Is online journal publication shrinking the long tail?

Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail, showed how the Internet has made it possible for business models that focus on small niche markets rather than mass markets to be successful. While a bricks-and-mortar bookstore will typically have at most a couple hundred thousand titles and make most of its money from bestsellers, Amazon.com can list millions of titles and makes a quarter to a third of its revenue from the "long tail" of books that are not in the top 100,000 sellers.

One might think that putting science journals online would mean that more obscure articles would get greater readership, but a study by James Evans published in Science argues that as more journals are published online, fewer articles are being cited, and those that are tend to be more recently published. While the ability to search online by keywords means that an author of a scientific paper is unlikely to overlook any published paper containing those keywords, it also means that authors are less likely to look at other articles published in the same issues or run into articles that may be related in the big picture but don't contain the selected keywords. Evans found that for each additional year of back issues available online, the average age of articles cited in that journal fell by a month. He predicts that for the average journal, adding five years of back issues online results in a drop in the number of articles cited per year from 600 to 200.

The concern here is similar to the concern about online social networks that become narrowly focused--that people are missing exposure to ideas that they might have previously come across, now that they can select more specifically the items they want. I'm not sure how seriously to take this concern. In my own case, I don't feel like the Internet is causing me to overspecialize, rather it's providing me with access to all sorts of information I wouldn't previously have run into. I don't feel like the Internet is in danger of subdividing into sections of compartmentalized information the way that Bill Bishop's book, The Big Sort, suggests people are forming physical like-minded clusters of neighborhoods. I wonder if Evans would have found different results if, instead of looking at journal citations, he looked at the role being played by electronic publications such as blogs and mailing lists, where I suspect there is increasing interdisciplinary cross-pollination.

(Via The Economist, July 19, 2008, p. 89.)

July's Pre-foreclosure Numbers

I bought my first house 10 years ago, in July, 1998. Prior to the purchase I was living in a nearby apartment complex, paying $435/month for a 2-bedroom, 1 bath. I (over)paid $86,500 for the house, putting 3% down, so my monthly payments, at roughly $600, were ~35% higher than my rent--a reasonable premium to me, considering I'd suddenly be living and building equity in "my own place."

Today, zillow.com says the house is worth about $192,000, and monthly payments at 3% down would come to just under $1300/month. By comparison, you can still rent that 2 bedroom apartment for around $600. Doing the same math again, I don't think I'd come to the conclusion that the "ownership premium" is really worth it. Would you?

You might be wondering what my little story has to do with July's notices of trustee's sales--which, at 6412, as you can see from the graph, were lower than June's. Bush's housing bailout bill recently became law, which may mean that we have just passed the peak for home foreclosures--and soon we may even see a stop to falling home prices. Great news for current home owners, but, as my personal anecdote suggests, not-so-great news for housing affordability in general. The bailout essentially is a subsidy to current home owners at the expense of future home owners.

Because it will prop up current prices beyond where they would have naturally fallen, housing affordability will remain low, encouraging the spawning of all sorts of new government programs to help address "the affordability gap" (or some such wealth-transfer justificationist nonsense)--making money cheaper than it actually is, which will in turn encourage sellers to raise their prices still further while at the same time creating homeowners out of people who probably aren't fiscally responsible enough to be ones. Is this sounding familiar, yet?

As a non-homeowner who is making twice what he made in 1998 but would have an extremely hard time justifying paying $1300/month to own a crappy house, I would have preferred if Congress could've just left well enough alone.

Bowl-a-Rama success

Yesterday we participated in the 6th Annual PACC911 Bowl-a-Rama on Arizona RESCUE's dog team. I bowled in the cat team's lane and brought down their average score, helping the dog team to another win--apparently Nintendo Wii bowling doesn't help train for the real thing. The event had a morning and afternoon session; RESCUE was in the morning session from 10-12:30. RESCUE came in second place for "loudest cheer," which added another $50 There were about 60 groups participating in the morning session which raised a total of about $122,000--of which RESCUE alone raised $42,000! Thanks to everyone who supported our efforts and to Lisa and Einzige for coming out to the event to cheer us on!

ApostAZ podcast #6

ApostAZ podcast #6 is up:

Episode 006 Atheism and Freethought in Phoenix- Go to atheists.meetup.com/157 for group events! Jim Lippard teases three cool books. "Squared" from Greydon Square's 'The Compton Effect'. Evolution Laments God of the Gaps. Saying Naughty Words. Bad reasons to be an atheist. Outro from 'Dream' Greydon Square's Album 'The Compton Effect'

Comments: The podcast gets better each time. I disagree with the idea that everyone who is an agnostic is just trying to be politically correct, or is fence-sitting out of non-rational reasons. John Wilkins and Paul Draper are two examples of philosophers who are agnostic because they have rational reasons for thinking that there is some balance between arguments for and against the existence of gods, that there aren't methods for weighing such arguments, or that there isn't sufficient evidence to conclude that gods exist or do not exist.

New Yorker article on magic

Via Podblack Cat, I read Adam Gopnik's fascinating account of magic as practiced by Jamy Ian Swiss, David Blaine, and with a few remarks from Teller and a visit to David Copperfield's private museum of magic. Gopnik discusses the history and psychology of magic, and the only false note I encountered was at the end, where he writes:

The magicians have the boys for a moment, between their escape from their fathers and their pursuit of girls. After that, they become sexual, outwardly so, and learn that women (or other men) cannot be impressed by tricks of any kind: if they are watching at all, they are as interested as they are ever going to be, and tricks are of no help. You cannot woo anyone with magic; the magic that you have consciously mastered is the least interesting magic you have.

That's a statement that seems to suggest that the general public can't be fooled by slick politicians using Machiavellian methods, that there's no such thing as effective marketing techniques, and that the methods of pick-up artists don't really work. But you really can fool all of the people some of the time.

Large Hadron Collider rap

Science writer Kate McAlpine (aka Alpinekat) has put out a YouTube video of "Large Hadron Rap." The LHC begins operation with a test on August 9, and the first protons are expected to circle the entire track in early September. The New York Times has the background on the LHC and the rap video.



(Via Podblack Cat.)

UPDATE (August 10, 2008): The Economist has a good article on what the Large Hadron Collider has the potential to discover--not just the Higgs boson, but supersymmetric particles with names like neutralinos (making up dark matter), and creating tiny short-lived black holes that will generate Hawking radiation and possibly win Hawking a Nobel prize.

World's largest horseshoe crab promotes creationism through motorcycle jump

Baltimore's Columbus Center Maritime Museum had the world's largest horseshoe crab model built for them--it is 68 feet long, 28 feet long, and has a 13-foot-high domed ceiling (apparently you can go inside it). The museum was in need of revenue, so it sold the giant horseshoe crab to the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum as it was under construction. AiG realized that the crab was too large to fit in their museum, and so they gave it to the Freedom Worship Church in Blanchester, Ohio. That church put the crab into a "scripture garden" and a "fossil courtyard," where it is used to argue for creationism on the grounds that the horseshoe crab has not evolved over time and exhibits evidence of design as "a true gift from God, with its blood being used as a clotting agent for disease in scientific research." And now it is going to be jumped over with a motorcycle for a fundraising event called "Crabfest," by Evel Knievel's former bodyguard, Gene Sullivan.

How could anyone fail to be convinced by that?

(Via the Wilmington News Journal, Ohio.)

Prosecution target for anthrax attacks commits suicide

Upon learning that he was about to be the target of a prosecution for the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, U.S. government biodefense researcher Bruce Ivins killed himself on Tuesday with an overdose of Tylenol with codeine.

Ivins became a suspect after it was discovered that he had failed to report anthrax contaminations at his lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 2002. In late 2008, he was ordered to stay away from a social worker who had counseled him, Jean Duley, who would have testified against him at his trial. In Duley's application for a protective order, she said that Ivins had stalked her and threatened to kill her.

Ivins worked at the same lab where a prior "person of interest" in the case, Stephen Hatfill, also worked. Hatfill was cleared of involvement with the attacks and won a $5.8 million settlement from the Justice Department after he sued for harassment and privacy act violations. Hatfill also won a $10 million libel judgment against Vanity Fair and Reader's Digest for an article by Donald Foster which claimed that Hatfill's writings and travels connected him to the anthrax attacks.

Ivins' attorney claims that he was innocent, but if that were the case, wouldn't his response have been more like Hatfill's? Perhaps, perhaps not. Private investigator and former CNN reporter Pat Clawson, who was also a spokesperson for Hatfill,

said on Friday that news organizations and the public should be “deeply skeptical” about any notion that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax killer unless and until solid evidence is brought forth.

“Everybody is jumping to the conclusion that because this guy committed suicide, he must be the anthrax killer,” Mr. Clawson said. “That is a lousy premise. The pressure of these F.B.I. investigations on individuals is phenomenal, and it is quite likely that this guy cracked under that pressure but had nothing to do with the killings.”

Ivins was a church-going Catholic and a married father of two.

(Hat tip to Greg Laden.)

UPDATE (August 7, 2008): The government's case against Ivins includes tracing the strain of anthrax to his specific lab, the fact that he worked long periods alone in a secure lab that housed that strain and could not account for his activity, that when asked to provide spores from his laboratory to investigators he gave them different spores and then lied about it, that he sent an email to an associate after 9/11 saying that terrorists have "anthrax and sarin gas" and have "decreed death to all Jews and Americans," language similar to statements in threatening letters included in the mailed anthrax envelopes. All of the spores used in the anthrax attacks came from a single flask in Ivins' lab, RMR-1029. That's probably the most conclusive evidence that Ivins was behind the attacks.

Apparently Ivins also engaged in an "edit war" on the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority's Wikipedia page, repeatedly posting negative information there, and thought that the group had declared a "fatwah" on him. (Via The Agitator.)

Tough questions for McCain and Obama

Ed Brayton gives a summary of Radley Balko's list of tough questions for the candidates. It's a pity that our mass media is unlikely to ask any of them. (Yet kudos to Fox News for publishing Radley Balko's columns asking them--they seem to be a whole lot better on the web than they are on television.) Brayton quotes the questions for McCain about how serious he is about cutting corporate pork when he personally profits from it (the laws that mandate alcohol be sold through distributors like Hensley & Co, where his wife got her fortune) and how he reconciles his support for the drug war with the fact that his wife was permitted to avoid any criminal penalties for her prescription drug problems. For Obama, he selected as favorites how Obama plans to pay for his proposed civilian national security force, how he reconciles his support for the drug war with his own past use of marijuana and cocaine, and why he supported the farm bill and supports ethanol subsidies.

I think Ed clearly picked out the best questions Balko asked of McCain, but here are a couple other questions for Obama that I particularly liked:

In a speech to Cuban-Americans in Miami, you called the Cuban trade embargo "an important inducement for change," a 180-degree shift from your prior position. The trade embargo has been in place for 46 years. Did denying an entire generation of Cubans access to American goods, culture, and ideas induce any actual change? Wasn't the real effect just to keep Cubans poor and isolated? In communist countries like Vietnam and China, trade with the U.S. has ushered in economic reform, and vastly improved the standard of living. Why wouldn't it be the same if we were to start trading with Cuba?

In addition to the drugs, Cuba, and school voucher issues, you have also changed or revised your position in recent months on the war in Iraq, government eavesdropping and immunity for the telecom companies, and holding employers accountable for hiring illegal immigrants. Under some circumstances, changing or revising one's position can show admirable introspection — the ability to revise prior conceptions with new information. Some of your new positions are more conservative. Some are more liberal. But they do seem to have one thing in common: Should we be concerned that your shifts have been to those positions that give more power and influence to government? Are there any areas where you'd actually roll back the federal government?

Balko asked a question of McCain about the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA, also known as McCain-Feingold), which I think did serious damage to the First Amendment and protects incumbent politicians by prohibiting any corporation (including nonprofits) or by an unincorporated entity using any corporate funds from running ads critical or supportive of a candidate within 30 days of a primary or within 60 days of a general election. I agree McCain should be asked tough questions about his apparent disrespect for political speech, but I didn't particularly care for the specific question Balko came up with.

Expert tells China visitors to encrypt data as U.S. announces policy of laptop seizure

I saw two articles this morning which I think invite comparison. First, Phil Dunkelberger, CEO of PGP Corporation, says people visiting China should take laptops with no data, or encrypt what data they have:

Travelers carrying smart cell phones, blackberries or laptop computers could unwittingly be offering up sensitive personal or business information to officials who monitor state-controlled telecommunications carriers, Dunkelberger said.

He said that without data encryption, executives could have business plans or designs pilfered, while journalists' lists of contacts could be exposed, putting sources at risk.

Dunkelberger said that during unrest in Tibet in March, overseas Tibetan activists found their computer systems under heavy pressure from Chinese security agencies trying to trace digital communications.

"What the Chinese tried to do was infiltrate their security to see who in China the Tibet movement was talking to," he said.

...

Dunkelberger, whose firm serves many multinational corporations operating in China, said, "A lot of places in the world, including China, don't have the same view of personal space and privacy that we do in the United States."

"You've got to suspect that every place you're doing work is being monitored and being watched," he said.

Dunkelberger's advice is good as far as it goes. Of course, PGP Whole Disk Encryption won't help protect data in transit, and while PGP Email will protect the content of email messages, it won't conceal the source and destination. The threat described is one where traffic analysis enough can reveal a lot, and so you'd want to make use of a corporate VPN, some kind of proxy, or a system like TOR if you want to protect information about where your Internet traffic is ultimately going. PGP is a good company that makes great products; my employer uses PGP Whole Disk Encryption and Email products.

The second article, however, casts some doubt on the last part of what Dunkelberger says. It looks like the U.S., where the NSA engages in warrantless wiretapping with the assistance of the large incumbent telecoms (and a spineless Congress gives them immunity for violations of the law), the CIA spies on foreign visitors within the borders of the U.S. in conjunction with the FBI's counterintelligence division, isn't so different from other countries. It's now publicly admitted by DHS that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers have the right to seize laptops and other electronic devices from people entering the U.S. and hang on to them indefinitely in order to search them. Therefore Dunkelberger's advice should be taken by anyone coming into the U.S., as well--use blank laptops or laptops with encryption only. Some companies have begun to only allow employees to have a web browser and a VPN client on their laptops, and keep all data in the corporation, which can completely eliminate this particular governmental risk.