text:
For IGTV, Instagram needs slow to mean steady
Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts, IGTV could get stuck with a reputation as an abandoned theater if the company isn't careful. It's no flop, but the long-form video hub certainly isn't an instant hit like Instagram Stories. Two months after that launched in 2016, Instagram was happy to trumpet how its Snapchat clone had hit 100 million users. Yet two months after IGTV's launch, the Facebook subsidiary has been silent on its traction.
"It's a new format. It's different. We have to wait for people to adopt it and that takes time," Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me. "Think of it this way: we just invested in a startup called IGTV, but it's small, and it's like Instagram was 'early days.'"
It's indeed too early for a scientific analysis, and Instagram's feed has been around since 2010, so it's obviously not a fair comparison, but we took a look at the IGTV view counts of some of the feature's launch partner creators. Across six of those creators, their recent feed videos are getting roughly 6.8X as many views as their IGTV posts. If IGTV's launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren't doing so hot, it means there's likely no free view count bonanza in store from other creators or regular users.
They, and IGTV, will have to work for their audience. That's already proving difficult for the standalone IGTV app. Though it peaked at the #25 overall US iPhone app and has seen 2.5 million downloads across iOS and Android according to Sensor Tower, it's since dropped to #1497 and seen a 94 percent decrease in weekly installs to just 70,000 last week.
Instagram will have to be in it for the long haul if it wants to win at long-form video. Entering the market 13 years after YouTube with a vertical format no one's quite sure what to do with, IGTV must play the tortoise. If it can avoid getting scrapped or buried, and offer the right incentives and flexibility to creators, IGTV could deliver the spontaneous video viewing experience Instagram lacks. Otherwise, IGTV risks becoming the next Google Plus — a ghost town inside an otherwise thriving product ecosystem.
A glitzy, glitchy start
Instagram gave IGTV a red carpet premiere June 20th in hopes of making it look like the new digital hotspot. The San Francisco launch event offered attendees several types of avocado toast, spa water and 'Gram-worthy portrait backdrops reminiscent of the Color Factory or Museum of Ice Cream. Instagram hadn't held a flashy press event since the 2013 launch of video sharing, so it pulled out all the stops. Balloon sculptures lined the entrance to a massive warehouse packed with social media stars and ad execs shouting to each other over the din of the DJ.
But things were rocky from the start. Leaks led TechCrunch to report on the IGTV name and details in the preceding weeks. Technical difficulties with Systrom's presentation pushed back the start, but not the rollout of IGTV's code. Tipster Jane Manchun Wong sent TechCrunch screenshots of the new app and features a half hour before it was announced, and Instagram's own Business Blog jumped the gun by posting details of the launch. The web already knew how IGTV would let people upload vertical videos up to an hour long and browse them through categories like "Popular" and "For You" by the time Systrom took the stage.
"What I'm most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that's mobile only. That doesn't exist anywhere else," Systrom tells me. It was indeed ambitious. Creators were already comfortable making short-form vertical Snapchat Stories by the time Instagram launched its own version. IGTV would have to start from scratch.
Systrom sees the steep learning curve as a differentiator, though. "One of the things I like most about the new format is that it's actually fairly difficult to just take videos that exist online and simply repost them. That's not true in feed. That basically forces everyone to create new stuff," Systrom tells me. "It's not to say that there isn't other stuff on there but in general it incentivizes people to produce new things from scratch. And that's really what we're looking for. Even if the volume of that stuff at the beginning is smaller than what you might see on the popular page [of Instagram Explore]."
Instagram forced creators to adopt this proprietary format. But it forget to train Stories stars how to entertain us for five or 15 minutes, not 15 seconds, or convince landscape YouTube moguls to purposefully shoot or crop their clips for the way we normally hold our phones.
That should have been the real purpose of the launch party — demonstrating a variety of ways to turn these format constraints or lack thereof into unique content. Vertical video frames people better than places, and the length allows sustained eye-to-lens contacts that can engender an emotional connection. But a shallow array of initial content and too much confidence that creators would figure it out on their own deprived IGTV of emergent norms that other videographers could emulate to wet their feet.
Now IGTV feels haphazard, with trashy viral videos and miscropped ports amongst its Popular section alongside a few creators trying to produce made-for-IGTV talk shows and cooking tutorials. It's yet to have its breakout "Chewbacca Mom" or "Rubberbanded Watermelon" blockbuster like Facebook Live. Even an interview with mega celeb Kylie Jenner only had 11,000 views.
Instagram wants to put the focus on the author, not the individual works of art. "Because we don't have full text search and you can't just search any random thing, it's about the creators" Systrom explains. "I think that at its base level that it's personality driven and creator driven means that you're going to get really unique content that you won't find anywhere else and that's the goal."
Yet being unique requires extra effort that creators might not invest if they're unsure of the payoff in either reach or revenue. Michael Sayman, formerly Facebook's youngest employee who was hired at age 17 to build apps for teens and who now works for Google, summed it up saying: "Many times in my own career, I've tried to make something with a unique spin or a special twist because I felt that's the only way I could make my product stand out from the crowd, only to realize that it was those very twists and spins that made my products feel out of place and confusing to users. Sometimes, the best product is one that doesn't create any new twists, but rather perfects and builds on top of what has been proven to already be extremely successful."
A fraction of feed views
The one big surprise of the launch event was where IGTV would exist. Instagram announced it'd live in a standalone IGTV app, but also as a feature in the main app accessible from an orange button atop the home screen that would occasionally call out that new content was inside. It could have had its own carousel like Stories or been integrated into Explore until it was ready for primetime.
Instead, it was ignorable. IGTV didn't get the benefit of the home screen spotlight like Instagram Stories. Blow past that one orange button and avoid downloading the separate app, and users could go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV's longer videos.
View counts of the launch partners reflect that. We looked at six launch partner creators, comparing their last six feed and IGTV videos older than a week and less than six months old, or fewer videos if that's all they'd posted.
Only one of the six, BabyAriel, saw an obvious growth trend in her IGTV videos. Her candid IGTV monologues are performing the best of the six compared to feed. She's earning an average of 243,000 views per IGTV video, about a third as many as she gets on her feed videos. "I'm really happy with my view counts because IGTV is just starting" BabyAriel tells me. She thinks the format will be good for behind-the-scenes clips that complement her longer YouTube videos and shorter Stories. "When I record anything, It's vertical. When I turn my phone horizontal I think of an hour-long movie."
Lele Pons, a Latin American comedy and music star who's one of the most popular Instagram celebrities, gets about 5.7X more feed views than on her IGTV cooking show that averages 1.9 million hits. Instagram posted some IGTV highlights from the first month, but the most popular of now has 4.3 million views — less than half of what Pons gets on her average feed video.
Fitness guides from Katie Austin averaged just 3,600 views on IGTV while she gets 7.5X more in the feed. Lauren Godwin's colorful comedy fared 5.2X better in the feed. Bryce Xavier saw the biggest differential, earning 15.9X more views for his dance and culture videos. And in the most direct comparison, K-Pop dancer Susie Shu sometimes posts cuts from the same performance to the two destinations, like one that got 273,000 views in feed but just 27,000 on IGTV, with similar clips fairing an average of 7.8X better.
Again, this isn't to say IGTV is a lame horse. It just isn't roaring out of the gates. Systrom remains optimistic about inventing a new format. "The question is can we pull that off and the early signs are really good," he tells me. "We've been pretty blown away by the reception and the usage upfront," though he declined to share any specific statistics. Instagram promised to provide more insight into traction in the future.
YouTube star Casey Neistat is less bullish. He doesn't think IGTV is working and that engagement has been weak. If IGTV views were surpassing those of YouTube, creators would flock to it, but so far view counts are uninspiring and not worth diverting creative attention, Neistat says. "YouTube offers the best sit-back consumption, and Stories offers active consumption. Where does IGTV fit in? I'm not sure" he tells me. "Why create all of this unique content if it gets lower views, it's not monetizable, and the viewers aren't there?"
For now, the combination of an unfamiliar format, the absence of direction for how to use it and the relatively buried placement has likely tempered IGTV's traction. Two months in, Instagram Stories was proving itself an existential threat to Snapchat — which it's in fact become. IGTV doesn't pose the same danger to YouTube yet, and it will need a strategy to support a more slow-burn trajectory.
The chicken and the IG problem
The first step to becoming a real YouTube challenger is to build up some tent-pole content that gives people a reason to open IGTV. Until there's something that captures attention, any cross-promotion traffic Instagram sends it will be like pouring water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom. Yet until there's enough viewers, it's tough to persuade creators to shoot for IGTV since it won't do a ton to boost their fan base.
Meanwhile, Instagram hasn't committed to a monetization or revenue-sharing strategy for IGTV. Systrom said at the launch that "There's no ads in IGTV today," but noted it's "obviously a very reasonable place [for ads] to end up." Without enough views, though, ads won't earn enough for a revenue split to incentivize creators. Perhaps Instagram will heavily integrate its in-app shopping features and sponsored content partnerships, but even those rely on having more traffic. Vine withered at Twitter in part from creators bailing due to its omission of native monetization options.
So how does IGTV solve the chicken-and-egg problem? It may need to swallow its pride and pay early adopters directly for content until it racks up enough views to offer sustainable revenue sharing. Instagram has never publicly copped to paying for content before, unlike its parent Facebook, which offered stipends ranging into the millions of dollars for publishers to shoot Live broadcasts and long-form Watch shows. Neither have led to a booming viewership, but perhaps that's because Facebook has lost its edge with the teens who love video.
Instagram could do better if it paid the right creators to weather IGTV's initial slim pickings. Settling on ad strategy creators can count on earning money from in the future might also get them to hang tight. Those deals could mimic the 55 percent split of mid-roll ad breaks Facebook gives creators on some videos. But again, the views must come first.
Alternatively, or additionally, it could double down on the launch strategy of luring creators with the potential to become the big fish in IGTV's small-for-now pond. Backroom deals to trade being highlighted in its IGTV algorithm in exchange for high-quality content could win the hearts of these stars and their managers. Instagram would be wise to pair these incentives with vertical long-form video content creation workshops. It could bring its community, product and analytics leaders together with partnered stars to suss out what works best in the format and help them shoot it.
The cross-promo spigot
Once there's something worth watching on IGTV, the company could open the cross-promo traffic spigot. At first, Instagram would send notifications about top content or IGTV posts from people you follow, and call them out with a little orange text banner atop its main app. Now it seems to understand it will need to be more coercive.
Last month, TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong spotted Instagram showing promos for individual IGTV shows in the middle of the feed, hoping to redirect eyeballs there. And today, TechCrunch researcher Matt Navarra found Instagram getting more aggressive by putting a bigger call out featuring a relevant IGTV clip with preview image above your Stories tray on the home screen. It may need to boost the frequency of these cross-promotions and stick them in-between Stories and Explore sections as well to give IGTV the limelight. These could expose users to creators they don't follow already but might enjoy.
"It's still early but I do think there's a lot of potential when they figure out two things since the feature is so new," says John Shahidi, who runs the Justin Bieber-backed Shots Studios, which produces and distributes content for Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso and other Insta celebs. "1. Product. IGTV is not in your face so Instagram users aren't changing behavior to consume. Timeline and Instagram Stories are in your face so those two are the most used features. 2. Discoverability. I want to see videos from people I don't follow. Interesting stuff like cooking, product review, interesting content from brands but without following the accounts." In the meantime, Shots Studios is launching a vertical-only channel on YouTube that Shahidi believes is the first of its kind.
Instagram will have to balance its strategic imperative to grow the long-form video hub and avoid spamming users until they hate the brand as a whole. Some think it's already gone too far. "I think it's super intrusive right now," says Tiffany Zhong, once known as the world's youngest venture capitalist who now runs Generation Z consulting firm Zebra Intelligence. "I personally find all the IGTV videos super boring and click out within seconds (and the only time I watch them are if I accidentally tapped on the icon when I tried to go to my DMs instead)." Desperately funneling traffic to the feature before there's enough great content to power relevant recommendations for everyone could prematurely sour users on IGTV.
Systrom remains optimistic he can iterate his way to success. "What I want to see over the next six to 12 months is a consistent drumbeat of new features that both consumers and creators are asking for, and to look at the retention curve and say 'are people continuing to watch? Are people continuing to upload?,'" says Systrom. "So far we are seeing that all of those are healthy. But again trying to judge a very new kind of audacious format that's never really been done before in the first months is going to be really hard."
Differentiator or deterrent?
The biggest question remains whether IGTV will remain devout to the orthodoxy of vertical-only. Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV's library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources. Instagram itself expanded from square-only to portrait and landscape photos in the feed in 2015.
"My advice would be to make the videos horizontal. We've all come to understand vertical as 'short form' and horizontal as 'long form,'" says Sayman. "It's in the act of rotating your phone to landscape that you indicate to yourself and to your mobile device that you will not be context switching for the next few minutes, but rather intend to focus on one piece of content for an extended period of time." This would at least give users more to watch, even if they ended up viewing landscape videos with their phones in portrait orientation.
This might be best as a last-ditch effort if it can't get enough content flowing in through other means. But at least Instagram should offer a cropping tool that lets users manually select what vertical slice of a landscape video they want to show as they watch, rather than just grabbing the center or picking one area on the side for the whole clip. This could let creators repurpose landscape videos without things getting awkwardly half cut out of frame.
Former Facebook employee and social investor Josh Elman, who now works at Robinhood, told me he's confident the company will experiment as much as necessary. "I think Facebook is relentless. They know that a ton of consumers watch video online. And most discover videos through influencers or their friends. (Or Netflix). Even though Watch and IGTV haven't taken the world by storm yet, I bet Facebook won't stop until they find the right mix."
There's a goldmine waiting if it does. Unlike on Facebook, there's no Regram feature, you can't post links, and outside of Explore you just see who you already follow on Instagram. That's made it great at delivering friendly video and clips from your favorite stars, but leaves a gaping hole where serendipitous viewing could be. IGTV fills that gap. The hours people spend on Facebook watching random videos and their accompanying commercials have lifted the company to over $13 billion in revenue per quarter. Giving a younger audience a bottomless pit of full-screen video could produce the same behavior and profits on Instagram without polluting the feed, which can remain the purest manifestation of visual feed culture. But that's only if IGTV can get enough content uploaded.
Puffed up by the success of besting its foe Snapchat, Instagram assumed it could take the long-form video world by storm. But the grand entrance at its debutante ball didn't draw enough attention. Now it needs to take a different tack. Tone down the cross-promo for the moment. Concentrate on teaching creators how to find what works on the format and incentivizing them with cash and traffic. Develop some must-see IGTV and stoke a viral blockbuster. Prove the gravity of extended, personality-driven vertical video. Only then should it redirect traffic there from the feed, Stories, and Explore.
YouTube's library wasn't built overnight, and neither will IGTV's. Facebook's deep pockets and the success of Instagram's other features give it the runway necessary to let IGTV take off. With 1 billion monthly users, and 400 million daily Stories users gathered in just two years, there are plenty of eyeballs waiting to be seduced. Systrom concludes, "Everything that is great starts small." IGTV's destiny will depend on Instagram's patience.
Source: TechCrunch


text:
Okra And Shrimp Gumbo
Try this lighter shrimp gumbo with southern favorite vegetable, okra.
- 1/4 cup olive or vegetable oil
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 1/2 green bell pepper, chopped
- 2 stalks celery, chopped
- 3 sprigs fresh thyme
- 3/4 teaspoon cayenne
- 2 1/2 teaspoons salt
- 2 bay leaves
- 2 tablespoons minced garlic
- 1 1/2 cups tomato puree
- 10 cups shrimp stock or light fish
- 2 gumbo crabs (see note below), apron and top shell removed, either halved or quartered (optional)
- 2 1/2 pounds fresh okra, ends trimmed, sliced crosswise (or 2 pounds frozen sliced okra)
- 1 1/2 tablespoons distilled white vinegar
- 1 1/2 pounds medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
- Cooked white rice, for serving
- Louisiana hot sauce, for serving
- Chopped fresh parsley, for serving
- Chopped scallions, for serving
In a large, heavy Dutch oven, heat oil over medium-high heat. Add onions, bell pepper, and celery and cook, stirring frequently, until vegetables have softened, 5 to 7 minutes. Add thyme, bay leaves, 1/2 teaspoon cayenne, 2 teaspoons salt, and garlic and cook, stirring, until garlic is fragrant, 1 minute. Add tomato puree, cook 2 minutes longer, then add stock and crabs (if using), and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook for 45 minutes.
Add okra and vinegar, and bring to a boil. Skim any foam that comes to the surface, reduce heat to a simmer, and cook, partially covered, until okra has fallen apart to create a thickened sauce, about 2 hours. (You will see that the longer the okra cooks, the less "slimy" it will be.) The sauce should be thick and rich; should it get too thick, thin with a bit of water.
Season shrimp with the remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon cayenne and stir well. Stir the shrimp into the hot gumbo and cook until just cooked through, about 3 to 5 minutes. Remove bay leaves and thyme sprigs; discard. Serve gumbo in shallow bowls, ladled over cooked white rice, with hot sauce, parsley, and scallions at the table for guests to add to their liking.
Note: Gumbo crabs are blue crabs that are not graded #1, i.e., they may not be as heavy or full of crabmeat and thus they are kept aside and sold as gumbo crabs for folks to use to flavor soups and stews. You can often find them in the freezer section in grocery stores in Louisiana, but if you cannot find them where you live, you can simply substitute 2 regular blue crabs if desired. Gumbo crabs are used mostly to flavor the gumbo and are not typically eaten at the table.
Recipe Details
- Source: Emeril's Table: Gumbo 101
- Dish Type: Soups
- Cuisine: Cajun/Creole
- Cooking Method: Braising
- Occasion: Any
- Effort Level: Simple

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Design and Analysis of Experiments Using JMP 15
Exam Content Guide
Below we provide a list of the objectives that will be tested on the exam.
For more specific details about each objective download the complete exam content guide.
Create a DOE Plan - 40%
- Identify and define the critical responses to be measured for the experiment
- Identify and define the factors to be varied for the experiment
- Identify and implement factor constraints if necessary
- Identify terms to be included in the model
- Create a design with the appropriate design features
- Evaluate the performance of the design for estimation, testing, and prediction
Data Collection – 15%
- Enumerate the benefits of randomization, and identify the impact of a restriction on randomization
- Explain how replication can be used and overused and distinguish between replication and multiple measurements on the same experimental unit
- Determine blocking requirements (how the blocking variable influences the collection of your data)
- Evaluate measurement system signal to noise ratio
Analysis - 30%
- Select the best model
- Exploit the best model
- Fit separate or combine models for multiple responses
- Be able to use the profiler under the graph menu (prediction formulas)
Create the next Experiment - 15%
- Conduct verification to determine the need to augment an existing experiment
- Be able to augment a design (add runs) to address specific needs
- Under Augment Design, be able to define: replicate, add center points, add axial, fold over, augment
Additional Resources
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text:
In Houston, as the nation struggles with job cuts and scarce credit, two sleek office buildings are galloping skyward, neck and neck, racing toward completion in a city that so far has managed to outrun the recession.
It is no coincidence that one of the two projects, the 29-story Hess Tower developed by Trammell Crow and Principal Real Estate Investors, will house an oil company, Hess Corp., since roughly half the city's economy runs on oil and gas. It's only a short drive from the refineries lining the Ship Channel at Houston's bustling port to the Energy Corridor on the city's west side.
Construction crews are hammering away at the 14th floor of Hess's newly leased, 845,000 sq. ft. global headquarters for exploration and production, on target for delivery in mid 2010. The choice downtown location is a stroll from Minute Maid Park, where the Astros play. A syndication of banks, led by Bank of America, is providing construction financing for the tower, says Adam Saphier, principal of Trammell Crow Houston. Contractors say the cost could exceed $300 million.
Blocks away, Houston-based Hines is developing the glass-sheathed, 46-story MainPlace tower, with nearly 1 million sq. ft. Hines landed KPMG, the audit and tax firm based in the Netherlands, as its first tenant with 110,000 sq. ft. and aims to complete the high-rise by early 2011.
The two towers symbolize Houston's vitality at a time when so many markets have been sapped by the country's crushing economic problems. In the fourth quarter, when the U.S. office vacancy rate stood at 14.5%, Houston's was 12.7%, reports New York-based data firm Reis.
When the national unemployment rate reached 8.1% in February, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, Houston recorded a healthier 6.2%, buoyed by the energy sector and a diverse economy. But for Houston, that rate represented a worrisome leap from 5.3% in December, recorded by the Texas Workforce Commission.
A lot has changed since the downtown projects began to rise more than a year ago. Credit tightened and oil took a hair-raising slide from nearly $150 a barrel last June to $48.14 on the New York Mercantile Exchange on March 18. "We don't believe there's going to be any more speculative developments coming out of the ground in the near future because of the turmoil in the capital markets, and even projects that have partial or full preleasing will have trouble getting financed," says Saphier.
Over the past year, as the country absorbed body blows with the fall of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and credit sources dried up, Houston remained a bright spot, a thriving oasis of commercial real estate activity. But now, despite the 36 buildings totaling 7.7 million sq. ft. under construction, according to brokerage CB Richard Ellis (CBRE), there are signs of a serious pullback. No office projects broke ground in the fourth quarter, and few if any are expected in all of 2009.
What's more, the oil service industry is laying off workers and fewer property deals are closing, says Clay Peeples, principal at Boyd Commercial, a Houston brokerage. "We had tremendous job growth here, probably the leading job growth in the country from '06 to '08," says Peeples. "The oil industry was so strong while the rest of the country was hurting we barely knew a recession had started," the broker says. "It's finally caught up. We're feeling the pain now, too."
Indigestion strikes the market
Houston's appetite for space seemed boundless as energy companies expanded and the office market absorbed a net 9.2 million sq. ft. in 2006 and 2007 combined. But leasing tapered off, and absorption shrank to just 588,000 sq. ft. in 2008.
The feast of new construction was too large even for a Texas-size appetite. A nine-year record of 3.5 million sq. ft. was delivered to the market last year, notes Grubb & Ellis, and more than 5 million sq. ft. will be delivered in 2009. Net absorption is expected to turn negative this year by 935,000 sq. ft., Reis reports.
Like Hess and MainPlace, many projects that broke ground last year were speculative. But not all developers will be as fortunate as Trammell Crow in reeling in a single company to lease the entire structure. Of the buildings under construction, 22.5% are build-to-suit, while 77.5% are speculative, according to CBRE.
Despite the influx of space, office demand remains relatively strong, says Saphier. "Clearly, the national economy is not well and we're just starting to feel the effects of that in Houston." But occupancy and asking rents remain high, he says. "They haven't taken a significant hit yet."
In the fourth quarter, asking rents for Class-A properties averaged $28.85 per sq. ft. in 2008, up from $26.29 per sq. ft. in the fourth quarter of 2009, Reis reports, while the Class-A vacancy rate rose to 10.6% from 9.1% a year earlier.
Craig Beyer, executive vice president at CB Richard Ellis in Houston, and head of its Global Energy Practice, agrees that 5 million sq. ft. of new space isn't cause for worry. "That's not much," he says. "We're a 200 million sq. ft. market."
Sublease space rises
What does give Beyer pause is the increasing amount of sublease space. "We are seeing a significant number of new subleases every week," he says. But with an average size of just 5,000 sq. ft., they have so far been inconsequential, Beyer adds. "Companies are right-sizing, they're not cutting any muscle."
But Derrell Curry, executive vice president and branch manager at brokerage Studley in Houston, sees it differently. "Over the last 120 days we've added about 1 million sq. ft of sublease space to the market. That's pretty dramatic. We're hopeful that's not going to continue, but it's a disturbing trend," he says.
Subleasing is going on all over town, Curry says, as some major oil companies and the petrochemical and engineering firms that contract with them cut back. "There's definitely retrenchment going on right now in the oil and gas companies. There are layoffs taking place today, and demand is way off as a result of it."
As head of CBRE's energy group, Beyer has seen some domestic facilities shut down. "A number of refineries have been mothballed," he says. "I would expect that with the economy down, you'll actually see some of them dismantled."
Houston-based energy company ConocoPhillips and oilfield services provider Schlumberger Ltd. are among the companies downsizing, reports note. Still, some global companies are expanding, and their rigs in the North Sea or Middle East continue to drill for oil.
"The large capital offshore, deep-water projects, you can't stop those things on a dime," Curry says. "It takes five to seven years for oil to be produced for drilling." Oil executives know that prices are cyclical, he says. A $10 per barrel rise by summer wouldn't be surprising, and it could spur hiring and office demand.
Power shifts to tenants
For now, as companies shrink and new space invades the market, power in dealmaking has shifted from landlord to tenant. Tenants are flexing new clout by demanding concessions and getting them. That's a far cry from just two years ago, when landlords wielded clout with a take-it-or-leave it attitude.
"I'm looking at a 200,000 sq. ft. deal, and I was verbally offered a year of free rent and a significant increase in the concession package," says Beyer, who represents tenants. In a normal market, he would expect a $35 per sq. ft. tenant improvement allowance and a couple months of free rent. Even with a $45 per sq. ft. allowance offer, his client walked, reasoning that with plenty of space available, there was no need to rush.
Meanwhile, at Boyd Commercial, Peeples pressured a landlord to lower the rate for an architectural firm leasing Class-A space in Westchase. The landlord had demanded a renewal rate of $20 per sq. ft., far more than the tenant was willing to pay. "I said, 'Look, we're not trying to beat you up, but make it worth our while and we'll stay.'"
Peeples negotiated a 12,000 sq. ft. sublease with a title company for five years at $12 per sq. ft., with cubicles and furniture. "That was a heck of deal," he says. The market rate was $18 per sq. ft., and the furnishings made the deal irresistible.
In this new negotiating climate, some tenants have abruptly canceled deals at the last minute, as signing was imminent, brokers say. Some were oil-related firms swept up in a mood of fiscal caution.
Brokers turn to sale-leasebacks
On the sales side, few deals are being made, and these are tough times for brokers. "Honestly, there haven't been any big sales," says Richard Rudd, managing director of capital markets at Jones Lang LaSalle in Houston.
So his firm got creative, negotiating sale-leaseback transactions, or single-tenant transactions featuring a tenant on a long-term lease.
"It's easier to get debt because you have the tenant's credit and the long-term lease to support the debt," says Rudd.
Through the rest of 2009, sales are expected to remain problematic. Office inventory will climb, as companies downsize. Some investors fear Houston may face days as dark as the 1980s, when an oil crisis brought the city to its knees as savings and loans failed, but that scenario seems far-fetched.
"Houston remains one of the nation's strongest office markets," notes Grubb & Ellis in its 2009 forecast. The city's diverse development, from the Texas Medical Center to the Port of Houston and industries such as aerospace, exerts a healthy demand for office space.
Bradley Freels, chairman of Midway Cos., which is developing the $500 million mixed-use CityCentre project with 425,000 sq. ft. of Class-A office space, says capital will be available for good projects.
Because the city resisted the temptation to overbuild on the massive scale that occurred in some other markets, the commercial real estate market is well positioned for recovery, he says. "I'm glad I'm in Texas, and more importantly, I'm glad I'm in Houston. I think if we're going to weather a storm, I'd like to be sitting exactly where I'm sitting."
Denise Kalette is senior associate editor.
29,400 employees -
Administaff Inc.
22,475 employees -
Memorial Hermann Health Care
19,986 employees
Source: The Houston Chronicle
CITY POPULATION 2.2 million
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
Source: Texas Workforce Commission
(Note: All rents are effective rents)
12.7% vacancy, 4Q 2008
11.4% vacancy, 4Q 2007
$20.66 rent per sq. ft., 4Q 2008
$19.21 rent per sq. ft., 4Q 2007
Source: Reis
10% vacancy, 4Q 2008
8.8% vacancy, 4Q 2007
$715 monthly rent 4Q 2008
$685 monthly rent 4Q 2007
Source: Reis
13.2% vacancy, 4Q 2008
12.1% vacancy, 4Q 2007
$13.85 rent per sq. ft., 4Q 2008
$13.99 rent per sq. ft., 4Q 2007
Source: Reis
9% vacancy, 4Q 2008
8.1% vacancy, 4Q 2007
$5.52 rent per sq. ft., 4Q 2008
$5.28 rent per sq. ft., 4Q 2007
Source: Marcus & Millichap
70.4% occupancy, 4Q 2008
62% occupancy, 4Q 2007
$102.49 average daily rate, 4Q 2008
$93.59 average daily rate, 4Q 2007
Source: Smith Travel Research
MainPlace: On the 39th floor of the 46-story downtown high-rise, a sky garden will be visible from the street. Recessed into the building, it will have planted terraces and a five-story atrium. Developer Hines is building the project through its Hines CalPERS Green (HCG) fund, which focuses on sustainable office buildings.
Developer: Hines
Completion: 2011
Cost: $360 million, estimated
CityCentre: The mixed-use development on 37 acres in Houston's Memorial district will have 425,000 sq. ft. of office space, as well as 400,000 sq. ft. of retail space, with restaurants and a 140,000 sq. ft. fitness center. The developer also plans 375 multifamily units, and a 245-room luxury hotel. The project, located in one of the wealthiest zip codes in Texas, is being built near the intersection of Interstate 10 and Beltway 8.
Developer: Midway Cos.
Completion: 2009
Cost: $500 million


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commercial yeast vs. starter
Lurked for a while, but now I have a question.... My starter's going quite well, making decent bread with it, nothing fancy but much better tasting than the local stuff for sale. My question: I've been using my starter as leavening for all of my baking right now (which I'm thrilled about) with much thanks to Andrew Whitley. When should I use commercial yeast rather than the starter? How do I know the difference?


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Choice is, as they say, as American as apple pie. Why shouldn't we be able to choose a school for our child among all the public schools our tax money pays for? Especially now, when there are so many different kinds of programs in our schools? Who could be against that, especially if we decide at the outset that if any school is oversubscribed, we'll admit kids by lottery, which is so obviously the fair thing to do?
And nothing could be more American than markets. We know that the way to drive quality up and price down is to create a market and let competition in that market do its magic. Choice and markets are like man and woman, a boy and his dog—they go together. And we also know that bureaucracies will never be as efficient as markets, because the bureaucrats run monopolies; they know that they will never lose their jobs and they have the political power to keep their salaries high and benefits generous, whether they are doing their jobs well or not, so they have no incentive to meet the needs of their own customers or to keep the price of the service down. We know these things.
So it seems obvious that, if we want to improve student performance and drive down the skyrocketing costs of education, we need to create effective markets in education and lubricate those markets with choice.
But do we really know all that? What I have just stated is the theory behind some of the most popular education reform strategies in the United States today. But there is no evidence, in the field of public education, anywhere among the advanced industrial countries, to back those propositions up. In fact, the evidence points in the other direction. Wherever these theories have been turned into policy in the field of education, they have not produced the advertised results. They have neither raised student performance nor lowered costs at the scale of a state, province or nation. The record actually shows that they can even make things worse.
A growing number of countries are surpassing the United States in student performance and are spending less per student than the United States. Not one has used choice and market incentives to do it. Some, like New Zealand, have embraced choice as a value and have developed policies that provide widespread choice for parents and students among public schools. But there is no evidence that these choice and market mechanisms have improved student performance overall and the research that has been done appears to show that there was greater inequality in student performance after such systems were installed than there was before they were introduced. In the United States, some studies show a slight advantage in student achievement for charter schools over public schools after accounting for differences in the background of the students and others show a slight advantage for regular public schools, but, when you look across all such studies, there is no clear advantage for either side.
How can this be? Why should the theories that underlie the very basis of the capitalist approach work so well in so many industries but fail to produce their magic in our schools?
First, we need to look under the rug of the theory. The theory says that, given choices, consumers will seek to maximize the value they are looking for in the product or service the industry offers. The education theorists assume that the value that the consumers will maximize for is student achievement. The whole theory underlying the voucher and charter movements requires that assumption. But the evidence leads elsewhere. Parents are first and foremost looking for schools they regard as safe. Safety trumps everything else. Next, everything being equal, they are looking for schools that are close to the student's home. Beyond that, different things matter to different people. Many, at the secondary level, are looking for schools with the strongest possible competitive sports programs. The quality of the academic program at the school often comes way down the list in the United States. I'll add to this list in a moment, but the point here is that there is no reason to believe that increasing choice will lead to schools being chosen on the basis of their academic program and therefore no reason to believe that choice will lead to improved student achievement. You can advocate increased choice because you value choice in a free society, but you cannot advocate choice because it will improve student performance. It won't, either in theory or in practice.
What really calls into question the idea that parents first and foremost seek schools for their children that maximize their academic achievement is what happens when the authorities try to close schools with abysmal student performance. The theory holds that, with sufficient choice available to parents and students, good schools will drive out bad ones as parents, informed about the academic records of the available schools, select good ones and abandon ones with poor academic performance records. But, as any school superintendent knows, the best way to assure yourself a short tenure is to try to shut down poor-performing schools. Communities across the country rise up in anger when an administration proposes to shut down its poor-performing schools and those who are angriest are the parents of the students currently in those schools. According to the theory, that cannot happen, but it does, all the time.
That is because most parents, apart from the factors I mentioned above, look for teachers who seem to care about their kids, places where their children are comfortable and where people know them. They want a school with a friendly staff and a principal who will solve the problems that parents bring to the principal's office. Apparently, when they have all this in a school that is close to home and seems safe, they will take that any day over another school that might have higher test scores, but is an unknown on these other points. Education reformers may want parents to make choices on the basis of student test scores, but they don't. And that blows a giant hole in the theory.
But there is another, deeper reason that the market theory is problematic. Consider why one school produces students with higher test scores than another. A famous 1965 U.S. Government report authored by a team headed by University of Chicago sociologist James Coleman found that the one of the most important factors explaining student performance was the socio-economic background of the other students in the school. Think about this for a moment. The finding essentially means that one of the most important things you can do for your kids if you want them to get a better education is to move into a community in which they will be surrounded by other kids who have the wealthiest and best-educated parents. Parents, of course, know this, so when they can, they move to the school districts serving the wealthiest and best-educated parents they can afford to be associated with. School choice is actually severely restricted in the United States even where it appears to be available. Poor kids cannot choose to get their schooling in rich kids' school districts. They can't even choose to get their schooling in districts that are only slightly richer than their own. What kind of choice is that, when we know that the parent's education background makes such a big difference in education outcomes?
This point about the influence of the customers on the quality of the service in the education arena is important for another reason. Think, for a moment about another industry with which we are all familiar: the grocery business. Go out to the wealthy suburbs and you will find a wide variety of grocery stores, everything from Costco to Whole Foods, Safeway to the local convenience store. But go to the inner city and it may be impossible to find any grocery store at all. Why? Because the big chains can't make money there. But, you say, that isn't true in education. Why? Because state and federal categorical programs provide extra money for the poor and minorities, per pupil expenditures are sometimes higher in many big city school systems than in some of the nearby suburbs. But so are the costs. Our inner city systems have high concentrations of handicapped students, homeless students, and students who live in homes where English is not spoken. It is much more expensive to educate those students than the students in the suburbs. My point is that high quality education providers are less likely to offer their schools on the scale that is needed in places where there are high concentrations of people who live in poverty. Even though there is money there, the costs are so high as to make it very difficult to offer a high quality service and still break even.
Most important, though, is the point made in the previous paragraph. What these schools lack are other students whose parents have levels of education and high levels of income. They lack one of the most important resources a school can offer. Why is that so important? Because the charter management companies that so many people are relying on to solve our school problems will grow and prosper only if they can show that they are successful. But their success depends more than anything else on successful parents, and schools serving the poor are not schools with successful parents. Precisely because this is a market in which the characteristics of the customer play a key role in the effectiveness of the product, this is a market that will not attract anywhere near enough competent providers to the communities that need competent providers the most.
Ah, you say, but what about the best known of the charter management companies? Don't they show that I am wrong, that competent providers will seek out the communities that most need competent providers? Actually, I don't think so. How many of the people who are likely to read this blog are likely to enroll their own children in the Green Dot schools? Very, very few, I would guess. They are good enough for other people's children but not your own, I will wager.
But this point cuts another way. Suppose for a moment that we set up a voucher system in which students have the right to cash in their vouchers in any public school system in the state. This, by the way, is very close to what the Romney campaign is actually proposing, at least for the expenditure of federal education funds. We know what is likely to happen from the research that has been done on systems in other countries that have been structured that way. Parents with the most education and highest incomes take maximum advantage of the available choices. They are more likely to have two-parent families with one parent not employed outside the home, so they have the time and the education to obtain and analyze the data on school performance and to go and visit the schools they are interested in and to sit in the back of classrooms to make their own judgments about what is on offer. They are more likely to have their own cars to get their kids to a school outside their own neighborhood or to be able to pay to get someone else to ferry their kids to and from school. And they are more likely to place a higher value on education than those on the other side of town who are having trouble feeding their families and putting a roof over their heads. Conversely, the low-income parents on the other side of town are more likely to be single-parents working two or three jobs to keep things together, with no time to find out what schools are available, to analyze the data on their performance, or to figure out the rules for getting into schools that are not nearby. In fact, they are less likely to know they have any choice at all. They are less likely to have their own car or the money or the time to get their children to a school more than walking distance from their home. So their kids are much more likely to be caught in a low-performing school. That school will be even less attractive to the best teachers who have a choice of schools in which to teach, so that school will end up with the most inexperienced and least competent teachers, who drag down the performance of that school, as will the increasing concentration in that school of students who are very difficult to educate.
In the end, the choice system and its market incentives will not improve average student performance, but it will, over time, work to make good schools better and bad schools worse. Is that what we want?
Any way you slice it, the market theory does not hold up in the light of either serious analysis of the premises on which it is based or the data on what happens when it is put into practice in education. If you want choice systems because you think there ought to be as much choice as possible in a democracy, go for it. But if you want choice and market-driven policies in education because you think they will raise student performance overall and lower the cost of provision, think again.


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Wars and rumors of wars are now filling the headlines as listed below with the most immediate top-level rumors of war being created by Russia among its own citizens.
Rumors of wars directly from the Kremlin
As tensions between the US and Russia have reached their highest since the Cold War, Russia denounced American duplicity last week and asked its own citizens whether they are ready for a nuclear attack. The Russian government cautioned people to know where their nearest bomb/fallout shelters are and know where their gas masks are in a drill that involved 40 million Russians. The Russia defense ministry explained to the public how the government would run under military control in the event of war. Russia deployed additional nuclear missiles in response to the US missile shield in Eastern Europe and tested new intercontinental ballistic missiles. Not bad for a week's news. (ABC News)
Yet, that was just one small part of the many rumors of war in the past week because the US government also issued top-level rumors of war.
Rumors of war directly from the White House
The Obama administration made formal accusations that Russia is engaged in cyber war with the US by interfering directly in US elections as more of Hillary Clinton's hacked emails went public. Russia slammed unprecedented US threats of retaliation against such cyber attacks, pointing out that the US has never demonstrated any evidence that the hacking came from Russia. Russia vowed to respond to what it said are false accusations but did not say what kind of response it meant.
After US Vice President Joe Biden's formal complaint against Russia, NBC reported that the CIA is planning a retaliatory cyber attack. Sources said the CIA has already begun selecting targets that will harass and embarrass the Russian government. The US has made such plans and then backed away in the past because such a move could launch an all-out cyber war in which Russia could be expected to retaliate with even worse measures, such as a shut down of the US electrical grid, rather than just exposure of embarrassing emails.
The Kremlin's spokesman replied, "The threats directed against Moscow and our state's leadership are unprecedented because they are voiced at the level of the US vice president. To the backdrop of this aggressive, unpredictable line, we must take measures to protect (our) interests." Russia's foreign minister said the claims were "flattering" but baseless. (Yahoo News)
Russian rumors of permanent military presence in Middle East
On Friday, the Kremlin announced that Putin just ratified an agreement with Syria that allows Russia to use one of its air bases indefinitely, creating a more permanent Russian presence in the Middle East. Russia also announced last week plans to build a permanent naval base in the Syrian port town of Tartus. (The Jerusalem Post)
As mentioned in my previous article, Russia also announced during the prior week that it would start shooting down any unidentified jets flying over Syria. These would most likely be US stealth bombers. In response, the UK ordered Royal Air Force pilots to shoot down any Russian jets flying over Syria and Iraq if they feel endangered by them -- pilot's discretion. "We now have a situation where a single pilot, irrespective of nationality, can have a strategic impact on future events." (Zero Hedge)
Other rumors of wars from the US
My article last week also reported that Russia had terminated cooperation with the US on one of its key nuclear disarmament agreements with the US on the basis that the US was not following through with anything it had promised. This after the Obama Admin. said it would (on Friday) be considering direct air attacks against Bashar Assad's regime in Syria -- the first direct moves being considered by the US to overthrow Assad's regime. Previous moves were against ISIS in Syria. (Reuters)
Turkey's deputy prime minister said, "If this proxy war continues, after this, let me be clear, America and Russia will come to a point of war," adding that the world was "on the brink of the beginning of a large regional or global war." (RT)
US proxy war with Iran in Yemen
Nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (left) and the
guided-missile cruiser USS Vicksburg (right) being replenished
and resupplied by the fast combat logistics ship USNS Supply in the Arabian Sea.
These wars are now more than just rumors from the top, though it is quite something to be living through a time when there are so many rumors of war that do come directly from the top. We are seeing an expansion of real, hot wars.
Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen fired repeatedly on American ships last week, and Americans returned fire with cruise missiles against the radar towers that targeted them. No US ships were hit, but the attacks and reprisal launched a real two-sided hot war in Yemen that quickly became more than just a US strike against Yemeni terrorists.
Iran deployed war ships in Yemen in response, flexing its own muscles against the US. Iran's moves were seen as being essentially Iranian harassment of the US over control of the Red Sea. Fox News went a step further in calling the war in Yemen a proxy war between the US and Iran since the stations the US struck are backed by Iranian support.
Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said President Barack Obama authorized the strikes at the recommendation of Defense Secretary Ash Carter and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford.
As an indication that the fight is about more than terror operations in Yemen, but also over control of access to the Red Sea, a Chinese war ship and Russian intelligence ship were also seen in the same region last week. (Fox News)
Rumors of war in the south pacific tear apart old alliances and forge new ones
Relations in the South Pacific are also going sour for the Obama Administration as the new president of long-time US ally, the Philippines, began boisterously deriding Obama as loudly as if he were Donald Trump. Rodrigo Duterte told Barrack Obama, "You can go to hell" while he also lashed out agains the EU, saying that purgatory would be a better place to be.
Duterte said he was realigning his foreign policy because the United States had failed the Philippines and added that at some point, "I will break up with America." Duterte further suggested he would realign with Russia. (Zero Hedge)
Duterte has also begun realigning with long-time rival China:
China confirmed on Wednesday that Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte will visit China next week, as the Southeast Asian leader's relationship with its traditional ally the United States frays.
Under Duterte, Manila's relations with Washington have come under strain and the recently elected president has opted to put aside years of hostility with China, especially over the disputed South China Sea, to form a new partnership. (Reuters)
This, at a time when President Obama has been ordering US military ships to maintain a strong presence in the South China Sea, ostensibly in support of Philippine rights to operate in that same area and in support of open international waters. China has been engaging those ships with warnings by fly overs and by bringing other ships close alongside US ships, and now the Philippines turn to China, instead of to the US because of US criticism of Duterte's war on drugs.
Pentagon video gives apocalyptic view of new world order
In the face of such increase of so many real wars and rumors of wars that may begin, is it any wonder the pentagon created the following apocalyptic video about our economic and militant future:
The Pentagon makes the following statements in the video about a rapidly changing world order that is decaying into social chaos and is increasingly vulnerable to anarchist and terrorist attacks in highly populated areas.
The urban environment will be the locus where drivers of instability will converge.... By the year 2030Â ... resources become constrained and illicit networks fill the gaps left by overextended and undercapitalized government.... Growth will magnify the increasing separation between rich and poor. Religious and ethnic tensions will be a defining element of the social landscape. Stagnation will coexist with unprecedented development as impoverishment, slums and shanty towns rapidly expand alongside modern high-rises, technological advances and ever-increasing levels of prosperity.
This is the world of our future. It is one we [the military] are not prepared to operate effectively within, and it is unavoidable.... It is an ecosystem that demands a highly agile and adaptive force to successfully operate within....
Living habitats will extend from the high-rise ... to subterranean labyrinths, each defined by its own social code and rule of law. Social structures will be equally challenged if not dysfunctional as historic ways of life clash with modern living, ethnic and racial differences are forced to live together, and criminal networks offer opportunity for the growing mass of unemployed. This becomes the nervous system of non-nation-state unaligned individuals and organizations that live and work in the shadows of national rule....
Digital security and trade will be increasingly threatened by sophisticated illicit economies and centralized syndicates of crime to give adversaries global reach at an unprecedented level. This will add to the complexities of human targeting.... Alternate forms of governance have taken control....
Urban conflict is written deep into the army's histories, but in tomorrow's conflicts these megacities are orders of magnitude greater in complexity.... Our soldiers will have to operate within these ecosystems with minimal disruption in flow. Our current and past strategies can no longer hold.... The future army will encounter a highly sophisticated urban-centric threat.... The threat is clear. Our direction remains to be defined.
This is the future that the US government and European governments envision and are, for some reason, knowingly creating with their push for more rapid immigration from regions unfriendly to the US. On the one hand the Pentagon knowing warns that immigration is rapidly creating serious social pressures and even disorder. On the other hand, the White House continually announces thatPresident Obama is making executive orders that will expand immigration. So, immigration is both known by the government to be creating social pressures that are a huge military risk and is intentional policy at the same time!
Pentagon's apocalyptic vision of urban dystopias is already happening
Do you think the dystopian future presented in the video seems imaginary? Well, it appears Paris is the first first-world city to openly exhibit this Pentagon-prophesied future precisely because ethnic and racial differences have been "forced to live together" by the EU's immigration laws -- just as the Pentagon video describes. When you watch the following linked video, bear in mind that fifteen years ago Paris boasted that it washed the streets twice a day to keep itself looking as pretty and inviting to its French citizens and its touring guests as possible:
The streets of Paris today (2016)
The city you visited or once hoped to visit no longer resembles the city you imagine in your mind. It is the city of the past that is imaginary, not the dystopian vision of cities that was described above by the US army. The City of Paris you envision in your mind ended when Paris became the capital of immigration from Syria and Africa, made dysfunctional by multiple acts of terror leading to governance by marshal law in a city filled with social tensions from forced immigration. The French are becoming a minority in their own capital:
If it weren't for the somewhat working infrastructure, the scene might as well have been the setting of movie shooting â or a slum in Mogadishu. The streets are littered in garbage, the sidewalks are blocked with trash, junk and mattresses, thousands of African men claim the streets as their own â they sleep and live in tents like homeless people. If no portable toilets are in reach, open urination and defecation are commonplace. Tens of thousands of homeless Illegal immigrants, undocumented or waiting for a decision of their asylum application, waste away trying to pass the time in the city.... They're hoping for a decision that would grant them an apartment, welfare and make France their new home. The conditions are absolutely devastating. The police have given up trying to control these areas, the remaining French people avoid the areas at all cost, crime and rape is rampant, just recently mass brawls and riots made the news as fights broke out near the Stalingrad metro station. (Facebook/Generation Europa)
The future described by the Pentagon is now, and it is not relegated to some decrepit third-world city like Mogadishu. It's in modern France's showcase capital -- La Ville-Lumiere, the City of Light -- where it appears they are no longer leaving the light on for us. Too bad if you didn't visit Paris last year or sometime before that when the now imaginary city you remembered existed. This is the real Paris, the new Paris under marshal law.
And this is an image of the years of Epocalypse that I have been saying lie ahead -- a time of socio-economic breakdown that is spreading unstoppably around the world -- apparently, by design because the Pentagon knows it is coming, knows it is bad, and, yet, the White House keeps pushing to create it. Europe has seen that is is not just coming, but is here, and it still keeps pushing it. So, this is an intended future that is now.


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A few weeks ag o, the economist Tyler Cowen attended a meeting in Manhattan during which Bill Gates briefed him and a small group of other guests on his latest philanthropic endeavors. Cowen was impressed. But one thing that impressed him in particular, as he later wrote on his popular blog, Marginal Revolution, was that Gates had been "smart enough, and health-savvy enough" to begin his presentation without first shaking everyone's hand.
"He could spend his whole life shaking people's hands, and basically be sick all the time," Cowen said later, adding, "I shake hands with people, but I wish the whole custom didn't exist. I'd rather bow or just pass business cards or something."
Cowen, a professor at George Mason University, is not alone in worrying about the dangers of the handshake. He is part of a small but adamant group of people who believe that one of our most common customs—the symbol of "hello," "goodbye," and "let's make a deal"—is also one of our most reckless. Other notables in the club include Donald Trump, who once called handshaking "one of the curses of American society," and the high-profile technology investor Michael Arrington, who has written that he'd rather not "swap germs via the ancient but disgusting habit of shaking hands."
Handshake phobia is not just the province of eccentric boldfaced names. At last year's Olympics, British doctors advised athletes to eschew the longstanding symbol of sportsmanship in order to avoid getting sick. And during the H1N1 epidemic of 2009, many school administrators, including at Northeastern University, decided to skip the ritualistic pressing of the flesh at graduation ceremonies, while the website stophandshaking.com began selling anti-handshake lapel pins, trumpeting the motto, "No offense. It just makes sense."
During these winter months, as pharmacies advertise flu vaccines and bottles of Purell sprout at every checkout counter, it's easy to imagine that the anti-handshake activists have a point. But do they? To pursue an answer to this question is to encounter a startling fact: When it comes to how much of a risk we're taking by shaking hands, doctors and scientists can't seem to agree.
"We don't know," said Allison Aiello, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, speaking specifically about the frequency of hand-to-hand transmission of flu. "As researchers, it's the
million-dollar question. We really want to know."
Without a doubt, experts say, it's possible to catch cold and flu by touching other people, and regularly scrubbing your hands with soap and water is never a bad idea. But how often those diseases are actually spread through hand-to-hand contact, compared to the rate of infection through the air, is a debate that stretches back in part to two dueling —not to mention quite disgusting—studies conducted during the 1970s and '80s, and which has never really been resolved.
The handshake is said to have started more than 2,000 years ago as a way for people to show one another they were unarmed. Today, we use handshakes to mark introductions, agreements, and farewells—at job interviews, business meetings, and conversations at parties. Handshakes serve as a kind of social punctuation mark, a gestural way to say, "Here we are and here we go."
But something else can happen when two people shake hands: Some of the microscopic critters on our fingers and palms trade their old digs in for new ones. Germophobes have been worried about this almost as long as germs have been known to cause disease. In 1925, Time Magazine reported on a doctor in Ann Arbor, Mich., who believed the average man's hands were "contaminated with...secretions," and that people who insisted on shaking hands anyway were "purveyors of death." Around the same time, a soap industry organization called the Cleanliness Institute waged a campaign against the practice, which it called "a biological discourtesy."
Anti-handshake sentiment persisted through the decades. In 1996, The New York Times Magazine interviewed a professor named Robert Swindle about the festering horror of it all. "Think of all those unwashed hands," Swindle said. "You're talking about fungal viruses, cold viruses, warts. Who wants warts?" Soon after, the Massachusetts Medical Society aired radio ads imploring listeners to wash their hands frequently, because even a "friendly handshake can carry many illnesses."
Through all this anxiety, the handshake has held firm. And while some, like Tyler Cowen, chalk this up to societal inertia, its enduring appeal testifies to the fact that many of us get something out of it. Studies have confirmed that the quality of our shake—the dryness of our palm, the firmness of our grip—can determine how others perceive us. Even more important, shaking hands serves as a powerful social lubricant. To not shake hands, in this light, is to opt out of harmony—to set yourself apart, and cause others to wonder whether you're a misanthrope, a weirdo, or just plain rude.
There's another reason, however, the custom has survived its encounter with modern science: Researchers have found it vexingly difficult to establish that touching other people's hands is actually an important vehicle for spreading the viruses we worry about most, particularly cold and flu. The influenza virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is widely believed by experts to travel mainly through the air, in the form of droplets that come out of people's mouths and noses when they cough, sneeze, and talk. The role of hand-to-hand contact is less clear, according to Jeanette St. Pierre, a spokeswoman for the CDC, though "most people believe this type of transmission is possible." And Arnold Monto, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, said that while "there is no direct evidence" that it spreads flu, studies have shown that using hand sanitizer does decrease the likelihood of catching it.
Things get even murkier when it comes to the common cold, spread by rhinoviruses. Everyone agrees that the virus infects us by getting into our noses and tear ducts. But when it comes to how it gets there—specifically, the importance of hand-to-hand transfer—the best information we have comes from experiments done about 30 years ago by a pair of doctors who disagreed with each other passionately. Jack Gwaltney, now retired, was then a professor of infectious disease at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. His early experiments involved infecting a group of paid volunteers with rhinovirus by depositing it directly into their noses. Gwaltney would then have his test subjects hole up in motel rooms divided down the middle with chicken wire. On one side of the wire, he'd put a healthy volunteer, and on the other, a sick one; after 72 hours, Gwaltney's team would run nasal tests to see if the infection had made the jump. In every case, they found, the healthy people had remained healthy—a result contrasted sharply with a separate experiment, in which healthy volunteers touched hands with sick ones before putting their fingers in their noses and eyes. Under those conditions, Gwaltney found, almost everyone in the test group got sick.
As convincing as Gwaltney's results were, results published around the same time by Elliot Dick at the University of Wisconsin in Madison challenged his conclusions. Dick, who died in 1996, believed Gwaltney was wrong about the spread of rhinovirus, and a series of experiments he ran during the 1980s seemed to bear that out. Perhaps the most convincing was one in which a group of test subjects, half of them infected with rhinovirus and the other half healthy, were made to sit in a room and play cards together for 12 hours straight while wearing arm braces and collars that prevented them from reaching their faces. If Gwaltney had been right, and colds happened primarily when people got the virus on their hands and then stuck it in their noses and eyes, the healthy card-players would have stayed healthy. But as it turned out, over half of them got sick. After running a control study, Dick concluded that the germs were traveling between his subjects through some other means—namely, the air.
Today, researchers who worked with Gwaltney and Dick all those years ago—and believed firmly, at the time, that their side was right—are saying that maybe the other had a point as well. "I sort of am in the position now where I think it's probably a combination of both," said Carlton Meschievitz, one of Dick's coauthors, now retired. Ronald Turner, meanwhile, a former student of Gwaltney's who is now a professor of pediatrics at the University of Virginia, said that a study he recently completed—in which the application of strong antiviral hand sanitizer was shown to have no effect on the transmission of rhinovirus—has caused him to rethink his earlier convictions.
"That era seems to have led to a lot of findings that were never followed up on," said Meschievitz. "I'm not sure if it was because of a lack of funding, or a lack of interest, or exactly what's happened. But for whatever reason the research [on the common cold] has decreased, to the point where I don't see anything on it at all in recent years."
What, then , should we do next time we see an outstretched hand coming towards us? Of course, there's always common sense: As Cowen put it, "If someone's sick and you shake hands with them, there's a real chance you'll get sick." But is trying to avoid this fate worth the cost of assuming that everyone actually is sick, all the time? Gwaltney, for his part, shakes hands with people without fear—he even did it with Dick "on numerous occasions," he said—but does avoid it if someone has what looks like "a rip-roaring cold."
The decision ends up coming down to priorities. "It's a question of risk-benefit, when it comes down to it," said Arnold Monto. "Are you going to risk offending your colleagues, or are you going to risk getting influenza? It's all a question of probabilities, as is most of life."
For powerful people like Bill Gates or Donald Trump, this might not be an issue. For those of us less immune to the effects of alienating behavior, the tradition and warmth of shaking hands may simply be worth the potential cost. In fact, until we know more, this may be part of what the handshake stands for—as not just a symbol of shared trust, but a sign of mutual optimism that what we catch from each other won't kill us.
Leon Neyfakh is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail firstname.lastname@example.com.


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I realize it's a bold assertion, but the $100 million that American taxpayers send to Paris every year to subsidize the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is – on a per-dollar basis – the most destructively wasteful part in the federal budget.
The video below will give you some evidence.
But the video also is a couple of years old, so it doesn't even include some of the more recent and most outrageous examples of OECD perfidy.
- The OECD has allied itself with the nutjobs from the so-called Occupy movement to push for bigger government and higher taxes.
- The OECD, in an effort to promote redistributionism, has concocted absurdly misleading statistics claiming that there is more poverty in the US than in Greece, Hungary, Portugal, or Turkey.
- The OECD is pushing a "Multilateral Convention" that is designed to become something akin to a World Tax Organization, with the power to persecute nations with free-market tax policy.
- The OECD has endorsed Obama's class-warfare agenda, publishing documents endorsing "higher marginal tax rates" so that the so-called rich "contribute their fair share."
The good news is that more and more people are sounding the alarm bells about this wretched bureaucracy.
Richard Rahn excoriates the statist swamp in his Washington Times column.
Most Americans probably would not approve of their tax dollars being used to support an international organization that undermines their fundamental liberties and promotes giving their hard-earned money to other governments, often run by corrupt or dictatorial regimes. This is precisely what the OECD is doing… The OECD was formed in 1960 to promote trade and investment among the developed countries. Over the years, it has morphed into an organization promoting higher taxes and the redistribution of income… Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and well-known tax economist, has closely followed the efforts of the OECD in promoting bigger government and more statism. In his extensive work, he has described how the OECD's "anti-tax competition project" is designed to prop up Europe's bankrupt welfare states and how its advocacy of "higher marginal tax rates," a "value-added tax" and "failed Keynesian stimulus" for the U.S. reduces economic growth. (Note: OECD bureaucrats work out of plush offices in Paris, travel first class and have tax-free salaries.) It is worth repeating: U.S. taxpayers are supporting high-salaried international bureaucrats who are advocating higher taxes on others, most notably U.S. taxpayers, but do not pay income taxes themselves. Hypocrisy abounds. …serious and fiscally responsible members of Congress have the ability to knock all or part of the OECD funding out of the budget through amendments, provided they can get a majority of their fellow members to vote with them. The major limited-government, free-market organizations have endorsed a cutback in OECD funding.
And here's some of what Dennis Kleinfeld wrote for IFC Review. He starts with a bit of history and explains how OECD bureaucrats live a good life at our expense.
The Organisation of Cooperation and Development has been in existence since 1960. …The OECD's purpose was to pave the way "for a new era of cooperation…." that started with the US and Europe and now essentially encompasses as members or to-be members virtually all the dominant industrial powers. The OECD Secretary General, Deputy Secretaries, and heads of the Directorates are non-elected administrators and policy-makers, who live in Paris tax free (except for the Americans), travel first class, live first class, and whose every expense is paid for by the member states from taxes or money borrowed. These are the guys who tell everyone else to pay their fair share of taxes and share in making sacrifices for the greater good of all. This reminds me that we should never confuse the Hippocratic Oath with hypocrisy.
He then puts forth a strong hypothesis.
In a colourful sense, the OECD is (if you remember Star Trek) the Borg of organisations. Looking around the world today, I believe it can be concluded that the OECD approach to solving the world's problems has solved nothing but has created even greater, perhaps now nearly insurmountable difficulties.
And he backs up his assertion by pointing out how the OECD is undermining the global economy.
The OECD promotes tax policies to create tax harmony, eliminate tax competition, and end tax abuse. To achieve this, the OECD has found that it becomes ever necessary to impose draconian and oppressive measures in order to make the income tax system work. Any idea of cooperative economic prosperity, encouragement of trans-national capital flows, international trade, or making global investing a seamless effort has been sacrificed on the altar of the income tax system.
And he shows examples of how OECD-supported policies are causing trouble and reducing liberty.
The OECD has long promoted such means to enforce income tax compliance. What is becoming increasingly apparent is that FACTA has gone too far and the backlash is being dramatically felt across all sectors of the US economy. Why then is it such a surprise that combining short sighted legislation with an already failing tax policy would result in rapidly accelerating an already declining economy? The OECD is mandating and leading what seems to be a cavalry charge over the financial and social edge into chaos. Its weapon of choice, the income tax system, is not achieving success for the taxpayers in this battle; rather it is assuring the defeat of individual liberties, the natural desire for privacy, and the freedom to live without the fear of arbitrary governmental retribution. Perhaps George Orwell's classic books 1984 and Animal Farm are not works of fiction but accurate previews of what the world will look like as the policies of the OECD create the future.
He then offers a strong conclusion about the OECD's collectivist program.
After 61 years of the OECD providing its services in the interests of international cooperation and economic development policies, it is safe to say that there is a lack of demonstratable proof that the OECD policies have actually been a positive factor in the world's affairs. In fact, the contrary seems to be the true. I am quite convinced that the OECD functionaries have proceeded under the fixed ideological beliefs that global social happiness and economic prosperity can only be achieved when individuals subordinate their economic freedom and liberties to the interests of the collective, a utopian view of society. They are wrong. The state of the world proves otherwise.
By the way, if you're not convinced that the OECD is a cancer that need to be cut out, here are a few additional distressing bits of evidence.
- The OECD has an anti-tax competition project designed to prop up Europe's bankrupt welfare states.
- The OECD pulled off a hat trick of bad policy in a 2010 document, promoting a value-added tax, Obama's global warming agenda, and failed Keynesian stimulus.
- The OECD endorsed Obamacare policies, as I explain in this video.
- The OECD even advocates higher taxes when nations are in the middle of economic crisis.
- The OECD also is pushing for higher taxes in Latin America, based on the odd notion that those nations should copy Europe's failed welfare states.
Removing American-financed subsidies from the OECD won't necessarily put an end to this corrupt and statist bureaucracy. But at least American taxpayers won't be violated to subsidize the pampered officials who drive the OECD's biased agenda.
And without America support, it is highly doubtful that the OECD would have any ability to bully nations into expanding the burden of government.
That's a win-win situation for America and the world.