association-list

Reading this economist analysis of the latest OECD report on broadband penetration got me wondering something. Not about broadband penetration per se, but about productivity and its relation to computer technology. This bit specifically:

In other words, new applications that effectively harness broadband must still be developed. So far, only online media and entertainment have done this. Strikingly, this is not simply a case of people and businesses integrating broadband into their current ways, as with the PC in Dr Solow’s time. Industries like health care and education need to change as fundamentally as, say, the music and film businesses have.

The question that I asked myself is: ‘What else is there that you can only do with a broadband connection that is not media based?’. Media is the obvious case and the big winner so far. Everything that has hit big on the internet so far because of the increase of bandwidth is a subcase of media. Music, movies, MMOs[1] (especially open-ended virtual worlds like Second Life), Skype/VoIP, YouTube, etc. All of these high-bandwidth activities are media stuff, bulk file transfers and high bit rate streams. So what else can we do with our ever faster (in some places, at least) network connections?

Brainstorming on this has proved fairly hard. Distributed Computation was the first thing I thought of. The faster and lower-latency your network connection, the amount of smarts you need to put into chunking and distributing parts of problems decreases, as coordination becomes easier and delivery of problems and solutions becomes faster. While this is pretty cool, it doesn’t speak directly to the problem of productivity in work or life. Services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk benefit partially from the same things, but since human processing speeds have a sharp upper limit, they can’t benefit indefinitely from the increasing speed of network connections.

Thinking about this sort of thing leads pretty quickly back to the basic nature of the work that people perform and the lesiure activities they engage in, and how computers and networks can make that easier, faster and more efficient.

There are lots of people already working on moving matter around more effectively and cheaply. It’s been the number one preoccupation of humanity since communities were more than a couple of days to walk across, and computers have already the bulk of their impact there, so most improvements are going to be incremental, and aren’t going to see much benefit from network speed, as matter is a lot slower than the bits that describe it.

There are also a good number of people involved in the selling of that matter once it’s arrived (at least at an intermediate distribution center, for online retailers). There too, computers and networks have already had most of their impact. Other than more and better product information and bigger and higher quality samples, there is not much benefit from faster networks here.

For people who design things, engineers, artists and designers, there’s some network scaling to be had from collaboration to be had in terms of collaboration. Unfortunately, this space is hard to break into, because it’s much easier for Autodesk to add networked collaboration to AutoCAD than it is for someone else to design and build a collaborative drafting and design application from the ground up.

For certain types of collaborative office work, there are also some scaling benefits to be had. Google is already doing some interesting work in this space, and I’m sure that there are at least a couple of fortunes to be made in it (although at some level it feels crazy to go up against Google at this point, especially when they already have such a lead). Nor am I convinced that there is a great deal more network scaling benefit to be had here. There is a low upper limit on the useful complexity of office software, and it’s already fairly painless to deliver these applications to the web browser.

What strikes me, at this point in my thought process about this issue is how little I know about how other people spend their time at work. To have any useful ideas about this, I think that I’m going to have to have a better grasp on how many people do what and what their jobs actually entail. A better idea of how productivity is measured and what it actually means would help, too.

I figure that I have to be missing something. Otherwise there’s not a whole lot of reasons to keep increasing the amount of bandwidth that homes get much beyond the point of being able to stream 2-3 HD programs and along with a couple of phone calls and some bulk transfers. That’s a big connection, but not that far off. Of course, it’s quite possible that these new, major uses for networking are things that no one is doing yet, and that no one sees the value of at this point, in which case, I’m unlikely to be the one who thinks of them first. Still, trying is an interesting exercise.

1) MMOs have experienced another benefit: being able to smoothly handle more other players in your immediate area at once. I consider this a subcase of distributed computation.

My super belated chime in on the whole death of the SF magazine market thing.

I think that Paolo’s and Erin’s comments are particularly interesting because they actually propose some forward movement in the market. The short SF market has shrunk so much that there’s almost nothing going on there, in terms of market diversity. I like some of the stories in the current magazines, but the return on investment is somewhat low: I don’t really like enough of them to keep buying them, although I continue to do so (at cover price) out of some sense of dogged loyalty to a kind of fiction that I love, at least for F&SF and Asimov’s. At the same time, none of the editors of the big three really speak to me, taste-wise, and their focuses aren’t my own. What I’d like to see are more magazines out there, with differing focuses and representing a wider variety of editorial tastes. For one thing, I’d like to see more ideas out there, more people thinking of various concepts for magazines, so that someone might actually get excited enough to take the plunge (or one of the existing magazines might get interested enough to launch a spin off).

So in that spirit, I present Energy States.

ES would be a mid-length monthly focusing entirely on overlapped serial short novels. The target length would be 30-50k words, too long to get published in most magazines, and too short to land a novel deal these days. The magazine would run these in 10-15kw chunks, aiming to put each novel in 3-5 issues. After each month, the first section of every story would be put online as a teaser for the rest of the story, and the entire story could be purchased stand-alone online for two dollars, once its print run was completed. Note that buying the story gives you access to previously purchased installments if the whole thing is not out yet, so the customer could catch up on a story that they’re particularly interested in without buying back issues. Bundles of popular stories could also be sold, and I imagine that you could make a deal with a PoD house for custom anthologies and chapbooks. Subscriptions, as a bonus, would get you access to all of the content, including back issues, online. For all individually sold items, the author would get a cut.

I’m not sure how well it would work out, honestly. I don’t know that there’s a reader’s market for this kind of thing, or if a starting magazine could possibly pay well enough to convince people to sell good work that they could possibly expand into a more profitable novel. This idea is mostly meant to address what I perceive as a gap in the writer’s market for story sales, allowing authors to get works out there that are currently considered unsalable.

I put aside something like thirty five books the other day. I’d recently needed to clean up all of the books at the foot of my bed and on my chair, so I reorganized and cleared out another shelf for those. As this involved some shuffling, I got a closer look at some of the things that have been festering at the bottom of my first to-read shelf, and I realized that I’m just not going to get to some of them. A few days later I was starting on a paperback and I realized that I wasn’t going to finish it, either. It was overwritten and far too long and the dialog was just painful. To make matters worse, it was the start of a series.

So I marked my place, got up, and cleared out half a shelf in my closet. Then I went through all the to-read piles, and the piles of things that I’d stalled out on long ago and I started culling. It pains me, because I’m a skinflint and paid full price for most of them, but once I was done there were still ninety books there. Almost a year of reading, if I was to stop buying books tomorrow. Away they went.

The only reason this even bears talking about (although it likely doesn’t) is that I don’t often put books aside very often. When I start something, I generally finish it, unless it’s too awful to continue reading. Lately, as I’ve spent more time writing and less time reading, I’ve been falling further and further behind. So it’s time for a new strategy. It’s uncomfortable for me. I feel that I should give each book a shot, each author a chance, but I just don’t think that its going to work. I realize that what I am doing is fairly normal, for the rest of the populace.

So, anyway. To the authors whose gems I will never discover, I’m sorry.

I was bored tonight and procrastinating, as per usual, so I decided to toy around with some simple simulations. The subject for these experiments was taxation, which I’m sure everyone and their dog finds wildly exciting, but these kinds of things are important, and if my life was exciting I wouldn’t be writing simulations.

The setup is this; take some fixed number of individuals, toss them into bins according to a normal distribution (Likely too narrow, really, as a lot of them end up empty. Might need to raise my sigma?), then crudely apply the effects of income, inflation, taxation, random chance, etc. The taxation comes in two modes. Progressive, rising steeply towards the top, and flat for income and capital gains. I eyeballed the curve for progressive, since I didn’t want to calculating each time, and I was too lazy to calculate it in the first place. Rates are 95% for the top bracket.

Some stats:

• Twenty bins in 5000 unit increments, starting at 20000.
• 10000 + 0-10000 starting investment capital.
• 10000 unit tax brackets (at the start).
• Inflation fixed at 4% per year, and brackets scale with it.
• Yearly wage increase is inflation +- 2%, with a 5% chance of losing or gaining 0-10% to simulate job changes.
• Capital gain is 5% if your capital is below a certain point, 8% above that, to simulate incredibly crudely that if you have more money, you have access to a better class of investments. Also there is a 10% chance of losing or gaining 0-20% to simulate above or below average years.
• No one ever dies or has major life changes.
• Income is the sum of your post-tax wages and post tax investment capital for bracket calculation purposes.

Initial results are what you would expect, if you’re reasonably familiar with the theory. Flat taxes tend to spread people out over time, eventually popping people off the top of the simulation and dropping them off the bottom.

Progressive taxes tend to squeeze people towards a stable middle, with outliers being fairly quickly corrected. It’s critical to lock the brackets to inflation or everyone falls off of the bottom in short order.

Observations:

• Capital tends to vanish if you have very little of it to start. At first, I started each person with 0-20000 unit of investment capitol. After a few thousand iterations, the vast majority of people had nothing. I’m fairly sure that this is a modeling issue.
• Programming to learn something new is a great way to remember why you started doing it in the first place.
• This is likely the least interesting post I’ve ever done. I haven’t defamed a single person!

If anyone is interested in looking at the code, or has a suggestion for refining the model, drop me a note. I’d have to clean the code up a little, but it’s not shamefully messy.

The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, by Daniel Brook

This book is quite likely to make you angry. Angry, if you’re a conservative, at a white, yale-educated author whining about how in order to make ends meet, living in a big city, he has to either suffer or ’sell out’. If you’re a liberal, it’ll make you angry at how bleak the picture he paints is, how completely the right has won certain rhetorical battles. I, personally, am in the latter camp, as disclaimer. Also, I’m more or less a part of the class that he’s talking about, as I went to a good school and have a good job and still can’t afford a house in the place where I want to live.

The book is essentially a paean to the era of progressive taxation and new deal social policies that the right in America has been dismantling for the last forty years or so. I don’t know the history as well as I’d like, so there’s a lot here that I have to take on faith. But the primary argument, that a tax structure that shrinks the middle class is bad for the country. This is not something that we should be aiming for (disclaimer, the EPI is a lefty think tank, take with salt, but I imagine those numbers are kinda hard to fudge). I’ll admit that I was sold on the argument before I picked up the book, since housing prices in San Francisco, where I live, seem to average around 5-700,000 USD for studios, lofts, and one bedroom apartments. I might be able to afford one, because I’ve been very, very lucky, but I’m fairly sure that no one I consider part of my peer group, other than the people I work with, will be able to.

The book is light, and in a lot of places would be bolstered by having better direct access to the statistics involved. It’s written like it’s intended to be made into a documentary. Its primary weakness, however, is linked to its main point, which is that if the children of the upper middle class can’t make it trying to do good, then almost no one can. Unfortunately, it’s too easy to get hung up on the fact that it is about the children of the upper middle class, Ivy Leaguers and graduate students. This is not actually a weakness of the argument, which still holds water, but a weakness to attack. These people (we people?) are not, by definition, a deprived minority. Any complaints that we make are easily attackable by our ideological enemies as the whining of people who want it even easier than we’ve had it. That we deserve to be able to remain middle class because that is where we were born.

This isn’t, of course, the argument that Brook is making, but it’s the easy perception and the standard line of attack. As of the moment, the book has 14 Amazon reviews, six with five stars, one with four, none with three, one with two, and six with one. I am willing to bet, however, that these ratings track the reviewer’s political affiliation more than they track age or socioeconomic class. Most of the negative ones essentially run, “Shut the fuck up and get a real job, you whiner.” Few of them dispute and of the arguments put forth, and when they do, they don’t attack the argument, they attack Mr. Brook, with standard aphorisms of the right; “You’ll understand when you get older.”, “Stop looking for a free ride and work for a living.”, etc.

Let me spell this out for anyone else who reviews this book. This is not a book about Mr. Brook’s or his classmate’s entitlement to a middle class lifestyle. It’s a book about how Reagan- and Goldwater-ite conservative policies on taxation have made the rich richer and have done nothing for the middle class. How if the rich continue to get richer, no one but the rich will be able to live in our most vibrant cities. How an unregulated market for housing and education squeezes out opportunities for the rest of us.

The book is only about the children of the upper middle class because it’s something that’s finally reaching us. It’s already gotten everyone else. We’re not the canaries, not even the miners, we’re the first shift bosses to succumb. If it’s made it this far, what’s next?

So, read the book. Think about it some. Take a trip to some of the other advanced democracies in the world, assuming that you can afford it, and that you can get the time off to go. Talk to some people there, tell them that you’re from Canada, if telling them you’re from the USA is coloring the discussion too much. Take a step out from behind the American exceptionalism that has been so carefully inculcated in you and me and realize that while it’s nice here, if you’re lucky, you most often don’t have to be lucky for it to be nice in one of the other advanced nations, where you wouldn’t be saddled by college debt, you wouldn’t have to constantly worry about what neighborhood you live in to make sure that your kids don’t go to a shitty school, you don’t have to work sixty or more hours a week to own a house.

Mr. Brook isn’t saying that he and his generation don’t want to work, or that they just want something to be given. He just wants to see them, us, be able to work to enrich our own lives, rather than the lives of the people who employ us. To be able to work hard for the things that matter, rather than having to make a choice between our lives and our ethics.

To raise the tone to an incendiary level and to clearly step outside of the argument made by this book. I’d like to put forth the thesis that conservative, regressive tax policies are are aimed at creating a semi-hereditary upper class, an ever less permeable nobility. This is something that, as Americans, as people true to the spirit of the Constitution, we should be fighting tooth and nail. Now stop whining, suck it up, and go out there and vote for someone who’ll raise your damned taxes and spend them on equality and the health and welfare of the people of this country.

Some truly remarkable data visualization stuff here. Also, the presenter, Hans Rosling, is a hell of a public speaker. And it’s not just tech glitz, either. Much thoughtful analysis of numerical trends as they relate to development. It gets weaker towards the end, but I think that this is just because I am less impressed with his dollarstreet software than I am with Gapminder and Trendalyser, which, I think are the best tools I’ve seen thus far for narrativising numerical sequences. Really, nothing quite like them for telling a story with numbers.

The video ends on quite a weird note, but it’s only 20 minutes, so you can’t go in expecting 100% thoughtful analysis of potential solutions and those that have been tried in the past.

When I was in high school, the Chaplain, who was a liberal sort, invited a group of Buddhist monks to come and visit. They came and talked, answered questions, skinny asian men, some young, some old, with shaven heads and saffron and orange robes, wearing sneakers or Birkenstocks over socks. Few of these things made any impression on me, though. I was in high school, after all, and knew most things better than they did. I’m still not a fan of religious orders, although I think that I could have a more fruitful conversation with one of them. The thing that really stuck with me, though, was the sand mandala that they completed while they were there.

I don’t know if you’ve seen one of these things, but they’re quite intricate, fine, clear lines of colored sand, shaken out of a paper funnel with delicate taps. The idea that they were simply going to complete it, let it sit for a few days, and then just tip it into the trash or perhaps use some other, more sacred method of disposal were abhorrent to me. I spent the couple of days that they took to complete it thinking up ways to preserve it. My favorite, the one I ended up suggesting to the Chaplain, was to have them build it on steel, or some other heat resistant surface, then bake it in the kiln we had in the art building, sealing the pattern in glass. He explained it all to me then, but I didn’t buy it then, and am not one hundred per cent sold on the idea of enshrining the transitory nature of things in expensive ritual.

Still, there are lessons to the things beyond the obvious, or at least there were for me. The value of artwork as symbol, rather that just being the thing itself. Up until then, art was just something that you did because it was beautiful, or because it felt good, rather than because it meant anything. Sometimes, of course, an artwork is just a thing done for its beauty, or the satisfaction of creating it, and often that’s enough, or even better than had it come gravid with symbol, but for all of my teachers nattering on about what this or that artwork symbolized, I’d never known what they meant before then, never had the realize that in a particular context a visual artwork could be transformed into a tool for saying, lent narrative weight beyond its immediate presentation.

I had intended to say something here about my distaste for the internet’s tendency towards the packratting of ephemera, but on further contemplation, it’s early days yet. Recording everything and then using various filtering mechanisms (primarily the eyes of the bored, at this point) to ferret out the things among them that aren’t trivial or ephemeral isn’t something that we’ve had the technological capability to do, up to now. As a strategy for finding the things worth preserving, it certainly has its merits. In all likelihood, most of the hesitancy we see, the trepidation toward being seen as trivial or insignificant, has to do with the human perceptual bias towards the superiority of the past. We should probably give it a little time before we bother to pass judgement, or even before we worry about the problem.