This is probably the biggest change that’s affected the gaming business over the last few years. It’s not just that we have digital distribution to our customers. It’s that we have this incredible two-way connection that we’ve never had before with our customers. We’ve gone from a situation where we dream up a game, we spend three years making it, we [...]]]> Back in October, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell explained the economics of video games as his company sees it. The Geekwire article is worth the read. For now, I’ll point out that he admits “We don’t understand what’s going on” and uses the language of co-creation of value, which I happen to believe is the current future as it were, to describe what the company is doing:

This is probably the biggest change that’s affected the gaming business over the last few years. It’s not just that we have digital distribution to our customers. It’s that we have this incredible two-way connection that we’ve never had before with our customers.
We’ve gone from a situation where we dream up a game, we spend three years making it, we put it in a box, we put it out in stores, we hope it sells, to a situation that’s incredibly more fluid and dynamic, where we’re constantly modifying the game with the participation of the customers themselves

The comments on piracy comport with insights from other industries:

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. For example, Russia. You say, oh, we’re going to enter Russia, people say, you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia. Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market. … the people who are telling you that Russians pirate everything are the people who wait six months to localize their product into Russia. … So that, as far as we’re concerned, is asked and answered. It doesn’t take much in terms of providing a better service to make pirates a non-issue.

The information on pricing is really cool. “[W]e varied the price of one of our products. We have Steam so we can watch user behavior in real time. That gives us a useful tool for making experiments which you can’t really do through a lot of other distribution mechanisms. What we saw was that pricing was perfectly elastic. In other words, our gross revenue would remain constant. We thought, hooray, we understand this really well. There’s no way to use price to increase or decrease the size of your business.”

Yet he goes on to describe how sales such as a 75% price reduction lead to a “gross revenue increased by a factor of 40.” They tested against a product they did not own and saw similar results. Then they tested free. It turns out free to play and and free work differently. His thought is that the user base matters because they value the products differently including “what the statement that something is free to play implies about the future value of the experience that they’re going to have.”

Furthermore, conversion rates shift too. Free to play often “see[s] about a 2 to 3 percent conversion rate of the people in their audience who actually buy something, and then with Team Fortress 2, which looks more like Arkham Asylum in terms of the user profile and the content, we see about a 20 to 30 percent conversion rate of people who are playing those games who buy something.”

What do all these tests mean? As Newell said, it’s unclear. That is why I could see some rather cool studies being done for this emerging area.

Untold tons of carbon were being pumped into the air, with people losing billions of dollars in energy costs, all because there was no easy, automatic way to control the temperature. But what if you could apply all the skills and brilliance of Silicon Valley to produce a thermostat that was smart, thrifty and so delightful that saving energy was as much fun as shuffling an iTunes playlist?

So far, you may be thinking that programmable thermostats are old [...]]]> As Deano and others might say Baby, It’s Cold Outside. And, heating costs are no joke. Neither is about $250 for a thermostat. Nonetheless, data and networks are changing the way we manage heating. As Wired reports, Tony Faddell, founder of Nest Labs makes this compelling point:

Untold tons of carbon were being pumped into the air, with people losing billions of dollars in energy costs, all because there was no easy, automatic way to control the temperature. But what if you could apply all the skills and brilliance of Silicon Valley to produce a thermostat that was smart, thrifty and so delightful that saving energy was as much fun as shuffling an iTunes playlist?

So far, you may be thinking that programmable thermostats are old hat. They are and may not have worked as well as hoped given that the Times reports “Two years ago, the federal government eliminated the entire programmable thermostat category from its Energy Star program.” Yet, there is something different here. Improved, networked climate control is not your father’s Oldsmobile. It sounds crazy, but the pre-orders sold out and demand is high. Others are in the game as well. Some require more tech savvy to install. Regardless the idea is that data and networks will allow one to manage energy costs well.

The Nest seems to be the leader for easy use and install. The Times explains that the design is great but then the iPod designer would have to do that, right? The best part for me is that the Nest uses Wi-Fi which means software updates, programming from the Web or an App, and it learns.

Learns? Yes, learns. The system tells users how much time it will take to raise a house’s temperature (which stops the habit of cranking heat to get to a lower temperature), notes manual adjustments for home, midday, away, etc. to start to offer an automatic cycle attuned to habits. Motion sensors help set basic overrides for heating and cooling to take care times when no one is home. In a nod to behaviorial economics and some things that I think Ryan Calo has been considering, the Times explains that “Nest says that turning down your thermostat by even a single degree can save you 5 percent in energy. To that end, it offers a little motivational logo: a green leaf. It glows brighter as you turn the ring beyond your standard comfort zone. As a positive-reinforcement technique, it’s a lot more effective than an exhortation from Jimmy Carter to put on a sweater.”

I always feel a little sad when reminded of President Carter’s attempt to address the energy crisis of the 1970s. It seems to flow from a view of WWII America when people buckled down for the greater good, but that had perhaps faded years before his plea. Still, if we have learned that other approaches can aid better judgment and action, maybe we will turn those thermostats to 68 and wear that sweater as the then President asked us to do.

It requires a full read, and I recommend reading it pretty much start to finish. That being said, the sections break out in rather nice ways. For example, the markets and information section offers a great way to understand things that [...]]]> Some months ago I mentioned a textbook called Networks, Crowds, and Markets to Susan Crawford (hat tip for the book recommendation: Nicklas Lundblad). After I told her how the text helps explain the basics about networks, game theory, and more, she said that I had to tell people about the book. So now I am. It is by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg who are both at Cornell. The pre-publication site has the draft text in pdf and the official pub is at Cambridge.

It requires a full read, and I recommend reading it pretty much start to finish. That being said, the sections break out in rather nice ways. For example, the markets and information section offers a great way to understand things that are often thrown around in law and policy circles. The most obvious example is the Wisdom of the Crowds idea. It turns out that only certain types of crowds are “wise.” As the authors point out: “The basic argument there, drawing on a long history of intuition about markets, is that the aggregate behavior of many people, each with limited information, can produce very accurate beliefs.” They explain:

Our results on state prices illustrate some of the technical basis for this intuition. In particular, we found that the crowd at the racetrack determines the odds, or the state prices, and these odds are an average of the opinions in the crowd. If the opinions in the crowd about the probability of horse A winning are independently drawn from a distribution whose mean is equal to the true probability of horse A winning, and if wealth shares are equal, then the state prices actually do converge to the true probabilities as the size of the crowd grows. This occurs because the state prices are actually the average belief in the crowd, and this average converges to the truth with the size of the crowd.

But these claims have two important qualifications embedded in them, both of which are important for understanding the limitations of the wisdom of crowds. First, it is important that the opinions are independent. … Second, it is important that all beliefs are equally weighted.

My read of the above is that those who invoke crowds as being wise should stop and consider whether the judgments are independently made. Online independent judgments are probably not as common as many think. In other words, crowds are not necessarily wise. To be honest, I am not sure I have digested the equally weighted insight. But I defer to the authors about that one.

Maybe it is the time of year when food feasts like Thanksgiving and the season of holiday giving make me think about simple, direct need and especially hunger. Whatever the reason, today that fundamental issue is upon [...]]]> Recent readings and the time of year lead me to two lessons. First, for those of us who can, let’s give to those in need. Second, let’s use science, data, and reason to guide policy. Extreme views for or against modes of farming and issues of the environment lead to mistrust, failures, and, in this case, starvation. Starvation should not be an issue on the table for the 21st century. Questions of efficacy and safety can be addressed. The information is here. The time to use it is now.

Maybe it is the time of year when food feasts like Thanksgiving and the season of holiday giving make me think about simple, direct need and especially hunger. Whatever the reason, today that fundamental issue is upon us more than ever. The Times reports “Millions of American schoolchildren are receiving free or low-cost meals for the first time as their parents, many once solidly middle class, have lost jobs or homes during the economic crisis, qualifying their families for the decades-old safety-net program.” The numbers are stark: “The number of students receiving subsidized lunches rose to 21 million last school year from 18 million in 2006-7, a 17 percent increase, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from the Department of Agriculture, which administers the meals program. Eleven states, including Florida, Nevada, New Jersey and Tennessee, had four-year increases of 25 percent or more, huge shifts in a vast program long characterized by incremental growth.” More than 3 years ago I wrote about the problems of a stigmatized school lunch program. I don’t know whether that system has evolved, but “apparently many of these formerly middle-income parents have pleaded with school officials to keep their enrollment a secret.” Society’s tendency to look down on the less fortunate is absurd. I am not sure what can be done about that. But perhaps we can reconnect with efforts to provide food across the world. The hard part could be the tensions between industrial farming and the organic movement. Yet, good science and data could show us a way out.

A Long Now Foundation seminar by Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak Organically Grown and Genetically Engineered: The Food of the Future shows that rather than combat, we can sue data and reflection to marry these efforts. Sustainable food should: Provide abundant safe and nutritious food…. Reduce environmentally harmful inputs…. Reduce energy use and greenhouse gases…. Foster soil fertility…. Enhance crop genetic diversity…. Maintain the economic viability of farming communities…. Protect biodiversity…. and improve the lives of the poor and malnourished. (He pointed out that 24,000 a day die of malnutrition worldwide, and about 1 billion are undernourished.)

That is a tall order. As the speakers noted organic farming works well and mitigates the problems of pesticides, (Data point: “Every year in the world 300,000 deaths are caused by the pesticides of conventional agriculture, along with 3 million cases of harm.”). But organic techniques can’t address all the diseases and pests out there and “Its yield ranges from 45% to 97% of conventional ag yield. It is often too expensive for low-income customers. At present it is a niche player in US agriculture, representing only 3.5%, with a slow growth rate suggesting it will always be a niche player.” Genetic engineered plants (often not allowed under current regulation) can fill the gap.

According to the report of Dr. Ronald’s part of the talk, “One billion acres have been planted so far with GE crops, with no adverse health effects, and numerous studies have showed that GE crops pose no greater risk of environmental damage than conventional crops.” Examples include, cotton, papayas, and rice. “About 25% of all pesticide use in the world is used to defeat the cotton bollworm. Bt cotton is engineered to express in the plant the same caterpillar-killing toxin as the common soil bacteria used by organic farmers, Bacillus thuringiensis. Bt cotton growers use half the pesticides of conventional growers. With Bt cotton in China, cases of pesticide poisoning went down by 75%. India’s cotton yield increased by 80%. Other pest management techniques are needed but genetics can do much work. Hawaiian papaya was going extinct from ringspot virus, but a GE solution inoculated the fruit and the saved the industry. As I have written, basic food supply is a huge problem and rice is a key example of that. Dr. Ronald’s work on rice is impressive. The data: “Half the world depends on rice. In flood-prone areas like Bangladesh, 4 million tons of rice a year are lost to flooding—enough to feed 30 million people.” Her work developed “a flood-tolerant rice (it can be totally submerged for two weeks) called Sub1. At field trials in Asia farmers are getting three to five times higher yield over conventional rice.”

Seems compelling to me.

The story starts in the usual eco-group takes on industry way with the NC buying “out area fishing boats and licenses in a fairly extreme deal — forged with the local fishing industry — to protect millions of acres of fish habitat.” But the NC put the fleet back to work using a commons model.

Bringing information technology and better data collection to such an old-world industry is part of [...]]]> Imagine you are a fisherman and haul in a catch with fish that are protected and that would get you in trouble. Quick! Hide it! Deny it! etc., right? Nope. The Times reports that a partnership among fishermen and the Nature Conservancy meant that this fisherman reported the catch so the overall area could thrive.

The story starts in the usual eco-group takes on industry way with the NC buying “out area fishing boats and licenses in a fairly extreme deal — forged with the local fishing industry — to protect millions of acres of fish habitat.” But the NC put the fleet back to work using a commons model.

Bringing information technology and better data collection to such an old-world industry is part of the plan. So is working with the fishermen it licenses to control overfishing by expanding closed areas and converting trawlers — boats that drag weighted nets across the ocean floor — to engage in more gentle and less ecologically damaging techniques like using traps, hooks and line, and seine netting.

The conservancy’s model is designed to take advantage of radical new changes in government regulation that allow fishermen in the region both more control and more responsibility for their operating choices. The new rules have led to better conservation practices across all fleets, government monitors say.

The challenges here were that “There wasn’t scientific information at that level that could match the fisherman knowledge.” Fisherman did not trust the NC, but when the NC bought some of the boats or permits from those who wanted to leave the industry, “The fishermen soon divulged which nurseries and rock formations needed to be protected and which areas where mature fish congregated should be left open. What resulted was a proposal that included large areas of closings — nearly 4 million acres — that most fishermen thought was fair. It was adopted easily by the fishery council in 2006.”

Now let’s look at the data magic. The NC uses a system called eCatch. According to the Times, fisherman were not sure about this reporting requirement “But fishermen have come to believe that the data will show patterns — for example, high catch rates of certain species after full moons along the edge of the shallow water shelf in July — that will help them all predict the danger zones. Independent fisherman have joined the risk pool and eCatch system because they see benefits. By handing out free iPads, the conservancy made the posting of real-time results almost effortless.”

And, it seems other areas are emulating this approach. “In Massachusetts, scallop fishermen, with the help of the University of Massachusetts, have developed a similar reporting program to avoid pulling in endangered yellowtail flounder.” Could lobster fishermen be far off from this method? Afterall at least with other seafood efforts the new method “yields profits and hardly any bycatch” (the term for catching sensitive species which can lead to market problems). And in what looks like another aspect of this commons comedy, in one case a family that sold its permit and leases it back at fair market value as long as the method “continues to use Scottish seining, which is far gentler to the ocean bottom than trawling is.”

Rather than the fight between nature groups and industry the fisherman offered a different picture: “The Nature Conservancy had identified that the small family boats were sustainable, and they wanted to help,” Mr. Fitz said. “We recognized that we needed help negotiating this increasingly confusing path into the future.”

He noted that on the one hand, the FBI had shut down a DNS changer fueled operation that “redirect[ed] infected computers to rogue websites.” As he explained, “The sheer scale of this DNSChanger scam is likely to increase the momentum for technology that makes it harder to subvert DNS for [...]]]> Many IP profs watch legislation, and we write about the way proposed laws are good or bad or wise or imprudent. I think the way the IP and online space are going will require more on the technology side. For example, the recent debates on the PROTECT IP Bill and SOPA had some interesting comments and observations about the security side of the way the bills would work. Stephen Cobb’s post captures the issue well.

He noted that on the one hand, the FBI had shut down a DNS changer fueled operation that “redirect[ed] infected computers to rogue websites.” As he explained, “The sheer scale of this DNSChanger scam is likely to increase the momentum for technology that makes it harder to subvert DNS for illegal purposes namely DNSSEC, short for DNS Security Extensions. The goal of DNSSEC is to protect the Internet from certain attacks, such as DNS cache poisoning, man-the-middle attacks, and the kind of DNS changing the FBI has so dramatically brought to light.”

On the other hand the proposed bills use the same technique to achieve their goals. “These bills would require DNS server operators in the US to replace the correct IP address for a website with an alternate address provided by the Attorney General’s office, if the website was “infringing.”

Mr Cobb captures a view that I think reflects what many in security believe. Finding solutions to online IP issues is not a bad idea. But the model on the table right now “is fundamentally incompatible with DNSSEC, a technology that will, if it is allowed to proceed, make many parts of the Internet more resistant to abuse, and expand the possibilities for lawful and profitable business in cyberspace. While the FBI and other law enforcement are working hard to stop the bad guys making millions by infecting our computers and subverting DNS it seems unwise to give private companies the ability to go ahead and change DNS armed only with court orders.”

And for those who want to get a bit more deep on the tech, Mr. Cobb offers “the whitepaper by Paul Vixie and other Internet lunimaries “Security and Other Technical Concerns Raised by the DNS Filtering Requirements in the PROTECT IP Bill” (pdf file).

This interview with Stefan is a great way to get into the area. For example, did you know that the drug war and security may share similar features? And yes reading beyond one’s direct field is wise. A key insight was that assigning value to malware and spam helps fight the problems and that a focus on only technical solutions was not as effective as one might think or hope:

We’d [...]]]> Ok so October is over, as is daylight savings, and cybersecurity awareness month. But, like all awareness months, I say why think about the issue for just that time? Nay, let us consider cybersecurity more often. Perhaps now. To start I offer Stefan Savage. Stefan is a professor of computer science and engineering at UCSD.

This interview with Stefan is a great way to get into the area. For example, did you know that the drug war and security may share similar features? And yes reading beyond one’s direct field is wise. A key insight was that assigning value to malware and spam helps fight the problems and that a focus on only technical solutions was not as effective as one might think or hope:

We’d been working together for quite a few years on large-scale attacks (e.g., worms, viruses, DDoS, etc.), and while we’d had lots of technical successes looking at those problems head on, it was pretty clear that the world wasn’t getting any more secure . Around that time we became exposed to the breadth of activity involved in underground trading of compromised accounts, credit cards, spam mailers, email lists, etc .—anything you could think of . This was really our inspiration, because we came to recognize the role that the profit motive was playing in all this (although spam was key to this evolution, we wouldn’t make the link until later).

I think it helped that at the time I was reading a book on the history of the drug war and the failings of supply reduction as a strategy due to the poor understanding of drug distribution economics. We came to see that our community had a similarly poor understanding of the value chain for economically motivated attackers and thus didn’t understand that our various technical interventions actually played minor roles, at best, in mitigating their actions.

Furthermore, the interview is simply a fun read of the way some serendipitous encounters, failed projects that nonetheless connected people working on the problem, and good old fashioned “I didn’t know I couldn’t do that” lead to “oh, yes I can do that”

this little team got excited about understanding how Storm worked, but—aside from Brandon—they had basically zero skill doing reverse engineering. So not knowing that this was a crazy approach to pursue, they tried reverse engineering the command and control (C&C) protocol in a blackbox fashion—sending data at a captive bot, writing down what it did, theorizing about why it did those things, or letting it talk to its normal C&C and seeing what it tried to do in response to various commands it received . Brandon was busy, but provided key insights when they hit roadblocks (e .g ., message encryption), but the rest was just raw guesswork over a period of several months . Vern and I had our doubts whether this was a good way for everyone to spend their time, since we weren’t confident they could do it, or even what the research question would be if they succeeded. Geoff Voelker was on sabbatical in India for this period, so he was bliss- fully unaware of how much time was being wasted on this . However, we gave the students a long leash and somehow they pulled it off, documenting most of the C&C protocol and then building a set of parsers that could interpret it.

Some key insights:

–Spammers work on commission
–Trying to explain to a university why one needs to buy goods from criminal organizations is funny (They were really trying to understand the entire system) and can lead to “Why can’t you just use a purchase order?” responses
–Failures matter

First, we failed repeatedly to wrap our minds around this paper. We had at least two aborted attempts to submit a paper only to discover that we still didn’t really understand what we were doing . I know that Vern, Geoff, and I all had doubts if this thing would ever come together (18 months of work without anything to show can shake even the most confident person) . We tried, but ended up failing, to incorporate a strong analysis of the spam delivery component (which programs were advertised by which botnets, which used Webmail, etc .), and we spent months building complex models for inferring the different individual affiliates of different program,s ultimately to discard them for the final paper . There is at least another paper’s worth of work in all the stuff that we left on the “cutting room floor,” but we chose to focus on the parts we were the most confident about.

Because computation in the cloud is no different from use of the Internet itself, it is not readily feasible or practical to cage and confine data flows within the cloud in a way that [...]]]> Yes there is still more ambrosia, err cloud, to consider. I will keep this one brief. My colleague, Patrick Ryan, was a scholar in residence and now an Adjunct Professor in the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program at CU Boulder. He also works with me on Google’s policy team. Ronak Merchant, Sarah Falvey, and Patrick have a piece about cloud policy called Regulation of the Cloud in India in the Journal of Internet Law. The paper goes into some telecomm history, looks at some business cases for the cloud, and makes some policy claims:

Because computation in the cloud is no different from use of the Internet itself, it is not readily feasible or practical to cage and confine data flows within the cloud in a way that is substantially different from the flow of worldwide information generally.

For this reason, regulatory frameworks should not be sui generis or custom tailored for the cloud and, instead, should leverage or update existing laws that are already in place. This article proposes a regulatory model for the cloud and shows how this model can be applied to India.

What is that proposal? Read the paper to find out! (Seriously, the history stuff was worth the read alone for me). Hint: Although somewhat India specific, the basic idea is that many regulations are already in place and so proposed new ones should be careful for “In the second largest democracy in the world, it is imperative that the free flow of information be preserved.”

First: What can be done, consistent with military security, and with the prior approval of the military authorities, to make known to the world as soon as possible the contributions which have been made during our war effort to scientific knowledge?

The diffusion of such knowledge should help us stimulate new enterprises, provide jobs for our returning servicemen and other workers, and make possible great strides for the improvement of the national well-being.

Second: With particular reference to the war of science against disease, what can be done now to organize a program for continuing in the future the work which has been done in medicine and related sciences?

The fact that the annual deaths in this [...]]]> Here are some pointed questions about science, innovation, and technological progress:

First: What can be done, consistent with military security, and with the prior approval of the military authorities, to make known to the world as soon as possible the contributions which have been made during our war effort to scientific knowledge?

The diffusion of such knowledge should help us stimulate new enterprises, provide jobs for our returning servicemen and other workers, and make possible great strides for the improvement of the national well-being.

Second: With particular reference to the war of science against disease, what can be done now to organize a program for continuing in the future the work which has been done in medicine and related sciences?

The fact that the annual deaths in this country from one or two diseases alone are far in excess of the total number of lives lost by us in battle during this war should make us conscious of the duty we owe future generations.

Third: What can the Government do now and in the future to aid research activities by public and private organizations?

The proper roles of public and of private research, and their interrelation, should be carefully considered.

Fourth: Can an effective program be proposed for discovering and developing scientific talent in American youth so that the continuing future of scientific research in this country may be assured on a level comparable to what has been done during the war?

New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life.

War should be understood as the military actions in Asia and the war on terror.

By now you all may have wondered, “What the heck is Deven doing talking about war (good God, y’all, what is it good for)?” Or something like that. And some of you may have figured out that all of the above except “War should be understood as the military actions in Asia and the war on terror”, which I threw in to try and seem like the ideas are from today, is from President Roosevelt’s letter to Vannevar Bush.

Funny how little changes overtime. Jobs, medical progress, public/private collaboration, the future of science education are all on our minds today. They have been a core issue since at least 1944. The full history of Science the Endless Frontier is hosted by the NSF. It is a fun read. Well, if you are absurdly nerdy, it is a fun read.

There are many things to enjoy in the report. One part that jumped out at me is his idea about employment and science. I may write more as I digest the report in general. For now take a read:

Scientific Progress is Essential … For the Public Welfare: (closest link to the passage)

One of our hopes is that after the war there will be full employment. To reach that goal the full creative and productive energies of the American people must be released. To create more jobs we must make new and better and cheaper products. We want plenty of new, vigorous enterprises. But new products and processes are not born full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions which in turn result from basic scientific research. Basic scientific research is scientific capital. Moreover, we cannot any longer depend upon Europe as a major source of this scientific capital. Clearly, more and better scientific research is one essential to the achievement of our goal of full employment.

How do we increase this scientific capital? First, we must have plenty of men and women trained in science, for upon them depends both the creation of new knowledge and its application to practical purposes. Second, we must strengthen the centers of basic research which are principally the colleges, universities, and research institutes. These institutions provide the environment which is most conducive to the creation of new scientific knowledge and least under pressure for immediate, tangible results. With some notable exceptions, most research in industry and Government involves application of existing scientific knowledge to practical problems. It is only the colleges, universities, and a few research institutes that devote most of their research efforts to expanding the frontiers of knowledge.

Today we may swap the rest of the world for Europe, but otherwise I think the point holds up rather well.

Bay Area radio struggles to have decent music. I tend to cycle through the few stations that may have something of interest. A recent addition to the dial focuses on 60s. 70s, and 80s. As a competitor points out, the new comer tends to repeat the same track several times a day. Recently the song Escape (The Pina Colada Song) has been playing quite a bit. The funny thing to me is that yoga and health food seem to have been dating and compatibility differentiators for more than 30 years. The style of the song and especially the attire, however, may not be as timeless; just reminders [...]]]> “If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain.
If you’re not into yoga, if you have half-a-brain.”

Bay Area radio struggles to have decent music. I tend to cycle through the few stations that may have something of interest. A recent addition to the dial focuses on 60s. 70s, and 80s. As a competitor points out, the new comer tends to repeat the same track several times a day. Recently the song Escape (The Pina Colada Song) has been playing quite a bit. The funny thing to me is that yoga and health food seem to have been dating and compatibility differentiators for more than 30 years. The style of the song and especially the attire, however, may not be as timeless; just reminders of the end of the seventies and the start of eighties (It was the last number 1 of the seventies and first of the eighties). Oddly that decade seems a bit more sane regarding taxes.

It took more than two years to produce that tax code overhaul. During that time, Reagan went on the road to plead his case for the plan. At a high school in Atlanta, Ga., in 1985, Reagan said they were going to “close the unproductive loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share.”
Meanwhile in Congress, Democrats and Republicans worked together to merge competing proposals for tax reform. Still in office today, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont was there during the passage of the bill. He says it was a different era.
“We had a lot of grownups in both parties, people who actually wanted the government to work,” Leahy says.

All of which makes me wish there was a world where I could write a personal ad seeking a new politician and find that the one who turned up was already in place. Now that is a fantasy.

Anyway, enjoy the song. Oh as moment of who knew: The song was released on September 21, 1979. The movie “10” which is a rather similar story and also a huge hit of the era was released October 5, 1979. As far I know they were not connected directly; yet they stuck together in my head because of the story lines.

Last year, 2.8 million vinyl records were sold in the United States, according to the Nielsen Company, which tracks music sales through its SoundScan system. [...]]]> Analog: The Resurrection is coming to a store near you. At least it looks that way. The Times reports that vinyl is making a comeback. I happen to have a fair amount of vinyl from when I saved up to buy LPs as a kid. But now companies like Goota Groove are among about 20 places that press vinyl and that together make up “the fastest-growing segment of the beleaguered music industry.” I have to note that the “beleaguered” view may have some challengers. TechCrunch reported that per SoundScan music sales have started to inch up. Plus according the to Times:

Last year, 2.8 million vinyl records were sold in the United States, according to the Nielsen Company, which tracks music sales through its SoundScan system. This year’s numbers are about 40 percent higher, and the real figures are higher still. Most vinyl now is sold in independent record shops, at rock clubs and through homemade Web sites. “SoundScan only gets about 15 percent,” Slusarz told [the reporter], smiling. “The majority of the stuff we press, it doesn’t even have a bar code.”

Furthermore this paper The Creative Destruction of Copyright – Innovation in the Record Industry and Digital Copying found

Eight years into a severe recession and a surge in unauthorised copying, the number of new titles published each year continues to expand at roughly the same rate of growth during the recession period as it did during the preceding boom period.

This result is counter-intuitive regarding the severity and duration of the recession. It challenges a fundamental assumption in much of the economic literature on the impact of unauthorised, digital copying, which has focused on the impact of unauthorised copying on industry revenues. According to the observations presented above, this literature will not support strong conclusions concerning copyright policy. That is because the manipulated variable in copyright policy is not suppliers’ revenues but ‘innovation and creativity’ as means to secure a diverse supply of cultural products that is responsive to societal change. The empirical findings also deflate the case for public investments in greater copyright protection, for penal procedures against so-called copyright ‘pirates’, and for setting high compensatory payments in civil cases brought by rights holders against infringers.

In short, there’s much more going on in the music market than mainstream methods of measurement capture. Indeed, small run print may be making a comeback too at least in the form of zines.

All of these points remind that creativity is not always about incentives, “MOST zines are labors of love, done as side projects and hobbies. The goal isn’t to turn a profit, but rather to capture a cultural moment, which in turn, offers the creators the freedom to explore and experiment.” In addition, the problem of capturing what is going returns here. “It’s hard to track exactly how many zines are in circulation at any time. Some are handwritten sheets that are photocopied a few dozen times, stapled and distributed by hand. Others, more upscale, are printed professionally in runs of several hundred and may be sold online.”

It seems that new creativity, old mediums, and the desire for a differently crafted artifact are driving some interesting areas of business. For those researchers, note writers, innovation junkies, and cultural theorists out there, I’d say there is some research to be done about how these businesses are doing, the size of the vinyl and/or zine market, what technology may have allowed these endeavors to take off, the non-economic motivations in place here as well as the economic ones. There may be more, but those leap to mind.

Oh and I love the fact that the paper has a references section. They are below fold with links where possible (I inserted from the list where provided and added some of my own. So errors etc., are mine; not Christopher’s). In other words, thanks Christoper and that whole research, cite culture thing. It worked and gave me [...]]]> Right then. My plea for sharing good work on the cloud has failed. I did what professor/nerd types do. I researched a bit more. So I now taunt you with more sharing by me. Christopher Yoo appears to be diving into Ambrosia (as I like to call the cloud). His paper, Cloud Computing: Architectural and Policy Implications can serve as another way into cloud ideas and literature.

Oh and I love the fact that the paper has a references section. They are below fold with links where possible (I inserted from the list where provided and added some of my own. So errors etc., are mine; not Christopher’s). In other words, thanks Christoper and that whole research, cite culture thing. It worked and gave me more on which to chew.

Birman, K., Chockler, G., & van Renesse, R. (2008). Towards a cloud computing research agenda

Brodkin, J. (2010, June 10). Amazon cloud uses FedEx instead of the Internet to ship data, Network World.

Buyya, R., Yeo, C., Venugopal, S., Broberg, J., & Brandic, I. (2009). Cloud computing and emerging IT platforms: Vision, hype, and reality for delivering computing as the 5th utility. Future Generation Computer Systems, 25, 599–616. NOTE: As is proper, there was not a link in the original citation list. I offer this link which I believe is the same substance but no one should assume it is what Christopher was reading.

Carr, N. (2008). The big switch. (New York: W.W. Norton). Here is a link to the books page which will let buy it from a range of sellers.

Foster, I., Zhao, Y., Raicu, I., & Lu, S. (2008). Cloud computing and grid computing 360-degree compared. (In Proceedings grid computing environments workshop: GCE 2008 (pp. 1–10)). DOI 10.1109/GCE.2008.4738445. NOTE: As is proper, there was not a link in the original citation list. I offer this link which I believe is the same substance but no one should assume it is what Christopher was reading

Geelan, J. (2009, January 24). Twenty one experts define cloud computing. Cloud Computing Journal.

Johnson, B. (2008, September 29). Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman. guardian.co.uk.

Mell, P. & Grance, T. (2009, October 7). The NIST definition of cloud computing (version 15). NOTE the link is as given in Christopher’s paper. It seems dead. I offer this link which I believe is the same substance but no one should assume it is what Christopher was reading.

Schmalensee, R. (1984). Gaussian demand and commodity pricing. Journal of Business, 57, S211-S230.

Vaquero, L., Rodero-Merino, L. Caceres, J, Lindner, M. (2009). A break in the clouds: Toward a cloud definition. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 39, 50–55. NOTE: As is proper, there was not a link in the original citation list. I offer this link which I believe takes one to the same substance but no one should assume it is what Christopher was reading.

Weinhardt, C., Anandasivam, A., Blau, & Stösser, J. (2009, March/April). Business models in the service world. IT Pro, 28–33.

Weinman, J. (2008, September 7). The 10 Laws of Cloudonomics. GigaOm, .

Weinman, J. (2009, November 30). Mathematical proof of the inevitability of cloud computing.

Weinman, J. (2011a, February 27). Smooth operator: The value of demand aggregation.

Weinman, J. (2011b, April 12). As time goes by: The law of cloud response time.

Yoo, C. (2010). Innovations in the Internet’s architecture that challenge the status quo. Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law, 8, 79–99.

Yoo, C. (2010). The changing patterns of Internet usage. Federal Communications Law Journal, 63, 67–89.

One reason I came to Google was to see what I might be missing. Cafes and more? Sure. But food for me is the tech knowledge that I, a humble unfrozen caveman lawyer, lack. Thanks to my colleagues, a little osmosis, and an environment that fosters learning, I have gained at least some new knowledge. Now, I thought about keeping it all for me and writing from my secret treasure chest/crystal ball of knowledge. But that’s lame. And really, given that the resources are public stuff, not even reality. Besides one of my hopes was to share core knowledge that might [...]]]> Yet again I say I am back. We’ll see how long it lasts; but as I will be moving closer to work, I am sanguine.

One reason I came to Google was to see what I might be missing. Cafes and more? Sure. But food for me is the tech knowledge that I, a humble unfrozen caveman lawyer, lack. Thanks to my colleagues, a little osmosis, and an environment that fosters learning, I have gained at least some new knowledge. Now, I thought about keeping it all for me and writing from my secret treasure chest/crystal ball of knowledge. But that’s lame. And really, given that the resources are public stuff, not even reality. Besides one of my hopes was to share core knowledge that might be useful to anyone writing/thinking about tech, so that whole “It’s mine! All mine!” idea from watching Daffy Duck (maybe it’s the initials that prompted it) died within seconds of it crossing my mind.

So, in the next few weeks, I’ll be posting about articles, books, and ideas that I hope will inform and help understanding in some tech areas. These are my views. Not Google’s. In other words, attribution to my employer is foolish.

Where are the academics and the idea that they are educating? Or what is the market here?

Lawrence’s post about anonymous reviewers relates to this point. The debate about peer review or not is stale. But peer review for certain publications and in certain fields exists and works well according to some. Are these folks paid? My non-empirical impression based on my experience and discussions with friends outside law, is that little to no pay is present [...]]]> Dave’s post reminds everyone that the IP morality play is not so good or even useful. And keep your pants on; I know that IP matters. And no, another engagement about incentives etc. is not that interesting. I think there is something else at issue in this case.

Where are the academics and the idea that they are educating? Or what is the market here?

Lawrence’s post about anonymous reviewers relates to this point. The debate about peer review or not is stale. But peer review for certain publications and in certain fields exists and works well according to some. Are these folks paid? My non-empirical impression based on my experience and discussions with friends outside law, is that little to no pay is present in many areas. Peer review may really be part of community membership and a commons-like approach to the need. So what is the cost or reason that great economics papers, sociology papers, and so on are behind JSTOR walls? What is going on when professors choose, or the journal they publish in requires, that work that could educate many is aimed at the few? Is there some secret knowledge that the masses can’t handle here? Oh my god! They read Coase! Gasp. The masses may think about deconstruction and the sociological implications of it! Horrors abound.

Many law professors now share their work for free. Thanks to the work of folks like Mike Carroll (Mike’s talk about this at the last IP AALS summer event was great), CC licensing and getting law reviews to stop thinking they are old school publishers are taking hold, as far as I can tell. Harvard and the NIH now press for open publishing. My paper, The Life and Death of Copyright, indicates that European views (at least from Victor Hugo at the conference prior to Berne) favored ways to ensure that society was educated.

I freely admit that there may be some costs and approaches to academic publishing that I miss. Nonetheless, it seems to me that academic authors may want to strive to have their work read, debated, cited, and shared…by every and anyone. My little dream is a world where the random girl in who knows where gets a penchant for math and reads so much she breaks through ideas outside the formal training some of us are fortunate to have. In a simpler vein, why not let future business people, doctors, computer scientists, etc. have the potential to explore the ideas that are most current and ones that are the foundations of the respective fields?

I am told my grandfather wrote an engineering textbook and refused to copyright it. When asked why, he said something to the effect that how could one lock up knowledge. I never really knew the man, as he died when I was quite young; so maybe it is a genetic predisposition. Then again, maybe the idea of an educator wanting to share knowledge is a hazard or feature of the position.

The Times reports that the man who created the first art for LPs has died. Cover [...]]]> I grew up saving money to buy albums. Big 33 and 1/3 rpm, vinyl albums with liner notes, lyrics, and cover art. When CDs arrived packaging was extended to give buyers the same sense of bigness. (FYI drug companies and now books inflate packaging or print so it seems like you are getting more. Who knew? We supersize sort of culture. Just check Dune in regular size and the new 800+page version that takes up more room on a shelf and feels more like an “I need an editor” Harry Potter tome). Oh right, back to the idea here (and where the hell is my editor one could ask).

The Times reports that the man who created the first art for LPs has died. Cover art fascinates me. At once it is, or was, a way to sell; yet it has its place as art too. The covers to almost any Blue Note album evokes a special moment in style and vibe. Others from the 1960s, 70s, and onward are special too. Sgt. Pepper’s spawned emulations by Prince and others I think. The images became part of the invitation to explore a world and mind set.

So think of a cover that has meaning for you and share. In the interim, check out these two and see what memories they may stir: