Twin Peaks Application: Fill & Download for Free

I went out to dinner last night with a friend at my local Twin Peaks. I’m a regular customer there, eating there at least once a week. Over the course of a couple of hours, I had five beers at $4.75 each. I also ordered six boneless wings with onion rings.For some reason, apparently the ticket did not print in the kitchen & my order was delayed. So, my waitress, who regularly waits on me and is a friend of mine, had to get the manager involved to re-print the ticket so the kitchen could make my meal.No big deal, I wasn’t starving and my friend had ordered chips and queso, so I was able to steal a couple of his chips.The manager, who is also a friend, came over to apologize, shake our hands, shoot the bull and tell me that he had comped our meals.That wasn’t necessary, but it’s appreciated. So we decided to go home and requested our checks.I happen to have some cash in my hands, and the bill was under 25 bucks, I don’t remember the exact amount and I don’t remember if we pay tax on beer or not, but I calculated the additional money for the food that I got for free and tipped based on that. I left a $50 bill and told her I did not need any change.So I paid about twice as much as it would have if there wasn’t tipping. She got a $25 tip from me. I have no idea what my friend tipped, he used a card and it’s none of my business. We were there for a little over two hours, I think. She had at least four other tables. So just on my bill, she made over $10 an hour.Contrast that with her getting an hourly rate and no tipping. Let’s say a restaurant paid their staff $15 an hour but there were zero tipping allowed. Do you think she would’ve been ahead of the game or behind? And I know that Twin Peaks is a restaurant that has atypical tipping practices. But I also know there are tables that leaves zero or very small tips, commonly with young men that don’t really know how to be adults yet.I have a friend who is a bartender there. “Sarah” is about 24 years old, beautiful and as nice as can be. She graduated from high school and has attended a little bit of college. Other than her physical attributes and her sparkling personality, she has no applicable work skills. She’s a very competent bartender though.One slow night when I was there and she was tending bar, we had a discussion about a variety of things including how much money a bartender can make at Twin Peaks. She told me that she brings home over $1000 a week working 24–30 hours a week, typically.That’s nearly $40 an hour. I can’t see a restaurant paying a bartender $40 an hour when they are selling bar food and beer. Actually, they sell more than just bar food and beer, but it’s not an expensive restaurant. So, I think that in many cases, tipping is better for the server.I think it’s important to mention that federal law requires that all workers, including the category known as “tipped workers”, are paid the minimum wage that is in effect at the time. For tipped workers, their base is lower but the total must be equal to the minimum wage when combined with the tips. That doesn’t mean that every employer abides by the federal laws, but I suspect most do.Some states have minimum wages that are higher than the federal level, I don’t know how they handle the tipping issue, but I suspect they mirror federal law, so that the combination of wages and tips must meet their minimum wage.I also know that there are restaurants who recognize that customers at their locations aren’t big tippers. It might be for a variety of reasons, commonly lunch menus aren’t as expensive as dinner menus, some places don’t serve dinner, some places have a demographic, like young college students, that isn’t flush with cash and so the tipping may not be as generous. I know there are restaurants the pay their employees more than the “tipped worker” rate.I often include my experiences at Twin Peaks on this platform. I’m a single man and I enjoy a cold beer, good food and pretty girls. I’ve developed a number of genuine friendships in my 4+ years of going to this establishment. It has become my Cheers since moving here from Connecticut.While my neighbor Craig and I were there last night, I noticed something that we see quite often. There were two middle-aged women standing by the front door waiting for a table. They were soon joined by a third woman. Apparently it was “girls night out” and they chose to go to a breastaurant.Of course, I have zero criticism about that decision. I don’t know the women, I don’t know their situation or experiences or how they chose this particular establishment. Maybe they like the same things we like, good food, cold beer and pretty girls. But I can’t imagine if there were a reversal that I would be interested in going to a restaurant with scantily clad young men with six packs!Naturally, they might have gone there realizing that most of the patrons would be men and that might have drawn their interest. And as I think about it, if there was a restaurant that attracted a lot of single women due to their business model, it might be a place I would be interested in hanging out at!

Opower uses clustering of hourly energy usage data from individual homes to drive energy efficiency on a large scale.Opower has access to energy usage data for over 50 million homes, including smart meter data (usually with hourly resolution) for over 8 million homes. We wanted to identify behavioral profiles of different homes, so we applied clustering to the smart meter data, inspired by work on load curve analysis in Ram Rajagopal's lab.To give you a sense of what the data looks like, here's hourly electricity usage from a single home for a single day:You can see that it's pretty noisy. Here's 5 more days from that household plotted on top of each other:And here's a year's worth of data from that household, along with the average usage in each hour of the day plotted in bold:You can see that there's a ton of noise in the daily usage, though maybe there's some pattern to it (a spike at 7am when the people in the house are presumably waking up, another spike around what's probably dinnertime, lower usage at night, etc.).Now, what if we look at that average usage (the bold line above, which we call a load curve) for all households? Here's that average curve plotted for 1000 different households (note that we limit ourselves to weekday usage):Once again, very noisy. We call this plot The Hairball. Overall, people tend to use more energy in the mornings and evenings, with the lowest valley coming while they're sleeping, but still, there's a lot of noise and it's hard to know what to make of all of this.So we applied a clustering technique to The Hairball, and this is what we found:Plotted here are the individual household load curves that most closely fit into one of the 5 resulting clusters. Here are the centroids of those 5 clusters, which we call load curve archetypes, along with what we subsequently named each archetype:Note that we didn't go searching for these particular shapes, or for 5 clusters in particular; this is what emerged naturally from the data.You can see some relatively intuitive behavior here -- Steady Eddies, Night Owls, and Twin Peaks households are presumably ones where people leave home during the day (though with different behaviors in the morning and evenings), and Daytimers are presumably home all day. We've correlated these archetypes to demographics and other information we have about the households (for example, Daytimers tend to skew older with fewer children, and Night Owls tend to be young, apartment/condo dwellers with below-average overall energy usage), but more importantly, these archetypes are identifying something behavioral, beyond demographics.What do we do with these archetypes? Once we've assigned each household to an archetype, we can target segments of the population with energy efficiency programs or specific messaging that is most appropriate to them. For example, Daytimers save the most energy when presented with our Home Energy Reports, and Steady Eddies save the least as part of our Demand Response programs.This is just one piece of the puzzle, but overall Opower drives 2 Terrawatts of energy savings per year, which is enough to power the city of Las Vegas.Most of the credit goes to Erik Shilts, who did a bulk of the research and productionalization, as well as the rest of our Data Science and Analytics teams. You can read more here: https://blog.opower.com/2014/10/load-curve-archetypes/

There is a subtle difference. I usually think of innovation as something technological. For instance, Uber is a new way to “innovate” mass transportation. You don’t have to call a cab, you can click on the app and someone will swing by and give you a ride. in a similar fashion, a digital tablet is an innovative way to digitally paint without all the hassle of analog medium. As I write you now without the use of quill and paper, word processing is an innovation as well. Creativity is more focused on an artistic work, but it could also apply to the applications listed above. But you can also be creative without being innovative. I am thinking now of the current season of Twin Peaks. I love the creativity of the show. I love how Lynch is testing the boundaries of what is considered the structur(more)