Analog and digital religions

Are you saved?

In the Christian tradition, the answer is binary: either you are, or you aren’t. Even if you’re not sure, God has decided. You’re either going to heaven or hell, with a side trip through purgatory for some denominations.

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. (Matthew 25:31-33)

There are other traditions where salvation is an “analog” process. The release from suffering comes about gradually through hard work.

Just as when a carpenter or carpenter's apprentice sees the marks of his fingers or thumb on the handle of his adze but does not know, “Today my adze handle wore down this much, or yesterday it wore down that much, or the day before yesterday it wore down this much,” still he knows it is worn through when it is worn through. (Samyutta Nikaya 22.101)

Our physical existence is analog: things wear down gradually, like the handle of an adze over years of use. (In case you also don’t remember what an adze is: it’s a tool used for smoothing rough-cut wood in hand woodworking.) On the other hand, technology is increasingly digital: something either works perfectly, or not at all. [*] The reception of analog TV will gradually get worse as one moves further and further away from a transmission tower, but digital TV quality falls off a cliff at a certain distance. It’s perfect, and then suddenly the screen is black.

It’s curious that we’ve taken so easily to binary, digital technologies given that we evolved in a physical reality that is analog and continuous. I suspect it’s because our minds categorize: someone is either male or female, friend or foe, sheep or a goat; the fruit is on the tree, in the basket, or on the ground. The classifying knack makes intelligible binary outcomes both in the spiritual life and modern technology though one may also have a gradualist religion, or a liking for vinyl records.

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* As always, yes, there are exceptions that prove the rule. PC performance can degrade gradually as a disk gets fragmented or an application accumulates memory leaks; glass and ceramic will fracture catastrophically.

The Soreness of Losing – Clinton Edition

A dark cloud of cranky Clintonism is hanging over the Democratic convention in Denver. Dark muttering about not supporting Obama because Clinton (either one) was disrespected just won’t go away.

There are many plausible explanations, including egotism, frustrated feminism and the Boomer/GenX divide. I rather like an appeal to the psychological phenomenon of loss aversion: people feel a loss more keenly than a gain.

Technically, loss aversion is the tendency to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains. I like to think of it this way: Imagine a store selling widgets. They can either sell them for $100, and offer a 5% discount for cash, or sell them at $95 but impose a $5 surcharge for someone buying with a credit card. The discount feels like a gain to the cash customer, and the surcharge feels like a loss to the credit card buyer. The net effect is the same, but the loss is felt more keenly than the gain. Therefore, stores will more likely post the credit card price and offer cash discount than impose a surcharge.

Clinton supporters went into the primary campaign assuming that they were going to win. Obama’s win is a keen loss to them; something that these people felt they already “had” is being taken away. For the Obamans, on the other hand, the win was a bonus; they never really expected it. They’re happy about it, of course, but don’t feel it as profoundly as the Clintonistas feel their loss.

There is probably little that the Obama campaign can do to assuage their pain. The best hope for the Democratic party is the operation of another cognitive bias: the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of an emotion, known as impact bias. Even though the Clintonistas may not feel that way now, by the time the November election comes around their current disaffection will have passed, and they will vote the Democratic ticket.

Why is it hard to be good?

Getting into his stride, productivity guru David Allen asks his $595/head audience, “How many of you have fallen off the wagon?” That is: how many, after having already forked out money at least once for his Getting Things Done regimen, have relapsed into their old bad habits? Many of them sheepishly raise their hands [1].

Something similar happens every week in churches, temples, synagogues, mosques and meeting houses around the world, though it’s usually cheaper and less glitzy: people go to be reminded, again and again and again, to practice virtue, and quit their vices.

Why is it so hard to be good, and so easy to be bad? Nobody needs a motivational speaker to remind them to sin. The goal is not to be virtuous for the sake of it, of course. Virtue is necessary for salvation. But the question still stands: Why is the path to salvation the difficult one?

If the virtues were adaptive, one could be sure that evolution would have made them pleasurable. We don’t have to be reminded to eat and procreate; it’s stopping ourselves eating and coupling in “inappropriate” ways that takes effort [2]. Perhaps salvation is a goal of the mind, not the body.

Morality comes to the fore when evolution by culture starts to outstrip human evolution by nature – times when the selection of memes becomes more important than the selection of genes.

The Axial Age was such a tipping point. Around 500 BCE, the function of major religions shifted from cosmic maintenance to personal transformation [3]. This was a time when urbanization and mobility was increasing. Literacy and technology moved into the cultural mainstream. There was a decisive change in people’s sense of individuality: a growing consciousness of humans as moral agents responsible for their own actions, an increasing awareness of the experience of death, and a preoccupation with what lay beyond.

Our struggle with virtue might be the clash between what it takes to be happy in an urbanized, technological society, vs. what’s required in a pre-literate life closer to unmediated nature.

The puzzle of the dark triad is instructive. The triad is a complex of anti-social behaviors that has serious social downsides: people who are narcissistic, sociopathic or Machiavellian risk being shunned by others, leaving them vulnerable to all the risks of being a loner outside the social circle. And yet, those behaviors persist; they must be adaptive. It seems that the dark triad helps you get laid (if you’re male). Such people are also useful as wartime leaders.

The dark triad, and other immoral behavior, is sometimes adaptive. Morality could be the way that complex societies compensate for their down sides. The struggle for virtue is the price our minds pay for the benefits our genes get from immoral behavior.

----- Notes -----

[1] This is a paraphrase of reporting in “Getting Serious About Getting Things Done,” Business Week, August 14, 2008

[2] Big sins, unlike the menial ones, usually do require persuasion, as in the pep talks that sellers of shady financial products get before they hit the phone banks. And we do occasionally commit acts of kindness without having to force ourselves – thought that’s rare enough to deserve being remarked. Those good behaviors that do “come naturally”, like caring for our own children, scarcely count as virtues.

[3] John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 1989, pp. 22-29

Use it or lose it

I’ve been thinking about how a trademark-inspired approach might change how radios are regulated. (See my February post on De-situating Spectrum; a conference paper will be available soon).

One of the interesting aspects of trademark is you own it as long as you use it. Wireless rights in a trademark-inspired regime would work the same way.

Under the current regime, many radio licenses are subject to build-out conditions that can lead to the retraction of a license if a network isn’t constructed to use it. (In practice, these conditions don’t really have teeth.) However, unlicensed operations don’t have build-out conditions. They should – though they will differ from licensed ones, since there isn’t a license holder to go after.

The idea is that the regulator (the FCC in the US, for example) would make clear that an unlicensed allocation is “use it or lose it”: if the band is not used in the way promised by manufacturers and contemplated by the regulatory decision, the rules will lapse. The unlicensed allocation may be replaced by something else.

Here’s a straw man.

“Use it” tests: At least three devices should have obtained certification by Year Three after allocation; at least 500,000 devices/year should be sold in Year Five. If not, the allocation is deemed not be used. If device sales fall below 50,000/year for three successive years at any time after that, the allocation will also be deemed to be unused.

Define the “trigger date” for losing the allocation as the year in which the allocation fails the “use it” test.

“Lose it” consequences: At the trigger date, the FCC will cease certifying devices; this means that no new devices will be sold. However, the (few) intrepid souls who bought devices should be able to continue using them, at least for a while. Let’s assume devices have a useful life of five years; unlicensed operation will continue to be legal for that period. At that point (five years after the trigger date) the allocation will lapse, and the FCC may choose to issue new unlicensed rules, auction the spectrum, or do nothing.

Notes

The parameters proposed above were by way of example. One would have to be sure that the “use it” test doesn’t discourage innovation and investment, and that the “lose it” consequences don’t drain the bathwater too soon; also, both should be as resistant as possible to manipulation by opponents.

Rather than an all-or-nothing loss, the FCC might reduce the size of the allocation as an interim step, as it did with UPCS. This is particularly easy if the unlicensed devices are reprogrammable over the air.

A regular review of operating parameters should be built into all unlicensed rules, even if the allocation is being used by the above criteria. If the rules change, there will be a two-step phase in that parallels the “lose it” consequences. In the first five years, legacy devices will be grandfathered in, but no new certifications will be issued for legacy operation. This should allow people to extract economic value from their investment. Five years after the rule change, though, operation of legacy devices will no longer be legal.

Motivation

One of the most compelling arguments against unlicensed white spaces is that allocating them would preclude ever cleaning up the “UHF mess”: valuable spectrum is under-used because cheap receivers require very large frequency gaps between transmissions to avoid one TV broadcast from interfering with another. For only a few cents in additional receiver hardware, transmitters could be packed more closely, allowing additional systems to operate. The other part of the “mess” is that fewer than 15% of Americans get their TV over the air; most of it is piped into homes via cable. High power transmitters are running night and day – precluding other uses – for the benefit of a small number of people.

Unlicensed advocates contend that Wi-Fi like devices should be allowed to operate in the frequency gaps. These devices will be smart enough not to transmit in the same channel as TV broadcasts, and their own transmissions will be so weak that they don’t cause interference to TV stations in adjacent channels.

Opponents say that this will set the mess in concrete. If a way is ever found to persuade broadcasters to cease transmission – a big IF, given that broadcasters have immense political power, and their imminent demise has been predicted for decades – then the new owners of the ex-broadcasting channels will have to contend with unlicensed “neighbors”. Once the technical parameters are set, the secondary unlicensed users become squatters and can’t easily be evicted. (Military transmissions from time to time interfere with garage door openers, e.g. in Denver and Quantico. The military has priority, but the manufacturers just ignored this. . . the military backed off, it seems ) Rather than have a pristine post-broadcast band to work with, new licensees will have to co-exist with unlicensed devices.

I don’t have much of a problem with this, provided the unlicensed devices are actually widely deployed. The problem arises when there are just a few scattered users that are blocking a new rights allocation (as a handful of over-the-air TV viewers are doing right now). Given the FCC’s administrative proceedings, it is exceedingly hard to get allocations changed. The 20 MHz unlicensed PCS (UPCS) band was allocated by the FCC in May 1995 but never really used. It took almost ten years for the FCC to re-allocate the lower half of the band to licensed use, and tweak the rules in the upper half to allow more technologies to operate.

There is also a more general objection to unlicensed: it’s very hard to back out of a bad decision, as the UPCS experience shows. Licensees that have flexible-use rights can change their mind about technology and rebuild their systems, if necessary by negotiating variances in spectrum rights with those in adjacent parcels; Tom Hazlett gives the example of the conversion from analog to digital in the cellular bands. In contrast, unlicensed allocations once made are slow to change. Built-in sunsets such as those I propose above could fix that problem.

Regulation tops the list of global business challenges

Ernst & Young has made a Top Ten list of challenges facing global businesses in 2008. (Thanks to Peter Haynes for bringing this to my attention.) I was rather surprised to find that “regulatory and compliance risks” came in first.

It’s telling that reg/compliance came out ahead of such sexy topics as aging consumers, radical greening, and energy shocks.

E&Y divide the threats into three categories: macro (geopolitics, macroeconomics), sectoral (industry specific), and operational. I prefer to divide it into perennials and fads. Using E&Y’s numbering:

Perennials

4. The inability to capitalize on emerging markets
5. Industry consolidation/transition
7. Execution of strategic transactions
8. Cost inflation
10. Consumer demand shifts

Fads

1. Regulatory and compliance risk
2. Global financial shocks
3. Aging consumers and workforce
6. Energy shocks
9. Radical greening

Reg/compliance might look like a perennial at first sight, but the transformation being wrought by ICT (“complexification” – see my paper Internet Governance as Forestry, PDF, 600kB) probably makes it a "fad" since it is posing significant new challenges. However, as Peter points out, reg/compliance is neither a perennial nor a fad if there are successive waves of transformation. It’s perhaps better categorized as “cyclical” – just like global financial shocks. (I wouldn't put energy shocks in the cyclical bucket. Even though there have been oil crises before, the exhaustion of reserves takes us to a qualitatively new stage every time.)

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Report: “Strategic business risk: 2008 — the top 10 risks for global business" (PDF , 3.1 MB). The list is a result of interviews with more than 70 analysts around the world; it’s therefore firmly in the “echo chamber” category. Unfortunately the report just focuses on the Top Ten, and so one doesn’t know which risks did NOT make the list. This would’ve been useful as context, categorizations like this are so squishy that one can fit anything in somewhere.

Mobile TV for the Bottom Billion

It’s a ringing endorsement of the subversive power of a technology when the Chinese government tries to block it. A technology that I only vaguely remember by the tantalizing “Radio Luxembourg” label on the dial of my family’s old valve-powered Telefunken is still going strong: 105 million of the BBC World Service’s 182m-strong global audience still listen to the Bush House via short-wave radio (Snap and crackle goes pop, The Economist, 19 Jun 2008).

Long-range radio is getting a digital make-over in the form of the Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM), a format designed for frequencies below 30 MHz (Stay tuned, Economist.com, 8 Jan 2008). DRM provides the same range as these traditional AM transmissions without the interference. (There is an alphabet soup of digital audio broadcasting standards; see wikipedia.)

But the basic premise of the digital transition is wrong: it just takes a service – TV, say, or radio – in a given band and digitizes it. Digital is “better”, though instead of one higher-quality broadcast replacing the analog one, the shift in practice is to “more”. None of the digital standards are different enough to make a real difference. Still TV, just more channels. Still radio, just more channels. This is lergely due to inflexible spectrum allocation; radio licensees can only broadcast radio.

There should be shift in kind, not in quantity. Replace radio by TV; replace TV by two-way data networks.

Cheap computing and clever algorithms means that one can just about squeeze an sub-analog-quality TV signal into a short-wave radio band.* That means that in a few Moore’s Law cycles, you’ll be able to get not-too-bad TV on the equivalent of a transistor radio.**

To be clear: this idea is not intended for the non-poor, and definitely not for the rich who are moving from radio to the internet for their audio in increasing numbers. But if you gave the people in the Bottom Billion a choice – say, those 105 million people who still listen to the Beeb on a shortwave radio – would would they pick crystal-clear digital radio, or junky hand-held TV that fits in their pocket and runs off a hand-crank? Which would the Chinese government be more afraid of? I'm with the Buggles: Video will kill the radio star.

(By the rule that if I can think of something, someone's already done it, some enterprising grad student has probably already lashed together a TV transistor radio - but a cursory web search didn't turn it up. Please shout if you know who's been there and done this.)

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* According to the Flash Video bitrate calculator, a talking head at 320x240 resolution with decent mono audio needs 100 kbps (120 kbps recommended). That’s way to much for a Digital Radio Mondiale stream, which delivers 17-35 kbps in a 10 kHz channel (wikipedia, digitalradiotech.co.uk). But if you’re willing to live with 160x120 and low quality mono sound, that’s 29 kbps FLV bitrate (35 kbps recommended). Another turn of the codec crank, and we’ll fit.

** Perhaps the biggest cost – and these No-Def TVs will have to be veeeery cheap – will be the LCD screens, which don’t obey Moore’s Law. But the volume of screens being made for iPhones and their ilk wil surely drive down that cost.

Cutting world hunger as a US policy goal

There are two groups who think harder about allocating scarce resources than the rest of us: professional economists, and poor people. Recently an eminent collection of economists concluded that helping poor people was the best way to use scarce resources to solve the world's biggest problems.

The challenge of the “Copenhagen Consensus” was as follows: Imagine you had $75bn to donate to worthwhile causes. Where should we start?

The most effective action we could take, according to eight leading economists, including five Nobel Prize winners, was to combat malnutrition in the 140 million children who are undernourished.

Providing vitamin A capsules and a course of zinc supplements for 80% of the children who lack essential vitamins would cost just $60 million per year, and yield benefits of more than $1 billion per year. This means that each $1 spent on this program creates benefits worth more than $17 in the form of better health, fewer deaths, and increased future earnings

Explaining why this project came out on top of the list, Nobel Laureate Douglass C. North said that “it has immediate and important consequences for improving the wellbeing of poor people around the world - that's why it should be our number one priority.” As soaring food prices put tens of millions of people at risk of hunger, vitamin supplements for children are critical to protect vulnerable populations.

The remaining priorities of the Copenhagen Consensus include opening agricultural markets; disease control; expanded immunization of children; increased education, especially for women and girls; and community-based nutrition promotion.

These priorities come as no surprise. In 2000, the United States joined all countries in the world in committing to the Millennium Development Goals to improve life for the world's poorest people by 2015; these goals include all the priorities identified by the elite cadre of economists at the Copenhagen Consensus. We are now half-way to 2015, and running behind schedule; we need to strengthen the United States' commitment to meeting these goals.

We should re-commit to cutting hunger and poverty by making it an official goal of U.S. policy. We must modernize and streamline U.S. assistance to ensure the maximum benefit reaches those in greatest need. According to Bread for the World, 12 departments, 25 agencies, and almost 60 government offices plan and implement U.S. global development policies and programs—hardly a model of seamless efficiency.

Last year Congress passed the Global Poverty Act, a bill introduced by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Rep. Adam Smith, and co-sponsored by Representatives Brian Baird, Norm Dicks, Jay Inslee, Rick Larsen, Jim McDermott, and Dave Reichert. The legislation aims to focus U.S. efforts to meet the most pressing Millennium Development Goal: cutting in half by 2015 the number of people living on less than $1 a day. The Global Poverty Act would also require a coordinated strategy to achieve this goal through U.S. aid, debt relief, and trade policies. The strategy would emphasize cooperation with other countries, international institutions, faith-based groups, and the private sector.

Senator Maria Cantwell was one of the original sponsors of the companion bill in the Senate, and Sen. Patty Murray is a co-sponsor. The Global Poverty Act now has 21 co-sponsors in the Senate. Senators Murray and Cantwell should use their influence on Capitol Hill to garner additional support for the bill.

America needs wise and active partners in every country to build a safe and prosperous world. Healthy and flourishing people in Africa will not only use our software, ride in our planes, and buy wheat from the Palouse; they will also help us write software, produce goods we need, and enrich our intertwined cultures. Alleviating hunger and poverty in the developing world is part of building a better America, as well as being the most cost-effective way to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

Cisco's 2007-2012 IP network traffic forecast

A Cisco outlook for IP traffic makes fascinating (if probably a self-serving...) reading: Cisco Visual Networking Index - Forecast and Methodology, 2007–2012.

• IP traffic will nearly double every two years through 2012. Total IP traffic will increase by a factor of six from 2007 to 2012.
• Despite the growth of P2P traffic, as a percentage of consumer Internet traffic it dropped to 51% at the end of 2007, down from 60% the year before.
• Video is now approximately one-quarter of all consumer Internet traffic, not including the amount of video exchanged through P2P file sharing.
• Internet traffic is growing fastest in Latin America, followed by Western Europe and Asia-Pacific

Thanks to David Hytha for the link.

Gender politics, big and small

I sense a lot of suppressed anger, and not just disappointment, among Hillary’s frustrated female supporters.

In a New York Times report this morning about Obama’s struggle to tap into Clinton’s donor base, Susie Tompkins Buell, a wealthy longtime friend of Mrs. Clinton, said she wanted to see how Mrs. Clinton was treated over the next few weeks, a sentiment that she said was shared by many of the women, especially, in her donor network. The Times says that for some, it is a matter of ensuring that Mrs. Clinton gets the proper credit, while others are waiting for the chance to question Mr. Obama.

This reminded me of a quote in a story that the Times ran yesterday about what same-sex couples can teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Esther D. Rothblum, a professor of women’s studies at San Diego State University reportedly said that heterosexual married women live with a lot of anger about having to do the tasks not only in the house but in the relationship.

Spiritual Virtues and Corporate Values

Religions have always promulgated lists of virtue; commercial companies do the same with their statements of Corporate Values. How do they compare?

Wikipedia enumerates many sets of virtues, and lists more than a hundred recognized in Western culture alone. The following core spiritual virtues occur in most traditions, East and West: loving-kindness, humility, and diligence.

The values statements of American companies are a rag-tag bag of buzzwords [see note below]. A few corporate values seem to be the core of what they want of their employees: integrity, excellence, and teamwork.

(Finding patterns in such lists is like seeing faces in clouds: any grouping is subjective and arbitrary. However, because of our shared physiology and culture – brain structure and social structure –observers will agree more often than one might expect given the subject’s complexity and ambiguity. Of course, even agreed patterns may not “really” exist, since humans are such pattern-finding paragons that they see meaning where there is none.)

There little overlap between the core spiritual virtues and the core corporate values. Companies prize the assertion of ego in the service of the group (cf. excellence, teamwork) whereas spiritual traditions esteem renouncing the self, and serving all equally (cf. loving-kindness, humility).

This contrast characterizes not just corporate life, or even Western values in general, but is a distinction between everyday life and most spiritual paths. Two of my friends who have engaged in meditation – an artist and an entrepreneur, respectively – have each found themselves struggling to resolve the tension between renouncing the ego and making their way in the world.

Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation tells the story the Axial Age, that pivotal period from about 900 to 200 BCE when many great religious traditions came into being: Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece. She sums up their common insight [Ch. 10, p.391]:

Regardless of their theological “beliefs” – which, as we have seen, did not much concern the sages – they all concluded that if people made a disciplined effort to reeducate themselves, they would experience an enhancement of their humanity. In one way or another, their programs were designed to eradicate the egotism that is largely responsible for our violence, and promoted the empathic spirituality of the Golden Rule.

It is difficult to reconcile the spiritual path with workaday reality. Armstrong describes the Mahabharata, which emerged in the oral tradition around 500 BCE, as a prototypical struggle with this dilemma [pp. 306-13]. How could a warrior reconcile the ideal of not harming others with his duty and vocation to fight and kill in defense of his community? There is no answer; the Mahabharata is a tragic cycle of violence and betrayal that ends in nihilism.

On a small scale, the circle can be straightened, if not squared, by limiting one’s ambition and circumscribing one’s scope: there are caring vocations that will pay a living wage. Buddhists believe that householders can stay on the path by avoiding certain livelihoods. Becoming a monastic is a high price to pay for attaining higher virtue – but at least one will not be beholden to Mammon or Caesar. Unless one renounces the lay life, the struggle between spiritual virtues and ego-based values will continue, inside and outside the corporation.


--- Note ---

I did a Google search on the keywords corporate, values and statement, and looked at companies on the first results page. Firms examined include: Boeing, Copyright Clearance Center, HMR Tech, Home Depot, IBM, Marklund, Merck, Microsoft, and Whole Foods

No longer a self-respecting nation

I'm ashamed. The United States held Murat Kurnaz at Guantanamo Bay for four years even though it knew of nothing linking him to terrorism, and the CIA told its German counterpart that it considered his innocence to be proven.

The story is told in a Christian Science Monitor report on Kurnaz's testimony to Congress on Tuesday this week.

This is bad enough, even without the allegations of abuse and torture (see the Washington Post review of Kurnaz's book).

What depresses me almost as much is the lack of "mainstream" news coverage in the US - unlike in Europe, where Kurnaz is apparently a household name. The Kurnaz testimony was on the front-page of the Monitor, but was not reported by (say) NPR, the New York Times, or the Washington Post.

The only silver lining is that Congress is attending to this matter. Even a stalwart Republican and defender of the Guantánamo prison system is reported to have conceded during the hearing that mistakes were made in this case. Regret is no substitute for avoiding shameful behavior in the first place, but it's better than nothing.

Better than regret would be action:

1. The United States should compensate those it has detained without reasonable cause at Guantanamo and elsewhere. If they end up using the money to attack the US, too bad; this is about our self-respect and morality as a nation, not a calculus of martial efficiency.
2. The Congress should make it clear through legislation that the US rule of law applies to anybody held by any agent of the US government anywhere, regardless of legal niceties like "Guantanamo is not US soil, so the law does not apply," or "the Pakistanis did it, not us."
   
3. The Congress should promulgate clear and uniform rules on interrogation techniques which apply to all agents of the United States; no exemptions for the CIA, special forces, military intelligence etc.

XP is dead, long live XP!

I've just had a fascinating experience while buying a laptop. I had been looking at the Lenovo R61, and was encouraged that I had the option to get it with Windows XP, not Vista.

When I switched my attention to the X61 last night, this option wasn't available: I could have the X61 with any version of Windows, as long as it was some shade of Vista. I started agonizing about having to buy the machine with Vista, strip it off, got to retail and buy XP, then reinstall...

Fortunately I checked in with Lenovo sales this morning. (They have a very good IM support.) XP is indeed available, the rep said, via the "Genuine Windows Vista Business downgrade to Windows XP Professional" option. Why didn't I notice it yesterday? Because it was changed last night. According to the rep, "[this] will be happening across all products from Lenovo between now and the 15th".

So much for the end of XP in the retail channel on the 30th of June...

You could say it's a win-win. There’s no price difference between Vista Business and XP Pro, so this customer gets what he wanted, and is happy. And therefore Lenovo is happy.

And Microsoft gets to count a Vista sale (and an XP sale?) even though the customer refused to buy Vista – so Steve Ballmer is happy.

But note the Econ 101 implication: there is no incremental utility going from XP to Vista Business. So what, exactly, was that five year death march all about? My heart goes out to all the Microserfs who poured their souls into Vista.

Weeds adapt faster than some companies

I've been using the analogy between forests and the internet to develop policy-making principles: see eg my short essay Internet Forestry: A principles approach to governance which is part of the the Publius Project over at the Berkman Center.

One of the questions is whether the very rapid change of the internet doesn't doesn't invalidate the metaphor; biological systems seem to evolve more slowly, at least at the scale of plants and animals. I don't think it does, since the underlying dynamics are the same: both are complex, adaptive, human-managed systems. However, some recent research shows that plants can adapt very rapidly as well.

ScienceNOW magazine reported on 3 March 2008 (Elizabeth Quill, How Weeds Take to Cities, subscription required) that a Mediterranean weed adjusted its reproductive strategy to deal with the challenge of city living in less than 12 years. Population ecologist Pierre-Olivier Cheptou and colleagues found that the plant Crepis sancta adjusted the mix of heavy vs. light seeds very rapidly after sidewalks were built around them. They produced more heavy seeds, which tend to fall on the small grassy patch around the plant, and fewer light one which would waft away and fall on concrete.

Some companies have taken longer than that to adapt to the internet...

Spectrum isn't a resource

I’m still struggling to understand what spectrum really is – and to articulate why the question matters. I hope I’m not becoming that whacko who keeps pestering physics professors with his “proof” that general relativity is wrong... Any feedback would be appreciated.

It seems to me that “spectrum” is conceived of in two distinct ways. First, a spectrum allocation is seen as a right to operate radio equipment in a given way, for example centered on a certain frequency band. In this case, “spectrum” isn’t problematic, because the term doesn’t carry any real meaning. It simply connotes electromagnetic radiation. A spectrum allocation confers a bundle of in personam rights, and all that matters is system operation. As Coase said in the 1959 FCC paper, “what is being allocated by the Federal Communications Commission ... is the right to use a piece of equipment to transmit signals in a particular way. Once the question is looked at in this way, it is unnecessary to think in terms of ownership of frequencies or the ether.”

Alternatively, one can think of spectrum as a series of abutting frequency bands, and a spectrum allocation as the right to use of a frequency band. The band is treated as a thing which a person obtains an in rem right to, just as they obtain in rem property rights via things like inventions, apples, and land. Tom Hazlett is a leading proponent of this approach, though the notion of wave lengths, frequencies and spectrum being resources (and thus “things”) is entrenched in US legislative language.

Tom has been persuading me, via Merrill & Smith’s 2001 paper in the Yale L J, that in rem rights are some sense better than in personam rights for thinking about property. However, I’ve struggled to put my finger on what the “thing” is in wireless policy.

To rehearse a metaphor: An owner rents a piece of farm land. (The hunting license analogy is more fun, but the fact that game moves around complicates matters more than this case merits.) The renter obtains permission to perform various behaviors with a bunch of constraints, like boundary lines, planting crops vs. running cattle, providing so much fertilizer, etc. So far, this sounds just like the in personam description of spectrum allocation: the a contract between the owner and the renter is like a license granted by a regulator to a licensee. A wireless transmission is like a renter using the land. The frequency band edges are like land boundaries; they indicate a constraint (underspecified, but I’ll ignore that here) on transmission, ie, system behavior.

Now let’s imagine that the rental contract ends, and no other renter shows up. Nobody performs any actions; no in personam rights are exercised. However, the land is still there – the thing which anchors the owner’s in rem rights persists. This is where the analogy to spectrum breaks down for me. When a system ceases transmission (the renter goes away), nothing remains. The frequencies that indicated band edges are parameters. They parameterize an output (a transmission) not an input (“spectrum”).

Since frequency parameterizes outputs not inputs, what it measures – spectrum – isn’t a resource. Therefore the whole question of ownership of spectrum is moot. As for what the input(s) might be: I’d have to say it’s ingenuity in system design, capital to build infrastructure, and the labor of running the resulting operation.

This by no means precludes an in rem analysis. One simply needs to define another kind of “thing”. This leads me from land to trademark as the guiding metaphor. Intellectual property is intangible, just as wireless operation is, but one can still identify a productive resource. In the case of trademark, it’s a signifier coupled to an interpretative context. The signifier is analogized to transmission, and the context to victims of interference. Trademark infringement is largely in the mind of the customer: are they confused or not by an allegedly infringing mark? Similarly, radio interference is largely in the receiver. Patents work in the same way: the productive resource is an invention coupled to a context of what constitutes novelty, obviousness, and utility.

Ultimately, this leads to a restatement of wireless policy in terms of system operation rather than spectrum (easy), and a reformulation of the rights that are issued along the lines of trademark rather than real estate law (hard).

References

Coase, R H (1959) "The Federal Communications Commission," Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. 2. (Oct., 1959), pp. 1-40.

Merrill, Thomas W and Henry E Smith (2001) “What Happened to Property in Law and Economics?” The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 111, p. 357

Factoid: The US has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but almost a quarter of its prisoners

The New York Times story Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’ is a staggering litany of American exceptionalism. A few excerpts:

Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. . .

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation . . . China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison [excluding those in administrative detention]. . .

The United States comes in first [in] incarceration rates, [with] 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. [Next]is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. . . . England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63. The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

The story cites a variety of causes, including higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net, and elected judges.