What could possibly go wrong?

Cory Doctorow writes:

Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures has received a patent for a DRM [Digital rights management -- MP] system for 3D printers, to stop people from printing out trademarked and patent objects. Like other DRM systems, this won't work (it will either have to be so broad in its parameters for recognizing prohibited items that it will balk at printing innumerable harmless objects, or it will be trivial to defeat by disguising the objects beyond the system's ability to recognize them).
...
From Tech Review's Antonio Regalado:

“You load a file into your printer, then your printer checks to make sure it has the rights to make the object, to make it out of what material, how many times, and so on,” says Michael Weinberg, a staff lawyer at the non-profit Public Knowledge, who reviewed the patent at the request of Technology Review. “It’s a very broad patent.”

The patent isn’t limited to 3-D printing, also known as additive manufacturing. It also covers using digital files in extrusion, ejection, stamping, die casting, printing, painting, and tattooing and with materials that include “skin, textiles, edible substances, paper, and silicon printing.”

Because if you're going to approve a really sweeping patent, who better to give it to than Nathan freakin' Myhrvold?

Another convoluted IP tale

Mark Evanier spells out the strange sequence that led from the creation of Mickey Mouse to this:

I was in the hospital when it was announced that Universal and Disney had concluded a deal that would send sportscaster Al Michaels to NBC while Disney would reacquire title to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

UPDATE: Right on cue, Mark Evanier provides another excellent IP post, this time on residuals.

Josh Marshall on Scott Walker's anti-tenure push

I've got to get out the door, so I don't have time to dig into this question, but many reform advocates such as Jonathan Chait have argued in very broad terms that educational systems which grant increased job security based on seniority only attract deadwood; good, productive academicians have no interest  in tenure since they would always be the last to be fired.

If this is true, why haven't elite private schools replaced tenure with a bonus system?

From TPM:

So I want to take a look at a different part of this. The crown jewel of the Wisconsin university system is the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It is one of the top research universities in the country and the world. And with this, you will basically kiss that jewel goodbye. To me this is the more salient reality than whether you think academic tenure is a good thing or not in itself.

If this happens, over time, the professors who can will leave. And as the top flight scholars and researchers depart, so will the reputation of the institution. So will graduate students who want to study with them, the best undergrads, money that flows to prestigious scholarship. Don't get me wrong. Not in a day or a year or even several years. But it will. If you don't get this, you don't understand the economy and incentive structure of university life.

Over the last couple decades, especially in the humanities, we've seen develop what increasingly looks like an aristocracy of tenure. The lucky PhDs land tenure and they've got a pretty good gig. In some cases they have a great gig. But the system is sustained by an army of TAs, adjuncts, other non-tenure track positions and assistant professors fighting for tenure. In some cases realistically, in some cases not at all realistically, all those folks are fighting for the hope of landing tenure at some point. Take that away and the whole system of sweated academic labor comes crashing down.

But again, that's bigger picture. Let's look at the medium picture. Take tenure out of the University of Wisconsin and the people who can will - over time - leave. If we had a single national system, that would be one thing, as it would effect all equally. And the departees wouldn't have any place to go. But it won't. Private universities, with the most outrageously high tuitions, will not do this. And the top academics will go there. The net effect of all this will be to kill off or bleed dry great state universities which are yes, still pricey, but not as crazy expensive and hard to get into as the prestige private universities.

Cracked has some fun with ad campaigns

The 7 Most Blatant Lies Famous Brands Based Entire Ads On

Slightly NSFW

Land of the Pyramids

I can't quite give this TPM/Slice article on multilevel marketing of dietary supplements an unqualified recommendation (for this and other reasons), but it's worth reading.

You can find a better treatment of multilevel marketing from the good people at This American Life (specifically Bianca Giaever and Brian Reed). And, if you really want to get deep into the weeds, check out this video from the Internet Archive...

Then follow the link to see what became of that Nutrilite.

Damn you, Jessica Williams!

God as my witness, I was working on a post about how open carry laws like this have have huge de facto exceptions.

The Daily Show
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Coming attractions

This is Joseph

Mathbabe (Cathy O'Neil) has been on a roll lately.  Expect to see some comments on her recent articles coming up in the weeks to come (Mark has an impressive queue at the moment).  In the meantime, one could do worse than to check her out.

Good cop, bad cop

Quick recommendation. I thought this TPM analysis of the McKinney, Texas incident by a former policeman turned law professor did an excellent job comparing the responses of the different officers on the scene. Obviously there's a limit to what you can tell from this video, but the difference certainly appears stark.

The issue isn't (just) excessive CEO pay

Nothing particularly new here, but it does reinforce the argument that current levels of CEO pay are impossible to justify even if you ignore the inequality question and limit yourself to value added to the company. 

The best-paid chief executive of a large American company was David Zaslav, head of Discovery Communications, the pay-TV channel operator that is home to "Shark Week." His total compensation more than quadrupled to $156.1 million in 2014 after he extended his contract.

Les Moonves, of CBS, held on to second place in the rankings, despite a drop in pay from a year earlier. His pay package totaled $54.4 million.

The remaining four CEOs, from entertainment giants Viacom, Walt Disney, Comcast and Time Warner, have ranked among the nation's highest-paid executives for at least four years, according to the Equilar/AP pay study.

One reason for the high level of pay in the industry is that its CEOs are dealing with well-paid individuals.

"The talent, the actors and directors and writers, they're being paid a lot of money," said Steven Kaplan, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. "In industries where the talent makes a lot of money, the CEO makes a lot of money as well."

Pay packages for CEOs overall grew for the fifth straight year in 2014, driven by a rising stock market that pushed up the value of executive stock awards. Median compensation for the heads of Standard & Poor's 500 companies rose to a record $10.6 million, up from $10.5 million the year before, according to the Equilar/AP pay study.

Peer pressure is another factor driving up executive compensation. The board members responsible for setting CEO pay typically consider what the heads of similar companies are making. If pay for one goes up, it will likely go up for others.

For the chieftains of media, there are also other factors boosting pay.

Several work at companies where a few major shareholders control the vote.

The media magnate Sumner Redstone controls almost 80 percent of the voting stock at CBS and Viacom. Because of his large holdings, Redstone can easily override the concerns of other investors about the level of CEO pay. Discovery's voting stock is heavily influenced by the brothers Si and Donald Newhouse and John Malone, another influential investor in the media industry.

At Comcast, which owns NBC and Universal Studios, CEO and Chairman Brian Roberts controls a third of his company's voting stock. That means he has substantial influence on the pay that he is awarded.

Comcast had no comment when contacted by the AP for this story.

What strikes me in these cases is the lack of correlation. You can make a good case that Moonves brings more than $54.4 million of value, but I'm not sure you can say that for any of the other names on the list. Zaslav is still being paid top dollar for a run that appears to be over. Iger got enormously lucky with Marvel (and you have to wonder how much longer that run will continue). Those, in turn, are more defensible than Roberts of Comcast, a company that proves that no amount of bad management can sink a de facto monopoly.

What happens when someone actually tests one of Nathan Myhrvold's culinary tips?

Myhrvold's wine tip doesn't appear to hold up.

From over at the food blog,

Privacy in and out of the classroom

This is Joseph.

From Dean Dad's comments section on a discussion of a taped conversation at Kennesaw showing an advisor acting poorly towards the student:

You will have a hard time getting and keeping good employees if you always assume that a selected video clip like that one indicates a pattern of behavior rather than a response to repeated misbehavior that even extensive training cannot always eliminate. As a man, you might not be aware of how often women on a campus are disrespected by male students when they do the same things that men do in a classroom or an office.

I am not in complete agreement with this perspective.  But I do agree that it is dangerous to use a minute long video clip (that one party knew was happening and the other did not) as a proxy for the entire interaction. 

This sort of "selective sampling" is likely to become a bigger and bigger problem as the ability to record in public becomes more and more trivial.  What do you do when it's not just phones that can record but eyeglasses as well?  But the ability to edit out previous interactions and to control the timing of the recording can be a powerful tool to drive the conversation. 

Just one more point to ponder.

Revisiting the SNAP challenge

We've already established that Trader Joe's is not where you want to shop if you have to live on a food stamp budget, but is it even possible to stave off hunger for a week with $28 worth of Trader Joe's groceries?

Yes, but just barely.

The internet has made historical revisionism so much easier

[UPDATE: Brad DeLong found an arguably more embarrassing example from the National Journal.]


This may be the best example of New York Times political reporting you will see you all day.

It started as a standard narrative journalism/puff piece. Amy Chozick and Trip Gabriel used a handful of anecdotes and a couple of well-received speeches to build a breathless account of political underdog Carly Fiorina surging toward the lead.

Hack political writers love this narrative. They also gravitate toward positive stories about candidates with whom they are comfortable. When I say "comfortable" I am talking about culture not politics. I will try to back this up in future posts, but I have long argued that left/right biases are far less common than more significant biases involving class, race, religion, region, education, etc. While the New York Times probably disagrees with most of Fiorina's politics, they are more than comfortable with almost everything else about her, from her prominent family to her CEO background to her wealth and extravagant lifestyle.

So far, all of this is just another day at the office for the New York Times election beat. Soon after the piece ran, however, people started to notice that the writers had really buried their lede. Deep in the story, it was revealed that Fiorina's surge was not quite as substantial as the headline suggested.

From paragraph 8 (as pointed out by Duncan Black):

While supporters in Iowa noted that she had doubled her standing in state polls, it was a statistically insignificant change from 1 percent to 2 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll released May 6. (That may seem piddling, but the same poll had Mr. Santorum, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2012, also at 2 percent, while 5 percent supported Mr. Bush.)

It is one thing to have a paragraph in the middle of your story that completely undercuts your premise; it is quite another to have people point out a paragraph in the middle of your story that completely undercuts your premise. A quick rewrite was definitely in order.

The resulting headline doesn't make a lot of sense -- if the polls are a reflection of the state's voters, Iowans appear to be swoon-shrugging over Fiorina -- but it does partially inoculate the story from further mockery.

Of course, the NYT has standards. They don't just rewrite a published story without even acknowledging it. The original headline is right there at the bottom of the page.

In small print and pale gray letters.

Yes, I am taking the pro side here on autonomous vehicles

In a comment on my recent relatively positive post on autonomous vehicles, Joseph points us to a Megan McArdle article that takes a different view.

While it is good to see that the conventional wisdom is starting to acknowledge some of limitations with driverless cars, I still have quite a few problems with the piece. McArdle makes some good points about the labor implications, but she does not seem to have a strong grasp of the technological or the implementation issues involved with using autonomous vehicles for long-haul trucking. We can get back to implementation later; for now let's talk about tech.

Here's McArdle:

You hear a lot about how Google cars have driven an amazing number of miles without accidents. You hear less, however, about how they have achieved this feat: by 3-D mapping every inch of those roads so that the car has a database of every stationary object, from traffic lights to guardrails. That allows the car to devote its processing power to analyzing the movement of objects that aren't in its database.

Such mapping is incredibly labor intensive, which is why, according to Lee Gomes, those amazing mile counts that Google's driverless cars are racking up "are the same few thousand mapped miles, driven over and over again." Most of them are near Google's headquarters in Mountain View, a place that gets only 15 inches of rain a year and never has snow or ice -- three common weather hazards that long-haul truckers must frequently contend with.

Just getting Google's technology to a point where we could have self-driving trucks would require mapping every inch of the nation's more than 164,000 miles worth of highways. But then what do you do with the truck? You're probably going to have to map some of the roads that connect to those highways too. And then constantly remap them, because things change all the time. You'll also have to teach the computer system what to do in a blinding snowstorm on Wolf Creek Pass. As we wrote in January, "The technology giant doesn’t intend to offer a self-driving car to areas where it snows in the near term."

McArdle makes a couple of common mistakes: assuming that, because Google dominates the coverage of driverless cars, it also dominates the research (which we'll get to later); and assuming that what is difficult for humans is difficult for robots and vice versa.

Rain and snow are problematic for us humans both because they can limit visibility and because they tend to create very complex physics problems that have to be solved in a fraction of a second. Bad weather visibility is much less of an issue with autonomous vehicles* than it is with human drivers while classical physics problems are the sort of thing that roboticists are very good at.

Along similar lines, McArdle observes [emphasis added] "But it seems like getting from there to fully automated trucks--necessarily huge, heavy, and  capable of horrific damage, with handling capabilities that change depending on the load, and a stopping distance almost twice that of a car at high speeds, will probably take a while." Yes, this will take a while, but not for the reasons McArdle imagines. Load effects and long stopping distance do make truck driving much more difficult for humans, but for computers they just represent simply another set of parameters. Furthermore, the biggest factor in real-life stopping distance is often reaction time, an area where computers have a distinct advantage.

Nor does the fair-weather testing complaint hold up. It is true that Google has largely limited its testing to clement conditions, but you certainly can't say the same for the upcoming Volvo test in, you know, Sweden.

Google's PR department has done a masterful job identifying the company with autonomous vehicles. This is not simply a matter of corporate ego. As I said earlier:

Google has a lot of reasons to want to be seen as a diversified, broadly innovative technology company, rather than as a very good one-trick pony cashing in on a monopoly (possibly two monopolies depending on how you want to count YouTube). A shiny reputation helps to keep stock prices high and regulators at bay.

It is enormously telling that McArdle cites Google ten times in her article while she doesn't mention Daimler by name and she never refers to Volvo at all.

* As far as I can tell, Daimler's prototype is doing its mapping independently in real time. While impressive, I'm sure the production models will share data and will also rely on existing maps.

CLEPs and MOOCs

Dean Dad makes a tremendously important point about MOOCs:

As a commenter correctly noted, there’s nothing stopping someone now from taking a MOOC in a “gen ed” area and then taking a CLEP exam to get credit.  CLEP fees are often lower than even community college tuition.  The ASU model is a more expensive and clunkier version of CLEP.  The MOOC-to-CLEP option has existed for a couple of years now, but students haven’t taken advantage in significant numbers.  

In case you're not familiar:

The College Level Examination Program (CLEP) is a group of standardized tests created and administered by College Board. These tests assess college-level knowledge in thirty-six subject areas and provide a mechanism for earning college credits without taking college courses. They are administered at more than 1,700 sites (colleges, universities, and military installations) across the United States. There are about 2,900 colleges which grant CLEP credit. Each institution awards credit to students who meet the college's minimum qualifying score for that exam, which is typically 50 to 60 out of a possible 80, but varies by site and exam. These tests are useful for individuals who have obtained knowledge outside the classroom, such as through independent study, homeschooling, job experience, or cultural interaction; and for students schooled outside the United States. They provide an opportunity to demonstrate proficiency in specific subject areas and bypass undergraduate coursework. Many take CLEP exams because of their convenience and low cost (typically $15) compared to a semester of coursework for comparable credit.

I plan to spend a lot of time this summer writing about better using CLEPs  and improving MOOCs. For now though, I want to get a couple of big points.

The Internet has a way of producing deceptively large numbers. This has certainly been true with MOOCs. Articles have breathlessly reported huge enrollments despite the fact that for online classes enrollment is an almost meaningless statistic. When we have tried to assign meaningful metrics to online classes, they have tended to do very poorly. CLEP-usage would appear to be another example.

CLEP exams are a well-established, easy, and cheap way for students to get college credit for taking online courses, but very few seem to be taking advantage of it. That's a bad sign, but it does suggest a way forward.

Now, just to be clear, I am not saying that CLEP tests are a perfect solution for this problem – – I am certain we could come up with a better system, particularly once we have some experience to build on – but for the time being these exams are probably our best option and the fact that we're not seriously exploring them indicates a deeper lack of seriousness about MOOCs.