This is a reprint of a piece I just posted on the Public Knowledge Policy Blog.
Year: 2008
Who… are you?
I’ve been working with various representations of self inside Croquet. The other day, I had a kind off goofy cartoon-like avatar, and at the same time, I had a Web cam of myself displayed on the wall of the virtual conference room. We were looking at technical problems with both. David said, “Well, Howard looks interesting.” Do I? Which me? Or do you mean me?
I’ve also been working with 3D heads that are automatically generated to look like a person from in a 2D photograph. The software has some large number of parameters by which a canonical head is adjusted. The values for a particular person are measured off the photograph. Now, I think of a person’s ears as being unique as a fingerprint, but the software uses the same generic ear for everyone. Since there’s only one frontal picture used, there isn’t enough side-view data to make personalized ears. It made me think of Westworld or Neuromancer, in which future people recognize artificiality by flaws in the hands. A character says, “’They’ can’t do hands right.” In the near-term metaverse, it’ll be the ears.
On the other hand, one of these heads was a fellow I’d never met before, although I’ve been working closely with him days, nights and weekends for two months. I had seen him with a small 2D photograph where his face would be on his avatar. From his family name, I thought his ancestors might be Asian, but the ID photo was just too generic. Maybe Eastern Europe? However, the 3D head had a distinct Pac-Rim cast to me that just didn’t jump out at me in the photo. Interesting.
Lots of opportunities to define who the heck you are. And are you the same wherever you go? Am I different at work and in social gatherings? (Is there a difference?) Should I have distinct identities and distinct representations? I don’t want to walk into the virtual office wearing my B&D avatar! (And indeed, tonight I walked into a meeting not realizing that I was wearing Intel’s CEO that I’d been testing earlier.) Qwaq CEO Greg Nuyens puts it this way: after you meet and work with someone in Qwaq Forums, we want some of that relationship to carry over to a subsequent meeting in person. You shouldn’t feel like the non-virtual meeting is your first. (Greg’s in the video at the previous link discussing identity, but not this particular point.)
UPDATE ON CYREN CALL
Apparently, I’m not the only one hearing this. Cory Boles of Dow Jones has this longer story and more detailed story (he being an actual reporter and all).
Stay tuned . . . .
Blogroll Jubilee!
Noted “reasonable conservative” blogger Jon Swift last year came up with the idea of a “Blogroll Amnesty Day”, sort of a jubilee during which the policy of “put me on your blogroll and I’ll put you on mine”1 would be in effect.
Now he reports that the idea is catching on, and that many blogs will be observing blogroll amnesty days on February 1, 2 & 3. Friends, I’m here to tell you that Wetmachine will be joining the fun too-also, subject to the proviso explained below the fold.
Did Morgan OBrien and Cyren Call Kill Frontline?
I’m getting a number of folks from different walks of life coming forward with the same story: Morgan O’Brien was the direct cause of Frontline’s investors pulling out.
Of course, there is no way I can actually confirm this on the record because the people in the room either can’t talk about it (due to the anticollusion rules) or won’t. Nevertheless, having confirmed this with sources I find reliable and who could not have coordinated with each other, I feel I need to come forward here and put this on the table. D Block and the public safety partnership are far too important to end up falling victim to the combination of insider baseball, manipulation and greed that appears at play here.
I have absolutely not talked to anyone at the FCC about this. No one at the FCC can legally respond to any of this, and I would not ask them to do so. Similarly, in my discussions, I have been at pains to avoid any conflict with the anticollusion rules. Nevertheless, the sources I have are, I believe, reliable, and I have therefore made a decision to go forward with this story. I must also add that because I am on sabbatical, I have not had any discussions about this with my employer, Media Access Project, or with anyone at Media Access Project while developing this story.
Details below . . . .
“The Medium is the Message”
One of the arguments against sharing music was society will be diminished because no one will create music without a sufficient intellectual property incentive.
We now have a flourishing culture of sharing for video, in which people of diverse skill levels are creating huge amounts of content. No shortage there.
So I want to ask, “Is there a flourishing of digital music content today?” Surely it is easier to both create and enjoy music than it is for video. (Music requires lower bandwidth and less power, play-anywhere music devices are good and plentiful, and music creation software are quite fantastic.)
It feels like there is lot of free music available in video form. I wonder if the legal fight against music sharing — rather than sharing itself — has stifled the medium of sound-only recording, even as the more demanding but less legally bullied video medium has exploded. The music itself has just been switched to a new medium, and may ultimately be better for it.
Meanwhile, it seems that half the top 10 best selling printed novels in Japan were written on and for cell phone distribution. I’ve heard that the explosion in the genre coincides with the spread of flat-rate pricing on text messaging.
DNA, it's not just for genetics any more
Technology Review has an article about a paper in Public Library of Science Biology titled Solid-State, Dye-Labeled DNA Detects Volatile Compounds in the Vapor Phase. In other words, DNA is being used as just a polymer, not the Stuff of Life. Why is this cool?
No self-respecting molecular biologist would have thought of this. Instead, a systems neuroscientist working on creating an electronic nose was thinking on the problem of sensor development. The nose worked on biological principles, identifying odors not by specific sensors (as with a CO2 sensor), but rather by the patterns of activity on an array of sensors. They were working with sensors made of polymers doped with compounds with fluorescent properties that would change in the presence of specific, target odorant molecules. Developing new sensors has been a completely empirical process for anyone in the electronic nose business. How to speed it up? DNA.
.
The 700 MHz Band Auction, Part IIIc: The Big Guys and the Wild Cards
Finally, again let’s begin our analysis of strategic options for major actors in Auction 73, 700 MHz Band, with a look at the footprints established by many of those actors in two previous Lower 700 MHz auctions (Auction 44 and 49) and the AWS-1 auction (Auction 66):
Cellular Market Areas (CMA) Map for Auction 44
Economic Area Groupings (EAG) Map for Auction 44
Cellular Market Areas (CMA) Map for Auction 49
Economic Area Groupings (EAG) Map for Auction 49
Cellular Market Areas (CMA) Map for Auction 66
Economic Areas (EA) Map for Auction 66
Regional Economic Area Groupings (REAG) Map for Auction 66
The Big Guys
There are quite a few major actors who qualify as the genuine big guys in Auction 73. Their participation and fundamental interests in this spectrum ensure that the reserve prices will be met and likely exceeded on all blocks (with some caveats on D Block).
QUALCOMM makes the list of the big guys in the auction if for no other reason than it nearly scored national footprint (minus the Western EAG) in a Lower 700 MHz auction. The 700 MHz Band auction provides a source of spectrum entirely compatible with its acquisition for its MediaFLO datacasting enterprise. It may be a C Block contender, but it is more likely that QUALCOMM will concentrate on E Block to flesh out its national footprint and consolidate. This isn’t going to be a QUALCOMM versus the world auction; QUALCOMM will narrowly target specific licenses, go after them tenaciously, and then get out if it looks like the spectrum is going for higher prices than expected.
More below…
Obama, Clinton, Edwards and all the other authoritarian Republicans
Will any of them stand with Chris Dodd this week in defense of the Constitution?
If so, they will win my support.
If not, they can go to hell, as far as I’m concerned.
MPAA Suffers “Intelligence Failure” On Piracy, No Weapons of Mass File Sharing On College Campuses
“We have also learned that college students have used university networks to download 40% of all pirated movies, while eating yellow cake (aka ”Twinkies“).”
— Dan Glickman, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Testimony Before the House Wholly Owned Subsidiary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property
As some of you may know, the MPAA ad RIAA have been pushing their wholly owned subsidiaries in Congress to pass rather draconian laws against those vile dens of vice and iniquity, colleges and universities (Or, as RIAA President Mitch Bainwol explained: “never will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.” He was promptly sued by ally MPAA CEO Dan Glickman). They have justified this on the basis of a 2005 report Commissioned by the MPAA and created by
LEK Consulting Services that purported to show that an astonishing 40% of industry loses from internet piracy could be traced to file sharing at universities. Because the MPAA refused to share either the methodology used or the underlying data, a number of folks expressed a healthy skepticism about this evidence. Nevertheless, a credulous Congress accepted this as “credible evidence” of a “weapons of mass file sharing” in our nations colleges and universities, and sought to impose heavy sanctions and possible invasion by federal troops.
The MPAA now admits it overstated the numbers a wee bit. According to this story, it turns out that the real number even using the data and methodology approved by the MPAA and LEK was 15%, not 40%. Further, as Mark Luker at EDUCAUSE points out, since the number was based on college students without regard for whether the activity took place on campus, the real number of files traded illegally over college networks is more like 3%. (And again, that’s based on the MPAA’s numbers and methodology as now disclosed, not confirmed by independent evidence).
Members of Congress — who uncritically accepted the MPAA’s previous statistics despite the lack of any corroborating evidence, the refusal of the MPAA to disclose its data or methodology, and the utter ludicrousness of the number to anyone who actually knows anything about file transfers and the amount of bandwidth and computer powering it would take to even come close to the numbers MPAA estimated for college campuses — expressed surprise at the disclosure. “Wow,” said a Spokesman for a Senator from California who has vigorously supported the sanctions against colleges when she can take time away from supporting immunity for telephone companies who secretly spied on Americans based on Administration insistence this was “necessary for national security” and who voted to authorize the war in Iraq based on intelligence reports and statements by the Bush Administration that later proved to be filled with outright lies, questionable data, and utterly ludicrous statements questioned by the vast majority of reputable experts. “Who would think we’d fall for this again?”
Nevertheless, both California Senators and a majority of the California delegation to the House issued a joint statement that while the MPAA and RIAA evidence continues to turn out to be total self-serving bunk, support for a raft of bills that would curtail fundamental freedoms and cost tax payers billions in both direct costs and lost productivity remained strong. “We will continue to support whatever means prove necessary to end the scourge of piracy that do not impact the monopoly profits of the entertainment industry for as long as the threat against this industry — which produces more of our home state’s jobs and revenues than you could possibly imagine — persists,” said the statement. “Sticking it to colleges and universities seems like a good way to do that even without any real evidence that it will help.” The statement was pointedly not joined by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who, in a separate statement, pleaded with her colleagues to “please get a Goddamn clue already” And to “stop embarrassing me, the State of California, and the Democratic Party.”
The MPAA blames the gross overstatement of internet piracy on college and university campuses — which it pushed aggressively for the last two years — on “human error.” The MPAA has promised a thorough investigation to determine what has went wrong. “We take this error very seriously and have taken strong and immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report,” the group said in a statement.
In an unrelated item, the MPAA announced it would give LEK Consulting, which created the 2005 Report, the coveted “Oscar of Freedom” at this year’s Academy Awards.
Stay tuned . . . .
-
Who… are you?
I’ve been working with various representations of self inside Croquet. The other day, I had a kind off goofy cartoon-like avatar, and at the same time, I had a Web cam of myself displayed on the wall of the virtual conference room. We were looking at technical problems with both. David said, “Well, Howard looks interesting.” Do I? Which me? Or do you mean me?
I’ve also been working with 3D heads that are automatically generated to look like a person from in a 2D photograph. The software has some large number of parameters by which a canonical head is adjusted. The values for a particular person are measured off the photograph. Now, I think of a person’s ears as being unique as a fingerprint, but the software uses the same generic ear for everyone. Since there’s only one frontal picture used, there isn’t enough side-view data to make personalized ears. It made me think of Westworld or Neuromancer, in which future people recognize artificiality by flaws in the hands. A character says, “’They’ can’t do hands right.” In the near-term metaverse, it’ll be the ears.
On the other hand, one of these heads was a fellow I’d never met before, although I’ve been working closely with him days, nights and weekends for two months. I had seen him with a small 2D photograph where his face would be on his avatar. From his family name, I thought his ancestors might be Asian, but the ID photo was just too generic. Maybe Eastern Europe? However, the 3D head had a distinct Pac-Rim cast to me that just didn’t jump out at me in the photo. Interesting.
Lots of opportunities to define who the heck you are. And are you the same wherever you go? Am I different at work and in social gatherings? (Is there a difference?) Should I have distinct identities and distinct representations? I don’t want to walk into the virtual office wearing my B&D avatar! (And indeed, tonight I walked into a meeting not realizing that I was wearing Intel’s CEO that I’d been testing earlier.) Qwaq CEO Greg Nuyens puts it this way: after you meet and work with someone in Qwaq Forums, we want some of that relationship to carry over to a subsequent meeting in person. You shouldn’t feel like the non-virtual meeting is your first. (Greg’s in the video at the previous link discussing identity, but not this particular point.)
UPDATE ON CYREN CALL
Apparently, I’m not the only one hearing this. Cory Boles of Dow Jones has this longer story and more detailed story (he being an actual reporter and all).
Stay tuned . . . .
Blogroll Jubilee!
Noted “reasonable conservative” blogger Jon Swift last year came up with the idea of a “Blogroll Amnesty Day”, sort of a jubilee during which the policy of “put me on your blogroll and I’ll put you on mine”1 would be in effect.
Now he reports that the idea is catching on, and that many blogs will be observing blogroll amnesty days on February 1, 2 & 3. Friends, I’m here to tell you that Wetmachine will be joining the fun too-also, subject to the proviso explained below the fold.
Did Morgan OBrien and Cyren Call Kill Frontline?
I’m getting a number of folks from different walks of life coming forward with the same story: Morgan O’Brien was the direct cause of Frontline’s investors pulling out.
Of course, there is no way I can actually confirm this on the record because the people in the room either can’t talk about it (due to the anticollusion rules) or won’t. Nevertheless, having confirmed this with sources I find reliable and who could not have coordinated with each other, I feel I need to come forward here and put this on the table. D Block and the public safety partnership are far too important to end up falling victim to the combination of insider baseball, manipulation and greed that appears at play here.
I have absolutely not talked to anyone at the FCC about this. No one at the FCC can legally respond to any of this, and I would not ask them to do so. Similarly, in my discussions, I have been at pains to avoid any conflict with the anticollusion rules. Nevertheless, the sources I have are, I believe, reliable, and I have therefore made a decision to go forward with this story. I must also add that because I am on sabbatical, I have not had any discussions about this with my employer, Media Access Project, or with anyone at Media Access Project while developing this story.
Details below . . . .
“The Medium is the Message”
One of the arguments against sharing music was society will be diminished because no one will create music without a sufficient intellectual property incentive.
We now have a flourishing culture of sharing for video, in which people of diverse skill levels are creating huge amounts of content. No shortage there.
So I want to ask, “Is there a flourishing of digital music content today?” Surely it is easier to both create and enjoy music than it is for video. (Music requires lower bandwidth and less power, play-anywhere music devices are good and plentiful, and music creation software are quite fantastic.)
It feels like there is lot of free music available in video form. I wonder if the legal fight against music sharing — rather than sharing itself — has stifled the medium of sound-only recording, even as the more demanding but less legally bullied video medium has exploded. The music itself has just been switched to a new medium, and may ultimately be better for it.
Meanwhile, it seems that half the top 10 best selling printed novels in Japan were written on and for cell phone distribution. I’ve heard that the explosion in the genre coincides with the spread of flat-rate pricing on text messaging.
DNA, it's not just for genetics any more
Technology Review has an article about a paper in Public Library of Science Biology titled Solid-State, Dye-Labeled DNA Detects Volatile Compounds in the Vapor Phase. In other words, DNA is being used as just a polymer, not the Stuff of Life. Why is this cool?
No self-respecting molecular biologist would have thought of this. Instead, a systems neuroscientist working on creating an electronic nose was thinking on the problem of sensor development. The nose worked on biological principles, identifying odors not by specific sensors (as with a CO2 sensor), but rather by the patterns of activity on an array of sensors. They were working with sensors made of polymers doped with compounds with fluorescent properties that would change in the presence of specific, target odorant molecules. Developing new sensors has been a completely empirical process for anyone in the electronic nose business. How to speed it up? DNA.
.
The 700 MHz Band Auction, Part IIIc: The Big Guys and the Wild Cards
Finally, again let’s begin our analysis of strategic options for major actors in Auction 73, 700 MHz Band, with a look at the footprints established by many of those actors in two previous Lower 700 MHz auctions (Auction 44 and 49) and the AWS-1 auction (Auction 66):
Cellular Market Areas (CMA) Map for Auction 44
Economic Area Groupings (EAG) Map for Auction 44
Cellular Market Areas (CMA) Map for Auction 49
Economic Area Groupings (EAG) Map for Auction 49
Cellular Market Areas (CMA) Map for Auction 66
Economic Areas (EA) Map for Auction 66
Regional Economic Area Groupings (REAG) Map for Auction 66
The Big Guys
There are quite a few major actors who qualify as the genuine big guys in Auction 73. Their participation and fundamental interests in this spectrum ensure that the reserve prices will be met and likely exceeded on all blocks (with some caveats on D Block).
QUALCOMM makes the list of the big guys in the auction if for no other reason than it nearly scored national footprint (minus the Western EAG) in a Lower 700 MHz auction. The 700 MHz Band auction provides a source of spectrum entirely compatible with its acquisition for its MediaFLO datacasting enterprise. It may be a C Block contender, but it is more likely that QUALCOMM will concentrate on E Block to flesh out its national footprint and consolidate. This isn’t going to be a QUALCOMM versus the world auction; QUALCOMM will narrowly target specific licenses, go after them tenaciously, and then get out if it looks like the spectrum is going for higher prices than expected.
More below…
Obama, Clinton, Edwards and all the other authoritarian Republicans
Will any of them stand with Chris Dodd this week in defense of the Constitution?
If so, they will win my support.
If not, they can go to hell, as far as I’m concerned.
MPAA Suffers “Intelligence Failure” On Piracy, No Weapons of Mass File Sharing On College Campuses
“We have also learned that college students have used university networks to download 40% of all pirated movies, while eating yellow cake (aka ”Twinkies“).”
— Dan Glickman, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Testimony Before the House Wholly Owned Subsidiary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property
As some of you may know, the MPAA ad RIAA have been pushing their wholly owned subsidiaries in Congress to pass rather draconian laws against those vile dens of vice and iniquity, colleges and universities (Or, as RIAA President Mitch Bainwol explained: “never will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.” He was promptly sued by ally MPAA CEO Dan Glickman). They have justified this on the basis of a 2005 report Commissioned by the MPAA and created by
LEK Consulting Services that purported to show that an astonishing 40% of industry loses from internet piracy could be traced to file sharing at universities. Because the MPAA refused to share either the methodology used or the underlying data, a number of folks expressed a healthy skepticism about this evidence. Nevertheless, a credulous Congress accepted this as “credible evidence” of a “weapons of mass file sharing” in our nations colleges and universities, and sought to impose heavy sanctions and possible invasion by federal troops.
The MPAA now admits it overstated the numbers a wee bit. According to this story, it turns out that the real number even using the data and methodology approved by the MPAA and LEK was 15%, not 40%. Further, as Mark Luker at EDUCAUSE points out, since the number was based on college students without regard for whether the activity took place on campus, the real number of files traded illegally over college networks is more like 3%. (And again, that’s based on the MPAA’s numbers and methodology as now disclosed, not confirmed by independent evidence).
Members of Congress — who uncritically accepted the MPAA’s previous statistics despite the lack of any corroborating evidence, the refusal of the MPAA to disclose its data or methodology, and the utter ludicrousness of the number to anyone who actually knows anything about file transfers and the amount of bandwidth and computer powering it would take to even come close to the numbers MPAA estimated for college campuses — expressed surprise at the disclosure. “Wow,” said a Spokesman for a Senator from California who has vigorously supported the sanctions against colleges when she can take time away from supporting immunity for telephone companies who secretly spied on Americans based on Administration insistence this was “necessary for national security” and who voted to authorize the war in Iraq based on intelligence reports and statements by the Bush Administration that later proved to be filled with outright lies, questionable data, and utterly ludicrous statements questioned by the vast majority of reputable experts. “Who would think we’d fall for this again?”
Nevertheless, both California Senators and a majority of the California delegation to the House issued a joint statement that while the MPAA and RIAA evidence continues to turn out to be total self-serving bunk, support for a raft of bills that would curtail fundamental freedoms and cost tax payers billions in both direct costs and lost productivity remained strong. “We will continue to support whatever means prove necessary to end the scourge of piracy that do not impact the monopoly profits of the entertainment industry for as long as the threat against this industry — which produces more of our home state’s jobs and revenues than you could possibly imagine — persists,” said the statement. “Sticking it to colleges and universities seems like a good way to do that even without any real evidence that it will help.” The statement was pointedly not joined by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who, in a separate statement, pleaded with her colleagues to “please get a Goddamn clue already” And to “stop embarrassing me, the State of California, and the Democratic Party.”
The MPAA blames the gross overstatement of internet piracy on college and university campuses — which it pushed aggressively for the last two years — on “human error.” The MPAA has promised a thorough investigation to determine what has went wrong. “We take this error very seriously and have taken strong and immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report,” the group said in a statement.
In an unrelated item, the MPAA announced it would give LEK Consulting, which created the 2005 Report, the coveted “Oscar of Freedom” at this year’s Academy Awards.
Stay tuned . . . .