Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The Roving Eye: No Newspaper Trust, Let Our Genomes Go, A Mundane Singularity

A fundamental value problem. Jeff Nolan has a smart post on why creating an online consortium of newspapers won't solve their problems. RTWT. A newspaper is already a bundle of information of various types, a bundle whose value is breaking down. Putting together a bunch of these bundles into a super aggregation of some sort doesn't fix the fundamentally broken premise. Even creating new bundles sliced along topical lines may be problematic unless there's some fundamental rethinking: The Associated Press is such a topical bundle and it's not exactly covering itself in glory. As Jeff points out, some deeper rethinking about both the cost and product side is required.

Chocolate is love. and it's good for you, too. Put it on the healthy diet list right next to red wine. More proof that your favorite deity wants you to be happy.

Bio-nannies on the march. Our betters in the California Department of Health are taking it taking it upon themselves to send out 'cease and desist' notices to companies providing genomic marker scans direct to consumers. It's less than clear that the laws about 'diagnostic' tests apply to results intended for general information, given that there's no immediate therapeutic intent. It is clear that California state government continues to drive the innovation golden goose to other locales.

While we're discouraging investment. Ever time a US oil refinery goes down for maintenance or due to an accident, the price of gasoline and other products spikes. The refining process runs right at the edge of being a choke point in our energy supply, and any glitch affects the end supply and hence the price point. That might have something to do with the fact there have been no new refineries built here since 1976. Perhaps some fresh investment would be in order. But no, the House Democrats think we should nationalize them instead. What a fine move to send any potential expansion capital running the other way. The Democrats are economic illiterates, or just don't care.

Train travel is a luxury. Trying to turn long distance routes into an alternative to air travel is inherently flawed. Charlie Martin runs the numbers. Commuter rail can make money, if not run by politicians. The long haul routes are for those out for adventure, not for business people on a schedule. Repackage and reprice them accordingly.

alt.singularity A nice catalog of potential technology breakthroughs that could lead to a 'singularity', without requiring either human-equivalent AI or de novo molecular scale nano-engineering. While these two seem to be articles of faith for some singularists, they both have the problem of a very low observed learning rate. Regardless of theoretical possibility, capital requirements and technology path dependency suggest that nanotech will emerge from some combination of carbon chemistry and silicon processing. Human replication seems to be going nowhere fast; emphasizing complementary and symbiotic intelligences in the machine phase seems more the ticket. It's good to see so many other break-out possibilities, given my skepticism on these two.

Is iGoogle Hosed?

I use iGoogle to collect a number of RSS feeds originated from blogs, in addition to a few of Google's MSM-originated feeds. The updating rate on the blog feeds has gotten slower and slower over the last few weeks. Right now, none of my non-MSM feeds have updated on the iGoogle pages since Thursday, two days ago. When I click through to the blogs, most of them have at least one post since then. I doubt all of their feeds happened to break at once.

What's going on, Google? I'll have to move my feeds elsewhere if you've gone unstable.

The Roving Eye: Not-So-Open Socialness, About That SUV We Rented, The Bus That Never Comes

Reality Check Time. While I admire some of the technologies being proposed as part of the project, the portability of social data espoused by its evangelists is starting to run into issues. It's not clear how many users, beyond the evangelists, think they have a problem. What's clear is that this information and its use is regarded as an asset by companies providing social networking capability, and will be treated as such: See Facebook's cutting off live access from Google Friends. For that matter, a social graph without identity information attached to its leaves is pretty worthless. And if you haven't noticed that Web companies tend to regard identities and their authenticators as valuable assets, you just haven't been paying attention for the last decade or so. Good luck with that, as they say.

We just went for a ride in the desert and look what happened! It's hard to believe anyone survived this. I'm guessing the first pass missed and gave the occupants time to "rapidly exit". Hanging out near live firing ranges is maybe not a good idea.

Smart, but poignant. A bus stop where none ever does, and those waiting forget why they're there. A subtle use of the persistence of past long term memories in Alzheimer's patients. It hits home - my wife and I each have a parent who is afflicted.

Too bad they couldn't both win. I've been an off-and-on watcher of professional golf through the years - a little more 'on' while I've been recuperating. But I've never seen anything to match the US Open battle between Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate for high drama. The wounded master up against a veteran journeyman playing the game of his life. Tiger's string of unreal eagle and birdie shots on Saturday. And the gentlemanly rivalry between two players who showed their respect and friendship throughout. Well played!

Dubious Distinction: The Associated Press

What is the AP? With even some of its member companies tabbing it as a faceless large news organization, you could easily miss the historic and economic background to this past week's kerfuffle. (I've you've been signed off the nets during that period, the AP attempted a number of DMCA takedown orders against the 'Drudge Retort' website, based upon short excerpts, headlines and occasionally naked links to some its stories. The excerpts, BTW, were shorter than those the above-linked Knoxville News blog post, written by a professional journalist, made of the New York Times article it cited as primary material. Well within fair use, IOW.)

The Associated Press is actually a cooperative, an corporate organization formed by old media companies as far back as 1846. Its main function has always been to collect and sometimes edit stories written by reporters at its member companies, and circulate them for possible publication by other member organizations. Back in the day, it was a way of economizing on costs like wire charges for international coverage. It's also a way for papers to get stories on distant local events that reach national prominence; the chances of your local rag having a reporter in (say) Des Moines when the levee goes down aren't too high - their reportage is almost certainly a locally written story carried by, and perhaps edited by the AP.

Put another way, the AP is an aggregation and distribution business. Of information. It's one of those 'infomediaries' that were supposed to have died a decade ago, with a dagger labeled 'Internet' stuck into the heart. Why is it still alive to annoy the blogosphere?

Part of the reason is that the AP's customers are also its owners. Take a look at the board of directors list. It would be hard to come up with better definition by example of 'vested interest'. These are not people motivated to change the AP's way of business until they are forced. That force has now arrived.

Not many posts after journalism insider Jeff Jarvis' screed against the AP, you will find the latest recital of bad financials from the newspaper biz. Among other discouraging numbers, a 14% quarterly fall in advertising revenue. And the AP both buys from, and sells to, that industry. They are getting it coming and going.

While the AP doesn't publish its financials, you can well imagine that they are pretty grim. And the 'net, a main driver of the newspapers' debacle, is likely even worse for the AP. While analysis suggest that online ad revenue will never fully replace print for the newspapers, the AP generally gets no revenue at all from Internet ads carried on sites that republish its stories. While Eric Schmidt may dubiously think Google has some moral duty to bail out display ad venues, it's hard to see how that would equate to making life better for the AP. After all, it's just redistributing stories written by reporters at its member newspapers. Google might be forgiven for thinking it's doing at least as good a job at that itself.

No matter how insulated the business and board, reality will eventually pay a call. Having been involved with boards full of 'strategic partners' before, I can attest to how much fun they can be when the business model evaporates and the owners' own strategies are all to seek. Rather than spending his time bleating about the imagined impact of 9/11 on the suffering press, the AP CEO and President now gets to work on the more mundane issue of how to stop the walls from coming in. Perhaps leading to certain desperation mode attempts to regain control over a distribution choke point that has long since evaporated, rather than figuring out how his organization could add some value. Links, huh, what a concept!. Maybe they should try it.

Nobody gets their own set of facts, and nobody gets their own set of laws. Having gotten squishy on the former, the AP now seems to be forgetting the latter. For legal overreach and brand destruction in the aid of staying in the buggy whip business, the AP is awarded this blog's Dubious Distinction award for business folly.

Update: Here's another worthy take along similar lines. Update 2: And more.

Further update: Jeff Jarvis makes essentially the same points, with more sympathy and less snark.

The Roving Eye: Yahoo Bleeds, Credit Meets Nicotine, The Underbelly of Higher Ed

Once is an accident, twice is coincidence... Jeff Weiner. Jeremy Zawodny. JR Conlin.. All apparently headed to startups or funders thereof. (Update: Usama Fayyad as well.) Come on, purple and yellow, don't just lie there, do something! Even other people's startups have figured out how to leverage your under-worked community assets.

Forex for Dummies as well as the rest of us. Here's a well-done tutorial on the ups and downs of the dollar, from a group of Bay Area money managers.

This is your brain on credit. A fascinating study suggests that paying with credit rather than cash partially disengages the cost function. (HT: Maggie's Farm.) So there's a scientific basis for the recommendation of some of my favorite personal finance books to dump the credit cards. I'd also say, from personal experience, that running a rigorous household budget may have the same effect, assuming you pay off your cards each month - and you do, right? Whether it's cash, debit or credit, it all gets marked off against a balance, the only thing that varies is when. Most people can figure out that pain delayed is still pain, but...

This is your brain on cigs. The latest American Scientist brings a piece on another study, a combined behavioral and MRI look at differences between nicotine addicts and others in a stock market simulation. Seems the addicts lose the ability to process what the experimenters call 'fictive signals' - what those of us with an economic bent would call opportunity costs. Do you suppose these two groups of researchers should be comparing notes?

In the belly of the beast. Adjunct 'Professor X' at Unknown College pens an Atlantic piece on the woes of teaching English lit and comp to those of marginal academic abilities. This all sounds very familiar. About 25 years ago I spent some time as an adjunct, in computer science, at a community college in Flint, Michigan, motivated by a need to keep the wolf away from the door as well as sampling the teaching option before plunging into the commercial world. Two weeks into the first term I was bemoaning the fact that I could see myself easily flunking half the students, based on their complete inability to handle systematic problem solving, let alone actual programming. My fellow slave laborers opined that it was normal, and the best thing I could do is persuade them to drop the course while they could still get a refund. Yeah, I been there. 

Glenn Reynolds has talked about a current bubble in higher education, and if you count back the years, my experience was at the height of the fad for retraining autoworkers. There is one other factor in common: Some of my students were driven into the classroom to escape the consequences of a local economy wrecked by a combination of auto company management incompetence and auto union arrogance. And a lot of today's lower echelon students are driven there because their high school diplomas mean little as a credential, due to...

The Roving Eye: Arrrrr Is For Robot, Following the Genomics Learning Curve, More Public Finance Follies

Talk like a pirate day for bots? Just as plenty of alternative uses have been found for formerly mil-only spy sats, so the applications for robots keep expanding. Here a report that a US Navy underwater droid trial resulted in finding new artifacts near a Revolutionary era ship wreck. Development budget hurting? Try turning your AUV loose in certain Caribbean and Florida waters, maybe.

Tick. Reports of an inaugural meeting of would-be hobbyist biological engineers. Today Cambridge, MA - tomorrow, ?

Tick. Biologist Richard Lenski at my alma mater, Michigan State has a long-running experiment to follow evolutionary trends in thousands of generations of fast-reproducing E. coli. Seems he's now made the first observation of a two-step mutational change that gave his bacteria the ability to utilize a different nutrient. If you don't know enough to engineer what you want, get nature to do it for you.

GOOG + Open Office = LUV? Should Google embrace Open Office? It's hard to see what they'd have to lose by doing so. My own experiments with Google Docs showed it can hit scaling limits due to bandwidth and/or server scheduling pretty quickly. Sometimes you just need a locally-hosted interface or computational engine. Microsoft has long been engaged in gilding the --- something nastier than a lily --- on Office. Each generation has a little more feature creep, cuts off more backward compatibility, and fails to address long-standing usability problems. Apple's shown there's a need for a light and usable alternative. Google could simply exploit this opportunity in a more mainstream fashion than Jobs & Co. ever will, and could create a smooth transition from/back to their SaaS offering. I'd say go for it!

The land of negative ROI. In what world does every dollar sunk into capex guarantee you will lose more operationally? That would be government-run mass transit in the US. Long viewed as a combination of make-work spoils program and welfare for the riders, every buck 'invested' means a larger system that can't cover its opex, let along depreciation and additional capex. Out here in the Bay Area, we have a heavy rail system running at near capacity due to the gas price rise, and it still can't cover its costs. Something smells rotten.

Fleecing NYC of a half billion bucks. That's apparently the amount of unfunded public pension liability covered up by an actuary who just happened to be an employee of the city, and therefore a beneficiary of the programs he was supposed to be vetting. Someone who did this in private industry would be in jail for fraud. Why isn't he? And people are running for office based on the idea of government controlling more of the economy.

A Death In The Family + Kudos

The sudden silence here was due to a short-notice trip out of town, for the funeral of my wife's mother on the East Coast. I had only swapped from crutches to a cane five days before, and since my wife had already flown out for the final illness (this was a hospice case), it meant a solo cross-country trip on uncertain footing with twelve hours notice. In the event, the trip out, the stay and return worked out reasonably well, in spite of some physical and emotional pains. That it came off so well is due in part to kindness and assistance along the way, and I'd like to use my private printing press to convey some thanks to:

Southwest Airlines, for putting me on the pre-board list even though I technically didn't meet their criteria. I normally avoid bulkhead seats like the plague, but it's just the place to be when you're 6'3" and have a leg that needs to be stretched out to keep down the swelling and pain. I got one on each of four flights, thanks to their help.

The Hilton Garden Inn at Islip Airport, which bumped me up to a larger handicap room without charge or being asked, and were very generous to my wife and myself when they learned the purpose of the trip.

The security folks at Oakland Airport, for skipping me around the line and hand carrying my junk to the X-ray machine. (Yes, it turns out a couple of plates in your leg does set off the detector. I'm going to have to get one of those security approval cards or deal with the wand and pat-down for the rest of my days.)