November 6, 2009 archive

Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage

Two weeks ago, I speculated on applying the “Teaspoon Model” to the problem of protecting small, niche, video streaming markets faced:

• on the one hand with Copyright Protection laws focused on protecting the cash flows of large media distribution middlemen; and,
  
• on the other hand, with a plague of bloodsucking bootleg streaming sites, surviving on miniscule revenue flows because they leech off of everyone – not just the creators of the work themselves, but also fansub and video-rip groups that make the content availbale for download, and free stream hosting sites for the streaming itself
  

Refer to the lovely Shakespeare’s Sister for the teaspoon concept itself – the idea of this application is:

So this is what I was thinking. Perhaps a small, struggling company that wanted to reduce the density of the cloud of bloodsucking flies draining the work of the artists who create this material of market value could gain leverage not by trying to find the Super-Teaspoon – but by recruiting a supporting group, each armed with ordinary teaspoons.

There’d have to be at least one person at the company actually sending out the letters to the sites streaming the bootlegs – but they would be far more effective if backed up by ten or twenty people contributing a couple of hours a week tracking down where the material is located. Indeed, the “white hats” could drop in info on where to get the material legally while at the bootleg bloodsucker streaming sites, including the proliferating opportunities for legal free streams.

The objection has already been raised, “but everybody does it”. But the experiment reported here shows, no, everybody does not sit around passively waiting to get a legal order to Cease and Desist. There are companies that do check out tips and clean out the trash and even YouTube does a far better job than MySpaceCDN.

Note: most graphics are samples from extant Photobucket and Flikr albums, but the “Storm in the Teacup” is an entry from a Photoshop contest, and “You’re Both Idiots” is by ~ZeKarmaMisama who can be found at Deviant Art, and the teaspoon is by Western Australia artist Pearl Rogers

I posted a diary at Daily Kos earlier today in response to Jerome a Paris’s diary in which he purported to debunk any claim that the invasion of Afghanistan for a pipeline was all conspiracy theory.

There is a teaching moment here; no matter how much you’ve previously researched, there is always more information out there you missed.

I know this, because I missed something very important…

larger here.

Professor Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, Louis Block Professor in the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago Geosciences, has published An Open Letter to Steven Levitt, the nation’s Super Freakiest Economist.  To put it simply, Pierrehumbert owns Levitt.

By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is wrong with the treatment of climate in Superfreakonomics , but what has been lost amidst all that extensive discussion is how really simple it would have been to get this stuff right. The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them. The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking needed to see if what they were saying (or what you thought they were saying) in fact made any sense. If you were stupid, it wouldn’t be so bad to have messed up such elementary reasoning, but I don’t by any means think you are stupid. That makes the failure to do the thinking all the more disappointing.

Pierrehumbert then takes one specific point from the chapter to highlight this “failure to do the thinking”.  Pierrehumbert’s examination of the issue of whether solar cells’ low albedo (high absorption of solar energy & thus heat) makes it senseless to pursue solar power provides a tour de force examination of the basics of research (using the web) and how Levitt seems to have totally flubbed.

The point here is that really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you that the claim that the blackness of solar cells makes solar energy pointless is complete and utter nonsense. I don’t think you would have accepted such laziness and sloppiness in a term paper from one of your students, so why do you accept it from yourself? What does the failure to do such basic thinking with numbers say about the extent to which anything you write can be trusted? How do you think it reflects on the profession of economics when a member of that profession – somebody who that profession seems to esteem highly – publicly and noisily shows that he cannot be bothered to do simple arithmetic and elementary background reading. Not even for a subject of such paramount importance as global warming.

Rather than seeking to summarize or crib his work, let me simply emphasize that Pierrehumbert’s discussion is highly recommended reading — for the substance and style.

Gary Ruskin | Green Change | 11.05.2009

It's easy to lie with statistics. Politicians do it every day. Climate change is the latest example.

Look at the leading climate change bills in Congress. The main Senate bill — approved today by the Environment and Public Works Committee — proposes a 20% target for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over 2005 levels by 2020. The bill passed by the House of Representatives sets a 17% target for greenhouse gas emissions cuts over 2005 levels by 2020.

Sounds good. Except it's not.

Here's the trick the Democrats are playing on you. They're moving the goalposts.

Most of the world — 184 nations — have ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Those nations follow the Protocol's use of 1990 as a base year for calculating emissions reductions. The United States didn't ratify the treaty, so our politicians use whatever base year makes them look good. Let's see how this works in practice.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has called for a 25-40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, over 1990 levels – not 2005 levels.

When you use the standard baseline — 1990, not 2005 — to evaluate congressional emissions reductions targets, suddenly they look very small. Which they are.

That's the key fact that President Obama and the Democrats are trying to hide.

The House bill would only cut 3.5%, and the Senate bill only 7%, over 1990 levels, by 2020.

That's not even close to the 25-40% that the world's leading climate scientists think we need to cut by 2020.

Last week, Europe offered a 30% cut.

It's time for the United States to lead by example on climate change.

Tell your Members of Congress to play it safe with our climate. Tell them to support a 40% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, compared to 1990 levels.