Truck and Barter

Goodbye, Landline!

Since the average total cost per minute is extravagant (roughly a minimum of 25¢ per minute of actual talk time), today I am having our landline telephone service disconnected.

The unused monthly cell phone family plan minutes will easily cover the minimal landline use, and for no additional charge.

Many have blogged about this, but I feel nothing... no nostalgia... no concern that an era is dying... no fear that the power will go out, and six hours later my cell will go dead along with the tower's battery backup.

But what to do with that extra dollar a day?

Can Google bring democracy to Arabs?

Technology never ceases to amaze me;

“Since Bahrain’s government blocked the Google Earth website earlier this year for its intrusion into private homes and royal palaces, Googling their island kingdom has become a national pastime for many Bahrainis.

The site allows internet users to view satellite images of the world in varying degrees of detail. When Google updated its images of Bahrain to higher definition, cyber-activists seized on the view it gave of estates and private islands belonging to the ruling al-Khalifa family to highlight the inequity of land distribution in the tiny Gulf kingdom.

A senior government official told the Financial Times that Google Earth had allowed the public to pry into private homes and ogle people’s motor yachts and swimming pools. But he acknowledged that the government’s three-day attempt to block the site had proved counterproductive.

It gave instant publicity to Google Earth and contributed to growing sophistication among Bahrainis in circumventing web censorship.

It also provided more ammunition to democracy activists ahead of parliamentary elections this Saturday, the second since King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa began introducing limited political reforms in 2001. “

Via FP blog.

Related;
Mahmood’s Den
Bahrainis use Google Earth to spy on royals' palaces

My Stock Broker is an ANN

Its seems like Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are ready to invade the stock markets;

“Artificial intelligence is becoming so deeply integrated into our economic ecostructure that some day computers will exceed human intelligence,” Mr. Kurzweil tells a room of investors who oversee enormous pools of capital. “Machines can observe billions of market transactions to see patterns we could never see.”…

But some are aware that a former Microsoft executive and chairman of the Nasdaq stock market, Michael W. Brown, is an investor in Mr. Kurzweil’s new hedge fund, FatKat, and that Bill Gates once described him as “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” …

“Five years ago it would have taken $500,000 and 12 people to do what today takes a few computers and co-workers,” said Louis Morgan, managing director of HG Trading, a three-person hedge fund in Wisconsin. “I’m executing 1,500 to 2,000 trades a day and monitoring 1,500 pairs of stocks. My software can automatically execute a trade within 20 milliseconds — five times faster than it would take for my finger to hit the buy button.”

Studies estimate that a third of all stock trades in the United States were driven by automatic algorithms last year, contributing to an explosion in stock market activity. Between 1995 and 2005, the average daily volume of shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange increased to 1.6 billion from 346 million….

For years, computer scientists had tried to help machines perform mundane tasks like reading printed words or telling faces apart. With algorithms similar to those used by stock pickers, programmers created millions of rules designed to tell an “A” from an “a.” But no machine could read a page of text as well as the average child.

So Mr. Kurzweil and others took a different tack: instead of creating sequential rules to instruct a computer to read, they thought, why not create thousands of random rules and let the computer figure out what works?

The result was nonlinear decision making processes more akin to how a brain operates. So-called “neural networks” and “genetic algorithms” have become common in higher-level computer science. Neural networks permit computers to create new rules and automatically change underlying assumptions by experimenting with thousands of random sequences and processes. Genetic algorithms encourage software to “evolve” by letting different rules compete, and combining the most successful outcomes….

But as these new techniques proliferate, some worry that promotion is outpacing reality. These techniques may be better for marketing than stock picking.

“Investment firms fall over themselves advertising their latest, most esoteric systems,” said Mr. Lo of M.I.T., who was asked by a $20 billion pension fund to design a neural network. He declined after discovering the investors had no real idea how such networks work.

“There are some pretty substantial misconceptions about what these things can and cannot do,” he said. “As with any black box, if you don’t know why it works, you won’t realize when it’s stopped working. Even a broken watch is right twice a day.”

Via Information Processing

Related;

The Economist Asks: Are Hedge Funds Necessary?
Inventor Ray Kurzweil on TEDTalks or listen to the podcast
When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management By Roger Lowenstein (book review)

Some posts by Arnold Kling; Nonlinear Thinking, Kurzweil interview, The Age of Radical Enhancement, Why inherited wealth is less important
Kurzweil and Human Capital

Kramnik vs. the computer

Google’s next product- Google Medicine?

Would Google replace doctors?

“Doctors facing a patient with unusual symptoms could well be advised to use Google to try to pinpoint the cause, a study published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) suggests.

Australian doctors were given 26 real-life cases of individuals who had fallen sick with relatively rare disorders.

They were not told what diagnoses had been given in these case reports but did a Google search based on the symptoms that were presented.

Google returned the right diagnosis in 15 out of the 26 cases – an accuracy rate of 58 per cent.”

The Perfect Anonymizer?

Will this be the end of internet censorship;

“A modified version of Mozilla Firefox that lets users browse the web anonymously has been released.

The Torpark browser can be stored on and run from a flash USB memory stick, which can effectively turn a PC into an anonymous terminal.

Hacktivismo - an eclectic bunch of lawyers, artists, hackers and human rights activists - has created the modified portable web browser.

On its website the group claims to be "committed to developing technologies in support of the highest standards of human rights."

Explaining the motivation behind Torpack, Hacktivismo founder Oxblood Ruffin said: "We live in a time where acquisition technologies are cherry picking and collating every aspect of our online lives - so it seems that it's a browser attempting to redress that supposed imbalance."

No installation is required to run Torpark but the two folders generated from its free download website have to stay together for the browser to run.

Working in conjunction with The Onion Router (TOR) network, the tool anonymises a user's connection through encryption and constantly changing net addresses. This makes it incredibly difficult for ISPs to track an individuals web-related activity and location.”

I haven’t tried it- let us hear from those who have used it.

Science Podcasts

A Brief History of Infinity: Space and the Universe

A Brief History of Infinity: Mathematics

The Communications Revolution;
The global effects of communication
Technology in life of people with disabilities
Communications Technology and Influence
Communications Technology and Communities

Harry Messel's life in science;This week is the 50th anniversary of SILLIAC, the first automatic computer to be built in an Australian university and tonight's guest is the man who made it happen. In his 35-year career as head of the School of Physics at Sydney University, Harry Messel taught thousands of students and used his entrepreneurial skills to raise vast funds to support scientific research. Now in his 80s, he's lost none of his enthusiasm and interest in the world of science

Jess Adkins has a lab full of cucumbers made of stone. They are, in fact, drill cores of corals from all over the world. He analyses these with surprising results, getting a remarkably accurate story of past climates going back thousands of years. This young professor from Caltech (the California Institute of Technology) has some amazing stories to tell of adventure and exploration

Why watch birds?;Author and birdy Sue Taylor from Melbourne has written a book called 'Why watch birds?', a beginner's guide to bird watching.

Belgian court fines Google

A ridiculous ruling;

“Google has been told by a Belgian court that its news service is in breach of the copyright of a group of local newspapers, in a surprise ruling that goes against existing global practice. The verdict meant that Google was forced to remove links to articles in French-language newspapers in Belgium over the weekend to avoid a €1 million (£675,000) daily fine.

The court decided that the way in which Google News operates “causes the publishers of the daily press to lose control of their websites and their contents”. However, Google said that it intended to appeal against what it described as “flawed” decision that would force it to close its news service if it was repeated elsewhere. It said that the Belgian legal action caught it unawares…”

Via AEI-Brookings’ Daily Reg-Report

Related;
Here is the actual ruling
Google's Belgium Fight: Show Me The Money, Not The Opt-Out, Say Publishers
Google could face Brazil lawsuit

Death Threats and Game Theory

South Asia correspondent to UK Telegraph writes in his blog about a recent incident involving a death threat to Maldivian dissident in UK;

“British police traced the foul-mouthed email to an address belonging to Husna Latheef, who is the wife of the Maldives Chief of Police, Adam Zahir. Mrs Latheef copped the caution but Mr Moosa (and I’ve no idea if he’s right or not) is convinced Mr Zahir is behind the threat.

The text of the threat is worth repeating for those who missed it, simply because it is so Neanderthal and unpleasant and tells you a fair bit about the people who run the Maldives once they are out of the clutches of their slick UK PR agency, Hill and Knowlton, whose top man once span for Tony Blair.

Try spinning this: “if i ever see u, i will f***ing kill you, you better watch ur f***ing back, id like to see you try and reply back to me u dumb motherf***er. who the f*** do u thnk [sic] you are. i know where u live so u better not go far from ur house in london cos i will f***ing shoot u.”…

Read the rest of the post for his speculation on the strategic reasons for British government sponsoring talks between the government and the opposition in the Maldives and using a bit of game theory he suggests;

“If Gayoom’s regime reads the Brit moves the same way Indian intelligence apparently does, and the Brits are seen to have an ulterior motive, then they might find Gayoom digs his toes in and the whole plan backfires.”

Related;
Zahir's Wife Received UK Police Caution
UK police warn wife of Maldives policeman over threat
Adam Zahir Cautioned By British Police
“The British police were able to act on the email because it was sent from a ‘blueyonder’ account, which was traced to Zahir’s London property. The email account was registered in Adam Zahir's wife's name, Husna Latheef.”
British Government Calls For Peaceful Evan Naseem Day

A Concept Map of Microsoft Office 2007

A cool concept map of MS Office 2007 resources by MS Office evangelist, Don Campbell.

Why do people go on the Internet?

It seems many Danes click online for government information, while the Swiss use the net more for job hunting, in UK more for games and music;

“Intensive computer game players are relatively few in number: usually male, aged 15-28, playing more than 20 hours per week. Mass-market consumers, on the other end of the scale, prefer playing games that are easy to learn and last a short time. Meanwhile, the market continues to evolve as players get older and tend to have higher incomes. Also, more and more women are starting to play multiplayer games online. In fact, although in most OECD countries men are more likely than women to use the Internet, significantly more women than men use it in the US.”

Why do you think it’s the case?

Related;
OECD STI Scoreboard
Internet World Statistics
Poll Shows More U.S. Adults Are Going Online at Home
A Web Journal Studying How Technology Affects Society
Digitial divide still separates white and minority students
Top 15 Online Populations by Country
Internet Activities

Hail the Google Books!

“In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia decimated cultural institutions throughout the country. Khmer Rouge fighters took over the National Library, throwing books into the street and burning them, while using the empty stacks as a pigsty. Less than 20 percent of the library-home for Cambodia’s rich cultural heritage- survived.”
- University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman

A new feature of the Google’s Book Search makes out-of-copyright works available for downloading and printing.

Juan Cole raises a couple of problems with Google Book project;

“One problem: I am already finding poorly done books, where every other page is blurred beyond reading. This is very bad because I don't know when it would ever be corrected, and no one would have an incentive to carry out this sort of project once Google has…

A second, general problem with Google is that on the whole it is no good at searching by date. Why is that so hard to put in a search engine? Is it that programmers just don't appreciate the desirability of being able to study instances of the word "liberte" in France, 1700-1789? You can put dates in the searches, but in my experience that doesn't return satisfactory results. If Google wants the project to have maximum impact, they need to address this problem. (It would be nice to address it in their general web search engine, too. Have you ever tried to find a document put up on the Web in 1998, where you don't remember whole search strings?) Otherwise, I see a business opportunity for a historian who has good programming skills…”

Related;

Google, the Khmer Rouge and the Public Good; Mary Sue Coleman’s speech- highly recommended, gives also a history of JSTORE.

Making of America Books

Wikimania Conference

Overselling the Web: Development and the Internet- a new book that is coming up, published by a World Bank economist, Charles Kenny.

Homeland Security warning on Microsoft Windows

The US Department of Homeland Security has urged Windows users to install the latest patches from Microsoft as quickly as possible;

“The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is recommending that Windows Operating Systems users apply Microsoft security patch MS06-040 as quickly as possible. This security patch is designed to protect against a vulnerability that, if exploited, could enable an attacker to remotely take control of an affected system and install programs, view, change, or delete data, and create new accounts with full user rights”

Via BBC

‘Free the Curricula, Free the Textbooks’- A Wikiality?

Two articles on the history of Wikipedia via Marginal Revolution; The Hive and Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?

Another explanation from The Economist;

“This success has made Wikipedia the most famous example of a wider wiki phenomenon. Wikis are web pages that allow anybody who is allowed to log into them to change them. In Wikipedia's case, that happens to be anybody at all. The word “wiki” comes from the Hawaiian word for “quick”, but also stands for “what I know is...”. Wikis are thus the purest form of participatory creativity and intellectual sharing, and represent “a socialisation of expertise”, as David Weinberger, who is currently writing a book on collaborative intelligence, puts it.

Among the new media, wikis are the perfect complement to blogs. Whereas blogs contain the unedited, opinionated voice of one person, wikis explicitly and literally allow groups of people to get on the proverbial “same page”. This is the main reason for the failure of a Los Angeles Times experiment with wikitorials, described in the previous article. Wikis are good at summarising debates, but they are ill-suited for biased opinion.”

Here’s Colbert’s attempt at explaining the Wikipedia; see also this video.

The major innovation I’m looking forward is when the Wikibooks gets a real take off- I don’t think it’s wikiality!

Related Links;

Best coverage of the Wikipedia amongst the blogs is at at Ross Mayfield’s Weblog.

Wikimania 2006: Opening Session with Jimmy Wales

Ten - or maybe a dozen - Things that Will Be Free

Wikimedia Foundation

Internet encyclopaedias go head to head; Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds.

The Faith-Based Encyclopedia

A couple of interesting posts by John Quiggin; Wikipedia and Sausages, Wikipedia-economics-category-project, When co-operation trumps competition

The Wealth of Networks

Multimedia;
Digital Maoism; here is the transcript.
Interviews from a Survey of New Media in The Economist; Andreas Kluth, technology correspondent
David Sifry, Founder and CEO, Technorati
Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired
Jerry Michalski, founder and president of Sociate
Paul Saffo, Director, Institute for the future

Researching with Wikipedia- introductory videos

Brion Vibber has worked on MediaWiki and Wikipedia's; an engineers view

Somebody Not Happy with Wikipedia

Podcasts on Two Outlooks- Global Economy and Information Economy

Kenneth Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard University and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, talks about the outlook for global economic growth, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the IMF's role in global economics at Bloomberg. Listen to the podcast.

Graham Vickery gives an overview of the information and communication technologies (ICT) industry for the OECD countries for 2006. Topics discussed amongst others; Market growth across the OECD and Non-OECD ICT markets, Top 250 ICT firms, World semiconductor market 1990-2005, Structural change in the ICT sector, ICT globalisation and trade, New trade competition, ICT-enabled service globalisation and offshoring; China and ICTs; ICT skills and employment; IT policy in OECD countries. Podcast from Radioeconomics.

Fun with Google

In an earlier post I linked to the book 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google. Amongst many others, it talks about the following fun application of the Google Maps; If I dig a very deep hole, where I go to stop?

Another cool idea is the Wayfaring Map which is dedicated to academic podcasts across the world ( via Cyberlibris blog)

Related;

Google Pack

Sponsored Google Videos

Videos from the Googleplex

From Kevin Kelly; Google SketchUp, Google Answers, Google Hacks, The Search

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO talks at SIEPR

Digital Maoism- Podcast of the Day

Radio National’s Philosophers Zone asks ‘Is a free market in ideas a good idea?’ More than two centuries ago, Adam Smith, the great theorist of capitalism, argued that the free market was a self-correcting mechanism: a lot of people seeking profits for themselves would produce general public benefit. But does it work with ideas? Can there be an encyclopaedia that corrects itself, as it grows ever larger on the Web?

Related;
DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism by Jaron Lanier
How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko

Bill Gates's Post-Microsoft future

Bill Gates is to take a backseat role at Microsoft. He is giving up the chief software architect role, so that he can concentrate his time on the charitable activities of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. One of the $29 billion foundation's key initiatives is improving high-school education in the U. S. Can he make a difference?

BusinessWeek looks at the school reform work of the Gates Foundation.

Another person who left the Microsoft recently and writes also an interesting blog- Scobleizer.

So what do you think Bill Gates should do after he retires from Microsoft?

First there was Carbon?

The latest from the BBC’s ‘In Our Time’ program focus on Carbon;

"Carbon forms the basis of all organic life and has the amazing ability to bond with itself and a wide range of other elements, forming nearly 10 million known compounds. It is in the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the shampoo we use and the petrol that fuels our cars. Because carbon has the largest range of subtle bonding capabilities, 95% of everything that exists in the universe is made up of carbon atoms that are stuck together.

It is an extraordinary element for many reasons: the carbon-nitrogen cycle provides some of the energy produced by the sun and the stars; it has the highest melting point of all the elements; and its different forms include one of the softest and one of the hardest substances known.

What gives carbon its great ability to bond with other atoms? What is the significance of the recent discovery of a new carbon molecule - the C60? What role does carbon play in the modern chemistry of nanotechnology? And how should we address the problem of our diminishing carbon energy sources?”

Contributors include Harry Kroto, Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University, Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University and Ken Teo, Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow at Cambridge University

Related:

Trapping Carbon, Freeing Coal; There is a lot of carbon in the ground. For eons, life forms ranging from microbes to Homo sapiens have trapped the element as part of their fundamental molecular makeup, died and cycled it into the great geologic chain of carbon

Cheap Drinking Water from the Ocean; A water desalination system using carbon nanotube-based membranes could significantly reduce the cost of purifying water from the ocean. The technology could potentially provide a solution to water shortages both in the United States, where populations are expected to soar in areas with few freshwater sources, and worldwide, where a lack of clean water is a major cause of disease

Open-Source Software in Disaster Management

BBC’s Digital Planet looks at the Sahana- an open source disaster management system which was developed in Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami and is being used increasingly across the world.

Does any one know of similar open source disaster management systems?

The Future of the Internet

Jonathan Zittrain proposes a theory about what lies around the corner for the Internet, how to avoid it, and how to study and affect the future of the internet using the distributed power of the network itself, using privacy as a signal example.

“From 1968 to 1998 the network's underlying protocols and addressing system were co-ordinated largely by an engineer named Jon Postel (whom techies referred to as “God”), acting under the aegis of America's Defence Department, which paid for the net's creation. Since 1998, the task has fallen to an international, self-regulating industry group called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), operating under the benign oversight of the American government. It manages things such as .com addresses and routing numbers that machines use online.”
-The Economist

Related:

World Summit on Information Society

Fighting Poverty with the Espresso Book Machine

The World Bank has started the first Print On Demand (POD) device - the Espresso Book Machine (EBM);

"The new low cost and fully automatic book machine, developed by On Demand Books LLC (ODB) with initial funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, will revolutionize book sales by printing and binding a single copy of a book at the point of demand. EBM can produce 15 - 20 library quality paperback books per hour, in any language, in quantities of one, without any human intervention. On a global scale, this would eliminate the costs of shipping and warehousing, returning and pulping unsold books, while allowing simultaneous global availability of new books. Print jobs can be initiated from the machine itself or from any locally connected computer using nothing more than a web browser.

Young ambassadors from DC high schools and universities will be present to officially print the first book by a retail customer at the World Bank InfoShop, the first site to offer this service. Buying a book will eventually be like getting cash from an ATM. You choose a title, insert a credit card to pay for the book and walk away with the finished book a few minutes later."

Is this a good way to fight poverty? I don’t know. If you were to ask Easterly he would have plenty of things to say. My challenge is for development institutions to be able to provide every student in the developing world the material he/she needs to develop their minds to the fullest like the following student from Mozambique.

Hi! my name is Guido Da Silva, and I am a student of economic course at Eduardo Mondlane University - Mozambique.
would you send me a book of Microeconomic, I need it very much.
My post address is
Guido Da Silva
Av. Josina Machel,200
3º Andar Flat 10
Maputo
Mozambique

(I found it in the comments section of a post at New Economist blog)

Related Link:

- Google’s Plan to Digitise the World’s Libraries and its implications.

Is There Value in Inconsistency? Modeling Wine

Both a virtue and a vice of eating at chain restaurants is the greater sense of certainty that at any single restaurant, the meal you havew will taste like it did the last time you had it, no matter where you happen to be. In the mind of the consumer, there is obviously some value to this, else we wouldn't see the vast number of fast food restaurants that we do. For the gourmand, however, the replication is usually a signal for poor quality. Perhaps its that there is an ease in making formulaic dishes that makes the connoisseur turn up their nose. Add to this the true foodie's attempt to constantly find new places. Why not return to a place that is reliable, and simply not order the same item until the menu has been exhausted? Perhaps there is some utility to be gained from the uncertainty in the quality of the meal; the consumer might enjoy the period of not knowing how the meal will taste.

Not terribly new or controversial, I would hazard to say. But it does raise questions in light of the new attempt to model the fermentation process in wine in order to achieve a greater uniformity in quality (flavor, in the general -- I'm sure wine lovers will have a huge number of variables against which they would prefer to optimize). Is there an interest on the part of the consumer to see that every bottle of wine is evened out to whatever degree science might allow? Obviously, for the seller there is some interest in being able to make broad claims about the wine (as well as avoiding spoilage). I wonder if this might not become a method employed mostly by large-scale wineries that attract casual shoppers, much like chain restaurants.

Partially related side note: For a successful restaurant, is there an optimal number of locations to open? Highly successful downtown restaurants often open suburban locations, to much success and little loss in reputation. But open scores of them, and suddenly the place is a "chain", with all the baggage that brings (for some consumers more than others, obviously).

Have I Mentioned I Don't Like Putnam?

Really, I don't. One of the silliest non-fiction books I've read in years simply must be Bowling Alone. Oceans of data are marshalled and then misused to claim that people are opting out of community involvement.

Maybe, just maybe, people don't like to bowl anymore because there are ever more numerous ways to be engaged with others. But never mind that! People are going on fewer picnics! Don't you understand how dangerous this is? Nevermind that kids are signed up for a far wider range of extra-curricular activities nowadays. Karate, chess camp, soccer, little league...none of that is important when the rolls of the Boy Scouts aren't increasing as fast as they once were.

Feh. I can only keep that up for so long.

Add to this argument, however, this new paper, "The Strength of Internet Ties." (Via the Complexity and Social Networks Blog.)

Disputing concerns that heavy use of the internet might diminish people’s social relations, the report shows that the internet fits seamlessly with Americans’ in-person and phone encounters. With the help of the internet, people are able to maintain active contact with sizable social networks, even though many of the people in those networks do not live close to them. The report highlights how email supplements, rather than replaces, the communication people have with others in their network.

Meanwhile, the reception for Better Together was appropriately lukewarm. Perhaps that was because it's an anecdote-drivin little work that still seems to miss the point. It mentions Craigslist, but focuses on things like town art shows and interpretive dance.

Hmmmm. Ever wonder about those noisy little objects all the students seem to be carrying around? Ever wonder why people have to demand that they be shut off or put on silent? Here's a suggestion: about taking a look at the size and breadth of the cell phone market to get even a small insight on just how much people contact each other.

Wordprocessing for Academics, Circa 1979

Writing in the Bulletin of the History of Economics Society Volume 1, Issue 1 (Winter 1979), David Levy noted in "Computerized Text Processing for the Historian of Economic Thought", that the typing technology of the day worked fine for business applications, but that academics needed to become familiar with the really good programs used to create computer documentation. You know, the ones that contained the latest technology:

I'm probably the last generation in the U.S. to have used an old-fashioned manual typewriter for typing up reports; I did so until we purchased word processing software and (what turned out to be an incredibly durable) Epson dot-matrix printer for our Commodore 64 some time in the mid to late1980's.

A Timeline of Failure

Perhaps this is a stretch, but stories like this make me think of the general problems with central planning.

History's Worst Software Bugs

With that recall, the Prius joined the ranks of the buggy computer -- a club that began in 1945 when engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark II system.1The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."

Waxing philosophical for a moment: writing code isn't easy. Writing flawless code is just about impossible. And that's when you pretty much know how everything is supposed to function, or it functions in a very limited set of ways. Now imagine trying to design systems that include something as uncertain -- and ingenious in finding ways around the system -- as people.

Why, then, do people not entirely expect centrally-planned programs to be flawed in direct relationship with their complexity? And seeing this, why would anyone believe that the answer is to more fully centralize the entire system for providing health care?

Google Makes Analytics Free

Google has announced the launch of Google Analytics, a newly-free visitor tracking system to better understand the way people interact with a website.

Looks like a decent system, especially since it's linked to the Google AdWords system. This being Google, though, if you use their tracker you have to expect that they are going to be watching you as much as you're watching you. Though, such privacy concerns did little or nothing to slow the interest in Gmail.

Online Worlds: Counterfeiting, Eminent Domain, and More

Over the weekend the Financial Times ran a piececovering an event that occured in the popular online game Everquest II.

In short: a player in Everyquest II found a way (allegedly, anyway) to sell an item, yet retain it at the same time, effectively duplicating the item. Since it's possible to sell popular virtual items for real money, this would allow the player to reap real cash for a virtual "glitch". Mildly amusing, to a certain extent.

Of greater interest to me, however, are the questions this issue raises for virtual worlds. Are online goods the sole property of the company that provided them, or does some consideration have to be given to the creative process that goes into making unique expressions with those tools? (A piece of art isn't the province of the maker of the canvas, the paints, or the brushes, despite it not having been possible to make the art specifically as it exists without those things.) Are these things covered by intellectual or traditional property rights? (Knowledge is, to some extent, non-excludable. But after selling a character or item for real cash, it's no longer usable by anyone else.)

Or, how about issues of eminent domain? What effect would it have on the level of play (and thus revenue for the company) if Sony Online Entertainment regularly employed this tactic:

"We have the right to take [gold] away if necessary," [Chris Kramer of Sony Online] says. "We allow people to come in and play in the world but they don't own the world. Our games are entertainment; we provide an entertainment service to our subscribers."

The online market Sony has devised could easily be read as an outgrowth of the company realizing that the employment of tactics similar to the declaration of eminent domain would seriously dampen involvement. Is it unreasonable to link game playing to economic activity in areas where the government regularly seizes property?

Today, Mountain View. Tomorrow...?

Looks like our Google overloards are "unwiring" their base camp in Mountain View, CA.

Unlike my distaste for municipal wifi, this I welcome openly. Also, I've recently been travelling more regularly out to Sunnyvale, CA; I should be near enough to take advantage of the service.

This, however, I find to be entirely laughable:

"Google has no plans at this time to expand our Wi-Fi efforts beyond the Bay Area," [Chris Sacca of Google's new business development unit] said.

Riiiight. The line for the Brooklyn Bridge sales start over here to my left....

The Next Real Estate Bubble

The guy who paid £13,700 (real money) for a virtual island is apparently doing quite well as a real-estate investor. So well, in fact, that he's already made his money back. And he's not the only one looking to set up a regular cash flow from land:

Last month, another of Entropia's virtual properties - a virtual space station - sold at auction for £57,000.

...

While the real housing market may be somewhat static, the one in the virtual world is booming, said the space station auction winner, gamer Jon Jacobs, AKA Neverdie.

He said the virtual real estate market was "on fire" as gamers increasingly realised that virtual worlds could start to compete with real worlds at an economic level.

Well, I don't know about that last statement. After all, online real estate doesn't face the constratint problems offline real estate does. Scarcity and distance from desireable neighborhood properties, namely. In fact, I don't even think it's the real estate thing that's of real importance here. Instead, what the players have done who buy the islands and space stations is to get around a variation of a problem mentioned by the folks at Terra Nova.

The lack of a strong service economy in the online world is in part due to the lack of player-based contract enforcement. (Hassling other players online when not in specific "player-vs.-player" areas is known as "griefing", and is usually an offense that can get you suspended by the game operators.) However, the ability for individuals to get mutual gain is often enforcement enough (weak thought it might be), and it appears that the real strength of the real-estate purchases is not that the "land" has some instrinsic value derived from scarcity, but rather its ability to facilitate player-to-player service transactions such as hunting and mining rights.

Social Nets in Virtual Worlds

Recent work issues have kept me a bit slow on the posting. The folks over at Catallarchy caught something before I did.

Life With Alacrity posts on mapping social networks that arise in virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Ultima Online. The post is a follow-on to a previous post about the issue of Dunbar's Number. For the source of the graphs presented at LWA, check out PlayOn.

According to the research, it looks as though guilds (read: online social groups) grow in cohesion until they number around 50 players. At that point cohesion tends to fall, indicating that it may simply be hard for those who are at the top of the guild to build and keep group interest when there are more than 50 players. I'd also hazard a guess that, in joining a group of that size, an individual may see less benefit in participating actively given that so many others are already present (that is, the marginal benefit to belonging is low compared to the cost of contributing to the group in whatever way). Perhaps interesting research on public choice theory is soon to come?

The Revolution Will Be Digitized

So, this isn't exactly what I was thinking about before, but it is interesting. Turns out a former revolutionary from Serbia is building a video game that will help train people in non-violent methods for political revolution.

"You have to worry about your organization," he continued. "Do you set up a hierarchal organization, or a cell-based one? Who is the best figurehead for the media? What kind of training do people need? And if you march on the capital without proper controls, things may turn violent, which will harm your cause. These are the things people can learn."

"You can have a 'what if' approach," Marovic said. "Play the same game several times, but try different things every time. You can't do that with books. This interaction makes a player spend more time with a game than with a movie. Weeks, instead of hours."

I wonder if you get to set things like tax rates and the opportunity cost of social unrest? This seems like a compelling first step. The skeptic in me, however, can't refrain from mentioning that the entire game is being built by one "side". First-hand experience gives them insight into the actual life of the oppressed, but I tend to think that the simulation would be a lot more useful if the other side of the equation (the ruling elite) were in fact played by actual people looking to keep hold of their power.

And if it comes to XBox Live, I'm immediately putting KD4r0nAc3m0glu on my friends list.

Text 70932 to vote for...

The Swiss will soon be voting via SMS messages from their cell phones. The Swiss style of democracy involves a great deal more voting events than the US counter-part, so it seems natural that they would be among the pioneers for making voting easier for the masses.

Of course, my concerns about the fallibility of electronic voting still apply. The ease of hacking cell-phones has been proven in graphic detail. See: Paris Hilton, once again gaining infamy by being incredibly comfortable with recording devices. Indeed, the article linked to highlights a major problem: the "security" of computer networks isn't always the weakest point in the chain, so efforts to create bleeding-edge security algorithms may be largely pointless.

Plus, this technology still doesn't appear to have a paper trail. Which may not create too much worry in the Swiss cantons when the votes may be re-done with little effort and little loss of voters from frustration, but could be catastrophic in something like a presidential election. Since phones don't have printers on them (yet?), a mailing with a statement of who you voted for (a correctable record, in effect) might solve some issues.

Most importantly, though, is figuring out when "text" became a verb. In my class last night my frustrated professor requested that a fellow student "text your friends when I'm done talking; the clicking is maddening." Didn't he realize that he might have been disenfranchising the woman?

MSFT: Free Software For Africa; Or Not

I'm not sure what the deal is with Microsoft and Africa. In this article, technology centers throughout South Africa could get free copies of Windows right from Microsoft (government-backed centers, notably). But over here we see that the GM for Microsoft Nigeria is belittling the idea that free software is of any value.

"It's easy to focus on cost and say how much is a product, but at the end of the day it's the total impact that's important. You can give people free software or computers, but they won't have the expertise to use it," he said. "Microsoft is not a helicopter dropping relief materials; we're there in the field."

Anyone who needed to get a job out of undergrad will understand the flaw in that reasoning: if people only hire experienced workers, how do unexperienced people get experience in the first place. Of course, if you train people on a limited set of tools in an operating environment that all but demands future use of single-company products, you effectively guarantee yourself future customers.

Wharton Discovers Virtual Worlds

Famed biz school Wharton has a great article about the structure and economies of virtual worlds. Among those quoted about it are Dan Hunter, a legal studies scholar at Wharton and a contributor to what is quickly becoming one of my must-read blogs, Terra Nova.

Some tidbits:

A large unresolved question about virtual worlds is whether mining and trading digital assets can be defined as real-world work. For instance, should the U.S. government track employment in these worlds? Hunter and Whitehouse both suggest that life in the virtual world is indeed work. After all, work is merely creating something tangible that is valued by others. "Economics is really just about choosing preferences," notes Hunter. "If I'm willing to spend $20 on a magic breast plate, that's tangible. Increasingly, these worlds are becoming workspaces."

For some highly-skilled players, it could actually be a significant source of income. If a player in Asia can acquire one power an hour by playing a game and then sell it for a profit to another player, he could make a living wage, accounting for exchange rates. Not surprisingly, such farming operations have been set up across the globe to facilitate these transactions. It has become "a cottage industry," says Castronova. "Individuals farm gold (virtual assets) for a company and then take a wage as independent contractors."

And, gee, this seems to sound familiar:

Experts such as Hunter argue that the burgeoning virtual asset market embedded in games like Second Life and World of Warcraft will create economic petri dishes to monitor consumer behavior, currency changes and productivity.

[...]

Worlds like Second Life can provide for micro-economic insights on the way people react to changes, adds Ondrejka. Linden Lab has already learned one lesson: Don't tax too much. In 2003, a group of players protested what they viewed as excessive taxation on players who built those properties that added the most value to society. The issue was resolved by introducing permanent structures to the game. Previously, a player's property left when he did, but was still taxed as if the property were there full time. Today, property and businesses can remain in the game -- and potentially generate revenue -- even when a player isn't online in Second Life. "This greatly simplified the system, allowing residents to forward invest," says Ondrejka.

As I mentioned in another of my always enjoyable lunches with T&B's owner, Kevin, a lot of the studies of gaming doesn't quite match my own interest in the subject. This article gets much closer to the heart of what fascinates me. The economies of places like Second Life are interesting, but I'd prefer to just see people evaluate these things as tools. Time and again, in readings on testing economic theory or game theoretic predictions, I was always left with a slightly...unsatisfied feeling reading about the structure of various experiments. At base, they often didn't seem to model the depth of emotional involvement that some people may feel in numerous situations (commons usage, willingness to pay questions, declared valuations on various aspects of life, etc.) . With the extent of involvement people feel for these virutal worlds, I think it might be worthwhile to ask if these things might not be a better test-bed for experimentation.

Oh, and another question: what do you think my chances would be of getting into a good PhD program by admitting I wanted to study, in part, video games? I'm getting visions of rejection letters with "Thanks, but we don't have a stipend large enough for what we believe your munchies-habit must be."

Municipal Wireless Catching On?

The second part in Wired's 4-Part feature on Wireless techfocuses on the growth of city-wide wireless networks.

Unusual for Wired, this article is largely superficial and unenlightening, rehashing the arguments into a bland "wireless for EVERYbody!!!" vs. The Curmudgeons Who Always Say Bad Things sort of debate. The author clearly comes out on the side of those who see muni-wireless as a an unalloyed good, fulfilling the basic rights of people everywhere to be able to surf porn at their local coffee-houses on sleek hip-top portables:

That may be true, but many cities also see municipal Wi-Fi as a larger social program. For them, it's a chance to bridge the elusive "digital divide" -- the gulf between those with access to broadband services and those who either can't afford it or simply can't access it from their impoverished part of town.

Philadelphia's Neff said that the city disqualified many vendors early because they didn't share her social goals. "Some just saw it as building a network and missed the social aspects," she said.

Of course, it might have helped to ask if the digital divide is, indeed, due to a lack of connectivity. The image this raises is one of home-after-home in poor neighborhoods staring blankly at a computer screen, letting life slip by for the want of a faster download speed. It may be anecdotal in scope, but after having been part of the founding of a tech-education program in Chicago, I can assure you that the needs go much deeper than finding a decent hot-spot.

And instead of just quoting the one person saying "the economics are crazy", it might have been of some value for the article to delve into why. Just one quick problem: the usage has to be at damn-near optimal levels for the network built. If the usage is too low, the city wasted money on something that isn't useful. If it's too high, the network is overburdened, and you will either have people not using it and paying twice for service (once through taxes and once on a crontract). Of course, the city could try to keep updating it, but it's still tax money that will have to be funneled into upgrading the network at nearly the same pace that demand for bandwidth grows, lest it get outpaced and abandoned by most users. I'd be willing to put hard money down saying that any government's process for reviewing and approving potential upgrades would be slower than a private company's.

My favorite bit from the article, however, is this:

In September, Federal Trade Commission member Jon Leibowitz endorsed (.pdf) the concept of municipal broadband networks, comparing them to public schools and libraries. [Link in original.]

And, as we all know, the public school system -- especially for poor areas of major cities -- is always a favorable comparison.

Farmers Without Subsidies

In the world of massively-multiplayer online roleplaying games, "farmers" are those people who play the game specifically to make money off the business of trading virtual-world goods for real-world money.

Via Terra Nova comes this article on numerous aspects of the Farming Community. Incentives, property rights, work conditions, effects of economic activity; it's a fairly detailed piece with some fascinating tidbits. You'll have to slog through a bunch of game jargon, but its worth it for an inside-baseball perspective on the effects (both in the virtual world and the real one), of people working obsessively to turn gaming into real cash.

Hey, I had that idea second!

Well, I don't know if I should be glad that I'm not the only one to think video gaming environments could be interesting test beds, or sad that I wasn't a visionary pione...heh. Yeah. I could barely type it with a straight face, let alone read it.

Anyway, from a fascinating Marketplace story, I heard about attempts to train emergency responders with video game technology. A brief mention is also made to "massive multiplayer" environments. The Christian Science Monitor had a similar story a few months ago. The Serious Games Initiative is sponsoring the Games for Change conference, and has some interesting references on its site. (I find the subject fascinating, even though I tend to cringe at things that say they are explicitly working for "social change". Society tends to change pretty well on its own; earnest proponents of further change usually imply that the change happen in ways they prefer, whereas I would prefer the change come up more spontaneously. This page urges us to join to help foster "positive social change". Positive, eh? Perhaps I'm too skeptical, but...)

Of course, the Army has been using simulation technology for years, and have even released games that are little more/less than the tools they use for training. The important differnce, and the one I think is key to this whole issue of MMO environments is that both sides of an interaction are being controlled by a human. That is to say, both the affected and the emergency response team could see online representation of reactions that bear striking resemblance to those we might see in the real world. Or, at least, closer to true than the programmed versions might ever get.

Why not get those training in emergency response help deal with those people who currently experienced a rapidly spreading plague?

UPDATE: Now it's even on NPR! If you didn't get a chance, this is a decent story on the World of Warcraft plague, including a chat with someone who works on modeling infection disease outbreaks.

The Next Reimportation Dilemma

MIT has been working to develop an ultra-cheap laptop that would put computers in the hands of people around the world who are currently very far away from being able to afford such a thing. CNet has some prototype images up. The images hint at the range of features, with the clever notion of a hand-crank for areas lacking in electricity, but also including tablet-like functionality.

Why do I get the feeling that, if these things are anywhere near $100 a piece, as is proposed, there will be a huge demand for them throughout the developed world? I can't be the only student who would have loved a tablet for note-taking with a power supply I can refresh right before class starts. How long after launch would you guess there would be websites offering to sell them near developing-world prices? And how soon thereafter should we expect frothy calls for legislation to either support or ban laptop reimportation?

And 62,000 miles to go before they sleep...

LiftPort Group has hit the 1000 foot mark on their move towards making the Space Elevator a reality.

Of course, this is just a tiny portion of the ultimate heights something like this would need to reach. But still, I'm gripped by the idea of getting in an elevator and hitting the button for "Geosynchronous Orbit". And I thought the ear-popping to the top of the Sears Tower was fun...

Camus, Snitter, Rowf...the Plague Elves?

Plague broke out this week. Originally thought to be well contained, a carrier made it out to the general population and infected someone who survived long enough to spread the disease through the wider community.

Fortunately, it was eventually contained and the plague was wiped out.

Even more fortunate, of course, is the fact that the plague was virtual. While this isn't the first virtual plague to hit massively multi-player games, it's the first time I've heard of the phenomenon getting out of control of those who monitor the games. An example of ingenuity and spontaneous disorder? That is to say, the efforts of numerous distributed individuals out-maneuvered the best planning of the experts who dilligently (intelligently?) designed the system. Waxing hyperbolic, some are making a great deal of the "world" moving beyond the intentions of the designers and calling it a true "world event."

For reactions to the breakout and the eventual attempt to control the situation, read through the forums linked to from the site I mentioned above. There's also some entertaining stuff on the official World of Warcraft forums. Sift through the numerous "in-character" posts and boastful ramblings, and you'll find a good deal of people arguing to keep the plague in the game.

If I seriously want to consider these kind of environments as potentially appropriate for testing and experiments, is this an argument against my position that people take in-game situations seriously enough that experiments might yield results with some level of verisimilitude? I'm not so certain. To be sure, these people aren't terribly worried about real life results from plague infection, but what I think they're ultimately asking for is the opportunity to act and react to ever-increasing levels of realism.

With the threat of true viral outbreaks looming large, what might be learned by watching the pattersn of behavior and interaction among the WoW gamers? The ongoing efforts of the game operators to respond to a situation that quickly ran out of their control? What if the programmers had, instead of rolling restarts of computer servers, tried modeling response teams, distributed to various locations, burdened by finite supplies and personnel?

UPDATE: Here's an article on the plague from IGN. From the end of the article:

[...] when a player's character dies, their gear suffers a 10% reduction in durability, unless they were killed by a player from the opposite faction. This reduction can be repaired, but it costs money, and a reduction to zero renders the item completely unusable until it has been fixed by certain NPCs.

Further complicating the problem is "griefing," a habit of some players in online games to harass others in a way that slows down their characters' progress. So certain individuals will not cooperate with Blizzard's attempts to quarantine certain areas of the world. This is particularly vexing for a game that makes almost every attempt to be the friendliest, most approachable MMO on the market.

There are, at least, some economic consequences to plague exposure beyond the hassle of restarting your game. Additionally, there are those who, as in any troubled situation, exhibit less-than-charitable characteristics.

(Please note that I do not, by any stretch of imagination, wish to suggest any sort of equivalence between this and something like the Katrina floods. Rather, I am fascinated by the extent to which one could model disaster and see potentially realistic results.)

My Own Private Andromeda

The privatization of space research and exploration appears to be continuing apace. Here are a couple notes on recent work in areas often considered solely the domain of government.

1) Space Elevator gets the nod from the FAA.

" The LiftPort Group, the space elevator companies, announced September 9 that it has received a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to use airspace to conduct preliminary tests of its high altitude robotic "lifters."

2) From Wired news, a company is looking to get a Mars community up and running in 20 years.

"All companies set goals, but newly formed 4Frontiers is eyeing some expansive horizons. The company's mission: to open a small human settlement on Mars within 20 years or so.

Sure, it may sound far-fetched. And the company's initial plans are a lot more terrestrial than ethereal, like developing a 25,000-square-foot replica of a Mars settlement here on Earth, then charging tourists admission.

But the people behind the venture are quite serious -- as serious as the $25 million they want to raise from investors."

The actual success or failure of the various projects isn't as important to me as the fact that there seems to be reasonably strong interest within private industry in making a run at space.

NOTE: This entry was edited for content by the author. I have done so in the interest of keeping well clear of conflicting interests between myself, my employer (whom this website in no way represents), and clients. This was done without reference to anyone/anything but my own judgement. If anyone has questions on the previous content, or would like a fuller clarification, feel free to write me at ian@theurlforthissite-dot-com.

Evolutionary Game Theory at Time Zero

Computer and social scientists in Europe are building an entirely virtual world from the group up to examine the development of society and culture. The programs will operate agents (independent of human control) in a massive system that features the development of language, building structures, eating, and mating.

The experiment will see about 1000 agents live together in a simulated world hosted on a network of 50 computers based at the various institutions involved. Each agent will be capable of various simple tasks, like moving around and building simple structures, but will also have the ability to communicate and cooperate with its cohabitants. Though simple interaction, the researchers hope to watch these characters create their very own society from scratch. Every character in the simulated world will need to eat to survive, and will be able to learn from their environment through trial and error - learning, for example, how to cultivate edible plants with water and sunlight. In addition, characters will be able to reproduce by mating with members the opposite sex and their offspring will inherited a random collection of their parents "genetic" traits.

Google Hacks (UPDATED)

I suppose I'm drifting a bit afield from economics, even if the question of information is highly relevant to the topic, but I thought these things might be of enough interest to post. (Kevin may edit this to improve the signal:noise ratio I'm clearly harming. But since Google has long been of interest around these parts...)

Google-Traffic: Combining Google Maps with traffic data from Traffic.com, you can now take a look at the major road conditions and trouble points on your commute home. (If you live in the listed cities, anyway.)

Google Housing: Maps and Craig's List come together to show you the location of the next place you might call home.

NYC and Chi-Town Hacks: See where the stops on the subway or the El are situated on Google Maps.

UPDATE: Here's another one for the Chicago audience. Chicagocrime.org offers an interactive Google Map paired with crime data.

hat's that smell? Did someone leave the modem on?

Here's an interesting new technological twist:

SAN DIEGO, CA-May 3, 2005 – Nethercomm Corporation, the leading innovator of subterranean broadband communications, announces the development of Broadband-in-Gas (BiG) Technology. This technology is designed to effectively multiply the current available bandwidth of cable television and all other broadband systems with data capacities exceeding ten gigabits. Broadband-in-Gas delivers unmatched levels of connectivity by making use of Ultra Wideband technology to wirelessly broadcast information in a way that is both safe and reliable by using the private spectrum isolated within natural gas pipelines.

In the case of both natural gas and broadband internet access (NB: PDF), usage increases with household income. If the infrastructure works like they claim it does, it certainly seems like they'll have a natural customer base naturally inclined towards adopting the service. The more interesting question, to me, is whether an effective bundling of the two by gas companies might help increase the usage of natural gas.

A possible 10+ gigabits of transfer capacity? Forget my DVR, I'd just watch everything on my computer.

Transaction Costs By Any Other Name...

non-scientific, though interesting in it's own right, survey by Computer Economics purports to show that the lower costs of Open Source Software are not, in fact, the biggest perceived advantages.

The survey indicates that IT decision makers value “reduced dependence on software vendors” as the most important advantage of open source. This indicates that software buyers must feel some level of dependence on proprietary software vendors, from which they desire freedom. Such dependence includes reliance on the vendor for maintenance and support and the necessity for the buyer to accept version upgrades that the buyer may not need or want.

This might be overgeneralizing the issue, to some extent, but I would tend to include this in with the "lower cost" advantage. The savings from not waiting around for support, for not having to fight with the sales reps about how much maintenance was included under the original sales contract, being limited to inferior choices among other software because of interoperability issues...the avoidance of large costs due to potential hold-up problems, generally, can be significant. That the respondents didn't identify them as "costs" doesn't matter if, in fact, the benefit of avoidance is being able to reinvest time and energy into things more productive for the company. Rightly or wrongly, open source is seens as facing this problem far less than vendor-specific products. On the other hand, one must hope that the open source community decides to become interested in solving a particular software need that your company may have. With no profit to respond to, it could well be that the best programmers are spending their days addressing what they believe is a desperate need for a really good OS X emulator.

Dayton goes WiFi

The city of Dayton, Ohio, now has a wifi "hot spot" all over downtown:

You can now surf the Internet for free in Downtown Dayton.

Your wireless computer, P.D.A., or cell phone can now surf the Internet for free if it's Wi-Fi equipped.

The free service is available within one square mile around downtown.

The city will pay about $5,000 a year for it, but most of the cost is paid for by the advertisers.

Well, I suppose we'll get to see what works and what doesn't. My first guess is that the $5K a year the city "pays" now will skyrocket before long. Either the idea will grab so many people the system can't handle the load (imagine all those businesses deciding the skip paying for private broadband access for a couple of years, then trying to run webcasts through the same line every one at every fast food joint is trying to use to download the new Nelly single) and the city will be on the hook to expand it even more, or, and I think more likely, it will experience the same result as wifi spots in other downtown locals that see highly variable traffic that doesn't exhibit much of a demand, meaning that the advertisers may not realize a benefit for what they've paid out. In fact, I don't see the argument that swayed these "advertisers". In the case of heavy demand beyond just the local kids surfing blogs and Friendset, I'm not sure how patient people would be with a heavy does of advertising. Personally, I'd pay to get a clean line and avoid having even more ads pouring at me. If the demand isn't heavy, who's going to see the advertising?

From the city's plan, it looks as though the advertising comes in the form of branded pages (such as log-on, and possibly frames?). Who pays attention to those, I'm not sure. And I'd predict a hack to be out in about 24 hours. The big plus I do see for the advertisers, however, is that the general audience is so oblivious to protecting computers from viruses and intrusion, that it won't dawn on people that without pricey software (or expert users versed in good open source stuff) this is the electronic version of licking the floor in a public restroom.

Robot Game Theory

Did you ever play with Legos?

Me, I spent my time trying to find all the little tiny Lego pieces that I had lost in the carpet before my Dad stepped on one is his bare feet and ended up tossing all of them into the trash.

This guy decides to model evolution.

A little modification, and it seems like you could have your own kitchen-floor version of Hawk-and-Dove. At the very least, it's an ingenious use of everyday items to expore a complex concept. On a larger scale, and with more programming savvy, I would imagine it could be possible to test various strains of mutations, resistance, stability of equilibria, etc.

evolution

when two robots reproduce, each recieves a copy of the other’s genetic code. the outcome for each possible action for each life routine is a random choice between the two parent codes. this alone would result in some pretty booring children, given that both parents are initialized with the same code, so i added a roughly 1 percent chance that a mutation will occur for each action that is copied.

the idea is that a robot which is better capable of maneuvering around without getting stuck will have a better chance of finding another robot and procreating.

If Jason Striegel, the author of the hack, were to post his code, I just might be induced to spend a couple hundred bucks making a ton of these one weekend. Yes, it does sound fun. And yes, I do understand that I have a problem.

Open Networks

I really should thank one of my neighbors for leaving their wireless network open for me to hop on. My own internet access went from poor before a technician "fixed" it the other day to very bad this morning to nonexistent this afternoon. I could be irritated that the problem wasn't fixed after the first visit, but the prompt service from Comcast has helped keep me calm.

Ian has posted his thoughts on Muni wifi. Carrying on some of his thoughts as I freeload on my neighbors, I am somewhat impressed by Comcast's prompt service in addressing the problem even though it's not fixed. Why some people think that government is best at delivering services is beyond me. If I was on a government network, it's not a wild guess that it would not be the next day that a technician is sent to my apartment to address the matter. After all, if in countries with socialized medicine the waiting lists lasts more months, how long long would it take to get a technician to fix my cable modem?

As Ian points out, Muni wireless does nothing to enhance competition and would mostly likely reduce broadband offerings. It's hard to compete with free, although AOL seemed to against the likes of NetZero. Right now, I'm happy somebody left their wireless network open. Thankfully, there is another provider besides Comcast in the area.

Edit: I forgot to say that while I should thank my neighbors for the free bandwith, it may cause them to close it down. It's better to have a backup,

T.V. Downloads

In a previous post I refered to an Inquirer article concerning why it was a smart move to have a worldwide release date for video games. The gist was that by staggering release times, an incentive is created for people to pirate the desired material, in that case it Half-Life 2 avoided creating one. A story on the BBC website makes the same point about T.V. shows and how Great Britain has become the leading downloader:

New episodes of 24, Desperate Housewives and Six Feet Under, appear on the web hours after they are shown in the US, said a report.

Web tracking company Envisional said 18% of downloaders were from within the UK and that downloads of TV programmes had increased by 150% in the last year.

About 70% were using file-sharing program BitTorrent, the firm said.

"It's now as easy to download a pirate TV show as it is to programme a VCR," said Ben Coppin from Envisional.

A typical episode of 24 was downloaded by about 100,000 people globally, said the report, and an estimated 20,000 of those were from within the UK.

...

According to Jupiter Research 40% of homes with broadband say it helps them pick and choose the programmes they want to see or that friends have recommended.

More Gmail Invites

Gmail has just given me 50 invites. If anyone is still left without Gmail leave a comment with your e-mail address.

Public Goods or Not, Lighthouses Saying Auf Wiedersehen

Looks like the superiority of GPS systems is resulting a bit of creative destruction along the German coast:

The popularity of the satellite-based global positioning system has led to the closure of lighthouses along the German coast. Many more may soon be extinguished. But critics question whether the new system is reliable and safe enough to warrant the closure of these historical beacons of safety.

One of the traditional pedagogical tools for telling econ students about public goods is to use the example of a lighthouse. As a fast example, it seems like a good one: you can't exclude one ship from seeing it while allowing others, and the use by one ship of a lighthouse as guidepost doesn't restrict others ships from using it. Of course, when anything seems too "just-so", there's usually something you're not being told. Read down through this description of public goods for some of the real story behind lighthouses.

The side opposing the shuttering of the lighthouses makes, in my opinion, an bad argument:

Bauermeister fears hobby captains are losing more and more of their skills as a result of modern technologies. If their GPS systems were to malfunction, they could face serious danger. "The sense of orientation is one that must be constantly trained," he cautions. "Those who now only rely on GPS are losing this important ability, which can save lives in dangerous situations."

Even civil engineer Eusterbarkey concedes there will be "disadvantages" for small ship operators if the lighthouses close. Though the 15 lighthouses on the North Sea cost German taxpayers about €400,000 a year to operate, money alone should not be a reason for shutting them down. "The overriding principle has to be safety on the high seas," he says.

Individuals that decide to ply the Germans seas without proper training and without the appropriate tools are choosing to take risks. The public receives no benefit from it, and isn't really in danger of being hurt the way drunk drivers end up hurting others. The larger companies, on the other hand, have invested time and money into preparing for the eventuality of a GPS failure. Seems to me that Germans (and others) are being taxed to protect someone's sense of nostalgia.

iPod Shuffle Not Random Enough?

Via Craig Newmark I read this article on MSNBC.

The crux of the piece seems to be one writer's attemt to figure out if there's something odd going on behind the function of his iPod Shuffles randomization process. It seems he's not the only one who's questioning the results of randomness.

There is an unintended consequence of the allure of Shuffle: it is causing iPod users to question whether their devices ''prefer'' certain types of music.

I'll second Craig's comment that people seem not to understand randomness. While the MSNBC writer should personally be ashamed that, given a chance to speak with Steve Jobs he actually brought up the possibility that the Shuffle function wasn't truly random since it seemed to hit some songs more than others, he does by the end of the article find someone to explain that true randomness doesn't mean a complete lack of groupings or "odd" patterns. Even the NYT piece touches on it briefly.which is too bad, really, since the iPod and iPod Shuffle could be great hooks to actually inform people about randomization and randomized processes.

The same issue arose in the show Numb3rs. (Newmark the Younger was positive on the show; I found it to be tedious in plotting and overly mystical about the actualy numbers, which seemed counter to the point of the show.) The "math genius" brother asked people to scatter themselves "randomly" around a room. When their spacing proved relatively even through the space, the ah-ha! moment came when he mentioned that true randomness exhibits groupings by sheer chance. Thus, clearly, the pattern of murders on map could be said to be "too perfect" in its attempt at randomness. Not well written, I think, but at least someone had the nerve to try bringing the issue up in prime-time.

For more information I would recommend the book Fooled by Randomness. Well written and free from the level of technical detail that a statistics text might have.

New Google Tool

Busy at work, so it's back to quick hits for posts.

Google's launched another search engine to beta: Google Suggest.

As you type, it tries to guess what you might be trying to look for based on the popularity of other searches starting with similar letters. Of course, type in the wrong (or right, depending on your view) first couple of letters, and the suggestions might be an insight into the minds of other people that you wish you didn't get.

In other Google news, Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan, and Oxford are going to scan in books to make their contents searchable on the 'net.

Interesting Technology

Tim Oren had a link to an article about some biometric technology which is being rolled out in Japan. The article doesn't mention the level of security the technology offers although I did find an article which mentions it being lower than iris scanning. Ultimately, what will drive the adoption of such technologies isn't if they are foolproof, but the benefits they bring. Fraud is here to stay no matter what technology is put into place and people will find a way around it.

Of course, technology has always had an oppressing effect on the underclass. Gone are the days when you could mug somebody and know they'll have cash on hand. There is an odd chance that the victim hasn't written their code on the card after all. Of course, this will only enhance the role education plays in crime. Earnings growth of criminals with college degrees will outstrip those of high school drop outs. Thus, the little guy will get crushed by corporate America once again and become their slaves. Corporate America, organize crime, what's the difference?

I will mention one other thing, such technology has benefits outside of security. For instance, it was damn unpleasant being locked out of my mom's house for six hours over Thanksgiving weekend when I left her house without a key. There was a keypad to get into the garage, but I forgot the code. It would be problematic to forget taking my eyes with me when leaving the house. If iris scanning becomes available for home security, I'm buying one.