In economics, it's rather difficult to run experiments. For example, we can't ask President Bush to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime 100 more times so that we can get statistically significant data on its effects on unemployment! The next best thing is to look for "natural experiments" that generate data that is just as good.
In this case, the authors wanted to experiment with the supply of P2P "servers". If the number of people offering to share P2P songs increases, then they hoped to measure the corresponding decrease in music sales. Naturally, they didn't actually run this experiment -- the RIAA would have objected to the researchers engaging in piracy!
So, they did the next best thing -- a natural experiment. When German students have their vacation, they share more files. This makes it easier to download songs in the US. They found easier access to P2P file sharing in the US did not cause a large drop in music sales.
Of course, this natural experiment isn't as good as a real experiment:
German vacations aren't randomly assigned -- but the authors argue that since German holidays vary in each state, that there is enough variation to get robust results.
The "German vacation" effect on the ease of downloading songs might
be too small to measure anything reliably. Germans P2P users supply only one sixth of all songs that US users download. This "experiment" might be akin to doing a drug trial with a very small dose of medicine. In this case, you need to collect a lot of data to reliably measure the effects.
There are many other concerns discussed in the article. But, this is probably the best evidence we are ever going to get.
Schneier, Applied Cryptography. Everything you need to know about practical cryptographic primitives and cryptosystems is in the first 5-10 chapters of that book.
I disagree. Applied Crytography does not adequately describe the limitations of these primitives. All of the algorithms are insecure for most applications on their own. They need to be heavily modified to become secure.
For example, applying RSA directly to a plaintext does not protect against leaking partial information to an attacker (eg: whether the plaintext contains an even or odd number). Schneier doesn't mention this, nor how to fix this problem.
I recommend Wenbo Mao's "Modern Cryptography" instead, which spends chapters on getting these details right.
MATH:
* Dudley, "Real Analysis and Probability"
* Stewart and Tall, "Complex Analysis"
* Artin, "Algebra"
* Milnor, "Topology from the Differentiable Viewpoint"
* Spivak, "Calculus on Manifolds"
* Cook, Cunningham, Pulleyblank and Schrijver, "Combinatorial Optimization"
STATISTICS:
* Casella and Berger, "Statistical Inference"
* Shaffer, "The Art of Causal Conjecture"
* Greene, "Econometric Analysis"
* Rao, "Linear Statistical Inference and its Applications"
COMPUTER SCIENCE:
* Aho, Sethi and Ullman, "Compilers: Principles and Tools"
* Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein, "Introduction to Algorithms"
* Mao, "Modern Cryptography"
* Bell, Moffat and Witten, "Managing Gigabytes"
* Goldreich, "Foundations of Cryptography", volumes I and II.
* Okasaki, "Purely Functional Data Structures"
* Sipser, "Introduction to the Theory of Computation"
* Pierce, "Types and Programming Languages"
* Gray and Reuter, "Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques"
ECONOMICS
* Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green, "Microeconomic Theory"
* Fudenberg and Tirole, "Game Theory"
* Muthoo, "Bargaining Theory"
* Laffont and Martimort, "The Theory of Incentives: The Principal-Agent Model"
* Cooley, "Frontiers of Business Cycle Research"
* Alt and Shepsle, "Perspectives on Positive Political Economy"
* Stokey and Lucas, "Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics"
* Tirole, "The Theory of Industrial Organization"
* Dixit, "Lawlessness and Economics"
This book seems to fit into all of the above categories!
* Fagin, Halpern, Moses, Vardi, "Reasoning About Knowledge"
Rebates are clearly a way of allowing poor students (and the like) buy electronics cheaply, while making it unattractive to, say, businesses who value things higher and don't like waiting in line at 5am and don't have time to fill in forms.
It's like the airline industry: tickets are much cheaper to buy a long way in advance. Airlines would like to offer reasonable prices to tourists, while at the same time forcing business travellers to pay a high price.
In both cases, the sellers are lowering the quality of their customer experience purely to provide incentives for those who value their products highly to pay a high price.
a) What you're doing.
b) Why you're doing it.
c) How you're doing it.
While I agree with (a) and (b), I disagree with (c). Programming languages are very good at explaining exactly how something is done. If your function is so complicated that it isn't obvious at first glance how exactly it achieves its stated objectives in (a), then you should fix your code.
I wrote a rant on this topic called How (Not) to Write Comments at http://members.optusnet.com.au/clausen/rants/comme nts.html a few months ago for my students. Before giving my recommendations, I made some fun of the comments my students were writing, which I classified as mystic translations, autobiography, military, comic strip and haiku.
Seriously. Every geek that I've known who gets a girlfriend seems to stop being a geek after that.
While I have always been a geek, I think my girlfriend made me more geeky... she convinced me to use the Maths library more! I think this lead to me becoming more mathematically rigourous.
When I first asked her out, she rejected me, but proceeded to find the proof of a theorem in the library I had been looking for! (The Ring version of the third fundamental theorem of Algebra, IIRC) She also got me into Topology...
LGPL is automatically dual GPL/LGPL. To quote from the LGPL:
3. You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. To do this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2, instead of to this License. (If a newer version than version 2 of the ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify that version instead if you wish.) Do not make any other change in these notices.
Once this change is made in a given copy, it is irreversible for that copy, so the ordinary GNU General Public License applies to all subsequent copies and derivative works made from that copy.
I can't understand why everyone's so excited about this non-free software.
Quoting Google's About Page, google is applying for a patent on it's search technique:
Google has revolutionized searching on the web with its patent-pending PageRankTM technology. PageRank leverages the structural nature of the web, which is defined by the way in which any web page can link to any other web page, instantly, directly, and without an intermediary. In a sense, this link structure automatically democratizes the Internet. It eliminates hierarchy and enables information and ideas to flow unimpeded from site to site.
Slashdot Mirror
Skype for Linux has been able to send SMS messages for 10 years or so. What's new about this?
In economics, it's rather difficult to run experiments. For example, we can't ask President Bush to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime 100 more times so that we can get statistically significant data on its effects on unemployment! The next best thing is to look for "natural experiments" that generate data that is just as good.
In this case, the authors wanted to experiment with the supply of P2P "servers". If the number of people offering to share P2P songs increases, then they hoped to measure the corresponding decrease in music sales. Naturally, they didn't actually run this experiment -- the RIAA would have objected to the researchers engaging in piracy!
So, they did the next best thing -- a natural experiment. When German students have their vacation, they share more files. This makes it easier to download songs in the US. They found easier access to P2P file sharing in the US did not cause a large drop in music sales.
Of course, this natural experiment isn't as good as a real experiment:
- German vacations aren't randomly assigned -- but the authors argue that since German holidays vary in each state, that there is enough variation to get robust results.
- The "German vacation" effect on the ease of downloading songs might
be too small to measure anything reliably. Germans P2P users supply only one sixth of all songs that US users download. This "experiment" might be akin to doing a drug trial with a very small dose of medicine. In this case, you need to collect a lot of data to reliably measure the effects.
There are many other concerns discussed in the article. But, this is probably the best evidence we are ever going to get.I disagree. Applied Crytography does not adequately describe the limitations of these primitives. All of the algorithms are insecure for most applications on their own. They need to be heavily modified to become secure.
For example, applying RSA directly to a plaintext does not protect against leaking partial information to an attacker (eg: whether the plaintext contains an even or odd number). Schneier doesn't mention this, nor how to fix this problem.
I recommend Wenbo Mao's "Modern Cryptography" instead, which spends chapters on getting these details right.
I forgot to mention:
* McKusick, Bostic, Karels, Quarterman, "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System"
Hi,
Here's my list, in no particular order:
MATH:
* Dudley, "Real Analysis and Probability"
* Stewart and Tall, "Complex Analysis"
* Artin, "Algebra"
* Milnor, "Topology from the Differentiable Viewpoint"
* Spivak, "Calculus on Manifolds"
* Cook, Cunningham, Pulleyblank and Schrijver, "Combinatorial Optimization"
STATISTICS:
* Casella and Berger, "Statistical Inference"
* Shaffer, "The Art of Causal Conjecture"
* Greene, "Econometric Analysis"
* Rao, "Linear Statistical Inference and its Applications"
COMPUTER SCIENCE:
* Aho, Sethi and Ullman, "Compilers: Principles and Tools"
* Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein, "Introduction to Algorithms"
* Mao, "Modern Cryptography"
* Bell, Moffat and Witten, "Managing Gigabytes"
* Goldreich, "Foundations of Cryptography", volumes I and II.
* Okasaki, "Purely Functional Data Structures"
* Sipser, "Introduction to the Theory of Computation"
* Pierce, "Types and Programming Languages"
* Gray and Reuter, "Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques"
ECONOMICS
* Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green, "Microeconomic Theory"
* Fudenberg and Tirole, "Game Theory"
* Muthoo, "Bargaining Theory"
* Laffont and Martimort, "The Theory of Incentives: The Principal-Agent Model"
* Cooley, "Frontiers of Business Cycle Research"
* Alt and Shepsle, "Perspectives on Positive Political Economy"
* Stokey and Lucas, "Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics"
* Tirole, "The Theory of Industrial Organization"
* Dixit, "Lawlessness and Economics"
This book seems to fit into all of the above categories!
* Fagin, Halpern, Moses, Vardi, "Reasoning About Knowledge"
Cheers,
Andrew
Rebates are clearly a way of allowing poor students (and the like) buy electronics cheaply, while making it unattractive to, say, businesses who value things higher and don't like waiting in line at 5am and don't have time to fill in forms.
It's like the airline industry: tickets are much cheaper to buy a long way in advance. Airlines would like to offer reasonable prices to tourists, while at the same time forcing business travellers to pay a high price.
In both cases, the sellers are lowering the quality of their customer experience purely to provide incentives for those who value their products highly to pay a high price.
I wrote a rant on this topic called How (Not) to Write Comments at http://members.optusnet.com.au/clausen/rants/comme nts.html a few months ago for my students. Before giving my recommendations, I made some fun of the comments my students were writing, which I classified as mystic translations, autobiography, military, comic strip and haiku.
That said, since the publishing/media indsutry is so oligopolized, it might be hard to convince publishers to try "risky" marketing methods.
Also, perhaps you need a culture of copycat for it to work. So perhaps one cartoon with copycat rights granted would be insufficient?
Andrew
And Turing was therefore a "dumb one"?
/dev/clausen
Quoting Google's About Page, google is applying for a patent on it's search technique:
Doesn't anyone care about freedom any more?