internet Archives - Kevin Low

Dot.con

I’ve recently finished John Cassidy’s Dot.con I got from library many days back. John Cassidy is a staff writer at The New Yorker and I always liked his writings about Economics. I’ll probably find a chance to lay my hands on his latest book, How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities soon.

Meanwhile, Dot.con have been an interesting read. It’s an old book, no doubt. I believe reading about the Internet Bubble now seem rather weird given that it has happened a while back and don’t appear to have any immediate relation with what I’ve been working on. Still, I think that events like this have lessons to offer that are often missed out and I was looking to read something a little further back given that I’ve been updating myself with The Economist all the time. John Cassidy didn’t fail me, starting his story from the time when the technology was developing for the rise of modern Internet, describing the roles that the US military and government played in its conception, research funding and even implementation. He combines the events leading up to year 2000 with interesting comparisons of speculative manias of the past and talks about retrospective telltale signs of irrationality.

He introduced me to Charles Mackay and his writing, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I subsequently realised I had the sections of Charles Mackay’s book in my 4-inch tome, The Real Price of Everything by Michael Lewis. Those pieces have just been added into my reading queue.

Cory Johnson reveals that John Cassidy was a rare skeptical voice with regards to the Internet Boom, but failed to live up to the promise of the title of the book:

Indeed, he is unable to dismiss the most fundamental notion (a mantra among the true believers) that the Internet changes everything. Despite the stock market meltdown, almost any reading of the evolving business practice wrought by the Internet suggests that more dramatic changes are yet to come.

In a sense, the Internet is not quite exactly an illusion so to speak. But I don’t think that was what John Cassidy was driving at. His idea is that business fundamentals have been abandoned during the period and it shouldn’t have been. The numbers he cites about businesses losing money even as stock prices climb is startling. He might have been against the arguments of the New Economy though, and he could have supported his argument with the fact that falling prices (with economic expansion) isn’t entirely an internal affair of US but a result of the external forces as well.

I’ve enjoyed the little stories told by Dot.con surrounding the whole boom and crash of the Internet, especially those about individuals trapped in those industries contributing and taking part of the boom. Besides that, Dot.con serves as a good look at human behaviours during a speculative mania.

Imperfect Information (Processing)

The Economist ran a special report on Managing Data, which is really about how to Data have become really abundant in our world today and how it might help us at all.

It is interesting how I have got a friend who once commented that all forms of market failure is a result of imperfect information. He says that people are consuming too much or too little of a product because they don’t have perfect information about the impact of the products, and so basically all the inability to analyse cost and benefit is a result of imperfect information. Likewise, to this friend of mine, technological advancement is basically slowly discovering information, truths that we previously know nothing of. Of course, that’s a little extreme and basically demanding perfect knowledge as well. For him, perfect knowledge would naturally be attained from having sufficient information.

The digital age ushered in lots of information; so much that we don’t have enough time to process them. In fact, even cataloguing them might be troublesome enough and the process generates meta-data, which in fact is information about information. They would prove useful though they actually add to the information heap. Say for example I give you a quote:

The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past:

If I don’t provide the source, it’s not particularly helpful unless you’re able to identify it from just the content. It’s from Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard the Second. But then that’s just a little bit of metadata; there’s more: it comes from Act II Scene I. And even more: it’s from Line 14-16. The ability to manipulate all these data themselves would create more information too. And they all might just prove to be way too much.

Economics have definitely become more complex thanks to the flood of information. Technology has allowed suppliers to maintain tighter inventory and reduce idle capacity but reality seem to drift further away from classical economics even as the economic agent are becoming more equipped with the information necessary to create a more perfect market. It appears, the next big assumption of Economics about the real world that needs toppling is in fact the idea of independence.

Serious thinking on the Internet

The Straits Times, on 19 February this year, republished an article written by Adam Cohen of the New York Times. Cohen’s article reminded me about some of the benefits of the Internet which many often overlook in view of the tremendous upwelling of “junk” (for instance, rag and gossip made more accessible online) on the Internet.

Cohen argues that some feel the Internet may be “driving culture ever lower”, but it is also allowing “a wealth of serious thinking”. He uses the example of a BBC podcast “In Our Time” which delves deep into history to examine “arcane topics from history, literature, science and philosophy”. This certainly would be the other side of the “Internet coin”, the benefits that could be accrued to laymen and academics alike. Albeit one needs to be interested before one can actually be open and be exposed to such “high-brow” knowledge, but at least it provides avenues for those interested to be enlightened.

While I admit I am not in the least interested in the “arcane topics” listed above, I am myself a beneficiary of the Internet in terms of exposure to “serious thinking”. TED.com is a good example. Short-form for Technology, Entertainment & Design, the website devotes itself to “Ideas Worth Spreading” by broadcasting presentations relating to these spheres and more, allowing netizens access to a more interactive / interesting showcase of what might be normally deemed inaccessible and arcane, meant only for academics and to be showcased in libraries and institutions. I have watched lectures / presentations that have amazed and enthused me about issues that interest me but would not propel me to borrow books from the library about it, such as on HIV/AIDS.

So… if you are bored, dont just watch paint dry on Youtube, watch something educational on TED.com and dont let your brain rot and idle.

Biz Connect

Just recently, The Economist was tabulating the impacts of social networks and featured significant discussion on their impact on the business. The Big Money has a list of top 50 brand names (they call them ‘companies’) that has been doing well on Facebook as a social media vehicle for their brands. It appears that Facebook have become some sort of brand management tool that is carefully balanced with fans/consumer followings and interactions. As applications proliferate on these social networking platforms, there is a risk that all these commercial stuff are crowding out the actual social messages that are being sent over it. While

Google recently produced Buzz as I’ve highlighted previously, and The Economist thinks that it’ll hardly do much to dent the influence of Facebook and Twitter.

Automated Eyes

I stumbled upon Tineye, a ‘reverse image search engine’. It basically allows you to upload an image and then perform a search for pictures that are similar to the image. This is the beginning of answering a question my friend have posted me a couple of years back when he asked if the Internet can help us find out the name of a person from a photo of him/her. Alternatively, if you have a picture of a place, you might want to upload the image to search for where exactly it is. Alas, Tineye is not yet capable of all that, to quote from the Wiki article:

A user uploads an image to the Web application search engine or provides a URL for an image (or for a page containing the image). The search engine will look up other usage of the image in the internet including their time of appearance and including modified images based upon that image. Tineye does not recognise objects or persons in an image, it recognises the entire image, and some altered versions of that image. This includes differently sized versions of the image.

The search engine is provided by Idée, Inc., a Canadian firm that also produces other image-matching technology products, like PixID. A demonstration of the power of this product is shown in this video that follows:

It purportedly helps client tracks usage of their photographs or images online and print publications to manage image license and also to ‘uncover unauthorized image usage’, and it kind of reminds me how it makes patent trolls’ job easier, reflecting a worsened state of gridlock. In other words, while the software may help to raise the opportunity for transactions and thus contribute value to creators, it might potentially discourage mashups in the area of graphic designs. Of course, it has a potential for good as well; scanning through a film can help the production crew find out whether they have obtained permission for all the images or clips used and would thus know what to filter out if they are unable to identify the owners.

The potential of such technology always works both ways and eventually it will be up to Economics to resolve the issues.

The Polarity of the Internet

In today’s The Straits Times, Rachel Chang comments about “the power of the Net to polarise”.

She cites the examples of how vocal people on Facebook and their blogs, who have publicised their political views or displayed their political affiliations, have been slammed and harasssed online to the point that one such blogger stopped writing. The empowering voice of the Internet appears to work like a double-edged sword, threatening to slit the throat of the person wielding it in the face of the majority or the powerful.

It scares me sometimes how polarised views on the Internet can get. There does not seem to be room for compromise or discourse, it is very much an “us against them” game in terms of opinion rather than the moderated views across the spectrum. Chang quotes Cass Sunstein of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for his view that people who “interact with others who share the same views… tend to become more extreme”. Of course, “the opposite is also true”, but at least looking at some of the incidents Chang has had to cover for The Straits Times, it appears as if the former applies more than the latter.

I can very much feel for myself this polarity when I visit The Temasek Review. It is considered a source that is less influenced by the government (as opposed to The Straits Times, which some may deem to be a government propagandist body) but I am seeing quite a lot of critical anti-government writing. Ever since I started visiting this website, my rosy views about the govenrment have been somewhat tainted, not in a bad way. At very least, I feel as if I am considering other non-governmental viewpoints that might reallly be the voice of the people and not just what the government feeds to us via the press. It is scary, however, how netizens slam each other for their views, be it pro-PAP or anti-PAP. It is rather heartening that there is much debate about Singapore’s future, and by and large discussion there is rather measured. It can get disturbing when emotions are flared up, as I notice in this write-up. I dare not express my views on this website for fear of being flamed to death by both pro-PAP and anti-PAP netizens.

Democracy… certainly brings about a cacophony that needs to be understood and tolerated, for all in the society to benefit. Hopefully with all the debate online and offline, people will come to a better understanding of what they want for their society. And it must mean dangerous times if arguments on the Internet spill over into real life and disrupt society.

So in essence… take heed online.

And just like Chang, I must add the disclaimer that I expect people to “shoot me nasty, unsigned email messages after reading this column”, if only just to pre-empt comments considering the nature of my writing.

Internet & China

With so many people obsessed with the Internet in China and yet even more obsessed with curbing the addiction of them, Google should be making money in China. But apparently it didn’t quite beat Baidu.com that much and thus decided on a ‘New Approach‘.

The Economist discusses the issue at length, citing how Google has come to this after experiencing hackers attacks. They also talked about the similar kind of problem other big sites are facing from China.

Tech Crunch noted that Google’s stance in this case is more about business; perhaps the hacking attacks have been around for a long time and Google has gathered the evidence but lately, they reviewed their business and decided that the cost of maintaining the engineers and censorship is too heavy given the gains they made.