Technology

Cheaper, Better, and More Efficient

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That’s how economist Mark J. Perry–drawing on the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers–describes today’s home appliances. The following chart goes nicely with my last post about the “magic washing machine“:

As Perry concludes,

Today’s modern household appliances are not only cheaper than ever before, they are the most energy-efficient appliances in history, resulting in additional savings for consumers through lower operating costs. The average dishwasher today is not only more than twice as energy-efficient as a comparable 1981 model, but its real cost today is only about 50% of the price of the 1981 dishwasher, measured in hours worked at the average hourly wage. Put those two factors together, and the average American’s dishwasher today is about six times superior to the dishwasher of thirty years ago…Put it all together and American consumers have never been better off when it comes to the standard home appliances that we all own and take for granted.

We could all practice a little gratitude and have some perspective.

I Cried Over A Washing Machine

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Economist Steve Horwitz has a great post at Bleeding-Heart Libertarians on statistician Hans Rosling’s (if you haven’t seen his site Gapminder, you should) TED talk “The Magic Washing Machine.” Horwitz says, “A number of my male libertarian economist friends have, independently, told me that there is a video that brings them to tears when they watch it, and especially when they show it to student groups.  I have had that reaction to the video as well…Yes, those heartless libertarian male economists report getting choked up and teary-eyed when they show this video to students.” These “9 minutes, and especially the last 90 seconds or so,” had me in tears as well.

I cried over a washing machine.

Why is this? Horwitz captures it beautifully:

What gets me about that video is the way Rosling captures an abstract intellectual argument about the power of markets and industrialization to improve people’s lives.  He uses a very concrete, emotionally rich example that combines our wanting to root for an underdog with a clear example of how markets have liberated both immigrants and women to live more flourishing lives.  We talk a lot about GDP per capita and human capital accumulation and women’s labor force participation rates.  But it is the idea that industrialization and capitalism made it possible for women to be freed from drudgery and to have the time to read and learn a new language and everything else that has characterized the dramatic improvement in women’s lives in the last century or more that really matters. Critics of markets sometimes say “you can’t eat GDP.” What they miss is that you can’t eat, or learn to read, or go to school, or leave a bad marriage, or do pretty much any of the basics that we might see as required for a flourishing life without the wealth and time created by the market economy.

Stephen Wolfram Wants To Solve Programming

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Super-smart guy Stephen Wolfram is proposing to create a new general purpose programming language that is powerful and easy to use, called Wolfram Language.

I’m skeptical. He doesn’t propose to be doing anything particularly innovative or ground-breaking:

“There are plenty of existing general-purpose computer languages. But their vision is very different—and in a sense much more modest—than the Wolfram Language. They concentrate on managing the structure of programs, keeping the language itself small in scope, and relying on a web of external libraries for additional functionality. In the Wolfram Language my concept from the very beginning has been to create a single tightly integrated system in which as much as possible is included right in the language itself.”

This isn’t a new idea. The problem with such an approach is that it forces users of the language to pack a lot of code into their programs that they aren’t using. In this era of high-capacity hard drives this isn’t such a huge deal for, for example, general-purpose machines like desktop PCs, but it does have repercussions for the language’s usability in embedded systems and the like.

It’s also tough to discern exactly what he’s talking about. Programming languages are meant to be tools, or better yet, provide a source of tools, like a toolbelt. Java, for example, comes with a lot of useful functionality out of the box, without any “external libraries,” but the functionality provided by those built-in libraries is akin to the tools in your toolbelt–they aren’t particularly useful in the context of a finished project but they are integral to the construction and proper functioning of that project.

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Wolfram appears to want to include what amount to finished projects in his new programming language. The usefulness of this is limited because the strength of programming languages isn’t really in their final products, but in what their basic tools allow you to accomplish.

He says:

“And so in the Wolfram Language, built right into the language, are capabilities for laying out graphs or doing image processing or creating user interfaces or whatever.”

All modern programming languages have these functionalities, either natively or as part of external libraries. All Wolfram is doing is forcing users of his language to pack them along. The primary appeal I see of this approach is consistency and (hopefully) guaranteed compatibility, which, don’t mistake, is a wonderful goal, but to try and accurately predict what programmers need ahead of time, particularly years down the road, is asking for trouble.

Instead of creating a general purpose programming language as he claims, Wolfram appears to be creating a programming language specially suited toward using this giant set of pre-built functions. Unless by “general purpose,” Wolfram thinks he has enclosed the majority of useful computation under the umbrella of his own libraries, but that’s quite a claim to make. As a programmer continually dissatisfied with the state of programming languages, I wish him luck, but I’m not overly hopeful.

Awesome 3D Human Interaction Device from MIT

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Sometimes the rapid pace of technological advancement is a bug rather than a feature. Everyone is so busy designing the next iteration of a familiar gadget (faster consoles, faster phones, faster tablets) that we’re not very good at exploiting the technology we already have. This awesome gadget is built with off-the-shelf components that have been around for years (like an Xbox Kinect sensor and a projector). It just took someone taking the time to rearrange this older hardware in an innovative new system.

 

Leading Health Care Innovation

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With the debates over Obamacare raging, the editors of Harvard Business Review and the New England Journal of Medicine have collaborated to produce an online forum entitled “Leading Health Care Innovation.” As the “Editors’ Welcome” post explains,

It is a forum for the debate and a place where members of the health care sector can share the results of their efforts to innovate. The insight center is pilot endeavor designed to test the waters for a permanent publication, and we welcome your feedback.

The insight center will run from Sept. 17 until Nov. 15. Its contents will span three broad areas:

  • The “Big Ideas” section will feature articles about the foundational principles in the formulation of a high-value health care system.

  • The “Managing Innovations” section will focus on the organization and delivery of health care and how to orchestrate change.

  • The “From the Front Lines” section will offer accounts of solutions to specific problems that practitioners have implemented in their organizations.

Definitely worth checking out.

How Long Do Disk Drives Last?

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This might seem like a mundane question, but it’s actually pretty interesting because the answer is: “No one knows.” Backblaze is finding out, however. They are a cheap backup service (I use them) like the better-known Carbonite. They are famous, in addition to low prices, for building their own racks to stick hard drives in and then open-sourcing the designs so you can build your own, if you like. What’s more: they use standard, commercial disk drives. The same kind that you might have in your desktop. Which means, with a sample size of 25,000 drives, they’re a pretty good source if you want real-world numbers on how long these puppies last.

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The whole article is really worth reading, but the take away is that–if current trends continue–the median life for a commercial disk drive is about 6 years.

Amazon, your newest car dealership. Okay, not really.

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Not actually selling, but acting as a portal. Maybe a gussied up advertisement. I’m not sure what it means, or if it will catch on, but selling cars outright on Amazon is inevitable, isn’t it? Amazon certainly isn’t the first online front to feature cars, but it’s certainly the most popular and well-known. While I’m not particularly impressed with… whatever this is, I wonder, how long until they are actually selling the cars themselves instead of just pointing you to your nearest dealership? And will people be willing to spend money on a car they haven’t actually touched and driven? (I say if the price is right, yes, they will).

The Future Needs Airships

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2013-11-08 Aeroscraft-3

It’s funny (funny strange, not funny “ha ha”) how society can act like an individual person in some ways. After the Hindenberg horrifically exploded, it was as though all of humanity had recoiled from touching a hot stove. Despite the fact that modern airships are filled with helium instead of flammable hydrogen, in some ways we’ve never gotten over the trauma of that incident.

But time and economics may finally be giving the airship a come back.

If you can’t beat ’em…

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A few years ago a consortium of tech giants bought several thousand patents from a failing telecom with, it appears, the express purpose of using them to hurt their biggest competitor. Counting amongst its members Apple, Sony and Microsoft, this coalition of corporations has allied together to use standard patent troll tactics in a bid to use these Nortel patents against Google and Google’s wildly popular Android mobile operating system, as well as several companies that build Android-based devices. At the time the patents went up for auction in 2011, Google saw what was going to happen and tried to purchase the patents itself, but was unable to pony up more dough than were the collective resources of some of the largest and richest companies in the history of the world.

So, now, instead of attempting to simply compete directly with Google, these companies, under a “plausible-deniability” shell company called Rockstar, are going to try to use the government to put the brakes on one of the biggest tech success stories of the modern age. In using purchased-patent warfare and filing their suit in the patent-friendly Eastern District of Texas, these tech giants, through Rockstar, are essentially conceding that they cannot best Google in the eyes of the consumer and must instead appeal to the failed and broken US patent system using the bogus framework of software patents to continue to pour more money into the pockets of their executives and shareholders.

It’s ridiculous, and it enrages me. The patent system exists ostensibly for the purposes of disclosure of invention. It is, at least theoretically, about information, and its dissemination into society. There is an agreement between the patent applicant and the patent office that the applicant will disclose the details of his or her invention (which encourages further innovation from other parties) and the patent office will grant certain rights to claim exclusivity (which is the incentive to invent and disclose). This pushes people to do work in fields that has not yet been done rather than “reinvent the wheel,” forcing them to license what has already been done if they want to utilize it in their own developments. In practice it is being used by attorneys and corporations to shake down anyone within reach, particularly the “little guy” without the resources to fight a protracted legal battle, and to outlaw and siphon money from their competitors’ products. This directly contracts the number of useful inventions and promotes the proliferation of useless inventions which exist only for purposes of litigation. As soon as a legal or social institution becomes the means to do the exact opposite of what it was meant to accomplish, it’s due an overhaul, if not demolition and reboot.

There are a few rays of hope, though. New Zealand, hopefully serving as an example of rationality in the world of patent insanity, recently outlawed software patents, with the European Union continuously debating similar action. I wouldn’t be surprised if we started to see more and more startups moving to software-friendly (ie, anti-software patent) nations in hopes of protecting themselves against the trolls looking for a government-mandated tribute.

In the past couple years we have seen increasing and heartening efforts from Congress and even Obama himself, most recently in the form of a bipartisan bill which looks to make a serious dent in the economic damage wrought by patent trolls every year. While that bill may not affect the impending Google vs. Rockstar war, it’s good to see our government is finally acknowledging there is a problem, and finding ways to do something about it.

The next step? Follow New Zealand.

More info here.

Published Academic Research: Everything You Know Is Wrong

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2013-10-21 Everything You Know is Wrong

Sometimes the wronger a thing is, the harder it is to convince people that something is wrong. Hat seems to be the problem with scientific research. Numerous individual papers have come out over the years indicating that there are serious problems with the professional scientific establishment. How serious?

In 2005 John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist from Stanford University… argued, “most published research findings are probably false.”

I would say that “most published research findings are probably false” is pretty serious. But that’s just the problem: no one wants to believe that a problem could be that bad, and so there’s a kind of reflexive deafness whenever the topic comes up. Every time I’ve brought the issue up, usually with folks who I would consider suffer a severe case of scientism, I’m challenged to show the research. Conveniently, this article in The Economist, has done a great job of aggregating the most important studies on this topic over the past decade or so.

The fact that so much of our science literature is bad. The fact that maybe we can finally start to address the problem is good. Also, Weird Al.