Hypothesis: In organizations where performance can be directly measured, compensation approaches the fair market value of the output generated from such performance.

Case 1: Professional Athletes

The general consensus among sports fans is that professional athletes appear grossly overpaid. How can one player truly be worth the $20 million dollars a year that their team is shelling out for their salary?

In fact, I would argue that professional athletes are probably the most fairly compensated in our society. Why would I say such a thing?

The numbers don’t lie. Professional athletes are the most accountable because every aspect of their production is meticulously tracked and measured. At the end of the day when A-rod’s agent goes to negotiate his contract, he is selling a body of work based almost exclusively on measured results and future projections based of those past results. Of course there are some intangibles that are taken into account like personal character etc.. but for the most part, the fair market value of a player is determined exclusively by the numbers.

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This following bit of code should get you up and running with a simple way of sharing data from your wordpress blog with a flash object. Creating the XML file is a bit of a hastle, since you can’t output XML directly from a wordpress template file to flash. Instead you have to use php’s fopen function to save your xml file to be accessed separately through your flash object.

The PHP

<?php 
// set headers
header('Content-Type: text/xml');
header('Cache-Control: no-store');
// get database results to output xml
$query = "SELECT content FROM wp_table ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 10";
$terms = $wpdb->get_results($query, OBJECT); 
$xml .= "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n";
$xml .= "<data>Your Data Goes Here</data>";
// save your xml file in your theme directory
$path = 'wp-content/themes/themename/output.xml';
$file= fopen("$path", "w");
fwrite($file, $xml);
fclose($file);
?>

The HTML & Javascript

<div align="top" style="margin-left:-10px;"id="flashcontent">
 <a href="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/triggerpages_mmcom/flash.html"><img src="noFlash.jpg" width="600" height="270" border="0" alt="Flash Not Detected" /></a>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
 // <![CDATA[
 var so = new SWFObject('<?php bloginfo ( 'template_directory' );?>/flashobject.swf', 'website', '600', '270', '9');
 so.useExpressInstall('<?php bloginfo ( 'template_directory' );?>/expressinstall.swf');
 so.addParam('menu', 'false');
 so.addParam('wmode', 'transparent');
 so.addVariable("xmlVar", '<?php bloginfo ( 'template_directory' );?>/output.xml');
 so.write('flashcontent');
 // ]]>
</script>