Month: July 2011

Readings: Facebook MD, Trading, Rainbow Toad, Tweeting Birds, Dominion of Melchizedek

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What I’ve read online today:

(1) “How Facebook Saved My Son’s Life” [Slate] – amazing story of how Facebook friends of one mother, Deborah Kogan, recognized symptoms of the rare Kawasaki disease in her young son, all while doctors missed the initial diagnosis…

(2) “How Hard Is It To Become the Michael Jordan of Trading?” [The Big Picture] – if you’ve ever wondered the statistics on what it takes to become a professional athlete, this post provides some numbers:

The talent pool gets much more competitive at the college level. The NCAA estimates approximately 3% of HS basketball players, and 6% of HS football and baseball players make an NCAA team.

If those number look daunting, the cut is far more challenging at the professional level. In basketball, only 1.2% of NCAA senior players get drafted by an NBA team. NFL drafts 1.7% of NCAA senior football players; Baseball holds the best odds, where 8.9% of NCAA baseball players will get drafted by a Major League Baseball club — but that includes minor league farm teams.

There’s a handy chart at the bottom of the post which summarizes the statistics. Now, what does it take to become an all-star trader?

(3) “After 8 Decades, Tiny Toad Resurfaces in Asia” [New York Times] – very cool discovery of the Borneo rainbow toad (click through to see the picture):

The Borneo rainbow toad, with its long spindly legs, looks a bit like an Abstract Expressionist canvas splattered in bright green, purple and red. But when this amphibian was last seen, in 1924, the painter Jackson Pollock was just 12, and the only image of the mysterious creature was a black-and-white sketch.

(4) “First Evidence that Birds Tweet Using Grammar” [New Scientist] – fascinating evidence suggests that birds tweet using proper grammar

First, they played finches unfamiliar songs repeatedly until the birds got used to them and stopped overreacting. Then they jumbled up syllables within each song and replayed these versions to the birds.

“What we found was unexpected…” The birds reacted to only one of the four jumbled versions, called SEQ2, as if they noticed it violated some rule of grammar, whereas the other three remixes didn’t. Almost 90 per cent of the birds tested responded in this way. “This indicates the existence of a specific rule in the sequential orderings of syllables in their songs, shared within the social community.”

(5) “The Strange Tale of Alleged Fraudster Pearlasia Gamboa” [San Francisco Weekly] – probably the most bizarre story I’ve read all week. It’s about the Dominion of Melchizedek, which, according to Wikipedia, is a micronation known for facilitating large scale banking fraud in many parts of the world. The SF Weekly story profiles its president, Pearlasia Gamboa, and her confessions.

The Dominion [of Melchizedek] eventually expanded beyond its underwater seat of government to claim more land: three more tiny Pacific islands and portions of Antarctica. After annexing its polar territory, the Dominion began listing among its senior officials a figure with the surname “Penguini,” a touch that a veteran California fraud investigator describes as “cute.”

What was the point of such a lovingly detailed fiction? The Dominion of Melchizedek, according to government authorities, was intended to act as a sort of mothership for con artists worldwide, issuing fake banking licenses, passports, and other documents to lend a veneer of official authenticity to fraud schemes. “Everything about it is phony,” says John Shockey, former head of the fraud unit for the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency.

A fascinating read.

Bill James on Crime

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Over at Grantland: a fascinating interview with Bill James, the father of sabermetrics, about…crime. Who knew that James’s passion in life is not actually baseball, but the mechanics of crime?

As a society, do we overestimate or underestimate the importance of crime in day-to-day life?

We underestimate it, because it’s our intent to underestimate it. We only deal with it indirectly. We all do so many things to avoid being the victims of crime that we no longer see those things, so we don’t see the cost of it. Just finding a safe place for us to have this conversation, for example — we needed a quiet place, but before that, we needed to find a safe place. A hotel lobby is what it is because of the level of security. I’ve checked out of this hotel, but I’m still sitting here in the third-floor lobby, because it’s safe. When you buy something, it’s wrapped in seven layers of packaging in order to make it harder to steal.

Another interesting exchange between James and the interviewer, Chuck Klosterman:

But is there some unifying element among the type of people who become murderers? What is the fundamental difference between the kind of person who kills someone and the kind of person who never could?

That’s an interesting question. In a lot of true crime stories, you will see that someone testifies for the defendant and talks about what a good person they are, and that this person could never commit the crime in question. I would like to think of myself as someone who would never commit a crime. I’m sure a lot of people would. But I don’t think that’s a good argument for anything. If I was on a jury, the claim that the accused was “too good a person” to commit the crime would not be an argument I would buy. Rabbis commit crimes. Ministers. Priests commit terrible crimes. Now, are they committing these crimes because they’re not really good people and they’re just pretending to be good, or are they truly good people who simply fail to deal with certain situations? I think the latter is more often the case.

But this is the most fascinating nugget from Bill James:

We continually become less tolerant of actions that lead to death. The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed…There will always be occasional exceptions, but we’re involved in a long struggle against murder, war, famine, disease — and we move forward more than we move back. 

I think that Bill James and David Eagleman need to have a talk. What about you?

The Stanford Prison Experiment, 40 Years Later

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No course in introductory psychology is complete without learning about the infamous Stanford prison experiment. Conducted in August 1971, the study was led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. Wikipedia provides a good summary:

Twenty-four students were selected out of 75 to play the prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Roles were assigned randomly. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond what even Zimbardo himself expected, leading the “Officers” to display authoritarian measures and ultimately to subject some of the prisoners to torture. In turn, many of the prisoners developed passive attitudes and accepted physical abuse, and, at the request of the guards, readily inflicted punishment on other prisoners who attempted to stop it. The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his capacity as “Prison Superintendent,” lost sight of his role as psychologist and permitted the abuse to continue as though it were a real prison.

Now, almost forty years later after the social experiment, Stanford Magazine interviewed some of the participants of the study. It’s a really fascinating read, and to get this first-person perspective is eye-opening.

Zimbardo’s explanation of how he was affected:

There was zero time for reflection. We had to feed the prisoners three meals a day, deal with the prisoner breakdowns, deal with their parents, run a parole board. By the third day I was sleeping in my office. I had become the superintendent of the Stanford county jail. That was who I was: I’m not the researcher at all. Even my posture changes—when I walk through the prison yard, I’m walking with my hands behind my back, which I never in my life do, the way generals walk when they’re inspecting troops.

The Stanford prison experiment lasted for only six days. Instrumental in convincing Zimbardo that the experiment was inhumane and should be stopped was Christina Maslach, who received her doctorate around the time.

Phil came after me and said, “What’s the matter with you?” That’s when I had this feeling like, “I don’t know you. How can you not see this?” It felt like we were standing on two different cliffs across a chasm. If we had not been dating before then, if he were just another faculty member and this happened, I might have said, “I’m sorry, I’m out of here” and just left. But because this was someone I was growing to like a lot, I thought that I had to figure this out. So I kept at it. I fought back, and ended up having a huge argument with him. I don’t think we’ve ever had an argument quite like that since then.

Zimbardo and Maslach would later marry, in 1972.

A confession from one of the guards, Dave Eshelman. I would be willing to bet that some of the prisoners suffered “lasting damage”:

The fact that I ramped up the intimidation and the mental abuse without any real sense as to whether I was hurting anybody— I definitely regret that. But in the long run, no one suffered any lasting damage. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, my first reaction was, this is so familiar to me. I knew exactly what was going on. I could picture myself in the middle of that and watching it spin out of control. When you have little or no supervision as to what you’re doing, and no one steps in and says, “Hey, you can’t do this”—things just keep escalating. You think, how can we top what we did yesterday? How do we do something even more outrageous? I felt a deep sense of familiarity with that whole situation.

In the piece, one of the prisoners, Richard Yacco, provides some context about the study:

One thing that I thought was interesting about the experiment was whether, if you believe society has assigned you a role, do you then assume the characteristics of that role? I teach at an inner city high school in Oakland. These kids don’t have to go through experiments to witness horrible things. But what frustrates my colleagues and me is that we are creating great opportunities for these kids, we offer great support for them, why are they not taking advantage of it? Why are they dropping out of school? Why are they coming to school unprepared? I think a big reason is what the prison study shows—they fall into the role their society has made for them.

Read the whole thing. I only wish they were able to track down one or two more prisoners from the study. I understand that most of them would rather not talk about it today, however.

Richard Feynman, Superstar Scientist

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Richard Feynman is my favourite scientist.

But this wasn’t the case until I ended up going to graduate school at California Institute of Technology. While studying at Caltech, I often came to the school’s bookstore and read for about an hour or so every morning. They had a huge section devoted to Richard Feynman (after all, Feynman taught at Caltech for most of his career). Over a span of a few months, I ended up reading several books by Richard Feynman. My favourite is probably What Do You Care What Other People Think?. Reading Feynman’s books, I began to appreciate that this wasn’t an ordinary scientist. He wanted to make a connection to everything he did, he wanted to understand how the world worked, and most importantly, he cared about the world he lived in and the people he met.

In the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson reviews two new books about Richard Feynman: Feynman (to be released in August 2011) by Jim Ottaviani and Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science by Lawrence M. Krauss. I haven’t read either of those books, while they do look compelling.

The overall summary provided by Dyson is excellent, even if I already knew much about Feynman’s history, and, for me, there wasn’t much new in the article. However, something that did stand out was this notion of “superstar scientist”:

Two new books now raise the question of whether Richard Feynman is rising to the status of superstar. The two books are very different in style and in substance. Lawrence Krauss’s book, Quantum Man, is a narrative of Feynman’s life as a scientist, skipping lightly over the personal adventures that have been emphasized in earlier biographies. Krauss succeeds in explaining in nontechnical language the essential core of Feynman’s thinking. Unlike any previous biographer, he takes the reader inside Feynman’s head and reconstructs the picture of nature as Feynman saw it. This is a new kind of scientific history, and Krauss is well qualified to write it, being an expert physicist and a gifted writer of scientific books for the general public.Quantum Man shows us the side of Feynman’s personality that was least visible to most of his admirers, the silent and persistent calculator working intensely through long days and nights to figure out how nature works.

If you had asked me to name superstar scientists in high school: Einstein, Millikan, Newton, M. Curie, and Bohr would have made the list. We didn’t learn about Feynman, unfortunately. But if you ask me today, then without hesitation, Feynman would be on my list of superstar scientists.

The entire summary is worth reading if you aren’t familiar with Feynman’s life. Absolutely have to agree with this, even if Feynman downplayed his exposure in his books (he served on the commission which sought to investigate the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster):

Feynman’s dramatic exposure of NASA incompetence and his O-ring demonstrations made him a hero to the general public. The event was the beginning of his rise to the status of superstar. Before his service on theChallenger commission, he was widely admired by knowledgeable people as a scientist and a colorful character. Afterward, he was admired by a much wider public, as a crusader for honesty and plain speaking in government. Anyone fighting secrecy and corruption in any part of the government could look to Feynman as a leader

This last tidbit was new to me and is some wonderful advice:

He [Richard Feynman] never showed the slightest resentment when I published some of his ideas before he did. He told me that he avoided disputes about priority in science by following a simple rule: “Always give the bastards more credit than they deserve.”

Readings: Pain, Woods+, Jeter’s 3,000th Hit

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A few reads from today:

(1) “Thinking Away the Pain” [Wall Street Journal] – author Jonah Lehrer probes this question: can meditation and other alternative methods (including cognitive behavioral therapy, biofeedback, and hypnosis) help with relieving pain?

Pain is a huge medical problem. According to a new report from the Institute of Medicine, chronic pain costs the U.S. more than $600 billion every year in medical bills and lost productivity. Back pain alone consumes nearly $90 billion in health-care expenses, roughly equivalent to what’s spent on cancer.

Despite the increasing prevalence of chronic pain—nearly one in three Americans suffers from it—medical progress has been slow and halting. This is an epidemic we don’t know how to treat. 

(2) “Woods+” [Ftrain] – What is Google+, exactly? This is a hilarious take from Paul Ford. My favourite part is the allusion to the short story, “The Most Dangerous Game.”

I know it’s confusing. But this is their competitor to Facebook basically. Except you can list your friends. That’s the circles. But it’s easier to remember if you call them holes. Like I could have a friend hole and an acquaintance hole and a K-hole. And they give you a list of friends and you stuff them in the hole, like Silence of the Lambs, except you are sending them images and text messages and hanging out with them on video chats. One of the things that can happen, according to the press, is that you can, if you are very lucky, talk with one of the founders of Google, because he’s hanging out using the service too. And you can ask him about user experience, and show him your cat.

(3) “Was Giving Jeter’s 3,000th Hit Back a Dumb Move?” [The Atlantic] – over the weekend, Derek Jeter joined an elite group of baseball players to have accumulated 3,000 or more hits in their MLB career. His 3,000th hit was a home run. The big story revolved around 23-year-old Christian Lopez, who caught the HR and then returned the ball to Derek Jeter. So what’s the issue? If Lopez decided to auction off the ball:

So how much money might the ball have fetched? According to one Bloomberg report, it almost certainly could have been sold for somewhere between $75,000 and $250,000 at auction…

But I think Lopez did the honourable thing here. In return, he received luxury box seats at Yankee Stadium, valued at $40,000+. However, the point of highlighting the article is for this fact, which you learn about in Economics 101:

Criticizing Lopez’s decision as crazy misses the maxim that “money isn’t everything.” But more importantly, it ignores an important aspect of basic economics that supports that maxim: utility theory. It teaches that money isn’t a person’s ultimate goal. Instead, they seek to maximize their personal utility. Think of utility as happiness: while money certainly plays a role in happiness for many people, it isn’t all that matters.

So, to an economist (and to someone like me), Lopez giving the ball back was a completely rational thing to do. It was the right thing to do.

Readings: Antidepressants, Wal-Mart, Google Plus

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A few reads from today:

(1) “In Defense of Antidepressants” [New York Times] – a solid opinion piece by Peter D. Kramer, coming to the defense of antidepressants. This piece appears reactionary against Marcia Angell’s “The Epidemic of Mental Illness” (Part I) and “The Illusions of Psychiatry”(Part 2) featured in The New York Review of Books (which I called one of the best long reads of the first half of 2011). It is always good to hear the other side of the argument.

Could this be true? Could drugs that are ingested by one in 10 Americans each year, drugs that have changed the way that mental illness is treated, really be a hoax, a mistake or a concept gone wrong?

This supposition is worrisome. Antidepressants work — ordinarily well, on a par with other medications doctors prescribe. Yes, certain researchers have questioned their efficacy in particular areas — sometimes, I believe, on the basis of shaky data. And yet, the notion that they aren’t effective in general is influencing treatment.

(2) “Today’s Special at Wal-Mart: Something Weird” [Wall Street Journal] – what happens in Wal-Mart stays in Wal-Mart…Unless you get written up in the WSJ:

Maybe a man dressed in a cow suit, crawling on all fours, will steal 26 gallons of milk from a Wal-Mart and hand them out Robin Hood-style to patrons in a parking lot, as allegedly occurred in Stafford, Va. in April.

Perhaps a glazed-eyed 20-year-old will take a truck filled with 338 boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts from a Wal-Mart before police find him drowsy and in possession of a bag of marijuana, as authorities say took place in Ocala, Fla., in March.

Or perchance a rapper named Mr. Ghetto will shoot an unauthorized, sexually suggestive music video paean to picking up women in the aisles of a Wal-Mart, full of ladies shaking their hindquarters in ways hindquarters typically don’t shake, as happened in New Orleans in May.

Hilarious.

(3) “Like it or Not” [Rethrick] – former developer of Google Wave and Google Plus speaks out about the innovation (or lack thereof) of the new sharing/social media service, Google+:

It might surprise you to learn that I don’t find Google+ all that innovative. It hits all the notes that a facebook clone merits, and adds a few points of distinctiveness that are genuinely compelling, sure–but I don’t find it all that interesting, personally. To my mind, Twitter was a far greater innovation that continues unchallenged. But broad product innovation is not exactly what they were going for, I believe.

What Makes a Good Liar?

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The abstract from this study (PDF):

A neglected area in deception research is what constitutes a good liar. On the basis of deception theory, people’s views about how liars respond, impression formation theory, and persuasion theory, we describe eighteen attributes which in our view are all present in a good liar. Insight into these characteristics will help law enforcement personnel in two ways: It provides insight into who would be suitable for undercover operations, and it may help lie detectors, because one reason why people make errors in lie detection is that they do not take the
full complexity of deception into account and seem to have limited knowledge about what is actually going on in a liar’s mind.

The authors of this study found 18 attributes/traits of good (or excellent) liars. Some of these may be obvious, but others are surprising:

(1) manipulativeness. “for manipulators, people high in Machiavellianism or social adroitness, lying is a normal and acceptable way of achieving their goals. Manipulators frequently tell lies, tend to persist in lying when challenged to tell the truth, don’t feel uncomfortable when lying, and don’t feel guilty when lying. In addition, they don’t find lying cognitively too complicated, view others cynically, show little concern for conventional morality, and openly admit that they will lie, cheat, and manipulate others to get what they want…manipulators are scheming but not stupid. They do not exploit others when their victims might retaliate, and do not cheat when they are likely to get caught. In conversations, they tend to dominate, but they also seem relaxed, talented and confident.”

(2) acting. Good actors make good liars; receptive audiences encourage confidence.

(3) expressiveness. Animated people create favorable first impressions, making liars seductive and their expressions distracting.

(4) physical attractiveness. Fair or unfair, pretty people are judged as being more honest than unattractive people.

(5) natural performers. These people can adapt to abrupt changes in the discourse with a convincing spontaneity.

(6) experience. Prior lying helps people manage familiar emotions, such as guilt and fear, which can “leak” behaviorally and tip off observers.

(7) confidence. Like anything else, believing in yourself is half the battle; you’ve got to believe in your ability to deceive others.

(8) emotional camouflage. Liars “mask their stark inclination to show the emotional expressions they truly feel” by feigning the opposite affect.

(9) eloquence. Eloquent speakers confound listeners with word play and buy extra time to ponder a plausible answer by giving long-winded responses.

(10) well-preparedness. This minimizes fabrication on the spot, which is vulnerable to detection.

(11) unverifiable responding. Concealing information (“I honestly don’t remember”) is preferable to a constructed lie because it cannot be disconfirmed.

(12) information frugality. Saying as little as possible in response to pointed questions makes it all the more difficult to confirm or disconfirm details.

(13) original thinking. Even meticulous liars can be thrown by the unexpected, so the ability to give original, convincing, non-scripted responses comes in handy.

(14) rapid thinking. Delays and verbal fillers (“ums” and “ahs”) signal deception, so good liars are quick-witted, thinking fast on their feet.

(15) intelligence. Intelligence enables an efficient shouldering of the “cognitive load” imposed by lying, since there are many complex, simultaneously occurring demands associated with monitoring one’s own deceptiveness.

(16) good memory. Interrogators’ ears will prick at inconsistencies. A good memory allows a liar to remember details without tripping in their own fibs.

(17) truth adherence. Lies that “bend the truth” are generally more convincing, and require less cognitive effort, than those that involve fabricating an entire story.

(18) decoding. The ability to detect suspicion in the listener allows the liar to make the necessary adjustments, borrowing from strategies in the preceding skill set.

###

(via Scientific American and Farnam Street Blog)

Emanuel Derman Takes on Financial Engineering

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In a two part series, Emanuel Derman (author of My Life as a Quant, which I highly recommend) takes on financial engineering. He comes across as somewhat rambling, but conversational and honest. You can’t help but think he’s playing the Devil’s Advocate. Perhaps if I read Derman’s thoughts before I entered the Quantitative and Computational Finance program at Georgia Tech…

What is financial engineering?

Financial Engineering is a multidisciplinary field. It involves financial knowledge, business knowledge, mathematics, statistics, and very importantly, computation, because there’s little you can achieve without computation. There are very few analytic solutions that apply to the markets and products you actually deal with, so you must approximate all the time, and decide what complexities to ignore.

Have to agree that there are few geniuses in the field. Practice with coding and experience is the key:

Because of this you need experience to be genuinely useful, and so there are very few young geniuses in the field, unlike mathematics or chess. Experience and some wisdom is often necessary, because you’re dealing with people and their quirks, and a large part of it is a social science. Hard science assumes there is a stable world underlying the observed phenomenon; in social sciences that stability is much less obvious, perhaps even non-existent, because you’re playing with people and they keep changing the rules.

The disillusionment that can come with a technical job, I think, doesn’t have to apply to financial engineering only:

If you go to work in a big investment bank, you’ll soon discover that traders and salespeople order you about and often make more money but have less technical skills than you. That’s less true today, when more trading is technology and algorithm based, and when products are more complex, and when the buy side offers many different opportunities, but it’s still often the case.

Many practitioners or programmers gets weary after a while, and want to become “one of them.” But they may not have the skill or more importantly the personality to do that. There are more opportunities these days, especially at hedge funds, but nevertheless I’ve seen many people get disillusioned by having to continue in their mainly technical role. Can you change to be what you want? Can you live with being who you are?

Derman comes across as a more grandiose Devil’s Advocate in Part 2, as evidenced here:

Many people think you’re mis-employing your talents when you go to work in finance. (Nevertheless, when people ask me if I couldn’t be using my skills more usefully, I ask them the same.) Yes, you are adding to knowledge, but what is it used for? Often, simply to make money. Yes, that making of money may make markets more efficient, but is that sufficient social justification? I sometimes think that at least in finance, to paraphrase Johnson, invoking efficiency is the last refuge of scoundrels/self-interested people. But everyone is self-interested.

Do you believe everyone is self-interested? What about those that become doctors? That volunteer in the Peace Corps?

Derman concludes that he’s not a saint (we’re not curing cancer, after all):

I like to think that part of our job on earth is to be perceptive and accurate about as much as possible, including ourselves, about the way the world really works. If you do that, even for small things, it can add up to something bigger. It’s the one standard that transcends individual fields of study. That’s part of my rationale. There are others parts too. But mostly, it’s interesting work and sometimes useful and I’m not a saint.

If you’re thinking about applying to financial engineering programs (Masters in Financial Engineering, or MFE), Derman’s two posts are worth your time. Excellent food for thought.

Readings: U.S. Default, Transocean, Tiny Camera, Light Bulb, Monkey Copyright

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Five great things I’ve read today:

(1) “Will the United States Default?” [New York Times] – implications of the United States going into default. If we don’t pay our debt, what’s the worst case scenario?

Three views emerge on whether the United States will default on its government debts, as I talk to people on and close to Capitol Hill. The first is, hopefully yes, and this August offers a good opportunity. The second is, possibly yes, but this would be bad, so we need some form of fiscal austerity. The third is, under no circumstances, and any talk of a need for austerity is a hoax.

The first view is mistaken. The second view hides a dangerous contradiction. And the third view borders on complacency.

(2) “Transocean: No Apologies over Gulf Oil Spill” [Business Week] – fourteen months after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, why doesn’t Transocean take any responsibility/blame in the accident?

Why is Transocean fighting so hard to avoid even a sliver of blame for the disaster? Here’s one theory: The company’s survival is at stake. “Transocean is playing a high-stakes game of chicken because the company can’t afford to admit even a portion of liability,” says Gordon. “The total liability could ultimately be $50 billion. BP wants Transocean to chip in a big percentage, but Transocean is a much smaller company than BP and doesn’t have that kind of cash flow or insurance. … So Transocean’s strategy is to offer zero, nothing—how about zip?—and hope that works in court. … I don’t think they care whether it works in the court of public opinion.”

(3) “Researchers Develop Lens-Free, Pinhead-Size Camera” [Cornell Chronicle] – amazing new invention at Cornell:

The new camera is just a flat piece of doped silicon, which looks something like a tiny CD, with no parts that require off-chip manufacturing. As a result, it costs just a few cents to make and is incredibly small and light, as opposed to conventional small cameras on chips that cost a dollar or more and require bulky focusing optics.

When will it come to market?

(4) “The World’s Greatest Light Bulb” [Slate] – very interesting read on a new LED light bulb developed at Switch Lighting:

Turned off, a Switch bulb looks like an incandescent from the future. It’s got the same pear shape as a standard bulb, but it’s divided into two sections. The bottom half is composed of a wavy metallic structure that looks like the wings of a badminton birdie. Above that is a thick glass orb filled with a cooling agent and a bank of LEDs, which are semiconductors that produce light. 

The current vs. long-term costs are debatable.

(5) “Can a Monkey License Its Copyrights to a News Agency?” [Techdirt] – if a monkey takes a photo in the forest, does the shutter make a sound? More important question: if it manages to take said photo, who does the copyright belong to? Short answer: animals can’t hold rights to copyright, even if they are of high intelligence. If, however, you pass your camera on the street to a stranger and he/she takes a photo, the copyright to that photo belongs to the one who clicked the shutter button.

Vision of the Internet from 1982

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An archived article at The New York Times from 1982 envisages the internet:

The report suggests that one-way and two-way home information systems, called teletext and videotex, will penetrate deeply into daily life, with an effect on society as profound as those of the automobile and commercial television earlier in this century.

It conjured a vision, at once appealing and threatening, of a style of life defined and controlled by videotex terminals throughout the house.

As a consequence, the report envisioned this kind of American home by the year 1998: ”Family life is not limited to meals, weekend outings, and oncea-year vacations. Instead of being the glue that holds things together so that family members can do all those other things they’re expected to do – like work, school, and community gatherings -the family is the unit that does those other things, and the home is the place where they get done. Like the term ‘cottage industry,’ this view might seem to reflect a previous era when family trades were passed down from generation to generation, and children apprenticed to their parents. In the ‘electronic cottage,’ however, one electronic ‘tool kit’ can support many information production trades.”

I’ve never heard of the “videotex” industry before:

The study focused on the emerging videotex industry, formed by the marriage of two older technologies, communications and computing. It estimated that 40 percent of American households will have two-way videotex service by the end of the century. By comparison, it took television 16 years to penetrate 90 percent of households from the time commercial service was begun. 

Some incredibly prescient predictions here:

The home will double as a place of employment, with men and women conducting much of their work at the computer terminal. This will affect both the architecture and location of the home. It will also blur the distinction between places of residence and places of business, with uncertain effects on zoning, travel patterns and neighborhoods.

Home-based shopping will permit consumers to control manufacturing directly, ordering exactly what they need for ”production on demand.”

Interesting to dig up archive articles like this, no?