Category Archives: commentary

commentary, gambling

Betcha's Saint Nick fights cops, courts, Congress… and wins (for now)

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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.

commentary, research, science, woblomo

The long tail of science: Good, bad, or ugly?

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(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?
commentary, economics, lastanalogs, technology, woblomo

Jamesburg, New Jersey: Per-capita bank branch capital of the world

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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.)


Six walk-in bank branches within one square mile in Jamesburg, NJ USA

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.

commentary, gambling, prediction markets, woblomo

KISS prediction markets (lingo) goodbye

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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:

InklingMarkets' explanation of short selling

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.

commentary, technology, woblomo

A world without roads and wires

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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.

commentary, lastanalogs, technology

The Last Analogs

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DictionaryThe 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 with VHS players, walkmans, card catalogs, newspapers, bunny ears, and film. We then watched as, inexorably, every last one of them winked from A to D. By 1993, the dawn of the digital age was ending, giving way to a blazing midday sun. Little did we know how thoroughly the Internet would shift the revolution into hyperlink drive.

Recently, 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.

1Eventually, I shouldn’t have to bother with street names and zip codes either: I’ll just address the card to my friend’s unique identifier and the post office will take it to the right place. That’s assuming by then that I’m still sinfully sending cards through the postal mail.
2Even today, people delete too many gems. I encourage you to follow Randy Pausch’s advice and archive everything.
commentary, people, politics, yahoo

2 weeks, 2 geeks: My two new fearless leaders

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Well, geeks are certainly inheriting my earth.

On January 13, my company named Carol Bartz, a self-avowed math nerd and former punch-card carrying member of her college computer club, as its CEO. In her own words:

I was a real nerd. I love, love, love, love math. Back in the late ’60s, math meant being a teacher if you were a woman. I wasn’t interested in teaching. Then I took my first computer course. It was crazy. It was like math, only more fun. I switched to computer science.

Exactly one week later, on January 20, my country turned over executive control to Barack Obama, a CrackBerry addicted comic book geek. In his inauguration speech, Obama vowed to “restore science to its rightful place”, “wield technology’s wonders”, and even addressed “non-believers” — wording that in any sane universe should be entirely unremarkable, yet in ours appears to represent an unprecedented milestone.

I can’t recall a two-week span filled with so much geek pride and cautious optimism.

Back to the Carol Bartz quote. Reading it brings a smile to my face. It also reminds me of my mom, who, convinced it was her only option, taught middle school for a few years before returning to medical school to pursue her passion, enjoying a successful career as one of the first women radiologists.

I highly recommend Bartz’s essay, which mixes biography with prescience and insight. Bartz describes how technology and the Internet are transforming collaboration and improving productivity, at the same time ushering in an era of information overload, email bankruptcy, and misuse of the extra time technology affords. Remarkably, she wrote about these things in 1997!

It’s amazing to think how things have changed since 1997. My own first web experience, courtesy Mosaic, came in 1994, the same year Yahoo! was founded. In 1996, PayPal predecessor and public company First Virtual wrote their own keystroke-sniffing malware as a stunt to bolster their urgent call to “NEVER TYPE YOUR CREDIT CARD NUMBER INTO A COMPUTER”. Ebay was founded in 1995, PayPal in 1998. In 1997, Friendster had neither come nor gone, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was 13.

Yet Bartz’s words seem more relevant than ever today.

commentary, economics, fun

Babel: English Lit Syndrome meets Economics 101

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My wife and I just finished watching Babel, a movie about people lost in foreign cultures struggling to communicate.

It turns out that when you pop in the DVD and hit play, by default there are no subtitles, despite the fact that the majority of dialog takes place in Moroccan, Japanese, sign language, and Spanish.

I suffered from English Lit Syndrome, thinking how cool it was how the filmmakers made you feel like you were lost along with the characters, recalling the spot-on memoryless feel of Memento.

My wife insisted that there must be something wrong. Perhaps we missed a setting or choice among the menu options for subtitles? As the Japanese storyline reached its close, with lengthy and intricate back and forth dialog between characters whose relationships I hadn’t the least clue about, I realized that maybe, just maybe, she was right.

When the movie ended, I dug back into the menu. Low and behold, there in a “settings” submenu was a choice for subtitles: English, Spanish, or none. Default on “none”.

My artistic elitism crumbled into simple annoyance.

Poking around online, it turns out I’m not the only one duped by the DVD bug or struck by ELS.

Just think of all the time wasted by people watching the movie in incomprehension, investigating the problem, getting irked, and most especially complaining about it online.

A classic Econ 101 lesson in efficiency lost.

But wait! The DVD spurred the disorganized masses to work together to produce a tower of criticism. How clever!

commentary, prediction markets, publication, research, search, yahoo

The "predict flu using search" study you didn't hear about

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In October, Philip Polgreen, Yiling Chen, myself, and Forrest Nelson (representing University of Iowa, Harvard, and Yahoo!) published an article in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases titled “Using Internet Searches for Influenza Surveillance”.

The paper describes how web search engines may be used to monitor and predict flu outbreaks. We studied four years of data from Yahoo! Search together with data on flu outbreaks and flu-related deaths in the United States. All three measures rise and fall as flu season progresses and dissipates, as you might expect. The surprising and promising finding is that web searches rise first, one to three weeks before confirmed flu cases, and five weeks before flu-related deaths. Thus web searches may serve as a valuable advance indicator for health officials to spot the onset of diseases like the flu, complementary to other indicators and forecasts.

On November 11, the New York Times broke a story about Google Flu Trends, along with an unusual announcement of a pending publication in the journal Nature.

I haven’t read the paper, but the article hints at nearly identical results:

Google … dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped it onto the C.D.C.’s reports of influenzalike illness. Google found a strong correlation between its data and the reports from the agency…

Tests of the new Web tool … suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To the reporter’s credit, he interviewed Phillip and the article does mention our work in passing, though I can’t say I’m thrilled with the way it was framed:

The premise behind Google Flu Trends … has been validated by an unrelated study indicating that the data collected by Yahoo … can also help with early detection of the flu.

giving (grudging) credit to Yahoo! data rather than Yahoo! people.

The story slashdigged around the blogomediasphere quickly and thoroughly, at one point reaching #1 on the nytimes.com most-emailed list. Articles and comments praise how novel, innovative, and outside-of-the-box the idea is. The editor in chief of Nature praised the “exceptional public health implications of [the Google] paper.”

I’m thrilled to see the attention given to the topic, and the Google team deserves a huge amount of credit, especially for launching a live web site as a companion to their publication, a fantastic service of great social value. That’s an idea we had but did not pursue.

In the business world, being first often means little. However in the world of science, being first means a great deal and can be the determining factor in whether a study gets published. The truth is, although the efforts were independent, ours was published first — and Clinical Infectious Diseases scooped Nature — a decent consolation prize amid the go-google din.

Update 2008/11/24: We spoke with the Google authors and the Nature editors and our paper is cited in the Google paper, which is now published, and given fair treatment in the associated Nature News item. One nice aspect of the Google study is that they identified relevant search terms automatically by regressing all of the 50 million most frequent search queries against the CDC flu data. Congratulations and many thanks to the Google/CDC authors and the Nature editors, and thanks everyone for your comments and encouragement.

commentary, fun, politics

Find where your polling place isn’t

Just in time for Election Day Tuesday November 4, 2008, here is an extremely un-useful mapping service to help you find exactly where not to go on election day in order to cast your vote.

Click here to find where your polling place isn’t for this election

For example, here is precisely where I would not go to vote if I lived where I work which I don’t:

Map Where Dave's Polling Place is Not

Ok, what’s the point of this you ask?

Well, first, there is little point — it’s mostly a joke.

Beyond that, it’s meant as a satirical commentary on the inability of computers to understand satirical commentary.

Search engine algorithms and search advertising algorithms can’t distinguish well between “polling place is” and “polling place is not”.

Enough googlebombing and I’d wager the above link could rise in the ranks for search queries like polling place.

Enough money and a griefer serious about policing the Internet’s un-seriousness could advertise the link to people searching for their polling place in battleground zip codes, keeping the ad text perfectly factual with a few well placed negations, bypassing human editors at least for a few crucial hours.

In a way, it’s a thought experiment into our future as robots replace humans in the workforce, in this case librarians and editors.

The site is not meant to fool people, even foolish people, only computers.