Dave Winer hits one out of the park

by Steve Keys

Readings from news execs
[Via Scripting News]

Preparing for Jay Rosen’s class today, I, like all the students, had to read eight speeches given by news execs.

It was a really depressing task. I guess that’s the point. Unless I was required to read them, I would have given up on each long before the end. The story is just too sad, and the rationalizations too weak, and honestly, way too vain and self-centered.

There was an interesting juxtaposition. Rupert Murdoch giving a mercifully short speech saying the biggest mistake someone in the news business could make is thinking the reader is stupid. He could easily have been introducing the next speaker, Bill Keller of the NY Times, who clearly thinks almost everyone who doesn’t work at the NY Times is stupid. It seems he would exempt reporters at The Guardian, the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune. Probably the Boston Globe as well. Not sure who else he respects, but he certainly doesn’t respect bloggers, or seem to understand that bloggers could have facts or perspectives that a Times reporter might cite (though, thankfully quite a few Times reporters seem to do that these days).

For Jay’s class, our assignment is to figure out how these guys are trying to adapt.

Here’s how I visualize how they’re doing it. Imagine a box made of cardboard. It’s big, but it’s light. Pick the box up and move it from one place to another. When it gets to the new spot, it’s still a big cardboard box. It still can contain the same stuff as the box did when it was in the old place.

That’s the transition each of these execs feel they have to make. The stuff in the box are news stories. The box is their editorial structure. The old place is print. The new place is the Internet.

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They do not realize that the cardboard box has been completely transformed into a totally new shape and that they need to adjust their business to reflect that. What these companies believe they provide can now be done by people for free or for very little. The world is full of Peter Parkers, free lance photographer. Most of what passes for media can be done by stenographers and PR people.

By Sturgeon’s law, 90% of the media is crap. And that crap can be filled by regular people who do not really get paid. These MSM heads are trying to keep their business model afloat in order to provide for that 90%. But the business arena has changed.

What they should be doing is supporting where they have some advantage – that 10% who are great. There are lots of media photos but only a few real photojournalists. Many people blog, but only a few can be uplifting and enlightening. Everyone has an opinion but only a few can get that across in 500 words.

These companies should be aggregating the 10% that is great. Instead, they just try to move the box. Leaving it for others to figure out how to leverage the box’s new shape.

Best quote of the day about Steve Jobs

by André Banyai

“It’s okay to be driven a little crazy by someone who is so consistently right.”
[Via Marco.org]

“It’s okay to be driven a little crazy by someone who is so consistently right.”

– John Sculley on the frustrations of working with Steve Jobs’ perfectionism.

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I learned a long time ago that the difference between a Nobel Prize and simply being crazy was being right. Too many companies at the bleeding edge fail because their crazy is actually crazy or their sane managers are wrong.

Combining the two is the key.

Direct evidence that FaceTime allows Apple and others to route around cell phone censorship

Middle Easterners get around iPhone 4 Facetime ban with iPod Touch 4G
[Via Edible Apple]

It’s probably not all that shocking that Apple’s Facetime video chat feature is not supported in a few draconian Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, and even relatively liberal countries like the United Arab Emirates. Folks in the Middle East looking to skirt around this ban, however, can make use of Facetime on Apple’s recently released iPod Touch via wi-fi. Sort of makes you wonder what the point of the ban is in the first place given that Facetime only works via wi-fi in the first place.

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Here we have customers using the Internet, Wi-Fi and Apple iOS devices to route around the control that cell phone carriers provide. I’ll bet these countries now try to prevent this use of Wi-fi but it becomes really hard since this is just data, not voice.

What happens when almost all neighborhoods have access to the internet via White-Fi or other technologies? Yes, there may be situations when access to a cell network is required but they will be fewer than we have today. And then, I can get a cheap cell phone, using my iOS devices to provide me access to the data I need.

iOS, FaceTime and White-fi may be the death knell of cell phone control at least for anyone who really cares. It could very easily be cheaper and would make the carriers simply relevant only as distributors of data.

More discussion of Microsoft’s and Intel’s flat feet

by Northampton Museum

Intel, Microsoft, and the Curious Case of the iPad
[Via Daring Fireball]

Brooke Crothers:

“That tablet thing? Yeah, we’ll get back to you on that.” That’s a crude but fairly accurate encapsulation of the attitude Microsoft, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices have toward the iPad and the tablet market in general.

Why the cavalier attitude? Before I defer to the opinion of an IDC analyst I interviewed (below), here’s one pretty obvious reason I’ll put forward. All three companies look at their revenue streams — traditional PC hardware and software on laptops, desktops, and servers — and come to the conclusion that the tablet is a marginal market. A deceptively accurate conclusion, because at this point in time — and even 12 months out — the tablet is marginal compared with the gargantuan laptop, desktop, and server markets.

An interesting take, but I disagree. I think Microsoft and Intel are both taking the iPad’s success extremely seriously. It may be a small market, as of today, but the trend line is heading north at a very steep angle. I think it’s a case where you can’t take what Microsoft and Intel say about it at face value. Intel has no processor to power an iPad-class devic. Microsoft has no OS to run an iPad-class device. Most worrying for these companies may not be the iPad itself, but the fact that iPad competitors — scant though they are, as of today — aren’t running Intel processors or Microsoft software.

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I wrote about this yesterday.Intel ahs no processor and MS has no OS to compete. Apple developed an incredibly great OS with OSX, providing them with a tool that scales across all form factors from mobile to server.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has a multitude of different OS, one for each form factor. They finally got one for a cell phone 4 years after Apple. How many years before they have an iPad one?

Intel’s current processors do not have the power or battery life to compete. They may have something ready next year but when will it be available in bulk.

Look at this tablet PC just released, with Intel’s processor and Windows 7. It weighs 2.5 pounds, a pound more than the iPad. And it has a 3 hour battery life, compared to the iPad’s 10.hours.

And, interestingly, it has sold out. This may well be because Apple has soaked up almost all the components needed for such devices. Others may not get access to them until the suppliers build new plants.

One has to expect that Apple has not been sitting on the sidelines developing its own silicon further, enhancing the operating system and working on new form factors.

And neither of these two companies seem to really have a cohesive strategy to compete with Apple’s FaceTime when it begins to eclipse the need for cell phone companies.

Ballmer called the iPad a PC

What if the iPad were a PC?
[Via Brainstorm Tech]

If you throw tablets in the mix, Apple just became the U.S.’s No. 1 computer maker

“The iPad,” writes Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore in a note to clients issued Monday, “is driving a rapid, unprecedented shift in the structure of the computing industry.”

To illustrate that point, Whitmore has taken a chart of domestic PC market shares over the past seven quarters as measured by IDC, which doesn’t consider tablets to be personal computers, and redrawn it with the iPad added in (see right).

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Steve Ballmer, head of Microsoft said, just this last summer, that the iPad is simply ” a different form factor PC.” He considers it a PC. So why don’t others?

Extremely cool manipulation of DNA

Chemical origami used to create a DNA Möbius strip
[Via Ars Technica]

Researchers at Arizona State University have recently used origami to fold DNA into a Möbius strip. Why? Because its frickin’ cool, that’s why. The scientists, who hail from the departments of biophysics, chemistry, and biochemistry, chose to make one out of DNA “not only because it is artistically inspiring, but also because it will likely display unique material properties that may be applied to create novel molecular devices.”

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Because if we can make a Mobius strip out of DNA, perhaps we can create all sorts of possible structures.

One of my favorite problems from the chemistry class class taught by RIchard Dickerson at CalTech involved a very small piece of circular DNA. By shifting reading frames. mRNA that was much monger than the DNA piece could be made.

Perhaps some wonderful things could be made from this. MAybet a really interesting science fiction story where aliens have DNA folded like a Mobius strip.

Researching why acupuncture trials are wrong

by Thunderchild7

The Cargo Cult of Acupuncture
[Via Science-Based Medicine]

Bloodletting, of course, was a major aim of early vessel therapy and is frequently described in the Su wen.¹

Paul U Unschuld

“Cargo cult” is a metaphor that describes the act of imitating an activity or a practice without any insight into the underlying principles. In the literal sense, it refers to a magico-religious practice observed in tribal societies, where the members ritually imitate the activities of a technologically-advanced society they had contact with, so that they can magically draw their material wealth. For instance, after WWII, indigenous tribes in New Guinea who had come in close contact with cargo planes, started to build landing strips and populated them with plane-like effigies that were made of straw, bamboo, and coconuts, so that they can magically lure the passing planes.² The term “cargo cult science” was introduced by Richard Feynman in a speech at Caltech in 1974 to describe pseudoscientific studies in which all the superficial aspects of a scientific inquiry are adhered to, but the underlying principles are not scientific. He classified many educational and psychological studies as such, for having the appearance of academic research but lacking the principles of a scientific inquiry.³

Another example of cargo cult science is the plethora of two-arm acupuncture studies that compare a needling regimen using the traditional concepts, and compare it with a non-interventional placebo. These studies might have the appearance of clinical research, but they are inherently flawed and inconclusive, because they do not rule out the possibility that the observed results are mainly due to the painful stimulus and injury caused by a needle, which can occur regardless of the insertion point. Indeed, an acute noxious stimulus from a prickle, heat, or any other painful stimulus – almost anywhere on the skin – can attenuate the perception of pain in another area of the body through a reflex called “counter-irritation,” also called the “pain-inhibiting-pain effect” or “diffuse noxious inhibitory control” (DNIC).⁴ DNIC was extensively studied by Fauve et al. in the 1980s, who showed in mice that it has an effect equivalent or superior to that of glucocorticoids.^5,6

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Acupuncture postulates that specific needling into specific areas has curative properties. But there is lots of data that non-specific needling can accomplish the same things. The body reacts to noxious stimuli by reducing the pain response.

Thus there may well not be anything about acupuncture as a specific therapy that is not already explained by evidence-based medical approaches.

So, doing acupuncture trials without controlling for these known effects results in trials that tell us little new. Seems pretty typical for alternative medicine.

Why Mandelbrot matters

by jurvetson

It is more than because of pretty pictures.

The death of Benoit Mandelbrot this week has spawned a lot of reflection on his work. Here is an interesting video that explains some of it.

And here is a great TED talk from just this year:

His work opened up the world of fractals and of chaos theory. But, one of his last books was prescient. The Misbehavior of Markets, published in 2004, demonstrates that the market is not rational at all and that it is much riskier than many would like to believe.

From an article written in 2004, with a subheading stating “The founding father of fractal theory warns that another Great Crash is a real threat. Martin Baker meets him” has these nice quotes:

“The financiers and investors of the world are, at the moment, like mariners who heed no weather warnings.”

“A few fund managers have experimented with these concepts [of price dependence, whatever that is, and volatility]. They often call it chaos theory – though strictly speaking that is marketing language riding on the coat-tails of a popular scientific trend. In reality, the mathematics is still young, the research barely begun, and reliable applications still distant.”

“My purpose is always to observe the symptoms and have a model of what is being seen. In the case of markets, it is frightening because there are so many people of great brilliance and extraordinary greed who work there. They don’t understand the market, but they understand the numbers.”

He has continued to discuss these topics with some very interesting videos recently about the crisis and the failure of efficient market theory:

The Black Swan, one of the more influential books written in the last decade, was strongly influenced by Mandelbrot’s work. The author knew things were going to get bad and said so. He and Mandelbrot discussed why they are so worried about the current crisis:

“The most serious situation we have been in since the American Revolution” might be hyperbole but perhaps not by much. The problem they discussed was that while failure is rarer, when it does happen it is much larger and more damaging.

Here is a nice description explaining why Mandelbrot felt , back in 2005, that those guys on Wall Street were doing it all wrong. It seems current events have overtaken his theories:

And wherever you put your money, understand that conventional measures of risk severely underestimate potential losses —and gains. For better or worse, your exposure is larger than you think.

Someone to remember for more than just a pretty picture.