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.

Which animal throws best? It's a mystery.

Which animal is biggest? Smallest? Fastest?

Good questions, and there are lots of answers. It's the sort of thing we talk about over breakfast. This morning, feeling clever, I asked my kids which animal throws best.

It's an important question.  A large animal that can throw a hefty object has a terrific attack and defense advantage against prey and predator alike. A social animal capable of throwing a hefty rock at 80 kph could, you know, rule the world.

There are very few animals that can throw well. It's quite a trick. To do it well an animal has to be bipedal, it needs really good binocular vision, and it has to be able to calculate trajectories.

Gorillas can throw things, but I don't think they compare to the naked ape.

Of course the kids didn't trust my answer. They wanted confirmation.

That's when I uncovered the mystery. The mystery of this search ...

"which animal throws best" - Google Search: "No results found for 'which animal throws best'."

No freakin' results?! Google is telling me nobody has asked this question with this phrasing on the net?!

That's not possible.

Is it?

Gordon's scale of corporate evil - 2nd edition

A post on why Facebook, Netflix and Amazon will join the Google-Apple truce reminded me it's time to update Gordon's 15 point scale of publicly traded corporate evil.

Here's the current list, with notes on who's moved up and down ...

1. Philip Morris: 15 (defines the upper bound)
2. Goldman Sachs: 14 (up - working for SPECTRE).
3. Exxon: 13 (global warming advocacy)
4. AT&T, Verizon: 12 - up two
5. Facebook: 11 (down 1 - still most evil tech company)
6. For profit health insurance companies: 11
7. Microsoft: 10
8. Average publicly traded company: 8
9. Google: 5 (down one)
10. Apple: 5
11. CARE International: 1 (They're not a PTC, so this is merely a non-evil reference point)

The greater enemy: why Facebook, Netflix and Amazon will join the Google-Apple truce

The Google-Apple war officially ended in September. I've not seen any convincing explanation of why the war ended; my best guess is that both companies realized that Verizon, AT&T and Comcast are the greater enemy. The three big carriers want to bring the cable TV business model to the net through the IP Multimedia Subsystem ... (emphases mine)

Mobile Carriers Dream of Charging per Page | Epicenter | Wired.com:

... The companies, Allot Communications and Openet — suppliers to large wireless companies including AT&T and Verizon — showed off a new product in a web seminar Tuesday, which included a PowerPoint presentation (1.5-MB .pdf) that was sent to Wired by a trusted source.

The idea? Make it possible for your wireless provider to monitor everything you do online and charge you extra for using Facebook, Skype or Netflix. For instance, in the seventh slide of the above PowerPoint, a Vodafone user would be charged two cents per MB for using Facebook, three euros a month to use Skype and $0.50 monthly for a speed-limited version of YouTube. But traffic to Vodafone’s services would be free, allowing the mobile carrier to create video services that could undercut NetFlix on price....

... “It certainly is exactly the thing we have been warning the companies will do if they have the opportunity and explains why AT&T and Verizon are so insistent that the wireless rules be solely about blocking and not anything else,” said Public Knowledge legal director Harold Feld....

... The ideas don’t look too different from the way cable companies price their video offerings, with different packages of programming at different levels.

... “I have been saying that this is where they want to go for a while,” van Schewick wrote to Wired. “The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), a technology that is being deployed in many wireline and wireless networks throughout the country, explicitly envisages this sort of pricing as one of the pricing schemes supported by IMS.”...

... And as van Schewick points out, this model is already showing up in European mobile networks, where some networks charge users an extra fee to use internet telephony or to use an e-mail client on their phone....

... For instance, Comcast runs an online video service called FanCast that competes with NetFlix and YouTube, and is trying to buy NBC, which owns more than 30 percent of Hulu.com. And every cable and satellite company offers pay-movie services for an extra monthly fee and a la carte video on demand that compete with third-party streaming video services, like Blockbuster and Amazon....

I love the Orwellian twist of calling a cable-company business model venture "Openet".

Google and Apple will never be best buds again, but the vision of a net run like cable TV has concentrated their minds. At the moment then, though betrayals are certain, we have Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon and even Facebook on one side. On the other side we have Verizon, AT&T and Comcast. Microsoft, the wounded Titan, lurks in the background, perhaps contemplating an acquisition.

As a consumer and citizen, there's no doubt which side I support. On a scale of corporate evil, AT&T & Verizon are far above Google and Apple (Facebook is another matter). Politically Google and Apple are pretty much on the Dem side, and Verizon, AT&T and Comcast are very much GOP.

Should be interesting, and scary.

Hans Rosling's Ted Talk trendanalyzer is now Google Docs Motion Chart

It's not new, but it's still awesome to see Hans Rosling demo the Trendanalyzer wealth/mortality graph. It's a great antidote to Rationalist fatigue; we have made awesome progress in 200 years. Measured in wealth and life expectancy, the hellholes of the modern world are still better than most of the europe of 1800.

Check out the mortality spikes at WW I/Spanish Flu and WW II, and the fall of South Africa.

The real trick is getting the data, but the software is still cool enough. Must be awesome to have something like that. Must cost a fortune though.

Except, it's free. My friend Rob M. pointed me to Motion Chart, Google's rebranding of the Trendanalyzer. It comes with Google Docs. You can make some pretty nice graphics for a blog post from it.

Yes, we've come a long way.

Research the past 200 years of memetic propagation: Google Books ngram viewer

Google Ngram Viewer. Awesome.

The frequency of the word "dementia" spiked in the period 1870-1885. It then rose gradually to 1920 and fell until 1962 or so. Since then it has skyrocketed.

"Hepatitis" was used (Upper case "H", searches are case sensitive at the moment) around 1818, but then it disappeared until 1940. I wonder what it meant in 1818; it wouldn't be the modern meaning of the word.

"Schizophrenia" does not appear at all before 1910.

Slide rule starts rising in 1880, spikes in 1940, and then fall smoothly to plateau around 1990.

The usage patterns of the "n-word" is remarkable -- there are peaks in 1860 (the war to preserve slavery), around 1940 (black Americans in the armed forces), 1970 (civil rights), and the late 90s (the meaning and usage of the n-word changes?).

Imagine how a teacher could use this.

Google's kid problem - something for the GOP led house to chew on

Google has a kid problem.

The latest example is the new Google eBooks iOS app. It seemed like a good option for my kids iOS devices. Problem is, like every Google app I've looked at it, it has an embedded browser. Disabling Safari doesn't disable webkit use, so the browser is always available. A full Google search prompt is only a few clicks away, so the iPhone eBook app effectively disables iOS parental controls.

Just like Google's ad platform disables iOS parental controls.

I wish Apple would give all apps with embedded browsers and NC17 rating. Still, this is Google's problem -- not Apple's. Google has the same problem with Android devices (no parental controls at all) and with Google search (no effective parental controls). I'm sure Chrome OS will be no better.

I guess we have to wait until the founders have kids. The one bright side of the GOP dominated House is that they might give Google a hard time about this. Google is no friend of the GOP, and those guys know how to turn the heat up.

Google may have to start paying attentions to kids. They can start by having their iOS devices disable WebKit use when Safari is disabled.

Jon Swift (Al Weisel) died Feb 27, 2010

During the Bush years I found solace in the ironic writings of Jon Swift. He didn't write every day, so I didn't notice when he stopped.

Today, browsing old links, I saw his blog. The last post was in March of 2009, a link to a friend's tragedy.

There's a lot of spam in the comment thread on that post, but midway down is a story ...

I don't know how else to tell you all who love this blog. I am Jon Swift's Mom and I guess I'm going to OUT him. He was Al Weisel, my beloved son. Al was on his way to his father's funeral in VA when he suffered 2 aortic aneurysms, a leaky aortic valve and an aortic artery dissection from his heart to his pelvis. He had 3 major surgeries within 24 hours and sometime during those surgeries also suffered a severe stroke. We, his 2 sisters, his brother, his partner and his best friend since he was 9 years old were with him as he took his last breath. We have all lost a shining start who warmed our hearts, tormented us and made us laugh as he giggled at our pulling something over on us. He passed away on February 27, 2010. My beloved child will live on in so many hearts. I miss him more than I can say. If you are on Facebook, go to organizations and join "Friends of Al Weisel, Unite!" It will give you just a taste of how special he was. Farewell, Jon (Al)

The blog went silent almost a year before he died. This news got some coverage in March of 2010, but I don't read many lefty blogs (I'm lefty enough). If you enjoyed Jon's writings, spare a moment for his partner, friends and family.

This post has links to some of his best writing.

I'm guessing his partner didn't have his passwords, or there would have been a follow-up post and the commenting would have been disabled.

The Hugo Awards revisited - 58 years later

Tor's Jo Walton is reviewing the Hugo Awards Nominees -- starting in 1953.  I started reading science fiction in the 1960s, so many of the early winners are vaguely familiar.

Jo refers us to the Locus Index to SF Awards, such as this 1959 Hugo listing including Alfred Bester's 1959s short story "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" - which is not nearly as inflammatory as it sounds.

Many of these stories can, with some work, be ordered through well connected libraries. I plan to try a few.

Yahoo kills Delicious - don't say you weren't warned about the Cloud

Not surprising ...

Michael Tsai - Blog - Yahoo Shuts Down Delicious:

Delicious was a good service, and I’m sorry to see all the data and metadata that people have entered go away

Some fear Flickr is next - like Digital Railroad. I wrote about Yahoo's likely use of Flickr in 2008.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

I don't put anything "in the Cloud" I can't walk away from. One reason I use Simplenote is that I have completely usable and completely current local copies of all data. If they go away tomorrow I can switch to an alternative in minutes.

Google deserves credit for supporting "data freedom" -- which is the only thing that can make the Cloud tolerable. Most recently the data liberation front gave OS X users an easy way to download entire online albums.  Google has a spotty data history, but I give them credit for their data freedom team.

See also:

• Dapocalypse now. Grab your data and run. RUN. (AOL xDrive, AOL photos, Google Lively, Yahoo User Profiles, MSN Groups, Digital Railroad)
• Fear the Cloud: Microsoft Danger was well named (Remember danger?)
• Should I trust (Simplenote) Simperium?
• Cloud Lesson #72: The risk of letting Google own your web site
• Jean-Louis Gassée on Cloud 2.0 – post of the month
• Fear the Cloud - Blogger's unfixed 5000 post limit (months later they fixed this)
• Nimbophobia: Why you should fear the cloud - Google's performance problems

Alta Vista RIP

In the 90s I taught physicians how to use the Internet. It gave me an excuse to attend Society of Teachers of Family Medicine and American Academy of Family Practice conferences. I didn't use PowerPoint, my "slides" were a set of web pages shared between different frames, like a slide on Digital's Alta Vista Search Engine:

In 1997 I wrote a series of tips on using Alta Vista like ...

+noir +film -"pinot noir"

Matches may be required, or prohibited. Precede a required word or phrase with + and a prohibited one with -. This query finds documents containing film and noir, but not containing pinot noir.

By 1999 though I was writing ...

There are about 800 million web pages that are publicly accessible (Feb. 1999 [1]). This excludes, for example, the New York Times and the Encyclopedia Brittanica! These are the pages that a search engine can find for you.

Until 1999 the best search engine was AltaVista. It had about the widest coverage (16% [1],[2]), very good performance, and a powerful but slightly complex search language. When AltaVista failed, Profusion was a great way to try every other useful search engine.

Then came Google, and everybody else became history.

This document introduces Google, and talks about how to use AltaVista and Profusion on those occasions that Google doesn't succeed.

Google crushed Alta Vista in the mid 90s. After that things went downhill - for Digital (acquired by short lived Compaq) as well as Alta Vista. I remember a strange project in the twilight years, a Snow Crash/Neuromancer inspired Alta Vista virtual office tower for business in cyberspace. I had an address there. It was kind of silly.

Even in the twilight years though, Alta Vista had a good translation service. I missed Alta Vista's "near" operator, even though Google searches were much better (Google now has it).

Eventually Yahoo bought the remnants of Alta Vista, probably for the patents and the remnant traffic. Today Yahoo shuttered Alta Vista.

RIP Alta Vista. Historians will forget there was anything before Google. The truth is Alta Vista was pretty good, and if Google had never existed the web might have been much the same.