Truck and Barter

Stargate SG-1 Pwned by YouTube Insurgents

Geeks among you might know that UK's Sky One has been airing the latest Stargate SG-1 episodes months ahead of the US's Sci-Fi Channel.

In fact, last night Sky One aired the Stargate SG-1 series finale.

We have had evidence for some time that the decision to delay airing in the US was not made with a deep understanding of the passion or technical savvy of the Stargate SG-1 fan base. Witness to both: already by today, at least two users have uploaded the series finale onto YouTube, in four or five less-than-ten minute segments, to meet YouTube's 10 minute per clip limit.

That's after the biggest Stargate copyright violator of them all -- who was uploading every single new episode of Stargate SG-1 and backfilling earlier ones -- had his account suspended.

At one point, illegal episodes of Stargate were so easy to find on YouTube, I had assumed that the copyright owner was being extremely progressive and tactful -- understanding that core viewership of these shoddy-quality uploaded versions is extremely likely to purchase the season DVDs in addition to watching the episodes online. Let them have their fun, and 99.5% of regular viewers won't even know about it.

But I was wrong: the copyright holders were worried about the impact of the 0.5%, but they were, apparently indecisive, lethargic, or incompetent.

Can it possibly be worth it financially to stop a couple of hundred, or even a few thousand people from sharing these episodes with one another?

And besides counterinsurgency, what can YouTube reasonably do to stop this insurgent community from taking countermeasures: opening up shell accounts for each episode, uploading the videos while misrepresenting the content in words, and distributing links among a trusted network? A loss of one account means nothing if multiple accounts hold identical content, or if files are retained by several seeders who can repost banned content to new accounts within hours.

Markets in Everything – God Helmet

If you’re interested in a short cut to spiritual experiences, neurobiologist Michael Persinger has devised a wired helmet that he says induces religious experiences in those who wear it.

Another helmet called Shakti – claimed to be better than the above one (price $220)

Related;
Shakti and the Koren Helmet - which is more effective?
God on the Brain - questions and answers
The God Experiments
This IsYour Brain on God
God moves in mysterious waves
Visions or Partial-Complex Seizures?
The Significance of Ellen White's Head Injury
Neuroscience - the New Philosophy
Neuroethics (podcast)

The Herd Instinct and the rise of SUVs

Robert Frank tries to explain the rise of fall of SUVs- to a lot of people it will seem quite obvious;

“Economists increasingly recognize the importance of herd behavior in explaining ordinary purchase decisions. A case in point is the sport utility vehicle. Herd behavior helps us understand not only the explosive rise of this market segment in the 1990’s, but also its imminent collapse…

The conventional determinants of consumer demand cannot explain this astonishing trajectory. Cheap fuel was a contributing factor, but clearly not an adequate explanation, because fuel had also been cheap in earlier decades. Similarly, rising average incomes cannot have been decisive, because the pre-S.U.V. decades had experienced even more rapid income growth…

To understand the explosive growth of S.U.V. sales, we must look first to changes in demand caused by new patterns of income growth and then to how others responded to those changes in demand. Unlike the three post-World War II decades, when incomes grew at about the same rate for people at all income levels, the period since the mid-1970’s has seen most income growth accrue to the wealthy…

An important feature of the herd instinct is that people are more likely to emulate others with higher incomes. Seeing a wealthy studio executive behind the wheel of a Range Rover instantly certified it as a player’s ride. As more and more high-income buyers purchased these vehicles, their allure grew. And when other automakers began offering similar vehicles at lower prices, S.U.V. sales took off…”

For Comment; Do readers of newspapers really appreciate economists telling them things that appear ‘common sense’? How does topics for op-eds get decided? Does the writer get paid or tipped to write about certain products and issues?

Via Michael Blowhard

Google Spreadsheets Beta Not Ready for PrimeTime

Some people have noted the lack of pivot tables and graphing capabilities, but I've had far more fundamental problems using Google Spreadsheets Beta in Firefox 1.5.0.4. These aren't bugs, but differences in usage from Excel that make it unlikely that I will be transferring to GS any time soon:

1) Formulas in INactive cells DON'T automatically change with a cut and paste. If in any cell (say D20) you write a formula that links to another cell (say B1), and then cut and paste B1 to any other cell, your formula in D20 isn't told of that the cut and past, so it continues to link to B1, even though there's nothing in it. And it doesn't matter if D20 links to $B$1 or B1. This alone kills the app's usefulness for me, as I do tons of manipulation requiring this functionality.

2) Some formulas in a cut cell DO change with a cut and paste. If you have a formula in D20 linking to B1, and cut and past D20 to D21, the cell will now link to B2 instead of B1. This is unexpected. You have to link to B$1 in order for a cut and paste of D20 to not change the row number D20 links to. This isn't terrible in and of itself, but I'm not used to the app working this way, since in Excel, when you cut and paste a cell, the formula in the cell doesn't change, ever.

3) There is no specialized right-click menu. Which I should have realized immediately. All you get is the standard browser right-click functions. I right click A LOT in Excel, and immediately say a tremendous decrease in productivity having to hunt for menus.

Will have to check to see how well GS works in IE.

The Big Bang to MS Office

PC Magazine has a review of the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 version, one of features being a blogging tool for MS Word;

“Like Google's free Blogger for Word add-in, Office's equivalent new feature works with Blogger, but it also works, of course, with Microsoft's own blogging services. You use the File/New menu to open a new blog entry; specify your blog service, username, and password, and then create a new entry or download existing ones for editing.”

Edward Tufte might faint after seeing the chart in the figure as an example of good graphing feature of the Excel 2007.

Related Links;

- Go for a video tour of the new interface. Some ‘official’ blogs covering it; Jense Harris and Microsoft Excel 2007. The talk is more about focusing on results.

- Junk Chart have more some of the new graph features in Excel.

- J-Walk Blog; Those who will have the most difficulty adapting are the great masses of office workers who have learned how to perform a dozen or so common tasks in Excel or Word, and they do them day after day. These people, for the most part, will experience serious frustration. In many cases, these workers don't even look at the "big picture." Rather, their task is broken down into a series of very specific steps that they've learned over the years. What happens when those steps no longer work? …There are millions of customized Office apps in use that use toolbars and/or custom menus. If you load such a file in Office 2007, your familiar menu modifications and toolbars do not appear. Well, they are still there, but the user must know to click the Add-Ins tab. Then, all of the toolbars and menu modifications are visible, stuffed into a single unorganized chunk. Toolbars are no longer free-floating, and you may need to do some serious scrolling to even find the toolbar button you're looking for. And once a toolbar is displayed, there's no way to hide it.

Not that I should expect more, really...

...but I just discovered that "endogeneity" isn't an acceptable word according to MS Word standards.

Then again, it's not found here, either.

I, for one, welcome our new Google Overlords

Google continues apace in its apparent attempt to improve on just about every aspect of the web.

New-to-me are Google Maps. While I find the initial search page a bit clunky (I'd prefer to have the Local Search fields open on the first page rather than be a tab choice and the example searches are more confusing than clarifying to me, but this is still Beta Testing), the functionality more than makes up for the roughness around the edges.

Perhaps my favorite feature is the combination of web search results with location searches. That is, type in a place and street number, and choose from the "pins" on the displayed map to see the name of the destination, search results with the "N more" option, and the choice to quickly move to a driving directions interface that is nicely intergated right into the "popups" that appear. Plus, the draggable map is a dramatic improvement over the "click the sides of the map to scroll" interface of MapQuest.

Lack of Merit

I was sadly disappointed by the analysis in The Economist's article
Meritocracy in America. The article's arguments rely on the assumption that genetic heritability of traits producing financial success is completely negligible. However, the article doesn't try to justify that assumption. In fact, unless I'm suffering from some mental block, the article never mentions that assumption. This is inexcusably silly for an article in 2005 which runs to three pages, and which repeatedly uses that assumption to use statistics about overall inheritance of success to derive conclusions about the strength of social mechanisms for inheritance of success.

Actually, I am predisposed to agree with some of the article's conclusion. It'd be pretty easy to convince me that social mobility has been decreasing (at least in the post-Jim-Crow era -- it would be harder to convince me that barriers today are as godawful as the Jim Crow laws were). It'd also be pretty easy to convince me that some reasonable measures of meritocracy could be declining too (emphatically not including skewedness of income as an indicator of nonmeritocracy or nonmobility, because I don't think professional sports, e.g., are wildly more nonmeritocratic and sclerotic than most of the economy). But many of the arguments in the article just don't support the conclusion unless, for reasons unexplained, alternative explanations are excluded.

(I usually pick up The Economist on Thursday when I visit Barnes and Noble cafe to play the game of Go. Thus, the article has been out for almost a week, and maybe someone else has dumped all over it for me. However, the only notable response I noticed in Google "economist meritocracy america" was here, and I think the article merits more dumping than that. If the definitive mo'-dumping response is out there already, then I'd appreciate feedback about how to improve my web search skillz to find such responses.)

Now, possible genetic heritability needn't necessarily involve psychological characteristics, and needn't even involve economic meritocracy or anything else which might reflects favorably on the system. Consider that The Economist itself within the last few years ran an article on "heightism", reporting a correlation between income and height. Height is strongly genetically heritable. For all that might be known by a thoughtful reader whose worldview is shaped by several years of reading The Economist, the reality behind the success statistics reported by the article might have little to do with social mechanisms for parents to favor their offspring, and much to do with the economic importance of inherited cosmetic factors like height, and/or other less-often-measured factors like complexion and hair. However, an even more glaringly obvious ignored explanation is that of inherited psychological characteristics (and/or inherited physical characteristics, like general health, which affect the mind) influencing success. (This influence needn't necessarily be through the usual meaning of "merit" either; it might be through things like predisposition to lie, ability to lie convincingly, predisposition to take risks, or predisposition to devote little energy to direct pursuit of sexual partners and to trust instead in the indirect outcome of one's single-minded pursuit of financial success.)

Discussion of inheritance of psychological characteristics is sufficiently politically incorrect that I feel little curiosity about the article's curious assumption that this effect is obviously zero. However, this political correctness at this level on this date seems woefully clueless or dishonest. Stephen Pinker's book The Blank Slate is full of evidence for the strength of inherited psychological characteristics and contains some evidence on their effect on economic outcomes. And it was quite a successful book, so it's not as though the ideas aren't widely known in 2005. The book is also sharply critical of solemnly blinkered silliness of research work silently excluding the possibility of genetic inheritance, e.g., on p. 375,

Yes, from the many useless studies that show a correlation between the behavior of parents and behavior of their biological children and conclude that the parenting shaped the child, as though there were no such thing as heredity.

and page 384,

The First Law implies that any study that measures something in parents and something in their biological children and then draws conclusions about the effects of parenting is worthless, because the correlations may simply reflect their shared genes (aggressive parents may breed aggressive children, talkative parents talkative children). But these expensive studies continue to be done and continue to be translated into parenting advice as if the heritability of all traits were zero. Perhaps [Marlon] Brando [who in an interview gave some homely observations about genetic predispositions, and was mocked for it] should be asked to serve on grant review panels.

Taking Pinker's word for the older literature (essentially none of which I've read for myself) I notice that this shoe seems to fit in 2005. Research agenda: Since there's probably little genetic relatedness between 1978 researchers and 2005 reporters, factcheckers, and editors at The Economist, evidently foot size is culturally determined! Now to look into mouth size...

Also, were I an economics journalist, not only would I be embarrassed to be caught unaware of the ideas (and characterized by the criticism) in The Blank Slate, I might also be embarrassed to be caught not reading Marginal Revolution. Their recent article pointing to an article about parent-child income correlations in adopted Korean children vs. genetically-related Korean children is not definitive, but it's suggestive enough that in the absence of a considerable body of research definitively leading to other conclusions, I think this single study might be enough all by itself to justify my characterization as "silly."

Also, a particularly dodgy-looking statistic: the article reports "nearly 70% of the sons in 1998 had remained either at the same level [by quintiles] or were doing worse [again by quintiles] than their fathers had." I expect this is technically true, but it looks like "how to lie by statistics" to me. Unless I'm confused -- which does happen, sometimes for publication... -- the absolutely random uncorrelated result would be 60%. I don't believe that the journalists expected their readers to pick up on this, or that they intended the sentence to be a masterfully concise summary of "68% [or whatever] of the sons in 1998 had remained either at the same level or were doing worse than their fathers had; in a country where outcomes were assigned randomly, the figure would be only 60%." After all, it is really very odd to summarize 60-something percent as "nearly 70%" when the baseline uncorrelated result is 60%, so that the difference in significance between 66% and 69.5% is large. It makes little sense as an attempt to be concise or informative, and much sense as a hint to help lead one's readers into the misimpression that the insignificance result is so far below 70% that the rounding is irrelevant.

As long as I'm on the subject of this article, sometimes I'm nostalgic for the old Economist and regret, e.g., how often the current Economist passes up the opportunity to make thoughtful, sometimes irreverently subversive, often quantitative observations. So, after wishing that this article met basic standards of social science and statistical cluefulness, I'll wish also they could've dropped into the article somewhere a paragraph comparing the magnitude of within-the-country inherited success factors to the magnitude of the effect of inheriting US citizenship (compared to inheriting citizenship in a random country).

On the plus (?) side, the new Economist does have "slither of society" -- a witty play on "All Snakes, No Ladders," one hopes.

(Incidentally, since this blog seems not to have a category for "Economic Journalism" at the moment, I got to enjoy some found mordant wit of my own with the "Product Review" categorization of this article. I hope that doesn't make me a bad person; I also think it might be a good idea to add such a more specific category or, I suppose, to declare the this kind of article to be inappropriate.)

Centurion Black

Via Drudge, we read about Antoinette Millard, a con artist suing American Express for issuing her a Centurion Black credit card, and letting her charge $150K a year:

She says she was mentally ill at the time of her spending spree and that American Express should have known that she was acting irrationally and impulsively.

She is suing them for $2 million.

The Centurion card, launched in October 1999, provides many exclusive benefits:

Personal Assistance

Each cardmember will be assigned a personal travel counselor to handle all travel needs, and their own concierge to help with anything from special occasion planning and selecting ideal gifts, to locating unusual items.

Retail Privileges

Special privileges will be extended to Centurion members at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, including personal shopper services, invitations to exclusive events, free consultation for restyling of precious jewelry (Neiman Marcus) and private shopping hours (Saks.)

The Amex Centurion web pages are not easily found. But there are web forums discussing the gritty details, including the annual fee:

Q: Ok because I am such a loyal spender with American Express will they give it to me for free?

Afraid not, American Express charge different amounts depending on the country of issue; in the US the fee is $2500 and in the UK �650, although in the case of the latter you can now renew for free.

I'm not rich, and would not use this card if I became rich. To some people this card sounds like conspicuous consumption--a tool of the ultra-wealthy; and it does demonstrate that a premium level of luxury is available only to them. But more importantly, it demonstrates that most of the services available to the ultra-wealthy--from basic financial advice to flight insurance to fraud protection--are available to anybody with any Amex card. Immense wealth still permits the expoitation of a team of fawning yes-men and personal servants. But Centurion club members cannot walk on water; aside from being treated with kid-gloves, they're just like everyone else.

Full photo here, and card reviews here and here. From the latter, a perfect example of the real benefit of the Centurion card:

He first received the card on the day of my birthday and used it to pay for a 600+ dollar meal at Ruth Chris� Steak House. Despite the fact that the waiters there have probably served some of the wealthiest customers in the area, the waiter my father gave the card to went around showing his friends (the other waiters). Not only that, but the manager of the restaurant came down shortly after paying the bill to see how things were and asks if my father wanted to celebrate my birthday (I guess the waiter had spoken with him) with a bottle of wine compliments of the house. I can�t see why anyone would not want to own this card if they could. Even if for nothing other than the sheer prestige that seems to come along with it.

UPDATE: At Overlawyered, Ted Frank has the details on the Amex lawsuit, as well as a link to a photo of the alleged perp.

Does Technical Advancement Breed Disposability?

I'll spare you all the frustrating-but-possibly-amusing-in-the-retelling story of dealing with the customer service people for my cell phone. Suffice it to say that it took several phone calls and multiple conversations each time to determine that my phone needed to be taken to the local cell phone retail location. Since it's my only phone, I promptly went to the store. Surprisingly, the line was short, the service friendly. I explained my problem, and they said they'd take a look. I went to the rack of amazingly expensive phones to indulge my techo-fetish issues. I thumbed a Pa1mOne, then turned around to ask how long the process would take. That's when they handed me my new (though identical) phone.

That was it. They threw out the other one without even checking the parts, transferred my numbers to a new phone, and washed their hands of the whole thing. Mind you, no one ever proved the problem was with the phone. When asked, the person behind the technical service counter said yes, it really was cheaper to just give me a new one than to order parts and repair the old one. Of course, it's deeper than that. Turns out, it's cheaper to give me a new phone than to even explore the possible problems with the old phone, let alone get new parts if such were required. What surprised me, though, was that it goes still deeper. Turns out that there isn't anyone at the store that knows how to even go about assessing the technical issues of the phones. The "tech department" focuses almost entirely on software issues. The physical phone is a toss away item.

If it's not worth hiring or training people to work on phones at their current state of technology, I'd expect the situation to only get "worse". That is, with the growth of cell phone/PDAs there will be more things that could go wrong, each of them more technically complex than the last, and thus there will be more reason to pitch them every time a customer comes in with a technical problem (a problem that could itself increase, since fitting more features in a relatively similar space to less sophisticated phones might require using parts ever more sensitive to shock). This, I'd guess, means that the technical advancement of phones has to keep a breakneck pace; the newest phones can command the highest prices and make up for the fact that cell service providers will end up throwing a certain percentage away.

Of course, that pace of increased sophistication (if I'm on to something) increases the amount of "slop" phones that have to be purchased by service providers and resellers like Best Buy/Circuit City/etc. Makes me wonder if there's an opportunity out there for good technicians to buy up the discarded phones, fix them, then resell them internationally where cellular networks are outpacing land-line development, but don't have the disposable income of more developed nations.

UPDATE: After less than 24 hours with the new phone, I can report...nothing's changed. As I suspected, there was nothing wrong with the phone itself. Not that I'm surprised that the service for cell phones is bad.

Domino's Information Dominance

I've argued with people who are concerned about corporations misusing private information, and I've insisted that it's government information dominance that we should be worried about. I still hold to that, although Domino's has given me pause.

My recent negative review of Domino's Doublemelt Pizza seems to have spurred the company to send me, via snail mail, a freebie offer of wings with my next pizza.

Now, they could only obtain my home address through a Whois query of T&B; I ask you, would they actually do this in response to a bad review? Or, rather, is it coincidence that a few days after my bad review, I get a "sorry for our poor performance" postcard? Did everyone who ordered a Doublemelt get this card?

Product Review: Domino's Doublemelt Pizza

We usually order pizza from a local place; it's not New York's finest, but it serves as a fine proxy. But the idea of thin crust and multiple layers of cheese sounded interesting, so tonight my wife and I ordered a doublemelt pizza from Domino's:

Domino's Doublemelt starts with a thin crust, covered in a creamy blended cheese sauce full of herbs and a hint of garlic. A second thin crust is added and topped with the basics � tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese and choice of toppings. To top it off, another blend of six cheeses is added.

"This unique combination creates a texture unlike anything you've ever tasted in a pizza before, with layer upon layer of flavor," said Ken Calwell, executive vice president, for marketing & development at Domino's Pizza.

The inner layer was certainly unique--uniquely terrifying, that is. This was more than a "creamy blended cheese" concoction.

Inspired by the success of similar pizzas in international markets, Domino's Doublemelt offers a new option for those looking to double their pizza enjoyment.

This option did not double our enjoyment, it nullified it.

Avoid at all costs.