Tim Oren's Due Diligence

Magic Buys Metaphor: What Will Google Do With BumpTop?

Back in 2007, I took note of the BumpTop animated desktop replacement interface, which takes advantage of modern machines' 3D graphics capabilities to provide an even more realistic interpretation of manipulating information. I contrasted BumpTop's literal interface to a more 'magical' approach, where user and machine actions have no 'real world' parallels. I picked Google as an exemplar of this style, where entering the right 'magic words' can cause information from anywhere in the world to appear; algorithm, not metaphor, has been the root of Google's fantastic success.

So while I'm off on vacation, Google up and buys BumpTop, and withdraws its product from the market. Most of the press and blog coverage, as with the linked article, have focused on the possibility that Google will use BumpTop as a come-back to Apple and other's multi-touch interfaces for pad and smartphone formats. As a competitive posture, it makes some sense, though I'll have to note that the sort of 3D graphical tricks that make BumpTop so appealing comes at a significant cost in processor cycles, which doesn't do anything good for battery life. For that matter, picking up a staff of expert UI designers accustomed to dealing with dynamic displays, in comparison to the usual browser straight-jacket in which Google's designers have had to work, also makes sense.

But I'm intrigued by another possibility, that Google will take an approach hinted at in my prior post, of using its algorithmic prowess to add magic to the literal world of BumpTop. Direct manipulation interfaces have the weakness of requiring user action for every change of state, which has inherent scaling problems when faced with a whole web or cloud of information, most of it unseen and unknown by the user. It's over twenty years since anyone pushed down the path of 'more magic', where the machine collaborates with the user in interpreting interface gestures and words, applying the results to very large information or social spaces. Google's ability to exploit its acquisitions has been extremely erratic in the past, but I hope they aren't overlooking this possibility.

Bayes Theorem Tutorial in Graphics

Here's a nicely done introduction to Bayesian reasoning, for those more inclined to visual learning versus formulas. I'm going to steal this approach next time I have to explain it to a non-engineer. As a bonus, it includes a clear explanation of the Monty Hall problem, a classic probability paradox. Via Ole Eichhorn.

Congratulations to SpaceX!

For a successful launch to orbit, on the first try, of their Falcon9 clustered engine vehicle. YouTube'd here. (Unofficial video, with background sound and buffer jumps. Will link to official vid when available.)

Update: here's the official SpaceX video page.

Review: Joel Kotkin's "The Next Hundred Million"

(This blog has been suffering its usual fate during California's spring. Neglect, that is. I've been out putting some miles on my hiking boots, thereby completing my rehab from getting the metal out of my leg. I'll try to unload a few things from the blogging queue before heading East to Virginia for vacation in a couple of weeks.)

I first noticed Joel Kotkin through bumping into links to his regular Forbes column. That led me on to the New Geography blog, where he's a frequent poster. A feed well worth following for those, like myself, looking for data and analytic points of view on location options.

For any who follow Kotkin at all, the main theses in this book - subtitled "America in 2050" will come as no surprise:

• Unlike other developed nations, America is still growing its population, and this is a good thing if we take advantage of it.


• The suburbs and exurbs are alive and well, will continue to prosper from the growing population, and are shifting from strictly bedroom communities to multi-faceted hubs in their own right.


• There is little sign of an aging population moving back to the urban cores.


• Locales that welcome development are growing and prospering, while those with regulatory land rationing stagnate.


• The American Heartland may be poised for a resurgence, due to overall population growth coupled with regulatory ossification of the coastal states.


• Race is diminishing as a factor in American life, while class and social mobility remain important.


• The biggest challenge facing America is finding work for the growing population which permits class mobility, while retaining the benefits of healthy seniors who wish to continue to work. The biggest threats to that future are centralized planning and overcommitment to foreign adventures.

If you're a believer in American exceptionalism, this is all good red meat. If you're an adherent of the 'New Urbanist" school, you'll hate it. What makes this book worth having, even if you've already ingested Kotkin's ideas elsewhere, is his exhaustive footnoting of analysis and forecasts, including both primary demographic and other data, and more accessible secondary sources. That's a luxury tough to fit into the blog post or opinion column formats, and if you're doing your own analysis, you'll almost certainly find something new in Kotkin's massive bibliography.

This also serves to highlight another valuable distinction of Kotkin: His work is largely descriptive and evidence based, grounded in both demographic fate and observable aggregate behaviors of people, rather than polls and theories. When he uses 'is' or 'will be', he's earned that formulation by observation. Contrast the futurist schools whose works are studded with 'should' and 'must', and are willing to lend their credibility to those who would use coercion to make it come out their way. (I consider it highly ironic that while 'progressives' of a century ago agitated to get the working classes out of tenements, those with the same label today seem determined to put them back there.)

Kotkin builds his theses of (sub)urbanism, ethnic blending, class, and Heartland resurgence brick by brick. In the his final chapter, titled the same as the book, he both sums up and inevitably ventures into politically-freighted territory. While he's no friend to GWB-style interventionism, and repeatedly cites the election of Obama as a positive in the decline of race consciousness, his conclusions on demographic outcomes, and what can be done to benefit from continuing American growth, are all at odds with the instincts and policies of the current administration, and the nanny-state Democrat majorities in DC and Sacramento.

This Is Your Economy On Government

Here is the effect of the taxpayer-funded 'Cash for Clunkers' program on auto sales.

Given this, what estimate would you make of the effect of the taxpayer-funded 'First Time Homebuyer' credit program?

Check your answer here.

Any questions?

(Hat tip: Coyote and one of his commenters.)

The Roving Eye: Clamatology, A Bio-Garage In Silicon Valley, Mickey The Crony Capitalist

I checked, it's not April 1st. This report on a use of prehistoric mollusk shells to estimate temperatures appears to be genuine. With a worldwide sample size of 26 such shells, it's not going to change science overnight, but it could prove informative in time. It also has multiple linguistic possibilities, leading to the informative but punishing comment thread on the post. Bonus points for the "shopped" illo, at least for those who follow AGW insider ball.

Waiting for VCs, or DHS, to knock. Outside of the probably excessive attention being paid to the amateur DIYBio movement, there are some serious folks working in minimal facilities. Rob Carlson documents one such, in an undisclosed garage in Silicon Valley. Whoever is behind it is attempting serious work - anti-cancer compound screening - but is lying low due in part to credible fears - documented by Carlson - of finding not venture capitalists but armed agents from DHS at their doors. There are legitimate issues of WMD proliferation here - Carlson himself has credibly proposed micro-brewing as a reasonable comparable to the potential scope and scale of low-rent bio-production. But an uncoordinated, antagonistic approach by bureaucrats toting guns is not going to lead to any sort of containment. It's more likely to cause the same swift proliferation of enabling knowledge as that sparked by the misguided Federal policies on cryptographic technology in the '90s.

The thug in the mouse suit. Back as far as the 60s, there's been a feeling that ugliness sometimes lurks behind the squeaky-clean, family-oriented facade at Disney. Maggie's Farm documents some of the recent questionable deeds of the mouse. You can choose from using the Federal government to extract fees from foreign visitors to help promote Disney parks, to suppressing politically uncomfortable content about 9/11, to getting a non-profit that exposed an ineffective Disney education product thrown out of its offices. And of course we all know about the 'copyright event horizon', ensuring that nothing created since the first appearance of Mickey will ever go out of copyright.

Startup Helps MSM Sites Become SEO Spammers

How often do you find a cross-over story about three notable Left Coast industries: venture capital, media, and -- err -- sex?

It seems that noted San Francisco sex writer Violet Blue did some checking on what the SF Chron and sfgate.com were doing with her content (NSFW WARNING) and didn't like what she found. Her past columns had been copied to another domain, all outbound links (and some punctuation) stripped, the articles split into multiple pages, the pages stuffed with keywords - some inappropriate, and festooned with pay-per-click ads. And it emerged that multiple domains had also been aliased to these dead-end copies. Now where have we seen that kind of behavior before?

Here I should mention that sfgate.com is apparently - by admission of the author - within the letter of her contract by making this use of her work. That relationship, now terminated, was based on a level of trust that she feels has been abused, and made no explicit stipulations on how the content can be reused. The interest here is what this incident may say about the ongoing behavior of the MSM online, and its implications for the industry's business model.

This occurrence is not a one-off. The Violet Blue post also mentions the LA Times as creating similar ad-stuffed dead end pages, also with a list of multiple aliased domains. What caught my attention was that both the Chron's and Times' alias lists incuded subdomains of one common domain: perfectmarket.com. Perfect Market is an LA-area startup that claims to:

[help] newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters with a web presence and other online publishers grow their revenue with little effort and no risk. Our proprietary technology solution better fulfills the needs of intent users – people who arrive at their sites through keyword searches seeking specific information – with exactly what they're looking for in our customers' online content. Optimized content with relevant ads generates higher click-through rates for advertisers, and dramatically more revenue for publishers and their ad network partners.

That glowing description does seem to fit the prosaic implementation discovered by Ms. Blue, so it seems safe to conclude that Perfect Market is the technology and services partner that assisted the Chron and Times in stripping the original content into its SEO'd counterparts.

Perfect Market is a well backed venture. It has raised over $20m in venture capital, the most recent round closing in February and announced yesterday. Interestingly, this round was led by the bankrupt Tribune Company, parent company of the LA Times. Perfect Market also has solid backing from more traditional VCs, including Trinity, Rustic Canyon and IdeaLab. (Mayfield also has a board seat, though no publicized investment.)

Again, nothing to see here from a legal perspective. The company is selling a service and technology to its MSM clients, who bear responsibility for its operation against content that they have bought or licensed.

There are three business perspectives that do emerge. The first is the potential reaction of authors who find their work used in this fashion, and the consequent ability of MSM sites to work with those with an established byline. Ms. Blue has pretty much covered that by example, so I will pass.

The second is the reaction of the so-far-unnamed party to the transaction: the search engine. The keyword and ad-stuffed dead end pages apparently produced by Perfect Markets's technology are isomorphic, from a search company's point of view, to those created by more questionable tactics such as scraping. The intent is the same: to spam the index. This is the behavior that routinely gets questionable sites shoved to Google's back pages, or banished altogether. One has to wonder just how long this type of abuse will be tolerated, simply because it's being practiced by a recognized media outlet. (And we can note in passing that the irony of an MSM that routinely suggests that deep links are 'stealing' behaving in this fashion is thick enough to spread on toast.)

Finally come the implications for the businesses of the MSM sites themselves. While Perfect Market suggests that what they are enabling is an exhibit of MSM brand power, reality would seem to be the opposite. It should be clear that neither the potential reader nor the original author are going to be happy with the existence of a keyword stuffed, link stripped dead end page. The difference between these pages and those of a more prosaic SEO spammer is simply the brand attached to them, which might entice the reader to click through. It should be clear that the Chron, the Times, and other MSM outlets behaving in this fashion are doing no less than milking their brands to the detriment of long term trust and value. It is a subtle, but telling, exhibition of their desperation.

Update: From a comment by Ben Metcalfe at GigaOM:

It looks like LA Times, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinal, South Florida Sun Sentinal, Hartford Courant, Allentown Morning Call, Virginia Daily Press and the New York Daily News are all using this or looking to.

Could California Borrow This Guy II

Chris Christie of New Jersey:

You know, at some point there has to be parity. There has to be parity between what is happening in the real world, and what is happening in the public sector world. The money does not grow on trees outside this building or outside your municipal building. It comes from the hard working people of our communities who are suffering and are hurting right now....

We need to understand we are all in this together. And you know, all of you know in your heart, what I am saying is true. You all know that these raises that are being given to public employees of all stripes, we cannot afford. You all know the state cannot continue to spend money it does not have. And you all know that the appetite for tax increases among our constituents has come to an end.

Yes. When the average wage in the private and public sectors are once again in line (and the unemployment rates ditto), then 'justice' will be served.

And we get girly-man Ahnuld and reruns of the Governor Moonbeam show. Poor California!

The Roving Eye: Keynes v. Hayek Crib, Genomics Learning Curve, Ghosts Of The Last Bubble

DKos Win! Not the place I'd normally go for economic enlightenment, but there's a very nicely done mini-tutorial on macro in the guise of a concordance to the Keynes - Hayek throw down video that I've featured before. Via the Instaprof.

All Your Base Are Belong... A report on new gene sequencing product releases at a recent conference provides plenty of evidence that the Carlson curves are still running. Plenty of novel designs based on new science, given some clear evidence that that there are multiple possible paths ahead, some with interesting implications on the speed and reliability of sequencing, as well as diversification of the sequencing market into niches. Still lots of technological uncertainty here; plenty of potential for today's leaders to miss the next generation. If you've got a win, cash it in!

Green gone to rust. What happens when the subsidies run out? Some remnants of the last time around the statist track. Ah, but this time, it'll be different! Sure it will! (PDF)

Obligatory eye candy. Night-time volcanic eruption at the Pink Tentacle blog.

It's The Uncertainty, Stupid

An NRO reader reports a Q&A with a Fed economist:

Did he believe that the healthcare reform and related tax proposals, the proposed cap and trade legislation and the consequent increase in energy costs, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the agitation for higher taxes on the wealthy, the proposal to increase corporate tax rates, the proposal to increase capital gains taxes, the trial floating of ideas such as a national VAT and removal of the earnings cap on FICA, the more robust regulatory bureaucracy . . . did he believe any of these uncertainties were depressing hiring?

He stated yes, without a doubt and proceeded to relay a conversation he had with a local chemical company regarding their 2010 capital expenditure budget. When asked what the company intended to invest in 2010, the response was ‘nothing,’ not due to a paucity of good opportunities, but because it was impossible for the company to calculate a rate of return given all the uncertainty over cost of labor, energy prices, regulatory mandates and the like....

“No investment means no hiring and no new tax revenues. It’s the uncertainty, stupid.”

And I'll note that 'nothing' for a capex budget really means you are milking the business. Depreciation isn't just an entry on the balance sheet and tax return, particularly not for a chemical manufacturer.

Anatomy Of An Assassination

On January 19th, 2010, a man named Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh died in a hotel in Dubai. Since his day job was a senior leader of the terrorist organization Hamas, with particular expertise in smuggling Iranian arms into the Gaza strip, his demise was mourned only by a select few.

Things became became more interesting when the autopsy apparently showed that what looked like a natural causes death was in fact a murder, possibly a Tazering followed by suffocation. Dubai's public places are well salted with surveillance cameras that are several grades better than those at the corner 7-11, and the local authorities went to work hunting in their captured footage for those who had done the dirty deed.

Leading to this fascinating 27 minute video. Silent, with title cards and subtitles explaining the images you're looking at - as the surveillance teams arrive in country, check into hotels, wait for the target to arrive and go to ground, stake out the premises and rent a room across the hall, rendezvous with a hit team, and set up a perimeter while the killing is done, then clear the area. You see everything but the deed itself. A bizarre, 21st century Day of the Jackal as silent film in miniature.

What you won't find out is whodunnit. (Note that the passports from which the names and faces shown at the end of the video were taken, turned out to be fakes - based on real people, but with bogus passport numbers or other information.) Suspicion has naturally focused on the Israeli Mossad, since they'd have plenty of reason to wish this guy dead. Israel is following their usual 'refuse to confirm or deny' which usually means 'yes', but now the Dubai police have arrested two Palestinians who once worked for Palestinian Authority security (Hamas and the PA are not exactly best buds), so who knows?

Update: A mystery writer speculates.

Could California Borrow This Guy?

Newly installed New Jersey governor Christie lays it down: The state is busted, public pensions and retiree benefits are the biggest single cause, and it's time for the hurt. The same is true in pretty much every state out there, but he's the one with the nuts to say it in plain English, and tell the awful truth about what the pols over-promised on the taxpayers' behalf. Much as I'd like to bring him out here to show the Governator - who's been showing the side effects of his earlier occupation - how to do it, Christie's going to be busy fighting off the smears and counter-attacks already pouring from public employees unions, teachers and other swillers at the public trough.

For those looking at governor candidates in California, and other soon-to-be-busted states, here's a test for the primaries and November: Look at and listen to each of them, and then see if you can envision that speech coming out of their mouth. If you can't, forget it. It's no time for wusses.

Brains and Beta

Researchers at Caltech has linked the fear of losing money to a specific structure in the brain, the amygdala. Subjects in which it was damaged were willing to essentially disregard downside risks. The amygdala is linked to emotional responses of all kind of events, including threats, and it makes sense that something that might have evolved to mediate life and death fight/flight decisions is invoked in making the fear/greed tradeoff in investing.

It would be interesting to also know the neurological involvement in gain seeking. But while Caltech gets started on that, perhaps someone should do profiles on amygdala function in - let's say - VCs, day traders, hedgies, and Fannie Mae executives.

(Via Tyler Cowen.)

Fascinating Analysis of Public Social Networks

Pete Warden has scraped profile information from millions of Facebook pages, creating a (US-centric) web of personal connections. Some rough clustering yields:


RTWT for further description of the analysis and clusters. I initially read his name for the southern West Coast cluster as 'Socialistan'. Heh. Hat tip to Razib Khan.

Political Counterproductivity

Krugman: "...a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis."

Coyote: "OK, sign me up."

Me too.