Monthly Archives: July 2011

A convergence: ICE, Copyright, O’Dwyer Swartz

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I think we’re in the middle of a very bad convergence of cultural inhibitors. Most things that would fall under the purview of culture is copyrighted. Historically, we never had much trouble with this as individuals. However, now we’re seeing more and more problems with this. As I’ve discussed in the past, ICE is heavily involved, individuals like James O’Dwyer and Aaron Swartz are in the middle of two different kind of legal action and content owners are coming up with new ways to control their material.

What do I think is going on? I think that we could be seeing the end of our ability to freely use our culture. We are also seeing the US attempting to govern the world’s copyright law. For instance, the US is seeking to extradite O’Dwyer over a links page, something like Justin.TV, which in the UK isn’t illegal and no one is sure if it’s actually illegal in the US or not (See this ars technica article for more information). This isn’t the only case like this. ICE seized a website that was declared legal in Spain.

One of the best parts of the copyright law for consumers is the First sale provision. This allows a consumer that owns a book, but not the copyright, to sell this book to some one else. Or do with this book anything they want to after the first sale. However, we’re seeing this ability erode away. Autodesk, makers of AutoCad, are suing a guy that is trying to resell a two copies of AutoCad. They are claiming it violates their copyright and their End User Licence Agreement.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is another manner in which content owners are exerting excess control over their content. If you bought a song from iTunes, that DRM is going to last longer than the copyright which it is absurd in my opinion.

Another case where DRM and content ownership is going to have a long term negative impact is in the PC gaming industry. There are a few major platforms for game digital game distribution. Steam being the largest, however all these games are put into a walled garden of “ownership” where you are able to play the game and use it, but you aren’t in control of the actual content. You have absolutely no ability to resell the game. In the past, if you didn’t like a game after you bought it, you had the ability to sell it for a loss to some place like Gamestop. With these online platforms you don’t have the ability to do that, as it would cannibalize sales from Steam itself.

Other services are starting to get into the act to prevent copyrighted materials from being sole without the owner’s consent. Today, PayPal has decided to ban payments to any website that is illegally selling copyrighted material (Torrent Freak article). This is pretty serious. As a company the have the right to do so, and I’m very sure that there will be some other service that will provide secure monetary transfers.

Based on these observations, I believe that our government and content owners are working to control and limit the freedom of usage of our own culture. It’s not a conspiracy, as the government is actively working with RIAA and MPAA to help regulate the material. ISPs have recently gotten involved in the game as well (EFF commentary). These groups are working to use copyright to gain more control over the material every day.

What can we do? Contact your government officials, get educated through EFF and Creative Commons, and other organizations like this.

Further reading:
Lawrence Lessig Code 2.0

Aaron Swartz and Freedom of Knowledge

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Aaron Swartz has been arrested and accused of a multitude of crimes, for a break down of them go here, for gaming a big journal retrieval site called JSTOR (it is a large one many journals are stored within this site). As some one that works with these retrieval services quiet often and has actually hit the limit for the amount of citation data you can pull from them, they can be frustrating. Some of the work I’m personally doing right now is related to citation analysis and co-authorship analysis. Which allows networks of knowledge flows to be seen. Another method is to do a word analysis within articles to create knowledge networks based on what articles are about, what knowledge is contained in each of the articles. Apparently, in the past, Swartz has done something like this. Some of my colleagues also use techniques to allow additional gathering of information. Most of this information, even with you have legal access, is difficult and very time consuming to procure. In this case, Swartz has access and may have been able to get a hold of this data through other means. JSTOR mentioned in one of their releases that they have a program that allows for high volume access to their publications. 

This case also has made me think of a few other issues with our current knowledge retrieval systems and repositories. Companies need to make money off these publications, so we can’t have them for free. However, through my research, I’ve used articles that are 20 years old. If this knowledge was patented, I would be able to access this and use it with no problem at this point. In many cases, it could happen sooner as many patents aren’t renewed after a certain time frame. Using a scientific article is typically more like using something published under a creative commons license, which means you can remix the information. Through citations you give credit where it is due. In most cases you can get access to the data and models, if you give the person credit, either through citations or co-authorship. Why does this work? Because the research is publicly funded.
Authors can also pay to allow full free access to their work depending on the journal. However, in most cases they don’t, or don’t get the article to be free continuously. However, there is some relief from the burden of paying for individual articles, Google Scholar, is able to find articles that scientists have on their personal websites, and allow access to “working paper” versions, which means they aren’t quite publishable yet, even after they have been published. 
I think for publicly funded research we need to have an exception to the copyright law, which changes it from 70 years to 10 years. Depending on the field even 10 years is to long. The work my wife is doing articles cited which are that old are typically cited because it’s giving credit to trail blazers. These papers are typically cited in the hundreds compared to the average of the tens. Once the copyright expired there would be much more competition for distribution of the articles and reduces the risk to the knowledge community if any given retrieval system or journal fails.
This Swartz case scares me in general, because it will make it even more difficult to access information and care a large risk if you create scripts to make it easier to get access to massive amounts of data.

Hypocrisy of science deniers

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This is something that has been bothering me for a while. People pick and choose the types of science they are willing to accept the validity of the scientific method. This relates to my controversies series where I explained several major controversies in the US. As I said then, people have decided for whatever reason to suspend their acceptance of scientific principles and believe something that is unfounded, been proven to be untrue, or untestable or have simply chosen not to accept the scientific data.

So what am I upset about? Well, each group of these people accept the scientific method in fullness in other situations. The general heuristic used in scientific research is the same in all types of science. The specific methodologies used are typically sources of creativity. Scientists are able to connect strings concepts, and data to create a testable theory to a problem. These theories are then rejected or accepted for more testing. That’s all well and good, but the problem is that people wholeheartedly accept less rigorous testing for other products. You hear the organic crowd talking about how this organic food is so much better for you than that processed apple sprayed with chemical. The reason, because it’s more natural. They also argue that fish oil and vitamins make you feel better. Well, the problem is that there is no actual evidence to support these claims. In many cases, as Michael Specter put it, it just turns into really expensive pee. However, many of them will reject health food science that disputes these claims.

Ok, so I’ve rambled a bit without a good story in this one. People will always be this way. However, this science, layperson disputed science, has lead to amazing breakthroughs that have made our lives better. For instance, because we know evolution to be true, we’re able to test on animals because we are genetically similar to them. We test specific animals in specific ways because of their genetic similarity to us. We are able to non-human organ transplants because of this as well. We have made huge strides in our technologies because of the same methods that developed the theory of evolution, climate change and vaccines. People have no problems, for the most part, using technologies. Adopting these new technologies that in some cases we don’t even really know why or how these technologies work the way they do.

People put more trust in these technologies than they do in well proven science that have lead to life saving inventions, and practices. We cannot pick and chose which sciences we support. We need to support all of them with the understanding that from any of these branches of investigation that something major can be discovered that will make our lives better.

We may not really understand or see how this will happen at first, but looking back we can see the wonders that have arisen because of our voyage into the endless frontier of science.

Economics III

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I’m sorry it’s been so long between my last couple posts. I’ve been pretty busy. Brian just moved to Eindhoven from Austin, so I’ve been hanging out with him, moving to our new place, and then I just read a dance with dragons. In addition to that, I’ve also started working on my research project for the summer. Hopefully things will settle down now and I’ll be able to post blogs more frequently.

So, last week, I was beating up on the neoclassical growth model and my friend came running to it’s defense. He had a good point. The best way to predict the weather is based on what today’s weather is. This might work passably well, but will fail pretty quickly here in the Netherlands and in Pittsburgh. It works really well in Austin. Hot today, going to be hot tomorrow. A better way to predict is to create a range of likely outcomes through simulation. This is what the weather man does on the news. They run simulations based upon the current conditions as well as conditions in the surrounding areas to make a better prediction than just walking outside.

Evolutionary economics is based upon these same ideas. Many of the models are more like climate models rather than mathematical equations. These models have predicted crashes similarly to what happened in 2007, based upon the rules of our economy and behaviors of people within the system. There have been some models that have attempted to create models very similarly to the neoclassical models, which are able to account for more of the differences between growth rates within countries.

I prefer the simulation approach over the mathematical models, because you are able to easily change things. As we have more control over our economy than the weather, these changes can reflect policy choices, changes in regulation as well as increases or decreases in government spending. As these changes build on each other the system can simulate how a series of changes within a short time period may impact the system.

The other benefit of evolutionary economics over neoclassical is the clear tie to how science, technology and education impact the economy. These factors are typically left in the residual or the measure of our ignorance in neoclassical economics. Changes in the rate of adoption or creation of new technologies and scientific breakthroughs can impact the long term health of an economy which everyone knows, but the economists haven’t done the best job showing it under neoclassicalism. If they had, then we would never be cutting education and science funding first. We would be pouring money into these systems to try to spur more discoveries!

Neoclassical economics was useful, however, I think the time for it has passed as it is unable to deal with the complexity of the world. Evolutionary economics looks at the economy as a complex system and is designed to handle it.

Further reading:
Origin of Wealth: http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Wealth-Evolution-Complexity-Economics/dp/157851777X
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQhNZENMG1o&feature=related

Economic Growth II

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So, two days ago I started discussing two different paradigms for economic growth. The first is neo-classical growth, the second is evolutionary economics. I basically asserted that neoclassical growth methods are crap. Well, I should have been a bit more careful. There are situations where they do work and can work well. However, they require a great deal of work to make sure that they actually predict anything. Additionally, they also measure if the economy is going towards or going away from a steady state position.

First, it’s not entirely clear if there is anything as a steady state economy. By steady state I don’t mean no growth at all, it’s more like consistent growth at a specific level. The US supposedly was in a steady state economic condition during the late 90s and early 2000s. However, two recessions, in my opinion, have revealed how flawed this theory of steady state economy is.

So what is neoclassical economics good for? Well, it can be used to predict growth assuming that the economy is capable of absorbing new technologies and innovations. If the economy is able to absorb these and then create manufacturing centers or research centers based on these advancements then the neo-classical growth model can work fairly well. It would work well for most European countries, however, I would still be skeptical of these predictions.

Why? Well, these growth models only capture a part of the economy as I said on Sunday. It also doesn’t predict or deal with changes within the structure of economies. For example, the age of steel was an extremely long lasting period, however, based on neoclassical growth the city of Pittsburgh should not have worried about shifting to a new area.

So what is evolutionary economics then? Well, I’ll get to that tomorrow.