Central Perk

luni, 27 octombrie 2014

Damn Cool Pics

McKamey Manor - The Most Extreme Haunted House in the World
A Halloween Photo Shoot with a Gory Twist
Actresses Who Are Much Prettier Than The Characters They Play

McKamey Manor - The Most Extreme Haunted House in the World

Posted: 27 Oct 2014 01:28 PM PDT

Arguably the most extreme haunted house in America! McKamey Manor is a very personalized, interactive and extreme attraction. It is truly like "LIVING YOUR OWN HORROR MOVIE."

The San Diego haunt is famous for its hands-on action. Unlike other haunts where "actors" aren't allowed to touch you or only give you a quick grab, McKamey Manor's cast holds you down, pulls you into coffins, wraps you up in duct tape, makes you eat live worms, dunks your head into toilet bowls and drenches you in blood. Worst of all, they may make you do jumping jacks. And if you try to escape, they stop you. As the marine who got pulled warns, "If you struggle, it only gets worse."

Admission is free, but a donation of dog food for Operation Greyhound is requested. You must be 21 and over. The typical length of a short show is advertised as 4 hours, but some shows last up to 8 hours.

A Halloween Photo Shoot with a Gory Twist

Posted: 27 Oct 2014 10:22 AM PDT

Reddit user ChutneyRain is an amputee. She's missing her left leg but she doesn't let that slow her down. She even decided to include her disability in a recent Halloween themed photo shoot. She proved that the best thing you can do when something bad happens to you is keep your head up and take creepy photos.

via imgur

Actresses Who Are Much Prettier Than The Characters They Play

Posted: 27 Oct 2014 10:11 AM PDT

Don't let the make up and the costumes fool you, these women are much sexier in real life.

Charlize Theron

Hilary Swan

Anne Hathaway

Lena Dunham

Tilda Swinton

Bette Midler

Charlotte Gainsbourg

Barbra Streisand

Claire Danes

Naomi Grossman

How to Recover Lost Pageviews in pushState Experiences

Posted: 26 Oct 2014 05:16 PM PDT

Posted by GeoffKenyon

PushState and AJAX can be used in tandem to deliver content without requiring the entire page to refresh, providing a better user experience. The other week, Richard Baxter dove into the implications of pushState for SEO on Builtvisible. If you're not familiar with pushState, you should spend some time to read through his post.

If you're not familiar with delivering content this way, you can check out these sites using pushState and AJAX to deliver content:

Time: When you scroll to the bottom of the article, a new article loads and the URL changes
Halcyon: When you click on a navigation link, the left hand panel doesn't refresh

While pushState is really cool and great for UX, there are analytics issues presented by this technology.

When the content on a page and URL are updated using AJAX and pushState, in most cases, the _trackPageView beacon is not fired and the pageview is not tracked. This artificially increases your bounce rate while reducing your pages per visit, time on site, and total pageviews along with other metrics associated with pageviews.

How to tell if you're having tracking problems

If you have a very high bounce rate or are generally curious to check if this is a problem for you, start by installing the GA Debugger extension for Chrome. Then go to the URL you want to investigate and open up the console (windows: control + shift + j, mac: command + option + j). Now, clear the console using the button at the left, and refresh the URL.

Once you refresh the page, you should see GA debugging show up in the console. To check that the initial page view is being tracked, you should see a "sent beacon" for a pageview.

Once you've established the initial pageview is tracked, click a link to load another page. If GA is properly tracking pageviews, you should see another pageview beacon being sent. If you don't see this, then you have a problem.

Capturing these pageviews with GTM

The good news is that even though this is a huge problem, it can easily be fixed with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Start by creating a new "History Listener" tag. Now set your fire rules to all pages and hit save. This will simply look for changes to the URL.

Now we'll need to create a separate event to fire a pageview when the URL History Listener fires. To do this, create a new GA tag.

If you already run Google Analytics from GTM, you'll simply need to modify your existing tag. This tag should, by default, be set to track pageviews.

At this point we'll need to set the firing rules. First, we should make sure the tag is firing on all of our pages for our basic GA installation.

The firing rule for all pages should be a default option.

If you are already running GA via GTM, you'll already have this set up. You'll need to create a subsequent firing rule to fire a pageview for this URL History Listener.

To do this, click to add a new firing rule and then select "create new rule." Name the rule, and then move on to conditions. The default rule should be [url] [contains]; we need to change this to [event] [equals]. Then we'll set the condition to gtm.historyChange. Now click save.

Now you should be all set to hit publish on your updated tag container. Overnight, you should see a change in your pageviews and related metrics.

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Seth's Blog : Munchausen by Proxy by Media

Munchausen by Proxy by Media

MBP is a particularly tragic form of child abuse. Parents or caregivers induce illness in their kids to get more attention.

The thing is, the media does this to us all the time. (Actually, we've been doing it to ourselves, by rewarding the media for making us panic.)

It started a century ago with the Spanish American War. Disasters sell newspapers. And a moment-by-moment crisis gooses cable ratings, and horrible surprises are reliable clickbait. The media rarely seeks out people or incidents that encourage us to be calm, rational or optimistic.

Even when they're not actually causing unfortunate events, they're working to get us to believe that things are on the brink of disaster. People who are confident, happy and secure rarely stay glued to the news.

The media is one of the most powerful changes we've made to our culture/our lives (I'd argue that the industrial revolution and advances in medicine are the other two biggest contenders). And yet because we're all soaking in it, all the time, we don't notice it, don't consider it actively and succumb to what it wants, daily.

Steven Pinker's brilliant book makes it clear that the world is safer than it's ever been. A large reason his thesis feels wrong to so many is that the media wants us to think that we're on a precipice, every day. Paradoxically, the cultural-connection power of the media is one reason why things are actually safer. [Check out Matt Ridley's optimistic take as well].

I'm fascinated by this paradox. By connecting us, by integrating cultures and by focusing attention on injustice, the media has dramatically improved the quality of life for everyone on the planet. At the same time, by amplifying the perception of danger and disaster, the media has persuaded us that things are actually getting worse. It creates a reason for optimism and then makes a profit by selling pessimism.

I don't think the media-industrial complex has earned the pass we give it. They built what we wanted, they built what worked, but the race for attention often is conflated with a race to the bottom. It takes guts to say, "no, we're not going to go there, even if the audience is itching for it."

We're the media now, and we can do better.

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duminică, 26 octombrie 2014

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Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Another Unbelievable Stress-Free Test; Whitewash Math and Deferred Tax Assets

Posted: 26 Oct 2014 09:36 PM PDT

In an effort to fool the public into believing the latest round of bank stress tests were actually designed to find stress, the ECB found 25 scapegoats, with the biggest losers in Italy and Greece.

Interested parties may wish to slog through the full 178 page Stress Test Report.

Capital Shortfalls

Reuters reports ECB Fails 25 Banks in Health Check but Problems Largely Solved.

Roughly one in five of the euro zone's top lenders failed landmark health checks at the end of last year but most have since repaired their finances, the European Central Bank said on Sunday. Italy faces the biggest challenge with nine of its banks falling short and two still needing to raise funds.

"This seems as if it has been pretty unstressful," said Karl Whelan, an economist with University College Dublin.

"The real issue is the size of the capital shortfall and that is very, very small. I don't feel a whole lot more reassured about the health of the banking system today than last week."

€48 Billion Shortfall

The Financial Times reports ECB Says Banks Overvalued Assets by €48bn.

The European Central Bank's dissection of the books of the eurozone's biggest banks has found lenders overvalued their assets by €48bn.

The results of the ECB's examination of balance sheets worth €22tn, known as the Asset Quality Review, will require the 130 lenders who took part in the exercise to adjust the value of their assets in their accounts or prudential requirements.

A quarter of the reduction, €12bn, will fall on Italian lenders, an amount just short of 1 per cent of their risk-weighted assets. Greek banks will have to lower their asset values by €7.6bn, or almost 4 per cent of their risk-weighted assets.

Philippe Legrain, an economist and former adviser to then European Commission president José Manuel Barroso, described the tests as a "whitewash".

"The ECB singles out less important banks in less important countries and gives the German banks a clear bill of health," Mr Legrain said.

German lenders will have to lower the value of their assets by €6.7bn and their French counterparts by €5.6bn.

The AQR reviewed 800 portfolios, which together made up more than 57 per cent of banks' risk-weighted assets. The ECB said they examined 119,000 borrowers and valued 170,000 items of collateral. Supervisors also built 765 models to challenge banks' estimates of their provisions.

The 130 banks account for 81.6 per cent of all eurozone assets.

Whitewash Math

Of the 130 banks, 25 failed, which seems like a lot. However, the total amount of under-capitalization is a mere €48 billion out of balance sheets that total €22 trillion.

That is an overall asset overvaluation of 0.218%.

Anyone seriously believe that with France, Italy, and Spain in or near recession? I don't. It's not even a generous rounding error.

Have Spanish banks written off 100% of their bad property loans? What about sovereign bonds assumed to be 100 percent risk-free? Didn't Greece prove bonds payments are not sacrosanct?

When the eurozone splinters, German banks are going to take a massive hit.

Deferred Tax Assets

Huky Guru has some interesting figures about Spanish banks.

About a year ago, Guru reported that a Reclassification of DTAs (Deferred Tax Assets) provided an extra €30 billion capital for Spanish banks.

Guru brought up the subject again today in Putting the Stress Tests in Context.

Paraphrasing Guru ... Accounting magic and government decree has allowed banks to compute an extra €30 billion in capital for Spanish banks via DTAs. Without that €30 billion, the average Tier 1 capital for Spanish banks would have fallen from 9.1% to 7.1%. More than one bank would have failed the test.

Spanish Banks Plow Into Spanish Sovereign Bonds

Guru notes "Spanish banks hold Close to €231.519 billion in Spanish bonds, almost twice around the capital of the Spanish banking system."

At least six Spanish banks have massive leverage in bonds. Catalunya Banc and NCG are particularly exposed.

The entire exercise was another stress-free farce.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

What Do Seven Billion People Do? Top 10 Mega-Cities by Population 2014 vs. 2030 Estimate

Posted: 26 Oct 2014 11:20 AM PDT

Reader Bran who lives in Spain sent some interesting charts of population, expected population growth, the world's largest cites, and what people do for a living. I don't have links for the charts, but most show the origin.

Seven Billion People

Breakdown

4.30 Billion Work
1.90 Billion too Young to Work
0.43 Billion Unemployed
0.58 Billion 65 or Older

Total about 7.2 Billion people

Cities With Projected 2030 Population of 10+ Million

Top 10 Mega-Cities by Population

Anyone have any concerns over these numbers in regards to jobs, food, housing, cost of education, healthcare costs, or retirement?

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com