Hooray for Stimulus
posted on May 16, 2011 in
It created -550k jobs!
web.econ.ohio-state.edu/dupor/arra10_may11.pdf
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My 10yo son discovers the concept of ‘Perverse Incentives’
posted on April 20, 2011 in
Recently, someone’s been advertising about a car that ‘watches the road for you’, and brakes for you when you’re falling asleep, distracted, etc.
The other day, Patrick told me ‘Dad, I’m worried about those cars’.
“Why is that?” I asked
“Well, if people think their cars are going to brake for them, they may think they don’t need to pay as much attention to the road, and there will be more accidents”. (i.e. a Perverse Incentive)
My boy!
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Thunderbolt, First Impressions
posted on April 7, 2011 in
My Blackberry Curve’s trackball finally got so stuck I couldn’t use it anymore, so I decided to upgrade to a Thunderbolt. (I was torn between the Thunderbolt and the iPhone 4, but I’d rather wait for the iPhone 5 than take the 4).
So I’ve had the TBolt for about 48 hours now. Impressions:
1) Battery life will be a challenge. It was fully charged at 7 am, now, at 11 am, it’s below 50%, with moderate usage (i.e. I’ve been using it here and there, but mostly been working).
2) There are a _lot_ of cool apps for it. Still getting used to them all, and all the options
3) The default UI has 7 screens, which doesn’t seem like enough, given how large some of the widgets are. I’m still getting used to that. I can use the ‘start’ menu equivalent, but I’d rather have the apps I use in easy reach for kids, etc.
4) Barcode Scanning is really nifty.
5) Signal quality is not as great as the Blackberry at my office – no 4G, and 3G seems to go in-and-out. Same network, so I think the phone’s antenna is not as good as the Blackberry’s
6) The keyboard is not nearly as good as the Blackberry’s
7) The screen, and the phone itself, is quite large. Seriously, it’s like a mini-tablet
By default, everything you do causes the phone to vibrate. I hate that, personally. It took a while, but I finally found out how to stop the vibrations: At the home screen, hit the menu button, and then settings, and then sound. The vibrations can be turned on or off from there.
9) There’s a way to determine which apps are running, but I can’t find it anymore!
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China’s manufacturing advantage starting to erode
posted on March 8, 2011 in
mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/03/manufacturing-at-home-makes-more-sense.html
This fits with my expectations – high inflation, rising wages and expensive fuel costs are making automated manufacturing in the US more attractive than semi-slave manufacturing in China.
IMO, this is going to continue, and China’s “production miracle” will collapse, because automation is inexorable, and a key competitive advantage of the US (and Japan).
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Google continues to win the future
posted on February 15, 2011 in
Wow: googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/introducing-google-translate-app-for.html
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The Great Stagnation – my review
posted on January 28, 2011 in
The Great Stagnation is a book(let) that discusses (Amongst other things) how we’ve run out of innovation steam in America. The theory is – we have used up all the low-hanging fruits in our country: our land, our natural resources, etc. And we’ve used up all the low-hanging fruit of innovation – electricity, steam power, gasoline motors, etc were all things that could be discovered by ‘just about anyone’ and now, innovation is a much more expensive and professional endeavor.
My respect for Tyler Cowen is extremely deep, and whenever I find myself disagreeing with him, I feel compelled to step back and think ‘Are you sure you’re right logically, or are you being emotionally committed to your existing opinions’.
So I will say that I think that Dr. Cowen is right about the present, but I think what we’re seeing, instead of a ‘great stagnation’ is a ‘deep breath’. Here’s why:
- The book itself – ‘The Great Stagnation’ is a relatively short book, priced at a very easy $4. This is an example of the economies of scale that we have wrought with the Internet, that we can sell small amounts of valuable things inexpensively, and still everyone in the value chain benefits.
- Nanotechnology – there is a ton of experimentation and investigation in nanotechnology. Not enough of it has been productized. But the ongoing innovation here is mind-blowing. I am certain we’re going to see some seriously life-altering improvements here in the next 5-10 years
- Power – we’re seeing a lot of ongoing experimentation in solar power, in fusion, in fission. And in storage as well. As these technologies mature, they pay dividends on our ability to innovate like nothing else.
- Robots – the ongoing development of robotics is a bit disappointing – I was expecting more by this point
- Quantum Computing – the primary benefit of QC is, IMO, solving logistics problems. It is proceeding well, although I don’t know that it will ever be the model for mainstream computer architectures.
- Superconductors – there’s some very interesting stuff going on here, but it does seem to move at a fairly slow pace, overall.
- AI – IBM is producing a computer that can play Jeopardy. There are apps on iPhones that can identify songs based on ‘listening’ to them, and can translate words in real-time by ‘looking’ at them. There is a lot of opportunity here, but it is a time-consuming process
Just as an aside – many of these innovations that are moving along nicely would not be possible in the timeframes they are if it weren’t for the Internet’s ability to let people collaborate and share information, data and ideas cheaply.
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John Stuart Mill on Freedom
posted on in
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
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Adam Smith on Freedom
posted on in
Every man is, no doubt, by nature, first and principally recommended to his own care; and as he is fitter to take care of himself than of any other person, it is fit and right that it should be so
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Metaeuphoric
posted on January 21, 2011 in
This was a very interesting read:
meteuphoric.wordpress.com/opinion/
Of course, I ignored the statements that didn’t match my priors, and thus I found it to provide compelling support for my point of view.
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Hee hee
posted on January 14, 2011 in
Things real people don’t say about advertising
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what would a world of ‘ems’ look like
posted on January 6, 2011 in
Refer back to here if you want to know what ‘ems’ are.
So imagine someone drops off a brain-scanner (BrainScanner9000) and a copy of BrainOS 3.1 at your door. You can use the BrainScanner9000 to produce a perfect copy of your brain at this moment, and you can run it on any computer that meets the performance specs required for BrainOS 3.1
You happen to have a computer lying around with the necessary memory, cpu and hard drive space, and so you decide to go through with the copy and installation. A few minutes later, *poof*, you have a brand new copy of you running inside the computer.
Now what? Well, that depends on you.
- If you wrote books, or edited them online, or did web page design, or any other job where much of your time is spent in front of a computer or on the Internet, potentially you could outsource that work to the Em
- If you write software, you could probably do the same thing
- You probably couldn’t get the Em to do the dishes, take out the garbage, drive you to work, etc
- Having the Em around wouldn’t make you smarter, except possibly in the sense that it kept writing interesting blog posts on your behalf, forwarding you interesting news and information from the outside world
- It would probably also make a delightfully challenging opponent in various online games
The biggest advantages would come from people who already have too much to do, and have to delegate significant parts of their online time to others – for example, mutual fund and hedge fund managers. People who do lots of time-consuming analytical work all day could outsource a lot of that to their virtual selves.
Another great use would be online entrepreneurial work – for example if you and 4 friends all created Ems for the purpose of starting a company to develop ‘X’ (where X is a website, game, application, etc), you would have the time to both do that (via the Em) , and to work a regular job. The best of both worlds!
I suspect that the arrival of bodies for the Ems would follow quickly. Then they could take out the trash, do the dishes, etc. Eventually, they’d become more specialized – for example the one with screwdrivers and voltmeters embedded in the fingertips. Once they became sophisticated enough, there’d be no need for meatspace humans to work at all, as long as there’s enough income coming in from the Ems to pay for food, etc.
There’s a lot more that could happen after that, but I’m going to need to spend some time contemplating that. If only I had an Em I could outsource that contemplation to…
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Cool ideas about the future
posted on in
www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/01/hanson_on_the_t.html
The theory is that we’re going to develop simulations of existing brains (inside computers) before we develop artificial intelligence. And, subsequently, we’ll developed incredibly cheap simulations of existing brains (inside incredibly cheap computers) at some point not terribly far after that.
So the “technological singularity” becomes one of trillions of brains able to solve problems, rather than, or in parallel to the development of strong artificial intelligence. In the podcast he calls these ‘ems’ – i.e. emulations. The implication of this is that the value of labor plummets, while the value of raw materials (that this labor needs to be created) skyrockets.
The business/investing thought that follows is to invest in companies that produce and manage physical commodities, such as rare metals and energy needed to house and activate these ems. Another sensible investment (to me) is companies that produce computer technologies. For example, without Intel, ARM, IBM, Motorola, etc, there’s no hardware for these ems.
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Collaborative Filtering
posted on January 4, 2011 in
I don’t think Mr. Kirn understands it very well:
What annoys me about the recommendation “engines” that drive e-commerce nowadays is their denial that I possess free will, or at least their denial that I often exercise it. I’m told that the programs rely on algorithms that mimic the workings of my cultural intellect, which must mean that I’m an algorithm, too. I’m not, though. I’m a complicated oddball, eccentric, eclectic and erratic — prized traits now reduced to irritable rejection of ubiquitous recommendations on my e-commerce sites.
Collaborative filtering looks at the movies/books you have read or watched, as well as the ones that you think highly of, and it finds other people who seem to like the same things. Then it tells you what these other people also like.
That is not “mimicking the workings of my cultural intellect”. This is not “making you an algorithm”. This is the equivalent of your friend saying “Hey, you liked Unforgiven and The Big Lebowski, right? You might like True Grit – I saw it, and it was great”
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Who said this?
posted on December 23, 2010 in
1998:
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
Answer
This does not mean that said prognosticator was a moron. Simply a reminder that human nature is to focus on and revere correct predictions, and forget incorrect ones. He gets some things right, he gets other things very wrong. Keep this in mind the next time he makes some sort of dour (since his predictions are almost always dour) prediction about the near future.
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