Numlock News: December 16, 2022 • Wrestling, Coke, Tokyo
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
Quant
One of the best schools plowing financial analysts into Wall Street is Baruch College, a City University of New York school that cranks out quants by the score. About 70 percent of the Masters of Financial Engineering students end up working for hedge funds, and the acceptance rate is just 8 percent, on par with Wharton's MBA track. The reputation of the city college in the eyes of the financial engineers bests programs at Princeton, MIT, Cornell and Carnegie Mellon, according to annual reports from QuantNet, and the in-city tuition for an 18-month MFE goes for just $29,000, while the starting salary comes in on an average $170,000, higher than MIT
WOW
Women of Wrestling is wrestling promotion owned by the owner of the Los Angeles Lakers, and eight years in it's finally scored its first syndication deal. It's rather small compared to the WWE and All Elite Wrestling promotions, which dominate the category, but it is pulling in viewership numbers higher than Impact Wrestling, which is the third-largest company by some reckonings. WOW averaged 258,000 viewers across 10 episodes, and most significantly of interest is that 50 percent of them were women aged 18 to 49, a demographic long neglected by wrestling.
Joshua Needelman, The New York Times
Coke
There are above 50,000 Coca-Cola Freestyle dispensers in operation, those hulking beverage dispensers that have every possible variety of carbonated Coke brand available on a touch screen. They sling 11 million drinks daily from the 32 brands available, and Coca-Cola is paying a lot of attention. The company can see what drinks are poured and in what combinations, and on four occasions have actually mined that data to make a new beverage for sale in stores. The data is the reason for Sprite Cherry, Coke with Cherry Vanilla, Coke with Orange Vanilla, and Sprite Strawberry with Lymonade existing.
Christopher Doering, Food Dive
Tokyo
The city of Tokyo has mandated that all new houses built after April 2025 must have solar panels, the first municipal regulation of its kind in Japan. The law applies to large-scale homebuilders and homes of up to 2,000 square meters, or 21,500 square feet. As it stands, just 4 percent of eligible buildings have solar panels in Tokyo. Japan is dealing with a uniquely difficult energy transition, as the country is resource-poor, relies heavily on coal and has reduced the use of nuclear energy following the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
Favorability
A new survey found the most favorably viewed host in daytime and late-night talk television is Drew Barrymore, who enjoys a net 43 point favorability. Daytime hosts cleaned up in the survey, with five of the top seven highest net favorables being daytime hosts like Barrymore, Kelly Clarkson (42 point favorability), Rachael Ray (38 percent net) and Jennifer Hudson (30 points). The best performing late-night hosts were the jimmies, Kimmel (32 point net favorability) and Fallon (39 point net).
Saleah Blancaflor, Morning Consult
Bleisure
Airlines are thrilled about a new, third kind of traveler beyond business travel and leisure travel: the bleisure traveler. These are people parlaying business trips into vacations. That means they're traveling on days that business travelers typically dominate. Airline revenue from corporate accounts are back to 75 percent to 80 percent of 2019 levels as of the third quarter, which is a pretty decent rebound, however it's plateaued a bit and airlines would like to see that get back, ideally through bleisure.
Alison Sider, The Wall Street Journal
Butterflies
The number of remaining Poweshiek butterfly sites in the United States is down to two, each in the same county, down from a high of 76 sites in the 1990s. That's a devastating number, but it's also a number that we only know about because there are scientists studying the decline of this insect, scientists that have to grapple with the reality that the thing that they are devoting their careers to is very likely going to die off, and potentially sometime soon. How those researchers deal with that not just on a scientific level but on a personal level is, unfortunately, an increasingly common problem.
Maggie Koerth, FiveThirtyEight
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The butterfly story just depressed me beyond belief. We are in the midst of one of the largest extinctions of flora and fauna in the history of this planet, and it's entirely our fault.
We absolutely suck as stewards of the planet.