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About Perl

9/21/08, How to read character information from the World of Warcraft servers

9/18/08, A pragmatic approach to writing a mp3 crawler in perl

9/12/08, Perl Best Admin Practices

9/4/08, Conditionals - How to make decisions in Perl using unless

9/2/08, Create time-availability maps with Perl and Google Earth

8/31/08, Conditionals - How to make decisions in Perl using if, else, and elsif

8/30/08, Red Hat Perl performance problems

8/22/08, Why I stick with Perl

8/20/08, Perl Sorting Techniques

8/18/08, How to tell if something is a file or a directory in Perl


43 Folders

3/25/09, SxSW 09 - Gruber & Mann - HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!

2/3/09, 43 Folders - Gangs, Constraints, and Courageous Blocks

1/31/09, 43 Folders Podcast - Returning the Week of 2009-02-02

8/2/07, [Series 1] Inbox Zero - Google Tech Talk

1/14/07, [Series 1] Kung Fu, Meditation, and Sexual Intercourse

1/10/07, [Series 1] Macworld: Jason Snell and John Gruber on iPhone applications

11/28/06, [Series 1] Productive Talk Comp.: Episodes 01-08

11/20/06, [Series 1] Productive Talk #08: GTD 2.0?

11/12/06, [Series 1] Productive Talk #07: Implementing GTD

11/6/06, [Series 1] Productive Talk #06: Interruptions

10/29/06, [Series 1] Productive Talk #05: Email

10/22/06, [Series 1] Productive Talk #04: Teams

10/15/06, [Series 1] Productive Talk #03: Someday Maybe

10/11/06, [Series 1] Productive Talk #02: Patching Leaks

10/10/06, [Series 1] Productive Talk #01: Procrastination

10/9/06, [Series 1] Sample from 'Productive Talk: 43 Folders Meets David Allen'

9/17/06, [Series 1] First-time Sex & the Beauty of 1.0

7/17/06, [Series 1] Work the Dash and Take the Break

7/6/06, [Series 1] It's Just a Cup

6/23/06, [Series 1] Fallow Projects & The Bread Crumb Trail

6/11/06, [Series 1] The Perfect Apostrophe

4/11/06, [Series 1] The Sticky Hipster (and the Case of the Missing Toilet Paper)

4/6/06, [Series 1] Putting Geeks in Context

2/7/06, [Series 1] The Richard Scarry Book of the Future

1/23/06, [Series 1] Honor Thy Energy

1/3/06, [Series 1] Fresh Starts & Modest Changes

11/9/05, [Series 1] How to Leave a Voice Mail Message

10/31/05, [Series 1] Goin' on a Media Diet

10/26/05, [Series 1] A Phone Made of Human Ass

10/20/05, [Series 1] The Myth of Multi-tasking

10/21/05, [Series 1] Weekly Wrapup - 2005-10-21

10/19/05, [Series 1] Fake Mail, 2005-10-19

10/17/05, [Series 1] Cleaning off the bed

10/16/05, [Series 1] The 'to have done list'


Wi-Fi Networking News

9/20/09, AT&T Launches 3G MicroCell Site

AT&T inches closer towards broad availability of its femtocell: Details of 3G MicroCell, an in-home base station for the AT&T network, have been floating around for months. What wasn't known was when the company was planning to expand its test program into commercial availability. With the launch of a detailed Web site describing all the advantages--but also with a Zip code availability checker--the company is moving far closer to release. (Update: Charlotte, N.C., is the first test market.)

The idea of a femtocell is to have a broadband-connected tiny base station in the home that allows an existing cellular handset to work without any modification. Sprint pairs its femtocell with an unlimited call options ($100 purchase price plus $5/mo for the base station's use and $10 additional/mo for unlimited calls). Verizon offers just the signal-strength improvements ($250). T-Mobile employs UMA, which requires one of many dual-mode UMA handsets that the company offers, but works over plain Wi-Fi.

The 3G MicroCell is unique in that Sprint and Verizon's systems support just 2G voice only. AT&T is a smartphone and calling adjunct, although most smartphones that the company sells include Wi-Fi, and thus the data side isn't very important to most home users. Better call quality and unlimited home calling are the big carrot.

Engadget has a price sheet which shows calling plans at $10/mo (for one or more cellular phones) for existing AT&T wireline customers, and $20/mo for everyone else. The base station is $150 if you want it just for coverage; $50 ($100 rebate) if you sign up for the service plan. (The pricing is apparently a test, too, however.)

That's relatively competitive to Sprint ($15/mo) and T-Mobile ($10/mo), and cheaper than Vonage or Comcast VoIP. Further with VoIP services, you pay per line available; with the AT&T option (as well as Sprint and Verizon) multiple cell phones can place calls at the same time, which gives you a form of multi-line service.

AT&T gets a huge benefit from femtocells, extending its market into homes where its cell service can't reach or reaches poorly, while offloading potentially large amounts of home calling from its network to broadband.

Copyright ©2009 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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9/15/09, Across the Border, HSPA+ Blooms

9/15/09, Clearwire Covers Silicon Valley with WiMax

9/11/09, IEEE Ratifies 802.11n

9/8/09, Take Control of Your 802.11n AirPort Network Updated for Snow Leopard

9/2/09, Interest High in Providing Service for New York Railroads

8/27/09, New WPA with TKIP Exploit Presented in Paper

Japanese researchers develop improved version of last year's WPA with TKIP exploit: (PDF) The researchers build on the work of Eric Tews and Martin Beck, in which those two German grad students figured out how to falsify short packets when the TKIP method of encryption was employed. Their method didn't crack a TKIP key, but relied on a weakness of TKIP's backwards compatibility with the thoroughly broken WEP security. For a thorough rundown of the Beck and Tews approach, see my Ars Technica article, Battered but Not Broken, and an article on this site, Don't Panic over WPA Flaw, But Do Pay Attention (both from Nov-2008).

I've had a chance to absorb the paper, A Practical Message Falsiﬁcation Attack on WPA, by Toshihiro Ohigashi and Masakatu Morii, and I'm not convinced of its efficacy as an attack vector, but it's darned clever. It's been reported as WPA broken in under a minute! by some news sources. In fact, it requires a lot of pieces to be in the right places, and doesn't allow recovery of a WPA encryption passphrase.

The following gets reasonably technical, but I'll give you the conclusion upfront: if you have any concerns about network integrity, move to AES-CCMP, which requires WPA2 Personal for home and small office networks or WPA2 Enterprise for larger networks. Using AES-CCMP requires that all network equipment be from 2003 or later, more or less. Earlier equipment, if still in use, should either be upgraded to newer Wi-Fi adapters, switched to Ethernet only, or retired.

Now the technical bits.

In brief, Beck and Tews rely on a weakness from WEP that lets them substitute bytes in very short, well-known payloads, such as ARP (address resolution protocol) messages by testing changes in the checksum to first solve for the existing bytes, and then sending a falsified packet. Their method relies on 802.11e (Quality of Service), because that protocol establishes separate queues that can duplicate the sequence used in the initialization vector (IV) that's part of the cryptographic process. Clients (or stations) reject lower-numbered IVs than the current point in the sequence.

Ohigahi and Morii use a physical man-in-the-middle (MitM) as part of their solution. Instead of relying on QoS, the Japanese academics employ a directional antenna that lets them intercept and reuse an IV: the station only receives the falsified packet, and thus doesn't receive an out-of-sequence number. This mostly likely requires a directional antenna which can overpower the broadcast of the access point for a given client; it might also work with a distant omnidirectional access point if the attacker had a more powerful omni. The attacker typically acts as a signal repeater; most data is relayed with no changes, as in the classic MitM approach.

The 802.11 security protocols combined with a secure EAP flavor (such as PEAP) only defend against an MitM attack in which a malicious party is attempting to establish encrypted connections masquerading as a client to an access point and an access point to a client. With third-party certificates, that's impossible. However, a station that relays packets without being part of the encryption chain should work perfectly well.

The Ohiagi/Morii approach has other refinements, such as monitoring the network for periods of low usage and then switching from the pure repeater mode into a key recover mode in which the malicious party attempts to recover the encrypted checksum, blocking communication between the station and access point during this time, which then eliminates the incremental IV problem because the intermediate IVs aren't sent, and thus the QoS queues aren't needed.

They reduce the time necessary for a crack by making additional assumptions about ARP packets that let them solve for the checksum about 37 percent of the time, and check whether they've recovered the key. This reduces the time for what they call a communication blackout--no AP to client transmissions--to about a minute. If they fail to recover the checksum key, they don't send a falsified packet, and thus don't start triggering the checksum key reset.

By reducing the time necessary for an attack to succeed on average and eliminating the requirement of QoS being enabled, the researchers have made this process less academic and far more real. But it's important to remember that:

This is an exploit just for TKIP, and doesn't have applications for AES-CCMP. This is not TKIP key recover, but recovery for the MIC checksum used for packet integrity. So far, because of MIC key reset algorithms, this is still applicable only to short packets with mostly known data, such as ARP messages.

ARP forgery could allow an attacker to convince a client to use it as a gateway and perform DNS resolution through addresses that the attacker provides. Poisoning DNS would allow redirection, phishing, and some forms of interception.

However, the primary issue with this attack is that it requires close proximity and the right circumstances to intercept and relay communications. That makes it hard to generalize, and hard to apply in more than a limited fashion. We'll see how this continued hammering on TKIP continues, and whether further weaknesses enable an even simpler or faster approach.

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8/26/09, Snow Leopard's Wi-Fi Improvements

Apple unleashes Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard reviewers: While the next release of Mac OS X doesn't appear til Friday, Apple ended its embargo for reviewers and others who gained early access to the operating system update.

There are three notable changes related to Wi-Fi, none of them terribly significant.

First, the AirPort menu--the place from which you select networks--now shows signal strength for each nearby network. That's useful if you have choices or are troubleshooting coverage. Hold down the Option key before clicking the AirPort menu and Apple now reveals more information than the same option in Leopard, including channel, band, transmit rate, and the obscure MCS Index (an entry that defines encoding choices in use).

Second, the sleep mode in Snow Leopard is integrated with Bonjour discovery, the network protocol Apple uses to advertise services available on a computer. For Mac models released in 2009 (as far as I can tell), you can wake a computer remotely by connecting to a service like file sharing over Wi-Fi or Ethernet--so long as the Mac was connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station or Time Capsule before it went to sleep. The base station acts as a proxy while the Mac is sleeping. (Macs from 2008 and before appear to only have the option to be woken over Ethernet.) You can read about all the details in an article I wrote this morning for the Mac publication TidBITS, AirPort Menu Improves in Snow Leopard.

Third and finally, you can have your current location and time set in the world via Wi-Fi. The Date & Time preference pane's Time Zone view has an option to set the time zone via the current location. This requires an active network connection, and almost certainly uses Skyhook Wireless data, as Apple already relies on that firm for iPhone Wi-Fi lookups.

Snow Leopard has a $30 price tag for those with Leopard installed; $170 for a bundle of Snow Leopard, iWork '09, and iLife '09 for Tiger users. However, the $30 updater will work with Tiger, too; it violates the user agreement, but Apple uses the honor system for enforcement since it already collected its profit margin when it sold you the computer.

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8/25/09, Femtocells Get Feedback

The WSJ writes of the low rate of adoption, interest in femtocells: I've long been a bear about femtocells, short-range indoor base stations designed to extend cellular networks to the home or small office, allowing the use of unmodified mobile handsets. Femtocells seem to be a way for carriers to bring their business into your home, instead of you gaining more control over your calling.

T-Mobile steered a different course years ago, signing on to the unlicensed mobile access (UMA) standard, which allows a handset to negotiate seamless during-a-call handoffs between a mobile network and a Wi-Fi network. T-Mobile had to introduce new handsets that include UMA software and Wi-Fi radios; the firm now has 10 such models which are priced like models without UMA.

Femtocells require no handset updates. A customer obtains the base station, plugs it into their broadband connection (just like UMA, the carrier doesn't pay for the call backhaul), and then unwinds up to 30 feet of GPS antenna. Femtocells have to have a precise location both to use the correct licensed frequencies for that area and to assist in meeting E911 call location requirements. (In fact, femtocells may help carriers meet those obligations well enough to offset worse performance elsewhere.)

But where T-Mobile paired UMA with a cheap, unmetered calling plan--now costing just $10 per month for 1 or more lines--Sprint's femtocell costs $100 and $5 per month plus a $10 per month fee for a single unmetered line. Verizon charges $250 with no monthly fee nor calling discounts. (AT&T's femtocell is still in testing in limited markets, and may have an unmetered plan associated.)

Further, T-Mobile counts all calls that originate on a Wi-Fi network under its unmetered plan, and allows you to use any qualified hotspot: any one for which you have access or a password, or that's part of its large aggregated HotSpot roaming footprint. If you receive a call or place a call over Wi-Fi, you can walk away onto the cell network and not have minutes apply. For Sprint, minutes are unmetered only when at the femtocell, and, as noted, Verizon doesn't engage in that at all.

Because T-Mobile relies on Wi-Fi for data, the speed that your handset can access the Internet is only limited by your broadband connection and the quality of the Wi-Fi network. Verizon and Sprint are shipping 2G-only femtocells, which means that handsets with 3G but no Wi-Fi would be severely cramped. AT&T will offer 3G service with its femtocell--but 3G drains a battery far faster than Wi-Fi does on a mobile device. You'll need to keep your iPhone or other phone plugged in to use it effectively in your home as a landline replacement. (AT&T's devices should be able to switch to Wi-Fi for data while making 3G calls, however.)

The cost of femtocells, where we're now a good year into real worldwide availability, is still far too high relative both to their utility and substantial deployment. Yes, that can drop via volume, but Om Malik points out that with only 20m femtocells predicted to be sold worldwide in 2012 (and 800K worldwide this year), the amount of investment in femtocell makers is far outstripped by the potential for revenue. That's a recipe for consolidation and closure.

Femtocells benefit a carrier by allowing customers to get coverage where they cannot, and offloading cell tower usage to a device that the customer has paid for or leases. Some reports have suggested that carriers should give away femtocells because the reduction in infrastructure buildout through heavy in-home use would be far cheaper than the cost of the femtocells.

Honestly, given the costs, limitations, and complexity, I'd rather simply use Skype on my iPhone over my home Wi-Fi network rather than a femtocell.

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8/21/09, Southwest Airlines Will Install Internet Service on All Planes

8/18/09, Wee-Fi: WSJ Repeats, Bus Stop-Fi, WiMax College Net, White Fi, Meraki Stats

Slate notices tired theme of WSJ's Wi-Fi cafe squatters article: Jack Shafer, media critic, compares the WSJ's summer 2009 story on how cafe owners are tired of people nursing a cup of coffee for 8 hours while bogarting Wi-Fi to my 2005 New York Times piece. I wrote a non-trend trend piece back in 2005, looking at why some cafe owners were turning off or restricting Wi-Fi, but also noting contrary trends, which have proven true. (I wrote a bit more about this on 5-August-2009 when the Journal article first appeared.)

Meanwhile, QSR Magazine, the trade journal for fast-food or "quick-service" restaurants, chimed in with a short report that Wi-Fi brings in bodies to buy stuff. Right on.

San Francisco bus stops will generate juice, Wi-Fi signals: Popular Mechanics covers a prototype covered bus stop that (when all are deployed) would generate 43,000 kWh per year--the equivalent of a few thousands dollars worth of non-renewable power, but often paid at a much higher rate for renewable. I'm not clear if the city can get a higher rate for feeding the meter backwards, or if it's only available to private citizens. The shelters also use less power for lights, and will include Wi-Fi access points. The plan is to roll out 360 shelters by 2013 at $30K a pop. Clear Channel Outdoor will pay for deployment and keep ad revenue.

College uses WiMax for network coverage: Northern Michigan University will hand out laptops--included in tuition since 2000--to students with WiMax cards for network coverage this fall. The intent is to provide secure and high-speed service over the hilly terrain of the school, and to students and staff off campus. This is the first move of the kind I've heard, and it'll be fascinating to check in with them in a few months.

Technology Review tutors us in white space spectrum: There's a lot of interest in using the guard bands, or empty space, between adjacent channels so long as it doesn't interfere with legitimate licensed uses. This could actually be Wi-Fi on steroids, allowing higher power levels and wider channels. There are a number of hurdles yet to overcome to make "White Fi" practical.

Meraki releases survey of device use on its networks: Meraki has observed over 200,000 unique devices on its collection of customers and self-run networks in 2009, and says that Apple equipment use grew year-over-year by 221 percent (laptops, iPod touch, and iPhone), while the devices it observed grew just 41 percent (from 150,000 unique devices in 2008). Apple equipment represents 32 percent of all devices seen by the networks, up for 14 percent in 2008. The company uses a software as a service (SaaS) centralized backend for its customers' administration, allowing it to track these kinds of statistics; it looked at usage over a 24-hour period in June 2008 and June 2009 across 10,000 access points.

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8/7/09, The Fine Points of Optional Wi-Fi 802.11n Certification

The Wi-Fi Alliance explains four optional 802.11n elements for future certification: The Wi-Fi trade group has over the last 10 years kept together the notion that every device with Wi-Fi on the label should work at the greatest point of agreement with one another. This has continued in spite of new elements and enhancements to the 802.11 family of standards, including 802.11n.

The recent news that the IEEE had approved 802.11n within the 802.11 Working Group, and ratification was likely a few months away, led the Wi-Fi Alliance to explain its roadmap for adding more steps to the certification process. When the Wi-Fi group certifies a device, it runs it through tests that are supposed to ensure that the equipment responds in a standard manner. (The group also does plugfests in which equipment makers bring lots of gear together outside of lab conditions.)

When the word hit, the alliance identified four optional areas of certification that it would add. I knew about some of these areas, but I spoke with the group today to clarify what this meant for both equipment makers and end users. The Wi-Fi Alliance said it would offer tests for coexistence in 2.4 GHz, space-time block coding, transmit MPDU, and three spatial streams. Scratching your head? After 8 years of covering Wi-Fi, I admit I was in that position over a couple of those.

Let's go through them with the help of Greg Ennis, the alliance's Technical Director, who--along with Kelly Davis-Felner, the group's marketing director--was kind enough to lead me through it.

Coexistence. I first wrote about 802.11n coexistence mechanisms in depth back in Feb. 2007, when I interviewed Atheros's CTO Bill McFarland when the Draft 2.0 approval was imminent (see "How Draft N Makes Nice with Neighbors; 5 GHz Averts Tragedy of the Commons," 16-Feb-2007).

Coexistence has to do with the use of double-wide channels--40 MHz instead of the roughly 20 MHz regular channels--in both 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. The 5 GHz band isn't a problem, because 20 MHz channels don't overlap; Wi-Fi selectable channels in 5 GHz are staggered by intervals of 4 band channels (5 MHz each), such as 36, 40, 44, and 48. In 2.4 GHz, channels are staggered only by a single 5 MHz band channel, meaning that the use of 40 MHz will nearly always conflict with other existing networks.

Ennis said that 2.4 GHz coexistence terms weren't fully settled until recently, even though manufacturers have built in some methods of using 40 MHz in 2.4 GHz. The Wi-Fi Alliance discouarged the use; Apple, for one, doesn't allow its gear to use wide channels in 2.4 GHz.

In the new testing regime, "not everybody is required to support 40 MHz operation--but if they do support 40 MHz operation, they must go through the testing that we've defined," Ennis said.

The mechanisms that require an access point backing off to 20 MHz channels are so broad and severe that it's unlikely you could use a wide channel in any environment in which other Wi-Fi networks operate. Still, Ennis says, it may be of use in enteprise situations, or with future gear that's all 802.11n with these modes enabled that can be more respectful of each other automatically.

Space-time block coding. This term makes my head hurt every time I read it. I go off to the Web and read up on the principle, and it's above my paygrade. All wireless communication has to allot slots in some fashion--through contention or scheduling--for bits to go through. That's the basis of all wireless standards.

What STBC does is extend that beyond time into the domain of space. An access point can, through some complicated encoding, send different information simultaneously using multiple spatial streams so that receivers (stations in Wi-Fi parlance) that have single-spatial stream receivers can separately but at the same time decode their unique package.

The utility of this complicated feature is that we're likely to start seeing lots of single-stream N devices, as I've written about in the past year. (See, for instance, "Does the iPhone Need 802.11n?", 26-March-2009.)

Chipmakers are most likely now delivering quantities of these lower-powered, cheaper 802.11n chips that can't offer two streams--and thus double the bandwidth--as laptop and desktop 802.11n modules can. With STBC, an access point can utilize the full available 802.11n bandwidth by splitting it spatially between two devices instead of halving bandwidth by speaking to a single-stream device solely.

Ennis noted that STBC also improves the signal-to-noise ratio, which makes faster rates and farther distances possible. "I think this is going to be a popular optional feature," he said.

Aggregation MPDUs (MAC Protocol Data Units). While sounding obscure, this is yet another way by which 802.11n can eke out improved speeds. For long sequences of data, aggregation MPDUs lets a Wi-Fi system create a long frame, reducing all the overhead required to send a packet. (Every packet has origin and destination information, a preamble, and other data that adds overhead.)

For video, for instance, Ennis says that this kind of aggregation can improve throughput, although probably not by double-digit percentages. "It's not as dramatic an improvement as say using more spatial streams, or using 40 MHz channels," he said.

Currently, the Wi-Fi Alliance tests aggregation only if a manufacturer's access point sends these aggregated frames; it checks that a station can properly receive such frames, which can be interpreted under earlier 802.11n drafts. The new optional certification tests for aggregated frames sent by both stations and access points. (If included, it must be tested.)

Three spatial streams. This last one is quite simple. The Wi-Fi Alliance can now test for devices that send three streams of data across space up from two streams of data. Ultimately, we should see devices that can handle four, with a maximum raw symbol rate of 600 Mbps with wide channels in 5 GHz.

Those are the technical bits. I asked Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director, how all the above plus other specifications already available and other elements coming down the pipe would be presented to buyers. The a/b/g/draft n labeling can only go so far. She said that's her primary focus right now, and there should be more news on that front soon.

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8/5/09, WSJ Says Cafe Owners Suppressing Laptop Users

This story ties unemployed folks to higher rates of longer squatting in cafes: The Wall Street Journal reporter writes,

Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables -- nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours -- and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading.

Oddly, I believe I wrote this same story with the same concerns at the top of the market in 2005, when cafe owners were, well, already having seen the love affair dim. Taking a hint from a Seattle cafe that turned off Wi-Fi on the weekends, Victrola in Capitol Hill, I wrote in the New York Times four years ago:

...there was also a disadvantage [to offering free Wi-Fi], staff members said: the cafe filled with laptop users each weekend, often one to a table meant for four. Some would sit for six to eight hours purchasing a single drink, or nothing at all.

(I also wrote about Victrola in more detail on this blog.)

This conflict between squatter and cafe owner has been true since Wi-Fi started to become heavily used as it became a standard feature in laptops or available through a cheap add-on card back in 2002 to 2003. Cafes that had attached an AirPort router to a DSL connection suddenly found themselves a bit at sea.

I have heard repeatedly (as the WSJ article notes) that there are folks who are either shameless enough or feel entitled enough that they bring in their own food or coffee, or purchase nothing, and then complain when asked to make a purchase or leave.

There's nothing new here, but it's interesting to see an old trend get hooked to the latest problem that brings people into "third places," away from home and work--especially given that they may have no work.

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7/28/09, Sprint Buys Virgin Mobile, the Last MVNO

Sprint Nextel will acquire the majority stake in Virgin Mobile USA that it doesn't own: Virgin Mobile was the last major mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), a cellular company type that owns customers not cell towers. While there have been attempts to create large MVNOs, only Virgin Mobile has remained viable, although not wildly profitable. Sprint was an investor in Virgin Mobile, and many said that was what gave the MVNO staying power. Most recently Virgin Mobile absorbed Helio, an MVNO started by SK Telecom and EarthLink to bring advanced phones from South Korea to the U.S. market and target services at younger folk.

Virgin Mobile concentrates on prepaid phone service, which is distinct from the postpaid contract offerings that require long commitments. With prepaid service, you pay in advance for minutes or no-contract subscriptions, and wind up paying substantially less. Virgin Mobile has a $50/mo unlimited talk plan, which contrasts with postpaid plans that are twice as much. (Virgin Mobile requires 2-year commitments on smartphones under the Helio brand, however.)

The company also has the only pay-as-you-go mobile broadband service. You have to pay upfront for a $150 USB 3G modem--sold exclusively by Best Buy for Virgin Mobile--and then service has no commitment. You buy pools of expiring bandwidth. $10 gets you 100 MB over 10 days; $20, $40, and $60 get you 250 MB, 600 MB, and 1 GB over 30 days. If you need more bandwidth, you buy another pool--no sneaky $50/MB overage fees.

While the broadband prices are high compared to Wi-Fi (Boingo with $10/mo unlimited North American hotspot access, for instance), they are extremely favorable when looking at major carrier 3G plans, which are $60 per month with a required 2-year commitment. Those plans, however, top out at 5 GB of use per month.

The biggest segment of growth for Sprint is prepaid plans, but it's sold such plans on its iDEN network, the old Nextel technology that will some day fade away. Virgin Mobile uses regular old CDMA, and brings over 5 million customers.

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7/28/09, Verizon Limits Free Wi-Fi to Laptops

The fine print is now available on Verizon's free Wi-Fi deal for its broadband customers: Only laptop Windows XP/Vista (32-bit only) users need apply. Which seems insane to me, but it's also in line with Verizon's remarkable micro-management of its users and usage. The "how to get it" page explaining how to obtain free Wi-Fi notes, "Verizon Wi-Fi is not available for PDAs, phones, desktop PCs or Macs."

I can reason that the PDA and phone issue is that the company hasn't figured out which smartphones and others to add the service to and whether to charge for it. AT&T offers iPhone and some BlackBerry owners free Wi-Fi on its home network of 20,000 hotspots (mostly McDonald's and Starbucks locations); Verizon, however, operates no Wi-Fi network, so additional users mean additional costs. Smartphone users are extremely heavy Wi-Fi data consumers, and if Verizon's deal with Boingo isn't flat-rate per user, then that might explain the hesitation.

The limit to laptops is sort of ridiculous. Desktop PC owners won't easily be able to access laptops, and you have to do be a broadband Verizon customer already, so it's not like you'd be using a Wi-Fi hotspot as your primary Internet connection, would you? There's a story here that's not being told.

The lack of Mac support is simply absurd. Boingo supports Windows and Mac OS X, and Verizon has long had excellent software and tech support for its 3G hardware for Mac OS X.

But wait! There's more. As I noted in a revised version of the story yesterday, IDG News Service noted and a spot check reveals that Verizon isn't offering McDonald's stores, which Boingo resells from AT&T's network. The reason there might be that the McDonald's contract is organized differently. Wayport signed up McD years ago, and structured its arrangement to offer flat-rate resale fees per user in a network, instead of session fees. With that ostensibly still in place even after AT&T's acquisition of Wayport, Verizon might not want to pay the associated fees to offer McDonald's access. This plus Verizon's awful hotspot finder rips some of the heart out of the ubiquity of Boingo's U.S. network.

Finally, Verizon limits this free offer to higher-tiered DSL and fiber (FiOS) subscribers. Existing 3 Mbps DSL or faster and 20 Mbps FiOS or faster customers are the only ones who qualify. Further, only new FiOS customers who buy 25 Mbps or faster connections will qualify.

This is all shooting itself in the foot; penny wise, pound foolish. If you're going to make an extra add-on attractive, you can't dangle a bright shiny ball at all your customers, and then snatch it away from what's likely 25 to 40 percent of them, based on market research.

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National Vulnerability Database

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3431

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3430

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3429

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3428

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3427

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3426

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3425

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3424

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3423

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3422

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3421

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3420

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3419

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3418

9/25/09, CVE-2009-3417

9/24/09, CVE-2009-3390 (opensolaris)

9/24/09, CVE-2009-2817 (itunes)

9/24/09, CVE-2009-2682 (hp-ux)

9/24/09, CVE-2009-3369 (backuppc)

9/24/09, CVE-2009-3368 (com_hbssearch)

9/24/09, CVE-2009-3367 (an_image_gallery)

9/24/09, CVE-2009-3366 (an_image_gallery)


Raw Thought (from Aaron Swartz)

9/27/09, A Summary/Explanation of John Maynard Keynesâ€™

With the recent economic crisis, there has been much talk of John Maynard Keynes and his economics. Keynes, the story goes, figured out the causes of the Great Depression and in doing so revolutionized the field of economics. Some conservative economists have forgotten or ignored his work, but society as a whole remembers his basic discovery: you get out of downturns by spending money.

Reading Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Money, and Interest then is a sobering experience. For the book is, indeed, truly brilliant, a definite work of genius. It’s the best book on the economy I’ve ever read; indeed, it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. Everyone has seen bits and pieces of wit quoted from the book, but Keynes weaves them into a beautiful tapestry that explains the whole of the modern economy. And yet, the book is a necessary now as it was then: economics has not learned a single one of his lessons.

This is a depressing thought, especially since Keynes throughout seems optimistic that once he’s explained everything so clearly, economics will be back on the right track. But politics has triumphed over logic and we’ve forgotten all the crucial things he explained.

Perhaps this is why it has a reputation for being a very tough book — so difficult that even economists can’t follow it. But I think this is entirely due to a difference in philosophies: the General Theory was the first book on economics I could really understand. And that’s because, unlike most economics books, it makes sense — the theories it proposes comport with the real world, instead of taking place in some fantasyland of perfect competition.

Still, the book isn’t exactly a smooth read. Keynes uses some archaic language and is trying to communicate some complicated ideas. There’s no math, but there’s still a lot to chew on. So I thought I’d try my best at an explanation/summary. It’s a long book, so if you’re in a hurry, you might prefer my shorter summary of the fundamental ideas.

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money [full text]

Book I: Introduction

1: This chapter cheekily consists of a single paragraph. It says the book is an attempt to show that classical economics (basically that summarized by Alfred Marshall, including Ricardo, Mill, Edgeworth, and Pigou) addresses only a special case of the economy, while this book outlines a more general theory.

2: The classical theory of employment says the labor market is just another market: people get paid what they make and people only work if they get paid enough to make it worth it. Since it seemed unlikely that society had run out of money-making jobs, it was assumed that unemployment was caused either by people not knowing where the jobs were (frictional unemployment) or insisting on being paid more than they could make (voluntary unemployment).

It seems difficult to explain the high unemployment of the Great Depression this way, but economists didn’t see how it could be otherwise. So their solution was simple: to end unemployment, people just needed to be willing to work for less.

What this amounts to is Say’s Law: supply creates its own demand. If there are people around willing to work, jobs will spring up to make use of them. If people are unemployed, it must be because they’re refusing to take the job.

There are two obvious problems with this. First, people may refuse to work for a lower nominal wage when they’ll accept working for a lower real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) wage. That is, if management decides to pay people $4 an hour instead of $5, people might go on strike, but nobody ever goes on strike demanding a raise because the cost of milk has gone up. (So inflation might actually be a better solution than wage cuts.)

Second, if wages go down, then the cost of making things goes down, which means that prices go down, which means that in real terms wages end up staying about the same.

Keynes has found a crack in the classical theory. The first half of this book will be dedicated to prying it open. The second half is filling it in.

3: When people get money, they spend some of it — but not all of it. And businesses choose whether to hire people based on how much they expect to sell. But how much they sell is exactly dependent on how much people spend.

So it’s how much people spend that determines employment. But this is totally consistent with there being unemployment — if people aren’t buying, businesses aren’t selling, so they fire people (who then buy less).

Indeed, this problem will be worse in richer countries, since the more people make the less of it they need to spend and thus less money is used to hire people. (The details of how the remainder gets invested has to do with interest and will be addressed later.)

Since this seems so basic, Keynes is puzzled at how it’s been so ignored:

The completeness of the [classical] victory is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority.

But although the doctrine itself has remained unquestioned by orthodox economists up to a late date, its signal failure for purposes of scientific prediction has greatly impaired, in the course of time, the prestige of its practitioners. For professional economists, after Malthus, were apparently unmoved by the lack of correspondence between the results of their theory and the facts of observation;—a discrepancy which the ordinary man has not failed to observe, with the result of his growing unwillingness to accord to economists that measure of respect which he gives to other groups of scientists whose theoretical results are confirmed by observation when they are applied to the facts.

The celebrated optimism of traditional economic theory, which has led to economists being looked upon as Candides, who, having left this world for the cultivation of their gardens, teach that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds provided we will let well alone, is also to be traced, I think, to their having neglected to take account of the drag on prosperity which can be exercised by an insufficiency of effective demand. For there would obviously be a natural tendency towards the optimum employment of resources in a society which was functioning after the manner of the classical postulates. It may well be that the classical theory represents the way in which we should like our economy to behave. But to assume that it actually does so is to assume our difficulties away.

Book II: Definitions and Ideas

4: The next three chapters aren’t so much part of the argument as attempts to clear up some basic concepts and objections.

We start by observing it’s impossible to measure things like “net output” or “price level” accurately — you’re always trying to compare qualitatively different things and run into no end of difficulties.

To say that net output to-day is greater, but the price-level lower, than ten years ago or one year ago, is a proposition of a similar character to the statement that Queen Victoria was a better queen but not a happier woman than Queen Elizabeth â€” a proposition not without meaning and not without interest, but unsuitable as material for the differential calculus. Our precision will be a mock precision if we try to use such partly vague and non-quantitative concepts as the basis of a quantitative analysis.

We can’t measure net output, but we can count the number of people employed. In general, if more people are working then more stuff is getting made, although this obviously isn’t a perfect connection. But employment is kind of a more interesting number and it will have to do.

So we’ll use only two types of counts: those of actual currency (money-values) and those of people (employment). And while workers are obviously not all equivalent the way dollar bills are, we can take an hour of unskilled labor as our standard and count people with special skills as multiples of an hour of unskilled labor. Thus if someone makes twice as much per hour as an unskilled laborer, we’ll count each hour they work as two unskilled hours. We’ll call these hours labor-units and we’ll call the money that gets paid for them wage-units. Thus the total amount spent on wages equals the wage-unit times the number of labor-units.

[AS: Obviously this accounting fiction isn’t particularly realistic since, in reality, the multiples people get paid change as the wage-unit goes up. Let’s say I’m a lawyer who makes $300 an hour and minimum wage is $5 an hour. If the minimum wage is doubled to $10 an hour, I’m not suddenly going to get paid $600 an hour, even though my relative productivity hasn’t changed. Keynes seems to suggest this can be modeled as “a rapid liability to change in the supply of labor;” I guess that’s possible.]

And as for some people being better at some jobs than others, we just pretend that’s an artifact of the equipment they use. In other words, as employment goes up and we run out of skilled truck-builders, we say the truck factory is getting less efficient. (If, indeed, there’s nobody left who can build the trucks, we say the truck factory’s efficiency has gone to zero.)

As problematic as this is, Keynes points out that it’s a lot more realistic than the classical theory, which just seems to magically assume everyone is paid in proportion to their productivity. By subsuming more efficient people with their machinery, Keynes says he better deals with the usual case, which is that the increase in efficiency goes to their boss (who owns the machines). And when more efficient workers actually are paid more, he takes that into account as noted above.

5: Businesses make production decisions not based on sales or anything solidly measurable, but on personal opinions: expectations. These can be either short-term expectations (the barrista will be given the day off if management doesn’t expect any customers) or long-term expectations (Starbucks won’t open up a new story if they expect coffee consumption to start going down).

Either way, new expectations don’t always take effect immediately (if you just opened a new store and then decide it wasn’t worth it, you don’t immediately close it). And the process of adjusting can have some odd effects: if you need to quickly ramp up production, you might keep hiring until you have more employees than you really need in the long-run. You use the extra people to get you up to speed, then you lay them off. The result is “a gradual crescendo in the level of employment, rising to a peak and then declining to the new long-period level.” This can happen even if you don’t expect to sell more things, but just a slightly different thing: you “overhire” to get up to speed on the new model, but then fire people until you’re back down to your previous level.

An uninterrupted process of transition, such as the above, to a new long-period position can be complicated in detail. But the actual course of events is more complicated still. For the state of expectation is liable to constant change, a new expectation being superimposed long before the previous change has fully worked itself out; so that the economic machine is occupied at any given time with a number of overlapping activities, the existence of which is due to various past states of expectation.

That said, today’s decisions are based on the conditions of today and expectations about tomorrow — not on past expectations or the conditions of the past. And, in practice, people don’t calculate their expectations from scratch each morning. They keep doing what they did yesterday unless they have a reason to change. Long-term expectations can’t be easily checked, so when they do change, they often change suddenly. Thus they can’t even be approximately estimated.

6: When you’re producing something, there are a couple of things involved. One is the amount of capital and equipment and so on you use up, which we’ll call the user cost. Another is the amount you pay to employees and other companies and so on, the factor cost. These two combined are the prime cost. The entrepreneur’s income is the value of his output less the prime cost — that’s what he tries to maximize.

Entrepreneurs can also lose capital due to unavoidable events — a market crash, an earthquake, the passage of time. These are supplementary costs. In addition, there are the unavoidable and unforeseen, which we’ll call windfall loss. We’ll define net income as just income minus supplementary costs, since people can’t really be blamed for the unforeseen events.

The total income of the community is just the amount sold minus the user cost. And total consumption is just all the stuff that isn’t sold to other businesses. [AS: I’ve been saying businesses because I find it clearer, but Keynes actually says entrepreneurs. I think I also use this kind of interchangeably with capitalists. Sorry.] Saving, of course, is just income minus consumption.

Investment is just the amount of current output that isn’t consumed. But since saving is just the amount of income that isn’t consumed and income is just output (output is always output to someone), savings necessarily equals investment.

[AS: This seems to be a little controversial (and, indeed, tends to be a bit confusing), but let’s just accept it as a quirky definition, not any kind of factual claim.]

7: Keynes spends the chapter defending his decision to define savings as equal to investment. [AS: I think he only ends up in making things more confusing, but maybe I’m missing something.]

Book III: The Propensity to Consume

8: We return now to our main argument. Earlier we said people spend the money they get, but not all of it. What changes how much they spend? Not much, Keynes argues. (Maybe large changes in interest rates, but those are rare.)

“The fundamental psychological law,” he says, is that, on average, the amount people spend increases as the amount they make increases, but not as quickly. (If you make $50K a year, you might spend $40K of it. If you make $1M, you might spend $500K of it. Obviously a lot more in absolute terms, but far less proportionately.) And this is especially true in the short-term — people’s habits take time to catch up with their incomes.

But this means that as national income increases, a smaller proportion of it will get spent, so more of it will have to be invested. And when national income falls, a larger proportion gets spent as people dip into savings and governments go into deficit. This is fortunate, because lower consumption also means lower income (when people buy less, businesses make less, so they pay you less). If consumption fell at the same rate as income, we’d fall into a downward spiral: lower consumption would mean lower income, which in turn would mean lower consumption, and soon we’d all be out of a job.

“Consumption â€” to repeat the obvious â€” is the sole end and object of all economic activity.” What are we making things for if not to use them? People can either be put to work making things for people to use today or making things for people to use tomorrow, but that tomorrow “cannot be pushed indefinitely into the future.” After all, an hour of labor cannot be “saved” and put into a bank for a rainy day! If people are out of work now, the time they’re wasting will never be recovered. [AS: This is truly brilliant. It’s hard to convey the excitement I felt when reading this.] Saving money for the future is not the same as making things for the future — it’s only the latter that’s useful.

But it’s not easy to think of useful things to make for the future. Eventually, we’re forced to make things for today. But as our incomes increase, we spend less on things today. And there’s our trap: if we don’t make things for tomorrow and we don’t make things for today, people are forced out of work since there’s nothing for them to make.

Another way to look at it is the more stuff we make for tomorrow, the less stuff we need to make tomorrow. And then what do we do? At some point we just need to consume more stuff.

People seem to recognize this when it comes to government making stuff. ‘â€œWhat will you do,â€ it is asked, â€œwhen you have built all the houses and roads and town halls and electric grids and water supplies and so forth which the stationary population of the future can be expected to require?â€’ But the same logic applies to private investment. What will we do when we’ve built all the factories the people of the future can be expected to use?

Money can’t survive on its own. If we don’t ever spend it, it becomes worthless.

9: How does raising interest rates affect consumption? We’ve said it doesn’t have much effect on people’s propensity to consume, but a higher interest rate means it’s more expensive to borrow money, which means companies invest less, which means incomes are reduced. (Since savings=investment, incomes are reduced such that the amount left over for savings equals the lesser amount now invested. [AS: This is the first use of that suspicious definition.]) Most people think that as the interest rate goes up, spending goes down and saving goes up, but this shows that saving and spending both decrease.

The more virtuous we are, the more determinedly thrifty, the more obstinately orthodox in our national and personal finance, the more our incomes will have to fall when interest rises relatively to the marginal efficiency of capital. Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward. For the result is inevitable.

Thus, after all, the actual rates of aggregate saving and spending do not depend on Precaution, Foresight, Calculation, Improvement, Independence, Enterprise, Pride or Avarice. Virtue and vice play no part. It all depends on how far the rate of interest is favourable to investment, after taking account of the marginal efficiency of capital. No, this is an overstatement. If the rate of interest were so governed as to maintain continuous full employment, Virtue would resume her sway; â€” the rate of capital accumulation would depend on the weakness of the propensity to consume. Thus, once again, the tribute that classical economists pay to her is due to their concealed assumption that the rate of interest always is so governed.

10: We’ve established that an increase in investment leads to an increase in income. But how much? Even if you hire people for investment, the money those people get paid in turn gets spent on additional consumption, increasing employment indirectly as well. (Of course, this is only true until we hit full employment — then prices just inflate.)

There must be an investment multiplier — call it k — such that an extra $1 invested leads to $k increase in income. And there must be a similar employment multiplier (k’) where for each person hired for a job, k’ people get hired in total.

But spending can have negative effects as well. [AS: Keynes apparently has government investment — i.e. stimulus — in mind here, although he never really comes out and says it.] If the interest rate goes up, that will slow investment. If people lose “confidence” because of all the spending, they may decide to hold onto their money. And some of the money can “leak” out to other countries. But this just weakens the multiplier, it doesn’t eliminate it.

Recall that the classical theory said people needed to be paid enough to compensate them for their distaste for working. But if you’ve been unemployed long enough, you might actually want to work. If that’s true, even wasting money is a good thing. “Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.”

It is curious how common sense, wriggling for an escape from absurd conclusions, has been apt to reach a preference for wholly â€œwastefulâ€ forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict â€œbusinessâ€ principles. For example, unemployment relief financed by loans is more readily accepted than the financing of improvements at a charge below the current rate of interest; whilst the form of digging holes in the ground known as gold-mining, which not only adds nothing whatever to the real wealth of the world but involves the disutility of labour, is the most acceptable of all solutions.

(Recall that at this time the world was still on the gold standard and thus mining for gold was equivalent to printing new money.)

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.

The analogy between this expedient and the goldmines of the real world is complete. At periods when gold is available at suitable depths experience shows that the real wealth of the world increases rapidly; and when but little of it is so available, our wealth suffers stagnation or decline. Thus gold-mines are of the greatest value and importance to civilisation. just as wars have been the only form of large-scale loan expenditure which statesmen have thought justifiable, so gold-mining is the only pretext for digging holes in the ground which has recommended itself to bankers as sound finance; and each of these activities has played its part in progress-failing something better. To mention a detail, the tendency in slumps for the price of gold to rise in terms of labour and materials aids eventual recovery, because it increases the depth at which gold-digging pays and lowers the minimum grade of ore which is payable.

(Keynes goes on to contrast gold-mining with building new houses which, being actually useful, has the side effect of decreasing the rent of old ones.)

Ancient Egypt was doubly fortunate, and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth, in that it possessed two activities, namely, pyramid-building as well as the search for the precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of man by being consumed, did not stale with abundance. The Middle Ages built cathedrals and sang dirges. Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York. Thus we are so sensible, have schooled ourselves to so close a semblance of prudent financiers, taking careful thought before we add to the â€œfinancialâ€ burdens of posterity by building them houses to live in, that we have no such easy escape from the sufferings of unemployment. We have to accept them as an inevitable result of applying to the conduct of the State the maxims which are best calculated to â€œenrichâ€ an individual by enabling him to pile up claims to enjoyment which he does not intend to exercise at any definite time. [emphasis added]

Book IV: The Inducement to Invest

11: Imagine you get a new widget-making machine. There’s the value of the widgets you expect [AS: there’s that word again] it to produce, less the cost of its inputs and maintenance. Call that the yield. Then there’s the cost of creating one more new widget-making machine. Call that the supply cost. The marginal efficiency of capital is the yield less the supply cost. [AS: Marginal efficiency of capital comes up a lot, so we’ll save time by calling it “your expected return.”]

Of course there’s lots of different things you can invest in; we’re assuming that you do whatever maximizes your expected return. And obviously you’ll keep borrowing money and investing it until your expected return reaches the market rate of interest.

It’s through the expected yield that changes in the value of money affect output. If people expect inflation, then expected yields go up and people invest more. Deflation does the opposite.

(Tyler Cowen, in his critical comments on the General Theory is struck by a throw-off clause in this chapter: Keynes says that it’s unlikely interest rates will go up if people expect inflation, since if people expected inflation prices would have gone up already. He writes:Â ”This simple yet powerful point doesn’t get the attention it ought to.Â Storage costs for goods and services may eliminate this paradox but perhaps not completely.Â It is striking how few economists have thought this problem through.”)

12: As we noted before, capitalists invest if they expect future sales to be high. But how do they know what future sales will be? “If we speak frankly, we have to admit that our basis of knowledge for estimating the yield ten years hence of a railway, a copper mine, a textile factory, the goodwill of a patent medicine, an Atlantic liner, a building in the City of London amounts to little and sometimes to nothing; or even five years hence.”

In olden days, what happened was that rough-riding men of business thought taking risks was manly and invested their money as a way of life. They got it in their head that they were going to build a railroad, and by Jove they did. They didn’t sit down and calculate whether they could have made more money buying bonds instead. Bonds are for wusses.

But now people invest their money in the stock market, which revises its profitability estimates minute-by-minute. “It is as though a farmer, having tapped his barometer after breakfast, could decide to remove his capital from the farming business between 10 and 11 in the morning and reconsider whether he should return to it later in the week.” And since much new investment money is raised on the stock market, it’s these estimates which influence new investment.

And the stock market depends on “what is, in truth, a convention” — namely that the current valuation of a company is an accurate assessment of its expected yield — that stock prices will only change if there’s new evidence suggesting the yield will be different. Thus, even though we actually have no clue what the yield might be, we all agree that the current stock price is our best guess and instead of worrying about the fact we actually have no clue what the “right” stock price is whatsoever, we only have to worry about those things which will affect it (the stock price).

So stock traders don’t sit down and try to calculate the long-term expected yield; they try to guess the short-term change in the stock price and trade base on that.

This is the inevitable result of investment markets organised with a view to so-called â€œliquidityâ€. Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity, the doctrine that it is a positive virtue on the part of investment institutions to concentrate their resources upon the holding of â€œliquidâ€ securities. It forgets that there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole. The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future. The actual, private object of the most skilled investment to-day is â€œto beat the gunâ€, as the Americans so well express it, to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreciating, half-crown to the other fellow.

This battle of wits to anticipate the basis of conventional valuation a few months hence, rather than the prospective yield of an investment over a long term of years, does not even require gulls amongst the public to feed the maws of the professional; â€” it can be played by professionals amongst themselves. Nor is it necessary that anyone should keep his simple faith in the conventional basis of valuation having any genuine long-term validity. For it is, so to speak, a game of Snap, of Old Maid, of Musical Chairs â€” a pastime in which he is victor who says Snap neither too soon nor too late, who passes the Old Maid to his neighbour before the game is over, who secures a chair for himself when the music stops. These games can be played with zest and enjoyment, though all the players know that it is the Old Maid which is circulating, or that when the music stops some of the players will find themselves unseated.

Or, to change the metaphor slightly, professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of oneâ€™s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

You might think that this just means someone who actually does sit down and calculate expected yields could make vast profits from all the speculators playing Snap. But calculating expected yields is much harder than guessing what everyone else will do; there’s no reason to think spending the same amount of time doing that is any more profitable.

And getting money for it is much harder — people don’t like it when you tell them “Yes, the stocks you bought are worthless now but just wait! Nothing real has changed, you just need to hold on and see if I’m right in the long run.” People don’t like it when their stocks go down. They’d much rather invest their money so that its valuation keeps going up and up and up.

And even if they were willing to wait, why should they trust you? “For it is in the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”

The more open our stock markets get, the more speculators predominate, and the worse things get for us.

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism â€” which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object.

A hefty tax on each trade might be the best way to discourage speculation and thus improve the functioning of the market. You might think (as Keynes once did) that the best solution is to just force people to hold on to what they buy, so they have to figure out what it’s really worth beforehand, but this will just push people to hold on to their money. The only solution would be to force everyone to either to buy goods or capital assets with everything they own.

And we return to the problem that many of our economic decisions depend on our “spontaneous optimism,” our “animal spirits,” our “urge to action rather than inaction,” not “the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.” This means not only that slumps get exaggerated (since they depress animal spirits, worsening the slump) but that economic performance depends to a large degree on keeping businessmen happy. If electing FDR gets them depressed, they might pull back their investments and send the economy into a slump. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s just the natural outcome of a system that depends on rich people feeling good. “In estimating the prospects of investment, we must have regard, therefore, to the nerves and hysteria and even the digestions and reactions to the weather of those upon whose spontaneous activity it largely depends.”

As a result, it seems likely that the State, which can calculate these things with an eye to the long-term and the social good, will take over more and more of the job of organizing long-term investment.

[Tyler Cowen: “This is the best chapter in the book and one of the most important economics essays of all time. â€¦ The insights here have yet to be fully mined.”]

13: We said before that businesses keep investing until their expected return reaches the interest rate (so lower interest rates mean more investment), but what determines the interest rate?

It’s often said that the interest rate is the price people demand for saving money instead of spending it. But this clearly isn’t true — people can save money under their mattress and not get any interest. No, the interest rate is the “price” people demand for parting with their cash.

“â€” which implies that if the rate of interest were lower, i.e. if the reward for parting with cash were diminished, the aggregate amount of cash which the public would wish to hold would exceed the available supply, and that if the rate of interest were raised, there would be a surplus of cash which no one would be willing to hold.” And if that’s true then the quantity of money is the other factor that determines interest rates. Thus the interest rate depends on people’s desire to hoard cash — their liquidity preference (L) — and the quantity of money (M).

Why is there a liquidity preference? Why don’t people just invest all their money? Interest rates never go below zero, after all. “A full explanation is complex and must wait for Chapter 15.” But we can see one reason now: uncertainty about the expected [AS: there’s that word again] rate of interest. If we expect interest rates to go up, we might want to hold on to our cash and use it to buy higher-yield bonds later. And thus, just as capital investment was driven by stock market speculation, interest rates are driven by bond market speculation. Again we have a tradeoff between having a market (and thus volatility) or no market (and thus overcaution).

There are other reasons people might want to hold cash. If they expect to do a cash transaction in the future, they’ll need to sell a bond then — but if the interest rate has risen in the meantime, they’ll be selling the bond at a loss. And if the interest rate falls, the economy will grow and people will need more cash for these sorts of transactions.

OK, so we have the following model: more money reduces the interest rate (as long as liquidity preference doesn’t go up faster), lower interest rates increase investment (as long as expected return doesn’t fall faster), more investment leads to more employment (as long as the propensity to consume doesn’t fall faster), and if employment increases prices will rise which can increase liquidity preference and thus require more money.

The public can’t control the amount of hoarding, since that’s necessarily equal to the amount of cash. All it can do is change the price of hoarding — the interest rate.

14: “Certainly the ordinary man â€” banker, civil servant or politician â€” brought up on the traditional theory, and the trained economist also, has carried away with him the idea that whenever an individual performs an act of saving he has done something which automatically brings down the rate of interest â€¦ without the necessity for any special intervention or grandmotherly care on the part of the monetary authority.”

But we’ve seen they’re quite wrong. Saving doesn’t lower the interest rate and thus increase investment — an increase in money does that. Instead, saving lowers demand and thus decreases employment. In which case, “a decreased readiness to spend will be looked on in quite a different light.”

[AS: And so this is the famous paradox of thrift. While each person thinks they’ll do better off by saving money instead of spending it, if a whole country decides to save their money, they’re all worse off, since nobody will have a job.]

[AS: I’m taking a bit from chapter 16 since it seems to really belong here:]

“An act of individual saving means â€” so to speak â€” a decision not to have dinner to-day.” But it is not a promise to have dinner tomorrow — it doesn’t replace current demand with future demand; it decreases demand altogether. And since future demand is estimated based on present demand, it tends to decrease investment as well. Thus decreased consumption leads to decreased employment.

It’s difficult to get people to realize that investing money doesn’t actually lead to an increase in investments. The problem is that capitalists aren’t buying capital per se, they’re buying an expected yield. They don’t care how good the machine is at making widgets, what matters is whether they can make money selling the widgets. If interest rates go up, it no longer becomes possible for them to make money, even though the machine remains unchanged.

15: The central bank can lower the short-term interest rate through open-market operations: printing money and using it to buy short-term government debt. But this doesn’t effect the long-term rates, which depend on people’s expectations of what the government will do to short-term rates. Perhaps the government should start buying and selling long-term bonds to address this.

It’s also possible (although unlikely) that no one will believe the government can keep rates so low and so they begin hoarding all the new cash the government prints. “In this event the monetary authority would have lost effective control over the rate of interest.” [AS: This, I presume, is the liquidity trap.] “But whilst this limiting case might become practically important in future, I know of no example of it hitherto. â€¦ Moreover, if such a situation were to arise, it would mean that the public authority itself could borrow through the banking system on an unlimited scale at a nominal rate of interest.” [AS: The US, however, is in this situation right now (2009).]

Other traps are hyperinflation (where no one wants to hold onto money) and a financial crisis (where no one trusts the banks enough to let go of money). And there’s the issue that even at low rates of interest, banks still need to trust their borrowers and make enough to pay their expenses, which may require them to raise rates.

16: OK, so we’re in a liquidity trap. There are all sorts of practical problems with lowering interest below zero, so instead what happens is that, in laissez-faire, employment falls to reach the new low levels. The only thing that can save us is if “millionaires find their satisfaction in building mighty mansions to contain their bodies when alive and pyramids to shelter them after death, or, repenting of their sins, erect cathedrals and endow monasteries or foreign missions.” That’s no way to run a country.

So the government will print money to keep the interest rate at a level corresponding to full employment. Presumably this means that interest rates will become very low (although you don’t want them so low that nobody’s making things to sell today). But as interest rates get lower, it becomes profitable to invest in building things with smaller and smaller expected yields.

If this happens, then it seems likely that within a generation expected return will reach zero [AS: !!] and everything will reach its marginal cost.

This gets rid of the most objectionable features of capitalism — people could still become rich by saving money, but there would be nothing left to invest it in, so their money wouldn’t ever grow. It would be the end of the rentier — the rich person who grows richer by using his wealth to exploiting others.

17: Let’s step back for a second. Why is money so special? After all, a bond is just a promise to get some money in the future. Why should it be any different from a futures contract on wheat? We could imagine paying the future wheat contracts in terms of wheat, resulting in a wheat interest rate. [AS: This sounds pretty ridiculous, I know, but give it a minute.]

The big problem is that money is the one thing market processes can’t adjust. 1) You can’t just go ahead and make it — it can’t be “grown like a crop or manufactured like a motor-car.” 2) You can’t reclaim it from use for other purposes — it doesn’t have any. (Land can’t be grown either, but if we really needed to we could free some up by moving closer together. 3) It’s very easy to store — it doesn’t spoil. Which is why the suggestion of making it spoil (by printing money with expiration dates, etc.) are on the right track.

Otherwise, our only relief comes from printing more money.

Thus in the absence of money and in the absence â€” we must, of course, also suppose â€” of any other commodity with the assumed characteristics of money, the rates of interest would only reach equilibrium when there is full employment. Unemployment develops, that is to say, because people want the moon; â€” men cannot be employed when the object of desire (i.e. money) is something which cannot be produced and the demand for which cannot be readily choked off. There is no remedy but to persuade the public that green cheese is practically the same thing and to have a green cheese factory (i.e. a central bank) under public control.

It is interesting to notice that the characteristic which has been traditionally supposed to render gold especially suitable for use as the standard of value, namely, its inelasticity of supply, turns out to be precisely the characteristic which is at the bottom of the trouble.

The classical view is that we are kept poor by our impatience — we insist on spending money now instead of saving it for later, when it will grow into more. But the truth is exactly the opposite: “That the world after several millennia of steady individual saving, is so poor as it is in accumulated capital-assets, is to be explained, in my opinion, neither by the improvident propensities of mankind, nor even by the destruction of war, but by the high liquidity-premiums formerly attaching to the ownership of land and now attaching to money.”

18: Keynes restates the theory.

Book V: Money-wages and Prices

19: Now that we have the theory, we can return to the point we started with: reducing nominal wages is unhelpful. The only thing that could work is a one-time decrease in everyone’s wages to a new level, but that a) is never going to happen in a democracy and b) unfairly penalizes wage-earners over everyone else. “There are advantages in some degree of flexibility in the wages of particular industries so as to expedite transfers from those which are relatively declining to those which are relatively expanding. But the money-wage level as a whole should be maintained as stable as possible, at any rate in the short period.”

20: We’ve said that employment ultimately comes from demand. So why should the government promote investment instead of demand? It’s because investment comes first. If you give people money to buy more (say) iPods, then first all the existing iPods get sold. This raises the price, which makes Apple richer but doesn’t help any employees — and Apple likes to save its money much more than its employees do. Eventually they begin to run out of iPods and start investing in additional factories to make more. And then those factories hire people to work there, who spend their wages on other things. It works, it’s just slow — if you want to get people employed quickly, you’re better off starting with building the factories.

OK, so you promote investment, but how much investment? Well, until you have full employment obviously.

21: Traditional economics is divided between the theory of value (perfect competition, supply and demand, and all that good stuff) in the main spot and then over to the side has a separate theory of money (dealing interest rates and inflation), with no clear connection between the two. “We have all of us become used to finding ourselves sometimes on the one side of the moon and sometimes on the other, without knowing what route or journey connects them, related, apparently, after the fashion of our waking and our dreaming lives.” The right split is between the theory of the individual industry and the theory of the economy as a whole. Or perhaps between the stationary economy and the shifting one, for money’s power “flows from its being a link between the present and the future.”

So how does printing money affect prices? Well, the naive view is that it doesn’t — the additional money gets used to buy more things which hires more people — until everyone is hired. Then the money can’t go to hire more people so it just goes to bid up the prices of things, creating inflation. As I said, that’s the naive view — there are a couple complications.

How does money influence demand? Primarily thru the rate of interest, which depends on liquidity preferences, marginal efficiencies, and investment multipliers. But these all depend on other complicating factors.

Marginal prime costs and labor costs increase as industry is forced to use more expensive equipment and laborers, resulting in higher prices. Some industries hit “bottlenecks” first, causing their prices to rise and demand to be funneled into industries that are faster to respond. Then as some workers receive better wages other workers will demand it and, since business is booming, receive it. Finally, with the additional demand equipment and so on will have to be replaced, raising marginal costs.

There’s an asymmetry in the system that workers will resist falling wages, but not rising ones. But this is good, because otherwise wages would fall to zero in any downturn and the entire economy would shut down. But the side effect is that “the very long-run course of prices has almost always been upward.”

Book VI: Short Notes Suggested by the General Theory

22: Why are there trade cycles, aka business cycles, aka booms and busts?

Let’s start by thinking about the end of the boom. So business is booming and everyone’s optimistic — even though costs of production (and maybe interest rates) are rising, sales are too, so expected profits are looking good. But since no one really knows what they’re doing, especially not the speculators, it’s understandable that “when disillusion falls upon an over-optimistic and over-bought market, it should fall with sudden and even catastrophic force.” Everyone gets freaked out that they’re not going to make money anymore and stops investing and raises their liquidity preference, raising interest rates and lowering investment further.

Because these things go together, they’re sometimes mistaken as the cause, but note that it’s the expected return which falls first, then interest rates rise. So even lowering interest rates isn’t enough to recover from the crash. And “it is not so easy to revive the marginal efficiency of capital, determined, as it is, by the uncontrollable and disobedient psychology of the business world. It is the return of confidence, to speak in ordinary language, which is so insusceptible to control in an economy of individualistic capitalism. This is the aspect of the slump which bankers and business men have been right in emphasising, and which the economists who have put their faith in a ‘purely monetary’ remedy have underestimated.”

And there are other problems: when the stock market crashes, rich people see themselves as less rich and decide to start spending less. (And when everyone follows the stock market, like in the US, this applies to everyone.) And the fact that people aren’t spending further decreases expected returns.

So that’s the bust. What about recovery? Well, recovery can’t come until old equipment is used up and has to be replaced and old stocks of goods that were produced get sold off and have to be replenished. When recovery picks up, it feeds on itself in the opposite way. But you can’t jump-start it just by lowering interest rates, since the real problem is expected return. Thus the government must step in.

Reading this, you might think the solution is to raise interest rates to prevent overinvestment during booms, since lowering them doesn’t get you out of slumps. But there’s two kinds of overinvestment: disappointing investments, where the investment would have made sense except the economy collapsed, and genuine overinvestment, where the investment could never have made money. It’s only the second kind that’s an actual waste of resources, and the solution to it isn’t raising interest rates “which would probably deter some useful investments and might further diminish the propensity to consume, but in taking drastic steps, by redistributing incomes or otherwise, to stimulate the propensity to consume.”

Why does redistributing income work? Think about the dot-com bubble where everyone was blowing money on useless fiber-optic cable. If venture capitalists are spending all their money on useless cable, the solution is to take their money away. Instead, you can give it to poor people, who will use it to buy useful things like food and clothing.

What happens isn’t so much excessive investment as misdirected investment. Everyone builds houses thinking they’ll all sell for lots and lots, then they find they aren’t actually selling for so much and the economy collapses. “We reach a condition where there is a shortage of houses, but where nevertheless no one can afford to live in the houses that there are.”

Thus the remedy for the boom is not a higher rate of interest but a lower rate of interest! For that may enable the so-called boom to last. The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom. [â€¦]

Except during the war, I doubt if we have any recent experience of a boom so strong that it led to full employment. â€¦ Nor was there over-investment in the sense that the standard and equipment of housing was so high that everyone, assuming full employment, had all he wanted at a rate which would no more than cover the replacement cost, without any allowance for interest, over the life of the house; and that transport, public services and agricultural improvement had been carried to a point where further additions could not reasonably be expected to yield even their replacement cost. Quite the contrary. It would be absurd to assert of the United States in 1929 the existence of over-investment in the strict sense.

In short, increasing interest rates to kill booms “belongs to the species of remedy which cures the disease by killing the patient.”

What would the world of the permanent boom look like? It’s conceivable that it might lead not just to full employment, but full investment — a world with so much plenty that you couldn’t expect to make a profit on any kind of durable good. “Moreover, this situation might be reached comparatively soonâ€”say within twenty-five years or less. I must not be taken to deny this, because I assert that a state of full investment in the strict sense has never yet occurred, not even momentarily.”

Others say the problem is that the country is so unequal that poor people can’t spend enough. The solution, they propose, is redistributing money to the poor to promote jobs. They are “undoubtedly in the right [at present],” when investment is “unplanned and uncontrolled.” There’s no other way to raise employment. If you can’t increase investment, you have to increase consumption.

But we could increase investment: “the wisest course is to advance on both fronts at once.” Not just so that the people we give money to can buy the new products investment creates, but so that they have enough money to buy even more, and thus spark growth themselves!

23: Now that Keynes has outlined his revolutionary theory, it’s time to look back at other economists the classical school dismissed.

The classical school — including Keynes in earlier years — grew up mocking mercantilism (protectionism) as incoherent and absurd. But maybe it makes some sense: Growth depends on the inducements to new investment. Investment is either foreign or domestic. Domestic investment is encouraged by the interest rate and foreign investment by the balance of trade. Thus, if you ignore direct investment by the government (as people had), these are the two things to be concerned about.

Now in general the interest rate is governed by the quantity of money and “in an age in which substantial foreign loans and the outright ownership of wealth located abroad are scarcely practicable” (not to mention the international gold standard), money equals precious metals which equals the balance of trade. (Since running a trade deficit with a country means sending them your precious metals instead of your exports.) Thus focusing on the balance of trade serves both purposes — and, at a time we didn’t know how to control interest rates, was the only direct means of controlling them.

Not all protectionism promotes the balance of trade, of course — mid-1800s Britain probably would have done best with complete free trade. But mercantilists saw the key points sooner than most, calling for an increase in money to reduce the interest rate.

But the worst part of the international gold system is the way it sets countries against one another. For a country could only keep its citizens employed if it had gold, and the only way to get gold was by taking it from another country (and thus throwing them out of work). “Never in history was there a method devised of such efficacy for setting each country’s advantage at variance with its neighbours’!”

The mercantilists perceived the existence of the problem without being able to push their analysis to the point of solving it. But the classical school ignored the problem, as a consequence of introducing into their premisses conditions which involved its non-existence; with the result of creating a cleavage between the conclusions of economic theory and those of common sense. The extraordinary achievement of the classical theory was to overcome the beliefs of the ‘natural man’ and, at the same time, to be wrong.

Another thing the classical economists long mocked were laws against usury. “I was brought up to believe that the attitude of the Medieval Church to the rate of interest was inherently absurd, and that the subtle discussions aimed at distinguishing the return on money-loans from the return to active investment were merely Jesuitical attempts to find a practical escape from a foolish theory. But I now read these discussions as an honest intellectual effort to keep separate what the classical theory has inextricably confused together, namely, the rate of interest and the marginal efficiency of capital. For it now seems clear that the disquisitions of the schoolmen were directed towards the elucidation of a formula which should allow the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital to be high, whilst using rule and custom and the moral law to keep down the rate of interest.” After all, “individual savings may be absorbed either by investment or by debts, and that there is no security that they will find an outlet in the former.” Laws against usury help ensure they do.

It is convenient to mention at this point the strange, unduly neglected prophet Silvio Gesell (1862-1930), whose work contains flashes of deep insight and who only just failed to reach down to the essence of the matter. In the post-war years his devotees bombarded me with copies of his works; yet, owing to certain palpable defects in the argument, I entirely failed to discover their merit. As is often the case with imperfectly analysed intuitions, their significance only became apparent after I had reached my own conclusions in my own way. Meanwhile, like other academic economists, I treated his profoundly original strivings as being no better than those of a crank. Since few of the readers of this book are likely to be well acquainted with the significance of Gesell, I will give to him what would be otherwise a disproportionate space.

Among Gesell’s proposals are the notion of stamped money (money you have to pay to get stamped regularly to keep it valid currency) which is a way of discouraging people from hoarding. “The idea behind stamped money is sound. â€¦ But there are many difficulties which Gesell did not face. In particular, he was unaware that money was not unique” — if people didn’t hoard it, there’s lots of other things they could hoard.

Keynes also discusses Bernard Mandeville’s incredible book, The Fable of the Bees. This incredible work of economic thought described the division of labor and the invisible hand in 1705, a full seventy years before Adam Smith. And, Keynes points out, it’s largely about the paradox of thrift — centuries before Keynes! It’s basically been written out of economic history, in part, no doubt, because it was written in the form of a scandalous satirical epic poem. Indeed, it so scandalized its readers at the time that it was “convicted as a nuisance by the grand jury of Middlesex in 1723, which stands out in the history of the moral sciences for its scandalous reputation.”

Finally we come to Major Douglas, who led the unorthodox Social Credit movement in the UK:

Major Douglas is entitled to claim, as against some of his orthodox adversaries, that he at least has not been wholly oblivious of the outstanding problem of our economic system. Yet he has scarcely established an equal claim to rank â€” a private, perhaps, but not a major in the brave army of heretics â€” with Mandeville, Malthus, Gesell and Hobson, who, following their intuitions, have preferred to see the truth obscurely and imperfectly rather than to maintain error, reached indeed with clearness and consistency and by easy logic, but on hypotheses inappropriate to the facts.

24: The two great economic problems are unemployment and inequality. We have addressed the first, but what are its implications of the second? Inequality has been addressed somewhat by government redistribution, but some are hesitant to go further because they believe that growth is promoted by savings and so taking away the savings of the rich will retard growth. We have seen that it’s quite the opposite — that redistribution, by increasing effective demand, promotes growth. “One of the chief social justifications of great inequality of wealth is, therefore, removed.”

That said, one wouldn’t want to get rid of money altogether:

[D]angerous human proclivities can be canalised into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunities for money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandisement. It is better that a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens; and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at
"Click Here" To Go Get Savings...

9/27/09, Keynes, Explained Briefly

If you read the economic textbooks, you’ll find that the job market is a market like any other. There’s supply (workers) and demand (employers). And the incredible power of market competition pushes the price (wages) to where those two meet. Thus massive unemployment is about as likely as huge unsold piles of wheat: if people aren’t buying, it’s just because you’re setting the price too high.

And yet, as I write, 17.5% of the country is unemployed. Are they all just insisting on being paid too much? Economists are forced into the most ridiculous explanations. Perhaps people just don’t know where the jobs are, some say. (Maybe the government should run ads for Craigslist.) Or maybe it just takes time for all those former house-builders to learn new jobs. (This despite the fact that unemployment is up in all industries.) But they’re typically forced back to the fundamental conclusion of the textbook: that people are just demanding to be paid too much. It might be for the most innocent of reasons, but facts are facts.

John Maynard Keynes’ great insight was to see that all of this was nonsense. The job market is a very special market, because the people who get “bought” are also the people doing all the buying. After all, why is it that people are hired to farm wheat? It’s because, at the end of the day, other people want to buy it. But if lots of people are out of a job, they’re doing their best to save money, which means cutting back on purchases. And if they cut back on purchases, that means there are fewer people for business to sell to, which means businesses cut back on jobs.

Clearly something is badly wrong with the basic economic theory. So let’s go through Keynes’ masterpiece, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, and understand his theory of how the economy works.

When you get your paycheck at the end of the week, you spend it. But presumably you don’t spend all of it — you put some money away to save, like you were told as a child. Saving is seen as a great national virtue — thus all those Public Service Announcements with talking piggy banks. Everyone knows why: put some money away today and it’ll be worth more tomorrow.

But there’s a kind of illusion involved in this. Money isn’t worth anything on its own, it’s only useful because it can buy things. And it buys things because it pays other people to make them for you. But you can’t save people in your bank account — if fifteen million people are out of work, they can’t put their time in a piggy bank for when things are looking up. The work they could have done is lost forever.

So yes, some people can save while others borrow from them — you can let your neighbor buy two iPods in exchange for letting you buy four next year — but the country, as a whole, cannot. At the end of the day, someone has to buy the things we can make. But if everyone’s saving, that means people aren’t buying. Which means the people making stuff are out of a job.

It’s a vicious cycle: if people buy less, companies make less, which means people get paid less, which means people buy less. And so on, until we’re all out of work. (Thankfully it doesn’t get that bad — but only because some people are refusing to lower their wages. The thing that mainstream economists said was causing unemployment is actually preventing it!)

But this cycle can be run in reverse. Imagine Donald Trump hires unemployed people to build him a new skyscraper. They’re suddenly getting paid again, which means they can start spending again. And each dollar they spend goes to a different business, which can start hiring people itself. And then those newly-hired people start spending the new money they make, and so on. This is the multiplier: each dollar that gets spent provides even more than one dollar’s worth of boost to the economy.

Now let’s look at things from the employer’s side — say you run an truck factory. How do you decide how many trucks to make? Obviously, you make as many as you think you can profitably sell. But there’s no way to calculate something like that — it’s a question about what customers will do in the future. There’s literally no way to know. And yet, obviously, trucks get made.

It used to be, Keynes says, that wealthy men just thought investing was the manly thing to do. They weren’t going to sit around and calculate what kind of bonds yielded the greatest expected return. Bonds are for wusses. They were real men. They were going to take their money and build a railroad.

But they don’t make rich people like that anymore. Nowadays, they put their money in the stock market. Instead of boldly picking one great enterprise to invest in, they shift their money around from week to week (or hire someone else to do it for them). So these days, it’s the stock market that stimulates most new investment.

But how does the stock market figure out what profits are supposed to be? In truth, it has no more clue than you do. It’s really just based around a convention. We all pretend that whatever the stock price is now is a pretty decent guess and then we only have to worry about the various factors that will cause the stock price to change. We forget about the most basic fact: that nobody has any clue what the stock price should be to begin with.

So instead of people trying their best to figure out which businesses will make money in the future, and investing in those, we have people who try to figure out which stock prices will change in the future, and trying to get there first. It’s like a giant game of musical chairs — everybody’s rushing not to be the one left standing when the music stops.

Or, you could say, it’s like those newspaper competitions where you have to pick the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs. The prize goes to the person who picks the faces that are most picked, so you don’t pick the faces you find prettiest, but instead the faces you think everyone else will find prettiest. But it’s not even that, since everyone else is doing the same thing — you’re actually picking the faces you think everyone else will think everyone else will find prettiest! And no doubt there are some people who take this even further.

You might think this means that someone who actually did the work and tried to calculate expected profits would clean up, taking money from all the people playing musical chairs. But it’s not so simple. Calculating expected profits is really quite hard. To make money, you’d have to be unusually good at it, and it seems much easier to just guess what everyone else will do.

And even if you were somehow good at guessing long-term profits, where would you get the money to invest? It’s in the fundamental nature of your strategy that your investments seem crazy to everyone else. If you’re successful, they’ll write it off as a lucky fluke. And when your stocks aren’t doing well (which is most of the time — they’re long-term picks, remember), people will take this as evidence of your failures and pull their money out.

The scary thing is that the more open our markets get, the faster people can move their money around and the more trading is based on this kind of speculation instead of serious analysis. And that’s scary because — recall — the whole point of the stock market is to decide the crucial question of what we, as a society, should build for the future. As Keynes says, “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

The best solution is probably a small tax on each trade. Not only would this raise a ton of money (modern estimates suggest even a tiny tax could raise $100 billion a year), it would help redirect all the brains on Wall Street from these wasteful games of musical chairs to something actually useful.

But even if we solve the problem of the stock market, there’s still some irreducible uncertainty. Because whether new investment makes sense always depends on whether the economy will be doing well in the future. And whether the economy is doing well depends on whether there’s new investment. So, at the end of the day, investment doesn’t depend simply on a careful calculation of future expected yield, but on our “animal spirits,” our optimism about the future. It’s this factor that exaggerates booms and deepens slumps and makes it hard to get out of a bad situation.

Even more perversely, it means economic performance depends in no small part on keeping businessmen happy. If electing Obama gets businessmen depressed, they might pull back their investments and send the economy into a slump. It doesn’t even have to be intentional — they may very well believe that a President Obama is bad for the economy. But when you have a system that only works when businesspeople feel good, their fears become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The result, Keynes suggests, is that the government will have to step in to prevent the economy from crashing every time rich people get a bit of indigestion.

So that’s how we calculate the income side of things, now what about costs? Most costs are pretty clear — you need to buy equipment and hire people. But since you need to make stuff now that you can only sell in the future, one of your big costs is going to be money to use in the meantime. And the cost of money is just the interest rate. (If you get a loan for a million dollars at 5% interest, you’re essentially paying $50,000 for the right to use the money now.)

Thus lowering interest rates increases investment — it reduces the cost of getting money, which reduces the cost of making stuff, which means more things can make a profit. And if more things can make a profit, more things get made, which means more people get hired. So what determines the interest rate?

Well, if the interest rate is the cost of money, the obvious answer is the amount of money in circulation. If there’s a lot of money lying around, you can get some pretty cheap. Which means that, fundamentally, unemployment is caused by a lack of money: more money (assuming people don’t hoard it all) means lower interest rates, lower interest rates (assuming expected profits don’t crash) means higher investment, higher investment (assuming people don’t stop buying) means more employment, and more employment means higher prices, which means we’re going to need more money.

Money is created by the central bank (the Federal Reserve in the US), which decides what they want the interest rate to be and then prints new money (which they use to buy up government debt) until the interest rate is where they want. To get the economy back on track, all they have to do is keep lowering interest rates until investment picks up again and everyone has a job.

But there’s one catch: the interest rate can’t go below zero. (Keynes didn’t think this problem was very likely, but in the US we’re facing it right now.) What do you do if the interest rate is zero and people are still out of work?

Well, you can pray that billionaires will start hiring us all to build them giant mansions, but that’s no way to run a country. The government has to step in. Instead of waiting for billionaires to build pleasure-domes, the government can hire people to build things we all need — roads, schools, houses, high-speed Internet connections. Although, honesty, it doesn’t have to be things we all need. They could hire people to do anything. This is why inspecting the stimulus money for waste is so ridiculous — waste is perfectly fine, the important thing is to get the money into circulation so that the economy can get back on track.

Another good solution is redistributing income. Poor people are a lot more likely to spend money than billionaires. If we take some money from the billionaires and give it to the poor, the poor will use it to buy things they need and people will get jobs making those things.

Remember that money is just a kind of illusion. In reality, there are just people who want things and people who make things. But we’re stuck in a completely ridiculous situation: there are lots of people who desperately want jobs making things — they’re literally not doing anything else — while at the same time there are lots of people who desperately want things made. It seems ridiculous not to do something about this just because some people have all the little green sheets of paper!

Capitalism seems to go through frustrating cycles of booms and busts. Some people say the solution is just to prevent the booms — raise interest rates so the party doesn’t get out of hand and we won’t all be sorry the next morning. Keynes disagrees: the remedy “is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom.”

Think back to the dot-com era, when venture capitalists were spending all their money laying fiber-optic cable under the street. The right solution wasn’t for the Fed to raise interest rates until even punch-drunk venture capitalists could realize all this investment in fiber wouldn’t be profitable. The right solution was to take their money away. Give it to the poor, who will spend it on something useful, like food and clothing.

So those are Keynes’ prescriptions for a successful economy: low interest rates, government investment, and redistribution to the poor. And, for a time — from around the 1940s to the 1970s — that’s kind of what we did. The results were magical: the economy grew strongly, inequality fell away, everyone had jobs.

But, starting in the 1970s, the rich staged a counterattack. They didn’t like watching inequality — and their wealth — melt away. There was a resurgence in classical economics, Keynes was declared to have been debunked, and interest rates were raised drastically, throwing millions out of work. The economy tanked, inequality soared, and things have never been the same since. For a while people talked about levels of inequality that hadn’t been seen since the 1920s. Then they talked about a recession the size of which hadn’t been seen since the 1930s.

Once again, Keynes provides us with the instructions on how to get out of this mess. The question is whether we’ll follow them.

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9/27/09, Redesign

9/27/09, The New Science of Causation

It seems like each new day brings another one of those headlines: regular sleep “linked to” life expectancy, playing video games “associated with” surgical prowess, bullies “at risk” of becoming criminals, and “does breastfeeding reduce a baby’s blood pressure?” (the old rhetorical question gambit). Sometimes the articles are clear: the research has only found a correlation between two variables — breastfeeding and low blood pressure were found together. But more often, they imply that causation is at work — that breastfeeding causes lower blood pressure.

You’ve surely heard that old statistics adage: correlation does not imply causation. Just because breastfeeding and low blood pressure are found together doesn’t mean the first caused the second. Perhaps the second caused the first (moms might prefer to keep breastfeeding calmer babies) or some other thing caused both of them (maybe moms who don’t work both tend to breastfeed and stress their kids less). You can’t tell from correlation alone.

Indeed, the philosopher David Hume argued that we could never know whether causation was at work. “Solidity, extension, motion; these qualities are all complete in themselves, and never point out any other event which may result from them,” he wrote. But not causation: “One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined, but never connected.”

And, as philosophers since Plato and Sextus Empiricus have argued, such evidence can deceive us. Imagine finding a button and, each time you press it, a beep is heard. Normally, we’d assume that the button always causes the beep. But we’d be wrong — one day the power goes out and the button does nothing.

Which is why, centuries later, Karl Pearson, the founder of mathematical statistics, banned the notion of causality from the discipline, calling it “a fetish amidst the inscrutable arcana of modern science” and insisting that just by understanding simple correlation one “grasped the essence of the conception of association between cause and effect.”

His followers have kept it banished ever since. “Considerations of causality should be treated as they have always been in statistics: preferably not at all,” wrote a former president of the Biometric Society. “It would be very healthy if more researchers abandon thinking of and using terms such as cause and effect,” insisted another prominent social scientist.

And there the matter has stayed. Causality is a concept as meaningless as “the soul” and just as inappropriate for modern mathematical science. And yet, somehow, this doesn’t seem quite right. If causation is nothing but a meaningless word that laypeople have layered over correlation, then why the ceaseless insistence that “correlation does not imply causation”? Why are our thoughts filled with causal comments (he made me do it!) and never correlational ones?

The result is exceptionally strange. Statistics has no mathematical way to express the notion “mud does not cause rain”. It can say mud is correlated with rain (i.e. that there’s a high probability of seeing mud if you see rain), no problem, but expressing the simple causal concept — the kind of thing any five-year-old would know — is impossible.

Statisticians may have never had to confront this problem but, luckily for us, Artificial Intelligence researchers have. It turns out if you’re making a robot, having a notion of causality is essential — not just because it’s the only way to understand the humans, but because it’s the only way to get anything done! How are you supposed to turn the lights on if you don’t know that it’s the light-switch and not the clicking noise that causes it?

The result is that in recent years several teams of AI researchers have turned their focus from building robots to building mathematical tools for dealing with causality. At the forefront is Judea Pearl (author of the book Causality, Cambridge University Press) and his group at UCLA and Clark Glymour (author of The Mind’s Arrows, MIT Press), Peter Spirtes, and their colleagues at Carnegie Mellon. The result is a quiet revolution in the field of statistics — one most practicing statisticians are still unaware of.

They started by dismissing Plato’s skepticism about the problem. Granted, they say, we may never know for sure whether the button always causes the beep, but that’s too stringent a demand. Science never knows anything for sure — the best we can hope for is extracting the most knowledge from the evidence we have. Or, as William James put it, “To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another.”

Next, they created a new mathematical function to formalize our notion of causality: do(…). do expresses the notion of intervening and actually trying something. Thus, to mathematically express the notion that mud does not cause rain, we can say P(rain | do(mud=true)) = P(rain) — in other words, the chance of rain given that you made it muddy is the same as the chance of rain in general.

But causes rarely comes in pairs like these — more often it comes in complicated chains: clouds cause rain which causes both mud and wet clothing and the latter causes people to find a change of clothes. And so the researchers express these as networks, usually called causal Bayes nets or graphical causal models, which show each thing (clouds, rain, mud) as a node and the causal relationships as arrows between them:

(clouds) | | v (rain) /\ / \ / \ v v (mud) (wet) | | v (change)

And all this was just the warm-up act. Their real breakthrough was this: just as kids can discover causes by observation, computers can discern causes from data. Now obviously the easiest way to do this is just to measure what happens when you do(X=x) directly — this, for example, is what randomized controlled trials do. Kids do it by dropping a fork on the floor and seeing if this causes Mom to pick it up; scientists do it by randomly giving some people a real drug and others just a placebo. The result is that we can be sure of the cause — after all, it was we who dropped the fork and gave out the drug; nothing else could be sneaking in and causing it.

But in most cases we don’t have this luxury. We’d like to know whether a new tax policy will cause the economy to tank before we enact it; we’d like to know whether smoking causes cancer without forcing kids to smoke; and even in randomized controlled trials, we can give half the patients the real drug, but we can’t make them take it. If the drug being tested makes someone so horribly sick that they stop taking it and then get better, drug trials still count that as a victory for the drug!

Obviously we can’t always know such things just from observing, but in a surprising number of cases we can. And the researchers have developed a mathematical method — called the do-calculus — for determining just when you can. Feed it a Bayes network of variables, their relationships, and their values, and it will return back what it knows and with what certainty.

Thus, in an example Pearl frequently uses, tobacco companies used to argue that the correlation between smoking and cancer was simply because there were certain genes that made people both more likely to smoke and more likely to get cancer. It didn’t matter if they quit smoking — their genes would lead cancer to get them anyway. Pearl shows that if we assume only smoking causes tar deposits on the lungs and the tar deposits are the only way smoking causes cancer, we can simply measure the tar deposits and calculate whether the tobacco companies are right.

Or, in another example in his book Causality, he analyzes data from a study on a cholesterol-reducing drug. Since whether people got the placebo or not is unassociated with any other variables (because it was randomly assigned) if we merely assume that receiving the real drug has some influence on whether people take it, we can calculate the effectiveness of the drug even with imperfect compliance. Indeed, we can even estimate how effective the drug would have been for people who were assigned it but didn’t take it!

And that’s not all — Peter Spirtes and Clark Glymour have developed an algorithm (known as PC, for Peter-Clark) that, given just the data, will do its best to calculate the causal network behind it. You can download the software implementing it, called TETRAD IV, for free from their department’s website — it even has a nice graphical interface for drawing and displaying the networks.

As an experiment, I fed it some data from the IRS about 2005 income tax returns. It informed me that the percentage people donate to charity is correlated with the number of dependents they have, which in turn correlates with how much people receive from EITC. That amount, along with average income, causes how many people are on EITC. Average income is correlated with the tax burden which is correlated with inequality. All interesting and reasonable — and the result of just a few minutes’ work.

The applications for such tools are endless. As Pearl points out, they have the possibility to radically improved how statistics are used in medicine, epidemiology, economics, sociology, and law. And, as Glymour observes, it lets us better understand results in neuroscience and psychology. Take The Bell Curve, the 1992 bestseller that argued blacks had lower IQs, causing poorer performance in school and thus lower-paying jobs and more crime. Glymour shows, by applying the do-calculus, these results only hold if you assume that there are no other interactions between the variables (e.g. that parental attitude toward learning doesn’t affect both IQ and performance in school). But the PC algorithm and TETRAD IV can demonstrate otherwise.

Such results may be a revolution in social science, but compared to building human-like robots, they’re child’s play. That’s certainly the impression one gets from Pearl. Discussing his work at a conference of Artificial Intelligence researchers, he said:

One of the reasons I find these areas to be fertile grounds to try out new ideas is that, unlike AI, tangible rewards can be reaped from solving relative small problems. Problems involving barely 4 to 5 variables, which we in AI regard as toy-problems, carry tremendous payoffs in public health and social science.

Billions of dollars are invested each year on various public-health studies: Is chocolate ice-cream good for you or bad for you? Would red wine increase or decrease your heart rate? etc. etc.

The same applies to the social sciences. Would increasing police budget decrease or increase crime rates? Is the Colorado school incident due to TV violence or failure of public education? The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research has distributed about 800 gigabytes worth of such studies in 1993 alone.

Unfortunately the causal-analytical methodology currently available to researchers in these fields is rather primitive, and every innovation can make a tremendous difference. […] This has been changing recently as new techniques are beginning to emerge from AI laboratories. I predict that a quiet revolution will take place in the next decade in the way causality is handled in statistics, epidemiology, social science, economics, and business. While news of this revolution will never make it to DARPA’s newsletter, and even NSF is not equipped to appreciate or support it, it will nevertheless have enormous intellectual and technological impact on our society.

For science’s sake, I hope he’s right.

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9/27/09, Tim DeLaughter and the Boundary of Spectacle

The traditional symphony is a highly formal event. Musicians, in formal clothes, sit in a carefully-designed arrangement high above the audience who (also usually in formal clothes) sits in seats and applauds at formally-appropriate moments (recall the odd paradox of most of the audience unsure when to clap; is it the end of the piece or just the end of the movement?). The music performed is also often formal, classical music, like fine art generally, typically signifying something a cut above everyday life.

This is challenged somewhat by things like the Boston Pops, a symphony who, for the 4th of July, performed “Sweet Caroline” with Neil Diamond to a crowd of people sitting on towels on the lawn waving flags. But, even so, the main feeling was of people crowding around to see something spectacular — look, it’s Neil Diamond!

The sense was rather different when, wandering past techs and grips, Tim DeLaughter, wearing the dingiest of street clothes, climbed over a forest of cables to the microphone and begun talking about how his father used to beat him for imitating Neil Diamond. Look, it’s him! was thoroughly tempered with Who is this guy?

“So, you know, I would say things like (Neil Diamond voice:) Please pass the potatoes! I’m so very hungry! [pats his stomach] and he’d say Don’t you dare do that again and bitchslap me [mimes bitchslapping] and of course I’d do it again and again.”

And so the audience was throughly puzzled by the time he, rather casually, dropped in the line “Let me bring out the band” and the couple dozen members wandered out onto the stage, also in street clothes. But soon the lights faded and Tim grabbed the microphone and in a burst of light and music, they launched into a rousing version of “Sweet Caroline.”

Tim pranced on stage like no one you’ve ever seen and the audience bounced up and down and sung along with enthusiasm, but in a throughly confused manner. No one was quite sure how seriously to take a disheveled-looking bunch of dancers, violinists, trumpeters, and harpists led by a guy in street clothes prancing around doing his best imitation of Neil Diamond. (Although, God, nothing can top the chorus girls flicking their hair in tune with “Live and Let Die.”)

A rock band is a special kind of spectacle all on its own — think of Beatlesmania, for example, or how “rock star” is a generalized term for a special kind of awe-inspiring celebrity — and Tim did everything he could to both heighten this sense and demolish it. They’d launch into furious imposing rock songs and the audience would scream and reach toward them, but then the rock would fade down into a quieter symphonic bridge section and Tim would sit down on the stage and chat casually with someone in the front row, while still playing the bridge’s main repeating theme on his guitar.

All the usual audience-musician relations were subverted. Musicians often point their mic at the crowd to inspire them to scream the key line in a chorus. Tim, in the middle of a verse, would bend down and point the microphone in a fan’s face and let them sing it. And while some musicians “bodysurf” on the crowd’s hands, while he sang about being “under the ocean”, Tim literally lay down on the beer-drenched sticky floor and crawled between their legs.

The tension was only heightened in the second act, when the band appeared in their famous white robes, but approached the stage by walking through the audience, saying hi to everyone and hugging like old friends. Tim frequently jumped down into the audience and hugged people in the middle of singing, the microphone in one hand reaching around their back to meet his face on the other side.

The fundamental tension of celebrity is appearing to the world as someone superhuman — achiever of great deeds, seen only in airbrushed photos and on giant screens, known by vastly more people than they themselves know — while still, at base, being a human like everyone else, the kind of person who goes down the street to get a sandwich and chats with people on the subway and all the other humdrum pieces of daily life. It’s an odd contradiction and never have I seen it presented better than watching the Polyphonic Spree on stage last night.

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9/27/09, On Finishing

NOTE: For those who have actually read Infinite Jest, you’ll probably get more out of my very spoiler-heavy summary of what happens just after the end of the book.

I don’t remember starting Infinite Jest. I don’t even remember buying it. I remember seeing its bulk and oddly-entrancing cover in the basement of the seminary coop. But the price sticker on the back shows I bought it on sale at a Borders. I don’t think I’d read anything by DFW when I bought it. I can’t remember why I would have. I very rarely read novels. Did someone recommend it? I can’t imagine who. Maybe I just thought, I need something long to take on this trip.

I remember reading chapter 2 (Eredy Waits for Pot) the week I spent in Boston after I got back from Europe. So I must have taken it to Europe. So I probably bought it at the San Francisco Westfield Borders; that was the bookstore I shopped at back then.

Did I start it in Europe? Around page 750, I found a note I couldn’t read in a hand I didn’t recognize with a symbol I couldn’t understand. But it was stamped with the address of our German hotel. Although I don’t remember having a room in the hotel myself; I just remember sleeping in other people’s rooms. I must have had a room, though, right?

That week in Boston I tried to write a book. Then I got sick. I stopped leaving the apartment. I stopped eating. I went a bit bats, I suppose. But it was getting sick that start of it, some kind of bad cold or something. I remember that. It didn’t leave me with much interest in swallowing food.

I remember taking the novel to the cafe on the corner. I remember the cafe being largely empty, huge lakes of golden light streaming in through the window, making everything glow. Time seemed to be slowed down, every moment made up of beautiful frames. And I read about Eredy waiting for pot.

My apartment at the time was a dingy place. My roommates and I had moved to San Francisco and the place was left empty except for the collecting dust. It was a big place, held three people before we left, and I had it to myself, to go mad in.

I next remember reading it in my new place in San Francisco, which I got later that year. I remember thinking it didn’t make much sense and had only a handful of good parts. I dusted it off again at my new place in Boston for Infinite Summer, starting from where I left off. But around page 500, I realized it wasn’t a bunch of isolated stories like I’d assumed. As the Aventura kicked shit into the Antitoi’s door I realized I’d been missing the point. On a trip to DC, I flipped back to check a detail and was shocked to find whole swathes of things I didn’t even recognize, whole chapters I’d not only forgotten but showed no signs of ever having read, rereading them didn’t jog a single memory.

The whole book is laced through with mocking cracks at this disconnected style, like a preemptive apology. And the ending really doesn’t help matters. But in the middle it is truly grand, some of the best fiction ever. I just hope that I’ll remember it.

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9/27/09, Honest Theft

Yesterday I mentioned the case of my friends who save money by living at MIT. They sleep on couches in the common rooms, break into the showers in the gym, and steal food and drink from the cafeterias. They use the money they save on necessities to promote the public good. I suggested that they’re actually behaving more morally than the average citizen. This seems shocking, so let’s look at the objections in depth.

There’s the obvious argument that by taking these things without paying, they’re actually passing on their costs to the rest of the MIT community. But for most of these things, there are no costs: no MIT students use the couches or the showers at night. And while it’s true that taking MIT food and drink probably does increase the university’s costs slightly, this concern doesn’t seem too consistently applied. Do you think it’s wrong to take one of the free refreshments at an MIT event? The consequences seem about the same.

Even if they were costing MIT money, it seems this could be justified. MIT receives enormous sums from the wealthy and powerful, more than they know how to spend. Much of it gets spent on unneeded luxuries for their already-elite students. Redistributing it to the town’s poorer residents seems potentially justified.

Others claim that this lifestyle results in increased security costs. I don’t see how that’s true unless the students get caught. Even if they did, MIT has a notoriously relaxed security policy, so they likely wouldn’t get in too much trouble and MIT probably wouldn’t do anything to up their security.

A more serious complaint is that this “erodes the social contact.” Peter Singer (no contract theorist he!) puts this more clearly in his book Democracy and Disobedience: In any society people are going to have disputes. Everyone’s better off if these disputes are resolved without resorting to force. Thus in most societies there are governments to help resolve disputes peacefully. Resorting to force when you don’t like their resolution could tip things back to the bad state of people resolving things through force in general.

I don’t think this is a particularly plausible concern. My friends (understandably) keep quiet about their lifestyle. If anyone, I am the one undermining the social contract by publicizing it. But let’s keep me out of this analysis for a second. It’s hard to see how sleeping on MIT couches will lead to violent revolution.1

It’s possible there are other objections to this style of life. Or perhaps some objectors are right — and not only shouldn’t we steal from MIT, but we shouldn’t take advantage of their largesse either. But thinking about these questions — as opposed to blindly following rules — is what it means to be a moral person and instead of eroding the social contract it seems much more likely to strengthen our moral sense.

Singer identifies one other concern, particular to democracies. (He thinks the previous concern is especially relevant in democracies, since there’s not much improvement revolution can lead to, but in the end he decides this isn’t too relevant since modern “democracies” aren’t actually democratic.) He suggests that it’s wrong to participate in politics and vote like everybody else, but then refuse to follow the rules when the decision ends up being something you don’t like.

I think this is a fairly silly objection and basically impossible to justify on utilitarian grounds. (The book is Singer’s doctoral thesis and is weirdly agnostic on utilitarianism. It’s also not particularly well-written, so my apologies if I’m missing part of Singer’s argument.)

Imagine it’s a presidential election year and the major issue is that candidate A has promised to make kids in public schools wear uniforms while candidate B opposes it. (Imagine also that the president has the power to accomplish this rule change by simple executive order.) Whatever happens, you refuse to send your child to school wearing a uniform — you plan to keep dressing them as you do now. You have two choices: vote for candidate B or not cast a vote for president.

Singer suggests that if you vote for B and A wins, you ought to make your child wear the uniform. It’s hard to see how this helps anyone. Nobody knows whether you voted for president or not (it’s a secret ballot), no good (as far as I can see) comes from not voting. Indeed, if you vote for B, you make it more likely that everyone avoids this unjust law and you make it more likely you won’t have to resort to civil disobedience and erode the social fabric.

It’s hard to see how any intuitive notion of obligation can trump this. ↩

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9/27/09, A Short Course in Ethics

How are we to live? Most people seem to agree that there are “right” things and “wrong” things and we should try to do the right ones, but they’re less clear on how to figure out what the right ones are.

Some say there are certain moral rules (don’t murder, don’t steal) that we must follow to be right. But how do you decide what those rules are? Many such rules have been proposed; how do we pick the good ones?

If you ask someone to justify a rule, they usually do it by listing its consequences: if we don’t steal, God will reward us; everyone will be happier if we stop killing. In the end, it seems like everything boils down to consequences: good acts are those which accomplish good things.

So how do we decide what good things are? Doesn’t everyone have their own idea of what’s good? Instead of trying to promote one particular person’s notion of what’s good, it seems like we should balance everyone’s good. In most cases, it’s impossible for us to know what’s actually good for a person, so this usually means taking their word for it and trying to give them what they want.

(Cases where people don’t seem to want what’s good for them are usually cases where people are confused about what they want. I may think I really want to eat this whole box of cookies but later I’ll realize I really wish I hadn’t.)

But everyone wants different things — how do we balance their desires? It seems like the only fair thing to do is to treat everyone equally. Of course, this doesn’t mean treating every want equally: if one person wants a yacht and another person wants a dry place to sleep tonight, the second want seems much stronger than the first; filling it will accomplish more overall good.

Here’s another way to look at this. Imagine that before we were born, we all sat up in the heavens and talked about how to design the world. None of us yet know which bodies we would be born into or which parents we’d have, so none of us can possibly be biased. Aren’t we all going to want to promote the greatest good overall? We’ll make sure the worst-off aren’t particularly worse-off in case we’re one of them, and we’ll make sure the rest aren’t especially handicapped in case we’re one of them.1 If we have to choose between a world with one more yacht for Larry Ellison and one with one more dry place to sleep for a woman in poverty, we’ll probably pick the dry place.

So we have our simple moral principle: when faced with a question, pick the answer that will accomplish the most overall good. Two friends both want to borrow my TV tonight, but one already has a TV and just wants it so he can watch two channels at once, while the other can’t afford even a single television. Our principle suggests the TV goes to the second.

But our principle doesn’t just apply to the questions we’re obviously faced with. Surely there are many other people who want a TV and have even less than my friend. By our logic, they would seem to deserve the TV even more, even though they didn’t happen to be asking me for it and thus forcing me to confront the question.

It seems like we need to think more carefully about the implicit question of each moment: what do I do now — with my time, my money, my possessions? And it seems like we need to apply the same moral rule.

The conclusion is inescapable: we must live our lives to promote the most overall good. And that would seem to mean helping those most in want — the world’s poorest people.

Our rule demands one do everything they can to help the poorest — not just spending one’s wealth and selling one’s possessions, but breaking the law if that will help. I have friends who, to save money, break into buildings on the MIT campus to steal food and drink and naps and showers. They use the money they save to promote the public good. It seems like these criminals, not the average workaday law-abiding citizen, should be our moral exemplars.

Such a thorough-going conception of ethics seems incredibly difficult. Surely it requires severe changes in our life. The traditional notion of ethics is much easier — there are some bad things (stealing, lying, cheating) and we need to try our best not to do them. But, as in any field, it’s important to separate the truth from what’s convenient. People are often criticized for not doing what they think is right (hypocrisy), but not believing in what’s right because it’s hard to do is far worse!

I am convinced that the account here is largely correct, but I certainly don’t live up to its demanding standards. And that’s OK. One of the conclusions of this argument is that it’s impossible to be perfectly moral. By accepting that, and keeping it in the back of my mind, I do a little better each day.

For a long time, people told me eating meat was wrong and I refused to believe them, because I thought it would be impossible for me not to eat meat. Then one day, I accepted that they were right and I was doing the wrong thing and I decided I could live with that. I wasn’t perfect. But shortly after I decided that, meat started seeming less and less attractive, and I started eating less and less, and now I don’t eat it at all anymore.

Accepting you’re immoral is the first step to being a more moral person.

This thought experiment comes from philosopher John Rawls, although its conclusion has been modified by Peter Singer. ↩

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9/27/09, Why I Am Not Gay

Until recently, men having sex with men was disapproved of in American culture. Actually, “disapproved of” isn’t really the right word — it was immoral, illegal, disgusting. People who did it lived in secrecy, under the constant threat of blackmail for their actions.

In the tumult of the 1960s, various out-groups — blacks, Chicanos, Native Americans — begun organizing themselves and demanding to be respected and given their due. And men-who-had-sex-with-men decided that they were an out-group — they were gay — and they deserved rights too.

In doing so, they transformed an action (having relationships with someone of the same gender) into an identity (“being gay”). And, using the normal human mechanisms for distinguishing between people in your club and those not in it, they closed ranks. Gay men didn’t have sex with women. Those who did weren’t gay, they were “bi” (which became a whole new identity in itself) — or probably just lying to themselves. And straight men had to be on constant guard against being attracted to other men — if they were, it meant that deep down, they were actually gay.

This new gay identity was projected back through history — famous historical figures were “outed” as gay, because they’d once taken lovers of their own gender. They truly were gay underneath, it was said — it was just a homophobic society that forced them to appear to like the opposite sex.

Along with the identity went an attempt at justification. Being gay wasn’t “a choice,” they argued — it was innate. Some people were just born gay and others weren’t. To a culture that tried to “correct” gay people into being straight, they insisted that correction was impossible — they just weren’t wired this way. (They even provided a ridiculous genetic explanation for how a species with a small percentage gay people might evolve.)

This might have been a good thing to say — maybe even necessary in such a homophobic culture — but in the end it has to be seen as simply wrong. Having sex with other people of your gender isn’t an identity, it’s an act. And, like sex in general among consenting adults, people should be able to do it if they want to. Having sex with someone shouldn’t require an identity crisis. (Nobody sees having-sex-with-white-people as part of their identity, even if that’s primarily who they’re attracted to.)

People shouldn’t be forced to categorize themselves as “gay,” “straight,” or “bi.” People are just people. Maybe you’re mostly attracted to men. Maybe you’re mostly attracted to women. Maybe you’re attracted to everyone. These are historical claims — not future predictions. If we truly want to expand the scope of human freedom, we should encourage people to date who they want; not just provide more categorical boxes for them to slot themselves into. A man who has mostly dated men should be just as welcome to date women as a woman who’s mostly dated men.

So that’s why I’m not gay. I hook up with people. I enjoy it. Sometimes they’re men, sometimes they’re women. I don’t see why it needs to be any more complicated than that.

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9/27/09, A Political Startup

“Politics is like the weather: everybody discusses it but nobody actually does anything about it.”

The golden dome of the Massachusetts State House rises majestically over the grass of Boston Common. The sun glints off the dome while kids play on the grass, but on the State House steps there is nobody except for a couple of my friends — and me, holding a ridiculously-large stack of paper that threatened to blow away in the breeze. “This is what failure looks like,” I thought.

Within half an hour, I found myself standing in the same place, surrounded by TV cameras and microphones on all sides, reporters throwing questions as fast as I could answer them. And the papers hadn’t blown away. How did I get here?

At the beginning of the year, I cofounded a political action committee, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. We had no money and no members and not much of a plan for how to get them. We wrote up long proposals for big donors on why they should write us checks, and tried negotiating with electoral candidates on why they should send us members, but neither of these were particularly successful. Then Jon Stewart attacked Jim Cramer.

Cramer came to symbolize the foolishness and vapidity of the media in the face of the financial crisis. His blatantly buffoonish cluelessness (“Don’t move your money from Bear! That’s just being silly! Don’t be silly!”) were the epitome of a press that championed the housing bubble and fumbled the crash. We were giddy about the press getting their day in scorn, but we wanted to accomplish positive change as well. So we hit upon the idea of starting a petition to demand CNBC hire someone who was right about the housing crisis.

We spread the word to friends and bloggers and before we knew it we had nearly 20,000 signatures — 20,000 new members. It was quite the start.

A couple months later, frustrated that Norm Coleman wouldn’t drop his spurious legal challenges against Al Franken being named a Senator, we started NormDollar.com. We asked people to donate a dollar each day Norm Coleman didn’t drop out of the race, money we’d spend electing progressive candidates. It was featured on Hardball and throughout the political press. We also videotaped Norm’s donors’ reactions when we told them about the program. But my favorite was when we presented Norm with a big novelty check for him to sign, representing all the money he’d raised for progressives.

Now we had money too.

I came back from my month offline to find we were raising money for TV ads — running ads in DC pressuring representatives to support the public health care option, asking whether they’d sold out to their insurance industry campaign contributors. And when Sen. Ben Nelson started a campaign to stall the health care bill, we filmed an ad with Mike Snider. Mike talked plainly to the camera about how, as owner of the local Syzzlyn Skillet, he received a call from his insurers saying they were raising his rates by 42%. “I can’t afford that!” he exclaimed. And then to hear his own Senator was trying to prevent health care reform?

Mike was just an average guy who made a real political difference. After we started airing our ad, Ben Nelson’s spokesperson tried to denounce him and the Senator himself called Mike and asked to see his health care bills. Mike was a guest on The Rachel Maddow Show and his restaurant has become a base of operations for the local political community. Mike’s story was so powerful that Ben Nelson was forced to put up his own ads directly responding to it — even though Nelson isn’t up for reelection in years — in which he (ridiculously) calls Mike a lying DC politician.

Mike’s story really inspired me as to the difference just one person could make, but I never thought that person would be me. When my Senator, Ted Kennedy, passed away, I wanted to honor his memory by fighting for the causes he fought for. His last request had been a letter to the Massachusetts legislature asking them to change the law and let a replacement be appointed to his seat to continue his fight for universal health care. Without the change, the seat would stay vacant for five months while an election could be scheduled — and the next five months will be crucial.

With the rest of the (growing) PCCC team, we came up with a plan to launch a petition asking the legislature to honor that request. We sent out an email asking people to sign and tell their friends. Within a few days, we had 20,000 signatures. I was blown away — clearly people cared.

I’d promised to deliver the signatures on Monday, without really thinking about what that entailed. I called the office of the Senate President and Speaker of the House to ask when I could come by and film a short video of the petitions being dropped off. The President of the Senate’s office blew me off, insisting that under no circumstances were cameras allowed in their office and saying that the President simply couldn’t meet with me. So we decided to make the delivery something they couldn’t ignore.

We emailed our list to ask people in the area to show up on the State House steps at 11am Monday. Then we emailed the press and asked them to get there at 11:15. I stayed up all night the night before, feeding paper into the printer trying to print out 20,000 names. Then I grabbed a stack and headed to the State House.

The stack — 600 sheets or so — kept trying to fall over and blow away and at the State House there were only a couple friends who were loaning me their camera. We decided to go in and scope out President Murray’s office. When we came back, our members started arriving: old ladies with their grandchildren, college students, and everyone in between. The media started pressing closer: a photographer for the Herald, a cameraman for Fox. Microphones kept being shoved in my face and people kept asking me to spell my name. I hefted the stack of petitions and kept repeating why I was here.

Local TV news isn’t exactly known for its crack reporters, but I have to say I was impressed by Janet Wu. She didn’t just ask me the standard questions, but kept pushing me on the hard stuff, barking responses at me, not letting me off the hook. The other reporters smelled blood and joined in. Soon I was at the center of a full scrum of cameras and microphones — surrounded on all sides, every local TV station there. I like to think I comported myself well: I didn’t get angry or flustered, I refused to me taken off-message, I kept stressing that this was about doing what the people wanted.

(Later, away from the cameras, Wu was a completely different person. “Hey there, little guy,” she cooed at a grandchild. “Hey, it’s OK, you can talk to me.” Actually, I thought the kid might have the right idea by staying quiet.)

At some point all the cameras dematerialized. “OK, go in,” someone said. “Just pretend we’re not here.” They’d all rematerialized down the street, to film us marching into the capitol, stack of signatures in hand.

Believe it or not, it’s not easy to walk into the state capitol holding 600 pieces of paper with TV cameras in front of you and a crowd of supporters behind. I kept wondering where to look and trying not to lose the rest of the crowd. Who knows how that footage came out. And when I got up the steps the reporters dematerialized again and rematerialized inside at the Senate President’s office, to film us marching down the hallway. We entered her office and all crowded in — I didn’t think we were all going to fit, but we just barely did. The receptionist — in the middle of a phone call — looked a bit flustered. We waited patiently. Soon a broad-shouldered man in a suit came out. “Thanks so much for the petitions,” he said, taking them from me. “The proposal will go through the usual process. He turned to head out. I was dumbstruck.

But, bravely, one of the older women spoke up. “Wait,” she said. “The normal process? Isn’t this a matter of some urgency?” “All I can say is it will go through the usual process.” Those women wouldn’t let him go. But eventually he did, looking the perfect image of the arrogant unconcerned Boston pol, and Janet Wu stuck a microphone in my face. “Do you feel satisfied?” she asked. I started to speak but she interrupted. “Wait. OK, go again: Do you feel satisfied?”

Outside, a cameraman turned the bright lights on one of the older woman. She was saying, far more clearly and convincingly than me, that no, she wasn’t satisfied. That this was an important issue and she wanted to be heard. I was so glad she came.

And then the press and the supporters dematerialized again. I was left, once again, alone with just my friends. We stood in the hallway trying to process what just happened. We caught the man who’d taken the petitions as he was coming out of the office. “So, what is your actual title?” I asked. “Director of Communications,” he said.

“And where is the Senate President really?” asked a friend. “Oh, she’s in Russia,” he explained. “Russia?” “Yeah, she’s helping with a nonprofit to assist orphaned children. Pre-scheduled trip. She does it every year.” “You’re saying she can’t meet with us because she’s in Russia saving orphans?” I asked. “That’s a pretty incredible excuse.” We all laughed. He headed off down the hallway.

“Wait, one more thing,” a friend called after him. “Where’s a good place around here we can get some lunch?”

Please, sign our petition.

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9/27/09, The Trouble with Nonprofits

In the 1990s, a group of psychologists began studying what made experts expert. Their first task was to see whether experts really were expert — whether they were particularly good at their jobs.

What they found was that some were and some weren’t. Champion chess players, obviously, are much better at playing chess than you and I. But political pundits, it turns out, aren’t that much better at making predictions than a random guy off the street.

What distinguishes people who are great at what they do from those who are just mediocre? The answer, it seems, is feedback. If you lose a chess game, it’s pretty obvious you lost. You know right away, you feel bad, and you start thinking about what you did wrong and how you can improve.

Making a bad prediction isn’t like that. First, it’s months or years before your prediction is proven wrong. And then, you make yourself feel better by coming up with some explanation for why you were wrong: well, nobody expected that to happen; it threw everything else off! And so you keep on making predictions in the same way — which means you never get good at it.

The difference between chess and predictions is a lot like the difference between companies and nonprofits. If your company is losing money, it’s pretty obvious. You know right away, you feel bad, and you start thinking about how to fix it. (And if you don’t fix it, you go bankrupt.) But if your nonprofit isn’t accomplishing its goals, it’s much less obvious. You can point to various measurable signs of success (look at all the members we have, look at all the articles we’ve been quoted in) and come up with all sorts of explanations for why it’s not your fault.

This isn’t to say that we should have companies replace nonprofits, any more than we should have chess games replace predictions. The two serve completely different goals — nonprofits aim at improving the world, not making money. But it does mean that if you’re involved in nonprofits (or predictions), you need to be much more careful about making sure you’re doing a good job.

Unfortunately, few nonprofits do that. Take, for example, the Center for American Progress, widely believed to be one of the most effective political nonprofits. They say their goal is “improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action.” But their “marketing brochure,” while filled with glossy photos, doesn’t even attempt to see whether they’re accomplishing this goal. It touts that they’ve released “an economic strategy for the next administration,” “convened a task force … to develop policy,” and “developed a plan for the bulk transfer auction of at-risk mortgages.” There’s not a single attempt to demonstrate that any of these things has approved the lives of Americans, let alone estimate how much.

Measuring things is hard and expensive, even in the simplest cases. Measuring the effect of loaning money to Africans seems a lot easier than measuring the impact of of a think tank report. But when Peter Singer asked Oxfam to measure the effectiveness of giving microcredit to villages in West Africa, they declined, on the grounds that it would have taken up half the budget.

But not measuring is even more expensive. Imagine that Oxfam experimented with two microcredit programs and found that one did 10% better than the other. Even with this very modest improvement, it would only take helping five villages before the experiment paid for itself.

And, as anyone who’s done these sorts of experiments knows, you often see improvements well in excess of 10%. To take a silly example, Dustin Curtis experimented with getting more readers of his weblog to follow him on Twitter. After four experiments, he’d achieved a 173% improvement. And even this is probably underestimating things. I expect many nonprofits are not accomplishing their goals at all. Even if they made a little bit of progress, their improvement would be mathematically infinite. (It’s also quite possible that many nonprofits are actually being counter-productive. After all, before we started measuring the effects of medical treatment, we were bleeding people with leeches.)

What can be done about this? I think that everyone who donates to a nonprofit should demand an accounting of results — not just the number of times they’ve been cited in the media or the number of policy discussions they’ve held, but an actual attempt to measure how much they’re improving people’s lives. For most nonprofits, I expect these numbers will be depressingly small. But that’s much better than having no numbers at all. For feeling bad about failing is the first step to doing better next time.

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9/27/09, Why I Wonâ€™t Use Rimuhosting

I originally got a VPS at Rimuhosting because their website lauded their “fanatical service” and a friend had concurred. In September 2006, I ordered my first server.

In December, a friend asked if I knew any good VPS hosts. I said I used Rimuhosting and hadn’t had any problems. “That’s funny,” he replied. “rimuhosting is the company that’s just given me horrible support over the last 2 weeks. No answers to email for 2+ days, then a claim that they didn’t receive it, then I send them the mail server log that says they should have received it, then they say ‘oh, that’s interesting. oh well.’”

I guess that should have been a sign for me. But instead, he changed his tune: “Well, if everyone thinks they’re so great, maybe I’ll give them another chance.”

The server went down for maintenance three times and was moved to a new IP once. In April 2008, the real trouble started. I was dinged for bandwidth overruns, apparently because Yahoo! was crawling the same files on my server hundreds of times a day. In June, they complained I was monopolizing the CPU, even though when I logged in the machine was 100% idle. They complained again in October and November and December and offered to take a look at the problem if I gave them root on the box. “Over my dead body,” I thought.

In December they set a CPU cap on my VPS. Then came the amazing bit. Despite already having sold me a VPS and put a CPU cap on my usage of it, they manually edited my partition to add their SSH key to my authorized_keys, used that to gain root on my box, noticed that a CGI script was using up CPU, and responded by turning off Apache. They didn’t even try to call me to talk about it in advance. They didn’t even call me at all. They just sent a little email. After the fact. The subject? “index.cgi is causing high CPU usage”

I asked them what was going on. Here was their reply:

In our welcome email we do mention that we have installed our key on your server.

We use that to help our customers. You are able to remove that if you are not comfortable with that.

Of course, I did remove it. They used their control of the hardware to add it back in.

We work to ensure that customer’s get a fair share of the CPU, and that their servers perform well.

If everyone is trying to max out the CPU then everyone’s performance will be poor. We can set it so that you get a fixed amount of CPU (and then we don’t mind how much CPU want to use). Or we can let your CPU burst up to 100% of a host server CPU core, in which case your server will run fast, but in which case we’d need to make sure you do not monopolize the CPU.

Or, they can break into my box and turn off my webserver. Oddly they don’t mention that last option.

If you think we can help in any other way, e.g. investigating that script or anything, just let us know.

I suppose this is the service Rimuhosting is known for. I won’t be taking advantage of it again.

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Abstractioneer

1/18/08, This is an EX-blog!

1/11/08, Moving on to abstractioneer.org

1/11/08, [Abstractioneer] Warumungu Norms, Privacy, Facebook, and Useful Friction

We could learn something from the Warumungu. Wendy Seltzer's Mukurtu Digital Archiving: digital "restrictions" done right is about DRM, freedom, and controls; I think it's also about privacy. What's private, and what's public, and what's semi-private are culturally determined no less than the Warumungu rules around who is allowed to see what artifacts: ...the Warumungu have a set of protocols around objects and representations of people that restrict access to physical objects and photographs. Only elders may see or authorize viewing of sacred objects; other objects may be restricted by family or gender. Images of the deceased shouldnÃ¢Â€Â™t be viewed, and photographs are often physically effaced. When the Warumungu archive objects or images, they want to implement the same sort of restrictions.With an interesting twist:People can also print images or burn CDs and thus allow the images to circulate more widely to others who live on outstations or in other areas. In fact, one of the top priorities in MukurtuÃ¢Â€Â™s development was that it needed to allow people to take things with them, printing and burning were necessary to ensure circulation of the materials.What, then, prevents people from violating these norms?Because the Murkurtu protocol-restrictions support community norms, rather than oppose them, the system can trust its users to take objects with them. If a member of the community chooses to show a picture to someone the machine would not have, his or her interpretation prevails Ã¢Â€Â” the machine doesnÃ¢Â€Â™t presume to capture or trump the nuance of the social protocol. People, relationships, and norms are fuzzy and messy, so maybe it's reasonable that a system to deal with them is fuzzy and messy too. What Murkurtu does is put enough useful friction in the way of disclosure to give community norms a chance to operate. You can't email an image out to a mailing list, but you can print it and show it to a reasonably small number of people at a time. The point is not to control distribution perfectly, but to give human-scale trust mechanisms a chance to operate correctly. Who owns the data?L'Affaire Scoble raised the question, who owns relationship data? Dare Obasanjo argues that his contact data is his, not Robert's. And he wants Facebook to enforce this.I'd argue that we should un-ask the ownership question. As long as we're talking about ownership, we're heading down the road towards DRM that has worked out so well for the music business. I'd like to talk about community norms, and what kind of useful friction we should be thinking about in the pure digital realm to give community norms a chance to operate. Reputation and portable identity is part of this, as are things like limited access (E.g., OAuth), rate limits, soft constraints, and user centric norm enforcement. (What would happen if the people on Robert's friends list were simply informed, in real time, that he was copying their data for an unknown purpose?)(Nick Carr has a great post on this subject as well.) -- Posted By John Panzer to Abstractioneer at 1/11/2008 02:23:00 PM
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12/12/07, Shindig!

12/9/07, Singularity to Launch from Adult Chat Room

12/5/07, OpenID 2.0 Released!

12/4/07, IIW2007b Updates

12/4/07, OAuth 1.0 Core Released!

11/30/07, Internet Identity Workshop 2007b

11/30/07, OpenID Commenting for Blogger!


ActiveWin.com Headlines

9/27/09, Microsoft Releases Code for 'Multikernel' Research OS 'Barrelfish'


on AIR Tour Weblog

9/27/09, Developing Secure AIR Applications

9/27/09, Signing, Deploying and updating AIR Applications

9/27/09, Quick update for Milan Event

9/27/09, Couple of notes for Todayâ€™s Prague Event

9/27/09, Week Three of on AIR Tour in Europe Review

9/27/09, Brightkite and the on AIR Tour

9/27/09, Stockholm, Berlin and Warsaw sold out

9/27/09, on AIR Europe Leg 2 Schwag Update (Book and Reference Guide)

9/27/09, Leg 2 of on AIR Tour in Europe close to selling out

9/27/09, Slides : Adobe AIR and LiveCycle DataServices (Enrique Duvos)


AOL Journals: Magic Smoke

10/10/08, Blogger Update

10/9/08, Migration Update

10/10/08, Blogger Help Group

10/9/08, Update on Private Journals and Comments

10/9/08, How you can help us help you...

10/9/08, Blogger.com Transfer Update

All,

Now that we've had about a day's worth of transfers to Blogger, we've tracked a couple of issues that I wanted to make you aware of, and I wanted to reiterate a couple of important tidbits.

Private Journals & Comments - While it's possible to move a private journal to Blogger by first making it public, it does look like there is an issue in importing the comments from that journal, and they may in fact be deleted upon import. We're is investigating a solution to this one, and will let you know the moment it's in place. Until then, unless you either don't have any comments, or don't care to keep them, I'd suggest you hold off on migrating private journals for now. Account Name Already In Use - If you had established your Blogger blogs prior to the import using the same blog name, the Blogger importer will *not* be able to use it as it will not overwrite any files. You'll first have to clear out or rename your placeholder Blogger blog, then re-initiate the import process. Feature Requests for Blogger - While we've been working very closely with the good folks at Blogger for the migration, we're really not at all involved with the future development or enhancement of their product. I'd encourage you to use their feedback mechanisms to make these suggestions, as they may never see them here in Magic Smoke. AOL Pictures and Albums - As Frank commented below, individual AOL Pictures images in your Journal are actually getting copied over to Google's Picasa. AOL Pictures albums, however, will not be included in the import process. If you wish to re-associate your AOL Pictures albums with your new Blogger blog, you'll have to do that manually. Ditto if you wish to move them to Picasa. Blogger Can't Find Your Journal - Is your journal marked private? If so, that would be why. Prior to making it public and initiating the import process, please review the first bullet point above. If the journal is *not* private, let us know and we'll try to figure out why it's not being found. Images Not Stored in AOL Pictures - Images hosted anyplace *other* than AOL Pictures are not being automatically copied to Picasa, and will have to be copied over manually, if you desire.

I think that about covers all of the known issues at this point.

I know there is a lot of anger and frustration out there about this shutdown, but please understand that we are doing everything we can to make this as painless as possible. The team doing this work is primarily composed of the same people who developed and managed Journals through it's launch and growth stages, and we're just as sad as you are that the call was made to retire the product. Our partnership with Blogger isn't making us a dime, and was done solely because they offer a very solid product and are backed by very passionate people who were willing to take on quite a bit of heavy lifting to make this a smooth transition. Our collective hats are off to them for being such great partners in this, and if you give this a shot, I think you'll be very happy being part of the Blogger family.

Tags: Journals, Blogger, Shutdown, Migration, Import

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10/8/08, Blogger.com

As you probably know by now, AOL Journals is scheduled to be permanently shut down on Oct. 31. Itâ€™s never an easy decision to shut down a product, especially one like AOL Journals that some of our members have used and loved for many years. But with a decline in Journals usage, we have to look carefully at all of AOLâ€™s features and products to ensure weâ€™re using our limited development and operational resources in ways that provide the greatest value to the largest number of members as possible. Though we know this is an inconvenience, the good news is that we've partnered with the good people at Blogger.com to provide a smooth transition for your journal. Blogger is a free service from Google that makes it easy to share your thoughts with friends and the world. Blogger supports most of the features you've come to expect from AOL Journals, and it's easy to get started. If you wish to transfer your journal to Blogger, they will move your posts, comments and photos to your new blog on their service. When you're ready, go to this link to get started.

We've conducted a fair amount of internal testing against the Blogger.com import process over the past few weeks, and have identified a few issues that you may run into:

Some users may get "Transfer process failed" error when trying to import their AOL Journals. They may need to clear their cookies and try again. Badly formatted HTML may cause Embed or Object tags not to be imported. Some users may see the import fail during the final "Publish imported posts now" step. Refreshing the page usually solves this problem. Also, some users will be able to go to www.blogger.com to view, edit, and publish their imported blog, even after the failure message. AOL Pictures Albums embedded in your Journal will not automatically migrate over during the standard process. Individual images will migrate just fine, but any albums you wish to re-associate with your Blogger blog will have to be done manually, post-migration. If your Journal is currently marked Private, you'll have to flip it to public status prior to the migration, otherwise the import tool will not be able to find it. Once you've moved the Journal to Blogger, you'll be able to set it to private again at your leisure.

You can always find the latest list of general Blogger Known Issues here: http://knownissues.blogspot.com and Blogger's AOL Journals Help here: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=112742. If you are planning to move your Journal to Blogger, we recommend that you help your readers find your new blog by posting a redirect link in your AOL Journal, which will stay live and fully functional until Oct.31.

Tags: Journals, Sunset, Blogger

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9/30/08, Clarification

10/1/08, AOL Hometown

10/1/08, Wednesday 1 October


The AOL Pictures Blog

8/6/07, Fun and Play

6/25/07, Speak Up

5/30/07, Buckets of Fun

5/30/07, Memorial Day

5/9/07, Sunny Spring

4/16/07, My Favorite Lens

3/29/07, The Eye of the Tiger

3/27/07, Happy Spring

3/2/07, New Feature Updates Just Launched

2/23/07, Tribute to the Soldiers


Aperture Plugged In

8/20/08, Writing An Aperture Edit Plugin â€“ Part 2

This is the second part of an ongoing series of articles that will hopefully shed some light on developing an Aperture Edit Plugin. This series is not meant to be a tutorial, but more of a documentation of my personal efforts to create a plugin for use in a two year long art project I will begin working on this fall. This art project is also going to be documented over at my website called Entropy Art. Please feel free to check it out, sign up and participate in any way that you would like. Also, I am making the source code for this plugin available as open source. As it is still just basically a template, I havenâ€™t felt the need to choose a license for it yet, but I will eventually. For now, please feel free to download the code and contribute any ideas you would like.

In the last part of this series I went through the very basic steps of creating a new project in Xcode. At the end I included a script that will allow you to run Aperture in debug mode so that you can debug your plugin using Xcodeâ€™s built in tools. However I made a slight mistake in the script.

If you notice the destination paths in the script all refer to Plug-Ins/Export. This was copied over from a previous project I had been working on that was an Export plugin for Aperture. For an Edit plugin, this should be changed to â€œEdit.â€

What Will My Plugin Do

At this point I want to achieve two things. I want to get my plugin to the point where it will load up my selected Aperture images and display them in the UI, and I want to really start thinking of what it is I want my plugin to do!

The first task was pretty easy as the SDK comes with a sample edit plugin that I was able to use to copy most of what I needed. It is pretty simple, and we will be going over it in this article.

The second task is a bit more involved. Of course, this will all evolve over time, but I sat down the other day and started to dream up what I would like my plugin to be. I also drew out some sketches of how I would like to UI to look and feel and I have included them here for all to see.

A professor of mine once told me that all good ideas can be drawn on a bar napkin ( or three ), so that is what I did.

After thinking about it for a while and making some notes I realized that what I really want is something akin to a few other applications out there. In fact, these other applications are really languages themselves, designed so that the people who use them can create scripts. But I want to make things a bit more visual. So, this plugin will do a number of important things. It will expose to the user a slew of image processing functions in a visual manner. They will be able to select for example a filter and use some controls to apply it to their image. Once they have their settings adjusted they will be able to add this â€œfunctionâ€ to a â€œscript.â€ This script is essentially a list of the userâ€™s selected functions and settings. You should be able to rearrange them in the order you want, and you should be able to edit them as needed.

You should also be able to save your scripts so that you can apply them to other images in the future. To start out I plan to draw on the various â€œImage Unitsâ€ found in the Core Image library. These are pretty extensive and allow for quite a bit of modification. In addition that what is already available you can create your own image units via the OpenGL Shading Language.

I havenâ€™t yet decided how I am going to present the data to the user if their function results in a 1D data-set ( images are 2D ). But I may have some view available that presents the data as a graph or something. For example, lets say the user wants to crunch their image into a histogram representation. I should be able to display things like histograms as well as 2D image data, but for now I will focus on 2D image data.

The other applications that I am sort of trying to mimic with this plugin are things like Processing or IDL/PV-Wave. They are full-on programming languages in their own right, but they basically do some of the things that I am trying to do here.

Building Blocks

To get things rolling I decided to tackle task number one and get my plugin to the point where it can load an image and display it to the user. This was actually really easy thanks to the SampleEditPlugin that comes packaged with the SDK.

My first step was to create a very simple user interface. This would essentially consist of a view for the image, next and previous buttons and done and cancel buttons. Using Interface builder I was able to set this up in no time simply by dragging the controls over from the library.

To do this, I opened the file in the template with the .nib extension. This is the user interface file and you edit it with an application called Interface Builder. It should open automatically in IB if you double click the file.

Once open you will see a few things. First of all there is the main window that houses all of your main UI elements. It already has a few items in it including the following: Application, First Responder, Files Owner, and an NSWindow simply called EditWindow.

The main pieces we will be interested in working with for the moment are the NSWindow and Fileâ€™s Owner.

If it isnâ€™t already opened by default, double click the EditWindow and you will see it appear. At the moment, there is nothing to it. It is just an empty NSWindow. Our first order of business is to get it to display on screen when we call the plugin from Aperture.

To do this we need to wire up the EditWindow to our outlet we have in code. To do this we control-click and drag from the item called Fileâ€™s Owner to the EditWindow. You will see it highlighted when you are on it in blue. Once you release the mouse you will have a small drop-down box that asks you what youâ€™d like to wire this to–select the only item in the list called _editWindow. This tells the plugin code that the outlet called _editWindow refers to that NSWindow in Interface Builder.

Iâ€™m really not exactly sure how this all works under the hood. It takes some getting used to and some reading up on Xcode really helps.

Once we have this wired up, we can run our plugin. If we select an image in Aperture and choose Edit With–>Visualize, we will see the single window appear. Unfortunately, we havenâ€™t given our plugin a way to quit at this point, so we are forced to kill Aperture and the plugin by clicking Stop in Xcode.

So our next obvious task is to add in the four basic buttons. I start out by opening the file in Xcode called Visualize.h. This name will vary depending on the name of your plugin. This is our main controller class for the plugin and will do most of the work of controlling our UI, amongst other things.

In Visualize.h there are already a number of items added by the template. Letâ€™s have a look.

As you can see in this screen shot the Aperture template has added a generic object called _apiManager, an NSObject called _editManager, and NSArray called _topLevelNibObjects, and our outlet for the NSWindow called _editWindow. Below this I have also added outlets for our four buttons and the NSView we will be implementing.

These outlets allow the code to manipulate the properties associated with each control. For example, if I want to enable or disable the Next and Previous buttons, I need to be able to access their properties programatically. These outlets make that connection in our UI.

In order to respond to an event ( when a user presses a button ) I need to add a few â€œactions.â€ At the bottom of the Visualize.h file, I add the following:

IBActions are the methods that get called when a user clicks a button or changes a sliderâ€™s value. These are the declarations for our button actions.

Once we have added this code we can jump back over to IB and wire things up. To wire up the IBOutlets we simply control-click and drag from Fileâ€™s Owner to the button we wish to wire up. When the drop down appears you simply select the outlet that goes with the button in question. Oh, and I guess I forgot to mention that you need to add the four buttons to the NSWindow. Just drag them over from the library. You can also double click them to change the text from â€œButtonâ€ to whatever you want.

To wire up the actions, we basically do the opposite. Control-click and drag from the button to Fileâ€™s Owner and select the appropriate action.

Once you have done this for all four buttons you will be able to write code to control what happens when a user presses the button, and you can manipulate your buttons properties in code.

At this point all I also want to add my view for the display of the image. To do this I am going to use an NSView which I drag over from the library. I also will wire this up to the NSView outlet I have created in Visualize.h called _imageView. I can stretch out the view to make it fill up most of the screen, and once I am done it looks something like the screenshot below.

Now I can save my interface and head back over to Xcode. The next step is to add the actual code that will get called whenever someone presses one of the four buttons I have placed in the UI.

Here is an example of what the code for the Cancel button looks like.

The action for the cancel button needs only one line of code at the moment. [_editManager cancelEditSession] simply tells the plugin to quit and to return things to the state they were in before opening the plugin.

For the remaining buttons I will leave the code empty for now. The Next and Previous buttons will require some more code that I still need to write, and the Done button actually does quite a bit as that is when all of the newly processed images get saved to disk.

But at least we can cancel our plugin at this point!

So at this point we still arenâ€™t displaying any images. The plugin doesnâ€™t know how to do this yet. In my next article we will go over how to get the plugin to display images, and how to implement the Next and Previous buttons. Hopefully by then I will have a clearer idea of what I want my plugin to do and how I want it to look! Until then, feel free to download the code and try it out for yourself. You may see some code that I havenâ€™t gone over yet, as I tend to write these articles a little behind the actual coding progress, but hey, this way you get a heads up!

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7/10/08, Nik Software Announces Silver Efex Pro

7/9/08, DataMind Releases Jade Enhancement Plugin

7/9/08, Hydra HDR Plugin for Aperture 1.5.3

7/9/08, Tiffen Dfx Digital Filter Suite 1.0

7/9/08, Power Stroke 1.0 from Digital Film Tools

7/9/08, Ozone 2.5 from Digital Film Tools


Aperture Tricks - All About Apple Aperture

1/29/07, Lightroom Leaving Beta â€“ Will Aperture Sales Increase?

1/12/07, iStockphoto Updates Aperture Plugin

1/7/07, Special Priced Aperture Training DVDs Gone

12/27/06, Aperture Training Video Sale

12/19/06, Aperture 1.5 Beyond The Basics

12/17/06, Happy Birthday To Me

12/12/06, Aperture Wins Macworld Award

12/11/06, Aperture 1.5.2 Released

12/9/06, FlickrExport for Aperture 1.0 Released

12/8/06, Aperture Feedback Page


apophenia

9/21/09, Seeking: Technical Research Assistant for Adhoc Tasks at MSR

This position has been filled.

Microsoft Research New England is seeking an undergraduate research assistant to help out with assorted tasks for 10-20 hours/week to assist Dr. danah boyd, a social media researcher who investigates youth engagement with various genres of new media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, etc.).

An RA who would enjoy this job would be technically proficient, a quick technical learner, able to change direction when something comes up, and curious to learn more about technology studies research. Projects might include tracking web content related to ongoing research projects, organizing research bibliographies, writing simple scripts to parse online data, managing mailing lists and blogs, etc.

The ideal candidate will have basic scripting skills and be familiar with Web2.0 technologies to find innovative solutions to various challenges. The ideal RA would be comfortable navigating both Microsoft Server and UNIX-based systems. Some tasks require familiarity with HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL incarnations, Movable Type, etc. or the ability to quickly learn these languages/platforms. Others would require the candidate to find 3rd party software that could help address the challenge. In short, this position is meant for someone who is a webgeek.

The RA would be required to do most work from the Microsoft Research office in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA but some tasks can be completed remotely. An undergraduate at a nearby university would be most appropriate for this position, although non-student locals may be considered. The position will be managed through contingent staff agency for Microsoft Research and will pay $15-$20/hour.

To apply, please send a copy of your resume and a cover letter to Paul Oka (poka@mit.edu) and CC danah boyd. Feel free to contact Paul with any questions you might have.

This position has been filled.

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9/21/09, Seeking: Research Assistant/Intern for Online Safety Literature Review

The Youth Policy Working Group at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society is looking for a research assistant intern to help update the Literature Review produced by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. This project builds off of the Berkman Center's work studying how youth interact with digital media and specifically seeks to draft policy prescriptions in three areas: privacy, safety, and content creation.

The ideal candidate would be a graduate student (or individual working towards entering a graduate program) who is fluent in quantitative methodologies and can interpret and evaluate statistical findings. The RA/intern would be working to extend the Lit Review from the ISTTF report to include international studies, new studies in the last year, and studies that cover a wider set of topics with respect to online safety. The products of this internship will be an updated Literature Review and a shorter white paper of the high points. Other smaller tasks may be required. This project should take 10-15 hours per week and will last at least the fall semester.

The RA/intern will work directly with Dr. danah boyd and will be a part of a broader team trying to build resources for understanding issues relating to online safety. The candidate should have solid research skills and feel confident reading scholarly research in a wide array of fields. The candidate must have library access through their own university. Before applying, the candidate should read the Literature Review and be confident that this is work that s/he could do.

Preference will be given to candidates in the Boston area, but other U.S. candidates may be considered if their skills and knowledge make them particularly ideal for this job. Unfortunately, we are unable to hire non-U.S. individuals for this job.

To apply, please send a copy of your resume and a cover letter to Catherine Bracy and danah boyd.

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9/21/09, accessible speaking events for the fall

9/12/09, sometimes I feel like a bitch

For the most part, I'm a fuzzy lovable energetic creature (or at least I like to think so). But new technologies combined with information overload sometimes bring out the inner bitch in me. And then I feel guilty.

I am drowning in information overload. I cannot read everything that I want to, engage in conversations with everyone I'd like to, let alone deal with high-bandwidith content like video. Over the last decade, I've developed a set of coping mechanisms for dealing with online conversations. Ways of keeping myself sane amidst the onslaught. The problem is that each new genre of communication and consumption brings new challenges and forces me to adjust. And just when I think that I've got a grip on what's going on, the genre gains mainstream adoption and I'm forced to get all rigid on people. And I hate that.

Let me be a little more concrete. And self-involved. I get hundreds of emails per day that I have to directly respond to. (Hundreds more get filtered into the "will read one day" folders that get very little attention.) I do a huge amount of my responding offline (on airplanes, public transit, cafes, etc.). Thus, messages with links take much longer to get my attention than messages without links. But there's something nice about turning an INBOX into something manageable before people have the chance to respond. The problem with Web2.0 technologies is that each one wants to replace the INBOX (or at least be an additional channel). For example, there are private messages and comments on social network sites, direct messages and @replies on Twitter. There are blog comments. And RSS feeds. And then there are all of the online communities and bulletin boards and chat spaces that have evolved from those developed in olden days. For me, it's too much. Too much I tell you. And we haven't even gotten to voicemail, text messages. Let alone all that's coming.

The onslaught of places to check makes me want to crumple. And, for better or worse, it's simply 100% not manageable if I want to keep up my research and stay sane. So I've developed my own quirky habits to cope and rather than be flexible for others, I've become demanding. I check voicemail sporadically (so please don't leave a message - send a text). I refuse to even check the private messages on social network sites (so if you've sent something there, I've never seen it). Because of how @replies are overloaded with retweets and references, I'm simply incapable of keeping up with the stream of directed @replies with requests to respond. And I almost never check online communities or bulletin boards and have bowed out from all collaborative projects that require that kind of engagement.

It's terrible you see. It's not that I *like* email (cuz goddess knows it's been a long time since "you've got mail" made me do anything other than cringe). But I know how to manage it. Too many years of Getting Things Done training has taught me to manage it as a glorious ToDo list that can get resolved. But I don't know how to meaningfully manage streams of content. And I don't have the structures in place to deal with content in the cloud that requires connectivity. And I don't like having to deal with Yet Another Walled Garden's attempt to replicate email. For my own sanity, I need one pile of ToDo. So at the end of the day, the only channel that actually works for me is email. And if you need me to respond to something, don't message me elsewhere; send me an email.

This is exactly the kind of issue that Bernie Hogan deals with in his dissertation. The complexities of multiple channels and people's individual preferences. And there are huge issues here - should someone be flexible to others' preferences or demand that others work around them? And here's where I feel like a bitch. I'm asking people to work around me. Because I can't cope with the alternative. And that makes me feel guilty and selfish. And I don't know what to do about this. Le sigh. So please forgive me.

This article has been translated. En francais. Thanks Ulysse!

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8/28/09, Vacation, Vacation, Vaaaay-kaaaay-shun! (offline till Sep 8)

8/25/09, am I an academic?

academia (n.): The academic world or community; scholastic life. academic (n.): 1) An ancient philosopher of the Academy.
2) A member of a college or university.
3) A member of a society for promoting art or science

At every academic conference I attend, I hear a constant refrain: "How does it feel to have left academia?" The tone changes dependent on who is doing the asking. Sometimes, it's pure curiosity or puzzlement, fascination at my choice. At other times, there's a hint of condescension, as though the question is actually: "Couldn't make it in academia, eh? Stuck in industry, eh?" I try not to bristle at this but I do find myself getting defensive and trying to explain my position at Microsoft Research over and over again. So I couldn't help but think that maybe it's time to write it down.

Microsoft Research is an industrial research lab in the old skool sense. In the world of computer science, the industrial research lab is well understood; it has a long history of success in producing valuable, field-changing research. Like AT&T Bell Labs or Xerox PARC, the halls of MSR are filled with scientists of the highest caliber. People who invented things that you take for granted. MSR grew out of this tradition. It's primarily filled with computer scientists (and engineers, physicists, mathematicians). Researchers are encouraged to pursue research questions that they feel are important and they are evaluated based on their publication record, contributions to the scholarly community, and innovative research that produces "tech transfer."

Being a social scientist in one of these labs is peculiar, but not new. I have long admired the anthropological contributions Lucy Suchman made to research while at PARC. Being a social scientist at an industrial research lab can be a tricky balance. There are plenty of anthropologists and other social scientists who do applied work at Microsoft, focused on specific product needs. This is extremely important work, but it's different than scholarly research. It's also tricky to say what constitutes "tech transfer" as a social scientist. I don't really produce IP in the traditional sense, but my work contributes to the company in other ways.

Yet, tech transfer is only a fraction of what I do. The vast majority of my time is spent doing the same type of research that I've been doing for years. I follow topics that interest me and dive head first in, regardless of whether or not it involves Microsoft's current or future products. I publish articles without seeking approval from anyone. I blog about my research without vetting it through Microsoft. I attend academic conferences, review papers, and contribute to scholarly discourse. It looks a whole lot like academia to me. Yet, I hear all sorts of remarks that indicate that folks don't believe that what I do is akin to academia. I feel the need to account for these and offer a different perspective.

But you're working for a corporation! Since when are universities not corporations? Best that I can tell, most universities are fundamentally real estate barons who gain public credibility by offering higher education. The difference is that Microsoft's products are very visible and related to the types of research that they seek to support. Both Microsoft and the university invest in research in the hopes that it will benefit the corporation as a whole, directly through the production (and protection) of IP or indirectly by creating an atmosphere where productive work can take place. The outcomes may look different, but both Microsoft and the university are large corporations with a fiscal mindset.

But a company makes you focus on the company's bottom line! There is no doubt that Microsoft would love to have research that benefits it financially, but the dynamic is far more symbiotic than parasitic. We're welcome to do the research we're most passionate about, but we get financial bonuses for creating patents or for producing quality research that benefits the company. It's an incentives system. On the contrary, I would argue that the university model is predominantly parasitic. Researchers at universities must run around begging external agencies for money so that they can do the research they love to do. When they finally succeed in getting a grant, how does the university respond? It takes 30-60% for "overhead." And when they don't get funding, they're punished with lack of research resources and students. Furthermore, most university researchers don't get to do as they please - they do what they (think they) can get funding for. I suspect I have far more freedom in terms of my research agenda than most university scholars.

Still, you have to spend time helping the company directly! Yes, I spend time working with product groups. But I like to think of it as my teaching duty. Rather than teaching Soc 101 to hung-over 18-year-olds who didn't bother doing the reading, I teach an interactive form of Soc 101 to engineers who are filled with questions that start with "but why?" and "but how?" I have a hard time imagining that my engagement with product groups takes up more of my time than teaching, office hours, and prep. And it's often quite fun and thought-provoking.

Well, there's no tenure! What exactly is tenure? The promise that the university will promise you a salary in return for perpetual grant begging? Tenure guarantees a job, but it doesn't guarantee an enjoyable one. There's no promise of a pay raise or good classes to teach. Microsoft Research does have the right to fire me but, from what I can see, it's more common for people to leave when they don't gel well (just like in universities). The bigger threat is whether or not Microsoft will be around in N years (arguably, also true with many universities). I suspect that my job is just as solid as it would be in most university environments. The difference really comes down to bonuses. At the university, there are no performance-based bonuses. At Microsoft Research, a large chunk of my salary is linked to performance. Thus, I have an incentive to do well. There are also promotions that parallel university levels; Researcher = Assistant Professor, Senior Researcher = Associate Professor, Principle Researcher = Full Professor. This may not offer the on-paper guarantee of tenure, but it is pretty darn equivalent.

It's not like you have students! Most professors love having students because of the collaboration potential. (Some enjoy the empire building but that's not my bent.) Of course, this varies by field. Some scholars feel as though they need students to complete their work; in other fields, students are more an opportunity to mentor. My approach to students is more of collaboration and mentorship rather than slave labor. It's true that I don't have students, but I have the fortune of being able to take a handful of interns each year for 12 weeks each. These interns are primarily post-quals PhD students who have the skills and passion for collaboratively working on a constrained research project. No, it is not the same as 7-year students that you get to watch grow, but it's not like I'm not engaged with younger scholars. My time with them is just more constrained and focused. There are also postdocs who come for 1-2 years. And when I'm craving collaboration, I can bring in visiting researchers to work with me. So it's a bit more hodge-podge, but there's still tremendous opportunities for engagement with scholars at all levels.

Whatever... it's not real research. This is what it always comes down to... "Real" research comes from the university, suggesting that what comes out of industrial research labs is "fake." I'm never quite sure how to best respond to this except to commit to proving folks wrong.

I feel very fortunate to have a position at Microsoft Research, even if lots of folks don't seem to get why it's a good deal. In many ways, this environment is far more academic than what I witnessed at MIT's Media Lab or Berkeley's iSchool. The biggest downside is that it's not helping with my disciplinary identity crisis. If I had joined a specific disciplinary department, I might have had a clearer sense of the "top" journals, relevant conferences, and whether or not publishing a book is a must to succeed. Perhaps not, but I like to think so. Instead, I'm as confused as ever about where to publish and how to best disseminate my research in a manner that is generally useful. Thus, instead of becoming a proper -ist, I'm continuing to pave a strange path that may or may not bite me in the ass in the future. Of course, this identity crisis is pure academia. And one of the clearest reminders that I'm still an academic through-and-through.

I may not be a professor, but I'm still a scholar and, arguably, an academic. The title of "Researcher" may not seem very impressive or academic in social science realms, but practically speaking, it's akin to "Assistant Professor" (and that's even how people discuss it internally). What I do looks a lot like what any university researcher does, but with fewer restrictions. I don't have to beg for grants. I don't have to battle onerous IRBs (note: dealing directly with lawyers is MUCH easier than dealing with academics who are worrying about the legal repercussions of research). I can travel when I need to for research. I can do research that I think is important. I can collaborate with whoever I please. In return, I make certain that my research (and that of others) is translated into language that product people can understand. Personally, I think it's a pretty amazing trade-off.

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8/20/09, some thoughts on technophilia

The New Media Consortium is hosting a Symposium for the Future October 27-29. I was asked to write a few thoughts that might provoke conversation in preparation for the event. This is a re-posting of my Ideas for Thought. If you are an educator or involved in the world of learning, consider attending the symposium. Regardless, if these topics interest you, consider reading the other idea pieces by Gardner Campbell and Holly Willis.

It is easy to fall in love with technology. It is equally easy to fear it. In a setting like this Symposium, many of us fall in the passionate lovers camp, dreamily accounting for all of the wonderful things we've experienced through and because of technology. All too often, our conversations center on the need to get technology into the hands of learners, as though the gaps that we're seeing can be explained away by issues of access. Push comes to shove, most of us know that there are problems with this model, but in a world filled with dichotomous rhetoric, it's easy to get into the habit of being the proselytizer in the face of fear-mongering.

I want to push back against our utopian habits because I think that they're doing us a disservice. Technology does not determine practice. How people embrace technology has less to do with the technology itself than with the social setting in which they are embedded. Those who are immersed in a techno-savvy, technophilic community are far more likely to embrace technology than those whose social world is shaped by other patterns of consumption and communication. People's practices are also shaped by those around them. There are cluster effects to socio-technical engagement. In other words, people do what their friends do.

Rejecting technological determinism should be a mantra in our professional conversations. It's really easy to get in the habit of seeing a new shiny piece of technology and just assume that we can dump it into an educational setting and !voila! miracles will happen. Yet, we also know that the field of dreams is merely that, a dream. Dumping laptops into a classroom does no good if a teacher doesn't know how to leverage the technology for educational purposes. Building virtual worlds serves no educational purpose without curricula that connects a lesson plan with the affordances of the technology. Without educators, technology in the classroom is useless.

There are also no such things as "digital natives." Just because many of today's youth are growing up in a society dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it. They don't. Most of you have a better sense of how to get information from Google than the average youth. Most of you know how to navigate privacy settings of a social media tool better than the average teen. Understanding technology requires learning. Sure, there are countless youth engaged in informal learning every day when they go online. But what about all of the youth who lack access? Or who live in a community where learning how to use technology is not valued? Or who tries to engage alone? There's an ever-increasing participation gap emerging between the haves and the have-nots. What distinguishes the groups is not just a question of access, although that is an issue; it's also a question of community and education and opportunities for exploration. Youth learn through active participation, but phrases like "digital natives" obscure the considerable learning that occurs to enable some youth to be technologically fluent while others fail to engage.

Along the same lines, keep in mind that the technology that you adore may hold no interest for your students. They don't use del.icio.us or Second Life or Ning or Twitter as a part of their everyday practices. And the ways that they use Facebook and MySpace and YouTube are quite different than the ways in which you do. We each approach technology based on our own needs and desires and we leverage it to do our bidding. In this way, we actively repurpose technology as a part of engagement such that rarely does one technology fit all. Yet, when we introduce technology in an educational setting, we often mistakenly assume that students will embrace the technology in the same way that we do. This never works out and can cause unexpected strife. Take social network sites as an example. You use this for professional networking; teens use it to socialize with their peers. Putting Facebook or MySpace into the classroom can create a severe cognitive collision as teens try to work out the shift in contexts. Most problematically, when teens are forced to navigate Friending in an educational setting, painful dramas occur because who you're polite to in school may be very different than who you socialize with at home. Using technology that ruptures social norms in the classroom can be socially and educationally harmful.

As we talk about the wonderfulness of technology, please keep in mind the complexities involved. Technology is a wonderful tool but it is not a panacea. It cannot solve all societal ills just by its mere existence. To have relevance and power, it must be leveraged by people to meet needs. This requires all of us to push past what we hope might happen and focus on introducing technology in a context that makes sense.

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8/16/09, Twitter: "pointless babble" or peripheral awareness + social grooming?

Studies like this one by Pear Analytics drive me batty. They concluded that 40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have "pass along value"; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news.

I challenge each and every one of you to record every utterance that comes out of your mouth (and that of everyone you interact with) for an entire day. And then record every facial expression and gesture. You will most likely find what communications scholars found long ago - people are social creatures and a whole lot of what they express is phatic communication. (Phatic expressions do social work rather than conveying information... think "Hi" or "Thank you".)

Now, turn all of your utterances over to an analytics firm so that they can code everything that you've said. I think that you'll be lucky if only 40% of what you say constitutes "pointless babble" to a third party ear.

Twitter - like many emergent genres of social media - is structured around networks of people interacting with people they know or find interesting. Those who are truly performing to broad audiences (e.g., "celebs", corporations, news entities, and high-profile blogger types) are consciously crafting consumable content that doesn't require actually having an intimate engagement with the person to appreciate. Yet, the vast majority of Twitter users are there to maintain social relations, keep up with friends and acquaintances, follow high-profile users, and otherwise connect. It's all about shared intimacy that is of no value to a third-party ear who doesn't know the person babbling. Of course, as Alice Marwick has argued, some celebs are also very invested in giving off a performance of intimacy and access; this is part of the appeal. This is why you can read what they ate for breakfast.

Far too many tech junkies and marketers are obsessed with Twitter becoming the next news outlet source. As a result, the press are doing what they did with blogging: hyping Twitter us as this amazing source of current events and dismissing it as pointless babble. Haven't we been there, done that? Scott Rosenberg even wrote the book on it!

I vote that we stop dismissing Twitter just because the majority of people who are joining its ranks are there to be social. We like the fact that humans are social. It's good for society. And what they're doing online is fundamentally a mix of social grooming and maintaining peripheral social awareness. They want to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn't viable. They want to share their state of mind and status so that others who care about them feel connected. It's a back-and-forth that makes sense if only we didn't look down at it from outter space. Of course it looks alien. Walk into any typical social encounter between people you don't know and it's bound to look a wee bit alien, especially if those people are demographically different than you.

Conversation is also more than the explicit back and forth between individuals asking questions and directly referencing one another. It's about the more subtle back and forth that allow us to keep our connections going. It's about the phatic communication and the gestures, the little updates and the awareness of what's happening in space. We take the implicit nature of this for granted in physical environments yet, online, we have to perform each and every aspect of our interactions. What comes out may look valueless, but, often, it's embedded in this broader ecology of social connectivity. What's so wrong about that?

Now, I began this rant by noting that these kinds of studies drive me batty. Truthfully, I also have a sick and twisted appreciation for them. They let frustration build up inside me so that I can spout off on my blog and on Twitter, providing commentary that some might find useful and others might code as pointless babble.

(Tx Lior for giving me something to get worked up about this morning.)

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8/6/09, Teens Don't Tweet... Or Do They?

Yesterday, Mashable reported Nielsen's latest Twitter numbers with the headline Stats Confirm It: Teens Don't Tweet. This gained traction on Twitter turning into the trending topic "teens don't tweet" which was primarily kept in play all day yesterday with teens responding to the TT by saying "I'm a teen" or the equivalent of "you're all idiots... what am I, mashed potatoes?"

I want to unpack some of what played out because I'm astonished by the misinterpretations in every which direction.

We have a methodology and interpretation problem. As Fred Stutzman has pointed out, there are reasons to question Nielsen's methodology and, thus, their findings. Furthermore, the way that they present the data is misleading. If we were to assume an even distribution of Twitter use over the entire U.S. population, it would be completely normal to expect that 16% of Twitter users are young adults. So, really, what Nielsen is saying is, "Everyone expects social media to be used primarily by the young but OMG OMG OMG old farts are just as likely to be using Twitter as young folks! Like OMG."

We have a presentation problem. Mashable presented this report completely inaccurately. First off, Nielsen is measuring 2-24. My guess is that there are a lot more 24-year-olds on Twitter than 2-year-olds. Unless Sockington counts. (And she's probably older than 2 anyhow.) Regardless, the Nielsen data tells us nothing about teens. We don't know if young adults (20-24) are all of those numbers or not. If all 16% of those under 24 on Twitter were teens, teens would be WAY over-represented in proportion to their demographic size.

We have a representation problem. The majority of people are not on Twitter, regardless of how old they are. Those who use Twitter are not a representative percentage of the population. Geeks are WAY over-represented on Twitter. Celebs and celeb-lovers are WAY over-represented on Twitter. Newshounds are WAY over-represented on Twitter. And while Joe the Plumber has an account on Twitter, I doubt it's him. Age is not the right marker here.

We have an interpretation problem. Saying that 16% of Twitter users are 24 and under is NOT the same as saying that 16% of teens are on Twitter. We don't know what percentage of youth (or adults) are on Twitter. If you want to compare across the ages, you need to know what percentage of a particular demographic is using the technology.

We have an impression management problem. There are teens on Twitter. Thousands of them. Saying "Teens Don't Tweet" gives the wrong impression because there are plenty of teens who do tweet (as they so kindly vocalized on Mashable and on Twitter). Still, just because they suddenly became vocal doesn't mean that those who are there are representative of teens as a whole. Furthermore, the presence of teens on Twitter doesn't mean that Twitter is a mainstream tool amongst teens. It's not.

Given all of these problems, I immediately dismissed the Nielsen report and the Mashable post as irrelevant and meaningless. Then it became a Trending Topic. So while I had a million things to do yesterday, I spent 6+ hours reading the messages of the people who added content to the trending topic, reading their posts about other things, going to their profiles on other sites, and simply trying to get a visceral understanding of what youth were engaged enough on Twitter to respond to the trending topic. What I found fascinated me. I'm still coding the data so you won't get any quantitative data just yet, but I want to give you a sense of my impression.

Teens On Twitter

The majority of teens who responded to the Trending Topic simply responded to the statement "Teens Don't Tweet" by noting that they were a teen and they tweeted. Others just noted that the trending topic was dumb. Many didn't know why the term had become a trending topic, were unaware of the Mashable article or Nielsen study, and thought that Twitter chose the trending topics. (I was in awe of how many teens commented that Twitter was stupid for making such a lie a trending topic. Some thought it was Twitter's attempts to tell them they didn't belong. One did ask if it was a trap to get teens to come out of the closet about their real age.)

Many of the teens who responded to the TT were not American or Canadian. I saw bunches of Brazilian teens, some Indonesian teens, and a smattering of teens from Europe, China, and Mexico. Many of their Twitter streams mixed English and the local language of their country. English dominated the responses but I did see non-English responses to the English trending topic.

About half of the teens included a link to a non-Twitter page in their bio. The pages were really mixed. Among the SNSes, MySpace dominated, but there were some Facebook links and links to Piczo and Multiply. There were also links to YouTube, Blogspot, LiveJournal, Deviant Art, and personal homepages.

Very few of the teens put their age in their bio, although quite a few made their age available in the content or through links. Teens posted messages like "I'm 16 and I'm on Twitter." And birthdays are a big enough deal that I was seeing things like, "I can't wait until I'm 16 and can get a car. Only 3 months to go!" And of course there's MySpace.

Most of the teens on Twitter followed on the order of 40-70 other people (with fewer followers). Who they followed included a smattering of other teens and a collection of big names - celebs, bloggers, geeks. There wasn't much discussion on their feeds about the number of people following them but they frequently highlighted how many tweets they had. I was surprised by how many of them would write a tweet saying nothing more than "this is my 1207th tweet!" Their content is primarily phatic in nature with an eye for updating as often as possible.

The most salient visceral reaction that I got when looking at the teens' Twitter streams was that teens on Twitter seemed to fit into three categories: 1) geeky teens, tech teens, fandom teens, machinema teens; 2) teens who are in love with the Jonas Brothers/Miley Cyrus, musicians, or another category of celebs; 3) multi-lingual foreign teens with friends/followers around the world who seemed to participate in lots of online communities.

While I can't make any meaningful conclusions until I spend more time with the data, it seems to me that the teens on Twitter - or at least the teens responding to the trending topic - are not representative of teens as a whole. That's not a bad thing. They're geeks and passionate creators and trendsetters and pop culture addicts. I don't get the sense that they're dragging their friends into Twitter, but rather, focusing on using Twitter to engage with other people who share their interests or people that they admire.

Anyhow, I'm continuing to track this but I thought I should just report out what I'm seeing in case it's of use to anyone but me.

Be warned: This blog post was written in brain-dump style to get some general impressions out there while I analyze the data. My goal is to give you a sense of what I'm seeing, assuming that you aren't staring at thousands and thousands of tweets by teens. Please don't interpret it as a "report" or a "study" or anything other than what it is: a blog post.

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7/30/09, help me find innovative practitioners who address online safety issues

I need your help. One of our central conclusions in the Internet Safety Technical Task Force Report was that many of the online safety issues require the collective engagement of a whole variety of different groups, including educators, social workers, psychologists, mental health experts, law enforcement, etc. Through my work on online safety, I've met a lot of consultants, activists, and online safety experts. Through my work as a researcher, I've met a lot of practitioners who are trying to engage youth about these issues through outright fear that isn't grounded in anything other than myth.

Unfortunately, I haven't met a lot of people who are on the ground with youth dealing with the messiness of addressing online safety issues from a realistic point of view. I don't know a lot of practitioners who are developing innovative ways of educating and supporting at-risk youth because they have to in their practices. I need your help to identify these people.

I want to know teachers. Who are the teachers who are trying to integrate online safety issues into their classroom by using a realistic model of youth risk?

I want to know school administrators. Who are the school administrators who are trying to build school policy that addresses online safety issues from a non-fear-driven approach?

I want to know law enforcement officers. Who are the law enforcement officers who are directly dealing with the crimes that occur?

I want to know people from social services. Who are the people in social services (like social workers) who are directly working with at-risk youth who engage in risky behavior online?

I want to know mental health practitioners. Who are the psychologists and mental health practitioners who are trying to help youth who engage in risky practices online? Or who help youth involved in self-harm deal with their engagement with self-harm websites?

I want to know youth ministers. Who are the youth pastors and ministers who are trying to help at-risk youth navigate risky situations?

I want to know other youth-focused practitioners. Who else is out there working with youth who is incorporating online safety issues into their practice?

I know that there are a lot of people out there who are speaking about what these partitioners should do, who are advising these practitioners, or who are trying to build curricula/tools to support these practitioners, but I want to learn more about the innovative practitioners themselves.

Please... who's incorporating sensible online safety approaches into their daily practice with youth in the classrooms, in therapy, in social work, in religious advising, etc.? Who's out there trying to wade through the myths, get a realistic portrait, and approach youth from a grounded point of view in order to directly help them, not as a safety expert but as someone who works with youth because of their professional role? Who do I need to know?

(Feel free to leave a comment or email me at zephoria [at] zephoria [dot] org.)

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7/28/09, Would the real social network please stand up?

This ideas in this post are based on conversations with Bernie Hogan and should be interpreted as the production of our co-thinking.

All too frequently, someone makes a comment about how a large number of Facebook Friends must mean a high degree of social capital. Or how we can determine who is closest to who by measuring their email messages. Or that the Dunbar number can explain the average number of Facebook friends. These are just three examples of how people mistakenly assume that 1) any social network that can be boiled down to a graph can be compared and 2) any theory of social networks is transitive to any graph representing connections between people. Such mistaken views result in broad misinterpretations of social networks and social network sites. Yet, time and time again, I hear problematic assumptions so let me start with some claims:

Not all social networks are the same. You cannot assume network transitivity. You cannot assume that properties that hold for one network apply to other networks.

To address this, I want to begin by mapping out three distinct ways of modeling a social network. These are not the only ways of modeling a social network, but they are three common ways that are often collapsed in public discourse.

Sociological "personal" networks. Sociologists have been working hard to measure people's personal networks and much of the theory of social networks stems from analysis done on these networks. Different scholars have taken different approaches to measuring personal networks, but, most stereotypically, this takes the form of a clipboard and pencil as a young grad student queries an individual to recall who they talked to yesterday and indicate who they would lend money to or call when they are having an emotional breakdown. On classic measurement survey is an appendix in the back of Claude Fischer's "To Dwell Among Friends."

Most sociological theory stems from analyses of these personal networks. Social capital, weak ties, homophily, ... all of those theories you've heard about are based on personal networks. Given that these are typically measured by eliciting people's understandings of certain categories (e.g., "friend"), there's a strong overlap between everyday language around social networks and the categories being measured.

If you're a sociologist talking to anyone other than sociologists, you would probably speak of personal networks as the golden standard, the baseline truth. Of course, if you were being honest with yourself or your colleagues, you will note that these measurements have their methodological flaws and biases which is why the scales for measuring personal networks haven't stabilized and why scholars still struggle with the best ways to elicit meaningful information from people being surveyed.

Behavioral social networks. Behavioral social networks are the networks derived from encounters between individuals. In their efforts to measure personal networks, sociologists have often tried to get people to manually document encounters with others through diary studies. With new technologies in place, folks have gone on to generate behavioral social networks through the traces people leave behind. For example, a record of someone's email exchanges provides a handy accounting of that individual's behavioral network. New technologies introduces new opportunities for measuring behavioral networks. Many genres of social media let us see who communicates with who. GPS technologies let us see who shares physical space.

Behavioral social networks provide valuable insight into people's practices and interactions, but they do not confer meaning. This is not to say that they don't have value. I would love to find the strangers that I regularly share space with as I traverse Boston. But we cannot assume that these are my friends or acquaintances. Yet, there seems to be a tendency (especially among geeks of all stripes) to overlay meaning-laden terms on top of these networks, to assume that high connectivity means friendship. This is where trouble often arises. Just because I spend a lot of time with my physical therapist does not mean that she is more important than other people in my network who I see less frequently.

The other difficulty in measuring behavioral social networks is that, at least to date, we measure distinct channels of connection. This complicates our ability to do meaningful comparison across people. If I use AIM as my primary way of keeping in touch with Person A and email as my primary way of keeping in touch with Person B and you only look at one medium, you get a distorted picture of who I communicate with. As communication channels proliferate, this only gets messier. So even when we talk about behavioral social networks, we have to talk about them in across a particular channel.

Publicly articulated social networks. Articulated social networks are the social networks that you intentionally list. In some senses, this is what sociologists are eliciting, but people also articulate their social networks for other purposes. Address books and buddy lists are articulated social networks. So too are invitation lists. Most recently, this practice took a twist with the rise of social network sites that invite you to PUBLICLY articulate your social network.

At this point, I would hope that most of us would realize that Friends != friends. In other words, who you connect to on Facebook or MySpace or Twitter is not the same list of people that you would say constitute your closest and dearest. The practice of publicly articulating one's social network can be quite fraught because there are social costs to the process of public articulation. Issues of reciprocity emerge and people find themselves doing a lot of face-work to navigate the sticky nature of having to account for their social relations in a publicly accountable way. Thus, the list of who you might list as a Friend is often a mix of friends, acquaintances, family members, people from your past, fans, professional colleagues, familiar strangers, and people you don't particularly like but don't want to offend. Oh and the occasional celebrity you think is interesting.

Relating Different Social Networks

These networks are NOT the same. Your mother may play a significant role in your personal network but, behaviorally, your strongest tie might be the person who works in the cube next to you. And neither of these folks might be links on your Facebook for any number of reasons.

Our instinct then is to ask: which is the "real" social network? Frankly, it depends on who you ask. Your mother may be cranky that you don't talk to her as often as your colleague and she may resent your refusal to Friend her on Facebook, but this doesn't mean you love her any less. Of course, this doesn't stop her from thinking you don't love her. If we're trying to understand emotional affinity, the behavioral and publicly articulated social networks aren't particularly helpful. But if you're mother thinks that time is not only a proxy for emotional depth but a proof of it, your behavioral social network might really upset her. (Note: behavioral social networks have gotten people into trouble in the past. See Cobot.)

The truth of the matter is that there is no "real" social network. It all depends on what you're trying to measure, what you're trying to do with those measurements.

We do ourselves an intellectual disservice when we assume that these different types of networks are interchangeable or that studying one automatically tells us about another. Most scholars get this, even when they're quoted out of context by journalists to suggest otherwise (see Cameron Marlow). But I get the sense that a lot of journalists, marketers, advertisers, politicians, and everyday folks don't. This is a problem.

Those who treat different social networks interchangeably project properties onto the network they're analyzing that don't hold. People aren't inherently cool or connectors because they have a lot of Friends on a social network site. Bus drivers and waitresses are much more likely to encounter more new people on a daily basis than executives, but this doesn't mean that they have more social capital. People who email regularly do not necessarily have strong tie strength.

This is not to say that structural information in behavioral social networks or publicly articulated social networks may not work as a proxy for personal networks. Perhaps the networks derived from a particular social media tool or through a particular channel of communication do actually provide insight into a person's personal network. There are great ways to empirically test this hypothesis involving the combination of structural analysis and interviewing. But you cannot simply assume that they are meaningful proxies just because they are both social networks.

There are also many opportunities for new research when we tease out different types of social networks. What if we overlay the different types of social networks? Can we get a better sense of how someone manages their social network? Can we see new structural properties that give us new insights into how people connect, share information, gather support, etc.? So many possibilities!

I'm super excited that so many people from so many fields are getting interested in social networks, but I'm also scared that there are a lot of assumptions flying around that make it difficult to make sense of people's contributions to this emergent field. Increasingly, I see sociologists and computer scientists and mathematician and economists outright dismiss work outside of their field as "wrong." I think that part of the problem is that we're each failing to account for what we can and cannot say based on the types of analysis we're doing. And I think that we often talk past one another because we're all talking about social networks but we're talking about different social networks. In accounting for three types of social networks here, I'm not trying to be all-inclusive, but I am trying to point out that there are differences and that we cannot assume transitivity either in terms of structure or theory. If we can find a way to better identify what kinds of social networks we're talking about and when and where what theories apply, I think that we'll go a long way in bridging different intellectual discourses.

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7/26/09, obsessively recording and sharing our vacations

At Blogher yesterday, the issue of "addiction" emerged in the keynote. A woman in the audience noted that she twitched for the first day of vacation because she desperately wanted to tweet the things she was seeing and witnessing, like the bald eagle flying by. On stage, the conversation turned so that we talked more generally about being able to take a technology free vacation, but I want to address the tendency to tweet the things we see directly for a moment.

It seems as though humans absolutely LOVE to 1) record the minutia of their lives; 2) (over-) share the details of their experiences. And for some reason, each new technology seems to get used by people to do precisely this. I really wouldn't be surprised if we found a cave painting that outlined what the dwellers ate for breakfast. So why are we so offended when people use the internet to do this?

Let's talk about that vacation for a second. Why is it so wrong that people tweet their experiences when it seems to be so right that they spend their vacations stuck behind their fancy new camera recording every moment? Personally, I'm more frustrated by those trying to capture the perfect shot than those who mull over the perfect 140 character version of the event before quickly pumping it into their iPhone. Those behind the camera are far less present than those mulling over the language to express the moment. Yet, somehow, we accept one as the epitome of the vacation while the other is a rupture of it. Why is this?

Then there's sharing. Sharing recordings of vacation events is also not particularly new. Sure, usually those who were vacationing waited until AFTER the vacation to share, but that was more a matter of practicalities. If you needed to get the film processed, you had to wait till you got home. But sharing events is a part of bonding, whether its an oral accounting of those events or a sharing of the recordings of it. One value of sharing records is the ability to share in a way that goes back to that time period.

For example, my grandfather has this brilliant album from the early 1940s when he first came to the States to train American pilots for the war. I'm fascinated by what he recorded - and what he didn't. The album is filled with images of 1940s Georgia and Texas, young British men goofing off before facing their most harrowing hour back in Europe. (My grandfather was a bomber pilot; he lost most of his friends and was shot down himself.) What I particularly love about this album is his little drawings, the white pencil on black background that makes it clear that he put this album together to really record this period in time, a period that he thought would be his only trip to America. I can page through this album forever.

We like when people share their records. Until we don't. Cuz we also know that there is the notion of Too Much. There are only so many baby photos you can take of a baby that's not related to you before you scream Too Much. There are only so many home videos that you can take until you scream Too Much. And the