(Which explains why I’m glad I don’t have to do it.)
Daily Archives: March 10, 2013
Visual fakery
The Economist has a terrific piece about the increasing tendency to manipulate digital images for fraudulent and other purposes. The trend includes some things that I (naive soul that I am) hadn’t realised. For example:
In around one in 75 insurance claims, photos documenting property damage have been fraudulently retouched, says Eugene Nealon of Nealon Affinity Partners, a company based in London that advises insurers. Liz Williams, editor of the Journal of Cell Biology, says her publication rejects around 1% of peer-reviewed scientific papers after discovering that microscope images have been doctored to make results look good.
An interesting arms-race is developing here. Canon and Nikon embed concealed ‘signatures’ in images taken with their cameras, but it turns out that these can be reinstated on doctored images. So it goes on…
Perhaps the safest policy from now on is never to trust a digital image!
Why the world isn’t as flat as Tom Friedman thinks
This morning’s Observer column.
Friedman’s book [The World is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century
] is a paradigmatic exposition of the dominant narrative about technology – what one might call the Californian ideology – which sees computing technology as an essentially benign force that, over time, will iron out many of the economic, cultural and ideological divides that so disfigure our contemporary world. The basic message is that the internet creates a level playing field. And the freedoms that the network brings – freedom to communicate, access knowledge, publish and consume – will in time undermine the capacity of tyrants to keep their subjects in thrall. In this at least, the Californian ideology mirrors its Marxist counterpart, in that both believe that the state will eventually wither away.
Between now and that particular nirvana, however, a few niggling difficulties remain. One is that the state shows no sign of withering any time soon…
Net benefits?
The Economist has an interesting piece about quantifying the benefits that the Net brings to consumers.
Measuring the economic impact of all the ways the internet has changed people’s lives is devilishly difficult because so much of it has no price. It is easier to quantify the losses Wikipedia has inflicted on encyclopedia publishers than the benefits it has generated for users… This problem is an old one in economics. GDP measures monetary transactions, not welfare. Consider someone who would pay $50 for the latest Harry Potter novel but only has to pay $20. The $30 difference represents a non-monetary benefit called “consumer surplus”. The amount of internet activity that actually shows up in GDP—Google’s ad sales, for example—significantly understates its contribution to welfare by excluding the consumer surplus that accrues to Google’s users. The hard question to answer is by how much.
Yep. Hard question. And then you have to compare it with the damage it does to, say, conventional retailers.