Category: Web/Tech
David Pogue praises Feedly
Here is part of his analysis:
The one everybody keeps saying is the natural heir to Google Reader, though, is Feedly.com. In fact, Feedly says the ranks of its four million users have swelled to seven million since Google’s Reader death sentence was announced.
It requires a free plug-in for the Firefox, Chrome and Safari browsers. Three factors in particular make it useful.
First, the biggie: Simply logging into Feedly with your Google name and password instantly re-creates your Google Reader setup. All of your news sources, favorites and tags — category names that you can apply to certain articles, for ease in rounding them up later — magically show up in Feedly, ready to use. The synchronization is two-way; until July 1, you can bounce between Reader and Feedly to your heart’s content, and your newsreader worlds will look identical.
I plan to try a switch soon.
Autocracy and Technology
It’s no surprise that autocracies have not created many innovations in information technology. The autocracies, however, are quite capable of adopting and adapting IT for the own purposes. Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen argue that we are moving into a new era of autocratic IT. Here from the WSJ:
….everything a regime would need to build an incredibly intimidating digital police state—including software that facilitates data mining and real-time monitoring of citizens—is commercially available right now. What’s more, once one regime builds its surveillance state, it will share what it has learned with others. We know that autocratic governments share information, governance strategies and military hardware, and it’s only logical that the configuration that one state designs (if it works) will proliferate among its allies and assorted others. Companies that sell data-mining software, surveillance cameras and other products will flaunt their work with one government to attract new business. It’s the digital analog to arms sales, and like arms sales, it will not be cheap. Autocracies rich in national resources—oil, gas, minerals—will be able to afford it. Poorer dictatorships might be unable to sustain the state of the art and find themselves reliant on ideologically sympathetic patrons.
And don’t think that the data being collected by autocracies is limited to Facebook posts or Twitter comments. The most important data they will collect in the future is biometric information, which can be used to identify individuals through their unique physical and biological attributes. Fingerprints, photographs and DNA testing are all familiar biometric data types today. Indeed, future visitors to repressive countries might be surprised to find that airport security requires not just a customs form and passport check, but also a voice scan. In the future, software for voice and facial recognition will surpass all the current biometric tests in terms of accuracy and ease of use.
Absurd pitches (pull out the Hayek and Polanyi lesson)
- Facebook – the world needs yet another Myspace or Friendster except several years late. We’ll only open it up to a few thousand overworked, anti-social, Ivy Leaguers. Everyone else will then join since Harvard students are so cool.
- Dropbox – we are going to build a file sharing and syncing solution when the market has a dozen of them that no one uses, supported by big companies like Microsoft. It will only do one thing well, and you’ll have to move all of your content to use it.
- Amazon – we’ll sell books online, even though users are still scared to use credit cards on the web. Their shipping costs will eat up any money they save. They’ll do it for the convenience, even though they have to wait a week for the book.
- Virgin Atlantic – airlines are cool. Let’s start one. How hard could it be? We’ll differentiate with a funny safety video and by not being a**holes.
- Mint – give us all of your bank, brokerage, and credit card information. We’ll give it back to you with nice fonts. To make you feel richer, we’ll make them green.
- Palantir – we’ll build arcane analytics software, put the company in California, hire a bunch of new college grad engineers, many of them immigrants, hire no sales reps, and close giant deals with D.C.-based defense and intelligence agencies!
- Craigslist – it will be ugly. It will be free. Except for the hookers.
- iOS – a brand new operating system that doesn’t run a single one of the millions of applications that have been developed for Mac OS, Windows, or Linux. Only Apple can build apps for it. It won’t have cut and paste.
- Google – we are building the world’s 20th search engine at a time when most of the others have been abandoned as being commoditized money losers. We’ll strip out all of the ad-supported news and portal features so you won’t be distracted from using the free search stuff.
- Github – software engineers will pay monthly fees for the rest of their lives in order to create free software out of other free software!
- PayPal – people will use their insecure AOL and Yahoo email addresses to pay each other real money, backed by a non-bank with a cute name run by 20-somethings.
- Paperless Post – we are like Evite, except you pay us. All of your friends will know that you are an idiot.
- Instagram – filters! That’s right, we got filters!
- LinkedIn – how about a professional social network, aimed at busy 30- and 40-somethings. They will use it once every 5 years when they go job searching.
- Tesla – instead of just building batteries and selling them to Detroit, we are going to build our own cars from scratch plus own the distribution network. During a recession and a cleantech backlash.
- SpaceX – if NASA can do it, so can we! It ain’t rocket science.
- Firefox – we are going to build a better web browser, even though 90% of the world’s computers already have a free one built in. One guy will do most of the work.
- Twitter – it is like email, SMS, or RSS. Except it does a lot less. It will be used mostly by geeks at first, followed by Britney Spears and Charlie Sheen.
That is all from Quora, hat tip goes to James Crabtree.
All you can read?
E-books are getting the Spotify subscription model.
Books have long been the last holdout as music, movies, games and even TV shows and magazines have embraced the subscription model. Pay a single monthly fee and you can gorge on all the content you can cram into your eyes and ears. But on Tuesday, Tim Waterstone, the founder of the UK bookstore Waterstones, announced Read Petite, a subscription streaming service for short fiction. It’s a baby step toward a new model that could shake up an industry that has seen traditional books losing ground to e-books, which comprised 22.5 percent of the book market in 2012.
Here is more. I say it will fail because people like the sense of finishing a work or set of works and having it behind them. This will make them feel all the more overwhelmed.
Online Education Trumps the Cost Disease
In a large, randomized experiment Bowen et al. found that students enrolled in an online/hybrid statistics course learned just as much as those taking a traditional class (noted earlier by Tyler). Perhaps even more importantly, Bowen et al. found that the online model was significantly less costly than the traditional model, some 36% to 57% less costly to produce than a course using a traditional lecture format. In other words, since outcomes were the same, online education increased productivity by 56% to 133%! Online education trumps the cost disease!
Bowen et al. caution that their results on cost savings are speculative and it is true that they do not include the fixed costs of creating the course (either the online course or the traditional course) so these cost savings should be thought of as annual savings in steady-state equilibrium. The main reason these results are speculative, however, is that Bowen et al. only considered cost savings from faculty compensation. Long-run cost reductions from space savings may be even more significant, as the authors acknowledge.
Bowen et al. also do not count cost savings to students. Based on my work with Tyler at MRUniversity, I argued in Why Online Education Works that students in online course can learn the same material in less time. Consistent with this, Bowen et al. found:
…that hybrid-format students took about one-quarter less time to achieve essentially the same learning outcomes as traditional-format students.
A 25% time-savings is significant. Moreover, the 25% time-savings figure is in itself an underestimate of savings since it does not include the time savings from not having to drive to class, for example.
Online education even in its earliest stages appears to be generating large improvements in educational productivity.
RSS bleg
Google Reader is shutting down in a few months, so what to do? Your suggestions would be most welcome, please leave them in the comments.
A related question is which blogs will be harmed the most by this development, assuming that the #2 choice of reader isn’t as good. Very old blogs may be reevaluated as choices to follow, since we all will have to fill out new feeds all over again. Blogs which post not so frequently will be hurt too, in relative terms as well as absolute. If you know a blog will post frequently, you simply might substitute into site visits. This will also likely hurt blogs with a lot of ads, such as the Forbes blogs which I know, again speaking in relative as well as absolute terms.
Addendum: Here are comments from Matt.
The jobs of the future?
Katherine Young, 23, is a Google rater — a contract worker and a college student in Macon, Ga. She is shown an ambiguous search query like “what does king hold,” presented with two sets of Google search results and asked to rate their relevance, accuracy and quality. The current search result for that imprecise phrase starts with links to Web pages saying that kings typically hold ceremonial scepters, a reasonable inference.
Her judgments, Ms. Young said, are “not completely black and white; some of it is subjective.” She added, “You try to put yourself in the shoes of the person who typed in the query.”
How smart do you need to be to do this? How well-educated? How is the quality of your work to be judged? The full article is here, interesting throughout.
What is the consumer surplus from the internet?
The Economist has an excellent survey article, here is one (not the only) estimate:
Yet another technique is to assign a value to the leisure time spent on the web. Erik Brynjolfsson and Joo Hee Oh of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology note that between 2002 and 2011, the amount of leisure time Americans spent on the internet rose from 3 to 5.8 hours per week. The authors conclude that in so far as consumers must have valued their time on the internet more than the alternatives, this increase must reflect a growing consumer surplus from the internet, which they value at $564 billion in 2011, or $2,600 per user. Had this growth in surplus been included in GDP, it would have raised economic growth since 2002 by 0.39 percentage points on average.
I would note one caution. Consumer surplus per se does not make published gdp figures inaccurate for most purposes, since all goods and services yield consumer surplus to some extent. One might argue, however, that the internet has higher than average consumer surplus, for purposes of thinking about human welfare.
Online Education and Jazz
A common responses to my article, Why Online Education Works, is that there is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience. I agree that this is true for teaching at its best but it’s also irrelevant. It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience. The time I saw Otis Clay in a small Toronto bar, my first Springsteen concert, the Teenage Head riot at Ontario Place these are some of my favorite and most memorable cultural experiences and yet by orders of magnitude most of the music that I listen to is recorded music.
In The Trouble With Online Education Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit:
Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition.
Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences.
Edmundson also says this about online courses:
You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will.
Edmundson reminds me of composer John Philip Sousa who in 1906 wrote The Menace of Mechanical Music, an attack on the phonograph that sounds very similar to the attack on online education today.
It is the living, breathing example alone that is valuable to the student and can set into motion his creative and performing abilities. The ingenuity of a phonograph’s mechanism may incite the inventive genius to its improvement, but I could not imagine that a performance by it would ever inspire embryotic Mendelssohns, Beethovens, Mozarts, and Wagners to the acquirement of technical skill, or to the grasp of human possibilities in the art.
Sousa could not imagine it, but needless to say recorded music has inspired many inventive geniuses. Edmundson’s failure of imagination is even worse than Sousa’s, online courses are already creating intellectual joy (scroll down).
(Sousa was right about a few things. Recorded music has reduced the number of musical amateurs and the playing of music in the home. Far fewer pianos are sold today, for example, than in 1906 when Sousa wrote and that is true even before adjusting for today’s much larger population. Online education will similarly change teaching and I don’t claim that every change will be beneficial even if the net is good.)
Sousa and Edmundson also underestimate how much recording can add to the pursuit of artistic excellence. Many musical works, for example, cannot be well understood or fully appreciated with just a few listens. Recording allows for repeated listening and study. Indeed, one might say that only with recording, can one truly hear.
Recording also let musicians truly hear and thus compare, contrast and improve. Most teachers will also benefit from hearing and seeing themselves teach. With recording, teaching will become more like writing and less like improv. How many people write perfect first drafts? Good writing is editing, editing, editing. Live teaching suffers from too much improv and not enough editing. Sometimes I improv in class–also called winging it–but like most people I am usually better when I am better prepared. (Tyler, in contrast, is the Charlie Parker of live teaching.)
Sousa and the modern critics of online education also miss how new technologies bring new possibilities. For Sousa then, as for Edmundson today, the new technologies are simply about recording the live experience. But recorded music brought the creation of new kinds of music. Indeed, a lot of today’s music can’t be played live.
In his excellent 1966 disquisition, The Prospects for Recording (highly recommended, fyi), pianist Glenn Gould said that using the technology of the studio “one can very often transcend the limitations that performance imposes upon the imagination.” The same will be true for online education.
Addendum: Andrew Gelman comments.
Only the Cyborgs Can Compete With the Robots
I think this is inevitable and in a way desirable. Only the cyborgs can compete with the robots.
MRUniversity New Courses!
We have four new courses at MRUniversity and a brand new design! The new courses are
- The Euro Crisis, a 90 minute mini-course over 3 weeks.
- The Economics of Media, 4 hours over 4 weeks.
- The American Housing Finance System, 15 hours running to June taught by Arnold Kling.
- Mexico’s Economy, a 4.5 hour course over 4 weeks taught by Robin Grier.
You can find our more about all of the courses at MRUniversity. Lots of new features as well. After registering, for example, you can click the “Follow this Course” button on the main course page and receive weekly email updates on course content, video chats and what other MRU users are up to. We have also made it easy to add material by clicking the “User Contribution” section under the videos. There you can add videos, research, news and opinions related to the video. We’ll feature the best user contributions on our homepage.
Also do check out the new home page and be sure to scroll down to see The List, all of our videos released so far. And remember, all of our videos are freely available for non-commercial use. If you teach economics or related material feel free to assign a video for homework or try flipping the classroom!
Even more courses coming soon!
Finally, a big hat tip to MRU’s web guru and program manager, Roman Hardgrave, who has done a stellar job on the new features and design.
Sentences to ponder
Our drone future?
(In case you’re worried that drones lack allies in Congress, rest easy: there’s a Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus with 60 members. With global spending on drones expected to nearly double over the next decade, to $11.3 billion, industry groups like the AUVSI are rapidly ramping up their lobbying budgets.)
And:
Singer estimates that there are 76 other countries either developing drones or shopping for them; both Hizballah and Hamas have flown drones already. In November, a Massachusetts man was sentenced to 17 years for plotting to attack the Pentagon and the Capitol with remote-controlled planes.
The very interesting article is here, by Lev Grossman at Time, hat tip goes to The Browser.
Observations on meeting Bill Gates
I am pleased to have been invited to a small group session in New York City to meet Gates and hear him present his new letter. My observations are these:
1. Gates has a command of data and analytics in development economics better than that of most development economists, or for that matter aid professionals. He also expects everyone at the meeting to know everything about what he is talking about, or at least is willing to proceed on that basis. That said, when it comes to answering questions he sometimes assumes a stupider version of the question than what is actually being asked.
2. He is smart enough, and health-savvy enough, not to waste time with handshakes at the beginning of meetings. People as productive as Gates should not be required to shake hands, and the same can be said for people less productive than Gates.
3. He does not go on and on. His opening remarks were about two minutes long, with no notes, and all of his answers were to the point.
4. We were served water, at exactly the right cool temperature, yet without ice cubes. No cookies.
5. Unlike Gates, I am not convinced that “health” is the key breakthrough area for economic development, but there is enough low-hanging fruit out there that it doesn’t have to be. That said, when questioned on this his answers were closer to tautology than they needed to be. Much of their emphasis on measurement seemed to me to track absolute movement toward goals, rather than relative efficacies of different project investments.
6. Gates suggested that if he had been more careful tracking and organizing his AP credits, he might have been able to receive his undergraduate degree. That is one sense, in his words, in which he is barely a college drop out. In another sense, it makes him a very extreme college drop out.
7. He mentioned that he is an extremely eager consumer (and not just funder) of on-line education and The Teaching Company. And this is a man who could receive free (or paid) lectures from almost anyone he wants.
8. Empellon Tacqueria, in the West Village, has an excellent mackerel ceviche and I recommend also the quail eggs.
9. I have now run into Reihan Salam twice in the last two years, in random public places in Manhattan, without any reason for expecting to see him there. This should cause me to revise my prior on something or other, but I am not sure what. When changing/surfing the channels, which I do occasionally to “keep in touch,” I also run into him on TV a lot.
10. Gates understands the very high returns from better governance, but also sees it is not trivial to reap them.
11. In the context of U.S. education, he does not worry that teacher cheating will bias test results very much at the macro level.
12. He is more optimistic about charter schools than I am (though I favor them), and more optimistic about the results from giving teachers feedback about their performance. In my view, bad teachers don’t very much want to improve and it is not so much a matter of knowledge. Undergraduate college teachers are evaluated all the time, and it does help, but it hardly brings the rotten apples up to par and I don’t see it as the key to moving the system forward at lower levels.
Here is Jason Kottke’s account. Here is Dana Goldstein’s account.
Gates’s annual letter, which was released earlier this week, is here.
What teens say about the tech world
I enjoyed this piece, full of fresh (to me) perspectives. Here is one excerpt:
She had almost nothing to say about Twitter because she didn’t know anyone in high school that used it. “Nobody uses it. I know you love it but I don’t get it. I mean, I guess a a few kids use it but they’re all the ones who won’t shut up in class, who always think they have something important to say.”
The follow-up to that is good too.
For the pointer I thank Elan Bachor.