Suppose you are interested in the level of a state variable (e.g. a disease is present or absent or of a pre-specified level of severity, a failure is recorded or not, etc.) and have a potentially useful but imperfect diagnostic test method, (e.g. a blood test result for this disease, or a quality control check for a manufacturing failure, is either definitely positive or not) . How do you interpret the result of the diagnostic test for the level of the state variable when the some or all of the information underlying the inference is ambiguous (imprecise)?

The first video clip basically walks through how to use and interact with  the graphical reasoning aid for posterior inferences that Phil and I have developed for the Mathematica Demonstration project. To actually use the player file yourself you need  this mathematica notebook (it has a .nbp extension) and  the freely downloadable Mathematica Player . There are 3 steps to getting going here:

1. Go to  Wolfram (makers of Mathematica)  and download the free Mathematica Player . You'll need to install the player, but usually your operating sytem will guide you through this.
2. Download the .nbp file from this page  or go to for the Mathematica Demonstration project and download the file on ambiguity we have published  there any other interesting demonstration. Look for an orange tab at the top left that says "download live version"
3. Open it from the Player and use the sliders to explore.

Of course the real trick here is to understand what it is you are doing - ie concepts concepts concepts! The additional information in this post just below the video clips contains a simple exposition of the logic of the interface. For a readable introduction to ideas of ambiguity have a look at a paper Phil Gunby and I have written.  It's a bit overstated but it does get across the point: namely it's not only being able to calculate inverse probabilities from precise numbers expressing sensitivities, specificities, and base rates, but also to explore how much ambiguity in any one or more of those inputs creates ambiguity in the final output (the inverse probability you are interested in).

The second video clip  is a quickie tutorial style webcast demonstrating  a graphic pencil and paper approach to inverse probability reasoning - ie how you can use graphical methods and robustness analysis for posteriro inferences when the basic inputs into that posteriro analysis are not precise.

First video clip: an introduction to the basic dynamic interface in the Mathematica Player used for exploring the effects of ambiguities on inferences:


Second video clip: back of the envelope type diagrams for examining ambiguity in inverse inference.



Let S be the logical truth value (1 or 0) of a proposition about the state variable (e.g. a disease is present or absent or a pre-specified level of severity, a failure is recorded or not, etc.), and let D be the logical truth value of a proposition about the outcome an imperfect diagnostic test for the state (e.g. the test result for this disease or failure is either definitely positive or not). Then our question is, in the language of statistics: how do (and should) people conceptualize and calculate a posterior inference about S after having observed some D when some or all of the underlying information about D, about S, and about the relationship between D and S is ambiguous (imprecise)?

From a statistical perspective there are 3 precise numerical inputs that feed into a coherent posterior inferences about binary valued S after having observed the result of the binary valued diagnostic signal D: a sensitivity number, a specificity number, and a base rate number. The first two numbers  characterize uncertainty about the results of the diagnostic D under two different information conditions about the state S. The sensitivity number expresses uncertainty about whether the diagnostic test D will be positive, i.e. D=1, assuming that S=1 is true. The specificity number expresses an uncertainty about whether the diagnostic test D for S=1 will be negative, i.e. D=0, assuming that S=0 is true. The third number, the base rate number, characterizes uncertainty about the the binary state variable S in the absence of , or prior to knowing, any diagnostic information D.

These numerically precise inputs can be presented in a variety of logically equivalent frames or formats to someone who wishes to make posterior inferences about the state variable S. Two stylized facts are known: (1) a majority of ordinary yet intelligent people, lay and professional alike, do not perform the posterior inference task well and (2) these same people typically do worse when information on the 3 numbers is presented in the standard probability formats favoured by statisticians compared to natural frequency formats favoured by behavioural psychologists (see references below involving Gigerenzer). Sometimes tabular and graphical means of communicating the relevant numerical information along with conventional descriptive textual methods are helpful decision aids in either format, although they are by no means panaceas for the problem. Yet virtually all research into the problem (statistical innumeracy) and the potential solutions (alternative formatting aids) ignores the problem of ambiguity. Research shows that decision makers recognize the inherent incompleteness underlying the numerical information presented, no matter what the format, even if they don't know exactly how to incorporate these ambiguities into their inferences. This interactive Demonstration is designed to facilitate the "what-if" exploration of the effects of ambiguities (imprecision) in sensitivity, specificity, and base rate information, alone or in combination, on posterior inferences through a linked tabular natural frequency and graphical probability format representation of underlying uncertainties .

Figure: static picture from Mathematica interface
























The table and the graphic in the Demonstration are set up in the following way. The truth table in the Demonstration shows the four logical possibilities for the two propositions S and D being true or false together. Frequencies or counts (hypothetical, although possibly based on some direct observations)  for each of the 4 logical possibilities in the columns (cells) are specified initially so that for 20 out of 100 the proposition S is true, S=1, while for 80 out of 100 the proposition S is false, S=0. This, gives a base rate for the truth of the proposition S of 20 out of 100, or 20%, shown as a triangle on the x-axis at 0.2 in the figure. At the initial values for the sliders, the sensitivity of the diagnostic test P(D|S=1) is set at 16 out of 20 or 80%, shown as a circle on the right hand margin of the graph; i.e. of the 20 cases where S is true, S=1, 16 also show a positive diagnostic result, D=1.  At the initial values for the sliders, the specificity of the test, P(D=0|S=0)=1- P(D|S=0) , is set at 56 out of 80, or 70%, shown as a circle on the left hand margin of the graph at a height of 30% , 100%-70%: i.e. of the 80 cases where S is false, S=0, 56 or 70% don't have a positive diagnostic, but 24 or 30% do. The resulting precise posterior probability for S being true given a positive diagnostic, P(S|D=1), is 40% or 0.4 in a probability format or 16 out of 40 (from 16+24 cases where D=1) in a natural frequency format, shown as a large square box on the x-axis top margin. A corresponding smaller square on the x-axis along the bottom margin finds the level of the other posterior probability, P(S|D=0). This is, the posterior probability for S being true given a diagnostic outcome that is not positive. The graphic deliberately does not focus on this posterior inference, as we are concentrating attention on the question: how should one interpret a positive diagnostic signal, or D=1? Note, there is a third probability , the base rate or the (unconditional probability) for the diagnostic signal, here 16+24=40 out of 100, or 40%, which can also be calculated given the sensitivity, specificity, and base rate numbers.
 

There are many interesting probability assessments in this simple model, but only 3 logically independent ones. The dotted and dashed lines in the figure are two linear constraints on a coherent inference process. There are two "base rates" , P(S) and P(D), one for the state variable S  and one for the diagnostic test D. P(S) is the marginal or unconditional probability of the proposition that S is true, S=1, i.e. that the underlying state variable is at the pre specified level. P(D) is the marginal or unconditional probability for the diagnostic test result being positive, i.e. that D=1 is true. It is important to recognize that these base rates are not logically independent of one another. The chances that S is true,  S=1, written as P(S=1) or in shorthand P(S), is a weighted average of the chances of S being true with a positive diagnostic, P(S|D=1), and the chances of S being true with a nonpositive diagnostic, or P(S|D=0). The corresponding weights are the chances P(D=1) of a positive diagnostic and the chances of a non-positive diagnostic, P(D=0)=1-P(D=1),  that is:
     P(S) = P(S|D=1)*P(D=1) + P(S|D=0)*P(D=0).

The dotted/dashed line between the squares is all combinations of {P(S),P(D)} that satisfy this equation for the given endpoints, which are conditional probabilities. . At the same time, the base rate or marginal probability P(D) for positive diagnostic results must be an appropriate weighted average of positive diagnostic results when S is true (sensitivity) and the positive diagnostic results when S is false (1 minus specificity) : that is,

    P(D) = P(D|S=1)*P(S=1) + P(D|S=0)*P(S=0).

The dotted/ dashed between the two circles plots all pairs {P(S),P(D)} satisfying this relationship. The intersection of the two lines solves for the unique pair of base rates for S and D, {P(S),P(D)}, that satisfies both linear relationships.
 

Changing any of the 3 components of one of the linear relationships means the components of the other relationship change as well. The Demonstration is set up so that the endpoints (capturing the sensitivity and the specificity settings) and base rate along the dotted/ dashed between the two circles can be changed by the sliders, and the endpoints of the corresponding changes in the dotted/ dashed between the two squares trace out the relevant posterior inferences, P(S|D=1) and P(S|D=0), with the emphasis on the former. There are two sets of sliders, one for reference purposes, the other to examine the impacts of changes in the underlying sensitivity, specificity and base rate information, either separately or jointly. For example, starting out with the initial values of sensitivity of 80%, specificity of 70% and base rate of 20%, changing one or all of the top set of 3 sliders alters the posterior inferences - but leaves visible the reference specifications. Of course the reference specification itself can also be changed by changing the sliders in the lower box. A fuller explanation of the coherency relationships involved in Bayes Theorem is available in the Demonstration Project titled "Bayes Theorem and Inverse Probability". Project Bayes Theorem and Inverse Probability.
 


References
Edwards, Adrain and Gigerenzer Gerd, "Simple Tools For Understanding Risks: From Innumeracy To Insight" British Medical Journal , Vol. 327, No. 7417 (Sep. 27, 2003), pp. 741-744.
Gigerenzer, Gerd and Ulrich Hoffrage (1995)  "How to Improve Bayesian Reasoning Without Instruction:
Frequency Formats" Psychological Review, 102 (4), 684704
Han,Paul K. J. ,  William M. P. Klein, Thomas C. Lehman, Holly Massett, Simon C. Lee and Andrew N. Freedman (2009) "Laypersons' Responses to the Communication of Uncertainty Regarding Cancer Risk Estimates "  Medical Decision Making , Vol. 29, No. 3, 391-403
Lad, Frank Operational Subjective Statistical Methods: A Mathematical, Philosophical, and Historical Introduction Wiley-Interscience (1996)
Mukerji, Sujoy "Foundations of Ambiguity and Economic Modelling" Economics and Philosophy, 25 (2009) 297-302
Schapira M, Nattinger A, McHorney C. Frequency or Probability? A Qualitative Study of risk Communication Formats Used in Health Care. Medical Decision Making 2001 ;21:459-67. 
Snapshot 1: A basic starting point
Snapshot 2: Changing the base rate
Snapshot 3: Changing the specificty

 

I have converted the flash streaming versions of the 4 HHMI 2008 Holiday Lectures series "Making Your Mind: Molecules, Motion, and Memory,"  into mp4 files, about 200 mb each . EVentually these should be available on itunes..but until then....just click to download (the original flash files can be viewed on line at HHIMi   Click here
 .

Lecture 1: Mapping Memory in the Brain, by Eric R. Kandel, M.D.

Lecture 2: Building Brains: The Molecular Logic of Neural Circuits, by Thomas M. Jessell, Ph.D.


Lecture 3: Plan of Action: How the Spinal Cord Controls Movement, by Thomas M. Jessell, Ph.D.

Lecture 4:Memories are Made of This, by Eric R. Kandel, M.D.

Against Monopoly referred me to The Misunderstood Idea of Copyright by Karl-Erik Tallmo. As ever when i read about copyright by non economists (and some economists) I get frustrated. Todays frustration is about the idea of modularity in language (and thinking, and culture) and the inefficiency of privatizing modular public goods.

Let me (start to) explain....

The first text you see after you click on Tallmo's page is:

This text may not be re-published, printed or copied without the author's permission.
Copyright © Karl-Erik Tallmo

What does "this" refer to? We all understand that it probably means something like "the text that follows", but let's take it at its literal meaning, a  self referential meaning?  Karl wrote this sentence "This text may not be re-published, printed or copied without the author's permission"  in an html file . But so did I.  I Googled the sentence   and had over 100,000 hits. Of course not all are clones of my sentence or Karl's sentence - ie I'm sure there are many "derivative works" that reshuffle the words , adding or omitting other words, to write the "same" idea but just "express" it a slightly  different way. Perhaps what I wrote and what karl wrote is really a derivative work from those other sources? But any way you cut the cake  this sentence has been used, written down, said, thought, recorded , thousands of times by thousands of individuals in the past and will be so used in the future. So who is "copying" who? My answer - no one is copying anyone else despite the near identity in what they assert. Whose permission does Karl have to seek, do I have to seek? Or does anyone/everyone EveryMan and EveryWoman who writes, thinks, speaks, records  this sentence have to seek permission from everyone else who writes, thinks, speaks, records this sentence...in an infinte , and completely non-operational - regress? My answer - no permissions need be sought.

The fact is Karl , I don't need your permission (nor do you need mine, nor does anyone else need anyone else's permission) to rewrite this sentence, to publish it in their blog or anywhere else, to print it in any form, etc.... Every letter in this sentence (every black black dot on a white piece of paper when printed or an electrical charge on a screen when being viewed or modulated into a sound wave when being spoken) is in the public domain. There is no originating author whose permission needs to be sought for any of the 20 odd characters from the (an) alphabet and related  grammatical symbols (including spaces)  or for  the 13 words in the sentence we are examining. I can find an "origin" for any and possibly every such sentence in the sense of a person who writes speaks records etc, but I don't need to, and I probably couldn't, find one unique originator that precedes in time - or thought -  every other originator and to whom any later originator owes obeiscance in the sense of needing to ask for permission....current understandings of copyright not withstanding.

So there is definitely one complete sentence on Karl's page which is exempt from the permissions and ownership claim that Karl asserts.

It's not "your" (private good) land Karl that other's "have to" (under some threat of violence or harm against them)  keep off.

What about the next phrase: "the misunderstood idea of copyright"? Hmm,  lets try an ill-formed syllogism:

• copyright is an idea,
• some ideas are misunderstood,
• therefore copyright  is misunderstood.

In order to think about  and discuss   my thinking about the truth or falsity of this claim with others, ie  the idea or notion  of copyright being misunderstood , this assertion - copyright is an idea - , that syllogism (incorrect as it may be), the question - is copyright misunderstood? , the suggestion - that copyright is perhaps a misunderstood idea,..... I churn the words and semi-associated concepts out, rearrange them, permute them, organise them into logical forms , sometimes in my head, sometimes on a piece of paper, sometimes on my computer. The fact that you (and thousands of others) have taken these five words:

1. the
2. misunderstood
3. idea
4. of
5. copyright

and wrote then down in your blog, html file , scrap of paper or...(and used structures like phrases and sentences and syllogisms, themselves modular components  abstracted from particular placeholder content) gives neither you, nor they, nor me  any exclusive ownership claim to these words in any and all their permutations . [In spite of the institutional fact of a completely unenforceable and inefficient legislation (itself expressed in public domain letters words sentences phrases)  that says yes you , indeed anyone, has an (exclusive) and monopolistic claim to whatever you write down say record etc and others have to ask your permision to "copy" it in the sense of themselves writing recording saying that "same" thing.]

Which part of this phrase "the misunderstood idea of copyright" is yours Karl? and which part of the phrase "the misunderstood idea of copyright" is mine? and which part belongs to anyone else who ever thought or said or wortoe or signed these words? El Zippo. None. Zero. No matter how often you assert it as yours.

I suggest that every sentence in the article Karl wrote, and indeed every sentence in almost anything that anyone else wrote or writes or speaks or records, can be analyzed this way. Broken down into its constituent parts, ie modular pieces,  99.9% of evrything ever written has been and will be used by somebody else. So if no piece "belongs" to anyone person exclusively, then every one of those pieces can be isolated, expressed, used, printed, reprinted..and reassembled...through structures that thesmelevs are modular components, waiting for placeholders to fill  them in, where the placeholders are more modular components (phrases, words) of yet other modular components, letters, marks,  etc) all arranged by and through logical structures like syllogisms that are also modular components. Publicly accessible modularity rules OK.
.
You really think that it's the "whole" thing together tha is "yours", the "authors"? Well Imagine a separation between the "author" and the person doing the expressing, a writer, a stenographer, a text from speeech recognizing machine. Take a template like the following "algorithm for a Logical argument".  A 12 sentence paragraph has a modular form:  Proposition 1; Proposition 2; Proposition 3; proposition 4'...proposition 12. Draw an arrtifical dividing line.  Now the first 10 are antecedents, the second 10 are consequents. Even numbered propositions explicate the odd numbered propsitions preceding them. Of course any paragraph could have a similar logical fomr, perhaps with 2 raher than 1  explanatory propositions for every positive proposition: I received a ticket for a bungy jump for my birthday. (explain bungy jump, explain birthday...). But when it came time to use it I chickened out. (explain "use" explain chickening out"). I asked for a refund (explain ask, refund). I received a Teddy Bear in exchange (explain Teddy Bear , exchange ).   Do you see what I mean here? the paragraph, the arrangement of propositions in a form : assert X, explain components of X, repeat several times, draw conclusion, is nothing new under the sun. Neither you nor any other "author" owns this template for an argument ...its been around for Yonks (a lon g time) - its a modular sturcture that nobody can (yet) exclude others for using ("copying" and "using" aren't distingusihable here) .

Having isolated that structure I ask again...Is that structure yours? No? Are any of the component sentences yours? No. So what exactly is yours that i have to ask permission about. Which sentence is "original" to Karl? Yes he is the author in the sense of the originating person wrting down, typing in, recording from speech recognition software , whatever; but yes too every one of the letters, words, phrases, and quite possibly entire sentences is and has been used by others, (and also the templates for arguments usualy found in a pargaraph at a time and thru a set of paragraphs ) . Indeed there is hardly anything new in what Karl writes at all. Of course ditto for everyone else. We, all of us writers, are reproducers...we just don't (and probably couldn't) acknowledge our sources, nor our sources sources, nor our sources sources sources.....even if we bother to look for them...and we certainly wouldn't waste our time asking our sources sources sources for their (sources) permissions .

Put more generally, the notion of n originating author is a red herring. We are all scribes Ok I exaggerate - in 99.8% of what we think and express we're superb imitators ("pirates"?) of structure and of content . Always have been, always will be.

Let me put this another way. Are propositions in the language of mathematics copyrightable? Does anyone treat them sa copyrightable? Whenever an economist wites : imagine a utility function Ui(x1,x2...) for n consumers with budge stes p.xi=m blah blah amd writes down his her optimization or equilibrium model, neither the deductive form nor the individual propositions are exclusively owned by anyone else. No one needs anyone else's permission to write down such equations and sets of derivations. Daily I read equations in professional journals of the form f(x1,x2,x3,,,,)=y. SOme people take derivatives of these equations to find other sets of equations, some people integrate these equations. There are some very general rules for maniplating general kinds of equations, like "take the first derivative with respect to a variable". No owns these rules though hundreds of textbooks on calculus exist that use them and thousands mor eprofessional papers and undergatuate essays and MA and PhD theses; no one "owns"(=exclusively owns)  x^2-1=4 and I'm not "copying" anyone else when I write it down and use it in my work or to set a homework problem or whatever.

Now back to the phrase "the misunderstood idea of copyright": What I am doing when I "use" [think, express]  these five words as INPUT is the same as what you are doing when you use these five words as INPUT - bu that doesn't make these (public good) inputs yours, nor mine, even though  the OUTPUT you produce in your html file and the OUTPUT I produce on my scrap of paper "looks" and or "means" the same to an educated reader  as the (public good) INPUTS accessed in some other form. I can and do use these words, and modular forms of persuasive arguments, them without your permission and you used them without my permission, or anybody else's permission. Until I read your article I never actually had heard of you, nor your argument, nor your use of these 5 words in that phrase. The "fact" that you expresed these five words doesn't make them individually or in combination yours at all in the sense that I have to aks you for permission to use them. 

Of course, you can get a legislator (for a price) to "grant you" a monopoly on a public good INPUT, and all the coercive power of the State to enforce that exclsuive monopolistic grant. That was the whole point of Bastiat's famous Candlemaker's Petition .

an AFterthought:

As for Karl's idea that you need to have a modern copyright law to be "able" to make your written work available for free, that is  rubbish. The enforcement of a promise by me to make what I have written available for free comes through the ease of reproduction by my competitors in the production process , not through a law sanctioning use of coercive police power to chase down anyone making money from repackaging what I have made available for free- cut and paste in todays' world. The fact that someone cuts and pastes, then publishes in some form, eg in a book, then charges for that book...and others actually pay for that book when they could cut and paste the same text of mine for free (as I did with the material from Bastiat)   needs no copyright (monopoly privelege) for its enforcement. Check out the myriad ways that Boldrin and Levine's book Against Intellectual Monopoly or Larry Lessig's Free Culture is published distributed used etc - anyone free to do anything they like with it, including comercialize it in parts or in other forms or.....You don't need copyright law for that (although you might like such intellectual monopoly to chase down competitors and top them from doing what they do best).

This is, to me, an important point. Competition and ease of entry exit provides the means of enforcement for selling at or around marginal cost. I run an ice cream shop. I love giving away ice creams for free to kids, to adults, to anyone. I don't have a monopoly on the idea of giving away ice creams to people. Others can enter and exit this ice cream industry very cheaply, and charge for their ice creams. MAybe they even buy their ice cream in cones off of me-- or more likely smart entrepreneurial kids who accept gifts from em and resell to others (who am i to say they shouldn't prefer cash in hand from reselling than the free ice creams i give them?) --repackage them and sell them for $3. But they won't stay in business long if their ice creams are "identical" to mine. I don't "need" to have an enfoceable monopoly right against them to give my stuff away. How do I prevent them from charging $3 for the same ice cream I give awya for nothing?  I don't. I can't. But I don't have to. They'll only sell ice creams for $3 when I am selling the "same" product if there is some added characetristic that others pay for. I only give ice cream  free to kids, not adults (as if the line is clear - think of alcohol sales prohibitions); to prevent arbitrage between the discriminatory markets I set up I might find the coercive power of the state useful  if i don't have to pay for the hired thugs to enforce the anti competitive activities I undertake in suppressing (child) competiton. But ice cream cones are not too durable and a melted ice cream cone in a kids grubby hands delivered to an adult 5 minutes after i scoop it out on a hot summers day....well, i don't really expect much competition!. Now consider something more durable, eg   Boldrin and Levine's book. I download the pdfs for my students. I create audio recordings from the pdfs for some of my Asian students who do not have english as their first language. Maybe some of them listen to the audio and retranslate it for themsleves in a voice recording? I annotate copies for myself and my  grad students. And I buy my own copy at Amazon for a reasonable price because books are more protable and durable  (for me)  when I travel and am away from my computer to use Adobe Acrobat to make my margin notes in. B&L don't "need" copyright law for any of these activites to take place. Low reproduction costs and high litigation costs  mean the "law" is simply irrelevant. (Breaking  up the collusive collective RMIA type entities who economize on enforcement costs by acting collectively through the apparatus of the State would go a long way to making copyright legislation simply irrelevant - ie rasing the litigation cost to any "complainant")

phil
check out this short video clip i put together on what bothers me about using the transaction prices you and ann have obtained: what can we learn from these transaction prices about relative valuations ? Well not a lot. The reason is becasue  (1) it's marginal not average valuations that transaction prices reveal and (2) theory could be very indeterminate here on what to expect given you have a wealth maximizer trading with a govt agency like DOC.

My general equilib version of the theory has DOC (and LINZ) totally unconcerned with development potential of land..but that very fact leaves open a huge potential for (a) efficnet exchnages (efficient between these two trading parties, not efficien in the sense of chanig the objectives of the govt bargaining agent) and an extremely wide variation in the range of avergae rates of exchange betweeen mountain top graing land and lakeside development land - which is precisley what you observe. This isn't to say some other bargaining theory won't narrow down the range of permissible (in the theory) exchanges, but it does create room for explaining the trades that do occur in terms  fo a simple GE model via variation in endowment point relative to aggregate acres of the tow types of land.

Anyhow
check it out
apologies for the rapid fire commentary but i was in a rush to get away....

Last week's   In our Time Radio 4 BBC weekly program on the Translation Movement should be of interest to every economic historian, and especially those interested in the role of intellectual monopoly (property) in the growth of knowledge. That is, there was none - ie no intellectual property  -  and two breathtaking renaissances with out it, one Arabic, the other European.
According to Melvyn Bragg and his 3 commentators the 9th century  translation of Greek texts on health, mathematics, philosophy, religion, and  engineering into Arabic was THE critical factor in the flowering of science and culture in the Islam world for the next several centuries  , and indirectly (through the much later translation of Arabic texts into Latin) was hugely influential in the growth of the European Renaissance. Of course we're also talking "derivative works" here, since "translation" often involved detailed commentary, elaboration and interpretation, and what the author regarded as correction, as well as   modification.
Do we have a "natural experiment" here? Two great eras of flourishing knowledge in science, philosophy, arts, trade commerce ... ie  culture ...built on, amongst other things, absence of tightly enforced national or international  exclusive rights in knowledge products ?  . As I listened to this fascinating discussion it made me think of two important costs in using and communicating knowledge, one that modifies the receiving units, the other than modifies the originating content. The first , and the largest, is the language barrier, language and literacy...overcome by education. But education in language and literacy is expensive, especially so for people already educated in one language, here Arabic, needing to learn another language, Greek, to "learn" (more)  at all. Much easier (cheaper) to transalte the original source material...which of coure involves copying. But transalating was expensive - it is a manual, labour and intellect intensive task, with wages (in current dollars) of $24k PER MONHTH (if the commentators on the program are to be believed). So with costs of training the receivers (human beings) really high and  the costs of copying and translating (recoding) really high, but NO IP costs for original copies, these societies still manage to create two Renaissances. Now in our era,  costs of modifying receivers (education in specific languages) and/or costs of copying and recoding to suit those receivers is really low, do we have a Renaissance? Well, maybe yes, maybe no. One thing for sure from this history lesson - when original copy costs are low even if reproduction costs are high, knowledge can flourish and be expanded on, changed, improved, developed, diseminated in the absence of intellectual porperty rights. And the counter factual  question is most interesting: what would have happened had a tightly enforced national and international system of copyright protection system existed "protecting" greek authors from "pirate" activities in the 9th century, and in later centuries Arabic authors from Latin transaltors? I guess it is a sign of   our times that we regard translators who don't pay as "pirates" and prosecute them as  criminals  , whereas during these two Renaissance eras transaltors who didn't pay were regarded as cultural heroes (and well paid for it) .

Lynne and I recently spent a week relaxing at Malolo Island resort in Fiji. It was terrific - great people, stunning natural beauty, and just slow and easy.."fiji time". Here's a collage of pictures.

cheers
john

I love reading, making margin notes, and keeping a wring binder of more extensive notes for the books I read. Unfortunately I read a lot of books - and have a lot of handwritten ring binder notes that re more or less unusuable becasue of the time costs for me of entering the text for the relevant notes. So recently I purchased MacSpeech Dictate Mac Speech's home page  (I could have chosen Dragon Naturally and used it through Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac (Intel on my  Mac - but I chose to go with a native-to-the mac programme that has licensed the Dragon NAturally speech recognition technology).

So attached here is a screen capture of how effective this note taking is. You'll see its not perfect by any means - but a large part of the problem is the lack of clarity in my speech. When I enunciate clearly - instead of slurring words and speaking too quickly the programme does a great job. Moreoever, its actually pretty easy to correct mistakes - either through voice commands or through the usual mouse select cut past retype type commands - or as you'll see in the attached video a combination of the two.

The book I am reading here is Yoram Barzel's An economic theory of the state around page 36 and 37. Here's the book o Amazon: A Theory of the State: Economic Rights, Legal Rights, and the Scope of the State (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)It's slow going as I read and think about what Barzel is saying.....but you can see how it is possible to think off the top of your head as you read, pause to collect your ideas, rephrase them etc using this speech recognition software.

Why are private ticket resellers ("scalpers") for the Warrior's big game on Friday being vilified by disgruntled fans, uncritical media reporters, and Warriors' management?

Let's go back to demand and supply basics. Ticket reselling in an open competitive retail market situation like Trade-me is a good thing for fans, not a bad thing. Every resale of an event ticket on Trade me is to the mutual advantage of both the buyer and the seller. There is no coercion. There is no monopolistic price gouging. There are no back door dealings between mates or ostentatious corporate party packages at wildly inflated prices involved.

Lets suppose there were 10,000 additional tickets made publicly available for Friday's big game, at typical Warriors game prices of $25 to $60 (half price for kids). At these relatively low prices there apparently was huge excess demand - thousands more people wanting to buy tickets than the number of seats available at Mt Smart stadium. Tickets got allocated in the first instance to whoever got through to Ticketek on the phone lines or over the internet....and then they get reallocated through a competitive trading process on Trade me.

Imagine that these 10,000 tickets could be resold on Trade-me for prices of say $300 each. That's 10,000 happy kiwis. A fan who bought four tickets for himself and his family at $25 each can , after resale, watch the game with his family on the new flat screen television and Sky Sport subscription he can now afford with the extra $1100 cash he has in hand. And the fan who paid $300 for each of the four tickets gets to go to a game that he and his mates really wanted to (where "really" is measured by their willingness to shell out even more than $300 to watch this live performance rather than walk down to the local sports bar to watch the games). Everybody's happy.

So who is complaining, and why? Fans who don't get tickets at the open market price on Trade me? Well, that's the way a competitive auction market works. If you can't pay the going market price in a Trade-me auction you don't get the goods - whether the goods are resold cars, resold houses, resold clothes or...resold event tickets. What about fans who paid $300 on Trade-me, got their ticket, but are bitter because they weren't fast enough off the mark (or in the right "mates rates" loop) to get the first lot of tickets at $25 each direct from Ticketek or the Warriors. Well, any buyer would like to pay a low price rather than a higher price. The problem is that there were lots and lots of would be buyers at a $25 price, far too many for the 10,000 available seats. In economics speak we call that a shortage, an excess of demand over supply, at a price of $25. Prices rise to clear the market, making demand equal to supply at the going market price. So if you are willing to pay more than $300 to take in the excitement of the big game and you got a ticket at that price consider yourself lucky - there are other people who would gladly take your place.

The idea that a "real fan" would never sell a ticket for the live game for a higher price than he/she paid is rubbish. Fan's differ greatly in their personal situation or willingness to pay to see live performances by the Warriors. Consider the thousands of season ticket holders who suffered through the first half of the Warriors season. Dad and the kids can go to the game live - or resell their 4 tickets for $1000. Would you begrudge them that choice? Does it make them any less of a fan because they prefer $1000 in the hand to watching the game live? Ditto for the local league club that has been gifted say 25 tickets to the game. Of course it's great (for the select few club members) to watch the Warriors live - but 25x$250 is $6,250. That buys a lot of uniforms for the kids, ground maintenance and improvement, new locker rooms, transportation, etc. Sure it would be nice to have both ($6,250 to spend on the club AND some live tickets) but when the choice is there many sensible club managers would, for the good of the game and the glory of the Warriors, opt for the cash in hand.

I'd like to ask the Warriors CEO Wayne Scurrah in particular, and the shareholdrs and management for the Warriors and Mt Smart Stadium - to reconsider their views on ticket reselling. Moralistic stereotypes of resellers as "scalpers" just doesn't cut it. Competitive re-trading markets do. I'm not questioning the contractual right of the stadium owner and event providers to trade the seats they provide under whatever terms - such as no reselling - they negotiate. But would you consider the idea that permitting and legitimizing ticket reselling could be both profitable for the sellers and preferable to fans?

Major sports team-owners (baseball, basketball, football) in the US have taken a different attitude towards online, direct reselling. The teams and leagues have given up trying (ineffectively) to crush the growing trade in direct reselling of event-tickets online, estimated at $US3 billion annually. Nowadays they either have their own on-line reselling sites (and take a fee for this service) or deal with brokers like StubHub, an online re-trading institution where fans resell their event-tickets and where sports teams refer their fans to in order to resell their tickets. ALL fans benefit , and the providing clubs benefit by getting a revenue slice they otherwise wouldn't have from referalls or brokerage fees (see a nice op-ed opinion piece on this by Jeff Jacoby and also a recent NY time article ).

Fraud, not price gouging, is the biggest problem in event-ticket reselling. Large, reputable, online trading institutions, with their coterie of specialist resellers and verification methods, and publicly accessible and transparent open auction methods, actually solve both problems. For example, StubHub provides guarantees of ticket legitimacy, tickets being in adjacent blocks, and refunds for cancelled events as a component of its online services, for a fee. Online sites run by team and venue owners use electronic-swipe ticketing methods to record and register transfers as well as to guarantee legitmacy of resold tickets.

Once you look at the issue of reselling event tickets in this way it opens up some new ways of thinking about allocating event tickets in the first place. Why no auction off a sizeable number of tickets for every game in the first place? Indeed, if I were a shareholder in either the Warriors or Mt Smart, I'd be asking some hard questions about why this wasn't done for the pricing of public tickets for the playoff games in the first place. If 10,000 tickets are sold between $25-$60 each, ie, for between $250K and $600K ,and they could have been sold for $300 each, ie for $3 million, who is accountable for the last $2.5 million in revenue?

It's not good enough to trot out a generalisation that the whole idea is to make the game affordable for fans. Which fans? At playoff time there are too many fans for the available number of seats. Some get in for a low price but many more don't get in at all. Has the game been made affordable for those who lose out in the ticket rush? Even if the Warriors gave away 10,000 tickets for free to whoever they deemed worthy (past supporters, mates of past supporters, kids clubs, one ticket for every amateur league player in Auckland), those particular ticket holders will be made better off by having the possibility of being able to resell their tickets in a competitive marketplace.

The key is that team-owners, stadium owners, fans and policy makers recognize and invest in the benefits of competitive secondary markets in event-tickets. Is that too much to ask?

Steffan, and Glenn, and  Lisa

Steffan here is how I do the quadratic scoring rule in mathematica. Before you look at it do have a look at Fig 2 in the paper....and Glenn please also make a correction to the equation A7 in Appendix A and to equation 2.2 page 17 - there are so many tiny superscripts and brackets  in here that I don't notice the error until I tried to use it to explain t o steffan what formulae to use.

 


















here is Fig 2 - Steffan whatever formulae you use after it is parameterized correctly you should be able to p;ot something that looks like the curve in this boundary.


The paramters just specify the size of the enclosing box, the position and the shape of that curve. The position and shape  is specified by three parameters - the degree of curvature and the intercept along the 45 degree line and the slope at that intercept on the 45 degree line. (measured relative to the upper right hand corner not the lower left).
 Once you depart from the standar QSR you may have to be a little more careful about boundary conditions to keep the opportunity set all in positive orthant).

Here is a little video clip showing you what I do to program this in mathematica
hope it helps
john

Good news. I just received the OK from Land Information NZ publications office that there is no copyright on Survey and Lands documents. So here is THE definitive history of land settlement policy in NZ  written by W Jourdain, a Supreme Court Solicitor and CHief Clerk for the Department of Survey and Lands at the time.

•  Jourdain, R.W. History of Land Legislation and Settlement in NZ , (Government Printer, Wellington 1925) in one hit (18MB) or in two parts pp1-48  pp48-end

Jourdain is "dry" and but the institutional detail at the micro level about the implicit and explicit "property rights" being defined and redefined in the changing policies and legislation of the time is very good.

The following two articles written in  1909 by WD Stewart, both from the Journal of Political Economy   provide a very interesting perspective on questions of Land monopoly and Land tenure policies in NZ. Stewart's analysis exams how public policy - and private interests - interacted from the 1870's through to 1907 to address  two questions (1) If land assets are to be a source of revenue for the State should the state sell its lands outright or lease them? (2) What is the most effective means of preventing land monopoly and the aggregation of large estates? 

• Land Tenure and Land Monopoly in New Zealand: I
  William Downie Stewart
  The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 17, No. 2. (Feb., 1909), pp. 82-91.
  JSTOR link URL
• Land Tenure and Land Monopoly in New Zealand: II
  William Downie Stewart
  The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 17, No. 3. (Mar., 1909), pp. 144-152.
  JSTOR link URL

Stewart has a sharp eye for the incentives created by changing contractual and legislative rules and policies , both  financial and political.  He notes that from  the 1870's all policy makers were becoming increasing aware that large scale infrastructure investments paid for from the public purse (in combination with other economy wide demand and supply side changes ) were creating windfall gains for landholders, and that the state was losing out on a valuable source of revenue from rental income on its land.  He describes the origin of and also  the folly (from the state's perspective) of  the infamous 999 year leases at fixed rents (4% of initial - circa 1895-land value), the  misrepresentation of private values in compulsory takings proceedings/bargaining in the breakup of large estates, and the  strategic manipulation of small scale "legal"  preemptive freeholding rights (part parcel call options in todays terminology) that were bundled in with pastoral lease/license rights. Stewart's articles also  have an uncanny prescience: he notes that at the time (late 1800's up to  1909) one fundamental objection to the principle of state ownership of land with long term renewable licenses leases and periodic rents determined by the State (for State  income generating purposes)   is that the growth in political power of license holders  would leave the State vulnerable to continual  appeals for rent reduction (with the taxpayer bearing the opportunity cost) and to attempts to use the political process to freehold licensed/leased land and bargain basement prices. Times haven't changed!

DRM lock-in is starting to get exposed for what it is - hopefully potential buyers will realize the end game, backward induct, and reuse to buy from the outset. Yes it is inefficient in labour time and quality loss to copy your DRM protected audio and video files with readily available screen and audio capture software. But it is (may be more) inefficient to purchase DRM coded content form fly by night suppliers, here today, gone (with your digital keys) tomorrow. Of course the fly by night suppliers can be the big guys as well as the shady operators, as two recent ars technica posts reveal. Take the major league baseball suppliers as well as Microsoft service providers.
Post purchase servicing of durable goods is usually something savvy consumers look for. WHen you spend $500 on a washing machine you expect to be able to use it as and when you want , including when you change homes , and under various contingencies, eg  when the motor dies, or the fan belt cracks, or the outlet pipe leaks, or....There are a myriad of service technicians, specilaized in these sorts of timely appliance repairs, who can usually deal with any washing machine (or other durable appliance) made by any manufacturer -  you are not even locked in to your original supplier for post sales service. Consumers know this, and care about it when they lay down their purchase price. But suppose you build up a library of 500 songs/videos at $2 a piece -that's two washing machines eh? But will you be able to do your laundry when you changes houses (computing playing devices) in the future or under various contingnencies? Will the companies that hold your product keys, that permit you to unlock your songs and use them on new computer equipment, well usually on 5 computers (why 5? beats the trinity by two, but falls short of infinity by a lot) - will these guys be around? WHy would you expect them to be? The two articles on ars technica remind us that there are important (and opportunistic) reasons why they wont be here, or that they may change their service providers, and they really don't give a shit about post purchase support (providing you with timely access keys for your locked in products.

Why are private ticket resellers on Trade-me being vilified by disgruntled fans who want to attend the World Sevens tournament next February (Dominion Post Sept 14)? The real heat should be turned on the managers of the event (the WRFU) , and not just by sevens' rugby fans (think Commerce Commission and WestpacTrust stadium owners).

Fans, and the general public, who are critical of ticket resellers ("scalpers") need to go back to demand and supply basics. Ticket reselling in an open competitive retail market situation like Trade-me is a good thing for fans, not a bad thing. Every resale of an event ticket on Trade me is to the mutual advantage of both the buyer and the seller. There is no coercion. There is no monopolistic price gouging. There are no secret back door dealings.

Suppose all 8500 of those publicly available Rugby Sevens' tickets were bought for $150 and resold on Trade-me for prices around three times as much, for $450. That's 8500 happy kiwis. A fan who bought four tickets for himself and his family at $150 each can , after resale, watch the game with his family on the new flat screen television he can now afford with the extra $1200 cash he has in hand. And the fan who paid $450 for each of the four tickets gets to go to a game that he and his mates really wanted to (where "really" is measured by their willingness to shell out even more than $450 to watch this live performance rather than walk down to the local sports bar to watch the games). Everybody's happy.

So who is complaining, and why? Fans who don't get tickets at the open market price? Well, that's the way a competitive auction market works. If you can't pay the going market price in a Trade-me auction you don't get the goods. What about fans who paid $450 on Trade-me, got their ticket, but are bitter becasue they weren't fast enough off the mark to get the first lot of tickets at $150 each direct from the WRFU. Well, any buyer would like to pay a low price rather than a higher price. The problem is that there were lots and lots of would be buyers at a $150 price, far too many for the 8500 available seats. In economics speak we call that a shortage, an excess of demand over supply, at a price of $150. Prices rise to clear the market, making demand equal to supply at the going market price. Are you worried about the "poor" person who by chance, or gift from the WRFU, got a ticket but couldn't afford a market clearing price of $450? Why not let that poor person decide whether they really want to go to the game live, or cash in on their good luck and watch it on the telly with $450 in hand?

Of course the high ask-prices for these event tickets in open market auctions on Trade-me would have been a lot lower had the WRFU supplied tens of thousands more tickets for sale direct to the public . But the WRFU held back 26,500 tickets from direct public access didn't they? At the same time they are complaining vociferously about , and actively suppressing (via threats and intimidation), the resale of tickets on trade-me.

Don't get me wrong. The WRFU isn't against resale of tickets. It's just against resale of tickets where it doesn't get a slice of the action. Those 26,500 extra tickets held back by the WRFU are available for resale, but not by the public, not by rugby fans. The WRFU has a list of authorized suppliers for its' event tickets, and if you go online and check them out, you'll find that there still are tickets available to the world sevens' tournament. Of course, there is the little matter of the prices charged and bundled in services, like food served to you in the venue, prime location box seats, overnight accommodation, or transportation.

One official supplier has a range of VIP lounge ($1000) , business packages ($845) and economy ($700) seats. Another has corporate box seats in bundles of 16 to 24 available for $800 per ticket (gst excluded). From yet another supplier, $550 buys you a ticket and accommodation at a Wellington Backpacker's while $950 will buy you a ticket and accomodation at the Holiday Inn. If you live outside of Wellington you'll be pleased to know that there are a variety of flight and match ticket combinations and available, $1000 from Christchurch to Wellington, $ 1100 from Auckland or Dunedin to Wellington. Last time I checked , Pacific Blue and Air NZ had return flights to Wellington from these centers varying in price for $80 to $200, implying a bundled net price for a ticket to the event of about $800-$900.

On 8500 of its tickets sold directly to fans the WRFU doesn't permit resale, except at a price equal to the face value of the ticket (and no other consideration). On 26,500 of it's tickets, sold indirectly to fans through commercial tour package operators, resale is the name of the game. Overpriced bundled services at implied ticket prices ranging from $500 to $1000 seem to be the order of the day. So who is scalping who?

It should be clear why the WRFU is opposed to rugby fans reselling their tickets . They don't get a slice of the action when fans resell but they do when their commercial suppliers resell. More importantly, the resale of tickets by fans would undermine the discriminatory pricing scheme that the WRFU uses to increase it's own profits from this event. To be effective (ie not undermined by competition) price discrimination, via segmenting the market, requires restrictions on resale from low price to high price market segments.

If WRFU was seriously interested in affordable tickets for fans it could run an online auction of all 35,000 tickets, not just 8,500. (35,000 tickets at say a market clearing price of $200 each is $7 million for a 2 day event - sure to cover costs, but still not as much as the $15+ million from 8,500 tickets @$150 each plus 26,500 at $700-$1000 each) If the WRFU was actually interested in the welfare of its fans and promoting local rugby it would actively facilitate resale of tickets in open trustworthy market places (we're not talking dark alleyways 10 minutes before event time here). Instead, it uses heavy handed intimidation tactics and contractually specified restraints on private resale to strike fear into the heart of any private individual reselling a right to a seat they legitimately purchased.

I'm not questioning the contractual right of the stadium owner and event providers to trade the seats they provide under terms they can negotiate. Any monopolistic or competitive supplier has that right . But only monopolists get away with exercising it. And those who also try to pretend they are protecting the welfare of the public they are monopolistically exploiting deserve all the bad press they get . Take for example the welfare of local rugby clubs. Suppose the WRFU gifts management of 50 local rugby clubs 10 tickets each. Why not let the club managers decide whether the wisest way to use those tickets is to dole them out to mates and go to the game live, or let the manager's mates watch the games on TV and resell the tickets online , using the proceeds for ground maintenance, club repairs, uniforms, ..whatever. Treat the ticket gifts for the assets they are, and show some respect for the ticket holder's ability to decide whether to use it personally or resell it, and create trading institutions that improve the wealth of those clubs you give ticket gifts to.

Major sports team-owners (baseball, basketball, football) in the US have taken a different attitude towards online, direct retailing than the WRFU. The teams and leagues have given up trying (ineffectively) to crush the growing trade in direct reselling of event-tickets online, estimated at $US3 billion annually. Nowadays they either have their own on-line reselling sites (and take a fee for this service) or deal with brokers like StubHub, an online re-trading institution where fans resell their event-tickets and where sports teams refer their fans to in order to resell their tickets. ALL fans benefit , and the providing clubs benefit by getting a revenue slice they otherwise wouldn't have from referalls or brokerage fees (see a nice op-ed opinion piece on this by Jeff Jacoby and also a recent NY time article ).

Fraud, not price gouging, is the biggest problem in event-ticket reselling. Large, reputable, online trading institutions, with their coterie of specialist resellers and verification methods, and publicly accessible and transparent open auction methods, actually solve both problems. For example, StubHub provides guarantees of ticket legitimacy, tickets being in adjacent blocks, and refunds for cancelled events as a component of its online services, for a fee. Online sites run by team and venue owners use electronic-swipe ticketing methods to record and register transfers as well as to guarantee legitmacy of resold tickets.

At a minimum, shareholders in WestpacTrust stadium, in the WRFU, and in Trade-me ought to be putting pressure on their management to explore whether there are i profit opportunities in the secondary market for event-tickets. And as they do - or should do - our competition watchdog, the Commerce Commission, should be taking an active interest. Smart policy makers in most US states have rescinded antiquated anti-scalping laws and regulations in order to change attitudes towards private ticket reselling and to facilitate the integration of event-ticket resale transactions into competitive online markets for a wide range of goods. The Commerce Commission can, and should, be taking a pro-active look at how to promote competition in secondary event-ticket markets in NZ. Perhaps they could start by investigating the heavy handed tactics and outdated moral inuendoes used by event and team managers/owners like the WRFU and the Warriors to intimidate direct reselling by the public.

The key is that team-owners, stadium owners, fans and policy makers recognize and invest in the benefits of competitive secondary markets in event-tickets. Is that too much to ask?

Christian Zimmerman over at Against Monopoly has an interesting post about lecturer's in Florida universities monopolizing the production/publication/distribution of "their" lecture notes. A debate about University of Florida..or any university prof's ....having "copyright" in their lecture material (written, spoken, graphical, video) would be a joke if it were not so serious.

Does anyone other than IP lawyers and their clients take seriously the proposition that the guy who delivers the lecture from 12-1 every monday and tuesday or the lady who wrote the textbook for the guy who delivers the lecture actually has said anything new? or that the guys and ladies who wrote articles or other texts or who gave seminars and lectures at other universities ...on which the chapters of the lady's text are based has said anything new? anything that rightfully "belongs" to them? EVERY idea taught in the curriculum of EVERY undergraduate course, if not every graduate course is and has been someone else's idea...The distinction of a PhD degree based on a PhD thesis is that something "new" is (supposed to be) produced...all else that goes before it...ie all your undergad and grad courses ... already pre-exists in some form or other and nobody, except local uni lecture note would-be monoplizers, bother much about trying to claim any of it for their "own". The payoff - in university appointment, promotion, prestige - comes in trying to extend the margins, not reprocess the stock.

Of course we all embellish previous stories in the retelling that is the delivery of the lecture...or it's "fixing" on paper or in some sort of digitized form(ie create temporary or permanent derivative works). But the key idea to remember is that when I or anyone else deliver's a lecture at a modern University we are taking someone else's ideas who has taken someone else's ideas who has take someone else's ideas....ad nauseam....and reprocessing them for you (students) consumption ( and storage). Don't look at the immediate product...the lecture and associated notes. Look at the production process behind that: course preparation, and then behind that, the PHD preparation which got your prof selected for this job. Doing the course work to obtain a PHD is 5-8 years of copying/editing/processing/embellishing other people's ideas, other people who have done precisely the same copying/editing/processing/embellishing in their generation...till what we see in the final product.....the 12-1 lecture on monday...is a bubbling historical and social half baked stew of ideas and thoughts.

As anyone who has read Steven Pinker will know, we humans - especially grad students and academic nerds -are amazing biological computational/information processing machines. The ultimate efficient photocopier with our visual senses and audio/tactile/motor abilities . That's what we academics do. We live to copy and edit. But that's OK. Copying at the genetic level is the essence of life, our life and every creature's life. And it certainly is part and parcel of the modern patronage system funded by general taxation, the system we call public education: this system is, and always has had copying - and further derivative works like editing and processing - at its heart. Of course the private incentives for academic teachers with captive audiences at local universities - especially universities like those that exist in Florida with tens of thousands of students - is to monopolize their product. But passing it off as their own is just that ...passing it off. And on our good days we can point to the small marginal contributions published in good journals that get us our promotions as "ours", but we all know that the bibliography and reference papers we cite...much less the ones we don't....are the true "source" of our intellectual prowess, and the citation labels are justthat -labels, pointers, to a vast stew of ideas.

Do you (student's) get that? over and over again, iteratively through time and across space in every university and college on the planet academics exist as biological information processors, copiers. We (well some of us) do more than just copy, but we do copy! And we're all better off for this extensive unmonitored unchecked rampant open bazarr and cacophony of idea copying and reprocessing. It's like a moder day version of the great pre-Guttenberg oral traditions where bards and storytellers transmitted culture...the transmission is in the retelling. But the first step in a good retelling is to copy someone's esle's re telling. The search for an original telling, the first and only telling...especially so it can be priced...is just crap!


But convincing prevailing powers-that-be in academia or the corporate world - either the regulators or the local monopolizers - is also probably futile...at least at a local regional level, the level where UF students and student associations work. One thing that can work though, at this level, is competition: competition discovered and disseminated by students as they use and spread knowledge of the availability of good open source course material that is relevant to their academic educations. For example, all of my introductory game theory lectures and related clips/slides/podcasts are available for anyone to use. There are literally thousands of people from around the world who have downloaded the entire 23 lecture series i have from last year, and am developing again this year, from iTunes(search on "game theory" in the description field) or from our university multi media website website uctv or here at strategicecon.com ). I don't know any of these people, except occasionally I get an email query or a thank you note or a "do you mind if I use these here" note. Just like me they use and resue these ideas for their own education..and betterment, financial or otherwise. Are they "copying" me - of course. Check out preston McAffee's micro text - free for download, and a great text. Doug Allen at SFU has a terrific first year introduction to economics book - not free, but very cheap at $C15. Ted Bergstrom and Martin Osborne have a new site called PoET where professional economists who are teachers publicly evaluate and report on undergad econ textbooks proce and quality. Stanford , MIT , Princeton and Berkeley - they and other fine universities are making their academic material publicly available in a wide variety of formats (audio or video podcasts, lecture notes and slides, pdfs of lecture notes) either directly or thru sites like iTunes edu. [See my earlier post on this topic of open source academic material , citing the example of Harvard getting its' academics to publish their research outputs for free access. Now think 20 years down the line when this material will find its way into lecture notes .....and some will claim these ideas as "theirs"!!]

Let's cut to the chase here. Let competition (and academic prestige) prevail. Virtually every academic prof relies on a textbook, or set of textbooks for their own course. Students can undermine the monopolistic attempts in better ways than just copying their lecturer's notes...which are after all just a copy of someone else's ideas. Start having a direct say in who that other someone else is. As an alternative to copying and redistributing your lecturer's notes find someone else on the web who teaches a similar course, with perhaps the same textbook and makes their material available for free. I put my hand up because your patronage of me will help me in the academic patronage system. But check out Stanford and MIT and Princeton and Berkeley - they all do it either directly or thru sites iTunes edu. So there is a supply of rich high quality academci material out there. Now create a demand!! then see how your UF prof's respond.

The new JSTOR platform is soon to be launched. I like their use of web based tutorials...but I don't particulary like the restrictive formats they are presented in (.wmv files). Besides offering multiple formats (and I'm happy to do the conversions), the flash based formats enable direct browser viewing -You Tube style - and mp4 formats would permit iPod viewing...and maybe a presence for JSTOR on Apples iTunes edu?? . Moreveover the blog style presentation of these videos enables public commenting. Here is a sample flash based video of the MyJSTOR tutorial , downloadable in a format the user can select, here mp4 and wmv (see lower left hand corner of the clip). It would be fairly easy to set up such an interactive tutorial site for JSTOR. What do you think?? Is it worth it?

 The NY times has a neat article describing how major publishers (Random House, Penguin) are going for unprotected MP3 formats for theri audio books. here seem to be (at least two) strategic issues recognized in the article. (1) How much do individual customers value being able to play their audio book recordings on their own devices, and (2) How can these established publishing firms (established in other modes)  compete with the dominant  other audio book suppliers , viz Audible.

Personally, speaking to the first issue, I found Audible's content control system (digital rights management) infuriating. I was a member for about a year, and paid for and downloaded  several books, but dropped my subscription after having great difficulty transfering my files between comoputers and my ipods. My work around was to make my own mp3 copy of one of my favourite audio books, DNA the secret of life, by crick and berry
. This was a painstaking 17 hours of copying, but once done I could transfer it at will between my ipods. Have I ever loaned out my mp3 version? no. Why bother? WOuld I if I was aksed? well I guess it depends on who does the asking - someone in my family yes, outside that no, not really. Would I make my mp3 version available for sale, small amount, on a server? Probably not , for a self interested reason - I have no interest in being pursued by the copyright cops. I also don't mind a small price being paid (if I knew a larger porportion was going to the author i'd pay even more...).After buying the audible book and listening to it three times (while jogging)  I actualy went to amazon and bought the book, for referenc e purposes. I wonder if my experience here, as a consumer, is typical? Maybe Random House and Penguin think so??