GrafoDexia

2012-01-27T14:40:00.002-05:00

This will be a fascinating case--right of resale with digital music.

2012-01-07T04:40:00.001-05:00

Nice quantitative breakdown of movie industry patterns.

2011-11-05T19:25:00.001-04:00

Graveyard of DRM: compilation of all the abandoned formats.

2011-07-23T05:04:00.002-04:00

Legal shenanigans around the public domain. My understanding of the law here is that companies are under no obligation to provide public domain works that they have copies of, but that anyone who obtains such a copy can redistribute it. I don't know how the law works with "intent to distribute" as in the original case, but in this case I suspect he'd be ok since he was careful to take only public domain works. Unless he violated a hacking law somehow (unlikely, given the fairly trivial things that were required in the first attack), or ran afoul of the contract (very likely, given the all-encompassing nature of most click-through agreements these days).

It would be interesting to try to quantify quite how many public domain works are locked up inside paywalls. Easier to come up with a number of works than with a valuation on their economic value.

2011-07-22T05:58:00.002-04:00

Conspiracy-theoryesque report of movie industry not releasing a report stating that "pirates" purchase more than non-pirates.

The interesting point here for me is not the smoking gun or the conspiracy theory or somesuch. Rather, I've assumed for a while that such evidence has made it into the hands of executives, either via the public domain or via commissioned reports. What's clear is that the decision-making process has simply ignored the evidence over and over again. It's not a phenomenon unique to one industry (or government, or even sometimes academia), sadly. For all the rise in "data scientist" positions at corporations, for all Netflix and Google's success, evidence is still a second class citizen.

2011-07-19T09:38:00.001-04:00

New Pandora/Last.fm competitor: Spotify.

2011-07-01T16:07:00.001-04:00

Electronics giant Ericsson takes a boldly moderate stand on piracy and anti-piracy.

2011-06-23T17:55:00.000-04:00

Nice to see someone studying IPhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif issues quantitatively.

A Generation of Software Patents

James E. Bessen

This report examines changes in the patenting behavior of the software industry since the 1990s. It finds that most software firms still do not patent, most software patents are obtained by a few large firms in the software industry or in other industries, and the risk of litigation from software patents continues to increase dramatically. Given these findings, it is hard to conclude that software patents have provided a net social benefit in the software industry.

The cloud

2011-06-22T02:59:00.003-04:00

You know that the "media cloud" has made it when copyhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif-cat clouds like Best Buy's new one start popping up.

On the other hand, being in Paris for the summer, I have discovered a huge downside: because you don't actually own your media, artificial restrictions get put in place. Not only do subscription services like Netflix stop working, but even movies that you ostensibly paid for with Amazon's video-on-demand service stop working. If you're going to charge the same price that the physical media costs, at least make it just as useful.

2011-05-25T15:55:00.002-04:00

An interesting illustration of how copyright law is not just about profits but speech.

2011-03-24T18:52:00.000-04:00

P2P on the decline?

"According to research group NPD Group, the shuttering of Limewire's music file sharing service has led to a similar decline in the usage of such services throughout the U.S. The number has gone from a high of 16 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007 to just nine percent in the fourth quarter of 2010, right after Limewire shut down its file-sharing services due to a court order, when a federal judge sided with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)."

Taxonomy of Conference Questions

2011-03-22T23:55:00.004-04:00

Some of the more "interesting" questions at a recent conference inspired me to conduct the following detailed analysis of secondary data.

Japanese econometrics study: Filesharing boosts DVD sales

2011-02-04T18:35:00.001-05:00

http://www.rieti.go.jp/en/publications/summary/11010021.html

"Whether or not illegal copies circulating on the internet reduce the sales of legal products has been a hot issue in the entertainment industries. Though much empirical research has been conducted on the music industry, research on the movie industry has been very limited. This paper examines the effects of the movie sharing site Youtube and file sharing program Winny on DVD sales and rentals of Japanese TV animation programs. Estimated equations of 105 anime episodes show that (1) Youtube viewing does not negatively affect DVD rentals, and it appears to help raise DVD sales; and (2) although Winny file sharing negatively affects DVD rentals, it does not affect DVD sales. Youtube’s effect of boosting DVD sales can be seen after the TV’s broadcasting of the series has concluded, which suggests that not just a few people learned about the program via a Youtube viewing. In other words YouTube can be interpreted as a promotion tool for DVD sales."

I wish there were an English translation, now that I've spent all this time learning econometrics....

2011-01-08T06:15:00.001-05:00

Free can be lucrative.

2010-11-30T16:26:00.000-05:00

Free geographical FCC data.

2010-11-28T12:46:00.002-05:00

In the final push to finish the semester and in need of something other than Pandora or last.fm. Found this list, which seems to be working out well. They're right about AccuRadio being of particularly high audio quality.

2010-11-09T09:03:00.001-05:00

Huge news: Ed Felten to be Chief Technologist.

2010-11-06T21:56:00.001-04:00

The Economist on eBook DRM: "If you own a physical book, in much of the world you may sell it, lend it—even burn or bury it. You may also keep the book forever. Each of those characteristics is littered with footnotes and exceptions for e-books. We are granted an illusion of ownership, but may read only within the ecosystem of hardware and software supported by the bookseller with sometimes additional limitations imposed by publishers. Witness Amazon's remote deletion—since abjured—of improperly sold copies of George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" in 2009."

2010-10-30T21:04:00.002-04:00

Kind of awesome: Peer-to-peer in bricks-and-mortar (literally).

2010-10-29T06:31:00.002-04:00

Mint (Quicken-like online personal finance program) has released anonymized user data. Might make for some fun studies.

2010-10-27T08:30:00.001-04:00

I vaguely remember reading about Songbird a few years ago when it came out, but it looks like it has matured into something that would be quite fun to play around with.

2010-10-16T07:58:00.001-04:00

Seminar Series: Law and Economics
http://www.law.upenn.edu/currently/seminars/lawandeconomics/
Hal R. Varian, Chief Economist, Google
“Copyright Term Extension and Orphan Works”
4:30-6:00 pm in Tanenbaum 145 at the Law School
Contact for more information: David Abrams dabrams@law.upenn.edu

2010-10-05T08:25:00.002-04:00

http://researchremix.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/sig-use-2010-proposal-award-for-tracking-data-reuse/

"I propose to follow one thousand datasets from data repositories into the published literature. Studying the reuse patterns of 100 datasets from 10 repositories will facilitate analysis across domains, datatypes, and repository structures. Analysis will focus on the relative levels and timing of data reuse, attributes of investigators who reuse data compared to those who deposit data, and topics studied through data reuse."

Wow. I'm looking forward to seeing the results of this in a few years, hopefully with some well-done poster-size visualizations to make sense of it all.

In related news, I've finally got Sweave set up and so my research is finally reproducible. Between that and being committed to entirely avoiding Excel even for graphs after an embarrassing copy-paste error, I'm quite happy with my research setup going into this whole PhD shindig. Now if only R did symbolic manipulation ad I could avoid Matlab/Maxima entirely!

2010-09-17T09:12:00.002-04:00

Blu-Ray DRM appears to be dead. I've said many times before that DRM will be broken at some point. It therefore likely exists not to prevent piracy (which almost always is feasible even without breaking DRM), but to prevent otherwise-legitimate use by those who have purchased the content. For instance, DVD DRM served to impede format shifting to iPods for some time, opening up a market for the same content to be sold to the same consumers in a new format.

2010-08-24T09:56:00.000-04:00

Open peer review, in the NYT.

2010-04-07T18:22:00.000-04:00

More cheap computing power to come?

2010-03-10T19:33:00.000-05:00

Movie futures exchange to open:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/business/media/11futures.html

Cool.

2010-01-30T17:16:00.000-05:00

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010/01/what_can_search.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+StatisticalModelingCausalInferenceAndSocialScience+%28Statistical+Modeling%2C+Causal+Inference%2C+and+Social+Science%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Not entirely dissimilar to using P2P search or availability data to predict sales.

2010-01-30T13:30:00.002-05:00

http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2010/01/bittorrent-census-about-99-of-files-copyright-infringing.ars
The full study description:
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/census-files-available-bittorrent

"this section [movies/shows] was heavily biased towards recent movies, instead of being spread out evenly over a number of years."

The Ars conclusion, that "the more DRM there is on the legit versions of the content, the more popular it is on P2P" is confounded by the overwhelming greater desirability of content produced by the major labels, of course, but it does mean that small artists have little to lose from going DRM-free, or even freely-downloadable if what they want is traffic driven to their website.

Obvious limitations:
1. Small sample size
2. Not weighted by volume shared
3. Not an unbiased sample of the universe of pirated content

2010-01-10T05:17:00.002-05:00

I wish the major health surveys would release small-area data so that we could do things like this. County is about the smallest we can get on a national scale, and only with mortality data.

In other news, just started clinics. Have no time for anything, but it's a lot of fun.

2009-12-20T17:31:00.000-05:00

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/what-is-drm-doing-in-my-garage.ars
<>

2009-12-05T12:35:00.001-05:00

Looks like the FCC is being active in pushing open networks:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/fcc-admits-cablecard-a-failure-vows-to-try-something-else.ars

2009-12-01T07:22:00.002-05:00

Apparently people are now swapping time on their Slingboxes. Sounds like that person wants to see local sports games or something.

2009-11-26T08:45:00.003-05:00

There's been lots of talk and work around publishing data to go with articles, but most of it has been stick-focused. Just ran across a paper published in July describing "overlay journals," which is more carrot-focused. Seems like it would work with ICPSR or repositories designed for individual authors to deposit their works.

2009-11-16T17:57:00.001-05:00

Musicians may get their content back from labels soon.

2009-11-13T22:49:00.000-05:00

Made some progress this week on a project I've been working on since I came back to Penn:
http://thedp.com/article/katherine-rea-accessing-medication

2009-11-01T22:21:00.001-05:00

Turns out it's not the end of the world as we know it after all:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/business/media/02ratings.html

2009-10-28T18:36:00.000-04:00

Gelman does some explaining of how Shazam works.

2009-10-17T09:24:00.008-04:00

Not the usual topic here, but I have been pondering bonds lately and needed a place to post a graph to illustrate a point.

We now return to our regularly-scheduled programming.

Sources of bond return, from here

Simple simulation to see how much of a difference adding a volatile yet higher-underlying-return asset class makes. Assumptions: Yield of total market is 4% and SD of 6.5%, yield of new asset class is 6% SD of 8%.

2009-10-14T19:55:00.002-04:00

Copyright documentary screening in our own backyard.

Diabetes paper is finally out. Ironically enough, I did most of the analysis on this from Ghana, with 12-hour blackouts every 36 hours bridged by hooking an inverter up to a car battery. Good times.

2009-09-25T16:20:00.000-04:00

P2P for academic papers.

2009-09-02T21:28:00.002-04:00

Minding my own business listening to Pandora, and what should come up but "Our First Approximations" by Jake Mann. There's a copy in a zip file available for download on the Band's MySpace page:
http://www.jakemann.org/valdez_ep.zip

I'm not sure a Bayesian would agree with the lyrics, but fun nonetheless.

2009-07-30T10:23:00.000-04:00

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86637/emi-quits-selling-cds-to-indie-record-stores/

2009-06-26T21:38:00.001-04:00

Simpsons more per viewer online than on air. Vindication for the more progressive movie/TV industry. It's curious that neither music (Pandora) or newspapers have seen this inversion.

2009-06-22T08:40:00.000-04:00

From "The Healthcare Economist" Shafrin's Healthcare Manifesto:

Reduce patent length. I have mulled over supporting the elimination of patents all-together, but as of now I’ll at least strongly support the reduction in the length of patents. Patents give producers a monopoly over certain goods produced for a given amount of time. This creates short-run inefficiencies, which may be outweighed in the long-run if companies increase innovation. So why should we shorten patent length? Boldrin and Levine provide some compelling arguments.
- Patents do not increase innovation: Before Italian patent protection 1961-1980: Italy discovered 9.3% of the world’s new active chemical compounds. After Italian patent protection: 1980-1983, Italy discovered only 7.5% of the world’s new chemical compounds. India also has limited patent protection, but is generating many of major pharmaceutical advances. Another study shows that strong copyright protections also do not increase innovation.
- Innovation Chains: Patents prevent innovation by disallowing other firms from building on the work of others
- Rent Seeking: Patents give companies an incentive to higher lawyers (to extend patent length and increase the scope of the patent) rather than researchers (who invent and innovate).

2009-06-21T22:49:00.000-04:00

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/06/21/1945216/Kindle-Zune-DRM-Restrictions-Coming-Into-Focus

2009-05-31T14:23:00.002-04:00

Interesting side-effect of Hulu, from talking to TV-less friends: If you're downloading the episode each week because you don't have a TV or you prefer to watch on the computer, you have a complete collection at the end of the season--you're building it in small chunks. Post-Hulu, there's no collection-building, and therefore you may be more likely to buy the DVD set rather than download for days straight. There also may be a psychological aversion to downloading something that is available for purchase in physical form (a collection) rather than something that is not (an episode).

Of course, the plural of "anecdote" and "speculation" is not "data"....

2009-05-23T07:31:00.002-04:00

From the Elsevier Reviewer's Packet:
"Elsevier shares the view of many that all scholars who wish to contribute to publications have an obligation to do a fair share of reviewing."

I don't disagree necessarily, but it seems a bit self-serving coming from one of the major publishers of toll-access journals--journals built by academics who seek to publish in them, academics who provide free labor in reviewing for them, and academic libraries who purchase them.

2009-05-02T21:20:00.001-04:00

A Stitch in Time: The Rise and Fall of the Sewing Machine Patent Thicket

Scholarly interest in how anticommons theory applies to patents has skyrocketed since Professor Michael Heller first proposed a decade ago that excessively fragmented interests in land can frustrate its commercial development. There is now a vigorous debate on whether anticommons exist in patent law, and, if so, whether these patent thickets impede innovation in patented products. As Professor Heller writes in his recently published book, The Gridlock Economy, "the empirical studies that prove - or disprove - our theory remain inconclusive."

This article contributes to this debate by analyzing the rise and fall of the first patent thicket in American history: the Sewing Machine War of the 1850s. The invention of the sewing machine in the antebellum era represents many firsts in the American legal system - the first patent thicket, the first "patent troll," and the first patent pool. Significantly, this case study verifies that patent thickets exist and that they can frustrate commercial development of new products. But it also challenges widely held assumptions in the patent thicket literature. Many scholars believe that this is largely a modern problem arising from a host of allegedly new issues in the patent system, such as incremental high-tech innovation, excessive litigation, and the rise of "patent trolls." Yet the sewing machine patent thicket exhibited all of these phenomena, revealing that patent thickets have long existed within the historically successful American patent system. The denouement of the sewing machine patent thicket in the Sewing Machine Combination of 1856, the first privately formed patent pool, further challenges the widely held belief that patent thickets are best solved through new statutes, regulations or court decisions that limit property rights in patents. To the contrary, the Sewing Machine Combination was formed against the backdrop of the strong protection of property rights in patents in the antebellum era. Thus, the story of the invention of the sewing machine is a striking account of early American technological, commercial and legal ingenuity, which heralds important empirical lessons for how patent thicket theory is understood and applied today.

2009-04-07T22:38:00.002-04:00

Perl code to convert SAS code to Stata code. This works if a project provides SAS statements to read in their fixed-width text file data format, as is reasonably common. Wrote this up to convert MEPS data without using SAS, and thought someone out there might find it useful. It fails if the value labels aren't all numeric, but that should be easy enough to fix.
--Ari

Usage:
./SAS_to_Stata.pl <> outfile.do

Code:
#!/usr/bin/perl

print "* Convert basic SAS file to read in fixed format into Stata equivalent\n";

# Initialize variables
$input = 0;
$label = 0;
$value = 0;
$format = 0;

# Loop through each line
while() {
my($line) = $_;
chomp($line);

# -- INPUT -- #
# If it's an INPUT statement, put us in a receptive state
if ($line =~ /(INPUT)/) {
$input=1;
print "infix ";
} elsif ($input==1 & $line =~ /;/) { #Take us out of receptive state at the ";"
$input=0;
print "using ____.dta, clear\n";
}
# If we're in a receptive state and the line is parseable as an input line, parse it
if (($input==1) & ($line =~ /\s+\@(\d+)\s+([A-Z\d]+)\s+([\$\s])(\d+).+$/)) {
$startcol = $1;
$varname = $2;
$endcol = $startcol + $4 - 1;
if ($3 eq "\$") {
$str = "str";
} else {
$str = "";
}
print "$str $varname $startcol-$endcol ";
}

# -- LABELS -- #
# If it's a LABEL statement, put us in a receptive state
if ($line =~ /(LABEL)/) {
$label=1;
} elsif ($label==1 & $line =~ /;/) {
$label=0;
}
# If we're in a receptive state and the line is parseable as a label line, parse it
if ($label==1 & $line=~/([A-Z\d]+)\s*=('.+')$/) {
print "label variable $1 $2\n";
}

# -- VALUE LABELS -- #

# If it's a VALUE statement, put us in a receptive state
if ($line =~ /(VALUE) (\$?)([A-Za-z]+)\s+$/) {
$value=1;
print "label define $3 ";
} elsif ($line =~ /;/) {
$value=0;
print "\n";
}
# If we're in a receptive state and the line is parseable as a value line, parse it
if ($value==1 & $line=~/\s*'?([-.]\d)'?\s*=\s*('.+')\s*$/) {
print "$1 $2 ";
}

# -- APPLY VALUE LABELS TO VARIABLES -- #

# If it's a FORMAT statement, put us in a receptive state
if ($line =~ /(FORMAT)/) {
$format=1;
} elsif ($format==1 & $line =~ /;/) {
$format=0;
}
# If we're in a receptive state and the line is parseable as a value line, parse it
if ($format==1 & $line=~/\s+([A-Za-z\d]+) (\$?)([A-Za-z\d]+)\.$/) {
print "label values $1 $3\n";
}

}

2009-04-01T14:39:00.000-04:00

"The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common;
But leave the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose."
~ English Folk Poem

2009-01-19T16:42:00.002-05:00

I ran across this book by Boldrin and Levine while perusing the Penn Bookstore the other day. Haven't read it yet, but I'm particularly enthusiastic that they use a term other than "intellectual property." As far as alternative terms go, Intellectual Monopoly isn't half bad.

--Ari

2008-11-28T17:02:00.000-05:00

Interesting discussion on the economics of a low but non-zero marginal cost good. "Therefore a small drop in demand causes a huge price collapse." It's curious how different this is from music production, because music is not an undifferentiable commodity and I imagine also because there's far less competitiveness in the music market (in terms of number of firms, homogeneity of thinking, and communication between firms).

2008-11-21T15:10:00.000-05:00

Modeling media sales, from my favorite statistical polisci blog.

--Ari

Awesome

2008-11-16T09:11:00.000-05:00

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/11/net-neutrality.html

2008-11-14T20:50:00.001-05:00

Another DRM mishap.

2008-10-27T21:29:00.000-04:00

A reasonably detailed explanation of peering and transit arrangements among internet providers. Good background for the perennial debates over net neutrality, who should pay to transport content, and so forth.

--Ari

2008-09-15T20:23:00.001-04:00

Just saw these on the OpenEconomics Data Store:
http://www.openeconomics.net/store/copyright_registrations_us
http://www.openeconomics.net/store/5f014cc2-e1d1-11db-aac4-00145101c316

--Ari

2008-09-11T23:04:00.000-04:00

Random tidbit from a forum I read:
"US Government statistics indicate the following percentages of foreign ownership of American industry:
• Sound recording industries - 97% "

I personally have no problem with this; given the statistic, however, the recording industry making the argument that long-duration high-protection copyright laws are necessary to "support American industry" seems disingenuous.

--Ari

2008-08-30T18:04:00.001-04:00

The failures of DRM.

--Ari

2008-07-21T10:16:00.001-04:00

The Economist on piracy as good for the content controller.

Ari

Quoted in the WaPo

2008-06-14T06:42:00.001-04:00

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

2008-05-10T16:29:00.000-04:00

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

2008-05-10T00:08:00.000-04:00

Real-world complications of impenetrable copyright laws.

--Ari

2008-05-08T17:58:00.000-04:00

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

Also, this is a pretty awesome classroom lesson.

Ari

2008-04-22T18:17:00.001-04:00

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

2008-04-15T10:25:00.000-04:00

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

2008-04-09T12:51:00.000-04:00

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

--Ari

2008-04-01T09:13:00.000-04:00

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

--Ari

2008-03-31T22:11:00.001-04:00

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

2008-03-15T14:35:00.001-04:00

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

Ari

2008-03-06T16:08:00.000-05:00

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.

2008-02-26T14:43:00.000-05:00

Big judgment on filesharing.

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

Free.

Ari

2008-02-26T08:43:00.003-05:00

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

2008-02-24T09:35:00.000-05:00

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

2008-02-23T12:10:00.000-05:00

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

2008-02-13T11:17:00.000-05:00

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

2008-02-11T16:56:00.000-05:00

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

2008-02-08T14:00:00.001-05:00

Random meta data source of the whenever.

Ari

2008-02-05T08:54:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-29T14:58:00.000-05:00

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

Ari

2008-01-28T14:57:00.000-05:00

Oy vey.

Ari

2008-01-18T22:14:00.001-05:00

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

Ari

2008-01-16T14:40:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-04T07:41:00.000-05:00

Let the DRM problems begin.

Ari

2007-12-27T07:09:00.000-05:00

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

2007-12-20T20:51:00.000-05:00

Nifty mix from CC/Lessig.

Ari

2007-12-15T09:34:00.000-05:00

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

2007-12-13T08:07:00.000-05:00

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

Ari

2007-12-11T10:26:00.000-05:00

Un^H^Hbelievable.

Ari

2007-12-01T09:31:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-19T20:29:00.000-05:00

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

Ari

2007-11-04T08:39:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-02T09:30:00.000-04:00

Sampling as Fair Use.

Ari

2007-10-25T11:51:00.000-04:00

Content will be free? Gives new context to the recent "free" pricing experiments by bands (which are in some ways selfish because long-term they're likely not sustainable but in the short term are incredibly clever since they've only ever kept a few cents on the dollar of CD sales anyway).

Ari

2007-10-16T20:20:00.000-04:00

Tim Wu is great, but the really interesting part of this article isn't the article itself, it's the parallels to other fields he talks about in the series.

Magic tricks as "IP."

--Ari

2007-10-10T07:48:00.000-04:00

VA to no longer release cancer data. Not exactly a typical topic for here, but it does relate to openness. Epidemiologsts are notorious for hoarding data. Do one study, sit on the data, and release a trickle of papers. Your career is made after that without much work. The incredibly important Framingham study is just being opened up, which is a good step. Death data by county is still being hoarded, though, and has been closed off since 2001. The excuse is always "privacy," but magically, if you work with one of their researchers you can always manage to find a way.

Increasingly, I think the Open Access fight is being won, but the open data and open code fights are not even on the radar. There are examples to the contrary, but they are few and far between, at least in the basic sciences and public health.

Part of the problem is that privacy claims still have a veneer of legitimacy. Mind you, I think they're incredibly important, but they're becoming a catch-all excuse for hoarding. There need to be standards--both technical and behavioral--to ensure privacy. Maybe someone could even come up with a super-secure box, a server filled with hard drives that would be hardened against attack and could be used to store secure data, with all analyses requiring non-anonymized data being run before they leave the box. Want to do research on our data? Buy an ISOxxxx-compliant box and make sure the data never leaves it in non-anonymized form.

--Ari

2007-10-09T08:21:00.000-04:00

There's been lots of talk of Health 2.0, but this is the first thing I've seen that might actually do something useful with the gobs of data that's collected. Even talk of using national health record data (e.g. having the anonymized charts of every patient nationwide vs. currently only having administrative data from insurance companies) for serious research has been scarce. The one caveat with this is that if the data comes from a biased sample or if they are confounded in the bajillions of ways epidemiologists have discovered things go wrong, it could easily be worse than giving no patients any information, as the conclusions patients come to would be false. Unfortunately, numbers tend to give a veneer of trustworthiness to almost any evidence.

Trackback for photos?

2007-10-07T15:17:00.000-04:00

The CC Attribution license is brilliant, but I wonder how much more so it would be were there metadata embedded in it with the attribution information, or a system like Trackback that would notify the creator when it was used. Think how much more motivating the chance of being published somewhere important would be were there a non-zero chance of actually knowing about it when it happened.

Ari

2007-10-03T21:55:00.000-04:00

I knew I liked Joel. Two more examples more germane to my world:
1) Bike parking. Want to pay for monthly secured parking in Harvard square? No problem. Want to pay to park your bike in the same garage below your building? Sorry, the rack's for residents only. Currently battling with this work after a year of happily parking my daily commuter indoors.
2) Pharmaceutical markets. Dr. Waldfogel mentions drugs as in the much-ballyhooed genomics revolution, but that's years off and going to be incredibly costly given current drug development costs. What we do know about drugs is that they are targeted towards the problems of the developed world, despite the vast majority of the world's disease burden residing elsewhere. We pour hundreds of millions into Anthrax, but virtually nothing into developing a Malaria vaccine.

Nothing much to say about the XO/OLPC, except that I held one before I left for Ghana and found it cute and well-designed. Given that they're building an infrastructure around it, I think they'll do just fine on their own merits.

Ari