Drunk driving less disruptive than thought ...

The media has widely reported that cell phone use impairs driving ability as much as a blood alcohol of 0.08.

Of course the media reports don't give us enough data to make any decisions on, thus my slightly tongue-in-cheak posting title. It's noteworthy that other studies suggest a conversation in the car may be equally distracting. I find my kids to be far more distracting than phones, passengers, alcohol or incoming meteors, but our situation is perhaps atypical.

If I were to be daring, however, I'd wager we'll discover that the subjects they're doing these tests on (grad students?) probably drive as well when intoxicated, under test conditions, as does the average healthy 75 yo in late afternoon.

Arms race in the market: Dynamic vs. predictive pricing

Airlines price seats on some combination of supply, demand, and psychology. Dell does this with their large and short lived "specials". Amazon has tried dynamic pricing too, though I'm not sure they're still doing it.

Well, as sure as night follows day the market has produced a countervailing force. The evolutionary arms race continues:

Airfares Made Easy (or Easier) - New York Times

.. Mr. Etzioni helped to create Farecast, an airfare search engine that also predicts how much the price of an airline ticket will rise or fall over the coming days...

... Farecast could become a great tool for consumers because it uses much the same techniques that airline computers have used to extract the maximum amount of money from the flying public. It is the latest Web site to harness cheap computing power to hazard predictions on all sorts of everyday things and make the data available to consumers.

One such site introduced this year was Zillow.com, ... It mines data in county land records to hazard a guess on the value of 65 million homes across the United States...

Inrix, based in Kirkland, Wash., crunches data to predict traffic....

... "This is Shopping 2.0," said Hugh Crean, Farecast's chief executive. It goes one step further than Web sites like Kayak, Sidestep and Farechase ... that search the listings of the airlines..

A traveler picks the dates and destination of the trip just as he would at any other online airline travel site. (The Farecast site has flights only to and from Seattle and Boston, but promises to have all the major American cities by year-end.) Farecast generates a list of the scheduled flights, listing them from cheapest to most expensive.

What's different is that at the top of the screen is an arrow that points the direction Farecast's computer predicts fares are headed. Farecast even specifies how much it will change.

I'll have to add these links to my Firefox bookmarks -- much handier now that Google syncs them to all my machines, and to my business travel web page.

I suspect the big money for Farecast will come from corporations, at the very least they'll use the threat of Farecast to get a better deal from airlines. Airlines may try to game the system, or they may find it's easier to reduce dynamic pricing -- which would put Farecast out of business.

Where's it going to go? The "military computer becomes sentient" is a staple of science fiction. Skynet is the best known popular example. Maybe, but maybe it'll be predictive pricing, or games. When predictive pricing software starts incorporating neural networks from rats (as in that infamous F-22 simulator rat brain) and it's time to start digging ... :-) Oh, wait, it's too late ...

Barack Obama is a fool

Pharyngula has done a great service, he's revealed that Barack Obamais a fool. Wow, it's good to learn that now.

Gaming Amazon reviews: 17/17 found this helpful

Looking over my Amazon reviews, it's hard to avoid an obvious correlation. My occasional very positive reviews get extremely high "helpful" ratings, but my frequent negative reviews get a more mixed set of "helpful" ratings.

Now some of that may be human nature -- most people buying things want to hear good news, not bad news. I do wonder, though, how much gaming is going on ...

(BTW, I always look for the bad ratings first. They are the ones I value highly. It's easy to tell which are thoughtful and well done.)

Take the Net: Own the last mile

Cringely promotes the idea of a historic figure -- the Visi Calc programmer:

PBS | I, Cringely . June 29, 2006 - If we build it they will come

... The obvious answer is for regular folks like you and me to own our own last mile Internet connection. This idea, which Frankston supports, is well presented by Bill St. Arnaud in a presentation you'll find among this week's links. (Bill is senior director of advanced networks with CANARIE, which is responsible for the coordination and implementation of Canada's next generation optical Internet initiative.) The idea is simple: run Fiber To The Home (FTTH) and pay for it as a community of customers -- a cooperative. The cost per fiber drop, according to Bill's estimate, is $1,000-$1,500 if 40 percent of homes participate. Using the higher $1,500 figure, the cost to finance the system over 10 years at today's prime rate would be $17.42 per month.

What we'd get for our $17.42 per month is a gigabit-capable circuit with no bits inside - just a really fast connection to some local point of presence where you could connect to ANY ISP wanting to operate in your city.

'It's honest funding,' says Frankston. 'The current system is like buying drinks so you can watch the strippers. It is corrupt and opaque. We should pay for our wires in our communities just like we pay for the wires in our homes.'

The effect of this move would be beyond amazing. It would be astounding. No more arguments about Net Neutrality, for one thing, because we'd effectively be extending our ownership and control of the wires all the way to the ISP interconnect. Of course you'd still have to buy Internet service, but at NerdTV rates the amount of bandwidth used by a median U.S. broadband customer would be less than $2.00 per month. Though with that GREAT BIG PIPE most of us would be tempted to use a lot more bandwidth, which is exactly the point.

I'm in.

Google's strategy: a summary

Google Blogoscoped is getting better all the time. I like this synopsis of Google's strategy:

Google Checkout Is Live

It looks like Google aims to become the software layer below all web content. A webmaster can now create a shop site by outsourcing the data publication to Google Base, getting extra publicity through Google AdWords, adding Google features through Google Account Authentication, add site search with the Google Web API, and allow shoopers to buy stuff with Google Checkout without having to handle credit card information. Community sites can make revenue via Google AdSense, share the revenue through the AdSense API, and outsource blogs (Blogger), web pages (Google Page Creator), groups (Google Groups), calendars (Google Calendar), videos (Google Video), images (Picasa Web Albums), maps (the Google Maps API) and so on. The foundation for all of this, really, is user trust in Google, and the question: will they screw with my data or not?

I'm still waiting for Google backup.

Heroes in Georgia: Ms. New and Mr. Carter

A respected Georgia high school teacher, one of only two credentialed teachers in a rural community, takes an extremely radical position. She teaches about evolution ....

Evolution's Lonely Battle in a Georgia Classroom - New York Times

... Pat New, 62, a respected, veteran middle school science teacher, ... a year ago, quietly stood up for her right to teach evolution in this rural northern Georgia community, and prevailed.

She would not discuss the conflict while still teaching, because Ms. New wouldn't let anything disrupt her classroom. But she has decided to retire, a year earlier than planned. "This evolution thing was a lot of stress," she said. And a few weeks ago, on the very last day of her 29-year career, at 3:15, when Lumpkin County Middle School had emptied for the summer, and she had taken down her longest poster from Room D11A — the 15-billion-year timeline ranging from the Big Bang to the evolution of man — she recounted one teacher's discreet battle.

She isn't sure how many questioned her teaching of evolution — perhaps a dozen parents, teachers and administrators and several students in her seventh-grade life science class. They sent e-mail messages and letters, stopped her in the hall, called board members, demanded meetings, requested copies of the PBS videos that she showed in class...

...On May 5, 2005, she filled out a complaint to initiate a grievance under state law, writing that she was being "threatened and harassed" though "I am following approved curriculum." She also wrote, "If we could get together within 24 hours and settle this and I feel I have support to teach the standards, then I would tear it up."

Suddenly the superintendent was focused on standards. Mr. Moye called the state department's middle school science supervisor and asked about evolution. "Obviously the State Department of Education supports evolution," Mr. Moye said in an interview....

... In January 2004, when they were about to be adopted, Kathy Cox, Georgia's education superintendent, announced that she would remove evolution from the standards because it was too divisive an issue. That set off a huge protest that included former President Jimmy Carter and Governor Sonny Perdue, a Republican. Within days, Ms. Cox reversed herself.

The strong implication is that the superintendent would have stopped her teaching evolution, save that it was a state standard.

It's the standard part that makes this a peculiar story. I'm used to thinking of education in the southern US as utterly miserable -- but Georgia has a state standard that supports biology education?! I recall that we even had a struggle (kept VERY quiet) in Minnesota to keep natural selection in the curriculum.

Clearly Ms. New is a hero, but it's nice to hear of yet another righteous act by the noblest American - James Carter. (Yes, credit to Republican Perdue too -- Carter just happens to be an old hero of mine.)

Would Gates have preferred Jobs? Yes, claims the Economist

It's annoying. No sooner do I stop subscribing to the evidently moribund Economist than they start showing flashes of their lost audacious insight. Emphases mine.

Economist: Ozzie the Wizard

THE co-founder, chairman and “chief software architect” of Microsoft, the world's largest software company, would deny it on his life, but the one person Bill Gates admires most for his geeky prowess—and might have chosen to succeed him as software architect—is almost certainly Steve Jobs. Unfortunately, Mr Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computer and victim of Mr Gates's predatory business instincts during the 1980s and 1990s, cannot be considered available, since he is busy leading Apple's renaissance as a builder of gadgets and software that, in the opinion of his fans, put Microsoft to shame. So Mr Gates spent years courting the geek he admires second most, a software pioneer named Ray Ozzie.

After many overtures, Microsoft last year bought Mr Ozzie's company, Groove Networks, and thus brought Mr Ozzie and his brother Jack inside the Microsoft tent...

... As a kid in suburban Chicago, Mr Ozzie was already soldering all sorts of dangerous circuits together in a guest bedroom, but it was at college in the 1970s that he discovered his passion, which was, as he once put it, “to augment relationships” among human beings through technology. The catalyst was his encounter with PLATO, ... he devoted his next three decades to writing software that enables “collaboration”.

His single biggest breakthrough came in the 1980s, when Mr Ozzie personally wrote a million of the first 3.5m lines of code for the first successful collaboration software, Lotus Notes...

... Mr Ozzie's company, Groove, was not a commercial success this time, but Mr Gates and others in the industry nonetheless saw the idea and recognised its potential. Last April Messrs Gates and Ozzie joined forces.

One reason why Mr Gates is so drawn to Mr Ozzie is that, as Mr Gates has said, “Ray is incredible at thinking of the end-user experience,” an area where Mr Gates, whose own genius is weighted towards business strategy rather than software finesse, has a less stellar reputation. Another reason is Mr Ozzie's personality, which is the opposite both of Mr Gates's and Mr Jobs's. Mr Gates has a squeaky voice and sounds perennially on the point of irritation; Mr Jobs pushes his colleagues as Ramses did his pyramid-builders and appears to have a similar self-image. Mr Ozzie, by contrast, wears a permanent Buddha-like smile, speaks in a soothing, deep voice and delivers even harsh appraisals with reassuring charm...

I've read many articles on the Gates transition. This and Cringely's are the only two worth the print. I presume the Jobs reference is tongue-in-cheek, but it is oddly plausible. Gates strategic brilliance (used to Evil ends, of course) and Jobs user experience genius would have been an utterly astounding combination. Of course they would never have been able to collaborate ...

Note the reference to PLATO, the face that launched a thousand ships. Old software never dies, PLATO was reborn as Notes and Groove and more. It was revolutionary.

I cannot resist the geek compulsion to imagine Bill Gates. I think of him as ruthless, with a compulsive desire to see things 'as they are' rather than as they are imagined to be. I imagine this is what has allowed him to kill ventures quickly. Did he realize his own weaknesses stood in the way -- and that for Ozzie to succeed he would have to leave? I wonder then how long Balmer will last.

Incidentally, Jon Udell, a deep thinker I've long admired, has had a longstanding relationship with Ozzie. It's hard to imagine Jon working for Gates, but it wouldn't shock me if he joined Ozzie. That would make for some interesting times.

PS. The Economist has also added links to 'article background' on their web site. It will be interesting to see what they do with these. They are web only, and the one for this article was well linked.

Google Checkout arrives - and it's Microsoft Wallet

Anyone remember Microsoft Wallet? It was a feature of IE 1.0, and I think it was part of Windows 3.1. Microsoft Wallet later became a Microsoft initiative to own identities, and provide a global account that would work across merchants. That triggered quite a furore.

And now the long rumored Google Checkout has arrived. It turns out to be a lot like Microsoft Wallet and Microsoft's identity management initiatives. Google's been owning my digital identity in stages, and now they've made the big leap -- they own my credit card information (AMEX, just to be a little safer). As yet Google is not a bank and there's no eCash/PayPal -- just credit cards. The interesting question is what this looks like for merchants. Do they have to get a standard credit card account or does Google step into the picture there?

Google masks email accounts on purchase, cutting down on corporate spam. That's worth something. The list of supported vendors is pretty small, the biggest is Buy.com, GNC and Dick's Sporting Goods. CD Universe has a $10 coupon code.

Now that Google has my credit card I am fully owned. I might as well tatoo Google on my forehead. That's the way of the modern world. You can be owned by Amazon, eBay (that would be hell), Microsoft or Google. Pick your poison. Since I don't believe Google is anywhere near as dominant as Microsoft, I'm riding that pony.

In terms of impact, so far Google is clearly competing with Amazon. Depending on what they're doing for vendors they may be after eBay as well. The purchase history screen has a 'review sellers' section, that implies Google will be doing identity and reputation management of sellers. That's where eBay blew it (big time), I trust Google has learned from that.

Update: The NYT fills in the merchant side. eBay is toast (yes!). The Google subsidy will open up eCommerce for items priced between $1.00 to $2.00.

... for merchants, the service comes with a twist: Google will waive some or all of the transaction fees for companies that buy advertising from it. That may give the service a leg up on competitors like PayPal and several smaller companies that help online merchants accept credit cards.

It will also add another entry to the list of businesses that have been shaken up by Google's innovations, a list that already includes publishing, advertising and desktop software.

Google is charging merchants 20 cents plus 2 percent of the purchase price to process card transactions, less than most businesses pay for credit card processing. Banking industry executives say that credit card processors typically pay MasterCard and Visa a fee of 30 cents and 1.95 percent for every purchase, so Google will be subsidizing many transactions.

What is more, for every $1 a company spends on search advertising, Google will waive the fees on $10 worth of purchases. Factoring in the 2 percent fee, that represents a rebate of at least 20 percent of advertising spending.

...Mr. Bresee said Backcountry would have people watching the performance of Google Checkout around the clock.

"If they convert at the same rate, and the fees are lower, we will put up the biggest Google Checkout button you have ever seen," he said.

RJR and the Elegance of Pure Evil

Can Evil of a certain sort have its own elegance? The idea is repulsive, but there's something about this story that produces the same sensation as elegant design. In world of infinite shades of gray, the tobacco companies are capable of a uniquely pure form of evil. Methamphetamine pushers do terrible things, sure -- but they are almost always victims too. Wrong, but not so purely evil. Even terrorists often believe they serve a noble cause.

Companies like RJR tobacco though -- they are rich. They are strong. They serve Evil with the same flair and style as Milton's Satan. Which answers my question -- Milton showed that Evil could have its own elegance and cachet. RJR is simply demonstrating that again (emphases mine, note that in better times the Secretary of HHS had a spine ...)

The Flavor of Marketing to Kids

Joseph A. Califano Jr. is president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. He was secretary of health, education and welfare in the Carter administration. Louis W. Sullivan is president emeritus of the Morehouse School of Medicine. He was secretary of health and human services under President George H.W. Bush.

Twenty years ago RJR created Joe Camel, who blew smoke rings over Times Square and was so heavily promoted that more children recognized this cartoon character than Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse...

All the while, RJR maintained that it did not market to children. But with the release of internal company documents years later, one of RJR's key papers, "Younger Smokers -- Ages 14-25," revealed the company's interest in marketing cigarettes to young smokers.

Now RJR is marketing the sweet smell and taste of flavored cigarettes that mask the harshness of natural tobacco, which can deter some first-time smokers, especially children. These cigarettes are packaged in shiny tins with cool new names, flashy advertising and candy flavors ranging from watermelon ("Beach Breezer") to berry ("Bayou Blast") to pineapple and coconut ("Kauai Kolada").

As Reynolds has known for decades, 90 percent of adult smokers become addicted as kids, and the younger a child begins to smoke, the likelier the child is to become a regular smoker. Moreover, the age at which kids first try cigarettes has been declining and now stands at just under 12. By masking the regular tobacco flavor and scent, flavored cigarettes make it even more appealing for a 12- or 13-year-old to take that initial puff and keep smoking until he or she gets hooked.

Reynolds introduced these cigarettes in 1999, slipping a pellet into the cigarette filters to give the smoke a candy flavor. But flavored cigarette sales really exploded in 2004, thanks to eye-catching advertisements in magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone -- all popular reading material for boys and girls...

Reynolds's claim that it flavors cigarettes to give adults an alternative to traditional smokes is belied by the findings of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo. That research institute found that, compared with adult smokers over 25, more than three times as many teens who smoke light up flavored cigarettes.

Reynolds now sells five Camel Exotic Blend flavors: Dark Mint, Mandarin Mint, Twist, Izmir Stinger and Crema. In addition, RJR has marketed 15 Limited Edition Camel Exotic Blends over the past five years, including Winter Mochamint, Midnight Madness and Twista Lime.

... Buoyed by its success in pushing candy-flavored cigarettes, Reynolds has now introduced alcohol-flavored smokes. To make them appealing to our kids, Reynolds has marketed them with names based on gambling lingo as well: ScrewDriver Slots, BlackJack Gin, Snake Eyes Scotch and Back Alley Blend (a bourbon-flavored cigarette).

... From 1997 through 2004 the number of children who smoke went down as court cases and public outrage curbed tobacco advertising to children. But in 2005 the youth smoking rate increased. Is it just a coincidence that our success in persuading kids to stay away from tobacco is slowing just as the marketing of flavored cigarettes is picking up?

They have to hook the kids. It's that or become extinct. RJR is serving their shareholders. I'm sure I own their stock in some of my index funds.

Yep, that's right.

Pure, unadulterated, Evil. Think the GOP (they are the government) will do anything about it?

PS. Sports Illustrated has tobacco ads? Good Lord. To think my son gets copies at school ... Time to do something about that ....

Political theory and the original position

The first few paragraphs were ok, but eventually this essay on how to structure a society glazed my oculars. I reference it because it's a window into what political theorists talk about -- and it's fundamentally a topic I care about (albeit without the rigor).

The theorist, a certain Mr. Rawls, is making a rationalist case that the "best" way to structure society is such that:

I. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all.

II. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.

In other words, Mr Rawls is specifying a resolution to the "Problem of the Weak". His proposal is a compromise between Marxist views (from each according to their strength, to each according to their need) and Libertarian views (to each according to their strength). Liberalism, in other words.

Works for me.

Gwynne Dyer: at least four June articles online

Gwynne Dyer's very peculiar web site has four new articles on Peru, conspiracy, Nigeria, Zarqawi and China. All interesting of course.

What does this guy have against subscription and notification (aka syndication)?

One extract:

... There must be a major terrorist threat; otherwise, the government is wrong or lying, the
intelligence agencies are wrong or self-serving, the media are fools or cowards, and the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with fighting terrorism...

Self sustaining entities: corporations and the Spanish Inquisition

One of the puzzles of classical economics is why we have corporations. In theory corporations induce overhead and distortions to a pure market of buyers and sellers of goods and services.

I suspect modern economics has many good answers as to why corporations survive and flourish, but I am innocent of deeper knowledge. I am thus free to speculate in the great blogging tradition.

My hunch is that corporations have some of the self-sustaining properties of (super)organisms (which modern biology actually considers rather corporate); in essence they have a will of their own beyond the wishes of their shareholders, stakeholders, customers, board and executives. I don't think this emergent intelligence is much above that of the proverbial amoeba, but it's enough to get by in the emergent ecosphere of cash (eg. energy) flow.

Now, I admit that's whacky. But there's a tangential connection to a different story told by reputable folk:

BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time - The Spanish Inquisition

... Efforts to suppress religious freedom were initially ad hoc until the establishment of an Office of Inquisition in the Middle Ages, founded in response to the growing Catharist heresy in South West France.

The Spanish Inquisition set up in 1478 surpassed all Inquisitorial activity that had preceded it in terms of its reach and length. For 350 years under Papal Decree, Jews, then Muslims and Protestants were put through the Inquisitional Court and condemned to torture, imprisonment, exile and death.

How did the early origins of the Inquisition in Medieval Europe spread to Spain? What were the motivations behind the systematic persecution of Jews, Muslims and Protestants? And what finally brought about an end to the Spanish Inquisition 350 years after it had first been decreed?

I have more to say about the Catharists, Dualism, the Graviton and consciousness [1], but the here I'm writing about the conclusion of these eminent scholars. They felt that the Spanish inquisition was so "successful" for so long because it took on a life of its own. The Catholic church and French aristocracy set up an effective apparatus (Bushies take note) for suppressing a proto-insurgency. In France it did its job and moved on, but the unique ecosystem of medieval Spain was much more welcoming.

In Spain the inquisitorial apparatus served many purposes beyond those of the church, it became what I (not they) would call a self-sustaining corporate enterprise [2]. In other words, it developed a mind of its own; the Inquisition served enough powerful people in enough ways that it stayed in business. A business run, as it turns out, by lawyers rather than theologians. (You'd think the Church would have recognized Satan's henchmen, but they're notoriously weak at that sort of thing.)

There's a theory of history to be written that tells the story of such self-sustaining 'corporate' entities across time, space and culture. Probably to be told by a neo-Marxist ....

[1] Actually, the draft of that post is rather conventional, despite the odd connections.
[2] I do have to note that the speakers seemed to dance around how much anti-semitism underlay the beginnings of the Spanish inquisition, though much of it took place after Spain had expelled all Jews. On the other hand they point out that Spain's precipitate decline over the next 500 years was in some measure due to that expulsion, abetted by their all too robust Inquisition.

The WSJ, the American Right, and the Protestant view of sinful poverty

A brief and amusing excerpt in Crooked Timber, quoting from an off-web article by a former WSJ journalist, tells us quite a bit about the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the sin of poverty and disability, the corrupting effect of Henry Beecher's Protestantism, and the human capacity for wilful ignorance

It is all of a piece with 'The Problem of the Weak'. The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages, a large segment of the GOP, the religious right and the Libertarian party all implicitly advocate a common solution.

Great post, and some excellent comments as well.

New York Times for free? Use the library

FMH writes about the hidden power of the library account:

Follow Me Here... : 06/25/2006 - 07/01/2006

... I just logged onto the Brookline (MA) library site and discovered I have free searchable access to the full text of all New York Times and Boston Globe articles, for starters. I have paid, oh I don't know, $3 or $5 to the Times or the Globe when I have needed to download an article in the past...

University students and some alumni organizations provide similar benefits. FMH points out that one can often obtain an out-of-area library cards for a small amount of money. In practice the library databases and access systems are often archaic and painful to use, but there's a chance that will improve.