Most cultures punish the atypically generous

All cultures punish "cheaters". That's unsurprising.

What's surprising is that most cultures punish the atypically generous ...

Balkinization

... the U.S, Australia and the U.K. subjects were much less likely to punish players who HAD cooperated by contributing to the group project. In other societies, ‘[m]any subjects engaged in anti-social punishment; that is, they paid to reduce the earnings of ‘overly’ cooperative individuals (those who contributed more than the punisher did).’ ...

Looking at the graph some cultures punish atypical generosity even more than "free riders". On visual inspection I see three grades of anti-social punishment (emphases mine) ...

• Low levels: US, Australia, UK, Switzerland, China, Germany
• Mid level: Denmark, Ukraine, Korea, Turkey, Russia (I suspect Japan would resemble Korea)
• High level: Saudi Arabia, Greece, Oman

I suspect Canada would fall between Germany and Denmark, at the high end of low punishment. I grew up in Canada, where we understood it was rude to be exceptionally good in any way. I wonder if what's measured here is really a general response to being exceptional (talented, witty, generous, etc) rather than to a specific response to "excessive" generosity. It may also be that in some cultures there is a strong duty to reciprocate generosity (Japan?), so the generous act can be a bit of an unwanted gift.

I think these responses are important to understand -- particularly for those whose programming favors generosity. Even in the US the naturally generous will work with people from cultures that may resent or feel burdened by an unsolicited gift. It is often wise to balance gifts with requests, providing an opportunity for the recipient to balance the scales. Most of all it may be wise to do deed invisibly, so nobody will feel burdened and the Samaritan will go unpunished.

 

Is the GOP truly a pawn of corporations and the wealthy? We'll find out soon.

Charlie Stross says emergent corporate entities control America. Krugman says wealth alone is sufficient explanation, emergent entities are an unnecessary complication.

John Gordon says control (the bouncing yellow ball) of America is a dynamic balance between the emergent corporate entity (ECE) powerful (wealthy) individuals, and the voting masses [1]:

Of course I'm right, but it would be nice to have evidence.

Fortunately, there's a natural experiment coming up. The GOP is threatening to destroy the American, and world, economy. This is in the interests of neither powerful individuals nor ECEs. So if it happens, then Stross, Krugman and I are all wrong. The Voters have power after all, and it's just too bad so many Americans are detached from reality.

I bet, however, that the Tea Party GOP caves, and the GOP that serves the powerful and the corporate wins.

That doesn't tell us whether Stross, Krugman, or me has the best story though. We need a different falsifiable prediction.

It's tough to come up with that test because this is a triangle of frenemies, not enemies. Often the interests of (hypothetical) ECEs align with those of powerful people and/or Voters (who are both consumers and employees).  We need test where the voters are neutral, but the interests of corporate entities and powerful individuals are opposed.

The only test I've come up with so far would be to examine the pattern of legislation over the past 30 years. My hypothesis is that we'd find that legislation and accounting regulations have furthered the development of ECEs even as they've reduced the rate of return to Powerful individuals -- perhaps shrinking that pool [2] and even reducing overall economic growth.

Can anyone think of another falsifiable test?

[1] Similar picture here, but there the third point was "the weak". Also true, but different point.
[2] So we end up with fewer "players", even though they may be individually wealthier.

See also:

• Speculation: The corporate ecosystem and American stasis
• Understanding the elections - what's really changed
• America 2011: exploring the boundaries of democracy and capitalism

Smartphone choice made easy: iPhone vs. Android

Asymco estimates half of Americans will use a smartphone by the end of 2011. That means either an Android OS device or an Apple iPhone, since there are no viable competitors.[2]
Which one should you choose?
It turns out the decision is quite easy.

• If you want to stay with T-Mobile or Sprint -> Android
• if you are with Verizon or AT&T then ...
  • the phone is for a younger teen or child -> iPhone, Android has no parental controls
  • you want software without advertising -> iPhone, Android apps are almost entirely ad supported
  • you are an iTunes user and buy iTunes video/movies -> iPhone, Android phones can't play iTunes DRMd video or music
  • you want to avoid malware -> iPhone, the Android marketplace is not curated
  • you want the device to have value in two years -> iPhone, it can be used as an iPod touch equivalent after its phone lifetime has passed
  • you want software and OS support over the lifetime of the device -> iPhone, Android device manufacturers rarely provide more than a few months of updates
  • Google voice is very important to you -> Android, on the iPhone it's not fully integrated
  • You don't have, or don't want to use, a classic (legacy) computer -> Android [3]
  • You want Google Apps support -> Android [4]
  • If none of the above is true, you can save 20% of the phone cost by buying an Android phone [1]

Most Verizon and AT&T customers will be happiest with an iPhone.
[1] Assuming $500 in mandatory data fees over the 2 year contract span, prices are about $550 for an Android device and about $700 for a comparable iPhone.
[2] BlackBerry is walking dead. Talk to me about Microsoft's phone in a year or so. Nokia? What's that?
[3] I assume Android doesn't require a legacy (Windows/Mac) computer. The iPhone expects one, I don't know if you can really use an iPhone without iTunes
[4] iPhone is a mediocre fit for Google Apps. I assume Android is better, but nobody talks about this.

The not-so-vast readership of Gordon's notes - and why I keep posting

I get emails when a reader (infrequently) comments. The author deleted this comment, so I'll keep it anonymous ...

Say, is it not odd that you don't have a bunch of readers reading your blog? You have been writing this since 2003 and nobody comments or reads it? Is this even real?

Oh and I figured out how I reached your blog. I was looking for "nobody reads your blog" on google and a comment from your blog showed up on the 47th page.

Its sad and funny at the same time...

I wasn't able to replicate his search results, but unless we're post AI this was a bio post, not a bot post.

It's a good question [4], but there are a lot of blogs that go unread. So mine is not that unusual. What's unusual is that it's been persistently unread for 7 years. So the real question is - "why would anyone write 5,494 posts that nobody reads?" (@9,000 if you add Gordon's Tech) [1]

The short answer is that I read both of Gordon's Blogs. As I wrote back in 2007 ...

... my own very low readership blogs are written for these audiences in this order:

1. Myself. It’s how I learn and think.

2. The GoogleMind: building inferential links for search and reflection.

3. Tech blog: Future readers who find my posts useful to solve a problem they have that I've solved for myself.

4. Gordon's Notes: My grandchildren, so I can say I didn't remain silent -- and my tiny audience of regular readers, not least my wife (hey, we don't get that much time to talk!) ...

Later, when I integrated Google Custom Search, my history of posts began to inform my Google searches. My blogs extend my memory into the wider net.

So that explains why there are 9,000 "John Gordon" posts.

As to why their aren't many comments/readers, I can imagine several reasons ...

• There's no theme. Gordon's Notes follows my interests, and they wander. At any given time there will posts that most people find boring, repetitive, or weird.
• I'm writing for someone like me, Brad DeLong, Charlie Stross, Emily L and others of that esoteric sort. That's an uber-niche audience.
• I have no public persona (I write using a pseudonym)
• I like writing, but I don't work at writing. I'd have to work a lot harder to write well enough to be truly readable.
• I don't market the blog.
• I update my blog at odd hours, and I'm slow to respond to comments.
• I have an irregular posting schedule.
• I don't right about areas where I'm really a world-class expert because I keep my blogging and my employment separate.
• I often write about the grim side of reality (that is, most of it).

That covers the bases I think. Except ...

Except, it's not quite so simple. It turns out I do have a few readers -- I'm guessing about 100 or so [3], not counting a larger number who come via Google [2], but certainly counting Google itself. Some of my readers are bloggers with substantial readership, and sometimes they respond to what I write.

So I do have an audience after all, it's just very quiet.

See also:

• Strange loops: Google custom and customized search - and a memory blog
• Google's IQ boost is only beginning

-- fn --

[1] Why do I share thousands of items via Google Reader? Because that's a searchable repository of things I find interesting. Another memory extender.
[2] I don't have a stellar Google ranking, but it's not bad 
[3] About 80 via Google Reader alone, where I share these posts.  There's also Emily, who comments over breakfast. A lot of my posts come out of our discussions.
[4] It wasn't clear when I first posted this that I like the question. I think it's a good question and I think it was meant well. Sorry for not making that clear. I've added this footnote.

Update 1/6/11: Based on comment response I probably have more regular readers than I imagined.

End times for the credit card?

Despite all of their security issues, I've never thought credit cards would go away. I figured one day banks would become liable for identity theft, and credit card companies would fix their broken-by-design security models.

I never thought credit cards would just go away -- until today. Today I went to pay my American Express Blue cash back statement. I do this monthly, it's usually a minor nuisance. Today, however, I found a newish web site. It feels Flash based. It features obnoxious, flickering ads. It made me do a security reset. The "feedback" button didn't render correctly in Safari, it wasn't the only rendering problem (just the most ironic one). To add injury to injury, the new site told me AMEX was making some incomprehensible change to its cash back program next March. I don't think that change is meant to please me.

I've seen this kind of service regression before. It doesn't end well.

It's a sign that the smart people at AMEX have abandoned ship. That fits with news coverage of the woes of the credit card business. Credit card margins are being squeezed, their prime victims, people who paid interest, have gone bankrupt.

We've all heard stories for years about a replacement for the credit card. It hasn't happened, but maybe this year will be different.

America 2011: exploring the boundaries of democracy and capitalism

Reading about the fall of Detroit, the ranting of the GOP's Tea Party House, ubiquitous fraud and corruption, and the emergence of the corporate person, it's easy to imagine that we're going where no nation has gone before -- testing the limits of both democracy and capitalism.

But has any nation been here before? How long did Athenian democracy last? Not all that long actually ....

Athenian democracy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Athenian democracy developed in the Greek city-state of Athens, comprising the central city-state of Athens and the surrounding territory of Attica, around 508 BC. ..

... The greatest and longest lasting democratic leader was Pericles; after his death, Athenian democracy was twice briefly interrupted by oligarchic revolution towards the end of the Peloponnesian War ... It was modified somewhat after it was restored under Eucleides; the most detailed accounts are of this fourth-century modification rather than the Periclean system. It was suppressed by the Macedonians in 322 BC ...

The Peloponnesian war lasted from 431 BC to 404 BC. So Athenian democracy might have lasted as little as 100 years. If you count periods of restoration you might get to 160 years. American "Democracy" [1] is about 235 years old.

Going where no nation has gone before ...

See also

• Invaders from Mars - Charlie's Diary (Charles Stross on the corporate entity) vs. Hive-minds and Kleptocrats - Krugman (Krugman disses Stross). I think I've got the right balance, but then I would, woudn't I?
• Gordon's Notes: Understanding the elections - what's really changed
• Gordon's Notes: Speculation: The corporate ecosystem and American stasis
• Gordon's Notes: Why do companies exist?
• Gordon's Notes: Troubled capitalism: The corporate entity

[1] Assuming one starts with white male landowner voters.

Product suggestion: Integrated attic stair and stair frame seal

When I'm looking for a product, I first imagine how it would work. Then I search for it.

Often I find exactly what I imagined. Sometimes, however, it doesn't exist.

Today, in the third coming [1] of the Minnesota ice dam, I went looking for a replacement for our old attic stairs.

I imagine an integrated stair/insulation system. This would be a metal frame that would sit into our attic floor. It would hold traditional folding/sliding stairs. In addition it would have a "lid" atop the frame with a latch and a door lifter.

To enter the attic one would go up the stairs and then open the latch. The lid, sealed by high quality rubber seals, would open up with a slight push. The door lifters would keep it open. A string would be used to shut it.

A simple idea, but this crude system is the best I could find - Attic Stair Insulation Insulsure Attic Tent AT-2 Model. So we'll have to have something custom made for us.

If you're a bored manufacturer, you should be able to put this together in a few months and sell it next year. Please send me a link and I'll update this post.

[1] Third in my residence here. Prior bad years were 1997 and 2004, but 2010-2011 may be the worst of all.

Detroit in ruins - we need salvage law for this wrecked vessel

The Observer is highlighting Detroit in ruins, a series of photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

Think of it as a slow motion but more devastating version of Hurricaine Katrina.

The most stunning image, for me, was the picture of the east side public library:

They abandoned a building full of books.

Others pictures show unsalvaged Art Deco chandeliers, classrooms with anatomic models, and piles of documents in an abandoned police station. Some of them are doubtless staged (this is art, not documentary), but did they really stage the library?

Can we organize a team of crack commandos to liberate the old books?

At this point, maybe we should treat Detroit like a wrecked ship open for salvage. Ten percent of revenue on recovered goods goes to the city, the rest to the winner.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Detroit, dialysis and special needs - 11/2010

Resolution 2011: Managing complexity

I'm good with resolutions. Mostly because I know how to pick 'em. I make 'em doable.

Consider sleep. I like to exercise, but in my life sleep is more important. So I've resolved to sleep at least 52 hours a week [1]. I think I can do that if I track the numbers and identify where I fall short.

That's one for 2011. The other resolution is about managing technological complexity.

I've been on a complexity reduction kick for a few years , but this year my focus is on technological complexity. I'm starting with the plausible assumption that we all have a personal "complexity budget". Some of us can manage more complexity, others less, but we all have memory and processor limits -- even the AIs among us.

We can spend our complexity capacity figuring out how to adjust product development to available capacity, or we can spend it figuring out what parts of SharePoint are worth using [2]. Both tasks will be equally draining.

At some points in my life I had complexity capacity to spare - perhaps because I wasn't using it wisely. That's not true now.  Gains from improved productivity techniques [3] and growth of mind [4] are offset by entropic neurons. Most of all though, my life overflows. I'm not complaining -- it's an overflow of good stuff. It means though, that I need to use my complexity capacity wisely.  I can't be spending limited firepower figuring out which of my 15 Google identities is running a feedburner bot linked to a pseudonymous twitter account.

It's not easy to reduce technological complexity. It often means making do with less; giving up tools and solutions I really like. Often it means declining new incrementally better improvements -- because a 10% gain isn't worth the learning curve and failure risk. Sometimes it means giving up on old tools that still work but are increasingly unsupported. Yes, it's a lot like software portfolio management.

Looking at how technological complexity grows in my life I can identify four broad causes....

1. Taking on too many simultaneous tools and solution sets.
2. Failure to clean up. Ex: Abandoned user identities, google accounts, etc. Creates noise and clutter.
3. Premature adoption of technologies and solutions. Ex: Any new OS X release, any new Apple hardware, trying to get Contact synchronization to work with both Google Contacts, OS X Address Book and iPhone, OS Spaces. Above all - Google Wave.
4. Prolonged use of increasingly unsupported solutions in a world of forced software evolution [6]. Ex: document-centric web tools, wristwatches, printers.

I've gotten better at the first one, but the next three all need work. The 3rd and 4th are particularly tricky. My heavy use of Google's multi-calendar sync solutions is clearly premature [5], but it's been very valuable and relatively bug free. On the other hand, I think my jury-rigged Contact integration solution may be a bridge too far. On the other hand, I stuck with Outlook's Notes feature long after it was clearly dead.

Cleaning up is the least interesting measure, but one of most important. There are 1,575 entries in my credentials database, extending back to August 1995. Sure, most of those sites are long gone, but I still have too many active identities and credentials. I need to gradually cull a few hundred.

This project should keep me busy for a while. It will, of course, suck processors in the short term, but I expect near term returns and long term gains. Feels like a good resolution target.

-- fn --

[1] It helps that recent research suggests that amyloid clearance occurs primarily during sleep, and I'm speculating that a 10-20% decline in amyloid clearance translates to 10 extra years of dementia.
[2] The wiki and, in the absence of alternatives, the document store. Don't touch the rest, even the stuff that seems to work is poison. 
[3] At my stage "GTD" is child's play.  I use a mongrel of Agile development planning methodology, GTD/Franklin, and a pocketful of tricks including calendar integration across family and work.
[4] For quite some time mind can grow even as brain more or less sucks wind. Not forever, but for a time. 
[5] The UI for configuration multiple calendars has been bizarrely obscure for about two years. This is not mainstream.
[6] It's predator-prey stuff. Software evolution was much more leisurely before human-on-human predation took off with hacks, frauds, identity theft, malware and the like. Now old bucks have to keep moving, or we become wolf chow. Software cycles are faster, products die quickly, and we have to keep buying whizzier hardware. If not for malware, the curated world of iOS would still be years away.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: tech churn
• Gordon's Notes: whitewater world
• Gordon's Notes: complexity
• Gordon's Notes: Why you will live in an iOS world
• Thunder in the Cloud: Lessons from my hacked Google Account
• Grumpy old boomers: pencil sharpeners, garbage cans, toasters, DVD/VCR combos and emergent fraud (6/2007)
• Are we experiencing a complexity collapse in software and finance? (11/2008)
• Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams (2/2009 - complexity facilitates fraud)
• Requiem for a gerserker - Gordon's Laws of Geekery (6/2009 - how I learned to look before leaping)
• Geriatric computing (6/2009 - old computers are too costly to keep)
• Tech churn: The Franklin Planner and Google Calendar
• Beware the traps of the Software World - 9/2009 - software allows new realms of complexity
• Left Behind: Ludd, Beck and the non-tribal roots of tea party rage - 11/2009 - Tea Partiers are left behind by the complex.

Why the United States Postal Service should manage our primary digital identity

For a non-expert, I do a fair bit of ruminating about the relationships between identities, credentials, and avatars/facets. Today a bug related to Google's (covert) Identity Integration initiatives, a recent flurry of stories on the endtimes of password based security, and the earth's orbit have got me chewing again.

I'll deal with the earth's orbit by making my solitary 2011 tech prediction. 2011 will be the year of two factor authentication and the gradual realization that management of digital identities is too important to be left to Google, Amazon and especially Citicorp, Facebook, and AT&T/Verizon.

So if we can't rely on Google (or Facebook) or Citicorp to manage our digital identity, including claim resolution and identity control, who can we rely on? What are the other alternatives, assuming that almost none of us will run an identity service out of our homes?

Obviously, government is an option. The (US) Federal government, for example, makes a robust claim on my identity. That claim, however, is so robust I would prefer to separate my obligatory IRS identities from all other identity related services. In any event direct US government identity management is a political non-starter. The right wing will start ranting about beastly numbers and rationalists will fret about the day Bush/Cheney II takes power.

That leaves business entities with strong governmental relationships, extensive regulation, and a pre-existing legal framework support that could be extended to support identity management.

An entity like, for example, the United States Postal Service (USPS).

You laugh. Ok, but consider the advantages:

1. The USPS has been in the business of managing confidential transactions for centuries.
2. There are post offices in every community that could support the person-present aspects of identity claims.
3. It's a regulated quasi-governmental agency that already exists.
4. The USPS manages passports
5. Much of the legal framework used to manage mail and address information could be extended to manage digital identities.
6. The USPS is dying and is desperate for a new mission.

I admit, it sounds crazy.

Except ... I'm far from the first person to think of this. It was proposed by (cough, choke, gag) Michael Chertoff ...

... former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff ... mused that the USPS was ideally situated to take part in the evolution of the government’s role in validating identity. He points out that the Post office is already the primary issuer of passports – an extremely important piece of personal identity. In the speech he expands on that model as follows: “one of the things I hope to see is, as the Post Office re-engineers itself over the next, you know, few years, they increasingly look at whether they can be in the business of servicing identity management. They can – because every town has a post office.”....  DHS: Remarks by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff at University of Southern California National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events

I can't believe I find myself agreeing with Chertoff, but there you go. What a way to start 2011.

See also (Gordon's notes unless otherwise noted);

• The Buzz profile problem: I am Legion (2/2010)
• Trust and credential management: MyOpenID (9/2010)
• Google's two factor authentication and why you need four OpenID accounts [1]
• Gordon's Tech: Rogue Twitter/Google feedburner connection - first of the Great Google Identity Integration bugs (1/2011)
• Juggling identities: Udell, Cameron and Identity Woman (3/28/2008)
• Wanted: an identity management service. Business model included. (3/5/3008 - I suggest Denmark)
• Fraud technologies use persona cloning to attack social networks (11/2007)
• Gordon's Tech: After the Gmail hack - passwords and security (9/2010)
• Gordon's Tech: Yet another identity of mine: MyOpenID (12/2007, before I gave up on OpenID)
• Gordon's Tech: identity
• Gordon's Notes: Identity
• Gordon's Notes: Security

[1] Incidentally, now that my kateva.org Google Apps users have Blogger privileges, and since Blogger is supposedly an OpenID provider, I'm thinking of implementing this using Blogger/Google Apps/Kateva.org

Update 1/8/11: A few days after I wrote this news emerged of a federal identity and certificate management initiative. Maybe I'm psychic.

iPhone apps and the Philip Morris business model

Once upon a time tobacco companies distributed abundant free samples. It's a good business model when you're selling an addictive product.

This holiday the kids have been piling up iOS games on their phones, mostly at $1 each. Since FairPlay DRM works on an iTunes/account basis, each app goes to four (soon five) iOS devices.

At 20 cents/app/phone this looks like a heck of a bargain -- but appearances are misleading. Increasingly the apps are entry points to a series of in-app purchases [1]. The real price is a cumulative sum; I'm guessing the average cost is more like $5 than $1. iOS games are rediscovering the Philip Morris business model.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing - for games. It means we can try quite a few games, and only spend money on those we really like.

It's certainly not a bad thing for experimental economists! The App Store is a wonderful model for exploring pricing strategies ...

[1] I don't know how FairPlay treats these. Are they tied to a particular devices or to the account? I suspect the former, which means the FairPlay redistribution (our five devices) becomes a feature, not a problem.

A quiet revolution in naming and framing disorders of the mind

Victory: The war against 20th century psychiatric diagnoses is all but won. It's been a long time coming, this rebellion has roots going back to the 1970s (not all of them equally evidence based). Things have really picked up over the past decade.

Our misclassification of disorders of the mind has led psychiatry, and neuropsychiatry, into a frustrating blind alley. Now that we're realizing our mistakes, we can start to make real progress.

There are significant implications for our understanding of disability in a technocentric society, and for our glacial rethinking of the meaning of responsibility. Those memes are still baking ...

The history of post-neolithic humanity in 10 minutes - DeLong's annual Econ 1 post

Brad DeLong, my favorite economist, has published the latest edition of his annual Econ 1 Berkeley: September 29 2010 Economic Growth Lecture. It's his gift to the rest of us, and a fine gift it is [1]. This is why I love blogs.

In about ten minutes anyone can catch up on the most current synthesis of the past 12,000 years of human history; from the deep history of the Neolithic to modern IT and the rise of India and China. He stops just short of putting IT on the same level as the development of language -- too soon to tell.

That leaves unspoken the period from about 150,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE and especially 30,000 to 12,000 BCE. This is deep history, and 2010 has been a breathtaking exploration of the pre-neolithic. In just the last eight months we've learned we moderns are a mongrel mix of Denisovan, Neandertal and, probably a lot of other pre-neolithic human "breeds". Out of that churning mix came something astonishing, horrifying, and (we currently believe) completely new to the earth - the technocentric animal.

Exciting times.

See also:

• The Denisova genome FAQ | john hawks weblog (Dec 2010)
• Denisovans: Ordinary humans with extraordinary genes? | The Loom | Discover Magazine (Dec 2010)
• Dienekes' Anthropology Blog: Is the Denisova mtDNA sequence modern? (Dec 2010)
• NEANDERTALS LIVE! | john hawks weblog (May 2010)
• After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC (9780674019997): Steven Mithen: Books (2006, now rather dated! It's on my read shelf via Steve M)
• On Deep History and the Brain (9780520252899): Daniel Lord Smail: Books (2007, Charlie Stross recommends this, I've not read it. I ordered a used copy for $6 including shipping)
• It's made out of meat. - Charlie's Diary - the spamularity comes next (Dec 2010). Incidentally, Scott Adams did a Dilbert cartoon on the spamularity about 8 years ago ...

Some of my stuff

• 50 million Neandertals living today
• Wolf and dog, Neandertal and human, and the limits of taxonomy
• Neandertal is us: the meaning of species
• How quickly can humans evolve?

[1] The next time I'm out SF way, I'm going to see if there's some way to sneak into a DeLong lecture. Maybe he sells tickets?

The Chinese net and machine translation

Chinese, for a time, will pass English as a net language. The authors imply that a predictable course, but they forget that the world's largest english speaking nation is India. So things may go back and forth for a while.

Even so, this would be a good time to make English-Chinese machine translation actually work.

Let me say that again with a bit more emphasis.

Working, bidirectional, English-Chinese machine translation may be the single most important technological goal of this decade.

I'll leave it to the reader to imagine why it will be so important. If you think about it for a few minutes, you should be able to come up with a good list.

Is this an achievable goal? I'm not sure. On the one hand we already have reasonable translation between closely related european languages. On the other, Google's current English-Chinese translation is worthless. The only time I've seen it work was when the Chinese article was a translation of an interview conducted with an English speaker. I know very little about the field, but I wonder if Google's statistical approach has run into a brick wall. Effective English-Chinese machine translation may require other approaches.

I'm not sure, but I would bet we'll see it work within ten years. As we get closer, I wonder if we'll start to see development of writing styles that are easier to translate. Any (typically unilingual) English speaker who routinely works with non-English speakers learns to speak in a form that's easier to translate. Sentences are shorter. Syntax is simpler, but vocabulary is more precise and often more technical. There are fewer short words with multiple meanings, and more polysyllabic words with single interpretations. Depending on the non-english speakers language, certain phonemes are avoided. Compositional words, made up of reusable terms, may work better than novel strings.

The resulting form is certainly English, but it is a technical and streamlined form of English.

Obviously, there are equivalent versions of written and spoken Chinese.

I suspect that as English-Chinese machine translation starts to become useful, these modified forms of written expression will play an important role.

Good luck with this one Google. Get it right!

Digital cameras 2011-2017

David Pogue writes today about affordable, bigger-than-pocketable, cameras with reasonable ISO 800 images. That made me think about how the digital camera market breaks down at the end of 2010. There are about 5 markets left today, cameras like the Canon G series are being replaced by these newer cameras.

1. iPhone 4 and equivalent
2. Very compact simple cameras. (Canon, everyone else)
3. Non-pocketable smaller-than-SLR fixed lens cameras (Canon, Panasonic, Samsung)
4. SLRs (Canon and Nikon)
5. MILC - Mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras (everyone but Canon and Nikon)

The first category is dead. Why buy an ultra-compact when you own an iPhone 4 or the equivalent?

So that leaves 4 "camera" categories for 2011-2012. The middle two occupy the same two niches that have existed since the 1960s ...

1. iPhone 4 and equivalent.
2. Non-pocketable smaller-than-SLR fixed lens cameras -> same niche as the film rangefinder
3. SLRs (Canon and Nikon) -> same as film SLRs
4. MILC

The last category is the interesting one. We've been expecting the MILC for the past decade, so it's hardly a surprise. Manufacturers are now ready to chop the prism and the mirror. By 2012 Nikon and Canon will have MILCs that work with their current lenses, and low end SLRs will fade away.

More than the SLR is at risk; MILCs can be much smaller than the an SLR. That doesn't leave much room for the "rangefinder". So by 2017 we'll have only two categories;

1. iPhone 8 and equivalent
2. MILC (Canon and Nikon)

Next year I expect to replace my 4-5 yo Digital Rebel XT with a 2011 model that bloody well better shoot ISO 1200 as well as my current camera shoots ISO 400 [1]. That will almost certainly be the last SLR I'll buy.

[1] More pixels means I can use less optical zoom, so larger F-stop, so the overall light sensitivity per end-image pixel is greater than the ISO difference alone. Needless to say, I'm not impressed with megapixels. I want photons.