Blown To Bits

Archive for the ‘The explosion’ Category

The Book Business

Sunday, December 28th, 2008 by Harry Lewis
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The book business has been affected by the digital explosion almost as much as the news business, but in a different way. People buy new books over the Internet, since the prices are low and the selection is large. So local bookstores are closing, and even major chains are threatened. And the aftermarket has gotten incredibly efficient — it is so easy and cheap to buy used copies that no one is buying new copies of the classics.

David Streitfeld takes us through the economics and ethics of all this in the New York Times today. He quotes the editor of a literary review thus: “With the Internet, nothing is ever lost. That’s the good news, and that’s the bad news.” So true. I buy more used books now — if I don’t need something right away, I’ll sometimes buy some 50 or 75 year old book rather than retrieving it from the Harvard depository.

Blown to Bits is part of the new book economy. We’ve posted the whole book for download for noncommercial purposes, and our publisher has priced it so low that (we hope) people will buy it anyway rather than print it or try to read hundreds of pages off the screen. We shall see. And it will also be interesting to see what it’s like to negotiate a book contract in the new economy. Even though we signed Blown to Bits less than two years ago, I have a feeling the experience is going to be different next time.

A Political Revolution, or Modern Tools for Old Politics?

Friday, December 26th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

Since Obama’s victory, an interesting debate has been going on about whether he really tapped the collective energies of Internet users in a collaborative way, or whether the Internet that was just a tool he used to conduct a very effective but fundamentally top-down campaign. There was a conference at the Berkman Center to discuss this and related questions; Yochai Benkler is eloquent in this video taking exception to the way Marshall Ganz had described Obama’s use of the Internet as an organizing tool. Some succinct essays surrounding these issues appear on the Berkman Center site here.

There’s an interesting short article in the Takoma (WA) News Tribune today entitled “Is Obama’s Web-based political revolution real or an illusion?” (It came to my attention because my wife, Marlyn McGrath, was quoted on the subject of how long it takes to read a college application — a number the reporter thought relevant since Obama has received 300,000 online applications for jobs in his administration. Also quoted is Professor Lillian Lee of Cornell, a Harvard PhD who used to be a teaching assistant for me — Lillian notes that the popularity metric used by the change.gov site for allowing certain posts to move up in the list is actually not awfully democratic in practice.)

Obama is trying lots of things, and that’s great. He probably could have been elected without the Internet, though it surely did him no harm to have collected millions of cell phone numbers on the promise that you’d be texted in the middle of the night about his VP pick, and a free “Go! Go! Go! Obama!” ring tone. Figuring out what actually works will take longer.

Google Opens a Door to Competition

Monday, December 22nd, 2008 by Harry Lewis

Google, whose mission is to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible, has decided not to organize and make accessible the world’s scientific data. In the interests of economizing, it is canceling its scientific data service, which promised to store massive quantities of scientific date, from the Hubble telescope for example, for shared use.

Google offers lots of wonderful stuff “for free,” and it’s not surprising that in a recession the company is picking its shots. But as Wired reports, Amazon, which also offers cloud data services, is waiting in the wings and may rush in to fill the void.

Tubes, 100 Years ago and Today

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

Today first: The New York Times has a very affirming editorial about the opportunities the Internet promises, and Obama’s opportunity to use national Internet diffusion as an economic driver for the nation.

And exactly 100 years ago today: The New York Times reported that the government, having considered the opportunities presented by the new pneumatic-tube communication technology, had decided not to “purchase, install, or operate” pneumatic tubes. Here is a scan of the original NYT story, and here is a brief summary.

Somewhere, perhaps Senator Stevens is laughing.

A tip of the hat to TheSync for pointing this out on Slashdot.

What’s “Broadband”?

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

Use of the term “Broadband” is unregulated in the US, but more and more people know they want it. Those conditions are ideal for shading the truth.

A new report in Great Britain states that more than 40% of “broadband” connections there are less than 2MB/sec. I’m not aware that any similar figures are available in the US, but I know some services offered as “broadband” are less than 1MB/sec. That’s still a lot better than dialup, which is limited to .06 MB/sec., but nowhere near the rates of at least 4MB/sec that make web surfing pleasant.

Another thing to realize is that ISPs split the channel capacity into upload and download speeds, generally allocating much more for download on the theory you shouldn’t be uploading movies (and they don’t care if you actually make your own). So they will give you two different numbers for the two directions — but it’s hard to be sure you can believe them anyway.

A Digital Tragedy

Thursday, November 20th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

We keep saying that the digital explosion has good and bad sides. For every meatspace tradition that dies because physicality isn’t what it used to be, a dozen digital innovations are born. But this morning, I’m going to grieve an irreplaceable loss.

The Out-Of-Town News Stand in Harvard Square is closing.

I remember how astonishing it was in 1964 when I arrived at Harvard from Wellesley, Massachusetts — hardly the ends of the earth — and found I could buy French newspapers and magazines (it was the only modern language I could read) and newspapers from a hundred cities across the U.S. It was like Widener Library except that when you came back a few days later, it was all different.

When the huge renovation of the public transportation system took place in the 1980s, the old T station, through which you used to emerge into Harvard Square, became the new home of the newsstand.

The digital explosion has killed the business. Newspapers are shrinking in general as news moves online. But the market for foreign newspapers — days or weeks old by the time they have arrive — has all but disappeared.

I might have hoped the place could stay open selling mostly pornography, but that’s moved online too.

I should have seen it coming a few weeks ago when I bought a Christian Science Monitor there. It’s not a paper I usually purchased, but that day’s edition carried a column of mine. It was a newspaper without news, such a small tabloid that it was folded twice and still seemed thin. I felt sorry for it, as I would feel sorry for a victim of famine. And now the Christian Science Monitor is no more as a paper publication (it will continue on the Web).

No Out Of Town News? I should be happy for all the opportunities there will be in its place, but this one is hard to take.

Wikipedia and Truth

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 by Harry Lewis

Wikipedia articles now turn up at the top of many Internet searches. They have assumed an astonishing degree of authority in only a few years. And deservedly: They are, in general, remarkably accurate. In an article appearing in Technology Review, Simson Garfinkel argues that the standards and protocols Wikipedia uses are redefining the very notion of truth. As Garfinkel explains,

On Wikipedia, objective truth isn’t all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication–ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. “The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth,” states Wikipedia’s official policy on the subject.

“Verifiability” means that the information appeared in some other publication. Other principles are “Neutral Point of View” — editing an entry about yourself is a no-no, for example — and “no original research.”

These principles work beautifully given the fact that anyone can edit entries. Vandalism and errors generally get corrected extremely quickly.

But the three principles don’t work perfectly, and Garfinkel gives a couple of thought-provoking examples where they fail dramatically, because information has gained currency through repetition and only the principals are in a position to explain why it is false.

A fascinating piece, and, like everything Garfinkel writes, very well-argued.

The Internet, the Web, and the Mobile Phone

Monday, October 13th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

November will mark 20 years since the word “Internet” broke into public discourse, with the release by Robert Tappan Morris of a “worm” that brought down many computers. Ten years later, the Web was in a state of exponential growth, and was already being exploited heavily for commercial and educational uses. At Harvard, by 1998 we had finished bringing high-speed connections to all our buildings.

This story about Abilene Christian University in Texas is a sign of things to come. Having discovered that the vast majority of students were bringing laptops to campus with them, they decided to equip every student with an iPhone or an iPod Touch. (Both have WiFi, and so can be used as Web browsers, email platforms, etc. Most students are picking the iPhone.) The university has passed on the Apple applications software and developed its own, presumably so it can switch to the Google phone or other open devices in the future.

How Did Wi-Fi Happen?

Sunday, October 5th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

A couple of weeks ago, John McCain’s top economic adviser held up a Blackberry and proclaimed,

“He did this. Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years — comes right through the Commerce Committee — so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create, and that’s what he did.”

The next day the campaign characterized this statement as a “boneheaded joke.” So be it. Everybody has to disown their surrogates’ statements from time to time.

But a related claim appears on the McCain campaign’s Web site, on the Technology Issues page.

He is the former chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. The Committee plays a major role in the development of technology policy, specifically any legislation affecting communications services, the Internet, cable television and other technologies. Under John McCain’s guiding hand, Congress developed a wireless spectrum policy that spurred the rapid rise of mobile phones and Wi-Fi technology that enables Americans to surf the web while sitting at a coffee shop, airport lounge, or public park.

Now the success of Wi-Fi is an important example of what spectrum deregulation can make possible. And the explosive growth of of Wi-Fi as a consumer product did in fact happen during years when McCain was chair of the Senate Commerce Committee (for the record, from 1997-2001 and 2003-2005). But what happened to Wi-Fi policy during these years? Basically nothing.

As readers of Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits know, the important policy step happened two decades earlier, under the administration of Jimmy Carter, of all people. That is when forces within the FCC started to push for unlicensed use of a small spectrum band — they wound up using a 100MHz band starting at 2.4GHz, because it was mostly used for microwave ovens, not communication technologies, so fewer parties would complain about the risks of “interference.”

What happened in the late 1990s was not new spectrum policy, but the inexorable advance of Moore’s Law to the point where wireless processing could occur in home computers and hundred-dollar wireless routers. So unless McCain’s guiding hand helped pass Moore’s Law, this claim seems utterly groundless. (Perhaps someone could ask him to explain it.)

Thanks to Michael Marcus for pointing this out.

Digital Photographic Extremism

Saturday, September 20th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

Digital photography, not the palmtop computer, is my favorite example of the triumph of Moore’s Law. Ten years ago we were still using film and Kodak was still making a lot of money doing it. Black and white ISO 400 film could be pushed up to 3200 if you had to underexpose it, but the results looked terrible. With color film pushed negatives would look even worse, and you needed a custom color lab to do it for you.

Today you can buy a Canon EOS SD Mark II, which has 21.1 million pixels per frame, and ISO up to 25600. Those are numbers beyond the imagination of anyone shooting pictures a decade ago.

Of course, in ten years, after the technology moves on, no one will be impressed.