The Pentagon's hastily retracted plan for a futures market in terrorism is actually a small diamond of idea hidden in a great steaming turd of misapplication and public relations incompetence.
One pioneer of using contrived markets of this kind to aid decision-making is Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs, with whom I've had several very interesting discussions on this and other topics. One of his ideas has been to get senior HP staff to bet real money on the company's financials in the coming year. The idea is that for relatively little outlay, HP can get a much more accurate forecast than would otherwise be possible. And those who guess the numbers right take home a nice bonus. Here's a short write-up from The Economist.
And if that's too heavy for you, you can always stick with Celebdaq.
Whenever the weather has turned hot in London in recent years, it's never taken long for some newspaper columnist or dinner party guest to remind us all that the high temperatures and passenger densities regularly reached in London Underground trains are, according to European law, unfit for transporting farmyard animals. Whether this be true or apocryphal, its a good conversation starter because almost everyone — Tube-haters, animal-lovers and Europhobes (and most Britons probably belong to all three groups) — can nod in earnest agreement.
Now this story from The Economist (subscribers only, I fear) brings an interesting parallel story from the US, this time less about our modern way life than about a modern (and particularly American) way of death.
Topsy the elephant of Coney Island, NY, was electrocuted a hundred years ago for killing three men. Her quick, silent death led Thomas Edison (the brains behind the whole scheme) to lobby NY politicians to introduce electrocution for human criminals — and, of course, many American states still use this method today. Except that electrocution is now considered inhumane for elephants and no longer used for them.
Thus flows the strange and tortured logic of state-sponsored execution.
This week's Face Value column in The Economist presents Craig Mundie, Microsoft's CTO, as their Colin Powell. The analogy is interesting — and to some extent accurate — in that Mundie is a relative moderate tasked with building bridges to groups that have been disenfranchised by the subtle-as-a-brick Gates-Balmer philosophy.
But quotes like this give you pause for thought:
"[I]f you're the biggest guy on the block, people will always resent you," says Mr Mundie.
Really? Do gamsters complain about the bleak soullessness of Sony playstations? Do petrolheads decry the lack of user-frindliness in GM cars? Do mobile phone users complain that Nokia handsets keep crashing on them? Do bank account holders cry out that Citigroup's marketing tactics are trying to lock them in? Get real, Craig, before some likens you to Comical Ali. Uh oh, too late...
Bob Cringely's Snapster idea has been getting a lot of attention, at least in geek circles.
As others have pointed out in those discussions, the idea is very unlikely to fly because (i) in the short term, record companies only have to come up with a licence that precludes this type of use, and (ii) in the long term, most lawmakers are idealogically closer to the RIAA than to Cringely.
But Cringley nevertheless deserves huge credit for coming up with an orginal and enlightening idea in an area desparately in need of creative thinking.
Microsoft's latest proposed innovation is an online music store that sounds just like Apple's. Also coming soon from MS: interfaces that users actually find appealing, advertising campaigns with flair, and a boss who wears black turtle-neck sweaters.
Not that they're trying to copy anyone, you understand.
Actually, I'd just settle for an operating system that doesn't crash quite so often. This from the NY Times (pointed to by Slashdot):
Mr. Gates acknowledged today that the company's error reporting service indicated that 5 percent of all Windows-based computers now crash more than twice each day.
And presumably those are just the ones they know about. <sigh>
This from the BBC:
Official music download websites could replace record shops as the public's preferred places to buy singles within five years, one of the UK's leading music industry figures has said.
Well, no shit. But the really interesting thing about the web is not that it's an alternative channel for 'mainstream' music, but that it allows a much greater variety of music to be bought and sold.
NHK (Japan's public TV network) has screened a video of a traffic pile-up taken by a trucker wth a mobile phone. Now everyone's a (potential) TV reporter.
I'm trying to square this:
"Six months ago, I sent a call-to-action to Microsoft's 50,000 employees, outlining what I believe is the highest priority for the company and for our industry over the next decade: building a Trustworthy Computing environment for customers that is as reliable as the electricity that powers our homes and businesses today."— Bill Gates, July 2003
with this:
"Windows passwords are not very good. The problem with [them] is that they do not include any random information."— Philippe Oechslin, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology after developing a method to break Windows passwords in an average of 13.6 seconds
Any ideas?
This from the BBC:
Two Democrats, John Conyers and Howard Berman, have proposed legislation which would make file swapping of pirated music and software a crime.The Authors, Consumer and Computer Owners Protection and Security Act of 2003 — known as the Accops Act — carries penalties of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for uploading a copyrighted file to a peer-to-peer (P2P) network.
"I am speechless about the idea of putting music fans in jail for downloading music," [Michael] Jackson said in a statement.
"It is wrong to illegally download, but the answer cannot be jail," he added.
So who is it, exactly, who's supposed to be out of touch with reality?
A whole computer for a third the price of Microsoft Office?! Well, not a whole computer exactly. You don't get a hard drive, so anything that's not on the bootable CD-ROM has to come from the network. But I can see this being huge in all kinds of places from internet cafes to family dens.
This stuff's been around a while now, but still worth posting I think. First, USA Today on the lengths that Microsoft went to in order to avoid losing the city of Munich to Linux. (Surprise! Shock! Horror! Um, not). Second, Joel Spolsky on why he doesn't quite believe it all followed by a reader's explanation to him that these machines will actually be running Windows inside VMWare. (So it it such a victory for Linux after all? Yes, I reckon, just as methadone's better than heroine because it offers a way out of your addiction.) Last but not least, InfoWorld on the shift of small and medium-size businesses from Windows to Linux on the desktop.
Even wondered how hedge fund managers make their money? No? Well I'm going to tell you anyway. This from The Economist:
A convertible [bond] is, in effect, two financial instruments in one: a bond, plus a call option on the company's shares. Investors pay for the call option by forgoing some interest on the debt. However, companies issuing convertible debt have been selling the option too cheaply. The main determinant of the value of an option is the volatility of the underlying asset over the life of the option. In the case of convertibles, the more volatile the price of shares, the more the option is worth. And companies assumed that their shares would be less volatile than they actually were.Hedge funds have latched on to the opportunity for arbitrage this has thrown up. A hedge fund buys the convertible and sells the debt component, keeping the call option. It then sells the company's shares short, giving it a hedge against movements in the share price. As the share price moves up and down, the fund adjusts its short position, a tactic known as delta hedging. The hedge fund makes money if the shares turn out more volatile than was assumed by the issuer of the convertible.
Got that? Good, now go out and make yourself rich.
A recent reader's letter to The Times quoted a speech by Supreme Court Justice Robert H Jackson at Nuremberg in 1946:
The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to reason.
The full speech is here.
Given recent events in Guantanamo Bay, do you thimk George Bush & Co. might like to reflect on this?
The Economist reports on why the lights (and air conditioning) are going out in Tokyo this summer, and why this is just the beginning.
George Bush rides roughshod over science. Well, he's not the first beneficiary of nepotism to use his influence in this misguided, dishonest way.
2blowhards report on why bestseller lists are no more reliable than a war report from Comical Ali.
I've been using Shrook for about half an hour but I already prefer it to NetNewsWire. This is no mean feat: NNW was previously my favourite RSS reader on any platform. On Windows, only the up-and-coming FeedDemon even comes close (and it's not quite there yet, though it's still in beta).
Why is Shrook so good? Forget the highly innovative "distributed checking" for a moment (this sounds useful but I haven't had time yet to judge how useful). Here are my favourite bits so far:
I don't have a good idea about performance and reliability yet — let's see.
(Thanks to BoingBoing for telling me about Shrook.)
Who's sillier, a passenger on a transatlantic flight who wears a badge saying "Suspected Terrorist" or the captain who throws him off? You decide.
Of the two manifestations of the machine-readable web, Web Services took off quickest and has already become a fact of life. That's not surprising: Web Services are defined and promoted by a bunch of companies. Companies are good at getting things made quickly and encouraging people to use them.
The Semantic Web, on the other hand, has been academia's contribution to this endeavour. As befits these roots, it's visionary — arguably to the point of delusion — and its moving forward v... e... r... y... ... s... l... o... w... l... y.
But companies never act except in their own interests and this can sometimes lead them into feuds that are counter-productive for their customers. There are signs that this sort of bickering might now hold up Web Services.
The Semantic Web, by contrast, long criticised for its lack of useful applications, continues to grow bit by bit.
Web Services is clearly centre stage today while the Semantic Web lingers in the wings. But would you bet on that staying true for 5 or 10 years? I wouldn't. The Semantic Web's time in the limelight will come, and probably sooner than you think.
Arrgh, we're stuck in an IE-centric world!
I'm with Tim on this one and, as an aside, this is a clear example of a blog being clearly better informed and more interesting that a professional publication.
The New York Times reports on a new method of reconstructing shredded paper:
Advanced scanning technology makes it possible to reconstruct documents previously thought safe from prying eyes, sometimes even pages that have been ripped into confetti-size pieces.
We seem to be entering a world where information can't be truly eliminated — however much you want to. Except perhaps by putting it into certain my trusty 'filing systems'. ;-)
Since Richard Feynman died, Frank Wilczek has become my favourite living physicist. I base this on the quality not of their research (which I'm nowhere near fit to judge) but their words and thoughts (which are sublime).
I was therefore please to stumble across this the other day while searching for something else online. (It reminds me a lot of a piece that Wilczek wrote for Nature a few years ago.) It's basically about (i) the remarkable ability of numbers to explain the world and (ii) an extreme application of Occam's Razor by which scientists are trying to create theories of the universe that contain the minimum number of nonconceptual (i.e., apparently arbitrary) quantities. As so often, Einstein explained it best:
I would like to state a theorem which at present can not be based upon anything more than upon faith in the simplicity, i.e., intelligibility, if nature: there are no arbitrary constants... that is to say, nature is so constituted that it is possible logically to lay down such strongly determined laws that within these laws only rationally completely determined constants occur (not constants, therefore, whose numerical value could be changed without destroying the theory).
Wilczek takes us from the mystical Pythagorean Brotherhood for whom "All Things are Number" via Kepler's Zeroth Law (a bold but incorrect attempt to fit the solar system into a structure determined by the Platonic solids) and quantum electrodynamics (which has only two nonconceptual quantities, the mass of an electron and the fine-structure constant) to quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which takes us surprsingly close to the ultimate goal:
To the extent that we are willing to use the proton itself as a meterstick, and ignore the small corrections due to u and d quark masses, QCD becomes a theory with no nonconceptual elements whatsoever.
I also liked his mention in passing that our naming of the square root of 2 as being irrational stems from the, well, irrational anxiety thatn this number engendered the Pythagoreans. We might say the same about "imaginary" numbers (products of the square root of -1), which are really no more or less imaginary than any other numbers and, like other numbers, seem to have a lot to do with the world. The Special Theory of Relativity, for example, suggests that the relationship between space and time is the same as the relationship between "ordinaryreal" and "imaginary" numbers. Time is certanly mysterious compared to space (we can only directly exprience the time that we call "now" and can only remember the past, not the future) but not many people would consider space to be "real" and time to be "imaginary". We need better words to describe this relationship. Answers on a postcard (or in a comment) please...
The NCI has declared that it aims to overcome (though not cure) cancer by 2015. Wired has this nice follow-up article on the scientists and methods at the forefront of this endeavour.
It's good to see that the Postmoderism Generator is still going strong after all this time. (Hit reload a few times and you'll get the idea.)
I've really been enjoying the Samuel Pepys blog. It's a welcome respite from the here-and-now, in-yer-face resolutely 21st-century web and reminds us that there's nothing new under the sun. Pepys was a blogger too, he just used a quill instead of a keyboard.
And so to bed.
I'm currently reading a pretty good book by that great neo-Darwinian, Richard Dawkins.
I remember him writing in The Blind Watchmaker about an experiment that he intended to do in his garden one summer to see if he could generate computer graphics that attracted insects (just like flowers do). His plan was to take a strict Darwinian approach: display several graphics on the screen then wait for an insect to hit one of them and use the charateristics of that shape for his next generation of patterns. I never did hear how he got on with this.
Now this guy is doing something similar but another step removed from the natural world. He's trying to generate beautiful poetry by natural selection (where people like you and me are the natural selectors). As I write, he's got through four generations and the top-ranked poem is:
when sometime the life loved to be throne revoking of shield in blood
Hey, give it some time. We're still in the Precambrian here. ;-)
I'm going to follow this project with interest.
In response to this post by Dave Farber complaining about the dodginess of his new Tablet PC, one of his correspondents sent in this funny story to demonstrate just how far you sometimes have to go to read a Windows error message. And after all that, I bet it was one of those ultra-helpful "Illegal operation: 505CR3WY0U" ones.
So politicians are coming to the blog and bloggers are going to see the politicians. There's sure to be a lot more hype about this before the dust settles and we can see what the long-term changes will be (both for politics and for blogging). But for now, here's a snippet from the second piece that I think we can all agree on:
"A blogging generation will be interested in an MP who blogs, because they themselves run blogs," said [Voxpolitics director James] Crabtree.But he admits that not all blogs will be popular, admitting that some politicians will run awful ones.
Who could he have in mind?
It's 150 years since the Black Ships entered Edo Bay and 66 years since the Rape of Nanking. This piece reflects on how far Japan has come since 1853 and how much it has contributed to the world (despite its well-documented shortcomings). Meanwhile, this news demonstrates (if it still needed demonstrating) that some of the old guard in Japan still live on a slightly different planet to the rest of us when it comes to describing Japan's activities abroad in the 1930s.
Tim Bray has posted a great piece about why, if you're a software developer, you don't want to be a 'sharecropper' (a developer of applications for platforms owned by other people). To avoid being screwed, you should develop for an open platform such as Unix or the web. Too true.
Is videoblogging a wave of the future? Probably, eventually, when someone comes up with something good to do with it. But not for this site while I'm paying $10 per gig. And for me it conjures up visions of public-access TV. So I'll stick with the mainly text variety for the time being.
The Independent has a sobering, if one-sided, account of the lies, half-truths and public ignorance that has characterised the Second Gulf War.
Tim Koller has a characteristically clear-headed piece in the McKinsey Quarterly about why accounting rules don't matter nearly as much as accounting transparency.
This week's Big Idea in Mobile Telephony is "push-to-talk" (if you're a teenager that's " voice instant-messaging, and if you're over 30 think of it as "walkie-talkie mode"). Sounds to me like it'll catch on. But then I said mobile phone photography was never going to be a hit and I was wrong about that.
A delicious attack on homophobic Anglicans (and by extension on all revealed religion) was published on the letters page of the Independent on Sunday and reproduced in The Week. I can't find it anywhere online, so I'll reproduce it here:
As the central biblical injunction against homosexuality occurs in Leviticus, and since such an injunction would have no moral force if we could pick and choose our proscriptions, it might be an idea for the clergy to develop a test of belief in this 3,000-year-old desert religion — the Leviticus Test.Prospective clergy would be inspected for mandatory circumcision. Any other mutilation would render them unfit, as would a confession of having eaten pork, shellfish, insects (other than locusts) etc. A male must not touch the dead... except for his mother, father, son, daughter, brother... or virgin sister.
No priest with a blemish may offer to God or come near the vicarage.
This test would be simple and pure and thus appeal to those who worry about other people's sex lives. And it is eccentric, irrelevant and slightly mad, which will appeal to dogmatists.
Robert Harmon, Hastings
A fund manager once told me (correctly, I believe) that as a former economist he firmly believed that there must be a 'correct' equlibirium level between actively managed funds and automated tracking funds. Too many actively managed funds and opportunities for clever stock-pickers to justify their bonuses evaporate in an ultra-efficient market, too many tracker funds and there aren't enough intelligent traders looking at the business news to force share prices to their correct level.
For an investor, the important questions from all of this are, of course:
and
The answer offered in a recent editorial and survey in The Economist is pretty clear: there is currently too much money in managed funds. This is because fund managers have been rather good at selling them and their customers have been rather too willing to believe in the benefits of having their money actively managed.
These days it's much better instead to put your money in a tracker fund. (Unless eveyone else does the same thing of course; that would make actively managed funds relatively more attractive and turn the whole argument on its head... until everyone recognises this and goes back to active management... you get the idea.)
Looks like my acquaintance might have to go back to being an economist for a while.
Oh dear, the uncouth practice of hair-pulling has found its way into the etiquette-encrusted, piously reticent world of sumo. Something like this could only have come from a foreigner (in this case a Mongolian). He's already a yokozuna (the highest rank) so the sumo godfathers can't delay his promotion. I wonder if they'll punish him further or just try to forget the whole sorry incident.
Junichi Saga was both cool and forgiving in his response to the news that these Bob Dylan lines were lifted almost word for word from his (obscure) novel, Confessions of a Yakuza:
I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound.Sometimes somebody wants you to give something up, And tears or not, it's too much to ask.
Saga's anwser, my friend:
Why would I sue? To take something that made people around the world happy and try to exploit it for money - that's poverty.
Knowledge@Wharton reports on an online music service idea that's getting too little attention:
In a celestial jukebox, instead of downloading songs to a computer hard drive or burning them onto a CD, listeners log onto a site that streams the music directly to their computers for immediate listening.
They acknowledge some resistence from consumers, who have been used to 'owning' the music they buy. But this seems a trivial obstacle to me compared to the one that's really holding everything up:
The music industry continues to fixate on CD sales as the chief vehicle for delivering its product.
Of course they do. It's so damn profitable that they can't really do anything else even though this way of doing business is already outdated and ultimately doomed. It's a classic Christensenesque dilemma.
No sooner had they permitted all-night drinking and bartop dancing when the Singapore authorities went and allowed their citizens to bungee jump and reverse bungee jump too. Where will it all end? Will spitting in public and smoking cannabis be next?
Nature reports that animal-rights groups in Japan (are there an animal-rights groups in Japan?) have found their western counterparts too aggressive.
"Given then Japanese character, radical acitvity would only alienate people," said a member of the Tokyo-based Animal Rights Center.
Why the reference here to "Japanese character"? Animal-rights loonies take note: exactly the same is true in the West.
Everyone and his blog has been commenting about AS Byatt's criticism of JK Rowling. So why should I be the only one left out?
I think your stance on this depends on whether you see books as primarily a source of entertainment or erudition. Having read both Harry Potter and Philosopher's Stone and Possession, I can say that I definitely consider the latter to be the better book. But that's because I enjoy AS's disappear-up-your-own-arse style of metaphor and scholarship. Frankly, 99% of the human race don't — they'd rather have JK's derivative schmaltz. (It was presumably for similar reasons that Star Wars was voted the best film ever.)
JK's stuff may be two-dimensional but both of those dimensions are rather well crafted and there's no denying that her books have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure. Why begrudge them this?
AS's stuff is more worthy. But does that make it better? Perhaps to some (including me). But her arguments start to lose credibilty for me when she claims Terry Pratchett to be a "genius". (I've read only one of his books and it really is the biggest load of purile, trite junk that I've ever forced my way through.) I'll also note that, though her sentences can be sublime, AS's contribution to world culture also includes probably the worst movie ever made.
A (Japanese) friend of my (Japanese) wife recently had a baby in Switzerland. The midwife was shocked to see that it had a flat head and suggested that baby and mother both see a doctor to investigate this deformity. She didn't seem to know that many – perhaps most – Japanese babies have flat heads. (Similar things happen with Mongolian spots, which most orientals have at the base of their spine and which can be mistaken for a bruised bum – a sure sign of abuse to paranoid medics.)
Anyway, I laughed again about all this when I read a ridiculous story about babies that lie on their backs getting flat heads:
In severe cases of positional plagiocephaly, babies have to wear a custom-fitted headband, called a cranial orthotic, for up to 24 hours a day, to correct the shape of the skull. The treatment lasts between two and six months, depending on how severe the problem is and what age the baby is. It can cost as much as $3,000 (£1,800).
Wow! The main benefit of lying on their backs is, of course, that they don't die cot deaths in nearly such numbers as babies lying on their stomachs. Sounds like a small price to me. Lighten up, flat-head fretters! Babies, like adults, have different shaped heads. Variety is good and I reckon they all look pretty cute.
Microsoft's decision to give shares instead of share options to their employees appears very sensible. And they even say that they're going to cost them properly, which will be real innovation. ;-)
This comes a day after it was announced that BT would pay its chief in shares, not cash (though, amazingly, now that I look I can't find this reported anywhere on the web). This is fine too, but senior managers have more direct short-term control over the share price than those lower down the ranks, so to truly align their interests with mainstream shareholders, they also need restrictions on how quickly they can dispose of them. Otherwise they have a perverse incentive to engineer boom-and-bust share price movements and dump their shares at the top.
A survey of ordinary folk confirms that most of them don't know what the hell we techies are talking about.
This delicious parable by Terry Jones does for Alastair "Beelzebub" Campbell what Animal Farm did for Josef Stalin.
And if you're into jokes about Gulf War II, this might also raise a chuckle.
Joi(chi) Ito has posted a long-but-interesting piece on emergent democracy. There's a lot to disagree with here (sorry, blogging isn't going to reshape the political structures of western democracies) but the whole piece is thought-provoking. The possibility that the internet might encourage countries to move towards a participative democracy along the lines of the Swiss model is something that I've been interested in since I found the web faith in the mid-90s.
At last, one of least understood aspects of Japan for visitors to that ancient land gets explained in words and pictures.
I must say, despite having lived there for many years (and in all other senses having become fully integrated into Japanese society), I still have some questions about what's supposed to happen to your trousers when you're using those squat-down types. I notice that they've carefully edited that bit out of the tutorial. Damn.
In my quest to escape from all those self-referential blogs about blogging and RSS feeds about what should be done with RSS, I've been taking a look at this blog, which contains hardly a reference to things technical, thus making it a hugely refreshing sight in the blogosphere.
They recently published this item about "qualia" (subjective sensations). As a former neuroscientist, I reckon they do a pretty good job despite their self-avowed amateur status. Though I don't buy their ideas on the possible evolutionary benefits of qualia, I really like their comments about qualia and art.
They were largely inspired by the work of VS Ramachandran. I agree that he's a fascinating guy to follow (I got my stint at The Economist 10 years ago after writing a test piece about some of Ramachandran's work.) But if there's anyone who's contributed even more to neuroscience than him, it's Daniel Dennett (who's a philosopher, not a scientist, but that doesn't seem to stop him ;-) and he reckons that qualia don't even exist.
So the debate goes on. Which is nice, because I'm rather enjoying it.
While he was president, George Bush Sr. was once photographed holding a copy of The Economist as he left his plane (much to delight of marketing staff and journalists at the newspaper). I wonder if his son has the same title on his reading list. If so, he might not be too pleased to see this wonderful piece about why "he's governing like a Frenchman". <heh! heh!>
This week's issue of The Economist includes three stories about Japan's trade in ideas with the rest of the world:
Samuel Pepys is reincarnated in blogland, courtesy of Phil Gyford. (Thanks to Clay Shirky for teaching me about this.)
RSS as a technology is fantastically simple and powerful, and is just now beginning to hit the big time. But RSS development as a social phenomenon is the biggest stinking failure I've come across in a long time.
See the discussion following this post to get an idea why. It's absolutely hilarious. Unless you're a developer who needs a clear definition of RSS. Or a consumer of RSS feeds. Or someone who cares about the future of the web. In those cases it would be more appropriate to weep.
The creators and promoters of RSS should take a huge amount of credit for producing something so valuable and an equally huge amount of stick for doing it in such a disorganised, bad-tempered and purile fashion. I'm not saying I could do any better — I'm also a borderline-autistic geek who's better at writing code than communicating and cooperating. But is it a shame (not to say hugely ironic) that an interoperability format that is so simple and powerful has to be created by an acrimonious process that's so convoluted and ineffectual.
I am suddenly even more in awe of what Linus Torvalds has achieved. Imagine the Linux kernel development being directed by the RSS crowd. :-{
One of the great mysteries of the world when I was learning about macroeconomics back in the mid-90s was the size of the equity premium. In the long run, shares used to offer something like six percentage points greater annual growth than 'risk-free' government bonds – and it wasn't clear to anyone why shareholders should need such a large incentive to invest in firms.
Since then, of course, share prices have fallen and become more volatile, simultaneously reducing the equity premium and increasing the level at which it would become explicable to economists. So the mystery has been largely or entirely squeezed out.
Even so, a recent column in The Economist reports (with slightly unconvincing drama) that the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) on which this view of markets is based has outgrown its usefulness. In fact all they're really reporting is an attempt to refine the use of a figure known as 'beta'. This is a measure of the typical size and direction of movements in the share price of a given company in relation to movements in the stock market as a whole – and it's a key part of the CAPM. The refinement in question involves splitting beta into two so the that the effects of changes in profits and discount rates can be separated. This is important because the share prices of different types of companies appears to respond differently depending on whether the news is about profits or discount rate.
The same piece in The Economist also quotes an interesting report from McKinsey that argues for a recalculation of betas to remove the effect of the high-tech bubble. This would reduce the betas of high-tech firms and increase the betas of other companies (because, by definition, the beta of the whole market is equal to one). All this is important because the beta is used to calculate a company's cost of capital, so it affects decisions about which investments are and are not worth making.
The Economist's conclusion in response to all this seems spot on to me: The equity premium itself, treated for so long as an inexplicable but stable fact of financial life, appears to be something that rises and falls with time, albeit much more slowly (thank goodness) than share prices themselves.
Kew Gardens becomes a World Heritage Site and makes this Friend of Kew happy.
This article about the decline of the single contains some interesting quotes.
Paul Weller (singer-songwriter):
"Unfortunately these days if you don't get a hit single, or your first album doesn't sell one point whatever million, you don't get a chance to make your second one... I wonder whether The Jam would have got on to All Mod Cons - we would have probably been dropped by then, as the first two records didn't sell that well."
Beverley Knight (singer):
"Back in the day the chances were that, unless it was a novelty record, it was a really good song... It's hard to sit at home and watch bands you know have been put together by a TV show. It's mediocrity dressed up as greatness."
Steve Levine (music producer):
"[Marketing is] more important [to record companies] than the music"
Chris Cowey (executive producer, Top of the Pops):
"[The charts are] dysfunctional [and] full of crap"
Apple's Music Store is encouraging individual song purchaes again, but IMHO record companies only have themselves to blame for the lacklustre, unimaginative, uninspiring and decreasingly lucrative singles market. And just in case you thought it's all down to piracy, read this.
I'm still trying to work out whether this (rather funny) story demonstrates (i) a strange ignorance on the part of apparently clever people in government about how to use software safely, or (ii) a jaw-droppingly bad decsion by Microsoft about what features Word users would consider useful. A bit of both, perhaps. The BBC also reported on the same subject.
Customers at Japanese newsagents are using cameras in their mobile phones to make copies of magazine pages without paying. The BBC and Slashdot report. Given that one of the main points of taking these snaps is to share them with friends, it sounds to me like this might is a great viral marketing tool. Publishing companies should end up selling more, not fewer, magazines as a result.