Twitter: Joshua Gans- @jodiecongirl Actually, it says more about you that you've heard of them!
- @jodiecongirl I think it says that economists don't just assume rational agents but are attracted by them too. Talk about a value conflict.
- @jodiecongirl Why uninteresting? Think of Alex P. Keaton, Quark , Sheldon and Dogbert.
- RT @freakonomics: Freakonomics Movie is released via iTunes tomorrow: http://bit.ly/9YveA3 [I'm gathering the kids for a Friday night movie]
- Am I to understand that we are now in the path of a Hurricane? http://bit.ly/daitO9 This aint the tropics.
Readership
Mar
31
The Green Stimulus
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Environment | 1 Comment
I have long thought that this is the right time to use government money to get a big push on climate change technology development and adoption. In a new paper, Nicholas Stern and his co-authors agree. They want a broad set of investments totalling some $400 billion. In the olden days, he’d be dreaming with that proposal but today things have changed. There is a message here for Australia too. We need more than just insulation, etc. Time for us to coordinate what big projects we are going to take on in negotiation with the rest of the world.
Mar
31
This site will make your day. A taste.
Mar
29
Flash of Genius Review
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Economics | Comments Off
I have talked about Flash of Genius
The issue with the movie is that it is a challenge to generate suspense. Put simply, you know he wins his court case because Ford is accused of stealing the idea (which they did) throughout the movie and they couldn’t say that unless that claim was upheld in a Court. So the main interest is what drove Bob Kearns and also how this whole matter impacted on his family.
For me, it is like the perfect business school case. All of the hallmarks of making lots of money, the impact of competition and also the weighing up as to whether personally the whole thing was worth while. And there is no easy resolution of that issue.
The movie does gloss over parts of the story and also forgets a few details in places (e.g., Kearn’s 1960s engineering class had way too many women in it. Actually, it would be too many for now). But other than that it is faithful to the times and does not degenerate into Hollywood pandering.
Mar
29
Hosting difficulties
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Economics | Comments Off
This blog’s host, Bluehost, has been subject to some network overload issues (probably malicious). That disrupted this blog yesterday and while it is up, there are occasional, couple of minutes long, outages. My apologies. But rest assured the crack technical team at Core Economics is on to it and crossing their fingers even harder than usual that this all gets resolved soon.
Mar
29
Whose job really matters
by Mark Crosby | Filed Under Economics | 2 Comments
The defence minister is accused of being too close to Chinese officials. Wayne Swan knocks back Minmetals proposed takeover of Ozminerals so as to not look too close to the Chinese. Seems to me like trying to save the Defence Minister’s job at the potential expense of several hundred mineworkers jobs. There can be surely be no sensible explanation for this bizarre decision. If you wanted to spy on the Instrumental range at Woomera the pub in Glendambo, or my Grandfather’s pub in Kingoonya, are much closer – or just try google earth.
Mar
27
Internet Sales and Copyright
by Kwanghui Lim | Filed Under IP, Innovation, Tech & IP | 1 Comment
Last month, CMCL and IPRIA organized an event to discuss whether internet service providers should be responsible when their customers upload/download illegal material. I wasn’t able to attend, but Sarah Berriman, one of my young and energetic students, did. She wrote to me expressing how a ‘generation gap’ exists in the way the music industry perceives its customers.
The main points made by each speaker were interesting, but also not unexpected. There seems to be a disconnect between the copyright holders and their customers. They don’t seem able to adapt to the needs and desires of the current generation, and it is a mystery to many why this should be. It is not as though broad and expensive market research is required to tell them this: the cinema is perceived as poor value for money. People like convenience, and having things when they want and how they want. Is it really such a leap to move to simultaneous international online sales? Is copyright the issue here, or the protection of an outdated business model? Perhaps it is time infringers were offered a carrot, instead of perennially getting the stick. [reproduced with permission from Sarah Berriman, Medical Student, Melbourne University]
Today I received a stack of books from amazon.com. They were shipped all the way across the world from Kentucky in the United States. And no less by the same company that refuses to sell me the very same books as electronic downloads because we are outside the United States. I am glad I’m young enough to fall into the same side of the generation divide as Sarah.
Mar
27
USD a safe haven?
by Mark Crosby | Filed Under Economics | 2 Comments
Follows is from my piece in today’s Age on the value of the USD.
The governor of China’s central bank this week remarked that there was a need for an alternative to the US dollar as the main reserve currency held by central banks. When the US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was misquoted as supporting this idea the US dollar took a brief tumble, though later Geithner stated that he had been misquoted and his comments taken out of context.
The fact that most central banks hold the majority of their reserves in the form of US dollars might provide support to the idea that the US currency is a safe haven in times of trouble. The recent drop in the Australian dollar has been caused partly by the fact that our currency tends to move up and down with rises and falls in commodity prices, but the US dollar has also risen because of the perception that the US dollar is a safe haven. This view is not too different to the view that prevailed from the mid 1990s to the early part of this decade, that the US government supported a “strong dollar.” The strong dollar view was popular in financial markets, and helped underpin a rising value for the US dollar.
But like the strong dollar idea, the safe haven view of the US currency is misguided. The reality is that no currency is entirely safe. Trust in a currency depends on holders of currency trusting that not too many notes will be issued. Today there is nothing to stop central banks from issuing too much currency other than the damage that this would do to their reputation. Some central banks, including the RBA, jealously protect this reputation, but others do not.
Under the classical gold standard period that prevailed from the 19th century until the Depression, currency notes did have intrinsic value, and perhaps could be relied on to be a safe haven. In some countries notes were issued by central banks, but in many countries private banks could issue notes, as long as they held gold to back the note issue. Under this system the value of a currency note depended on the amount of gold that backed each unit of currency.
After World War II it was decided to modify the gold standard system so that countries would hold US dollars as reserves. In principle these US dollar reserves were supposed to be exchangeable for gold, though in practice this was discouraged. This system worked quite well as long as the US government and Federal Reserve limited US note issue so as to maintain the value of the US currency. But the financing of the Vietnam War strained this system, and led to excessive US note issue and inflation. By 1971 it was clear that the US dollar was not going to be able to maintained at the then price of US$35 per ounce. After some demands for gold from the German central bank the Nixon administration suspended convertibility of US dollars for gold in August 1971.
Since 1971 there has been nothing “backing” the issue of notes in most countries. Maintaining the value of notes requires that countries do not issue too much money. It is ironic that the US has been regarded as a safe haven when it seems that there are many obvious parallels to the early 1970s when it comes to current management of the US economy. The government is currently running huge budget deficits, and the US Federal Reserve last week announced that it would be purchasing some US Treasury bonds that are being issued to fund this spending. This is equivalent to printing money, and while the amount of additional money supplied in this way is currently a small fraction of total currency outstanding, it seems likely that further printing of money will occur.
Will the US dollar tumble as a result of excessive issuance of money? I doubt it. But faith in the US dollar as a “safe haven” relies on the US Treasury and Federal Reserve being more conservative than other central banks as far as inflation and money growth goes. On this front the evidence is clearly that the US should not be relied on as a safe haven – not now, and not in the past either.
Mar
27
Baptism Bonus
by Andrew Leigh | Filed Under Parenting | Comments Off
Joshua Gans and I have previously shown that financial incentives can affect birth timing. Now some evidence that non-monetary incentives matter too. From the BBC:
At the end of 2007, in a move to reverse the Caucasian country’s dwindling birth figures, the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Ilia II, came up with an incentive. He promised to personally baptise any baby born to parents of more than two children.
There was only one catch: the baby had to be born after the initiative was launched.
The results are, in the words of the Georgian Orthodox Church, "a miracle". … The country’s birth rate increased by nearly 20% during 2008 – a rate four times faster than the previous year.
‘Personally baptise’ all those babies? Wow, that sounds like a full time job. Unless…
The next baptism is scheduled for early April, when thousands of mums, dads and their children will cram into Tbilisi’s biggest church, the Sameba Cathedral. The babies will be briefly dipped into a gigantic inflatable font after receiving a blessing from his Holiness, Ilia II.
HT: Rocco Weglarz (font of all wisdom this week)
Mar
26
Should Genes be Patented?
by Kwanghui Lim | Filed Under Academia, IP, Innovation, Regulation, Tech & IP | 2 Comments
Should Genes be Patented? This is a question of tremendous importance, and one that is the subject of an Australian Senate Inquiry. Chris Dent and I sent in a submission on behalf of IPRIA and CITE, which is available here. We believe there is insufficient empirical evidence (yet) upon which to make specific changes to patent law. Other people have quite different views, as expressed in their submissions. Next month, we are organizing a CITE & IRIA public event on this topic. It will include a discussion by four panelists: Gillian Mitchell of the PeterMac Cancer Centre, Gregory Mandel from Temple University, Dianne Nicol from the University of Tasmania, and Dan Peled from Haifa University in Israel. The event will be chaired and moderated by Joshua, and will include a 45-minute public debate. Post your thoughts here. Or better still, sign up for the event at http://www.ipria.org/events/seminar/Patenting%20Genes.html
Mar
26
Speeding up refereeing
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Academia | Comments Off
Dan Hamermesh points us to the new policy at the Economic Journal that will offer 500 pound prizes for the best referee reports. He argues that it will likely not speed up referees or give them more incentives to agree to do reports. I tend to agree on that score. Indeed, Maxim Engers and I had a paper in the American Economic Review (1998) that argued that it was the very fact that potential referees cared about speed that made any sort of reward designed to speed things up, less likely to be worthwhile. Put simply, I feel guilt if I decide not to do something as it causes delay but if I know that there are more rewards about I think it is more likely that the next person they ask will go ahead and so the delay I might cause is reduced. That said, it may mean that the reviews people agree to do will be done a little more diligently.
Mar
26
From XKCD (HT: Rocco Weglarz & Robert Wiblin)
Mar
26
Compare the pair
by Sam Wylie | Filed Under Economics | 2 Comments
Earlier this week, US Treasury Secretary Geithner rated the efforts of Prime Minister Rudd in the GFC as an A+. Geithner’s fulsome praise of Rudd is not surprising given the similarity between Geithner’s Public-Private Investment Program for toxic loans and Rudd’s Australian Business Investment Program (Ruddbank).
In both plans bank assets will be purchased by a highly leveraged vehicle that is funded by a combination of government guaranteed debt and a 50/50 equity split between investors and the government. The purpose and investors are a little different but the structure is almost identical — even the level of leverage is the same with 6:1 in Geithner’s plan and 6.5:1 in Ruddbank.
Mar
25
Challenges to economics
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Economics | 6 Comments
In The Australian, Stephen Matchett writes about how the financial crisis is impacting on the study of economics. It won’t surprise you to learn, after you read it, that I liked the article. And no, it is not because I am quoted liberally (not that there is anything wrong with that) or because it refers to Melbourne Business School as the “citadel of academic economics” (not that it isn’t) but that, after a fairly long discussion a few weeks ago, the article actually fairly represents what I was trying to get across. That is, that economics has always faced these challenges, that the financial crisis and issues with markets sit right there in Economics 101, but that the core of economics is still the core of economics. The only quibble I have is the impression that economics is currently unfashionable amongst students. That isn’t my experience nor the experience in many Universities where economics is not compulsory but currently have record enrollments.
[Update: an alert reader points me to this quote of mine, "everybody wants policy-based research, but nobody does the work" which I think I meant to say (or did originally say, hard to remember) "evidence-based research."]
Mar
24
What makes a good CEO?
by Andrew Leigh | Filed Under Economics | 2 Comments
My AFR oped today looks at some new research on what makes a good business leader. Full text over the fold.
Mar
23
Energy efficient cars encourage driving
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Environment | 5 Comments
While I like the idea behind Better Place, in the New Yorker, David Owen sums up a concern I have had for some time:
How do we persuade people to drive less—an environmental necessity—while also encouraging them to revive our staggering economy by buying new cars?
The popular answer—switch to hybrids—leaves the fundamental problem unaddressed. Increasing the fuel efficiency of a car is mathematically indistinguishable from lowering the price of its fuel; it’s just fiddling with the other side of the equation. If doubling the cost of gas gives drivers an environmentally valuable incentive to drive less—the recent oil-price spike pushed down consumption and vehicle miles travelled, stimulated investment in renewable energy, increased public transit ridership, and killed the Hummer—then doubling the efficiency of cars makes that incentive disappear. Getting more miles to the gallon is of no benefit to the environment if it leads to an increase in driving—and the response of drivers to decreases in the cost of driving is to drive more. Increases in fuel efficiency could be bad for the environment unless they’re accompanied by powerful disincentives that force drivers to find alternatives to hundred-mile commutes.
That is, fuel efficiency drives more use of fuel, not less. And that can well mean more emissions. If you are interested in the technicalities, the proof is here.
That said, I don’t agree with this implication in the article:
One beneficial consequence of the ongoing global economic crisis is that it has put a little time back on the carbon clock. Because the climate damage done by greenhouse gases is cumulative, the emissions decrease attributable to the recession has given the world a bit more room to devise a plan that might actually work.
Mar
23
ideaCHECK: Bank Fees
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Economics | Comments Off
A couple of weeks back Fujitsu Consulting got some publicity about their bank fee report that suggested that fees charged by Australian banks were 22 percent higher than their UK counterparts. I’m no fan of banks and their fees but in this latest ideaCHECK on that report from the Centre for Ideas and the Economy at Melbourne Business School, Richard Hayes suggests that the Australian performance may not be as bad as all that.
It appears the FC benchmarking approach does not answer any question about the total level of fees actually paid by Australian households. Instead it appears directed at a different and more limited question – if everyone used all banking products and they had the transaction and product bundles equivalent to those obtained from some survey data then what would average fee levels be. This question has limited usefulness when it calculates an Australian fee level so starkly different from the observed average.
At the very least, the Fujitsu analysis looks far from a complete account of the matter.
Mar
23
Foxtel blues
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Economics | 2 Comments
I realise that some of the most popular posts on this blog occur when I complain about customer service at a particular company. Because of the high page rank, while tempting, I don’t tend to post right away when there is some transgression by a corporate so as to give them a chance to respond through normal channels. The latest trangression from Foxtel occurred a week ago. Their time is up.
So as a lover of TV I have a Foxtel IQ2 box. Historically, we have had a couple of other Foxtel boxes in the house that we have paid $20 per month each for rather than try some other means of sharing cable or whathaveyou. What we found is that for the past year we did not watch those boxes at all. Finally, I went through the process of having them disconnected.
Here is the thing, it turned out that my primary box was not the Foxtel IQ2. It was one of the boxes I wanted to get rid of. That seems trivial and the account person on the phone made it out to be but he had to disconnect my service and reconnect it to reassign the IQ2 as my primary box. I asked if that would cause any other issues and he said no.
Don’t ever let them disconnect your Foxtel IQ2 box! Disconnection causes you to lose access to all of your recorded programs. In my case, 60 percent of the DVR was filled up with stuff I meant to watch including movies (including United 93 which I want to keep there for ever as something I should watch but can never bring myself to do it), TV shows, etc. After doing all this, later that evening, I logged on to watch one of the recorded programs and was greeted with a message “you are not authorised to view this program as it was recorded with another account.” So my DVR was full of recorded programs that I could not watch.
Now you think that this would be some account numbering error and could be easily restored. No such luck. Technical support said this occurs from time to time and no restoration was possible. All of that was gone. They then reminded me that Foxtel IQ is a service and I am not guaranteed the ability to watch. Well I knew that because if you try to record HD, half the time it stuffs up and you can’t watch it. But that is different from them getting rid of all of the recordings without any warning whatsoever. Had I known I might have kept one box going for a little while to watch the stuff I really wanted to watch.
I rang back the next day to complain to ‘billing’ who were the ones who stuffed up my IQ and they promised that someone higher up would ring back to discuss recompense. They never called back.
My advice to anyone out there thinking of getting a Foxtel IQ. Don’t. Get a Tivo as it actually works and then if ou have stuff you want to time shift — of which, let’s face it, the only candidates are The Daily Show or Colbert Report — watch them online for free.
Mar
23
Facebook blues
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Economics | 2 Comments
Facebook changed its format again last week and apparently 94% of users hate it. I think that is about the same proportion as those who hated the changes 6 months ago. Facebook claim not to care but there are real issues here. They should care as their web presence is only part of their product. Perhaps a more suitable name for the future would be ‘Flipbook.’
The main issue is that we have yet to find our social norms on Facebook. For instance, in my little community, you are supposed to update your status once or twice a day but you can drop in other interesting stuff as much as you like. In the old format, I could look at just status updates or I could look at broader feed. You knew what’s what.
The new format combines these two and I am not sure what I am supposed to be doing. It is not like we can have a meeting and work out the new norms. Facebook want us to update very regularly but I’m not sure I want to read regular updates from everyone. For instance, one friend who I was following on Twitter decided to link the two through Facebook status updates. The result was their posts filled my Facebook. That wasn’t what I was after but I had a stark choice between keeping them or dropping the friend.
Put simply, Facebook’s social norms cannot settle down unless they settle on the format. And they are at real risk of someone else working out how to port communities to another platform so they had better get their act together if they want to keep not earning money at the rate they are now.
Mar
23
CPRS, Submission No.1
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Environment | Comments Off
There is an internet game where people try to be the first commentor on a post. I guess I have made a few submissions to Australian parliament inquiries over the last year and I seem to have secured the Submission No.1 slot a few times. Anyhow, the Senate just posted by submission on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (who said the time frame was too tight). It covers material discussed on this blog but it is all collected in the one place. Of course, it is Submission No.1.
Mar
23
Advertising is failing on the Internet?
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Advertising | 1 Comment
I guess we would call that the “Department of Huh?” But that is exactly what Eric Clemons of the Wharton School has said today. He starts of with some assertion that the decline in Internet ad revenues is not explained by the recession and that traditional advertising (of which the page of his post is littered) cannot translate over to the internet (which may be true). But he believes that the fact that content is not pushed but shared causes the whole model to collapse.
I guess if he had left it with that, we might be OK, but the perennial question arises: What about search and Google? After all, that is hardly directed advertising.
Misdirection, or sending customers to web locations other than the ones for which they are searching. This is Google’s business model. Monetization of misdirection frequently takes the form of charging companies for keywords and threatening to divert their customers to a competitor if they fail to pay adequately for keywords that the customer is likely to use in searches for the companies’ products; that is, misdirection works best when it is threatened rather than actually imposed, and when companies actually do pay the fees demanded for their keywords. Misdirection most frequently takes the form of diverting customers to companies that they do not wish to find, simply because the customer’s preferred company underbid. Misdirection also includes misinformation, such as telling a customer that a hotel is sold out when, indeed it is still available, if the hotel has chosen not to pay a promotional fee, and then allowing the guest to choose an alternative property.
What? Has he ever done this? The ads come up because of the keywords the consumer has typed in and the advertisers recognition that they may have something that can attract their attention. Then, the consumer, in the face of a column of explicitly unrated search results must actually choose to click an ad for anything – misdirection, payment and business model – to actually happen. Let me put the business model in as simple a sound bite as possible:
If the ads trick, consumers won’t click.
In other words, it had better not be misdirection and all of the evidence (in terms of Google ad revenues) suggests that they work just fine. Danny Sullivan reckons Clemons doesn’t actually use the net. It is hard to disagree.
I think search directed advertising works precisely because it matches the user activity – search – with the form of the content – both sponsored and not – search results. This is why banner ads have a much harder job; consumers want to avoid them. This is not necessarily the case with sponsored search.
Mar
22
Good acquirers
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Innovation | Comments Off
In terms of innovation commercialisation, one thing that Scott Stern and I emphasised is that there were benefits to both established firms and start-ups from acquisition deals and, thus, established firms might benefit if they had a reputation for being a good acquirer. So I read with interest this Slate article about the behaviour of the newly established firm, Pet Holdings. Pet Holdings is responsible for various viral websites including FailBlog and LOLcats.
When I told Huh that I wanted to write about him, he feigned reluctance—what if a prominent article describing his success spawned a competitor? But then he explained that it would actually be very difficult for a new competitor to take on Pet Holdings because it sat on a huge competitive advantage: a meme portal. By now his sites are big enough that when Huh spots something buzzy, Pet Holdings can quickly replicate the idea and then make it popular through links from Cheezburger, Fail, and his other blogs. Pet Holdings is not shy about copying successful memes outright. Last year the company was in discussions to buy Engrish.com, which has been compiling funny translations for years. When negotiations didn’t work out (Huh didn’t explain why), Pet Holdings started a competing site, and now it’s almost as popular as the original. Huh says that he prefers to buy sites than to copy them, especially when established sites have a devoted audience that can proselytize an idea. There are, though, few legal implications to copying good memes—because such sites traffic in user-generated content that’s amorphously defined (does lolrus infringe on lolcat?), it’s difficult to trademark memes.
You know something tells me that negotiating with Pet Holdings in the shadow of its now proven ability to replicate what you have is not much of a negotiation. The problem is that someday someone is going to come up with an unexpected viral site that allows them to duplicate the whole set of things Pet Holdings has. If they don’t want to do a deal with Pet Holdings then there is some vulnerability there.
Mar
22
Accepting only the rejected
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Academia | Comments Off
Tyler Cowen points us to a new journal, Rejecta Mathematica, that only allows submissions from articles rejected by other journals. Of course, that means that you have to submit somewhere else first. But it will be interesting to see how many submissions it gets from papers that could have been accepted somewhere else. After all, do you really want to signal your research as being in the definitely mistakenly rejected class as opposed to the possibly mistakenly rejected class? In economics, the experience of the BE Press Journals for which a lower tier journal explicitly implies rejection for an upper-tier one indicates a reluctance to play that game.
Mar
22
Series Finales
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Television | 10 Comments
(Caution: reaction but not plot spoilers for BSG ahead): Unless you have been hiding out somewhere in the last day, you’ll know that there is a consensus that the Finale of Battlestar Galactica was really terrible and was enough to pretty well make the 5 year investment a negative one. Let’s face it, when Galactica 1980 has a more realistic depiction of human societal interactions, you are in big trouble.
Of course, this raises the question: has anyone got the final episode right? There are some candidates for the good including Firefly (if you count Serenity as the finale) and also Seinfeld. I am told that Newhart was excellent but the finale was never shown in Australia and we still wait for DVD. Shows like Cheers and Fraser tried to do too much while the various Star Trek series were OK but had wained anyway by the time they ended. Babylon 5 can be excused because of studio wrangling although it can’t be excused on the basis of later telemovies. Nonetheless, it is hard to find ones that have been so destructive of the series’ point as BSG. How sad.
Mar
21
Access Economics’ Broadband Report
by Joshua Gans | Filed Under Broadband | 3 Comments
I have been working my way through Access Economics’ Broadband Report it wrote on behalf of Telstra. (Here it is). As I stated earlier, it is good to actually have this because it is impossible to evaluate Telstra’s claims without it. Recall that they showed that a two year delay in High Speed Broadband roll outs would result in a total loss to the economy of $3.2b from now until 2020.
What Access Economics have done to get this is model a carrier-wish-list scenario against various forms of delay or reducing the overall spend on the network. The good news they argue is that all of the investments massively pay off in terms of social net present value but on the whole issue of whether delay is a problem or not, there is an issue of ‘garbage in-garbage out.’
Actually, that is not entirely fair as my issue is that Access Economics only choose one bit of garbage whereas I would like them to have run their model a few times based on different assumptions as a form of ‘stress test.’
The two assumptions I have problems with are on the assumed productivity benefits from high speed broadband and the social discount rate. The former is a ‘guesstimate’ based on all of the studies (that the report nicely summarises) on the value of ICT and broadband throughout the world. Their number is that high speed broadband will add 0.1 percent to productivity per annum on average (with little at first and then a quick jump up as broadband is adopted). Of course, that rate of adoption depends on the broadband price, download limits, etc; none of which has assumption stated. In other words it is an decidedly uneconomic model (unless of course it is isn’t but they have chosen not to reveal it). The point is that the number drives everything and so if it was three quarters of that, the results would be very different. But as Access Economics declined to test alternatives we don’t know.
The second assumption is that the social discount rate is seven percent. This strikes me as high as we usually use about 4 percent for these things. What is interesting is that if you do have a too high discount rate you end up reducing the NPV from the investment. Sounds like that is against a broadband advocate’s favour. But that isn’t the case if you are advocating for no delay. In that case, the high discount rate will, for an equivalently productive investment, inflate the losses from delay. I suspect that if we used the usual 4 percent, it would be a wash and with it Telstra’s headline number before the Senate.
Finally, all of this assumes no improvement in Internet technology with other networks becoming available prior to 2016 that are superior. Yes, really? It doesn’t even include Telstra’s own cable upgrades to 100Mbps.
So make what you will of all this. Basically, the value of 12Mbps broadband is according to this report, one thirtieth the value the Government claims it is. That is a big whopping difference. Second, it is completely unclear we are suffering because of delays that may or may not be occurring. But, finally, this report is probably the best cost-benefit analysis of high speed broadband for Australia that has been done. So choose your standard and that will tell you how to feel.
Mar
21
There has been an attempt to solve a long-standing mathematical problem in a massively collaborative way. It is called the Polymath1 Project and looks to provide a new proof of the density Hales-Jewett (DHJ) theorem. Apparently, after about 7 weeks, it looks like they have done it. Details are here. I’ll leave it to you to wonder about the potential of all of this.
In a related note, David Pogue laments the lack of attribution to the original authors of Internet jokes. Believe it or not, this raises key issues of relevance to collaborative science.