Keys Corner

I don’t like sitting in a smoky restaurant or pub and intensely dislike having smoking in my house. So you might think I’d be upset at the “smoker’s victory” being reported by the local and international press. The constitutional court has ruled that the law in some German states, prohibiting smoking in one-room establishments, is illegal. This is seen as a victory for smokers. Wrong. The court has posed restrictions on when smoking will be allowed in the bars in the interim period, and has given the government less than two years to get their act together and publish a workable law.

The problem with the existing law is that small bars and restaurants are disadvantaged compared to larger establishments which can set aside a separate “smoker’s room” so long as they also have a non-smoking part too. So the little guys have been loosing business to the bigger places.

The court has explicitly said that a complete ban on smoking is fine – it protects people’s health and is in line with EU law.

I’m optimistic that after the next national election in 2009, a blanket ban will be passed – it’s the only way the government can conform with EU law and the court ruling. It’ll be have to be some of the fastest legislation ever passed here, however – the court has set a deadline for the end of 2009 and the election is likely to be held in September 2009. The government is unlikely to push new legislation through before the election because we have one of the highest proportions of smokers in Germany (34%) of any country in the EU (and because anti-smoking campaigns are associated historically with the Nazi movement), and there is a strong smoking-lobby in Germany.

Following up on the last posting I made here, I see that Cory Doctorow has written an article in today’s Guardian, about how the music industry is slowly commiting suicide:

This month’s announcement of a back-room deal between ISPs (internet service providers) and the big record companies to spy on suspected copyright infringers and reduce the quality of their internet connections is just the latest paragraph in the record industry’s long, self-pitying suicide note, and it’s left me wishing they’d just pull the trigger already and stop beating their chests and telling us all how unfair it all is…

I couldn’t agree more with him. That the music industry is in such dire straits is mainly their own fault for ignoring new technologies for so long, and hoping that they’d just go away. There’s plenty of money to be made by offering innovative services at a reasonable price as we can see by looking at services such as:

• iTunes (music downloads – 5 billion songs sold and counting)
• Rhapsody(music streaming on-demand – 5 million songs available)
• Last.FM (music streaming on-demand – 21 million users)
• Shazam (identify snips of music you have heard – 4 million tracks cataloged)

So come on, music companies – stop moaning and start innovating!

I can’t recall having seen such an idiotic idea for a long time:

Internet users could face an annual charge of up to £30 to download music, under plans to be unveiled today that aim to tackle illegal file-sharing.

[British] Ministers are backing proposals that would enable millions of broadband users to pay an annual levy which would allow them to copy as much – previously illegal – music from the internet as they wanted. The money raised would be channelled back to the rights-holders, with artists responsible for the most popular songs receiving a bigger slice of the cash.

Can you imagine anyone who can download unlimited music from the internet buying CDs as well? We buy most of our music from iTunes these days and only buy CDs rarely – and only if they are priced below the iTunes price of 9.99 Euro per album. Instead of supporting the music industry, this proposal will decimate it.

Where can I sign up? And when can I subscribe to unlimited film downloads too?

Update (2008-07-24 21:20 hrs):
Reading the BBC web site this evening, it seems the newspapers misreported the plans this morning:

Mr Taylor [of the British Phonographic Industry] said newspaper reports stating that online users could be subject to an annual levy to cover losses from file-sharing were incorrect.

Which is a pity, but does show that the industry hasn’t lost it’s marbles completely!

Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and staff at Capital Fund Management in Paris studied the news feeds from Dow Jones and Reuters that provide real-time reports of items of potential interest to investors. Looking at over 90,000 news items in a two-year period, they investigated how sudden movements in stock prices were linked to the ticker reports. The interesting thing is that they couldn’t find any correlation at all between the two (Report in this week’s New Scientist – unfortunately you’ll need to buy the magazine or get a subscription to read the full article). Here’s a link to the research paper (200 KB PDF file), but be warned – it is pretty technical!

The conventional economic theory is that stock prices move close their “fair” price based on the collective knowledge of the companies which issued the stock. If news about a strike at a factory is published, you would expect the stock price of the affected company to fall as they won’t meet their production targets, for example. So news ticker items are expected to influence stock prices directly – how often have we heard “The markets fell today on news that ….”? Well, it appears that the theory and practice simply don’t match.

The research by Bouchaud and his colleagues indicates that instead, market psychology places a large role – prices continue to rise or fall long after they have reached the “fair price” because of the prevailing expectations in the marketplace. When a correction does occur, it can be triggered by a random piece of news, which then becomes amplified by social feedback.

Another group of researchers has been playing with models which take account of the positive feedback effect between traders that occurs in the financial markets:

Things go smoothly until the amount of leverage reaches a certain threshold, at which point the model shows the market undergoing a sudden change, loosely akin to a physical phase transition, like water freezing into ice. Increasing levels of credit create stronger links between market players, heightening the chance that the failure of one can put an unsustainable burden on others, triggering further failures. In the simulations, once the level of leverage passes a certain threshold, it becomes overwhelmingly likely that a single chance failure will send waves of trouble through the entire market. Avoiding future crises will mean identifying where the real-world market’s “freezing point” is – and keeping levels of leverage low enough to steer clear of it.

Unless the central and national banks take these models into account, it is likely that the next crash is already waiting off-stage, waiting to catch us unawares when the current property crash has played out.

Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus and William T. Freeman have come up with a novel visual dictionary of the English language. Using nearly 8 million images from Google Images, they have created a pictorial dictionary of some 53 thousand nouns:

We present a visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning. Each of the tiles in the mosaic is an arithmetic average of images relating to one of 53,464 nouns. The images for each word were obtained using Google’s Image Search and other engines. A total of 7,527,697 images were used, each tile being the average of 140 images. The average reveals the dominant visual characteristics of each word. For some, the average turns out to be a recognizable image; for others the average is a colored blob…

My brain must be addled today, as I can’t figure out how the numbers above lead to a total of 80 million, however it is quite fun to click on the mosaic and see what turns up.

(Photo from English Russia)
When I see photos of machines like these, I am extremely glad that I haven’t ever had to fight in a war:

During the WW2 Russian Army was using a “Fire Hedgehog” – the set of 88 Tommy-gun alike machine guns loaded into a plane.

It was used at low attitude flights to effectively saw off hundreds of enemy soldiers. When the pilot got above some Nazi crowd the pilot of started fire, then the doors in the plane’s bottom were opened and this Fire Hedgehog was coming into play, eighty something non-stop firing machine guns could really look like the Hedgehog from Hell.

(via English Russia)

Short video illustrating some of Otlet’s ideas
Paul Otlet (1868 – 1944) proposed many of the ideas which have been implemented in the world wide web – including the idea of a library of information much like Wikipedia – and actually implemented his ideas in the form of the Mundaneum, back in 1910. The Mundaneum, occupying 150 rooms in Brussels’ Cinquantenaire was an attempt to organise all the knowledge in the world according to the Universal Decimal Classification and resulted in building a highly structured card index system containing over 15 million index cards referencing information sources by 1934, which ultimately were to be made accessible to anyone who wished to access it, in their home, using TV screens and the phone. He even used the term “réseau” when talking about his idea of connecting information and people – which means “network”.

Unfortunately the idea died and was forgotten after the Germans took over the building housing the Mundaneum at the beginning of the Second World War, and much of the information in the Mundaneum was lost and scattered as a result.

If you haven’t heard of him, neither had I – until I stumbled over an article in yesterday’s El País (Google translation to English here).

The article tickled my curiosity and I found that there had been a Google Tech Talk by Alex Wright made last October on early ideas around information technology that could have lead to different versions of the internet, which devotes some time to explaining Otlet’s ideas (approx. one hour viewing time). If you are interested in technology and have the time, the talk is worth watching – if you can’t spare so much time, there is a short and interesting article about Otlet here. There’s a slightly longer and interesting article by W. Boyd Raymond (who discovered a large collection of Otlet’s documents in an abandoned office in Belgium in 1968), about Otlet here.

Reading the newspapers at the moment, you could be excused for thinking the prices for everything have been climbing steeply – oil by 50% in 2008, and in the last 12 months it has doubled in price, all manner of foodstuffs and other raw materials such as steel.

So I was surprised, today, when looking through a photography magazine printed in 2004 to see that one thing (other than property) has become much cheaper in the last four years – the camera memory card. Just look at these differences in price:

Memory card type	Price 2004	Price 2008
1GB SD card	190 €	5.90 €
2 GB CF card	400 €	10.89 €
4 GB CF card	1200 €	26.17 €

It really brings home the message that it doesn’t pay to be on the cutting edge of technology, unless you have very compelling reasons.