Category: Web/Tech
Vending machine auction markets in everything
…ecoATM, a firm based in San Diego…has devised and deployed in several American cities a series of ATM-like devices that will automatically analyse your mobile phone, MP3 player or phone charger, and then make you an offer for it. These machines will give you cash in hand or, if you prefer, send the money as a donation to the charity of your choice. The hope is that this hassle-free approach will appeal to people who can’t be bothered to recycle their old phone when buying a new one.
After taking fingerprints and driving-licence details (to discourage crooks from using them to fence stolen goods), ecoATM’s kiosks employ a mixture of computer vision and electronic testing (they will automatically present users with the correct cable and connector) to perform a trick that even the most committed gadget fan might struggle with—telling apart each of the thousands of models of mobile phones, chargers and MP3 players that now exist. They can even make a reasonable guess about how well-used (or damaged) a device is, which can affect its resale value. Any mistakes the machine does make are logged and used to improve accuracy in future.
Once the device on offer has been identified, the kiosk then enters it into an electronic auction. Interested parties bid, and a price is struck in seconds. This auction is the key to ecoATM’s business model, because it means the firm is acting as a broker, rather than carrying a stock of second-hand equipment which it then has to sell. If the owner of the equipment accepts the offer, the kiosk swallows the device and spits out the money.
Really. The article is here.
AidGrade
I am sent this information and so I am passing it along. The venture looks interesting:
AidGrade (http://www.aidgrade.org) is a new, research-oriented non-profit. It is using crowdsourcing to compile results of impact evaluations of development programs, showing the different programs’ past effectiveness. Many characteristics of each academic paper are coded up, such as where the study took place, what kinds of methods it used, characteristics of the sample, etc. AidGrade also has a “meta-analysis app” which lets users select papers by these filters and get an instant online meta-analysis of the results.
Guest Blogger: Ed Lopez
Ed Lopez, co-author with Wayne Leighton of Madmen, Intellectuals and Academic Scribblers and president of the Public Choice Society, will be guest blogging at Marginal Revolution this week. Madmen is about the process of political change, where we are, where we should go and how can we get there given the insights of public choice economics. If, to quote Jim Buchanan, public choice is “politics without romance,” then Madmen is about revolution without romance–how political change can occur in a democracy. One of my favorite stories in Madmen is about Coase’s idea to auction spectrum rights.
But to allow the market to determine even the question of assignment meant a significant change in the status quo. When he was called to testify before the agency shortly before his FCC paper was published [in 1959, AT], Coase’s reception was indicative of how political institutions—especially Congress but also the FCC—would view his idea for decades to come. Commissioner Philip Cross began with the question, “Is this all a big joke?”
A decade later one former FCC commissioner wrote:
The Commission has absolutely no intention of considering them now or in the foreseeable future. They are purely the mind-spinning of an academic bureaucrat.
Most interestingly, in 1969 the RAND Corporation commissioned Coase, along with William Meckling and Jora Minasian, to produce a report on “Problems of Radio Frequency Allocation.” The Coase/Meckling/Minasian report was written in 1969 but not released until 1995! The report had been deemed too politically sensitive to publish and had been suppressed.
Eventually, however, first academics then many politicians and then even the FCC became convinced that spectrum auctions were feasible and as it became clear that money was to made that they were also desirable. Even after the idea earned fairly widespread acceptance, however, it took many years to be implemented because the Congressional committees with oversight of the FCC and the industry did not want to give up power. The right to allocate spectrum gave the members of these committees power which they transformed into campaign contributions and political support.Spectrum auctions were not implemented until they were also crafted to give advantages to some groups that these committees wanted supported. The payoffs to the new technologies, however, were so large that even with transaction costs and rent seeking a bargain was possible, a truly Coasian bargain.
The dangers of “early intervention”
An Australian psychologist says smartphone apps allowing parents to send their naughty children phone calls from Santa “are not useful” and “could be abused.”
Dr. John Irvine said the smartphone apps — including the free “Fake Call From Santa” app and the $1.99 “Parents Calling Santa” app — are “not productive” methods of behavior correction, The Courier-Mail, Brisbane, reported Wednesday.
“These kinds of apps have made the Santa threat much more real and immediate and they could be abused by some parents in the lead-up to Christmas Day,” he said. “What is the point in threatening something that you are not going to carry out? Is mum really going to cancel presents on Christmas Day?
“Empty threats are not useful as kids soon realize that there are no consequences,” he said.The “Fake Call from Santa” app includes an incoming call with audio, but the “Parents Calling Santa” app allows parents to choose from three recorded messages — a “well done call,” a “could do better” call, or a “must improve or you will get a lump of coal for Christmas” call.
The link is here.
More on Online Education
At Cato Unbound I respond to some of the critics of my article Why Online Education Works. Here is one bit:
We do need more studies of offline, online, and blended education models, but the evidence that we do have is supportive of the online model. In 2009, The Department of Education conducted a meta-analysis and review of online learning studies and found:
- Students in online conditions performed modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction.
- Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction.
- Effect sizes were larger for studies in which the online instruction was collaborative or instructor-directed than in those studies where online learners worked independently.
- The effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types. Online learning appeared to be an effective option for both undergraduates (mean effect of +0.30, p < .001) and for graduate students and professionals (+0.10, p < .05) in a wide range of academic and professional studies.
The Internet is a Series of Tubes
Turns out the internet really is a series of pipes tubes. Here is a picture from one of Google’s Data Centers.
The pipes are for running cooling water. Here is another data center:
More here.
Why Online Education Works
My essay at Cato Unbound, Why Online Education Works, goes beyond much of the recent discussion to give specific examples of how online teaching increases the productivity and quality of education. Here is one bit:
Dale Carnegie’s advice to “tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said” makes sense for a live audience. If 20% of your students aren’t following the lecture, it’s natural to repeat some of the material so that you keep the whole audience involved and following your flow. But if you repeat whenever 20% of the audience doesn’t understand something, that means that 80% of the audience hear something twice that they only needed to hear once. Highly inefficient.
Carnegie’s advice is dead wrong for an online audience. Different medium, different messaging. In an online lecture it pays to be concise. Online, the student is in control and can choose when and what to repeat. The result is a big time-savings as students proceed as fast as their capabilities can take them, repeating only what they need to further their individual understanding.
More at the link including a discussion of how most of my teaching career happened in 15 minutes.
Responses from Siva Vaidhyanatha (Robertson Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia), Alan Ryan (former Warden of New College, Oxford) and Kevin Carey (Director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation) follow later this week.
Edward Moore asks
From a reader email:
This hypothetical question just popped into my head and after mulling it over for a while it occurred to me that it’s really a great stagnation question.
“Would you trade your last five years of life to always have the best personal technology provided to you (iPhones, iPads, google glass, whatever implantable, wearable things are coming) if the consequence of not making the trade was that you were limited to basic desktop technology for the rest of your life?” The decision must be made now and is binding. Right now I think I would make the trade because I would hate to miss out on all the things that are coming. I think I would have said no in 1995. Does that make me a great stagnation skeptic?
I love your blog.
Go for the years, I say. But at “six months” it is a tougher call…and perhaps Ed is a younger man than I am. I certainly would advise an eighty-year-old to take the years, or for that matter the six months.
Project Blue Sky, from Pearson
Project Blue Sky allows instructors to search, select, and seamlessly integrate Open Educational Resources with Pearson learning materials. Using text, video, simulations, Power Point and more, instructors can create the digital course materials that are just right for their courses and their students. Pearson’s Project Blue Sky is powered by Gooru Learning, a search engine for learning materials.
What are these people really up to?
No wonder they don’t have a clear sense of what “austerity” means:
Mrs Brooks told the Leveson Inquiry earlier this year that Mr Cameron signed some of his missives to her “LOL” – mistakenly thinking it meant “lots of love” rather than “laugh Out loud”.
Here is more. The article is puzzling throughout.
Marginal Revolution University has been Banned in Minnesota!
Minnesota has banned MRUniversity and other online education services from providing content to Minnesota residents. This seems like a joke but it is not from The Onion. Coursera, one of the larger players in this field, has rewritten its terms of service to prohibit Minnesota residents from taking its courses:
Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.
Tyler and I wish to be perfectly clear: unlike Coursera, we will not shut down MRU to the residents of Minnesota. We are prepared to defend our rights under the First Amendment to teach the good people of Minnesota all about the Solow Model, water policy in Africa, and the economics of garlic–even if we have to do so from a Minnesota jail!
Paradoxes of Internet Regulation–Korea Edition
Google’s maps of Seoul are peculiar, they offer public transit directions but not driving directions. Turns out that this is due to Korean law (the Measurement Act) which prohibits the export of Korean map data without obtaining government approval. (The distinction appears to be that driving directions are “new” maps and thus unapproved while transit directions are fixed and can be approved in advance of generation.)
Local versions of Google satellite imagery are also much lower resolution in South Korea due to military restrictions. Google has argued that by satisfying the law within a country it satistifes that country’s law, a policy rule on Google’s part that I applaud, but this policy does lead to the paradox that the images of South Korea available in South Korea are not as high resolution as those available in North Korea!
More generally, however, the bigger Google gets the more countries it has a physical presence in (servers, sales staff and support etc.) and thus the more leverage individual countries, especially large countries, will have to degrade the services that Google offers not just within-country but to the world.
Reason TV Interviews Alex on MRU
Truth Bounties
The Truth Market is an interesting combination of prediction markets, bounty hunting and crowd funding that aims to separate the wheat from the chaff of truth claims. Here is how it works:
You hear a statement that you think is bogus (or you hear the denial of something that you think is true). You open a challenge in which you offer to pay a truth bounty of $x if someone can prove that the bogus statement is true (or prove false the statement that you think is true). Other people can join your challenge, adding to the bounty. If the total bounty exceed a significant threshold the challenge goes live.
Once a challenge is live, anyone can earn the bounty if their evidence for or against the claim meets the standards of a neutral, professional, scientifically trained group of adjudicators (provided by TruthMarket). If within a given time-frame no one wins the bounty the bounties are returned to the contributors minus 20% which goes to the initial sponsor of the challenge. The initial sponsor can now also trumpet that despite significant cash no one was able to prove the bogus claim (or refute the true claim).
Thus, there are incentives to offer challenges, incentives to answer challenges, and incentives to pay attention to the results. TruthMarket has some serious people on its management team and advisory board. There are already challenges about global warming, cell phones, defensive gun use and other issues.
Will the Truth Market work? In order to work, TruthMarket will need a track record of significant money bounties and adjudicated claims. As of yet, I don’t see many (any? the site is unclear although this is the most important part of the process).
Most important, people have to regard winning a bounty and the failure to win a bounty as informative. My experience, however, is that the people who regard betting as informative are already rational and well-informed about other issues so the bounty isn’t necessary to prosecute the truth claim.
The Amazing Randi’s one million dollar prize for “evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event,” was first offered in 1964 but has never been claimed. In theory, that tells us a lot. In practice, the failure of the prize to be won does not seem to have changed many people’s beliefs.
Shared Creation
From Joshua Gans’s Information Wants to be Shared.
Economic theory has not quite caught up with this interesting area of
shared information. I can speculate on future business models for books and
the news because they fall within baseline economic motives. But when
it comes to shared creation, nonmonetary motives loom larger and the
economist’s toolkit is harder to rely upon. Wikipedia is a prime example.
More than just a content platform, it is built on and maintained by an army of anonymous volunteers. Back in 2001, when it started, economists would
not have predicted Wikipedia’s success; nor can they really explain it now.Other social scientists have not waited for economists to catch up. But
perhaps no person has examined the notion that broad, shared creation can
be effective more than MIT professor Eric von Hippel. One of the great
facts from his research is this: a vast number of useful innovations come
not from some scientist and engineer tinkering in a lab, but from users
solving their own problems. Examples abound, from scientific instruments,
to mountain bikes and, of course, to open source software. In some cases,
the innovations were the work of lone innovators, while for others, local
communities together produced advances. It is the latter that interests us
here.
Economists thought that Wikipedia couldn’t work because of problems of motivation but what turned out to matter most was not motivation but transaction costs. With 7 billion people and low transaction costs what other forms of shared creation become possible?