Category: Web/Tech

Robert Sloss predicted the iPhone in 1910

by  Tyler Cowen in

Well, more or less.  Or is it an iPad?  In 1910 Stoss published an essay called "The Wireless Century," intending to predict the world of 2010.  In this world everyone carries around a "wireless telegraph" which:

1. Serves as a telephone, the whole world over.

2. Either rings or vibrates in your pocket.

3. Can transmit any musical recording or performance with perfect clarity.

4. Can allow people to send each other photographs, across the entire world.

5. Can allow people to see the images of paintings, museums, etc. in distant locales.

6. No one will ever be alone again. 

7. Can serve as a means of payment, connecting people to their bank accounts and enabling payments (Japan is ahead of us here).

8. Can connect people to all newspapers, although Sloss predicted that people would prefer that the device read the paper aloud to them (not so much the case).

9. Can transmit documents to "thin tubes of ink," which will then print those documents in distant locales.

10. People will have a better sense of the poor, and of suffering, because they will have witnessed it through their device (not obviously true, at least not yet).

11. People will vote using their devices and this will empower democracy (nope).

12. Judicial testimonies will be performed over such devices, often from great distances.

13. People will order perfectly-fitting fashions from Paris; this guy should be in the Apps business.

14. Married couples will be much closer, and distance relationships will be closer and better.

15. Military targeting and military orders will become extremely precise.

The essay is reprinted in the Arthur Brehmer book Die Welt in 100 Jahren.  The book is interesting throughout; a bunch of the other writers thought in 2010 we would be fighting wars with large zeppelins.

Google and Verizon and net neutrality

by  Tyler Cowen in

I found this excerpt from Reihan to be persuasive:

I’ll just note that Google official line on wireless net neutrality, as stated by Richard Whitt, sounds fairly persuasive. Why insist on net neutrality regulations for wireline but not for wireless services?

First, the wireless market is more competitive than the wireline market, given that consumers typically have more than just two providers to choose from. Second, because wireless networks employ airwaves, rather than wires, and share constrained capacity among many users, these carriers need to manage their networks more actively. Third, network and device openness is now beginning to take off as a significant business model in this space.In our proposal, we agreed that the best first step is for wireless providers to be fully transparent with users about how network traffic is managed to avoid congestion, or prioritized for certain applications and content.

I believe in legally mandated net neutrality when monopoly is present, as with many cable providers, but not with wireless.  Here is my previous post on net neutrality.  Here are Robert Litan and Hal Singer, defending the Google-Verizon arrangement.

CAPTCHA Economics

by  Alex Tabarrok in

CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are the distorted text puzzles that are designed to keep spammers out of websites.  Although some AI systems have been developed to solve CAPTCHAs the market has discovered that it is cheaper to farm out the problems to workers in developing countries.

Here is an amazingly detailed investigation from researchers at UC San Deigo of the market for solving CAPTCHAs.

Bottom line:

  • Prices run about $1 per thousand CAPTCHAs solved, depending on the time of
    day and demand.
  • The median response time to solve a CAPTCHA is 14
    seconds and accuracy runs about 90%.
  • “[T]he
    business of solving CAPTCHAs,…is a well developed, highly-competitive industry with the capacity to solve on the order of a million CAPTCHAs per
    day.”

Hat tip: Mim’s Bits.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Layman's overview of P vs. NP and the new proof, and origami is NP hard.

2. Many prediction tools, from Ian Ayres.

3. Rumored Romer replacements.

4. Photos of "ugly animals," though many I find cute or more intriguing than ugly.

5. German growth beats estimates: "Laurence Boone, chief economist at Barclays Capital France, said the breakdown of the GDP figures was “somewhat surprising” because it was growth boosted by a 0.4 per cent increase in household consumption, which had been expected to be flat given unemployment and impending fiscal retrenchment."  Germany is growing at an annualized rate of over eight percent this quarter.  This divergence, however, does increase the strain on the euro.  Unfortunately, Germany is still quite exposed to potential real economy weaknesses from China and the weak eurozone countries.  There is more detail here.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Are TV viewings actually up?

2. Sounds like excess capacity to me.

3. At the State Fair: deep-fried butter and chocolate-covered bacon.

4. Where does the Laffer Curve bend? (prize for the best answer goes to Greg Mankiw)

5. Max Hastings podcast.

6. Japanese aquarium features frozen fish.

7. Very good post on carbon tax and innovation.

8. Rubik's Cube can be solved in no more than twenty moves.

9. Japanese micro-homes.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Another view of zero MP workers.

2. New paper on racial inequality, and also here.

3. What are consumers spending more, and less, on.  Read also the discussion of aggregate expenditures.

4. More evidence of labor market mismatches.

5. Via numerous MR readers, alleged proof that P = NP.  Here is one skeptic.

6. The advertising strategy of The Economist.

7. Tony Judt links in the right-hand column.