Category: Web/Tech

How are left-wing and right-wing blogs different?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Via Kevin Lewis, here is Aaron Shaw and Yochai Benkler:

American Behavioral Scientist, April 2012, Pages 459-487

Abstract:
In this article, the authors compare the practices of discursive production among top U.S. political blogs on the left and right during summer 2008. An examination of the top 155 political blogs reveals significant cross-ideological variations along several dimensions. Notably, the authors find evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation. Blogs on the left adopt different, and more participatory, technical platforms, comprise significantly fewer sole-authored sites, include user blogs, maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content, include longer narrative and discussion posts, and (among the top half of the blogs in the sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization. The findings suggest that the attenuation of the news producer-consumer dichotomy is more pronounced on the left wing of the political blogosphere than on the right. The practices of the left are more consistent with the prediction that the networked public sphere offers new pathways for discursive participation by a wider array of individuals, whereas the practices of the right suggest that a small group of elites may retain more exclusive agenda-setting authority online. The cross-ideological divergence in the findings illustrates that the Internet can be adopted equally to undermine or to replicate the traditional distinction between the production and consumption of political information. The authors conclude that these findings have significant implications for the study of prosumption and for the mechanisms by which the networked public sphere may or may not alter democratic participation relative to the mass mediated public sphere.

Microsoft Help

by  Alex Tabarrok in

From my computer:

Why can’t I get Help from this program?

The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn’t included in this version of Windows. However, you can download a program that will allow you to view Help created in the Windows Help format.

For more information, go to the Microsoft Help and Support website.

Is it any wonder that some people hate Microsoft?

Apple fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Matt:

Courtesy of Ajay Makan and Dan McCrum at the FT, Barclays Capital estimates that based on reporting thus far earnings growth for S&P 500 companies was 7 percent in Q4. But if you strip out Apple, that plummets to 2.9 percent.

One company, in other words, is responsible for most of the earnings growth among the large cap firms in the index.

(Pulls out Albert Hirschman for re-read…)

Cell phone taxes and the tragedy of the anticommons

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Why are cell phone taxes so high? In the United States we tax cell phones more than beer. The usual explanations for high taxes, negative externalities and low elasticity of demand don’t seem to apply to cell phones. Our colleagues Thomas Stratmann and Matt Mitchell offer an answer based in political economy.

…no single politician does choose to tax them that much. Instead, the high taxes that we pay on our cell phones are the sum of lots of little taxes imposed by several different political entities. Consider, for example, the tax bill of a typical New Yorker. It includes a federal USF fee, four state taxes, five city taxes, and a local 9-1-1 fee. Each of these is relatively small, but when you add it all up, the combined rate is over 22 percent.

…The mobile service tax base appears to suffer from a tragedy of the anticommons…numerous overlapping tax authorities seek to obtain revenues through wireless-service taxation, and this may lead to overexploitation of the tax base.

…We use state-level data from three years to examine the possible economic, demographic, and political factors that might explain the variation in these rates. We find that wireless tax rates increase with the number of overlapping tax bases.

Hat tip: Neighborhood Effects.

Where was the web invented?

by  Tyler Cowen in

From David Galbraith, via Kottke:

I’ll bet if you asked every French politician where the web was invented not a single one would know this. The Franco-Swiss border runs through the CERN campus and building 31 is literally just a few feet into France. However, there is no explicit border within CERN and the main entrance is in Switzerland, so the situation of which country it was invented in is actually quite a tricky one. The current commemorative plaque, which is outside a row of offices where people other than Tim Berners-Lee worked on the web, is in Switzerland. To add to the confusion, in case Tim thought of the web at home, his home was in France but he temporarily moved to rented accommodation in Switzerland, just around the time the web was developed. So although, strictly speaking, France is the birthplace of the web it would be fair to say that it happened in building 31 at CERN but not in any particular country! How delightfully appropriate for an invention which breaks down physical borders.

Udacity

by  Alex Tabarrok in

In The Coming Education Revolution I discussed Sebatian Thurn and Peter Norvig’s online AI class from Stanford that ended up enrolling 160,000 students. Felix Salmon has the remarkable update:

…there were more students in [Thrun’s] course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford.

Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed — by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary until they really master the material.

And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based.

So what I was expecting was an announcement from Thrun that he was helping to reinvent university education: that he was moving all his Stanford courses online, that the physical class would be a space for students to get more personalized help. No more lecturing: instead, the classes would be taken on the students’ own time, and the job of the real-world professor would be to answer questions from kids paying $30,000 for their education.

But that’s not the announcement that Thrun gave. Instead, he said, he concluded that “I can’t teach at Stanford again.” He’s given up his tenure at Stanford, and he’s started a new online university called Udacity. He wants to enroll 500,000 students for his first course, on how to build a search engine — and of course it’s all going to be free.

Why isn’t the iPhone made in America?

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is an excellent article, and perhaps it will win one of David Brooks’s Sidney Awards, excerpt:

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

…Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

Most of all, I like how the article shows that some Chinese economic advantages result from scale, speed, flexibility, and the supply chain, more than just from lower wages per se.  I believe we need a rethink of the current importance of economies of scale and scope, and what they actually consist of.

Tale of a published article

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Joshua Gans:

But people are wrong on the Internet all of the time. So what really annoyed me was how Cowen ended the post:

“This counterintuitive conclusion is one reason why we have economic models.”

…Now where did all that lead? Frustrated by the blog debate, I decided to write a proper academic paper. That took a little time. In the review process, the reviewers had great suggestions and the work expanded. To follow through on them I had a student, Vivienne Groves, help work on some extensions and she did such a great job she became a co-author on the paper. The paper was accepted and today was published in the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy; almost 5 years after Tyler Cowen’s initial post. And the conclusion: everyone in the blog debate was a little right but also wrong in the blanket conclusions (including myself).

The rest of the story is here.  Stephen Williamson serves up a different attitude, and here is Paul Krugman’s very good post on open science and the internet.

How well can you communicate over email? (or blog posts? how about in person?)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Justin Krueger, Nicholas Epley, Jason Parker, and Zhi-Wen Ng write (pdf):

Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail (e-mail). Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies 4 and 5 further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one’s own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else. Because e-mail communicators “hear” a statement differently depending on whether they  intend to be, say, sarcastic or funny, it can be difficult to appreciate that their electronic audience may not.

The pointer is from Sendhil Mullainathan on Twitter.

The culture that is Sweden

by  Tyler Cowen in

…In December, officials from the country’s tourism board decided that they would hand over the reins of their @sweden Twitter account to a different citizen each week.

So far, the project, which has been called “the world’s most democratic Twitter account,” has featured tweets from a female priest, an advertising executive and an organic sheep farmer, Reuters reported.

This week, Sweden’s tweets are from Hanna, “just your average lesbian truck driver.”

“Gosh, I really enjoy being @sweden,” tweeted Hanna. “They’ll have to grab the account out of my dying hands.”

The article is here, hat tip is to Angel Cabrera.  You can follow Hanna (in English) here.

Should computers have their own websites?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I think so, if not now very soon:

Websites designed to be read by computers rather than humans could make it easier to share and use data says Stephen Wolfram, creator of “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha. Writing in a blog post, he suggests that “.data” should join the likes of .com, .org and .net as a new top-level domain (TLD) for organisations to share data in a standard from, creating a “data web” that would run in parallel with the ordinary web.

Under Wolfram’s scheme, a website like wolfram.com would be accompanied by wolfram.data. A human visitor to wolfram.data would just see a list of publicly available databases, but a computer would be able to access and interact with the data itself.

Of course, this kind of data sharing is already possible thanks to application programming interfaces (APIs), the software instructions published by many web services that allow programmers to combine data in creative ways, such as plotting Twitter updates on a Google map. Each organisation’s API is different though, which can make them hard to use. Wolfram’s proposal would put data in a standard location and format, making it easier to access.

For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.

Why are some programmers paid more than others?

by  Tyler Cowen in

The law of one price does not seem to hold, so Brandon Berg poses a question to me:

I’m curious about the reasons for the wide regional variation in wages for software engineers. Computer software would seem to be the ultimate tradeable good, as it can be sent instantly around the world at zero cost. I’m a computer programmer and have recently been looking into employment opportunities in East Asia, and was surprised to find that typical wages for programmers varied by as much as a factor of 5, with the US and Japan at the upper extreme and mainland China at the lower extreme. Wages in Singapore are less than half of US wages, despite a similar per-capita GDP. Wages in Shenzhen are less than half of what they are in Hong Kong, just an hour’s train ride away.

What’s going on here? Why do firms continue to hire overpriced American and Japanese software engineers when they can get them for half price in Hong Kong, even less in Singapore and Taiwan, and at a 75-80% discount in China? I’ve had some people tell me that American and Japanese programmers are just better, but I’m skeptical of this, especially considering the difficulty level of the interviews I had in Shenzhen and Hong Kong.