You are assuming that food markets are asymmetrical information markets. I would ask you to prove that assumption.
Let's say I sell you a donut, and it doesn't have an ingredient label. How do you know what's in it? You might be able to determine some aspects of its quality immediately (does it taste good, does it make you sick, etc...), but other aspects of its quality, such as "is this donut good for your long term health?" are more difficult to answer without knowing either what's in the donut (hard to determine if you don't have reliable information from the manufacurer or a chemistry lab), or conducting a scientific study of people who eat my donuts (which is prohibitively expensive and time consuming). If I know what's in the donut (and thus have a better idea of its quality), and you don't, that's information asymmetry. If I can manufacure my donuts cheaper by using inferior ingredients, I can undercut the prices of donut manufacureres who make similar tasting yet higher quality (perhaps healthier) donuts. Possibly I can even put them out of business. My superior market positions is assured by lack of food labelling, so it's naive to assume I'm going to support any kind of "efficient, adequate, and useful" labelling. (This is sort of a dumb example, but it's the best I think of at the moment.)
Further, Akerlof's asymmetrical information market applies to a market in which the information disparity only goes one way. In real markets asymmetrical information travels in both direction. In the food markets consumers often know more about their choices than sellers do. This marketing information is so important that screening is often done by sellers even before products reach the market.
I think you're confusing knowledge of the quality of the product (which is what akerlof was talking about) with knowledge of the criteria by which consumers rate the quality of the product. You are right, though, that information asymmetry works both ways. An example of the consumer knowing more than the seller is insurance transactions. People buying insurance have a better idea than the insurrer if they're likely to need the insurance. Generally healthy frugal people have a tendency not to buy medical insurance, which drives up the price for people who actually are likely to need it. (I don't necessarily agree with universal government sponsored health care, but this is one of the arguments for it.)
Because we all know that that the best information on what you should and should not by comes from a public internet forum. People on the internet are as a rule more intelligent AND honest than anyone else.
and to those who can't, they can copy and paste the text into a translator.
Or a speech synthesizer (assuming the text is available as text and not images) such as festival, if your vision isn't very good - also something you can't do with the dead tree version.
Furthermore I've never seen any evidence that an unregulated market will always serve the interests of consumers.
For evidence of the opposite, see a market for lemons. (I haven't been able to find Akerlof's original paper on the Internet, but many descriptions of the general concept exist.)
He shows that in a market where the consumer does not know the quality of the things he/she buys (information asymmetry), the market will provide a strong disinsentive for sellers to sell high quality products. Food labelling laws allow the market to operate much better, and as a side bonus, occasionally prevent people allergic to certain kinds of food from ending up in the hospital.
I'd like to see a world where I can step into a store, whip out a pda with a bar code reader, scan a product barcode, and see ratings and reviews of that product right there in the store, downloaded from epinions or some similar site via a wireless network. Of course, public opinion of a product isn't everything. In the case of food contents, the public has no way of knowing without being told by the manufacturer if a particular food contains some additive that has negative long term health consequences.
Does anyone have a link to the text of this "open letter"? I didn't see a link to it in the article text (maybe I missed it somehow), nor was I able to find it with a few quick google searches.
Suppose your state uses Approval Voting and selects Nader. Now, the spoiler effect is just transferred to the national level, where Nader can spoil the race in the EC. Your state "wasted" its electoral votes on Nader. Most people will figure this out in advance (or be told) and won't let it happen.
Maybe a good solution would be to use approval voting at the state level. Then each state generates a list of candidates ordered by number of votes they receive. At the national level, we can do instant runoff, or any of the other methods that require an ordered list. Each state is weighted by the number of electoral votes it has.
It might be better to abolish the EC all together, but it does serve several useful purposes:
The issues of rural areas (that control our food growing capability) are not ignored.
The effect of vote fraud in any given state is bounded.
In close races, recounting a state is a lot easier than recounting a whole country.
One hurdle to getting anything to change is that the states and the nation have to change simultaneously. Change could begin at the state level, with each state transitioning to approval voting at its leisure, but as the parent said, the maximum benefit would come from changing the electoral college. I suspect that would require a constitutional ammendment.
Wikipedia is often a synonym for "uninformed shithead"
I'm glad to see we've set a new high standard for intellectual debate here on slashdot today. One reason why I posted the gradparent was because I'm honestly curious what people think of Allawi, and if anyone has any good insight to support or refute what the wikipedia article says (both in terms of accepted fact and accusations by various parties). If you have some, then please post it.
In December 1990, Allawi announced the Iraqi National Accord (INA). The main sponsors of INA were the British, but they received secret backing from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States. The group consisted mainly of former military personnel who had defected from Saddam Hussein's Iraq to instigate a military coup. Allawi was recruited by the CIA in 1992 as a counterpoint to the more well-known CIA asset Ahmed Chalabi, and because of the INA's links in the Ba'athist establishment.
According to former CIA officers, Allawi's INA organised terrorist attacks in Iraq between 1992 and 1995, allegedly including the bombing of a cinema and a school bus that killed school children. This campaign never posed a threat to Saddam Hussein's rule, but was designed to test INA's capability to effect regime change.
(Emphasis is mine, to acknowledge those points that are accusations, not necessarily accepted facts.)
Allawi is at best a controversial figure who came to power largely due to the backing of the US:
Although many believe the decision was reached largely on the advice of United Nations special envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, the New York Times reported that Brahimi only endorsed him reluctantly after pressure from U.S. officials. (In response to a question about the role of the U.S. in Allawi's appointment, Brahimi replied: "I sometimes say, I'm sure he doesn't mind me saying that, Bremer is the dictator of Iraq. He has the money. He has the signature. Nothing happens without his agreement in this country." [14] (http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/585/585p15. htm) Two weeks later, Brahimi announced his resignation, due to "great difficulties and frustration".
Maybe the whitehouse didn't write his speech, but there's certainly room for a skeptic to wonder about its origins, and Allawi's motivations.
The article on Allawi over at wikipedia is quite informative, though it raises more questions than it answers... there are a lot of wild theories and accusations out there, hard to know which are true. At the very least, he's led an interesting life. Since he's worked so closely with the CIA, MI6, and the Baath party in his earlier years, and seems to have a (possibly undeserved) reputation as some kind of hitman/thug/loose cannon, I wouldn't blame an Iraqi for not trusting him.
Does anyone have a link to the washington post article that Feinstein is quoting? This is close, but not it.
Well, Claude Shannon showed that, with a perfect modulation and error correction scheme, you could only push so much data over a given communications media, with a given amount of bandwidth and SNR. If you want more, you have to either
use more spectrum (aka bandwidth)
increase signal strength
decrease noise
Since background noise is not controllable, they would have to be doing one of the first two (effectively increasing radio pollution), or overcoming inefficiencies in a previous modulation scheme.
Anyone know how close the various 802.11 standards are to the shannon limit?
New York - The American Civil Liberties Union won a tremendous victory for Internet privacy today in the case of ACLU & Doe v. Ashcroft, challenging the constitutionality of "National Security Letters" (NSLs) under the USA PATRIOT Act. The letters, issued directly by the Department of Justice without any court oversight, can be used to demand sensitive financial and communications information about citizens even if they are not suspected of any crime. When Internet Service Providers receive such demands they are forbidden from revealing their existence to anyone.
Wow, shorter and much more informative than the abcnews story. The wikipedia link for the patriot act is here.
Is this software as good as the ever-extensible Kwiki implementation?
Talk about looking gift horses in the mouth.
It's a reasonable question. Being open source puts it on a level playing field with all the other wikis out there, so why not compare them on a per-feature basis? I certainly wouldn't use it if I didn't have some compelling reason to prefer flexwiki over other wikis I like and am already familiar with (I'm using mediawiki right now).
Google identifies relationships between data using only on the links between pages containing the data.
The Semantic web represents relationships between data based on metadata (i.e. data about data). This is a far more powerful way to describe the meaning of data.
This is an important point. Google computes the pagerank of a page based on the eigenvector of the web link matrix, which is a clever and usually effective approach. Unfortunately, each link only conveys a little bit of information. A link from page A to page B is assumed to be an endorsement of page B's relevance by page A. But what if you could add extra metadata to the links? Not just a URL and a human readable text label, but a machine readable label as well, like this?
If you could apply arbitrary attributes to web pages, google would have much better information to go on, and a user could specify the importance of certain attributes depending on what he/she is looking for.
Kuni: Ahhh, a red snapper! Mmmmm, very tasty! Okay, Weaver, you can either hold onto you red snapper... or you can go for what's in the box that Hiro-San is bringing down the aisle right now!
[Hiro-San emerges, carrying a table with a box]
Kuni: What's it going to be, Weaver?
Phyllis Weaver: I'll take the box! The box!
[Applause]
Kuni: You took the box! Let's see what in the box!
[box is opened]
Nothing! Absolutely nothing!! Stupid!! You're so stupid!!!
Here's some more info on hex. From the wikipedia article:
The game was invented by the Danish mathematician Piet Hein in 1942, and independently by the mathematician
John Nash in the late 1940s. It became known in Denmark under the name Polygon; Nash's fellow players at first called the game Nash. According to Martin Gardner, some of the Princeton University students also referred to the game as John, because it was often played on the hexagonal tiles of bathroom floors.
...
Players have two colors, say "Red" and "Blue". (Of course, the colors are merely a convention and the actual colors vary from board to board and from version to version.) They alternate turns placing a piece of their color inside a hexagon, filling in that hexagon with their color. Red's goal is to form a red path connecting the top and bottom sides of the parallelogram, and Blue's goal is to form a path connecting the left and right sides.
I've never played it, so I can't really comment on whether it's more interesting than go or not.
No need to break it directly, just wait for tokens to start showing up on ebay. Hmm, give out thousands of tokens, and assume that no one will lose or sell them. Somehow, this whole scheme doesn't seem like such a bright idea...
Read Time Stamp Counter. Used to count clock cycles for benchmarking.
It's actually useful for more than just benchmarking.
The time stamp counter is incremented every instruction cycle, and it lives in a register on x86 processors, so it can be read very quickly. In linux, time is kept by the periodic interrupt timer (PIT) which causes an interrupt at some interval, like 100 times a second. If your program calls gettimeofday(), the current time is calculated as boot time + jiffies (the number of PIT interrupts recieved since boot time) + (current tsc value - tsc value at the last interrupt)/(cpu frequency). Programs can also call rdtsc directly, and save themselves from making a system call, though this is only useful if they only care about relative time, not absolute time. There was some talk awhile ago about making "jiffies" visible to user space through some sort of memmory mapping trickery, so gettimeofday could be implemented completely in user space, but I'm not sure what became of the idea.
I have no idea what the TSC is used for in windows, but it's probably something similar.
Does anyone have any insight on how this differs from octave?
This is the first I've heard of R, but I've tried using octave a few times. It seems to be a sort of enhanced gnuplot. I was thinking about using it for a project I'm working on, though I may just stick with good 'ol C for performance.
Do any of these projects work well with sparse matricies? I'm interested in using them to run a pagerank-like computation, but not if they use n^2 memory.
I recently wrote the article on Byzantine Fault Tolerance. (Hope I got it right, anyone here want to critique my prose and technical understanding of the concept?)
Another fun thing to do is find articles for places near where you live that don't have pictures and add one. I did this for Cape Lookout. Not the best picture, but it works.
It seems like it would make a good high school project to have students add to the wikipedia article for their town. A lot of the town articles are stubs added by scripts from US census data, and lack history and other interesting details specific to each town.
Except that the guys running governments have far more power than corporations. If you don't trust corporate power why would you trust government power?
That depends, in a well functioning democracy, the government has to remain accountable to the populace, and may have checks and balances in place to prevent any one branch of government from having absolute control.
In a similar vein, in a properly functioning free market, the powers of any one corporation are limited by competition, and consumer knowledge. When either of these conditions are not present, the government ought to stepin to prevent the rise of a powerful entity that is accountable to neither the public nor their consumers.
People can get screwed by either a misbehaving government or by misbehaving corporate monopolies. Unchecked power is evil in any context, I don't see how one is worse than the other. One of my reservations against voting for Badnarik (but I might anyways) is that I'm not sure that he understands that some industries lack natural competition and need to have government checks on their power. Good examples include industries where redundant competing infrastructure is prohibitively expensive, such as roads, delivery of electricity, and anything that relies on last-mile telecom infrastructure.
Badnarik opposes government regulation of the energy industry, instead arguing that the free market is more effective in controlling prices and maintaining stability. "All you need to know about economics is the law of supply and demand. When the supply of something goes down, the price of it will go up. And as the price of gasoline goes up, the consumerist at the pump is going to provide the incentive for finding alternative sources..."
Most consumers don't have much choice about the price of electricity - there's only one wire going to their house. Maybe I'm taking Badnarik out of context. Does anyone have any further insight on what he really thinks about government intervention in cases where the market lacks natural competition, due to high barriers of entry?
Slightly offtopic, but there was an article at linux weekly news awhile ago about a new scheduling algorithm for NUMA machines. They made an interesting point that load balancing between hyperthread cores (by migrating processes) is much cheaper than load balancing between separate physical cpus, since both hyperthread cores share the same L2 cache, and thus the process doesn't have to start over with an empty cache.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say I sell you a donut, and it doesn't have an ingredient label. How do you know what's in it? You might be able to determine some aspects of its quality immediately (does it taste good, does it make you sick, etc...), but other aspects of its quality, such as "is this donut good for your long term health?" are more difficult to answer without knowing either what's in the donut (hard to determine if you don't have reliable information from the manufacurer or a chemistry lab), or conducting a scientific study of people who eat my donuts (which is prohibitively expensive and time consuming). If I know what's in the donut (and thus have a better idea of its quality), and you don't, that's information asymmetry. If I can manufacure my donuts cheaper by using inferior ingredients, I can undercut the prices of donut manufacureres who make similar tasting yet higher quality (perhaps healthier) donuts. Possibly I can even put them out of business. My superior market positions is assured by lack of food labelling, so it's naive to assume I'm going to support any kind of "efficient, adequate, and useful" labelling. (This is sort of a dumb example, but it's the best I think of at the moment.)
I think you're confusing knowledge of the quality of the product (which is what akerlof was talking about) with knowledge of the criteria by which consumers rate the quality of the product. You are right, though, that information asymmetry works both ways. An example of the consumer knowing more than the seller is insurance transactions. People buying insurance have a better idea than the insurrer if they're likely to need the insurance. Generally healthy frugal people have a tendency not to buy medical insurance, which drives up the price for people who actually are likely to need it. (I don't necessarily agree with universal government sponsored health care, but this is one of the arguments for it.)
-jim
That's what reputation systems* are for.
*This www2004 paper uses data from epinions for their test data, which is the site I mentioned in the grandparent.
-jim
Or a speech synthesizer (assuming the text is available as text and not images) such as festival, if your vision isn't very good - also something you can't do with the dead tree version.
-jim
For evidence of the opposite, see a market for lemons. (I haven't been able to find Akerlof's original paper on the Internet, but many descriptions of the general concept exist.)
He shows that in a market where the consumer does not know the quality of the things he/she buys (information asymmetry), the market will provide a strong disinsentive for sellers to sell high quality products. Food labelling laws allow the market to operate much better, and as a side bonus, occasionally prevent people allergic to certain kinds of food from ending up in the hospital.
I'd like to see a world where I can step into a store, whip out a pda with a bar code reader, scan a product barcode, and see ratings and reviews of that product right there in the store, downloaded from epinions or some similar site via a wireless network. Of course, public opinion of a product isn't everything. In the case of food contents, the public has no way of knowing without being told by the manufacturer if a particular food contains some additive that has negative long term health consequences.
-jim
Does anyone have a link to the text of this "open letter"? I didn't see a link to it in the article text (maybe I missed it somehow), nor was I able to find it with a few quick google searches.
-jim
Maybe a good solution would be to use approval voting at the state level. Then each state generates a list of candidates ordered by number of votes they receive. At the national level, we can do instant runoff, or any of the other methods that require an ordered list. Each state is weighted by the number of electoral votes it has.
It might be better to abolish the EC all together, but it does serve several useful purposes:
One hurdle to getting anything to change is that the states and the nation have to change simultaneously. Change could begin at the state level, with each state transitioning to approval voting at its leisure, but as the parent said, the maximum benefit would come from changing the electoral college. I suspect that would require a constitutional ammendment.
-jim
I'm glad to see we've set a new high standard for intellectual debate here on slashdot today. One reason why I posted the gradparent was because I'm honestly curious what people think of Allawi, and if anyone has any good insight to support or refute what the wikipedia article says (both in terms of accepted fact and accusations by various parties). If you have some, then please post it.
-jim
...who used to work with the CIA. From this wikipedia article:
(Emphasis is mine, to acknowledge those points that are accusations, not necessarily accepted facts.)
Allawi is at best a controversial figure who came to power largely due to the backing of the US:
Maybe the whitehouse didn't write his speech, but there's certainly room for a skeptic to wonder about its origins, and Allawi's motivations.
-jim
The article on Allawi over at wikipedia is quite informative, though it raises more questions than it answers... there are a lot of wild theories and accusations out there, hard to know which are true. At the very least, he's led an interesting life. Since he's worked so closely with the CIA, MI6, and the Baath party in his earlier years, and seems to have a (possibly undeserved) reputation as some kind of hitman/thug/loose cannon, I wouldn't blame an Iraqi for not trusting him.
Does anyone have a link to the washington post article that Feinstein is quoting? This is close, but not it.
-jim
Well, Claude Shannon showed that, with a perfect modulation and error correction scheme, you could only push so much data over a given communications media, with a given amount of bandwidth and SNR. If you want more, you have to either
Since background noise is not controllable, they would have to be doing one of the first two (effectively increasing radio pollution), or overcoming inefficiencies in a previous modulation scheme.
Anyone know how close the various 802.11 standards are to the shannon limit?
-jim
Wow, shorter and much more informative than the abcnews story. The wikipedia link for the patriot act is here.
-jim
It's a reasonable question. Being open source puts it on a level playing field with all the other wikis out there, so why not compare them on a per-feature basis? I certainly wouldn't use it if I didn't have some compelling reason to prefer flexwiki over other wikis I like and am already familiar with (I'm using mediawiki right now).
-jim
This is an important point. Google computes the pagerank of a page based on the eigenvector of the web link matrix, which is a clever and usually effective approach. Unfortunately, each link only conveys a little bit of information. A link from page A to page B is assumed to be an endorsement of page B's relevance by page A. But what if you could add extra metadata to the links? Not just a URL and a human readable text label, but a machine readable label as well, like this?
If you could apply arbitrary attributes to web pages, google would have much better information to go on, and a user could specify the importance of certain attributes depending on what he/she is looking for.
-jim
They do have good algorithms for that sort of thing. Too bad they're not more widely used.
-jim
Kuni: Ahhh, a red snapper! Mmmmm, very tasty! Okay, Weaver, you can either hold onto you red snapper... or you can go for what's in the box that Hiro-San is bringing down the aisle right now!
[Hiro-San emerges, carrying a table with a box]
Kuni: What's it going to be, Weaver?
Phyllis Weaver: I'll take the box! The box!
[Applause]
Kuni: You took the box! Let's see what in the box!
[box is opened]
Nothing! Absolutely nothing!! Stupid!! You're so stupid!!!
-jim
...
I've never played it, so I can't really comment on whether it's more interesting than go or not.
-jim
-jim
And disk is often only an issue because there's not enough memory, and the machine has to swap.
-jim
He supports instant runoff voting. I prefer approval voting myself, since it's a bit simpler, but almost anything would be better than plurality voting.
-jim
It's actually useful for more than just benchmarking.
The time stamp counter is incremented every instruction cycle, and it lives in a register on x86 processors, so it can be read very quickly. In linux, time is kept by the periodic interrupt timer (PIT) which causes an interrupt at some interval, like 100 times a second. If your program calls gettimeofday(), the current time is calculated as boot time + jiffies (the number of PIT interrupts recieved since boot time) + (current tsc value - tsc value at the last interrupt)/(cpu frequency). Programs can also call rdtsc directly, and save themselves from making a system call, though this is only useful if they only care about relative time, not absolute time. There was some talk awhile ago about making "jiffies" visible to user space through some sort of memmory mapping trickery, so gettimeofday could be implemented completely in user space, but I'm not sure what became of the idea.
I have no idea what the TSC is used for in windows, but it's probably something similar.
-jim
Does anyone have any insight on how this differs from octave?
This is the first I've heard of R, but I've tried using octave a few times. It seems to be a sort of enhanced gnuplot. I was thinking about using it for a project I'm working on, though I may just stick with good 'ol C for performance.
Do any of these projects work well with sparse matricies? I'm interested in using them to run a pagerank-like computation, but not if they use n^2 memory.
-jim
I recently wrote the article on Byzantine Fault Tolerance. (Hope I got it right, anyone here want to critique my prose and technical understanding of the concept?)
Another fun thing to do is find articles for places near where you live that don't have pictures and add one. I did this for Cape Lookout. Not the best picture, but it works.
It seems like it would make a good high school project to have students add to the wikipedia article for their town. A lot of the town articles are stubs added by scripts from US census data, and lack history and other interesting details specific to each town.
-jim
That depends, in a well functioning democracy, the government has to remain accountable to the populace, and may have checks and balances in place to prevent any one branch of government from having absolute control.
In a similar vein, in a properly functioning free market, the powers of any one corporation are limited by competition, and consumer knowledge. When either of these conditions are not present, the government ought to step in to prevent the rise of a powerful entity that is accountable to neither the public nor their consumers.
People can get screwed by either a misbehaving government or by misbehaving corporate monopolies. Unchecked power is evil in any context, I don't see how one is worse than the other. One of my reservations against voting for Badnarik (but I might anyways) is that I'm not sure that he understands that some industries lack natural competition and need to have government checks on their power. Good examples include industries where redundant competing infrastructure is prohibitively expensive, such as roads, delivery of electricity, and anything that relies on last-mile telecom infrastructure.
Quoting this wikipedia article (not sure what the original source is)
Most consumers don't have much choice about the price of electricity - there's only one wire going to their house. Maybe I'm taking Badnarik out of context. Does anyone have any further insight on what he really thinks about government intervention in cases where the market lacks natural competition, due to high barriers of entry?
-jim
Lawrence Lessig has a blog.
-jim