Androids and walled gardens

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This morning’s Observer column…

‘We are all,’ said Keynes, ‘the slaves of some defunct philosopher.’ The question that will increasingly preoccupy mobile-phone executives from now on is which deceased sage is more appropriate for their product. Up to now, the relevant thinker has been Lenin – who, you may remember, was a control freak. Given that most mobile operators had their origins in traditional telephone companies – which liked to think they ‘owned’ their customers – this is hardly surprising. These outfits have control freakery in their corporate DNA.

Last week, the first mobile phone based on Google’s Android operating system was released by T-Mobile in the US. (The network is bringing it to the UK in November.) The philosophy underpinning the device is radically different from anything we have seen thus far in the mobile-phone market. The world is about to become a more interesting place. And what happens next could have far-reaching implications…

CORRECTION: An observant reader, Duncan Thomas, has just spotted an error in the piece as published. The piece says that “the most important difference [between the Google phone and the iPhone] is that the Android software ecosystem will not be an uncontrolled, open space”. That ‘not’ ought to have been deleted. Drat and double drat.

LATER: Webmonkey’s five reasons why Android might do the business

1. It promises to run on most modern smart phones – More cell networks will support Android than iPhone does — the iPhone is bound to just AT&T. Mobile providers NTT DoCoMo, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile and more have committed to the project. Also, more handsets will operate on it. You might even get more life out of your old phone if it supports it. Handset manufactures HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung have already signed on.
2. It’s open-source software – Any programmer can whip up some code to match popular features from any other phone. Under the Apache license, any programmer can take the code and port their own version of the OS.
3. It has support for Google products out of the box – The latest Android demonstration displayed the phone’s compass prominently in Google Maps. You can bet Google will have the latest and greatest features of their software running on Android before it hits other operators.
4. Third-party developers have more access – iPhone prohibits people from using its internet capabilities for things like VoIP or an alternative browser. Android’s API allows you to create an application for anything, even the dialing software. The evidence is in the 50 applications already developed for the Android Developer Challenge last May.
5. Android allows for ‘unlocked’ phones – Most handsets in America, including the iPhone, are locked by software to a cell phone provider’s network. While there are various ways to jailbreak, it’s not easy and might break your terms of service. The availability of downloading and installing your own unlocked OS might just change the game in respect to shopping for mobile phone providers and signing contracts. If this method gets more popular, it is conceivable phone networks may drop the contracts in lieu of (better) European pre-pay pricing.

McCain’s Blizzard of Lies

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From Paul Krugman’s NYT column…

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”

Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.

So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction…

Krugman’s point — that if people campaign like this then you get some idea of how they’re going to govern. In other words, it’s all about

the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

User-generated science

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This is the headline on an interesting piece in last week’s Economist about the effect of the web on scientific publishing. Excerpt:

Peer-review possesses other merits, the foremost being the ability to filter out dross. But alacrity is not its strong suit. With luck a paper will be published several months after being submitted; many languish for over a year because of bans on multiple submissions. This hampers scientific progress, especially in nascent fields where new discoveries abound. When a paper does get published, the easiest way to debate it is to submit another paper, with all the tedium that entails.

Now change is afoot. Earlier this month Seed Media Group, a firm based in New York, launched the latest version of Research Blogging, a website which acts as a hub for scientists to discuss peer-reviewed science. Such discussions, the internet-era equivalent of the journal club, have hitherto been strewn across the web, making them hard to find, navigate and follow. The new portal provides users with tools to label blog posts about particular pieces of research, which are then aggregated, indexed and made available online.

Although Web 2.0, with its emphasis on user-generated content, has been derided as a commercial cul-de-sac, it may prove to be a path to speedier scientific advancement. According to Adam Bly, Seed’s founder, internet-aided interdisciplinarity and globalisation, coupled with a generational shift, portend a great revolution. His optimism stems in large part from the fact that the new technologies are no mere newfangled gimmicks, but spring from a desire for timely peer review…

You want fries with that $700 billion, Mr Paulson?

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A few days ago I mentioned that the markets were thinking about the possibility of the US government defaulting on its debts. Professor Charles Goodhart, a noted UK economist, then came on BBC Radio explaining that it was impossible for a government to default in this way, and I assumed I had simply misunderstood the signals. But in today’s Financial Times, Gillian Tett reports as follows:

This week, the cost of insuring against a US default via credit derivatives hit record levels. Yesterday, London dealers were quoting between 23 and 28 basis points, meaning it costs €23,000 ($33,600) to €28,000 a year to insure €10m in bonds. But the quotes for McDonald’s were about 25bp-26bp.

Yes, you read that right: the entity that brought us big fries and the floppy clown commands as much gravitas in the credit world as the mighty US of A.

These CDS prices might seem weird: it is extremely unlikely the US will default. But there are at least two factors making investors jittery. One is the rising cost of US bail-out plans. If you spend $50bn here (to support money market funds), $85bn there (to rescue AIG), another $30bn (to complete the Bear Stearns deal) and then $700bn (for a bail-out), soon you are talking serious numbers.

More specifically, the rescue proposals from Hank Paulson, US Treasury secretary, are threatening to push gross US debt well above 70 per cent of GDP for the first time since 1954…

Interesting, eh?

Evening in America

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[McCain] tried to remind viewers of his greater experience and heroic combat career, while also casting himself as a maverick outsider ready to storm the barricades. Mr. McCain wanted to be the true revolutionary in the room, but his is the Reagan revolution, and for a lot of people right now, it doesn’t look like morning in America.

The New York Times, summing up last night’s Presidential campaign debate.

Miss Alaska

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Meet the next Vice-President of the United States.

Later: there have been stories circulating on the Net saying that YouTube is removing copies of this footage. So far (Saturday 27 October, 10am GMT) this copy seems to be still going. But in case it disappears, there’s another copy here.

McCain looking for his 9-11 moment? Some cheap, armchair psychologizing…

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Watching McCain posturing as the saviour of the US economy this evening I was reminded of this post by David Weinberger.

McCain’s suspending of his campaign is so very odd that I find myself looking for psychological, and not just political, explanations. So, try on this armchair psychoanalysis, keeping in mind that I’m just making this stuff up:

First, assume that McCain is desperate. When Fox puts you at 39%, desperation becomes reality-based thinking. Second — and this is the unpleasant part — imagine that McCain has had the thought that many of us had had: A terrorist attack in October would shake up the entire electoral chessboard, and might well favor the Republicans. (Yeah, yeah, I don’t think it should it, either.)

Now, no one wants a terrorist attack (except, um, the terrorists), including John McCain, of course. But we’re talking psychology here. So, could it be that McCain is reacting to the financial meltdown as if it were a large-scale terrorist attack because deep within him, he’s waiting for the crisis that saves him, the crisis that lets the aging warrior put on his flight suit one more time?

After all, the subtext of his “putting country first” trope isn’t patriotism but heroism. Heroes need crises. McCain’s brand of heroism consists of sacrifice: He gave up 5 years of his life in North Vietnam, and now he’s willing to give up campaigning.

McCain’s political problem is that in this case, his self-sacrifice seems unnecessary and can be taken as panic or cowardice. It seems like sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake. He thus runs the risk of voters turning away from the hero-without-a-cause to the leader who has one.