Quoted in the WaPo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/11/AR2008061101570.html
Right at the end, plus I was at least one of the 'experts' (ha!) in, "The two trends -- overall national improvement, with certain subgroups doing worse -- are not incompatible, experts noted."

Ari

LA claims copyright crimes are a public health nuisance, among other things. I love how the first commenter justifies copyright exports as a universal good by citing the weapons industry!

Ari

Real-world complications of impenetrable copyright laws.

--Ari

Another beautiful Times graphic. They're on a roll lately.

Also, this is a pretty awesome classroom lesson.

Ari

The article I've spent nearly two years on is finally out, 700+ million draws from the binomial distribution later.

The WaPo article is probably the best. It also showed up in:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/health/research/22life.html
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4700405&page=1
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN2146521720080422
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-04-21-life-span-study_N.htm
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_9011215
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/22/MNBB10843L.DTL
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iq_F2tT6KLMTalRIjYvjBKTLKYrAD906LK9O0
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/359985_dyingsooner22.html?source=mypi
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2004364803_lifespan22m.html

Majid and Chris have been doing most of the quoting, but I've been handling some of the radio coverage. The SoCal NPR affiliate's public affairs show recorded my ramblings live for ten minutes or so. Exciting stuff.

--Ari

Please don't make all research results CC-BY. AFAIK, collections of data are not subject to copyright under US law (the original case had something to do with phone books), but IANAL. Claiming that copyright applies to them, even if your intent is to make the results available, just normalizes the claims of malicious actors who would like data assemblages to be subject to copyright.

For alphabet soup clarification, check out the IAD.

--Ari

"When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied." Wisdom for the content industries.

--Ari

Israel introduces Fair Use. Good to see at least one developed nation moving in the right direction in their copyright legislation.

--Ari

Listening to Pandora, this one just popped up:

Rob Dougan, Furious Angels, Clubbed To Death (Kurayamino Variation)

The "Variation" is particularly appropriate, as the first bars appropriate material from Elgar's Enigma Variations. Yet another use that would be impossible were the work under copyright. Over-protection of copywritten works does not necessarily encourage innovation.

Ari

Where have all the cool internet radio stations gone? When will they ever learn?

Ari

The placebo effect varies by price. Interesting that medicine seems to be among the last to pick up on things that other fields are well-aware of--although the mess surrounding Vioxx and other COX-2 inhibitors saw some discussion of this effect. In this case, I believe students of marketing and economics have known about the "luxury good" effect for some time, where a high price acts as a signal of quality. Amusing finding when considering this finding from this week's news. Anecdotally, I find that even highly-educated people think of pharmaceutical prices as determined by manufacturing costs (or manufacturing plus R&D costs, as PhRMA would like us to think*; or manufacturing plus R&D plus advertising costs, as PhRMA-haters would like us to think).

For near-zero marginal cost (NZMC) goods like drugs, music, movies, etc., that's basically not the case. Pricing is determined by what is somewhat confusingly known as 'what the market will bear.' Of course, all market prices are determined that way by definition, but in this case it means prices are set through a process more like the idealized monopoly from Economics 101 than a perfectly competitive firm. This dynamic explains the rise of PBMs and other attempts to create price-controlling oligopsonies, although such mechanisms have their issues as well.

The disconnect between the way economists and marketers think of pricing for NZMC goods and how the general public perceives said pricing is fascinating. I wonder if there is any literature in the marketing world about the mechanisms for the higher perceived value of higher-priced goods? Certainly the component in the placebo study is strictly the intrinsic effect, but I imagine in the real world there is another factor, namely that higher-priced goods provide more incentive for their manufacturer to market them agressively, particularly given the association between high price and market control which means the advertiser can capture a greater share of the increased volume from advertising.

--Ari

* See, for instance, the "Today's medicines finance tomorrow's miracles" campaign.

Big judgment on filesharing.

In slightly more amusing news, Lessig's not running for Congress.

Free.

Ari

In the words of a friend, "Edward Tufte would so approve."

Impressive indeed.

Update: Just noticed they used color instead of a y-axis. Perhaps the y component is density rather than true values, in which case they get a pass (hard to explain density to a general audience).
Update: It's not density. "The area of the shape (and its color) corresponds to the film's total domestic gross."

Ari

Subpoenas for peer reviews. Not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it could easily be abused to stifle science; on the other, IANAL but I can't think of any compelling reason why review should be granted any more protection than many other things that are discoverable, and it may help push towards open review, which I'm more or less in favor of.

Ari

Top-down structure of social media. In some sense this misses the point, though. Who those core contributers are is determined only by their usefulness to the site. It would be more honest to say that upfront, but ultimately that is a better structure. Gladwell (not a big fan, apropos) would say that other mechanisms are simply the result of a human bias towards "potential" rather than past results.

Ari

Harvard is apparently adopting an opt-out OA policy. This mechanism of encouraging OA is brilliant and entirely in line with the research on opt-out in organ donation and IRA adoption. Because there's an opt-out provision, no one can complain that this restricts their journal choices. Because it's there by default, adoption will increase dramatically. The only issue is that I imagine many people will sign traditional journal agreements anyway, and thus wind up placing themselves in legal messes. Not that big a problem though, because journals would be even more misguided than the RIAA to sue. Think that suing customers is bad? Try suing academics for disseminating their works.

Ari

Consilience, a new interdisciplinary journal on development, uses a CC license. Specifically, it uses a "Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License." Perhaps the Japanese watchmaker model of have-it-your-way licensing has gone a bit too far!

Ari

Random meta data source of the whenever.

Ari

Still don't think that "piracy" can be speech? No better time to disabuse oneself of the notion than an election year.

In other news, I got an e-mail from the editor of a paper that was just accepted asking me to sign their copyright agreement. In the past I have hated doing so, but this time I was greeted with a CC lincense. The journal? PLoS Med. Yay.

--Ari

Is the entirety of Canada the next 'celestial jukebox'?

Ari

Oy vey.

Ari

Massive collection of open and semi-open data sets:
http://www.datawrangling.com/some-datasets-available-on-the-web.html

Ari

Found at theinfo.org (a site dedicated to large datasets):
http://bulk.resource.org/copyright/
As best I can tell, this is the best source of copyright registration data out there. historical.tar.gz is particularly tempting.

Ari

Let the DRM problems begin.

Ari

Stupendous. I have a hard time imagining that this isn't the turning point in the OA battle, at least in the U.S. and certainly in the biomedical sciences. The U.K. already has Wellcome and others with an OA mandate. The mandate (assuming it's enforced or researchers are worried about it being enforced) will encourage the infrastructure of OA and cause spillover effects. By infrastructure here I don't necessarily mean institutional repositories, as those are fairly pervasive at this point at major institutions, but rather largely the knowledge of how to self-archive among researchers. If they have to do it for half their papers and discover that it only takes two minutes (and eventually they find distant colleagues contacting them who never would have otherwise), that dramatically lowers the barriers to doing it for non-mandated (e.g. non-NIH-funded) articles.

--Ari

Nifty mix from CC/Lessig.

Ari

Are leaked BitTorrent releases being used to gain knowledge about show quality? That's funny, because I believe there was a certain Penn professor who had a similar idea years ago that was told he was crazy and didn't know the business.

Failure cascades. Interesting due to its potential to use real video games to do good social science. I think this approach holds more promise than building fake games to do so, because even with large grants you can't compete with the resources put into a commercial game. There's a classic tradeoff between the large volume of difficult-to-interpret data which comes from observational studies vs. small amounts of highly detailed data which comes from experimental studies which seemsrelevant here.

--Ari

Slingbox is adding a fair use sharing feature. Check out the video, about 3/4 of the way in.

Ari

Un^H^Hbelievable.

Ari

Just to clarify the last post, I don't mean "amateur" as a slight. Quite the contrary. In contrast to conaisseur or cogniscenti, the word amateur derives not from knowledge of a discipline but from love of it. In some sense it's a false dichotomy, as the incredible fund of knowledge on the Amateur Telescope Makers list I frequented almost a decade ago makes clear. Given a choice (not that I'm in a position to be doing much auditioning at this point in my life) I'd choose a candidate whose knowledge is driven by passion over one who is simply knowledgeable any day. Dr. Lopez, for one, espouses similar views.

Why bring this up now? I just ran across a great post about amateurism in chess.

--Ari

Visualizing bad recordings

Saw this one on the Ars fora. Pretty cool bit of amateur/cognoscenti/connoisseur investigation.

Ari

Industry Canada: Downloaders have a positive effect on music industry.

"Napster": PC music subscription business no good.

U. Oregon defends students.

Net neutrality FCC complaint.

EMI offers illegal downloads.

--Ari