Monthly Archives: March 2006

Keynes’s General Theory in a nutshell

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Brad DeLong blogged Paul Krugman’s intro to the General Theory…

Stripped down, the conclusions of The General Theory might be expressed as four bullet points:

  • Economies can and often do suffer from an overall lack of demand, which leads to involuntary unemployment
  • The economy’s automatic tendency to correct shortfalls in demand, if it exists at all, operates slowly and painfully
  • Government policies to increase demand, by contrast, can reduce unemployment quickly
  • Sometimes increasing the money supply won’t be enough to persuade the private sector to spend more, and government spending must step into the breach

    To a modern practitioner of economic policy, none of this – except, possibly, the last point – sounds startling or even especially controversial. But these ideas weren’t just radical when Keynes proposed them; they were very nearly unthinkable. And the great achievement of The General Theory was precisely to make them thinkable….

    • Drinking buddies online

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    Hmmm… Another wacky MIT Media Lab Project…

    Lover’s Cups explore the idea of sharing feelings of drinking between two people in different places by using cups as communication interfaces of drinking. Two cups are wireless connected to each other with sip sensors and LED illumination. The Lover’s cups will glow when your lover is drinking.

    When both of you are drinking at the same time, both of the Lover’s Cups glow and celebrate this virtual kiss.

    Bet they’re not dishwasher-safe.

    The clickthrough’s tyrannical efficiency

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    Terrific post on Nicholas Carr’s Blog about what the Net is doing to newspapers. Sample:

    Traditional newspapers sold bundles of content. Subscribers paid to get the bundle, and advertisers paid to have their ads in the bundle, where those readers would see them. In effect, investigative and other hard journalism was subsidized by the softer stuff – but you couldn’t really see the subsidization, so in a way it didn’t really exist. And, besides, the hard stuff contributed to the value of the overall bundle.

    That whole model has been slowly unraveling for some time, but the web tears it into tiny little pieces. Literally. The web unbundles the bundle – each story becomes a separate entity that lives or dies, economically, on its own. It’s naked in the marketplace, its commercial existence meticulously measured, click by click. Advertisers, for their part, pay not to be seen by a big group of readers, but to have their ads clicked on by individual readers. They’ll go where the clickthroughs are. Clickthroughs themselves are priced individually, depending on the content they’re associated with. As for readers, they’re not exactly trained or motivated to pay to read anything online. The economic incentives created by the web model are very different from those of the old print model – and it’s economic incentives that ultimately determine business decisions.

    Google buys Writely

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    I’ve been using Writely for a while as an online word-processor that enables one to create documents on which colleagues can also work. Now comes the news that Google has acquired the four-person start-up that created the application. It’s just another step in the progress towards public realisation that the network, not the platform, is the computer. Or, as one of my colleagues puts it, “the PC is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet!”

    More: Some useful comments on Good Morning, Silicon Valley.

    Life after television, contd.

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    More grist for my mill…

    We may be known as a nation of couch potatoes, but it seems that Britons are grasping the 21st century with both hands: we now spend more time watching the web than watching television, according to internet giant Google.

    A survey conducted on behalf of the search engine found that the average Briton spends around 164 minutes online every day, compared with 148 minutes watching television. That is equivalent to 41 days a year spent surfing the web: more than almost any other activity apart from sleeping and working.

    Television addiction has been Britain’s national pastime for years, but experts agree that viewers around the country are increasingly switching on their computer screens instead of their TV sets. And it is a phenomenon that is set to grow, with two thirds of respondents in the Google survey saying that they had increased the time spent online in the last year.

    The empire fights back

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    Instructive New York Times piece about how corporate PR is finding its way — unacknowledged — into Blogs.

    Brian Pickrell, a blogger, recently posted a note on his Web site attacking state legislation that would force Wal-Mart Stores to spend more on employee health insurance. “All across the country, newspaper editorial boards — no great friends of business — are ripping the bills,” he wrote.

    It was the kind of pro-Wal-Mart comment the giant retailer might write itself. And, in fact, it did.

    Several sentences in Mr. Pickrell’s Jan. 20 posting — and others from different days — are identical to those written by an employee at one of Wal-Mart’s public relations firms and distributed by e-mail to bloggers.

    Under assault as never before, Wal-Mart is increasingly looking beyond the mainstream media and working directly with bloggers, feeding them exclusive nuggets of news, suggesting topics for postings and even inviting them to visit its corporate headquarters.

    But the strategy raises questions about what bloggers, who pride themselves on independence, should disclose to readers. Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, has been forthright with bloggers about the origins of its communications, and the company and its public relations firm, Edelman, say they do not compensate the bloggers.

    But some bloggers have posted information from Wal-Mart, at times word for word, without revealing where it came from.

    Glenn Reynolds, the founder of Instapundit.com, one of the oldest blogs on the Web, said that even in the blogosphere, which is renowned for its lack of rules, a basic tenet applies: “If I reprint something, I say where it came from. A blog is about your voice, it seems to me, not somebody else’s.”

    Quite. Caveat lector.

    The G: drive

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    Another juicy morsel from the briefing for analysts — spotted by Good Morning Silicon Valley…

    Theme 2: Store 100% of User Data

    With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).  … As we move toward the “Store 100%” reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache.

    An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine.

    Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of a user’s data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be accessed across applications.

    Translation: Google is planning a remote hard drive for everyone. If your PC hard drive is C: then the Google drive will be G: And after a while you’ll stop worrying about whether stuff is on C: or on G: — until Alberto Gonzales comes data-fishing, that is…

    As Google CEO Eric Schmidt puts it: “We want to be able to store everybody’s information all the time.” He means it.

    Thanks to Kevin Cryan for pointing out that it is Alberto Gonzales, not John Ashcroft, who is now Attorney-General of the US. (I’d got it wrong in the first version of this post.)

    Why rich companies are happier

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    Two slides from Google’s PowerPoint presentation to analysts caught my attention. In a section about how the company goes about things, Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior VP for Product Development, first put up this picture of how conventional companies work:

    The next slide showed the Google Way:

    Ah, the delights of hubris.

    The very first Web browser

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    Screenshot of Tim Berners-Lee’s Next workstation screen from, I would guess, early 1990.

    Update: Hmmm… James Cridland did some digging and came up with a directory listing which assigns the date 7 June 1994 to the image. This doesn’t necessarily date the screenshot, though. But if it does, then the image certainly isn’t “the very first Web browser”, as the headline on this post suggested, because Mosaic was released by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina in the spring of 1993 and there were certainly browsers running on Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT workstation in CERN way before that.

    In any event, the first browser was a text-browser like Lynx rather than a graphics-based one like that shown in the screenshot.

    Posted in Web

    Innocent as charged

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    Following up on Andrew Brown’s scarifying tale of being stopped and searched on exiting from a London Tube station, I came on David Mery’s web site on which he keeps a wonderfully detailed account of what happened to him — and of the aftermath.

    Like Andrew, David was stopped and searched for preposterous reasons (e.g. his jacket was “too warm for the season” and he was checking his mobile phone for messages); unlike Andrew, he was arrested, had his laptop and possessions confiscated and his flat was searched. With the aid of a solicitor, he gradually extracted retractions from the Met but the scary bit is that the fact that he was (wrongly) arrested cannot be expunged. This means, for example, that he is likely to have difficulties getting a visa to travel to the US (which could affect his career prospects), because you are required to disclose any arrests when applying for a visa. The more one thinks about this, the worse it gets. Bin Laden has won, hands down.