Category Archives: General

Here’s the Problem

Ben Franklin changes his mind:

I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalm’d off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion consider’d, with my master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc’d some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” So I din’d upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

The mind is not a particularly consistent thing. I like that: “a reasonable creature” because it is a more modern framing of this puzzle than the classic, i.e. Greek, where in the the rational man does battle with his animal self, typically thru the medium of will power. Franklin is more modern, he reasons cheerfully amoungst his multiple interests.

I gather we can now be quite exacting about what’s going on when we change our minds. Below we have two ways that we might weight the value of future rewards. The upper curve is that prescribed by the rational man beloved econ 101 text books. The lower curve is the result of experiments on pigeons, children, and undergraduates.

Causes of Concern

It is a very strange and disturbing time, isn’t it?

Here in Massachusetts we have a Republican running for governor who’s campaign is largely funded by her spouse. They live in this amazingly wealthy neighborhood in a house on the ocean north of Boston. His company is a few miles from the house, making for a pleasant commute. Which is all fine; but for the detail that the state’s economic development program helped pay for the villa his company’s in. Seems that the Republican administrators of the program decided that this delightful neighborhood, one of the richest in the state and possibly the country, was a economically depressed. Well I guess that’s what business friendly Republicans do.

And then we have this guy Allen in Virginia, running for Senate. He stuffed deer’s heads into the the mailboxes of black people, or niggers as he called them for years. After months of stories like that coming out about this guy he’s running neck and neck against his opponent. What’s up with people in Virginia?

I have often joked, but now I am afraid, that what globalization would bring to us was South American governance, i.e. where when countries go bad people of the opposition just disappear never to be seen again. The right to demand that a court review the why somebody has been tossed in prison, it’s what 400, 600 years old? Our elected officials, here in the US, recently set that aside. The president or his minions now have the power to disappear us.

Consider this story in the Times today. Guy happens on the vice president in the street. Tells him that he thinks the Iraq policy is reprehensible. Can you guess what happens next? Yup, the secret service tossed him in jail.

Why exactly do we fear terrorist more than this? Why do we fear terrorist more than people who would, apparently without shame, write laws that retroactively say that their torturing people is legal. Why do we fear terrorists more than people who would make torture legal?

And then you have the announcement that Rice, who’s now secretary of state, was fully briefed on the Al Queda threat in July 2001, months before 9/11. She was told on a scale of 1-10 this threat was a 10, that something had to be done. She did nothing. Which is news. It’s deeply troubling. But it’s part of a pattern that was already clear. The administration just didn’t care. Didn’t care to learn how care about this kind of issue.

So while that’s horrible I’m more bewildered that it appears the 9/11 commission knew about that briefing and left it out of their report. Huh? I know that the commissions report was horribly partisan, but really this is over the top. How exactly can we trust anything in the report at this point. What else got left on the cutting room floor?

Of course Rice handled the news like any bad PR problem. First pretended that meeting didn’t happen, then that she couldn’t remember it, and then finally her staff admitted it did happen. Hope thru out, I presume, that it might blow over.

II guess it did blow over.
Now we have a new circus. A congressman who’s been chasing underage boys around the capital building for years. The good news, for him, is that the Scientologists are old friends of his, so he’s hiding in one of their ‘rehab centers.’ He’s got some excuses. Blame those Catholic priests. Though people say he doesn’t drink he’s also blamed on the drink. You’d think given that he’s got millions of bucks he could get a better crisis manager to handle his PR.

Of course the real story there is that if you’re a viciously unethical political party boss, then a rich closet gay pedophile makes a great lieutenant. No risk he’s not going to follow orders! So now we have the small amusement of watching the party captains skitter like roaches under the fridge when the lights come on.

What’s wrong with this country? It still it isn’t clear that the Republicans will be shown the door in the upcoming election. How can any citizen vote for any of these people? This really bewilders me. More so, it terrifies me.

Presentation of Self

A casual model of identity presumes that it is about self, but it’s not. Identity is about multiple actors. For example, typical usage of identity cards requires three actors, i.e. the card’s holder, issuer, and the reader. All the internet embeded identity protocols follow a similar pattern. PGP keys have the same three players. Those who sign your key fill the role of card issuer.

All of that reminds me of the seventies television detective who would carry an assortment of business cards from which he could pick the identity he wanted to adopt prior to questioning a witness. I can’t help thinking of him each time some spammer offers me yet another 50 free business cards. When I have worked for older companies they always had a business card policy, while these days you can pretty much design your own, which can lead to trouble.

At the optometrist the other day another customer was selecting glasses that would make her younger in the evenings and older when she was in front of her students. The optometrist related the story of how he has people come in seeking short term rentals of glasses, say for an interview. So there is a huge subtext of style, fashion, and the like off to one side here. Riding the subway it’s facinating to observe how carefully crafted some people’s presentation of self is.

All of which has gotten me thinking about ways that people present themselves in the internet. I can’t recall when email software first came to support automatically appending a signature file; it certainly goes back a long way. The finger/.plan file scheme, according to wikipedia, goes back at least to 1971. I seem to recall something similar on the Dartmouth basic system in the late sixties.

What triggered writing this post was noticing some interesting examples where the identity issuer role is about enabling the shaping of who you are more than authenticating who you are. That’s interesting from the point of view of the business modeling of identity systems since the issuer role is, presumably, the only really profitable role in this industry. Credit card and check printing companies do a bit of this when they let you select which cat picture to put on your card or check.

Web forums do this by allowing users to select the avatar. I’m shocked, at this point, that there doesn’t appear to a number of firms trying to capture forum avatar market. Why, for example, can’t I stick something into my account settings at the model train forum which so that my avatar there is based on my flickr photos of my train set? Or my delicious tag cloud around my train tag?

In point of fact there is a huge amount of this going on. Here are two examples.

It looks to me like Ticker Factory’s first users were hanging out in child birth forums. What ticker factory lets you do is put a simple chart into your signature showing progress toward a goal. These are very simple, here is one from a weight loss forum.

I find it notable that most of the data, the parameters, reveal not the data but information about the person’s style.

For a while if you typed “doll” on google it would suggest that you’d might have actually meant to type “dollz“, and even today the top hit for “dolls” is not about dolls. When I first stumbled on the dollz movement I thought it was a kind of online paperdoll, which it is. but it’s actually about creating avatars and signatures. It’s discussed at wikipedia, where this provocative sentence appears.

The first instances of cartoon dolls showed up in 1995 as avatars made for use on a visual chat client called The Palace by a Palace user named artgrrl (later known as shattered innocents)
.” Should of listened to her mother I guess. The dollz/avatar business appears to be huge. I wonder how much market concentration has already happened?

Notice that both of these examples have a tiny bit of advertising in the resulting image. Sites like flickr and delicious accumulate quite extensive models of their users and that ought to enable them to offer services like these that are more informed about who the person is. You can inject these feedburner widgets into forums and email signatures.

I guess I don’t know where this posting is going. Maybe I should ramble on about christmas cards next.

Melting Web Traffic

Over at the Alexa blog at the tail end of a rambling post about the competition for the #2 spot in their ranking we find the following provocative statement:

…over the last six months the Reach and Pageview numbers for both of these giants has been declining, along with Yahoo, in the Alexa stats. That isn’t to say that their overall users or page views are declining, rather that their percentage of the overall traffic on the Web is shrinking.

Markets condense for lots of reasons. Fast growing markets condense because the rapidly entering new customers lack information to guide thier choices leading them to mimic exisiting market players, i.e. you get strong preferential attachment. That concentration of market share can be quite durable since the winners will then work to lock those customers in. As the market matures knowledge about the vendor/customer relationship increases. Vendors get better at managing lock-in while customers become more knowledgable about how to shop.

The relationships that define an industry’s structure. Market share is a metric of the vendor/buy relationships for a particular class of vendors. Individual relationships can come and go, but they tend toward durable. A particular class of relationships is quite durable; which makes market share something dependable. That stablity allows firms to plan their capital expenditures confidently; i.e. it lowers their risk. From a planning point of view how your industry is consilidating or not is as important as if your industry’s market is growing or shrinking.

So I’m particularly bewildered that Alexa doesn’t track and chart an actual measure of how condensed the traffic is.

Bad Plutocrats, No Cookie!

Back for a moment on the left/right (aka little/big-economic entity) distinction. Consider a treaty who’s name is something along the lines of ‘Treaty to protect the rights of X.” Now, imagine the X that that is furthest to the right. ‘Treaty to protect the rights of Bill Gates?” ‘Treaty to protect the rights of the G7?’ How about: ‘Treaty to protect the rights of Broadcast Organizations‘?!?

Which brings us to a related question; how does the Plutocracy feel about the demotion of Pluto? Heavens, if they can organize to eliminate the death tax you’d think they could get it together to for this!

Sell signals

Statement from Billy Campbell, President, Discovery Networks, U.S. Discovery Communications, Inc

Our entire company is deeply saddened by the tragic and sudden loss of Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. Steve was beloved by millions of fans and animal lovers around the world and was one of our planet’s most passionate conservationists. He has graced our air since October 1996 and was essential in building Animal Planet into a global brand.

What a legacy! “Building a global brand!”

Polarization and Paralysis

Here’s another interesting point from Polarized America.

When your designing your governance scheme one of the levers you can adjust is how much consensus is required before it’s possible to make major changes to the rules. For example here in the US it’s is very tedious to change the constitution. Another example is the Senate’s rules that make it impossible for a contentious issues to pass with a slim majority. There are lots and lots of these schemes; for example all the checks and balances built into the system.

So it’s no surprise that if the nation becomes polarized then the Congress becomes is paralyzed. That’s how the system was designed and it’s one of the patterns the authors of Polarized America illustrate that with data.

So then what happens? A few things. The two sides in the argument trash around looking for other means to achieve their goals. This model has something to say about the president’s repeated efforts (largely successful) to expand the power of the executive branch. This thrashing around attempting to find alternate ways get control of the government’s power is inherently dangerous because they skirt the boundaries of what is legal. The frustration of polarization creates an emotional climate where the political actors can self justify falling off the edge.

Because many of the programs that are designed to temper the concentration of wealth (i.e. programs that redistribute wealth) like the minimum wage, social services, education funding, health care funding, are not indexed to inflation this paralysis has the side effect of eroding their effect. Since this time around the primary poles of the division are about wealth that reinforces the polarization.

One notable thing about the models underlying Polarized America is the counter intuitive result that when you look at the actual votes in congress the social conservative dimension is a extremely weak predictor compared to the economic one. That’s counter intuitive because most of the rhetoric about American politics is about ethical and moral issues; e.g. stem cells, minor rights (race, gay, women), and the degree of separation between secular and religious institutions.

That too can be explained by this the realization that the architecture of our government means that a polarized you can’t make major changes.

The irony here is that the architecture is probably protecting the right from getting tossed out on its ear. The data is clear. The electorate has broad deep support for the redistribution programs that temper the corrosive effect of concentrated wealth. They also are an extremely tolerant bunch with little interest in the socal-right’s conservative agenda. The architecture has allowed the right to avoid the blame for eroding the redistribution schemes of economic liberals, and prevented them from the most socially conservative acts.

Blog Payolla!

A fun article in a recent the New Yorker about a radio station in New York City mentions in passing that Eliot Spitzer the NY attorney general is currently investigating a bunch of radio stations for taking payola. I’m kind of glad, if surpised, that there are still consumer protection laws on the books about that.

Meanwhile bloggers can now take payola, see over here.

This article about blogger payola is wonderfully ironic once you notice the amazing assortment of advertising techniques in use by it’s web site.