Category: Web/Tech

Shared Creation

by  Alex Tabarrok in

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?

New Videos: Leading Thinkers on Development

by  Alex Tabarrok in

At MRUniversity we just released over 30 new videos on leading thinkers on development. We cover Amartya Sen (who gets three), Bela Belassa, Karl Polanyi, Adam Smith, Paul Romer, William Easterly and many others. In terms of  the course these videos are optional, they are for dipping into as per one’s interest. In these videos, we sometimes provide a second perspective on issues we discuss in greater detail in forthcoming topic videos.

On Monday we will be releasing a new section of the Development Economics course, Food and Agricultural Productivity.

Can mobile phones boost educational outcomes?

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Jenny C. Aker, Christopher Ksoll, and Travis J. Lybbert:

The returns to educational investments hinge on whether such investments can improve the quality and persistence of educational gains. We report the results from a randomized evaluation of an adult education program in Niger, in which some students learned how to use simple mobile phones (Project ABC). Students in ABC villages achieved test scores that were 0.19–0.26 standard deviations higher than those in standard adult education classes, and standardized math test scores remained higher seven months after the end of classes. These results suggest that simple information technology can be harnessed to improve educational outcomes among rural populations.

An ungated copy is here.

A third Industrial Revolution?

by  Tyler Cowen in

James Tien has a new paper:

The outputs or products of an economy can be divided into services products and goods products (due to manufacturing, construction, agriculture and mining). To date, the services and goods products have, for the most part, been separately mass produced. However, in contrast to the first and second industrial revolutions which respectively focused on the development and the mass production of goods, the next – or third – industrial revolution is focused on the integration of services and/or goods; it is beginning in this second decade of the 21st Century. The Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) is based on the confluence of three major technological enablers (i.e., big data analytics, adaptive services and digital manufacturing); they underpin the integration or mass customization of services and/or goods. As detailed in an earlier paper, we regard mass customization as the simultaneous and real-time management of supply and demand chains, based on a taxonomy that can be defined in terms of its underpinning component and management foci. The benefits of real-time mass customization cannot be over-stated as goods and services become indistinguishable and are co-produced – as “servgoods” – in real-time, resulting in an overwhelming economic advantage to the industrialized countries where the consuming customers are at the same time the co-producing producers.

Keywords: Big data, decision analytics, goods, adaptive services, digital manufacturing, value chain,
supply chain, demand chain, mass production, mass customization, industrial revolution

For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.

The Evil of Pagination

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I agree with Farhad Manjoo:

Splitting articles and photo galleries into multiple pages is evil. It should stop.

Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the Web, the kind of obvious no-no that should have gone out with blinky text, dancing cat animations, and autoplaying music. It shows constant, quiet contempt for people who should be any news site’s highest priority—folks who want to read articles all the way to the end.

Pagination persists because splitting a single-page article into two pages can, in theory, yield twice as many opportunities to display ads—though in practice it doesn’t because lots of readers never bother to click past the first page. The practice has become so ubiquitous that it’s numbed many publications and readers into thinking that multipage design is how the Web has always been, and how it should be.

Neither is true: The Web’s earliest news sites didn’t paginate, and the practice grew up only over the past decade, in response to pressure from the ad industry. It doesn’t have to be this way—some of the Web’s most forward-thinking and successful publications, including BuzzFeedand the Verge, have eschewed pagination, and they’re better off for it.

Can a Google autocomplete function be libelous?

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Germany:

…for Bettina Wulff it’s a nightmare. The wife of former German President Christian Wulff wants the search engine to cease suggesting terms that she finds defamatory. This has nothing to do with the search results, but rather with the recommendations made by Google’s “Autocomplete” function, a service that is also offered by competitors like Bing and Yahoo. All one has to do is type her first name and the first letter of her last name to get search suggestions such as “Bettina Wulff prostitute,” “Bettina Wulff escort” and “Bettina Wulff red-light district.”

Don’t forget the problem of cascades here:

The Autocomplete function, the usefulness of which Google so guilelessly praises as a means of giving one’s fingers a rest, undeniably helps spread rumors. Assuming that someone unsuspectingly begins to look for information on “Bettina Wulff” and is offered “prostitute,” “Hanover” and “dress” as additional search terms — where, independent of their actual interests, will users most likely click?

Why 8 1/2 x 11?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Most books aren’t printed on 8 1/2 x 11 paper so why are these the standard paper dimensions? Paul Stanley offers an answer:

…we have ended up with paper sizes that were never designed or adapted for printing with 10-12 point proportionally spaced type. They were designed for handwriting (which is usually much bigger) or for typewriters. Typewriters produced 10 or 12 characters per inch: so on (say) 8.5 inch wide paper, with 1 inch margins, you had 6.5 inches of type, giving … around 65 to 78 characters: in other words something pretty close to ideal. But if you type in a standard proportionally spaced font (worse, in Times — which is rather condensed because it was designed to be used in narrow columns) at 12 point, you will get about 90 to 100 characters in the line.

The standard paper dimensions are thus not optimized for reading using printed fonts so typographers try to make adjustments. One adjustment is to abandon the standard paper size which is what books do. Another is to make the margins very wide which is the Latex default.

[Another] answer — which is what most wordprocessors did — was to stick to the standard “document design” (margins of an inch or so) and just use proportionally spaced fonts as if they were typewriter text. This produces very long lines, which are not comfortable to read. But that discomfort can be somewhat alleviated by increasing the space between lines (1.5 or double space), which helps prevent “doubling”, and by avoiding type sizes below about 11 or 12 points (depending very much on the design of the font).

Another possibility is to use the margins for marginalia, which I like. (Stanley points to the Latex tufte class as a way to do this.) One could also a two-column format or just make the text bigger.

Stanley concludes:

These are all potentially valid design choices. I happen to think that the most conventional one (stick with 1 inch margins, and add line spacing to prevent doubling) is probably the worst of them, and that it only seems “right” because we are accustomed to it. And it doesn’t generally save paper, because unless you use single spacing you lose vertically the extra space that you gain horizontally.

We need to fix this problem. Now is the time for a margin revolution.

Hat tip: John Cook at The Endeavour.

It’s not just monetary policy, it’s Scott Sumner day

by  Tyler Cowen in

I haven’t seen anyone else say it yet, so I will.  The Fed’s policy move today might not have happened — probably would not have happened — if not for the heroic blogging efforts of Scott Sumner.  Numerous other bloggers, including the market monetarists and some Keynesians and neo Keynesians have been important too, plus Michael Woodford and some others, but Scott is really the guy who got the ball rolling and persuaded us all that there is something here and wouldn’t let us forget about it.

I disagree with Scott on a number of points (I think he overrates the importance of sticky nominal wages for instance, and I would like to force him to admit that the private sector can manufacture nominal gdp), and I see the net gains from this policy as smaller than he does.  Still, Scott  deserves our highest level of applause in this matter.

Here is Scott’s very latest blog post on the Bernanke press conference.

Code is Law

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Geeta Dayal, Wired: On Tuesday, some visitors trying to get to the livestream of Michelle Obama’s widely lauded speech at the Democratic National Convention were met with a bizarre notice on YouTube, which said that the speech had been blocked on copyright grounds….

On Sunday, a livestream of the Hugo Awards — the sci-fi and fantasy version of the Oscars — was blocked on Ustream, moments before Neil Gaiman’s highly anticipated acceptance speech. Apparently, Ustream’s service detected that the awards were showing copyrighted film clips, and had no way to know that the awards ceremony had gotten permission to use them.

…As live streaming video surges in popularity, so are copyright “bots” — automated systems that match content against a database of reference files of copyrighted material. These systems can block streaming video in real time, while it is still being broadcast, leading to potentially worrying implications for freedom of speech.

It is not just patent law which is out of control. If a copyright bot takes down a video for which there is fair use there ought to be grounds for a counter-suit.

Sentences to ponder

by  Tyler Cowen in

Apple became the world’s most valuable-ever company two weeks ago. It is worth $624bn, more than all the listed companies in Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain together. The employer of 63,300 people – each valued at $10m – is more valuable than all the shares available to investors in the MSCI China index, the international benchmark.

Apple is not as big as the domestic Chinese market. But the comparison is not silly: it is more than half as big as the free float of A shares, where foreign investment is restricted.

Here is more.

The forward march of progress takes another step

by  Tyler Cowen in

Google announced a new phase of its self-driving car project Tuesday. The test vehicles, of which there are “about a dozen on the road at any given time,” have so far logged 300,000 miles of road testing without a single accident under computer control. In the next phase of testing, team members will start commuting to work solo, with the robot at the wheel.

The link is here, hat tip to @PaymonFarazi.

What is the ideal “development economics” Twitter feed?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I have some suggestions:

https://twitter.com/#!/GdnDevelopment

@Viewfromthecave

@OECD_Centre

https://twitter.com/#!/blogageco

https://twitter.com/#!/WorldBankPSD

https://twitter.com/#!/clairemelamed

@Shanta_WB

@whydev

@cblatts

@evavivalt

@deankarlan

@m_clem

@RachelStrohm

Some of them are shirkers, I know.  Whom else do you recommend?