Daily Archives: November 26, 2008

Just give him the money

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Willem Buiter doesn’t see why he should be left out of the bailouts.

My wife and I are the proud owners of all the common stock in a small company, created originally as a vehicle for supplying consultancy services. Because we are both US citizens, the company is registered both in the US and in the UK. Over the years since its creation, an awareness has grown inside me, that what we really own is a bank: money goes out (quite a lot) and money comes in (not quite enough). All we lack to be a proper bank is leverage and a marble atrium.

To remedy this obvious deficiency, I have decided to submit a request to the US banking regulators (cc’d to Hank Paulson) to grant bank holding company status to our enterprise. If G-Mac can aspire to this status, which gives the qualifying institution access to all the Fed troughs and to what’t left of the TARP, then so can we.

Unlike G-Mac, which provides financing for crappy, environmentally unfriendly vehicles that no-one really wants, our would-be bank holding company is a model of family values at work. Sure, we don’t make loans. But show me a bank today that does. You may wish to point out that the two principals involved have no experience running a bank. You would be correct. But what really is worse, having no relevant experience or having an extensive track record of running multi-billion enterprises into the ground? Make a choice between a definite risk and the certainty of abject and costly failure.

JJ profiled

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The New York Observer has a long profile of Jeff Jarvis.

To meet Mr. Jarvis is to wonder how he can have become the bogeyman to so many in his profession. He is tall with that recessive posture that is meant to compensate, the body repelling the attention his ideas so readily attract. He has a good face, not a frightening one; when he speaks on anything, however small, the circumspection and intentionality ripples around his gray-stubbled, professorial face.

But his is a model of journalism that gives a lot of old-school journalists a vague feeling of nausea…

Can Google Flu Trends Be Manipulated?

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Interesting contribution to the discussion by Ed Felten.

My concern today is whether Flu Trends can be manipulated. The system makes inferences from how people search, but people can change their search behavior. What if a person or a small group set out to convince Flu Trends that there was a flu outbreak this week?

An obvious approach would be for the conspirators to do lots of searches for likely flu-related terms, to inflate the count of flu-related searches. If all the searches came from a few computers, Flu Trends could presumably detect the anomalous pattern and the algorithm could reduce the influence of these few computers. Perhaps this is already being done; but I don’t think the research paper mentions it.

A more effective approach to spoofing Flu Trends would be to use a botnet — a large collection of hijacked computers — to send flu-related searches to Google from a larger number of computers. If the added searches were diffuse and well-randomized, they would be very hard to distinguish from legitimate searches, and the Flu Trends would probably be fooled.

This possibility is not discussed in the Flu Trends research paper. The paper conspicuously fails to identify any of the search terms that the system is looking for. Normally a paper would list the terms, or at least give examples, but none of the terms appear in the paper, and the Flu Trends web site gives only “flu” as an example search term. They might be withholding the search terms to make manipulation harder, but more likely they’re withholding the search terms for business reasons, perhaps because the terms have value in placing or selling ads.

Cyberchondria

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Wow! Microsoft Research has just published a research study on what happens when people seek health information on the Web. Abstract:

The World Wide Web provides an abundant source of medical information. This information can assist people who are not healthcare professionals to better understand health and disease, and to provide them with feasible explanations for symptoms. However, the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure. We use the term cyberchondria to refer to the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web. We performed a large-scale, longitudinal, log-based study of how people search for medical information online, supported by a large-scale survey of 515 individuals’ health-related search experiences. We focused on the extent to which common, likely innocuous symptoms can escalate into the review of content on serious, rare conditions that are linked to the common symptoms. Our results show that Web search engines have the potential to escalate medical concerns. We show that escalation is influenced by the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users, the presence of escalatory terminology in pages visited, and a user’s predisposition to escalate versus to seek more reasonable explanations for ailments. We also demonstrate the persistence of post-session anxiety following escalations and the effect that such anxieties can have on interrupting user’s activities across multiple sessions. Our findings underscore the potential costs and challenges of cyberchondria and suggest actionable design implications that hold opportunity for improving the search and navigation experience for people turning to the Web to interpret common symptoms.

The Obama rebound?

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Sometimes, it’s ifficult to know what to think. This morning the Today programme carried a chilling article about the upsurge in US gun sales since Obama’s election. On the other hand, here’s an interesting reflection Mark Anderson.

The old adage says, The darkest hour is just before the dawn.

It’s hard to be upbeat these days, when every statistic is worse than the last. But the other day, as I was considering predictions for the coming year, a thought occurred to me: we are experiencing the waning days of the administration I have repeatedly called the worst in US history. Of course things look dark.

Is it possible, once the new administration is in place, that hearing daily announcements of LIPs (leadership, ideas and plans) put forward by people who are both smart and qualified, will have the opposite effect on the public from the constant drumming of fear we continue to have today?

Of course.

Is it also the case that markets react more to perception than to ground truth?

Generally, yes.

So I asked myself, what will the state of mind be of the average American, say, three weeks into the next administration – let’s say, by Valentine’s Day, February 14th?

If their house has just been foreclosed and their car repossessed, we know what they’ll be thinking. But otherwise, I expect it will be radically more optimistic than it is today.

Is that enough to provide a market rebound? It could be.