Ratings: syndies all brighten up

All the syndicated game shows had something to be happy about in the week of September 17-23. The big two launched their new seasons successfully, and every show was up from the week before. TVNewsCheck spreads the glad tidings...

Wheel of Fortune 6.3 - up four ticks

Jeopardy 5.6 - up eight ticks, just to outdo the soulmate

Family Feud 4.0 - up a tick

Millionaire 2.2 - even poor Meredith was up a couple ticks

Baggage 1.1 - What's this? Jerry? In his debut syndie week?

As you might expect, Meredith and Jerry didn't make the top 25 at TV by the Numbers. The viewership averages for the other three shows: Wheel of Fortune 9.5 million, Jeopardy 8.3 million, Family Feud 5.7 million. Very respectable audiences in the gazillion-channel universe.

TVNewser put out a cable ranker for all of third quarter 2012. GSN enjoyed a very nice three months with 383K/268K viewership averages prime time/total day. Thank you, Messrs. Foxworthy and Harvey.

September Campaign: Poland in Flames preview 1

For various reasons work on the second part of my September Campaign containing the historical campaign and operations section has been slow. But I've made some progress and thought I could share some of it and talk a little about what you can expect in this second half of the invasion of Poland focused "Early-War" Flames of War supplement.  This preview will cover the historical section, in the next preview I will talk more about the scenarios and campaign itself. As always, these preview pictures may be "fuzzy" because they are print screen's.

First of all, the content of this half will be more interesting and more open to gamers and Early War interested people outside of the immediate Flames of War sphere. While you could enjoy the information in the Orders of Battle section it was in the end written with Flames of War in mind. The campaign section will contain historical information, scenarios and a hobby section that is a lot more general.

And while I will reference forces and army lists from the Orders of Battle section in each scenario profile I'm fairly certain that you will still be able to take 80% and translate it into whatever game you are playing (Bolt Action, Victory Decision, etc).

The first part of the Poland in Flames book handles the historical background of the nations involved, you got a fragment of background about the Polish 2nd Republic in the Orders of Battle section, but here I try to explain the international relations, schemes, interwar conflicts, diplomatic decisions and reasoning behind certain decisions. It's not super heavy weight material, as this is no history book, but I do feel that it makes for interesting reading and expands the understanding of events leading up to the outbreak of WW2 and gives some insight into how how the allies reasoned about their alliance with Poland, how Poland reasoned about it's situation, how Germany and the Soviet Union played everyone and the indications of their future decisions.

The historical section also include biographies of Polish, German and Soviet commanders so that you are able to connect a name with a face later on when you command specific armies under the command of these men. It may also be interesting to read the background of the military commanders and their exploits prior to WW2.

One thing  that I expanded greatly, from 1 to 4 pages, is the geographic location and summary of (most) battles between the Poles and German/Slovaks and Poles and Soviets. They are arranged chronologically and provide a small snippet of information on what happened, where and what date. This was you will be able to have a timeline reference and geographical understanding of where a scenario takes place. Having a way of locating the locations on a map should provide additional information for those interested.

The last thing in the historical section is a operational map section showing the actual movements of armies during the invasion of Poland. Again, this is meant to provide a frame of reference so that you can connect commanders with armies, armies with movements, movements with battles and dates.

I hope this preview have been interesting, and I hope that you will stay tuned for the next one.  Since there is a lot of things going on at the moment, I don't have a set release date. Though I do hope to release this book as a standalone download and as a compilation with the Orders of Battle section this month.

For those of you wondering about the cover picture (which will be the cover of the standalone book, and the picture dividing the compilation of OoB and Historical Campaign sections), it's the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein shelling the Polish Westerplatte depot at Danzig/Gdansk.

I also want to thank everyone for their support and kind feedback on the September Campaign v.2 Orders of Battle section, and I hope that everyone have downloaded the latest "2.1 update" which include changes big and small. Changes that were inevitable, and after which I think the content has stabilized and will remain as it is.

Visibility: Its Back!

Both Sunday and today, something very precious returned to us.

It has been gone for weeks and months.

Visibility.

Mount Rainier was back in all its majesty, Mt. Baker jutted out to the north, the Cascades seemed close and well defined, and the Olympics again towered over the Sound.

Compare images from Puget Sound Clean Air Agency's visibility cam today and only a few days ago (Thursday). 

Why so good?

We have had a fairly major change in the trajectories of the air over us, with the flow in the lower atmosphere now from the north and northwest, thus pushing the smoke from the eastern Washington fires towards the east and south.  For example, here are the winds aloft over Seattle from 11 AM on Friday to 11 AM on Saturday (heights are in meters and time increases to the left).  Substantial wind change.

During the summer we often had bad visibility when air came off the Pacific as well, due to the enormous amounts of smoke coming from the Siberian fires.  But those fires are mainly out now.

In addition to clear skies, we had other visual treats....wonderful displays of jet contrails, and some of them were clearly apparent from space, particularly late Friday and Saturday.  First, a few contrail shots from my department.

Here is a MODIS visible satellite image for Friday afternoon over western Oregon...the white lines are contrails.  Lots of north-south tracks towards California.

Sometimes the contrails show interesting substructures.  I saw this one yesterday.

 Looking closely one can see two lines, one from each engine.  As the contrail aged, wavelike undulation appeared in the lines and then they appeared to revolve around each other.  I understand these are called contrail instability waves and represent some kind of shear-flow instability.  Pretty neat.

Lewd, crude and feud

Some of the funniest stuff on the GSN Internet board lately concerns the supposed lewdness of Steve Harvey's Family Feud.

For a show that features no violence or nudity, you'd think that Harvey Feud was the greatest threat to decency since, I dunno, high-school sex education. I generally laugh off such prudery over a little off-color talk on the show. But the complaints have started to leak into the mainstream media. The Philadelphia Inquirer has joined the Steve-is-a-threat brigade.

The show is getting better ratings, and success always attracts critics. (Failure attracts critics, too, but people get tired of punching a deflated bag.) Still, I just have to laugh at the anti-Steve Legion of Decency. If you're going to faint over expressions like "trouser snake," then maybe 2012 television is not for you. Try taking a time machine back to 1954. And never get within nine miles of a television set showing Game of Thrones.

The justified criticism of Harvey, from my POV, is his transformation of Family Feud into the Steve Harvey Standup Routine. But folks seem to like the act, so I'm not complaining too much.

Got big JSON? BigQuery expands data import for large scale web apps

By Ryan Boyd, Developer Advocate

JSON is the data format of the web. JSON is used to power most modern websites, is a native format for many NoSQL databases hosting top web applications, and provides the primary data format in many REST APIs. Google BigQuery, our cloud service for ad-hoc analytics on big data, has now added support for JSON and the nested/repeated structure inherent in the data format.

JSON opens the door to a more object-oriented view of your data compared to CSV, the original data format supported by BigQuery. It removes the need for duplication of data required when you flatten records into CSV. Here are some examples of data you might find a JSON format useful for:

• Log files, with multiple headers and other name-value pairs.
• User session activities, with information about each activity occurring nested beneath the session record.
• Sensor data, with variable attributes collected in each measurement.

Nested/repeated data support is one of our most requested features. And while BigQuery's underlying infrastructure supports it, we'd only enabled it in a limited fashion through M-Lab's test data. Today, however, developers can use JSON to get any nested/repeated data into and out of BigQuery.

For more information on importing JSON and nested/repeated data into BigQuery, check out the new guide in our documentation. You should also see the Dealing with Data section for details on the new querying syntax available for this type of data.

Improvements to Data Loading Pipeline

We’ve made it much easier to ingest data into BigQuery – up to 1TB of data per load job, with each file up to 100GB uncompressed JSON or CSV. We’ve also eliminated the 2 imports per minute rate limit, enabling you to submit all your ingestion jobs and let us handle the queuing as necessary. In a recent project I’ve been working on, import jobs for 3TB of data that previously took me 12 hours to run now take me only 36 minutes – a 20x improvement!

We’ve published a new Ingestion Cookbook that explains how to take advantage of these new limits.

We’re initiating a small trusted tester program aimed at making it easier to move your data from the App Engine Datastore to BigQuery for analysis. If you store a lot of data in Datastore and are also using BigQuery, we’d like to hear from you. Please sign up now to be considered for the trusted tester program.

Learn more this week

Michael Manoochehri, Siddartha Naidu and I are in London this week talking about BigQuery and these new features at the Strata big data conference. Ju-kay Kwek will also be talking about BigQuery at the Interop NYC conference tomorrow. Please stop by, say hi, and let us know what you’re doing with big data.

We’ll also be producing a Google Developers Live session from Campus London on Friday at 16:00 BST (15:00 GMT).


Ryan Boyd is a Developer Advocate, focused on big data. He's been at Google for 6 years and previously helped build out the Google Apps ISV ecosystem. He published his first book, "Getting Started with OAuth 2.0", with O'Reilly.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Gentlemen's Club second rifleman

Second rifleman for the Gentlemen's club, the more miniatures I paint in these "chocolate candy colors" the more pleased I am with the direction.

This particular miniature ended up with a more menacing looking facial expression than I intended - but I'm not complaining. The beard is very interesting, shaved upper lip makes this guy look feral. I really like the pocket watch detail on this one as well.

Business Game

Game has broader utility than most of its advocates imagine.  But regardless of the application, it always unwise to pay excessive attention to women telling you what they want, regardless of whether the subject is business or inter-sexual relations:

A leading German women’s magazine praised for dropping skinny models in favour of 'real people' has reversed its decision after two years - because sales dropped as the lbs piled on. This month's e-edition of Brigitte features slimline pro-models again.

This is code for the 'real people' experiment being a failure. During the two year trial over 1,000 women aged between 18 and 68 had been used in fashion and beauty features - 'to give beauty its naturalness back and show that attractiveness has many faces'.

Think about this.  The German magazine, Brigitte, sells almost exclusively to women.  The publishers were no doubt assured that eliminating those offensively slender models from the magazine's pages would increase sales, and probably found themselves subject the usual point-and-shame pressure of the sort that women have directed at a wide range of organizations and institutions for the last forty years as well.

The publishers almost surely believed that by giving women what they were actively demanding, they would benefit from in the form of more positive press and increased sales.  They got the more positive press they were expecting, as the media around the world covered their action favorably.  But they didn't get the sales; the best-selling magazine that once sold 700,000 copies per month saw that its subscriptions "dropped by nearly 22 per cent while 35 per cent fewer copies were sold in shops".

The magazine would have been in much better shape had its publishers kept this basic principle in mind: women cannot tell you what they want because they do not consciously know what they want.  Their desires can only be ascertained by their actions, not their assertions.