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How do you check the weather?

Inspired by this Wall Street Journal piece about the financial difficulties faced by The Weather Channel — Verizon FiOS dropped the station because of “customers’ growing use of online sources and apps to look up weather information” — I wondered how many people get their weather from the station. Is it true that customers are flocking to apps and the Web?²⁹

Because I’m 24, I either don’t bother checking the weather or just use the default app on my phone. I assumed everyone else was like me in this regard. I was wrong.

I couldn’t find data on this, so I asked SurveyMonkey Audience to run a simple survey. It ran April 6-10 and had 938 respondents. It asked two main questions: How do you check the weather? And, do you check a weather report every day?

Here’s where people go for weather forecasts:

METHOD	PERCENTAGE
Phone’s default weather app	23.2%
Local TV news	20.6
A specific website or app	19.1
The Weather Channel	15.2
Internet search	14.2
Newspaper	3.5
Radio weather	3.4
Newsletter	0.9

The Weather Channel actually doesn’t do half bad here! It had 15.2 percent penetration overall, and that was pretty consistent regardless of how old the respondent was.

About 4 in 5 respondents said they check a weather report daily. And there were a couple of interesting differences in how people looked up the weather, depending on whether they were a daily checker or not. People who said they checked the weather every day were more likely to go to a specific website or app (21 percent of daily checkers versus 10 percent of non-daily checkers) or The Weather Channel (16 percent of dailies versus 10 percent of non-dailies). Non-dailies were much more likely to just do an Internet search (23 percent versus 12 percent for daily checkers).

And while The Weather Channel performed relatively equally across age groups, weather-checking in general isn’t a young person’s game. The probability that a respondent checked the weather on a daily basis climbed with his or her age bracket: 68 percent of people 18 to 29 years old checked the weather daily, while 87 percent of people 60 and older did. (Not super shocking either: The older a respondent was, the more likely he or she was to get weather from radio, local TV and newspapers.)³⁰

Among respondents from New England, home to a lot of harsh weather, 94 percent checked the weather every day. On the other end of the spectrum, 70 percent of respondents in the Pacific region — those smug jerks in California, Oregon and Washington who were Snapchatting east-coasters like me all winter with their stupid temperate and predictable climate — felt the need to check a daily report.

But the really interesting finding from this isn’t about newspapers or even The Weather Channel. It’s about local television news.

So 36 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds got their weather from their phone’s default weather app, compared with 14 percent of people aged 60 and older. That’s a 22 percentage point difference. Where were those 22 points being taken away from?

It’s not The Weather Channel: Slightly more young people got their news from the network than the 60-and-over crowd. No, the weather app on your phone is sucking eyeballs away from local television news. For people 60 and up, 29 percent got their weather from local news. Only 8 percent of the 18- to 29-year-old crowd did. That’s a 21 percentage point difference.

Sure, The Weather Channel has some financial difficulties ahead when it comes to getting carriage fees where they’d liked them. But the network’s problems don’t really seem to be generational, at least not according to this data. Local news weather’s may very well be.

All the data from this survey is up at GitHub. One thing I didn’t look at that might be interesting is the “a specific website or app” category, where we asked respondents to volunteer which particular website or app they use. Dig into the data, and let me know if you find anything.

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With the GT-05 we expand our successful „Gaming Tower" series with a compact mini-tower with an exceptional design. Versatile features, such as the incredibly simple hardware installation, an integrated card reader or the ability to customize the color scheme of the case, distinguish the case. The GT-05 fulfills our requirements to offer exceptional functionality, a stylish design and outstanding quality at an attractive price.

Cover and front of the GT-05 are kept in black piano lacquer finish. One 3.5 inch and one 5.25 inch external bay are available for the installation of drives. A flip-down cover closes optical drive bay and ensures a uniform color scheme. Only the plastic elements that run through front and top, as well as the power and reset buttons are held in matte black. Without any effort, these elements can be swapped with different colored pieces (which are included) and allow an almost unique individualization of our PC-case.

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Warning: There are spoilers ahead.

On Sunday’s episode of “Silicon Valley,” the Pied Piper gang are back and meeting with venture capitalists after a lawsuit from their main competitor, Hooli, caused the VC company of the late Peter Gallagher to back out on investing in them.

But there was also a funny subplot during the episode, in which Pied Piper member Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) tries desperately to sabotage his cousin’s Kickstarter campaign for his app called "Bro."

Bro is a messaging app that lets you send the word “Bro” to everyone else who has the app.

Showing his cousin he's "cool,” Dinesh donated $5,000 to his campaign, but now with Pied Piper's funding in peril, Dinesh doesn't have the money and tries to convince his cousin to halt the campaign.

If Bro sounds familiar, that's because there’s a very similar app already on the market.

The Yo app, created by Or Arbel — reportedly in only eight hours in 2014 — makes it possible for you to send people who also have the app the word "Yo."

“Silicon Valley” creator Mike Judge told Business Insider that season 2 was being written when Yo hit the market and they thought it was comedy gold.

“It’s silly because it’s a nothing app,” Judge explains. "I remember thinking, there was MySpace and Friendster before Facebook and maybe after Yo some others would come along.” (Which has already happened, thanks to Aaron Paul.) 

But like most jokes or storylines on the show, the creators always attempt to bring as much reality to it as possible.

In the case of Bro, a team was formed to create a prototype.

“We worked with a bunch of iOS developers and there were some interfaces [of Bro] that were developed for the day we shot,” said “Silicon Valley” co-producer and lead technical consultant, Jonathan Dotan. “So some of the actors had the prototype [in the scene]."

There aren’t any shots of the Bro interface in the episode, but the use of the app leads to a funny sequence in which Pied Piper member Jared (Zach Woods) sets up a meeting with a VC company through "Broing" with one of its members. However, the meeting turns out to be disastrous for the Pied Piper guys, leading a heartbroken Jared to confront his contact saying, “I thought we were bros?”

According to HBO, there are no plans to make the Bro app available for the general public.

Business Insider reached out to Yo creator Or Arbel to get his thoughts on Bro. Though he was not aware the show spoofed his app, he seemed flattered.

“I love the show, so for Yo to be mentioned is amazing,” said Arbel. “We are doing some things that are bigger than sending a Yo or a Bro, but this is a milestone for us, to be honest.”

SEE ALSO: Why one of the most beloved characters in HBO's "Silicon Valley" isn't in the second season

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Silicon Valley Darling Tristan Walker: This Advice From Ben Horowitz Made All The Difference In My Success

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Mmmm… ‘Murica!

Competitive eater Molly Schuyler broke a new record this weekend, eating 3 72-oz steaks in less than 20 minutes.

At this year’s 72oz Showdown at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, Schuyler was matched up against four teams of two, and she singlehandedly destroyed her competition while besting herself in the process.

The other teams included professional wrestlers and football players and they each had one hour to throw down as much as they could.

In total, Schuyler, who weighs just 124 pounds, ate 3 steaks, 3 baked potatoes, 3 shrimp cocktails, 3 side salads and 3 rolls.

Basically, as The Big Texan describes it, she consumed more than 13.5 pounds of food which is “the equivalent of a bowling ball or averaged sized three-month-old baby.”

Anyone who stops by The Big Texan can take the challenge, but if they don’t finish their meal in an hour they have to pay $72.

Schuyler not only got the 3 free meals, but also a $5,000 prize… and apparently an extended trip to the bathroom.

@c_ohman @TheBigTexan ..you don't even know

— Molly Schuyler (@MollySchuyler) April 20, 2015

Last year she ate only 2 steaks, so she beat her previous record by an entire meal. You can watch the entire gorge-fest below, starting around the 39:13 mark.

One steak and sides: 4:18. Two: 11:47. Three: 20:00. Congrats to @MollySchuyler! pic.twitter.com/vnk4l1z9a0

— The Big Texan (@TheBigTexan) April 19, 2015

Image Via: The Big Texan

The post Record of the Day: 120-pound Woman Eats 216 Ounces of Steak in Under 20 Minutes appeared first on The Daily What.

Pete Pistone shares some news, notes and observations from a weekend of racing at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Submitted by Thad Beversdorf via FirstRebuttal.com,

So the fundamental case for a 20 year bull run as BMO is calling for and  certainly many other banks seem to be onboard with that is not looking great YTD.  In fact, most perma bulls have shy’d away from even mentioning fundamentals other than to say that generally they aren’t looking great but don’t worry the Fed is still engaged.   And so I feel its a worthwhile exercise to have a look at the technicals.  Thing about the technicals is that you can cherry pick any baseline point to really make any case, good or bad.  But if we take a look at a time period that encompasses several cycles we negate our ability to cherry pick the baseline and we can be much more confident in our overall analysis.

So what I’ve done is taken a two decade period of S&P pricing which encompasses several cycles.  Mid 1990′s was a market mid cycle having recovered from the short recession of the early 1990′s but before things really began heating up in the late 1990′s.  If we just have a gentle look at the chart we see we’ve had a couple large cycles with fairly extreme booms and subsequent busts.  Currently we are in the midst of the third boom which has taken us to new all time highs.  Now even a 5 year old can look at the chart and say at some point this thing has a large down turn, same as it always does.  That’s easy to see and not many will argue it.  But as so many bulls remind us we could have said the same thing about this chart a year ago and we’d have missed out on significant returns.  Very true.  So the key is then figuring out where the down turn begins.  I know I know that’s the kind of stuff you have to go to biz school for eh.  Ok so let’s first have a look at the easy chart.

So pretty simple.  Two full cycles and into the third which doesn’t tell us much.  Let’s add some markers to see if we can’t pick up on some technical cues.

So what we’ve done is run a 2.5 standard deviation Bollinger Band (BB) using a 100 period moving average looking at monthly returns because we are interested long cycle technical cues.  We’ve also run Relative Strength Indicator (RSI) using 20 periods.  What we find is actually quite notable.  During the tech bubble cycle we saw the S&P rise to the upper BB where it tracked the upper band for some time.   During that same period we saw the RSI move above 70.  Now as the market peaked we saw the S&P move below the upper BB and we also saw a decline in RSI.  What is very interesting is that the point where RSI dropped below 70 is the point the tech bubble burst and sent S&P into a free fall.  The market continued to sell until the RSI dropped below 30 at which point the market stabilized and reversed higher.

This took us into the start of the credit bubble cycle.  Here the RSI move up very quickly and plateaued just below 70 for several years during which time the S&P moved up but never quite made it to the upper BB.  Then in 2007 the RSI moved above 70 but then quickly reversed back down below the upper band.  Interestingly again the RSI dropping below the upper band seemed to trigger the bursting of the credit bubble as we saw S&P again move into free fall.  Then here too we saw the market stabilize as the RSI moved through the bottom band.

And again this brought us into the latest Fed bubble.  Now during this latest cycle the RSI moved up but bounced off the upper band a few times without actually breaking through 70.  At the same time the S&P moved higher but with quite heavy volatility.  Eventually we saw the RSI move up and break through the upper limit.  It was about the same time that the S&P traded higher to the upper BB where it tracked for some time.  However, at the end of November 2014 the S&P started to dislocate and moving down below the upper BB.  And then ominously January of this year we saw the RSI also move below the upper RSI band.

Remember this technical signaled the popping of the past two bubble cycles.  Now February saw the RSI move back above the upper band but March moved back down below.  I would watch this very carefully now.  I would venture to say if April remains below the upper RSI band we could very well have moved into the latest and perhaps greatest period of wealth destruction. It is time to protect those assets.