Steve Reads

I’m waging a one-man crusade to make the term “MP3” a generic term referring to “any digital-audio format,” even if that digital-audio format is, say, Ogg Vorbis. I’d like the MP3 to suffer from genericide.

I need to read the original study, but there’s a description on Crooked Timber of a Princeton study seeing how people evaluate new information. Here’s the synopsis:

You take a bunch of sophomores and tell them they’re going to play the role of Admissions Officer to Princeton. They look at application files, and judge whether an applicant should be admitted. There are several criteria — let’s simplify and say there are only two: GPA and SAT scores. Applicants who score highly on both measures are strong candidates for admission. After having the experimental subjects rate enough files so you know what their standards are, you divide them into two groups and present the first (control) group with a applicant who has a 3.7 GPA(out of 4) and excellent SAT scores. Nearly all the subjects say this student should be admitted. The other (experimental) group gets the same file, except they’re told there seems to be an inconsistency in the application. The school transcript says the student’s GPA is 4.0, but the letter from the Principal says its 3.7. Do you admit, reject or ask for more information to resolve the inconsistency?

Most subjects ask for more information. It turns out that the Principal is right and the applicant’s true GPA is 3.7. With this information in hand nearly everyone votes — surprise! — to reject the applicant. The interpretation is that new information is weighted more heavily than it ought to be (in the light of evidence from previous decisions) simply because we have bothered to go and find it out, and not because it’s useful or ought to change our mind. [Both chunks bolded in original.]

Fascinating. Of course I need more evidence to be convinced of the phenomenon in the generality described above; is this specific to sophomores? Specific to certain kinds of decisions? Specific to decisions in groups? Lots of other questions to ask, but it’s a neat line of thought to pursue. I never would have thought to ask the question, let alone perform the experiment.

Speaking of this general field (say, quantifying irrationality in ordinary decisionmaking), can anyone suggest a good entry point into Kahneman’s and Tversky’s work?

Police in Colorado set up a roadsign announcing that there would be a drug search a mile ahead, then waited behind the sign and watched whether anyone threw anything out of their windows. When someone did throw something out, police called ahead to flag the car for littering. Police would then pull the car over, and take a look at what it had jettisoned. If it had thrown out drugs, the passengers would be arrested for possession. The court held that “The posting of signs to create a ruse does not constitute illegal police activity.”

I just find this incredibly fascinating and subtle. I’ve yet to read the Kansas precedent that apparently informed the Colorado court’s decision.

I just remembered an MP3 I heard once, featuring my hero Larry Lessig saying “I thought we knew that” (5-meg MP3) over a thumping techno beat. More fully, he was saying

So here’s what I thought we knew: I thought we knew the Internet was going to shake things up, to change things. To mess things up. To change the way things have been. I thought we knew that, we lawyers, and we had committed ourselves to watching and waiting and letting things shake out. I thought we knew that. I thought we knew that if we stepped in now to regulate, we’d screw it up.

I looked around a bit and found the source of Lessig’s speech in that song. Give the song a listen, at least; I think the speech is also worth listening to, or at least worth reading.

I’ve written down some more thoughts on cell phones. I hope they’re interesting.

I discovered the NationMaster website today, comparing many (if not all) of the world’s countries using various statistics. It’s very neat, and it reminds me of some other things that I’d like. Most generally, I’d just like to see the full probability distribution of various random variables. For instance, the chart of female life expectancies at birth shows that the U.S. has the 45th-highest life expectancy. But if you look at the chart, the numbers are so close together that the difference between nations could very easily be overcome by various sampling and non-sampling errors. (Those of you who are wondering whether “sampling and non-sampling errors” could be replaced by the more succinct “errors” need not fret. Sampling error is the amount that the mean from one sample will vary from another sample, just because samples are random. Non-sampling errors are, for instance, errors that lead you to choose a non-random sample.) Not only that, but it might be the case that the U.S. has a very small variance in its life expectancy: the average woman lives 80.2 years, and the odds that you’d live any less than 70 years might be minuscule, for instance. Jordan (ranked 42) has a life expectancy of 80.3 years, but a sizable proportion of people might die before their first birthday (and no, I don’t actually know whether that’s true). I think it’s reasonable to say that, given equal means, a smaller variance is better, and should factor into the rankings.

The recent flap over Mel Gibson’s new movie (my cache) reminds me: how do you behave in the face of something like this movie that’s supposedly offensive? On the one hand, I don’t want to give money to someone who’s supposedly anti-Semitic. But on the other hand, I don’t want to sound like all those people who got so upset over The Last Temptation of Christ or The Satanic Verses without actually seeing or reading them. But if I pay for one ticket to Mel Gibson’s movie, I’ve done all the damage I can do. Or maybe I could buy one ticket, see it, and if I find that it’s anti-Semitic, recommend that my friends avoid it. I’m not sure what the best approach is; I appreciate any suggestions.

Via The Volokh Conspiracy: a North Carolina prosecutor is using laws designed to combat nuclear and biological weapons (my cache) to prosecute a man charged with running a meth lab:

A Watauga County prosecutor is using a law intended to combat terrorism to fight the spread of methamphetamine laboratories in northwest North Carolina.

District Attorney Jerry Wilson has charged Martin Dwayne Miller, 24, of Todd with two counts of manufacturing a nuclear or chemical weapon in connection with a methamphetamine arrest Friday. Miller also is charged with eight other drug-related offenses.

 . . . 

The law reads, in part, that the term nuclear, biological or chemical weapon of mass destruction applies to “any substance that is designed or has the capability to cause death or serious injury and  . . .  is or contains toxic or poisonous chemicals or their immediate precursors.”

As Volokh notes, the great danger with many of these antiterror laws is that they’re so general that they can be used against anyone. We have to rely on John Ashcroft’s – and now, apparently, North Carolina prosecutors’ — sound judgment to ensure our own freedom. This is far too thin a reed on which to hang such a fundamental right. I’m surprised that a libertarian legal scholar like Volokh would be willing to tolerate such limited judicial protection. Shouldn’t we all — libertarians and otherwise — insist on strong judicial protections in the face of strong antiterror laws?

Professor Solum links a paper by Eugene Volokh on the slippery-slope argument (and a PDF version). I’ve not read it yet, but I’m fascinated and a bit gleeful. How wonderful that someone out there has really thought with some philosophical sophistication about slippery-slope arguments. At least I hope that’s what Eugene did.

Fair use allows you to excerpt small portions of the text from a book — say, a single definition from a dictionary. You are not allowed, however, to excerpt the entire book. Here’s a technological approach to getting around this; I wonder if it would pass legal muster. Try wrapping the definition in an XML tag:

 <dictionary> <word>angioplasty</word> <definition> surgical repair of a blood vessel; especially : BALLOON ANGIOPLASTY </definition> <anotherWord> <link>[some URL]</link> <word>monkey</word> </anotherWord> </dictionary> 

Lest the implementation obscure the point, here it is: you’re constructing a dictionary one word at a time. I transcribe the definition of one word, you transcribe another, someone else transcribes a third, and I link to all of you. Then any number of simple programs can spider the collection of links, and build a dictionary electronically. If multiple people have transcribed the same definition, the spider can check for errors. Maybe we could add in some tags that list the next word in the physical copy of the dictionary, so that our spider would know which words it needs to fill in. And so on.

(Update inspired by comments from Adam: remove the “linking to other dictionary entries” bit. Replace it with “use Google to do a raw-text search for other dictionary entries.” Maybe it’s a bit slower, but the point is somewhat stronger: I’ve only excerpted one dictionary entry, and have used a technology — Google – that obviously has substantial noninfringing uses.)

What’s the copyright-violation status of this distributed dictionary? Each of us is only excerpting a small bit of the dictionary, so we’re individually within our rights.

Generalize a bit: I transcribe one page of a book, and so do you. I grab one frame from a movie and post it, and so do you. I sample one second of a song, and so do you. All within your fair-use rights, I suspect, but all cumulatively copyright violations.

(Update inspired by comments from James: Even a centralized website for assembling distributed works has substantial noninfringing uses. I could just as easily transcribe copyrighted works as public-domain ones. So even if there were some centralized website listing works that have been partially transcribed, there’s some question as to whether that website could be nailed for contributory infringement.)

My point here isn’t to find some clever way to “hack the law,” to use a phrase that James passed my way. My point, instead, is to note the increasingly wide grey areas that we’re going to have to deal with — either within the copyright structure that we’ve already built, or by trashing it and starting over to reflect the vastly different world we live in.

Via Crooked Timber: the Transportation Security Administration now admits that it has a list (my cache) of war protesters whom it targets in airports. Sometimes this targeting includes strip-searching. The list is entirely separate from the terrorism watchlist of those who might pose a genuine security threat.

I wonder when the American media will pick this up.

My former coworker Jeff had a shitty weekend. He has been granted a remarkable facility with words, apparently, because his description is priceless. I’m glad that we got a chance to see his writing talent, but I’m sad at the cause of the essay. I extend Jeff virtual condolences. I say: remain a nice guy. Think of poor Job, all afflicted with sores by a wrathful god. At least you didn’t get sores, right Jeff?

Dan Gillmore waxes rhapsodic about Internet phones. I know people who have them and love them, and Gillmor says they only cost $20 per month for unlimited calls. At that price, I can afford to get one and cut a lot of minutes off my cell. But that just raises the next question: when will we have wireless Internet phones? For those to be cheap, the wireless Internet infrastructure needs to be cheap, and right now the cell-phone companies own that infrastructure. Maybe enough people setting up WiFi hotspots will fix part of that problem, but that’s surely not a sustainable solution.

Julian Sanchez mentions a book he helped edit entitled In Defense Of Global Capitalism. I’m intrigued by the title, though Adam keeps reminding me that the free-market ideology is remarkably non-falsifiable: a man chooses to kill himself so that more food might be left for his family, and somehow we can still claim that the man is a utility-maximizer (he just assigned higher utility to his family’s survival than to his own). That’s Adam’s example, and it’s a really good one. My question: is the hypothesis that people maximize their subjective expected utility falsifiable in practice, or can every bit of data be folded into it? And if every bit of data can be folded into it, then where’s the evidence for one of the central tenets of market ideology?

That said, I’m quite interested in reading the book, and I wonder whether others — of any ideological stripe — would be willing to read along with me.

For some reason I was just thinking about Luis Buñuel, the legendary pathbreaking film director. If you haven’t already discovered Buñuel, I’d like to recommend at least Belle de Jour and That Obscure Object Of Desire. Buñuel repays endless viewings; I hope I can encourage at least a few people to see him for the first time.

I saw I Capture The Castle earlier this evening. The cinematography is startling in a few ways. First, Ebert is quite right when he says that “The film is shot with that green British palette that makes everything look damp and makes us imagine the sheets will be clammy.” But the cinematography might also be described as “whimsical”: the shots themselves seem to be having fun. And there’s the occasional sudden jump from one shot to another that reminds me of Godard’s Breathless. In Breathless, the mid-scene jumps seemed sorta superfluous, just to make the viewer aware of another convention in the language of film (and then subvert it). In I Capture The Castle, it’s a bit more subtle, and just makes you jump a tiny bit. Hard to explain, but I think you’ll notice it if you see the film.

The plot is overly melodramatic for my tastes; probably the best available synopsis is “You’re in love with him!” “No I’m not, I’m in love with you!” “No, you’re in love with me!” “No wait, I’m confused!” It would be insufferable if the daughters weren’t such enjoyable characters, and the narrator (Cassandra) in particular. The actress who plays her, Romola Garai, is just achingly good. Ebert writes that “Garai  . . .  is heart-winning in the role,” and again he’s spot-on. (I tend to agree with him. Not always, but often.) She just turned 21, too. I’m jealous. Four years my junior, and she still managed to send chills down my spine a couple times.

It veers a little bit too close to what Eddie Izzard describes as the “room with a view and a staircase and a pond” movie, but there’s enough appealing stuff in it that I’d go see it again. And I think the last shot is priceless on its own. I can’t quite explain why; I’m curious whether people agree with me.

Tomorrow’s movie: Swimming Pool. It looks great.