Oddhead Blog

I grew up in Pittsburgh. I love Pittsburgh. I still run into people who believe Pittsburgh is a steel town. Pittsburgh is not that — the steel industry cleared out (and the air cleared up) before I moved there at age 10 in 1981 — though driving through its streets it sometimes feels like one: gritty row houses, dive bars, old-growth neighborhoods, and independent shops, worn and welcoming.

Then what is Pittsburgh?

A sports town, no doubt, but that doesn’t count.

A hospital town, perhaps. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is a sprawling conglomerate of hospitals, doctors, researchers, and medical school, growing organically and through acquisition. Several other private hospitals and networks dot the city.

But with one the the top five computer science departments in the world at Carnegie Mellon University churning out grads at all levels, you might think Pittsburgh would have the seeds of a high-tech ecosystem. Yet there are few major technology companies, startups, or venture capital firms to nurture them locally. (Two exceptions I can think of: Google and CombineNet.) Instead, CMU students tend to flee for the coasts after graduation.

Could Pittsburgh develop a startup row, a mini Silicon Valley? Pittsburghers have been hoping for and heralding such a transformation for decades. Given the city’s famous (SF-worthy) gradients, there’s even a perfect name for it: Silicon Hill.

In selecting Pittsburgh for the G-20 summit, the Obama administration cited Pittsburgh as a post-industrial success story with “renewed industries that are creating the jobs of the future”. But that seems very glass half full as (paraphrasing) one of my Pittsburgh friends noted on Facebook.

Paul Graham wrote a terrific essay (as Paul Graham is wont to do) about how a city might go about buying their own Silicon Valley.* He concludes that it may be possible. “For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in could make itself one of the biggest startup hubs in the world.” His main conjecture is that the money would fund a large number of good local startups in their infancy but without forcing them to stay — the best startups simply won’t take money that constrains their future options. The funding would have to be rich enough and the environment nice enough that they simply would not want to leave.

Is Graham right and, if so, could Pittsburgh pull it off?

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* See also Graham’s older and longer essay How to be Silicon Valley.

For a long time I was terribly confused and conflicted about net neutrality (and embarrassed about being uncommitted on such a core issue in my industry). On the one hand, paying more for higher quality of service is only natural and leads to better provisioning of resources and less waste. HD movie watchers can pay for low latency streaming while email users need not. Treating their packets the same is madness, even worse legislating it so. On the other hand, many people I respect including economically literate ones vociferously argue for net neutrality. And Comcast “shaping” Skype traffic scores an 88 on the Ticketmaster scale of evil.

The key to understanding this debate is recognizing the difference between anonymity and egalitarianism. A mechanism is anonymous if the outcome does not depend on the identity of the players: two players who bid the same are treated equally. It doesn’t matter what their name, age, or wealth is, what company they represent, or how they plan to use the item — all that matters is what they bid. This is a good property for almost any public marketplace that ensures fair treatment, and one worth fighting for on the Internet. AppleT&T should not block Google Voice just because it’s a threat. In fact, even without legislation, it’s almost impossible to bar anonymous participation on the Internet. Service providers can, if forced to, encrypt their packets and hide their content, origin, and purpose, making them indistinguishable from others.

However no one would argue that everyone in a marketplace should receive identical resources. Players who bid more can and must be distinguished (for example, by winning more items) from players who bid less. So, while it’s wrong to discriminate based on identity, it’s absolutely essential to discriminate based on willingness to pay. That is the difference between an egalitarian lottery (silly) and an anonymous marketplace (good).

Somehow the net neutrality debate has confounded these two issues. I agree that any Internet constitution should include that all packets are equal regardless of their creator or purpose (charging $30 for “unlimited” data and in addition 30 cents per 160-char text message scores 72 on the ticketmasterindex). However, users or services who are willing to pay for it can and should receive higher quality. To do otherwise virtually guarantees wasting resources.

Update 2009/08/27: Mark Cuban (as always) says it well. [Via Tom Murphy]

Lance Fortnow wrote a terrific op ed in the current issue of Communications of the ACM, arguing that the field of computer science should operate like most other academic disciplines and use journal publications as the primary measure of research contributions, freeing up conferences to serve a community role.

I agree (nearly) completely. The conference publication system is broken. Computer science papers are by and large not scholarly documents: many are sloppily written in deadline-driven haste with poor literature reviews, often blamed on page limits. Many reviews are rushed or cursory and decisions are safe at best, arbitrary at worst. The conference system encourages balkanization and discourages the emergence of a unified computer science conference.

Journals are better, as long as we move forward and not backward. We need open-access journals with fast turnaround times. Lance’s article itself underscores the point: it’s behind a pay wall, albeit a comparatively inexpensive and lenient one — Lance can distribute the near-final pre-print version on his own web page. That’s good but not good enough.

Kamal and Panos also have some refreshing ideas on this subject. Platforms like Yoav Freund’s machine learning forum represent a natural and intelligent evolution of peer review.

I recently spent two days at an economics workshop. In some ways it felt like visiting a foreign country. For one, the audience doesn’t clap. Especially when the speaker ends with “thank you”, the silence is deafening. I hadn’t realized how instinctual the reaction to applaud had become. Of course, it’s arbitrary whether a community claps or not when one of its members concludes a speech. If a community always claps for every speaker, the signal is meaningless as a gauge of satisfaction, like restaurant patrons tipping 18% regardless of service. In fact, almost surely the speaker is just as grateful to have the attention as the audience is to receive the information. It’s not like a political rally where clapping indicates loyalty. Still, it seems like a nice gesture with near zero cost, so why not? Maybe it’s because computer scientists are generally poor speakers that we like to reassure one another. It reminds me of my first international flight. When we landed, all the passengers cheered — the tradition on international flights at the time and apparently at one time on all flights. It seems that now even international flights do not culminate in a round of applause for the pilot. I find it sad that apparently “don’t clap” is the stable equilibrium.

Second, each session was organized with two presentations followed by a lengthy review given by a “discussant”, usually a senior member of the community. I found the format useful: the discussant highlights the main points of the papers in a different voice, helping to reinforce the message, and provides some of their own opinions and insights. The main drawback is that covering two papers takes a full hour and a half, with almost no time for questions and discussion from the audience.

Luckily, even though some of the rituals were foreign, the language was familiar. It so happens that economists and computer scientists speak a remarkably similar dialect of math. Those of us working on market design are especially close: we inhabit similar circles at meetings, universities, and now industry labs (“mini universities” according to Susan Athey) like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, and even co-author papers. Al Roth may have inadvertently suggested why. He encourages thinking of economics as engineering. Computer “science”, like the design branch of economics, seems less science than an amalgam of math, engineering, and art.

Surely no legislature would craft an entire bill just to outlaw one person’s as-yet unprofitable small business?

So when Nick Jenkins, founder of Betcha.com, calls a proposed Washington State law the “Kill Betcha.com Act”, certainly he must be exaggerating, paranoid or both, right?

Actually not. I read the bill, and indeed its sole purpose seems to be to redefine gambling so as to make Jenkins’s company illegal.

First some background. About two years ago, Jenkins, a crazybrilliant lawyer turned entrepreneur, started Betcha.com in Washington State, where gambling is illegal. Betcha.com was a peer-to-peer betting site with a huge caveat: losers didn’t have to pay if they didn’t want to. Because they weren’t necessarily risking money, they weren’t gambling. The Washington State authorities were not amused; they raided the company and jailed Jenkins & co, even extraditing them to Louisiana over seventy cents.

Then, in February 2009, the tide began to turn. Reversing a lower-court decision, the Washington State Court of Appeals vindicated Jenkins and his business model: Honor-based betting was not gambling. The former lawyer had done his homework well and, sure enough, was right all along.

So, some Washington State politicians decided to put the honor back into gambling. They proposed to redefine a bet as risking money on the understanding that you “will or may receive something of value” if you’re right, adding in the crucial two new words “or may”. So far, two attempts to pass the revised wording have stalled, keeping hope alive for an eventual resurrection of Betcha.com.

Apparently Washington State has a history of extreme positions on gambling, including outlawing writing about or linking to gambling websites, despite the standard hypocrisies of supporting state lotteries, horse racing, and Indian casinos.

Jenkins’s new mission is to keep the governor who turned him over to Louisiana authorities off the Supreme Court should Obama nominate her. Christine Gregoire couldn’t have gained a more tenacious and law-savvy enemy.

Thank you Nick Jenkins for continuing to fight when most would have given up long ago. Your hard work and sacrifice brings desperately needed clarity to gambling laws and paves the way for US gamers to someday get the products they want.

(First in a series of “random thoughts on science”)

A mind boggling number of academic research conferences and workshops take place every year. Each fills a thick proceedings with publications, some containing hundreds of papers. High-profile conferences can attract five times that many submissions, often of low average quality. Smaller venues can seem absurdly specialized (unless it happens to be your specialty). Every year, new venues emerge. Once established, rarely do they “retire” (there is still an ACM Special Interest Group on the Ada programming language, in addition to a SIG on programming languages). It’s impossible for all or even most of the papers published in a given year to be impactful. Most of them, including plenty of my own, will never be cited or even read by more than the authors and reviewers.

No one can deny that incredible breakthroughs emerge from the scientific process — from Einstein to Shannon to Turing to von Neumann — but scientific output seems to have a (very) long tail.

Is this a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing?

Is the tail…

Good?

Is the tail actually crucial to the scientific process? Are some breakthroughs the result of ideas that percolate through long chains — person to person, paper to paper — from the bottom up? Is science less dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants than giants standing on the shoulders of dwarfs? I published a fairly straightforward paper that applies results in social choice theory to collaborative filtering. Then a smarter scientist wrote a better paper on a more widely applicable subject, apparently partially inspired by our approach. Could such virtuous chains actually lead, eventually, to the truly revolutionary discoveries? Is the tail wagging the dog?

Bad?

Are the papers in the tail a waste of time, energy, and taxpayer dollars? Do they have virtually no impact, at least compared to their cost? Should we try hard to find objective measures that identify good science and good scientists and target our funding to them, starving out the rest?

Ugly?

Is the tail simply a messy but necessary byproduct (I can’t resist: a “messessity”) of the scientific process? Under this scenario, breakthroughs are fundamentally rare and unpredictable hits among an enormous sea of misses. To get more and better breakthroughs, we need more people trying and mostly failing — more monkeys at typewriters trying to bang out Shakespeare. Every social system, indeed almost every natural system, has a long tail. Maybe it’s simply unavoidable, even if it isn’t pretty. Was the dog simply born with its (long and scraggly) tail attached?

By 2007, Jamesburg, New Jersey, a town of 6,000, had four walk-in bank branches — Bank of America, Constitution, PNC, and Sovereign — complete with bricks, mortar, tellers, and aura of trust along its quaint “Main Street” downtown corridor.

Apparently that wasn’t enough.

In 2008, Chase Bank and TD Bank broke ground. Thousands of motorists now pass them every weekday morning on their way to the New Jersey Turnpike and again every evening on their way home. If I had a hand in it, I might insert a drive-thru restaurant, of which there are currently none, into the path of commuters. But I don’t and the Invisible Hand chose otherwise: to erect two more banks for a total of six banks within one square mile, or one for every 1000 residents. (To be fair, the surrounding township has 30,000 people, but probably a dozen more banks.)

We live in an era of electronic banking when ATMs dispensing paper money seems horribly analog. Walking through a door under a roof of a building representing the shelter for my money to talk to a person is, I’ll admit, occasionally reassuring, and even less occasionally useful. But everyone must admit that this is an activity growing rarer by the day.

So why are bank branches staging a last stand in this small New Jersey town?

Probably because the surrounding community, Monroe Township, is home to several retirement communities whose residents select banks based on the accessibility of branches. (They also buy newspapers and watch ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson at 6:30 and hence commercials for prescription drugs.)

Several new shopping centers have gone up in the area and each seems to have the same collection of stores, anchored by a drug store and a bank.

The data may say that these are profitable investments, but for how long?

Jamesburg would seem to have great potential as a consumer destination: a walkable urban strip in the center of a relatively affluent suburban township, on the bank of a gorgeous lake adjacent to a 675 acre park. Yet it has a few mom and pop shops, one Subway, one Dunkin’ Donuts, and one gas station. And six banks. Go figure.

The lingo of prediction markets varies widely.

The same “thing” might be called an information market, idea future, virtual stock market, financial market, securities market, event market, binary option, betting exchange, bookmaker, market in uncertainty, or gambling/wagering. Only recently has the name prediction market emerged with some sort of consensus.

To place a prediction in the market, you might do any of the following:

[bid/buy/bet on/back] the “yes” [security/contract/coupon/future/outcome] at [price/probability/fractional odds/decimal odds/moneyline] X

Predicting something won’t happen gets even uglier. You might:

[ask/short sell yes/buy no/buy bundle & sell yes/bet against/lay] at [price/probability/fractional odds/decimal odds/moneyline] X

For example, InklingMarkets uses the “short sell yes” variation:

So what is the clearest language for prediction markets?

A good guiding principle in this regard is KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid. Or, in more grandiose terms, Occam’s razor. All else being equal, one should choose the simplest and most straightforward option.

By this measure, it seems that betting lingo wins hands down. It’s vastly simpler to say “I bet $10 that Obama will lose” than to say “I short sell three shares of Obama at price 67″. The former is more direct and intuitive. Almost everyone understands what it means to place a bet, including subtleties like risk, uncertainty, and competition. On the other hand, even avid stock traders get tripped up by the concept of selling short.

Every prediction can be stated as: “I bet that outcome O will/won’t happen; I’ll risk $X to win $Y”. Betting for things and against things is symmetric. There is no need to short sell, buy bundles first, etc.

Yet most prediction markets don’t KISS, going with financial terminology instead, reflected even in the name itself. Why? I believe it’s because of the legal and social stigma attached to gambling. It’s a shame that such considerations force vendors to make the technology harder to understand and more complicated to use.

Take the Earth and subtract just two things: roads and wires. How much more pleasant a place would it be? No asphalt arteries carving a dense grid throughout the world’s grass and trees devouring tax dollars. No endless rows of poles and towers draped with miles and miles of wires coming between our eyes and our skies. Imagine the makeover the space around and under your desk would receive!

Actually, the vision may not be as far fetched as it seems: we just need personal flying vehicles and wireless power & communications.

The Last Analogs were born after commercial color TV (1953) and graduated high school before Mosaic (1993), roughly spanning from Steve Jobs to Larry Page.

Last Analogs like me grew up in the dawn of the digital age, yet had plenty of experience with VHS, walkmans, card catalogs, and film before the Internet shifted the revolution into hyperlink drive.

I recently had a Last Analog moment: A holiday card I sent to a friend was returned undelivered.

He had moved and I had sent it to his old address.

It turns out I actually had the correct address filed away in an email folder — he had kindly sent it to me months earlier — and I had even tagged the email as “contact info”. Yet my address book failed to reflect it, mostly because my address book doesn’t read or process email, but rather expects me to do it.

This is an inherently Last Analog problem.

The new address books — the Facebooks and Plaxos of the world — solve the problem gracefully. On Facebook, I don’t keep my own separate copy my friend’s address; instead I keep a pointer to my friend and all his data and let him do the updating. My friend doesn’t need to email me and I don’t have to transcribe anything (or, in the early days, call and write), and repeat the same for all his friends. He updates his own information and everything else happens automatically.¹

There are a ton of inherently Last Analog problems, including not knowing how much money you’ve spent in a month, how many calories you’ve burned or eaten, where your car or key or friend is, or where you are. A Last Analog could be living and working near an old college buddy and not even know it.

But perhaps the most unfortunate Last Analog problem is our impaired collective memory. Last Analogs grew up without the benefit of all the little digital trails that people now leave automatically as they go about their lives: the emails, twitters, geo-tagged photos, walls, groups, friendlists, and blogs that form a searchable, hyperlinked diary.²

For Last Analogs to catch up still requires considerable effort: for example, digging out old boxes of print photos and scanning and geo-tagging them by hand. Presumably even this process will become cheaper and easier, but in the meantime the online map view of my post-college European tour is fifteen years in waiting and counting, memories of metadata fading, and the slide show at my 20th high school reunion this spring will be only as complete as busy schedules allow.

Too bad the wayback machine doesn’t go that way back.

I guess its time to get over my First Digital envy and get to work scanning uphill both ways in the snow.