so apparently time travel has finally arrived. Walked by the bus shelter opposite of Berlin Hauptbahnhof this morning and was greeted with a ‘Willkommen in der Zukunft’ (‘Welcome to the future’) message scrolling across the LED display.

Have not entirely figured out how the future is different from the present nor how i can get back to the present but apparently in the future bus shelters have LED displays that are powered by solar panels integrated into the same bus-shelters. Now the people in the future only have figure out what they want to do with them.

LED display with ‘Willkommen in der Zukunft’ message. Turns out that present day cameras do not work well with the LED scrolling display technology of the future.

so i am finally finding the time to read James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. At the end of chapter 2 he makes the observation that…

…the modern state, through it’s officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, asses, and manage. The utopian, immanent, and courteously frustrated goal of the modern state is to is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of it’s observations.

This observation, which is essential in understanding how governments work, is even more interesting when seen in the context of large non-state entities like facebook. It clearly illustrates why the recurring attempts to compare facebook to a nation state (most recently in this otherwise rather informative Verge article on facebook’s security).

Seen in the light of Scott’s observation facebook is a quantum leap ahead of the modern state: Facebook does not need simplified abstractions to make sense of the social reality of it’s members as it had direct and unmediated access to this social reality (if you want to understand how granular Facebook’s analytical grid is, this Planet Money episode is a good start).

In the end this is what makes Facebook dangerous: it may very well be that this direct access to the social reality of it’s members does not justify it’s inflated IPO price, but with increasing pressure to monetize the social reality of it’s members, Facebook will sooner or later realize that governments are probably willing to pay for access in order to once and for all achieve their utopian, immanent, and courteously frustrated goal of total information about their populations.

so it turns out that, since last year, they have a marathon in the gaza strip. even better, this is the only marathon which covers the entire coast of a state territory (much like Belgium is the only county in the world that has a tram running along it’s entire coastline).

the Volkskrant article that made me aware of the existence of the gaza marathon even claims that the coastline of the gaza strip is exactly 42K long, which after some quick fact-checking turns out to be only slightly wrong.

According to various news-reports, this year’s edition was quite a hellish task, with very low temperatures and a sand/rainstorm blowing into the faces of the competitors.

the New York Times has a longish article portraying the Operations Center of the City of Rio that has been build by IBM’s smarter cities unit.

In the article both the city of Rio de Janeiro and IBM portray the operations center as some kind of magic wand that enables the benevolent city government to steer the daily life of the city’s population using video feeds and text messages:

City employees in white jumpsuits work quietly in front of a giant wall of screens — a sort of virtual Rio, rendered in real time. Video streams in from subway stations and major intersections. A sophisticated weather program predicts rainfall across the city. A map glows with the locations of car accidents, power failures and other problems.

[…] Rio represents a grand challenge. A horizontal city sprawled between mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, it is at once a boomtown, a beach town, a paradise, an eyesore, a research center and a construction site. Oil-industry giants like Halliburton and Schlumberger have been rushing to build research centers here to help develop massive oil and gas fields off the coast.

Special police units have moved into about 20 slums, called favelas, in an effort to assert government control and combat crime. Rio is also reconstructing major arenas and building a rapid-bus system ahead of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics.

This is a city where some of the rich live in gated communities while some of the poor in the favelas pirate electricity from the grid. And where disasters, natural and otherwise, sometimes strike. Rainstorms can cause deadly landslides. Last year, a historic streetcar derailed, killing five people. Earlier this year, three buildings collapsed downtown, killing at least 17.

[…] In real flood conditions, the operations center decides when to set off the sirens. That decision is based on I.B.M.’s system, which uses computer algorithms to predict how much rain will fall in a given square kilometer — a far more precise forecast than standard weather systems provide. When the program predicts heavy rain, the center sends out text messages to different departments so they can prepare.

The article lists a number of criticism of this surveillance based approach to smart cities:

Some wonder if it is all for show, to reassure Olympic officials and foreign investors. Some worry that it will benefit well-off neighborhoods more than the favelas. Others fear that all this surveillance has the potential to curb freedoms or invade privacy. Still others view the center as a stopgap that does not address underlying infrastructure problems.

Which seems perfectly summarized by this graffiti that i came across in central Rio last january (two days after the building collapse mentioned in the NYT article above, which took place within 10 minutes walking distance from the location of the graffiti).

Makes me wonder if the graffiti artists was referring to a general tendency or to the Operations Center of the City of Rio in particular.

recently a friend mentioned that his kids (who have the daycare mother as y) observed that at fatima’s (the daycare mother) they would get ‘vis met oogjes’ (‘fish with eyes’) as opposed to the vis(sticks) without eyes that they were served at home. for some reason i really love this observation/expression which is perfectly captured in this work by Stummerer, Hablesreiter & Hanslmaier from their book Food Design XL:

wired has a short interview with Robert Neuwirth author of Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy which highlights some of the points made in the book (the main point being that combined the informal economy worldwide would be the second largest economy after the US). The interview hints at some fairly interesting observations such as merchant-driven product innovation and multiple layer interfaces between formal economy multinationals and their informal sales forces. Hopefully the book explores these in some more depth.

Midway through the interview wired has placed this map of the world which shows the size of each country’s underground economy, as a percentage of its GDP. While the map is not entirely credible (Iran and Indonesia having informal economies that account for less than 10% of GDP?) the most striking feature (for me) is the color of Belgium…

earlier this week i found myself in the bathtub reading through this list of voting recommendations by the ‘Audiovisual Coalition/EP CULT Committee‘ on the ‘Proposal for an orphan works directive’. The voting list makes voting recommendations with regards to amendments (proposals to change the text of the proposed directive) suggested by various Members of the European Parliament. In total it lists 230 amendments and recommends either to vote for them or against them. Here is one of them (amendment 195 by Jean-Marie Cavada):

For me these two boxes full of text pretty much capture a lot of what is wrong with public policy making in the field of copyright. But first, let’s recall what this directive is about:

(1) There is a large class of copyright protected works where the rights holders are unknown or where it is unknown if they are still protected by copyright.
(2) Copyright law makes most uses of a copyright protected work conditional on the permission by the rights holder(s).
(3) Such permission cannot be obtained when the rights holder is unknown when it is unknown if there still is a rights holder.
(4) As a result works without a known rights holder (‘orphan works‘) cannot be used without infringing copyright.
(5) This outcome is highly undesirable since it does not benefit anyone, neither the rights holders nor members of the public who might want to use such works.

The proposed directive on orphan works seeks to address this issue by allowing certain uses of orphan works on the condition that a diligent search has been carried out and that this search has failed to locate the rights holder. The core of the proposal is relatively undisputed. The discussion in the European Parliament (and in other places) centers on the scope of the above mentioned ‘certain uses’ and the question who should be entitled to make such uses.

This is where the above snippet from the voting list becomes intresting. MEP Cavada proposes (left box) to add a new article to the directive that would allow broadcasting organizations to use recognized orphan works (i.e works where a diligent search to locate a rights holder has been unsuccessful):

4a. For this Directive to be fully effective, broadcasting organizations need to be able to use recognized orphan works, under the conditions established by this directive, in the course of their normal activities.

In response, the voting list compiled by the CULT committee indicates that MEP’s should vote against this amendment and provides the following argument to support this recommendation (right box):

The inclusion of commercial broadcasters is not compatible with the public policy objectives of this proposal.

Now the interesting part of the argument is the reference to a ‘public policy objective’ that is said to underpin the proposed directive. As i have outlined above the objective of the proposal is to make copyright protected works that have been rendered inaccessible by a dysfunctional copyright system available again.

Available for the public to access these works, but also available for the public to re-use them, and to build upon them. So the public policy objective of the proposed directive is to provide access to these works and it should be self evident that (commercial) broadcasting organization are an important platform facilitating such access.

For some reason the CULT committee of the EP (and many other stakeholders in this debate) seem to have completely lost track of this objective. Instead of promoting access to works that are rotting away in archives (often at enormous costs to the public that is paying for archiving and preserving them), every possible effort is undertaken to limit access to orphan works as much as possible.

The general consensus seems to be that only non-commercial uses by non-commercial cultural heritage institutions who have the actual works in their collections should be allowed. Quite obviously this is not in line with any public policy objectives, since it keeps the works out of reach of most of the public.

The reference to the public policy objective in the voting recommendation perfectly illustrates to what degree the discussion about orphan works (and more broadly copyright) has been captured by special interests. Those trying to limit the scope of the directive are willing to risk enormous amounts of collateral damage in order to make sure that the ideology of unalienable exclusive rights of authors does not get undermined.

It is pretty disappointing to see that the CULT committee of the European Parliament seems utterly incapable to distinguish between special interest driven ideology and public policy here.

So the latest Planet Money podcast consists of this absolutely fascinating interview with Harvard professor turned casino CEO Gary Loveman. The interview is fascinating on a number of levels, chief among them this detailed look into data-driven behavioral manipulations:

Gary Loveman: Everybody who gambles knows that the house has an advantage. They are not unhappy that they loose any more that one is unhappy that they pay $40 to walk into the magic kingdom at disney. They recognize that there is a fee to provide all this but they get very unhappy if the loss is surprisingly severe – or as a statistician would put it, if they are in the tail of the distribution rather than the mean of the distribution, right?

So we have programs where a customer comes to play, we can observe real-time who in the casino is there on his first visit. It’s all though that [loyalty] card. So if Jude puts that card in and our system recognizes that this is the first time that we met her, a flag goes up to the casino management: New customer, Jude, playing the 25¢ video poker machine number 275 in the front left corner of the casino. And people on our staff will then begin to monitor all such people.

And we focus on those whose gaming results are way out in the negative tail, that is they are playing a slot machine where they should be getting back $94 out of a $100 but they are only getting back 50 out of $100. I know that this is a bad experience for Jude and she is going to feel that this was a very poor first visit. So the question is then: what are you going to do about this?

And you can imagine a couple of answers: one is ‘nothing’ which is the normal answer in consumer life. The other is that someone comes out, introduces themselves to Jude and says: ‘welcome to – lets say – Harrah’s St.Louis‘. Now the first thing that Jude is going to say is: ‘Hi, this place sucks! i am having a lousy day, i can’t win anything’.

Then the question is what do you do then? first of all you apologize, you say ‘Gee i am sorry to hear this, we do not like our customers to have a bad experience, how can i help?’ and you can help by buying Jude dinner, by giving her additional coin to play in the slot machines because at some point the law of large numbers will bring Jude back to the mean. You could offer her a room in the hotel or a ride home in the limo or any number of different things.

We do these kinds of interventions and then we run tests and control against it to see whether of all the people having a bad first experience, those who have a visit from one of our staff are more inclined to come back for the second visit. And not surprisingly they are dramatically more likely to come back.

[…]

Gary Loveman: Now when i was an academic i did this with airline data. So imagine through frequent flyer data that we observe that Jude has a visit on an airline, the flight was delayed and her bag was lost. Is it any mystery that she hates the airline? No, she hates the airline, you know that. So if you want her to visit the airline again the next time, how would you treat her? You would want to acknowledge that the last trip was a bad one and you would want to try to do something to make it up. It is exactly the same idea. But the airlines never do that.

this was mentioned in passing in an item on carbon trading that ran in today’s NOS evening news: the delhi metro is now transporting more passengers per day than the dutch national railways. a quick check on wikipedia shows that this is a bit of an understatement: daily ridership of the delhi metro system is 1.8M passengers per day while the NS is moving a mere 1.1M passengers per day (and struggling to do so i might add).

This figure pretty much blows my mind in a number of ways. while there have been railways in the netherlands since 1839 the delhi metro did only exist for a year or so when i first came to delhi in 2003. in less then 10 years this system has evolved into a system with 6 lines, 142 stations and 190KM of tracks. if you believe the delhi capital website you can even rent bicycles at some stations (back in 2003 the fact that i cycled from conaught circle to sarai was considered completely insane).

This is quite an achievement for a city that did not have much of a public transport infrastructure until 5 years ago. I still vividly how during one of my first trips on the delhi metro i observed multiple grown ups who tried to get a grip on the escalators in various stations. Seeing grown ups, how had clearly never encounters an escalator before, gathering the courage to step onto the moving stairs was one of the most powerful illustrations of modernization that i can imagine.

In the same vein the fact that there are now more riders on the delhi metro than on the the entire NS system strikes me as one of the most powerful illustrations of the insignificance of what is happening in the europe vis-a-vis the rest of the world and asia on particular…

Stumbled across this little hidden gem in an interview on ‘Tendencies and stakes of copyright’ that Lorena Boix Alonso (Deputy Head of Cabinet of Neelie Kroes) gave to the Forum D’Avignon (emphasis mine)c:

For example, according to recent studies many consumers are confused about what they are allowed to copy or record concerning content leading to negligible costs of reproduction they have legally, to the point that in many cases consumers are even paying for unauthorised access to content. Moreover, they do not seem to be aware of the value of IPR. With digitisation of content, users tend to forget the creativity part behind an item and do not measure the impact of their action. These factors make IPR enforcement difficult. This is why IPR enforcement actions by governments are often not understood by the users.

this is quite an amazing quote. as far as i understand economics, value is not something that is determined by the producer of a work and that consumers need to become aware of.

Instead value is something that is usually determined in market transactions between suppliers and consumers. As long as misguided ideas such as the one expressed by Lorena Boix Alonso in the interview above are used to structure the discussion about copyright in the digital age, we will never manage to resolve this discussion.

Instead of fabulating about inherent values of digital goods (and then leaning on policy makers to somehow enforce these fantasies), rights holders really need to understand that what they need to do is making offers to consumers that are attractive to them.