting and player development, and scouting and the numbers, that's when you're going to have more success.… A lot of the unknown has been demystified, so to speak.

Pittaro: I don't know if there was any one point in time but over the course of a few years you started seeing teams hire analytics people. You look at the general managers who have been hired since 2001 or 2002, you look at the departments that have been created, you look at the positions that have been created, and over the course of time you realize that the owners have come to the realization that, yeah, you know what? There's something in this. I think that's for every team to realize exactly what that is.

Baker: And now, if you look, so many of these front office that fit those kinds of decimals—Ivy-league or equivalent educated, they're generally white, liberal-arts background or economics, they go to business school or law school, like in the case of my boss Theo [Epstein]. I want to say 18 of the 30 GMs fit this type of thinking. Progressive thinkers relying on data. If it didn't work, then it wouldn't be in baseball 15 years later.

So it's really worked in that this kind of ethos has now swept through all of professional baseball. And I think if you're not looking at it from that perspective, if you don't have that research and development team or you don't have a sabermetric team and you're not using this information, then you're behind and you're going to get beat.

Billy Beane (current Athletics president and former general manager), Paul DePodesta (former Athletics assistant general manager), David Forst (current Athletics general manager) and Eric Kubota (Athletics scouting director) all declined requests for comment for this story.

Multiple interview requests by VICE Sports to Michael Lewis's publicist went unreturned.

Where Are They Now?

Eddie Bane: Special Assistant to the General Manager, Boston Red Sox

John Baker: Mental Skills Coordinator, Chicago Cubs

Joe Blanton: Relief Pitcher, Washington Nationals

Drew Dickinson: Pitching Coach, University of Illinois

Ben Fritz: Manager, Tri-City Dust Devils (San Diego Padres Short-season Single-A affiliate)

Jed Morris: Head Baseball Coach, Eastern University – St. Davids, Pennsylvania

Stephen Obenchain: Supervisor of Portfolio Support Services, Donaldson Capital – Evansville, Indiana

Chris Pittaro: Special Assistant to the General Manager, Oakland Athletics

Jim Pransky: Area Scout, Colorado Rockies

J.P. Ricciardi: Special Assistant to the General Manager, New York Mets

John Sickels: Executive Editor, Minorleagueball.com (SB Nation affiliate) – Lawrence, Kansas

Steve Stanley: Owner, Stanley Insurance Agency – Scottsdale, Arizona

Brian Stavisky: Inside Sales Analyst, Dresser-Rand – Olean, New York

Tabitha Soren: Author, Fantasy Life: Baseball and the American Dream – Berkeley, California

Mark Teahen: Owner, Sorso Wine Room – Scottsdale, Arizona

Lloyd Turner: Hitting Coach, Vermont Lake Monsters (Oakland Athletics Short-season Single-A affiliate)

An Experiment That Changed Baseball: The Moneyball Draft 15 Years Later published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[polixy]

Q&A: Political polls and the 2016 election

Q&A: Political polls and the 2016 election;

Voters cast their ballots at a fire station in Alhambra, California, on Nov. 8, 2016. (Ringo Chiu/AFP/Getty Images)

The outcome of the 2016 presidential election surprised a lot of people – not least the many political pollsters and analysts covering it. Today the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), the nation’s leading organization of survey researchers, released a long-awaited report that examines polling during last year’s long primary and general election campaigns.

Courtney Kennedy, Pew Research Center director of survey research

Courtney Kennedy, Pew Research Center’s director of survey research, chaired the AAPOR task force that produced the report. We sat down with Kennedy recently to discuss its findings and recommendations. The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity and conciseness.

Ever since Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton last year, there’s been plenty of criticism of the performance and trustworthiness of polls. Was that the impetus for this report?

Actually, this committee was organized back in May 2016, months before any of us had the slightest inkling that last year would be a particularly unusual year for polling. The original intent was pretty straightforward: to evaluate the performance of polls, both in the primary season and the general election; to compare how they did relative to past years; and, to the extent the data would support it, assess whether certain types of polls – online versus telephone, live versus automated – did better or worse than others.

But as of midnight or so on Nov. 8, it was clear that what the committee needed to do had changed. We couldn’t just do this very technical, “what was the average deviation” type of report. We needed to, in addition, consider another question: “Why did the polls seem to systematically underestimate support for Donald Trump?” There already were a number of hypotheses floating around – such as the so-called “shy Trump” effect (Trump supporters being less willing than others to disclose their support to an interviewer),  differential nonresponse (Trump supporters being less likely than others to participate in surveys), things of that nature – and we felt obligated to take on that additional piece.

The report notes that, while the national polls generally came pretty close to the actual nationwide popular vote (which Clinton won by 2.1 percentage points over Trump), the performance of polls at the state level – where presidential elections actually are decided – was a lot spottier. What reasons did you find for that?

We found evidence for multiple potential causes. One factor that I think affected everybody who was polling in the battleground states, is the legitimate late change in voter preference in the last week before Election Day. The data on this has its limitations, but the best source is the National Election Pool’s exit poll, which has a question about when voters made up their minds about who to vote for in the presidential race. That showed several roughly 20-point swings in favor of Trump among voters making their mind up in the final week. You didn’t really see that nationally, but in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and even Florida, you saw what looks like dramatic movement.

That’s sort of a good news/bad news finding for pollsters. The good news is, if you interviewed people at a certain point in time and they changed their mind several days later, the poll wouldn’t have detected that. That’s not a flaw in the poll, other than perhaps with the field period in which the pollster decided to do the data collection. But there’s fundamentally nothing that was necessarily off if what was generating most of the error was just honest-to-goodness changes of opinion.

What else did you find at the state level?

Another interesting finding had to do with poll respondents’ level of education. A number of studies have shown that in general, people with higher levels of formal education are more likely to take surveys – it’s a very robust finding. Places like Pew Research Center and others have known that for years, and we address that with our statistical weighting – that is, we ask people what their education level is and align our survey data so that it matches the U.S. population on education. And I think a lot of us assumed that was common practice in the industry – that roughly speaking, everybody was doing it. And that’s not what we found. At the state level, more often than not, the polls were not being adjusted for education.

Now in some elections, such as in 2012, that wouldn’t matter, because the very low educated and the very highly educated voted roughly the same way. But 2016 was drastically different – you had a quite strong linear relationship between education and presidential vote. And that meant that if you had too many college graduates in your poll, which virtually all of us do, and you didn’t weight appropriately, you were almost certainly going to overestimate support for Clinton.

Were there any possible factors for which you didn’t find evidence?

Yes. Take the hypothesis that there’s a segment of the Trump support base that does not participate in polls. If that’s true, that’s a huge problem for organizations like ours, and we need to study that and understand it if we’re ever going to fix it. But we looked for evidence of that, and we didn’t find it.

If it’s true that we’re missing a segment of the Trump support base, we would expect to find – without doing any fancy weighting, just looking at the raw data – that people in more rural, deep-red parts of the country would be underrepresented. And we didn’t find that; if anything, they were slightly overrepresented. We did a number of things with a critical eye looking for those types of problems, and did not find them. And so that gave me real reassurance that fundamentally, it’s not that the process of doing polls was broken last year.

What, if anything, can the profession do to address the issues the committee found with state and local polls, especially given that so many of the newspapers and TV stations that historically sponsored them can no longer afford to do so at the same level?

There’s lots of evidence to show that the resources that news organizations have for polling seem to be declining over time, and that does two things, I think: There are fewer news organizations doing polling, and those that do – particularly local news organizations – are using very low-cost methodology. What the report shows is that there are important design differences among the national polls, which tend to be pretty well resourced, versus the state polls, which tend to be done a lot more quickly using more automated methods with fewer resources. The state polls are half as likely as national polls to have live interviewers, and they’re about half as likely to have adjusted for education in their weighting, which we know to be important. So there are these structural things that seem to have compounded the gap in performance between those state polls and the national polls. We know that on average they’re doing it differently, and in ways that produced greater error in this election. It’s also true that over time, you just see that there’s more error in the state-level polls.

So I could imagine that a professional association like AAPOR might investigate whether this could be addressed, either by professional education or even by trying to organize funding for more rigorous state-level surveys, conducted very close to Election Day, in order to catch people who change their minds late. This would obviously be done by researchers who use very sophisticated, state-of-the-art weighting protocols, so you don’t have things like this education mishap. It’s unclear if that would completely fix the problem, but at least then you’d have an infusion of higher-quality polls into that set of polls that, on average, are done fairly cheaply.

Another piece of the 2016 election cycle was the prominence, even beyond the individual polls themselves, of the data-analysis operations and news sites that aggregated polls and used them not just to predict the final outcome but to give very precise-sounding probabilities that Clinton or Trump would win. How appropriate or useful is it to use polls as predictive tools?

Polls aren’t designed to produce precision on the order of “so-and-so has X.X% chance of winning.” There was actually quite a bit of diversity of opinion on the committee on that issue: Some leaned toward being more aggressive in emphasizing that distinction between the predictors and the pollsters; others less so.

But there is a distinction. Polling and prognosticating really are two different enterprises. A well-done public opinion survey can tell you what opinion was during the time that interviewing was done, but that really doesn’t speak in a precise way to future behavior. It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: A poll is a snapshot in time, not a way of predicting what will happen. As we say in the report, greater caution and humility would seem to be in order for anyone making claims about the likely outcome of an election based in part or in whole on polling data.

Where polls can be useful is in helping answer important questions about what is motivating voters, why people are voting or not voting, how they feel about the policies being debated, how they feel about the candidates themselves. All of those questions are more than deserving of serious answers, and that’s what polls are really best designed to do.

So, can polls still be trusted despite what happened last year?

I believe they can. First off, it’s worth pointing out that the performance of election polls isn’t a good indicator of the quality of surveys in general. Election polls differ from other types of surveys in some key ways: Not only do they have to field a representative sample of the public, but they also have to correctly model who among that sample will actually vote. That’s a very difficult task that non-election polls simply don’t have.

It’s important to dispel the notion that polling writ large is broken – our investigation found that not to be the case. At the same time, we shouldn’t whitewash what happened. There were errors, and the polling industry has taken a reputational hit. But the polling community and poll consumers should take some comfort in the fact that we’ve figured out quite a bit about what went wrong and why, and we all can learn from those errors. Some things were outside of pollsters’ control, namely the late shifts in voter preference; other things were in their control and are fixable. The education imbalance, for example, is very fixable.

We as researchers should be talking about the whole story of polling in 2016 – the differences between the national polls and state polls, the fact that we’ve identified major factors that led to the errors – in an open, non-defensive way, to dispel the “polling is broken” narrative. That narrative does a disservice to our democracy. Because polling, imperfect as it is, remains the best available tool for measuring the attitudes of all Americans. And when it’s done well, it can still produce very useful data. No matter which party is in power, it’s important to have independent, objective researchers measuring how the public feels about major issues of the day.

Topics: 2016 Election, Donald Trump, Elections and Campaigns, Polling, Research Methods, Voter Preferences

; Blog – Pew Research Center; http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/04/qa-political-polls-and-the-2016-election/; ; May 4, 2017 at 07:00AM