Category: Web/Tech

Typepad had a slight glitch this morning which prevented us from posting but as always they responded very promptly and fixed the problem.  Thanks Typepad!

You can read him here, mostly on topics of law, philosophy, and religion.  And yes he still has his own blog with Gary Becker, their latest topic is overpopulation.

You will notice some turnover in our blogroll as of late.  Our software accommodates twenty entries, yet I can think of at least sixty blogs I would like to list.  The growth in recent economics blogs has been especially rapid.  Our apologies if you have been "defrocked."  And if you haven’t yet, perhaps you will be, apologies in advance.  I think of blogrolling as a (temporary) free advertisement for somebody else.  But the maximum service to our readers is to have some turnover and expose them to new blogs.  We haven’t stopped loving you.  Perhaps you have become too famous to need the publicity, or perhaps you will reemerge on our blogroll once again.  But we like and read your blog as much as ever.

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…shoppers choosing, say, turkeys could one day scan bar codes with their cellphone cameras to find out where the birds were from, and even see pictures of the farms.  The transformed bar code would call attention to environmentally friendly products and raise the consciousness of shoppers everywhere…Software already exists that allows camera phones to read bar codes.  And some companies have begun sharing encoded product-tracking information with curious consumers.  This year, Heritage Foods started providing a tracking number with every piece of meat it sells.  When keyed into the company’s Web site, the number provides the animal’s medical and feed history.  The site also features a turkey Web cam, so you can examine the animals’ living conditions for yourself.  As Patrick Martins, co-founder of Heritage Foods, puts it, you can "see Tom naturally mating with Henrietta."

Here is the full story, NYT password required.

My take: I suspect a more popular use of this technology would call up ads and suggested product uses.  Or how about third-party bar codes, such as Consumer Reports might supply?  Consumers would then get suspicious if no such bar code were present.  From another direction altogether, the nerds could program their phones with calibrated macro models to estimate the effect of the expenditure on gdp, the deficit, and the value of the dollar.

That is all from the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Dec.12, the annual "Year in Ideas" feature.  Want another innovation?  Try stock options for soldiers.

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Mark Cuban is on the move:

Cuban and Wagner plan to buck the Hollywood system of releasing movies over many months, through separate windows for theaters, pay-per-view, DVD, and broadcast TV. Instead, Cuban said, they intend to attempt "day-and-date releases," in which their films premiere simultaneously on Landmark screens, HDNet, and DVD. "We think it’s a way of maximizing our revenues, controlling marketing costs, and adding value to our brands," he said. "And we don’t think giving people alternatives to going to the theater will hurt us at the box office. It’s just like with the Mavericks: We still sell out the games even though they’re on free TV."

Even more heretical is Cuban’s opinion of DVDs, which is that they suck — or, at least, that they’re inferior to hard drives as a medium for storing digital content. "Why would we invest in DVD," he asked, "knowing that hard drives are going to grow in capacity, shrink in size and price, and can also be erased and rewritten?" He imagines selling HD movies stored on key-chain drives — or putting multiple films on larger drives, "like software used to be packaged on PCs." Moreover, he added, "with ever-expanding storage, we can increase picture quality for years to come by taking advantage of new cameras and better compression schemes. With DVDs, we can’t."

Cuban’s bottom line?

"We’re on the brink of a war for the living room between the PC and electronics companies," he said. "And the thing we know about death wars like that is that the consumer always wins."

Here is the full story.  I’ll jump on board when a hard drive crash occurs less than every five years; I’ve never had a TV break on me.  Right now for me "convergence" would be a nightmare.  Simpler is better, it is the time constraints that bind, and all the rest is about giving me something I don’t (yet?) want.

Addendum: Here is a good short article on where the DVD is headed.

Those Nobel things are rigged to make sure the smart people win them.

And:

At least you both appear to sound smart, so far.

Those are my two favorite comments on the debut entry on the new Becker-Posner blog.

Addendum: More is up.

Now that Richard Posner and Gary Becker will start blogging, let us return to Eszther’s query of how blogging and academic scholarship fit together.  I see a few models:

1. A blog post can have a new idea.  It is like a very short journal article, with other bloggers/linkers as providing a citation index of sorts.  Plus you receive quick and useful feedback.

2. The blogosphere as a whole is the relevant unit of analysis.  Don’t think that a single post amounts to much of importance.  But the blogsophere as a spontaneous order (sometimes) spits out the truth.

3. Blogging is a way to publicize academic work and give it new readers.  I call this "blogging as loss leader."

4. Blogging is more like editing a journal or magazine than writing an article.   

5. A blog post is like a (very short) public lecture.

6. Blogging is a fundamentally new medium, akin to an epic in serial form, but combining the functions of editor and author.  Who doesn’t dream of writing an epic?

Don’t focus on the single post.  Rather a good blog provides you a whole vision of what a field is about, what the interesting questions are, and how you might answer them.  It is also a new window onto a mind.  And by packaging intellectual content with some personality, bloggers appeal to the biological instincts of blog readers.  Be as intellectual as you want, you still are programmed to find people more memorable than ideas.  The academic blogger faces the new challenge of tying these disparate functions together in a compelling product.  Intellectual substance, personality, writing, and editing, that is our juggling act.

This hypothesis suggests, by the way, that reading a blog many times will be more rewarding than just sampling it once.  Readers should "specialize" their blog reading to some degree, rather than jumping around and reading the best posts on a given day.

I’ve heard that if Posner were a law school, his citation index would put him in or close to the top ten.  And Becker just gave up his Business Week column a few months ago.  He is also the most widely cited living economist, not to mention that Nobel Prize.  So why are they blogging?  They must think there is something to number six, and are eager for a new challenge.

A new blog on outsourcing just started here, courtesy of the Corante.com group.  They have another new blog on globalization more generally, read here.

And there is a rumor that Richard Posner and Gary Becker will be starting a "Posner-Becker blog" sometime soon.  Here is an apparently confirming email from Posner, but I cannot vouch for the transmission chain of this information.

Addendum: The rumor seems to be true…

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Law does especially well in the blog medium, philosophy usually does poorly.  You can cite a legal case or precedent more easily than you can summarize Also Sprach Zarathustra.  But Will Wilkinson’s The Fly Bottle is snappy, smart, and to the point. 

I liked this bit:

My philosophical heroes are Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Darwin, Hayek, and Quine [TC: very close to my list, sub in Plato for Aristotle]. You know, the founding fathers of the reality-based community.

Apparently I’m so empiricist that some folks get confused when I look out the window and report that politics is not primarily a matter of arguments, but more a matter of coalitional identity and the stories that bind these identities together. My practical point, which I also believe to be empirically sound, is that if we hope to get anywhere, we’d better face up to the facts about the way people make political choices, and that simply lashing out at others’ deeply-held identities with the disdainful counter-assertion of our identities is rather likely to be counterproductive.

And here is Will interpreting Tyler on social security.  Here is Will on why Bush won.

Many thanks to our superb guest blogger Daniel Akst!  Be sure to read his columns and his novels.  When is the next one, Dan?  Next week Tyler will be back to blogging from Fairfax rather than Calcutta.

Vote here.   

Thanks to Wired for the pointer.

We are pleased to announce that our regular pinch-hitter, Fabio Rojas, is back with us again. Welcome Fabio!