Each season television networks try shows air shows like Drive to see what kinds of ratings they get. If they get good ratings, they are renewed. If not, they are cancelled.

There is an obvious logic to this: why would a television network broadcast a show that nobody watches?

It seems like in recent years, however, television networks launch shows like Drive, only to yank them a few weeks later. The problem with this is that it habituates viewers to expect that a new show might get pulled from the air without warning. Since people who watch television shows get invested in them (ask any Sopranos fan whether they are on edge to see whether or not Tony gets whacked this season), if they suspect a new show might get randomly yanked, they won't give it a shot. Would you?

An alternative model for debuting new shows is the "special series" approach in which the network essentially makes a deal with its audience: we'll guarantee X number of episodes. If the show is popular, we'll renew it. That approach is how the game show Identity was launched. I think it is also how NBC launched Heroes. As a viewer, you're willing to watch the introductory episodes because you know there is no guarantee beyond X number of episodes. Your expectations are appropriately calibrated. No guarantees on a seven season run, but you also know that it wouldn't get pulled in the middle of a story arc, like Drive. I also think that Lost was launched using this approach.

I wasn't particularly interested in Drive, but I was interested in another Fox show, Standoff. But since I got burned a few years ago by enjoying the NBC shows Mr. Sterling and Conviction only to have them cancelled, I don't watch any new series until they've been renewed for at least one season (although I did watch a couple of the initial episodes of Identity, hosted by Penn Jillette). I can then watch season one via DVD.

(The TV shows I regularly watch -- all via DVR -- are: 24, Sopranos, Entourage, Penn & Teller's Bullshit!, The Daily Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, NFL Live, NBC Nightly News, and the Sunday morning news shows.)

We are heading towards a media ecosystem in which broadcast networks are really only valuable for live news and sports. Between now and then, television will face steadily increasing competition from packaged and downloadable media. During these final years of the dominance of "prime time programming", television networks need to do a better job of understanding the psychology of how their viewers make decisions to invest time in new shows.

Out of the box, Media Center supports doing this through the shared videos interface. But with a couple of simple tweaks, including one using the group policy editor (gpedit.msc), you can get the tv shows to show up in the tv section of the Media Center interface. It's totally seamless sharing. Your whole house becomes a networked DVR.

It turns out that you cannot do this with Vista Home Premium because the geniuses at Microsoft have removed gpedit.msc from the Vista Home Premium sku. I don't recall ever reading that gpedit.msc was not going to be in Home Premium, but yet they stripped it out of the product anyway. And now, as a result, I cannot make the computer policy changes to allow the sharing of recorded tv. I've tried changing the settings via the registry to no avail.

Hopefully, I'll discover some work around to this vexing problem. In the meantime, I'll just hope that Apple comes out with a good alternative to MSFT for the htpc community. And I'll bet that they include it in every single edition of OS X.

Reading that blog post reminded me just how hard it is to accurately measure human potential. Although the SAT and IQ can be important tools for measuring that potential, they are hardly the only tool one should use. The late Paul Wellstone had an SAT score in the 900 range, yet he want on to become a professor and a great Senator. Giuliani's SAT score was hardly breathtaking, but he went on to graduate magna cum laude from NYU law school, wipe out the NY mafia as U.S. Attorney, reduce crime as the NYC mayor, and heal the nation after 9/11. Another example of just how hard it is to predict human behavior: the average SAT score for the wealthiest 1% of the country is less than 1200 (the average of the top 1% of pre-1995 SAT scores was probably around 1500).

Measuring potential in sports, on the other hand, would seem to be much easier. You can measure athletic talent with a stopwatch, yardstick, or weight.

With that in mind, I decided to take a quick look today at last year's NFL Scouting Combine. As you might know, the combine is an invitation only event held each year by NFL scouts to take a look at prospects for the coming year's NFL draft. College players who are invited participate in a series of athletic tests, the results of which are published.

I decided to take a look at last year's wide receivers. I'm a football fan, not an expert, but I assumed that wideouts would benefit the most from raw athletic talent like speed and leaping ability.

Not every hopeful competes at all in the combine, especially if they know they will be drafted high (Santonio Holmes and Sinorice Moss skipped it in 2006). Those who do compete don't take part in every athletic competition.

Last year, there were still 31 wide receiver hopefuls who participated in the 40-yard dash, vertical jump, and broad jump skills competitions. Of those 31, 19 were drafted. I conducted an analysis of those 31 players by ranking them in athletic ability.

The method I used to rank them was relatively simple. I ranked them from 1-31 in each of the three categories, and turned those rankings into a percentile score (100 for first place, 0 for last). I then averaged each players results to come up with a composite score. I then ranked the players according to their composite scores, giving 100 to the best player and 0 to the worst.

Not surprisingly, the average undrafted player was in the 32nd percentile and the average drafted player was in the 61st. Oddly, however, the first half of draftees (as selected by teams) had a lower average percentile score -- 56 -- than the second half of draftees -- 67. Perhaps in later rounds the scouts are less familiar with players actual value and therefore more reliant on objective athletic measures?

So how did these draftees perform? Well, 10 of them didn't even make a single catch all season. Their average percentile was 57. The 9 who did make at least one catch had an average of 66. (Remember that these percentiles are based on comparisons with the 31 original combine participants.)

What's interesting is that 2 of the 12 undrafted players still made the NFL and made catches (Martin Nance and Hank Baskett). Nance had a 17th percentile score and Baskett, who had the third best year among all rookie wideouts who participated in the combine, had a 53.

Overall, the 11 wide receivers who both participated in the NFL Combine's 40 yard dash and jump competitions as well as got at least one reception averaged in the 61st percentile, a little above average. Overall, they averaged 276 yards.

4 received between 300 and 1038 yards. They averaged a 58th percentile score. 3 received between 100 and 300 yards. They averaged a 74th percentile score. 4 got less than 100 yards. They averaged a 53rd percentile score.

The top two receivers out of this group were Marques Colston (with 1,038 receiving yards and 8 TDs, Colston was the best rookie wide receiver and probably the best overall rookie) and Greg Jennings (632 yards, 3 TDs). Colston had a 70th percentile score and Jennings had a 45th percentile score.

Going back to the original 31 players I analyzed:

• The top quartile averaged 49.5 yards and 0.5 TDs (3 had catches, 7 drafted)
• The second quartile averaged 230 yards and 1.5 TDs (4 had catches, 5 drafted)
• The third quartile averaged 109 yards and no TDs (3 had catches, 5 drafted)
• The fourth quartile averaged 4 yards and no TDs (1 had catches, 2 drafted)

Marques Colston was clearly the steal of the draft as the 252nd pick overall. Even if he never catches another pass, his selection will go down as one of the best ever.

One thing that seems pretty clear in looking at these numbers is that it is more important to have sufficient athletic talent than superior athletic talent to perform well in the sport of football.

It would be silly of me to venture a guess as to how NFL scouts might be able to improve their model for predicting success. They get paid to do it and even they haven't figured it out. I suspect that they never will. Human beings are capable of doing the most surprising things. But even if scouts eventually get it down to an exact science, in tomorrow's draft they won't be able to do much more than take educated guesses and hope they get lucky with the next Marques Colston.

Brian Williams moderated the debate, and I'm reminded that he is one of the greatest news anchors in television history. And that's not a compliment.

From time to time you hear people say "the medium is the message" or talk about the "structural biases" of the media. The performance of Brian Williams and NBC News after the Virginia Tech shootings is the perfect illustration of the aforementioned concepts.

In a nutshell, NBC News glorified the shooter (I won't say his name, because he has already gotten enough publicity). They may have glorified him as a demon, but they glorified him nonetheless.

The reasons?

First, NBC News understands that cognitive biases such as the availability heuristic cause people to overestimate the relative importance of individual incidents. (Losing thirty-two college students is a tragedy, but it is also important to remember that every two weeks, on average, more college students commit suicide, and every day in America, more people are murdered.)

Second, television is a visual medium. The shooter provided NBC News both moving and still images, exactly what television needs. As a former communications director, I know that in order to get television coverage, you need to stage a scene for television cameras to film. I also know that when television cameras didn't show, if I hired a camera crew and delivered the video to television stations, they would frequently broadcast it. It's worse than kids and candy; television journalists demand video above all else. If the shooter had simply given them a letter, television networks would not have had the material they needed in order to devote nearly every news broadcast for a week to the shootings. They still would have sensationalized the story, but they wouldn't have had the material they needed to really go across the line. But instead, he gave them the material they needed to create a bigger story. (One assumes he did this because he wanted to become a permanent part of American and perhaps world history. Thanks to the media, he has.)

Third, NBC News is a business, a business in competition with other media outlets. Their exclusive access to the video and images of the shooter gave them an advantage over other media outlets, an advantage they exploited to the extreme. Even though though the only news value in the videos and images was to allow everybody in America to become armchair psychologists, it was impossible to avoid the images which had come into their possession. I intentionally avoided most of the coverage of Virginia Tech yet even when I loaded web sites like msn.com, images of the shooter dominated their pages. (Ironically, I was researching homicide statistics for an unrelated project.)

In retrospect, I'm sure that even Brian Williams would agree (in private) that the relentless hype surrounding the videos served no great purpose. The notion that having aired the video will prevent future murder sprees is almost laughable. The opposite is likely true. NBC and the rest of the media have demonstrated their willingness to lionize people who commit such crimes, giving the next potential shooter all the incentive he (or, less likely, she) needs. It's also sad that almost no one could name any of the thirty-two victims, but almost everybody can name the shooter.

But the larger point that I am making is that the news media's response was inevitable. Television relies on images and video. Moreover, television news is a competitive business. No rational television news network would ever withhold easily exploitable video like that which NBC received. If they did, their shareholders would sue them, and the shareholders would probably win.

Orthodox free marketers like to argue that markets produce optimal outcomes. Yet here is an example where the combination of the financial incentives of television news networks, their reliance on imagery, and human beings' cognitive biases produced a clearly unwelcome outcome. And it is equally clear that this outcome was inevitable.

Bill Maher, whose show I love, made a seemingly sensible point. He said that when drunk football fans or drunk baseball fans run onto the field in the middle of the game, their image is not broadcast on television because doing so would encourage more fans to run on the field. His point is a good one, but it is not directly analogous to the news media's handling of the Virginia Tech shooter.

Baseball and football broadcasts are carefully controlled productions. In a sense, a stadium is a massive televison studio, and anything that happens inside can only be legally broadcast with the consent of the MLB or NFL. There is no competition, nor should their be. Because their is no competition, they can implement policies such as turning cameras away from fans who storm the field.

But what if several different stations were allowed to use their own camera and production crews to film baseball and football games? Clearly, there would be a competitive pressure to show what's happening on the field when the game gets disrupted.

Now I'm not making the argument here that we should have a single, government run news network. I'm simply submitting for your consideration an example of how structural biases influence news coverage, and how intelligent (yet potentially deranged) people can manipulate those biases to their advantage. Being aware of these biases gives you a better chance of understanding what's actually happening in the world around you. And, as trite as it may sound, knowledge is power.

By the way, I just came across that clip on a web site slamming Rosie O'Donnell for claiming that 9/11 was a U.S. conspiracy by the government. She didn't exactly say that, but she definitely implied it. Yikes. How deranged can someone be? It's an incredibly irresponsible thing for her to say because it is completely and totally false. She deserves whatever condemnation comes her way.

In case you're not part of the reality-based community and think that 9/11 was a conspiracy, read the Popular Mechanics report debunking the conspiracy myths.

As a single, young, white male (soon to be 34) you might think that I’d be the last person in the world concerned about pay disparities. Hey, if men make more, then more money (and power) for me, right? Unfortunately for my selfish genes, however, I was raised by a feminist university professor, the type that gives Ann Coulter ulcers, gray hair, and yellow teeth. So basically I’ve been brainwashed to think that it’s a real problem if women earn less than men. (Isn’t it amazing how the power of ideas and abstract thought can triumph over my genetic tendency to want to pay women $0.72 on the dollar?)

Now, fortunately, my mom also believed in motherhood. And I think that if you asked her, she would agree with the proposition that more women than men take time off of work to raise children, and that this will have an effect on incomes.

But in the early part of a woman’s career, the possibility that she might one day become a mom should not impact her pay. Four of my closest friends have worked a total of 15 jobs in the last decade. None of them became a mom – they are all dudes. And none of them earned less at any of their jobs because they didn’t swear a blood oath not to quit. The fact is, when employers hire someone, they expect him or her to eventually change jobs, and whether it’s to become a research analyst or a mother doesn’t really matter. (In fact, they should probably prefer an employee become a full-time mom than work for a competitor!)

What I found interesting about this AAUW report is that it offers statistics about income in the first year following college graduation. Here they are:

• women working full-time after graduation earn just 80% of what men working full-time after graduation earn

•  among these full-time workers, women had a higher average GPA than men (3.16 to 3.04)

When you break the stats down, it becomes clear that discrimination against women is not the primary explanation for the earning gap. For example, full-time male workers work about 45 hours per week compared to 42 hours per week for women. And in many specialized professions, there is hardly any pay gap between men and women. One year after graduation, women make 99% of what men make in medical professions, 98% of what men make in education, and 105% of what men make in engineering. Still, in business and management professions, women make just 81% of what men make, despite being 52% of the employees.

The study’s authors found that 75% of the pay gap could be explained by controlling for the factors that result from choices people make – field of study, occupation category, hours worked, etc. In other words, all things being equal, in today’s market, women can make 95% of what men earn.

Some people may look at that relatively small 5% pay gap and say that we don’t have a serious problem. But I think they are wrong:

• First, 5% of a $50k salary isn’t exactly chump change. $2,500 is still enough to cover my Seahawks season tickets (though I’m not sure most women would spend their money this way!) Anything less than zero discrimination is a problem.

•  Second, it’s still true that women make much less than men for the same amount of work. Even though the primary cause may be that they choose lower-paying professions (like education), part of the reason that these professions pay less is probably because they have been historically dominated by women, who had lower earning potential. The vicious circle is obvious. It’s time we raise the pay of many of these professions, especially education. Who knows, perhaps more men will want to be teachers then? What harm could there be in that?

• Third, I wonder if part of the reason that women earn more than men in a field like engineering can be explained by the fact that there are so few female engineers. If the proportion of female engineers increases, it would stand to reason that their pay would decrease relative to men. Although we know that there isn’t much overt discrimination against women, there is still some. When more women enter historically male professions that now pay women a premium because of the paucity of females in their job market, what impact will that have one women’s overall average earning power?

It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at the issue of women and pay in the workforce and these thoughts are totally off-the-cuff. I’m quite sure that my views will evolve over time.

The singular data point that left me most optimistic is that overt discrimination does not appear to be a dominant factor in explaining the income gap between men and women. Nonetheless, women still earn a lot less than men, and that troubles me. To the extent that women may work less than men, it would appear to be an issue of choice. But I find it troubling that a major factor explaining why women earn less than men is that they choose professions that are paid lower wages, especially since part of the reason that these professions earn less is because they are dominated by women.

I don’t pretend to have a solution to the problem, but I think it’s pretty clear that one exists.

• When I'm using Windows Media Center, video plays smoothly when there are no UI elements on the screen. But as soon as a UI element, like the time elapsed bar or the information bar, comes up, the video starts to stutter.
• I have an Nvidia 6600 graphics card with 256MB memory which works just fine under XP. But even with the new drives, video playback is choppy. When I use the onboard graphics on the 6150 chipset, playback is fine, but that requires using even more onboard memory. I'd like to use my perfectly serviceable 6600 card, which should yield better, not worse performance.
• The lack of scan/overscan is disastrous. The documentation claims that there is an 8% scan/overscan option available if you go into the display settings control panel. Either I'm dumb or this feature is actually unavailable, at least for my 6600 and 6150 graphics solutions.

All-in-all, I'm probably reinstalling XP on the box in question. That's saying quite a lot. I use XP on my core HTPC, but my plan for this satellite PC was to use Vista so I can get used to the new Media Center, which has a very different look and feel. But the functionality is so bad -- primarily because of Nvidia -- that I'm going to go back to XP for awhile.

I've always suspected that even conservatives knew their defense of Bush's victory in Florida was bullshit. The unforgettable fact is that Al Gore was elected by this country and the people of Florida to be President. Whatever impact the early declaration of Florida for Gore might have had on Republican turnout in the panhandle, its detrimental impacts were more than offset by the poorly designed butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County (which cost Gore at least 6,607 votes) and the black voters who were illegally disenfranchised (until a change in Florida law earlier this month, one-third of black men in Florida were not allowed to vote).

Putting all that aside, Al Gore still received more votes in Florida than George W. Bush using the standards established by each county's election officials. The problem is that a statewide recount using those standards was never undertaken.

We know that more ballots were marked for Al Gore than George W. Bush because an independent, non-partisan team of researchers counted each disputed ballot in the entire state of Florida. They planned to release their findings in late September. But after the 9/11 attacks, the research consortium decided to postpone release of its potentially incendiary results, and when they did release the results, they did so without much fanfare. If you review their findings, you'll see that Al Gore's strategy of a selective recount would not have changed the election's result, but that sidesteps the core truth that even if you set aside the problematic ballots and the disenfranchisement of blacks, Al Gore still received more valid votes than George W. Bush, and the Supreme Court squashed any hope of discovering that fact before it was too late.

It's important to always remember that Bush is the only president since the 19th century to win an election with fewer votes than his opponent. It's even more important to remember that he only took office after an intense legal struggle in the state of Florida, governed by his brother, a struggle prematurely aborted by five U.S. Supreme Court justices, each of whom were appointed when Bush's father was vice president or president.

I say all this because after Bush successfully staged his coup in 2000, I could not imagine having a lower opinion of him. Unfortunately, in the years since, he has proven that my circa-2000 imagination was quite limited indeed. In fact, just about any American who does not believe in Christian Zionism has had their opinion of Bush crushed by the weight of his disastrous Presidency. (To be fair, I haven't seen a study correlating support for Bush with Christian Zionism, but given that about one-third of the country subscribes to the basic notion that "Israel must have all of the promised land, including Jerusalem, to facilitate the second coming of the messiah," I suspect that I'm right.)

Despite all the havoc that conservative support for Bush has wrought, one of my guilty pleasures is reading their critiques of Bush's Presidency as they come to realize the damage they have done. And now that we are approaching 50 months of war with/in/against/for Iraq (Bush's policy is so confusing I'm not sure what preposition I should use), some of the criticism comes from what might be described as "reality-based" conservatives.

Consider the following opinion pieces:

- First, one blogger debunks the notion that Bush is evil. While he agrees that explaining Bush's job performance could be explained by having made a deal with Satan, he wonders where the physical evidence is.

- Second, a columnist writes that it is much more plausible that Bush and his cronies are alien lifeforms.

They are both hilarious. I'm glad to see that hope is not lost for American conservatives and that they have a good sense of humor. Plus, I know they're kidding around, but actually I think they might be on to something.

And I suspect that now that might be a bit more willing to admit that they were full of crap about the Florida recount in 2000. Some might even wish that Gore, who at the very least is an alien from a different planet than Bush, had been elected.