On a recent Saturday I became a taxi driver for my oldest son, and drove him home from the gym. Something by Gil-Scott Heron came up on the bop jazz channel on the car’s satellite radio. Heron’s rebellious expressions made him famous, but today the radio played themes of love. It was one of Heron’s earlier and milder pieces.

The jockeys experiment on this channel on the weekends, taking the music to the edges, though this hardly qualified as an edge. Though Heron is not regarded as a jazz pioneer in most circles, the beat poets influenced him, and he borrowed many of their rebellious forms for individualized expressions.

My son stared out the window, rendered silent by one of those adolescent moods in which sentences never exceed three words. Sometimes the mood can last for months.

Looking for an opening, I faked surprise. “Well, look at that.” I said with an upbeat tone, “It is Gil Scott-Heron.” This registered nothing from the passenger seat, not even a curious question, such as “Who is Gil Scott-Heron?” Was my son listening or descending into a month-long silence? He remained motionless.

A father has to be intellectual resourceful at these moments. I gambled, and issued an overstatement that I hoped might catch his attention. “Some people regard Gil Scott-Heron as the father of Hip-Hop and Rap.” If my son was at all paying attention, he would regard this sentence as a stretch, at best. The present song more closely resembled a male rendition of something acceptable to Ella Fiztgerald. Nothing about this love song would suggest such a radical interpretation. Still, the music contained enough rhythm to be catchy. My son stirred, and I sensed he was listening to me.

If the hook was in, then perhaps he would take the bait. “His most famous song was something called ‘The revolution will not be televised.’ Have you ever heard of that?”

“No.” My son shifted his weight while answering. Maybe I had him. This is what passes for a teaching moment in the suburbs.

“I will play it for you when we get home.” I promised, “You might like it.” No sound came from son, and we drove on.

My son once told me after visiting my classroom on go-to-parent’s-work-day that my classroom demeanor resembled my behavior at home. His lack of enthusiasm led me to imagine that he lay there motionless on purpose. “Don’t encourage him” he was saying to himself.

Not that his answer surprised me. He is only a sophomore and he attends a college-oriented public high school in a squeaky-clean suburb. As far as I could tell, this school taught only sanitized versions of rebellious texts, not something too dangerous, such as “Catch-22” and “The Autobiography of Malcom-X” and “Slaughter-House Five.” There is only so much intellectual discomfort most suburban families can take.

I still recall hearing Heron for the first time. A high school friend introduced me to it when we both were undergrads at Berkeley. It was one of those subversive things one friend does for another. I had never forgotten that moment. It came at a time when I was beginning to look at the world in a different way, when I began to wrestle emotionally and intellectually with the way others looked at the world. There was so much.

When Heron passed away last year, I learned that the poem had long ago passed into iconic status. I would have thought that iconic status might have allowed high schools to render his message in bite-sized forms that young minds could digest, safe from the complaining nannies of the neighborhood. Alas, no.

After we got home, and before my son retreated into surfing Facebook and other forms of online diversions, I went to the computer in the family room. All the other children were there watching the Disney Channel. I downloaded the recording, brought up the text, and told them to turn down the sound on the television. The three oldest children gathered behind me and looked at the text on the computer. The recording started. My youngest child did not like the interruption. He left the room, no doubt to find another television with Disney on it.

Gil-Scott Heron’s voice came out of the computer, recognizably forceful and assertive, with that distinctive sense of controlled rage. Yet, I was struck by it. He was almost polite by today’s norms. The delivery contained so much restraint and discipline.

Heron began to recite his work in the distinctive rhythm of beat poetry, with a saxophone in the background accenting it at pauses. The dissonant music set the atmosphere, suggesting irony, discomfort, and disappointment…

“You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip, Skip out for beer during commercials, Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox, In four parts without commercial interruptions…”

The youngest of the three remaining kids had tolerated the first few sentences, but her perky eleven year old mind could not see the point. She had given up on it by the time Heron had mentioned Xerox. She listened a while longer, finally leaving to go find her younger brother. She later told me that she did not understand why I liked a poem that did not rhyme.

My two oldest children, dutiful to a fault, stayed on, and listened to the entire recording. That took some admirable patience, as the poem is actually rather long.

I also secretly cringed as the poem went on. Some of the allusions were dated. The poem satirized events and contemporary celebrities in ways shocking to Heron’s listeners, but these were meaningless to my children. Spiro Agnew, Nixon, Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen, Glenn Campbell, Tom Jones, and Englebert Humperdink – they did not know these names, did not identify with the pop culture of the 1970s, and did not know what these people stood for.

More to the point, the kids did not recognize the platitudes of the past. Commercial pop passed in stanza after stanza. Yet, these slogans of corporate America had long ceased to be pervasive. They were not recognizable.

“The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people. You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl. The revolution will not go better with Coke. The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath. The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised. The revolution will be live.”

It ended. There was silence. My two oldest children stood there motionless. Their minds had not been expanded. They looked at me. I looked at them.

It was time to go for broke. Sensing the disconnection between the recording and their experience, I looked for whatever hook first presented itself.

“What was the big theme?” I said leadingly. Silence.

“Was he being sarcastic?” I begged lightly. They nodded in silence.

“What does he mean by revolution? What kind of revolution?” Silent stares. Motionless.

“Did you hear the jazz music in the background? Was that harmonious or dissonant?” Nodding in silence. Shrug.

“What was the big theme?” I tried again, adding a new question. “Did he really mean that it would not be televised?” Motionless.

I paused, searching for something that might resonate. “What will be televised if not the revolution?”

“Commercials about Coke,” said my son.  I looked him in the eye.

I could see the struggle between two instincts. One instinct moved him to try to figure out what had made his father so animated, to solve the puzzle presented to him. The other instinct pulled him with all its force. It led to a similar place, but added desperation to the answer. Perhaps he could bring this moment to a polite end. His observation about Coke took more from the latter instinct than the former instinct. He was fishing for an answer, hoping to find a way out. He was throwing me the one concrete piece he grasped.

I was excited by the answer, and tried to ignore the tortuous aspects to the interrogation.

“If the TV is showing coke commercials, why won’t it show the revolution?” Both kids looked at me with blank looks. I looked back at them.

I tried one more time. “What was the big theme?” They remained motionless.

The teaching moment had passed with barely a step forward. Well behaved, sheltered to the core, and eager to please, my two teenage children did not understand the language of Gil-Scott Heron. He did not resonate with them. Neither of them knew the soul of rebellion, the struggles of the beat poets, or the loneliness of angry individualism. Neither of them was destined for late nights pouring over the phrases of Yeats, or Dickinson, or even Frost – that is, on their own volition. They might still do it if an instructor required it of them, or their Dad.

I was secretly grateful I was not raising tortured artists. The beat poets were never satisfied. Restlessness haunted their lives.  My children did not appear destined for that path.

The Socratic instructor gave up, and I answered my own question. “Mainstream television would not know what to do with the revolution. Revolution falls outside of what it normally broadcasts. Heron is saying that it will happen anyway. It just won’t be publicized by the mainstream.”

My oldest daughter stood there, absorbing the explanation, still not sure what to make of the exchange between us. She did not get it. She wanted to please me, and she could see that I was doing my best not to appear crest-fallen.

My son looked at me, and a small sly smile slowly cracked one side of his face. “Ah, Dad, yes it will.” He said with confidence. I looked at him. His tone did not reveal irony, or insolence, or anger, or rebellion, or the views of an outsider, or torment on any level.

No, my son merely meant to signal that we needed to reverse roles. I was the one who did not understand. For a brief moment he would be the teacher and I the student.

He declared, “The revolution is already on MTV.”

He said it matter-of-factly, as if I had missed the obvious, as if Gil Scott-Heron described a world that no longer existed, articulated a problem that had been resolved. The revolution had come, and it was everywhere, in every device, and on many channels. It had been there for a while, even on something common, such as MTV.

He smiled with just a hint of the satisfaction that comes after solving a puzzle. I looked at him, and I could not think of comeback. At least he thinks for himself, I thought. Triumphant in posture, he turned, hinting at a giggle, and left the room.

My daughter looked at him walking away, and looked at me. She shrugged, turned to the TV, and turned up the sound on Disney.

I ran my second marathon on the morning of May 4th. It was the Wisconsin Marathon in Kenosha – official slogan: “The World’s Cheesiest Marathon.” The token meal at the end of the race includes beers and bratwurst. The race has a nice playful atmosphere. My first race had been the Chicago Marathon seven months earlier. Wisconsin had just under 3,400 participants. Chicago had just over 30,000. Both were a big party, but at a different scale. I liked them both.

I had been optimistic about this race and had compiled a special list of upbeat favorites designed to make the run more enjoyable by quickening the pace. The songs started with “Linus and Lucy” by Vince Guaraldi. I crossed mile 25 as the iPod played the last song in the compilation. It was Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” It made me smile. Though I did not need to quicken my pace at that point, I was rather content with the outcome, despite not realizing most of the goals. At least I had made a good spirited attempt trying.

There were six goals for this marathon, listed below in order of importance. These were:
1. Don’t die.
2. Finish.
3. Don’t throw up.
4. Beat the time from the Chicago Marathon (i.e., faster than 3:40:19).
5. Don’t walk (except for water).
6. Qualify for the Boston Marathon (i.e., faster than 3:30).

As it turned out, I only achieved two of these goals. You can probably figure out which two (Obviously, this post is not written from the grave). But focusing solely on the outcome does not really tell the story of how the goals came to be unrealized just after Mile 24. That is an amusing story worth telling.

Goal #6 should not be dismissed out of hand as too audacious. It had something to do with my presence in this marathon. Running the Chicago Marathon was merely for the bucket-list. The training made it become something more. In my youth I had never run more than six miles at a stretch. Yet, a few half-marathons taught me that I was surprisingly good at long distance running. It is odd to discover an unrealized talent somewhat later in life, but in my case the joy of discovery transmuted into obsession. I involved my wife and kids, and kept them up to date on progress. They tolerated the workouts, and teased me  .

As should be apparent from comparing goals #4 and #6, I did not qualify for Boston in my first marathon. That, by itself, is unremarkable, and quite common. The way I failed, however, cast a shadow on the strategy for the Wisconsin marathon.

There is nothing quite like the 23rd mile of a marathon. It can be mental torture, with the finish line still several miles off in the distance, while the legs are spent, rubbery, and numb. At the Chicago Marathon the bottom fell out for me on mile 23, and I never recovered. I gave in without much of a fight because I was not properly prepared for it. Giving up then made the rest of race a disaster. By the last mile I was shuffling, spent and exhausted, and, in retrospect, probably on the verge of physical collapse.

This time I vowed to do better.

More experienced marathoners helped me understand that I had made a rookie error in my first marathon, not reserving energy for the last few miles. I had paced myself poorly, expending all my strength going out too fast in the first few miles. Experienced marathoners advised me to make explicit time targets for the race and stick to them. That would discipline the pacing.

It worked too, at least at first. The 8 mile mark came in just under 1:01, as planned, and the 16 mile mark came in just over 2:05, just a tad slower than planned. The race had one interim reader at mile 19, and it recorded 2:28, also on target. I was not confident about qualifying for Boston when I came into mile 22 at 2:54, but I still felt good, since some of the prior mile had involved a hill. More to the point, there was gas in the tank.

Mile 23 – the place where it fell apart on the previous race – did not lead to collapse. There was a sense of triumph as I approached the sign for mile 23, even a little elation and adrenaline. I looked at my watch and saw 3:03. I was not optimistic about running 3.2 miles in 27 minutes, as it would require some eight-minute miles, and my legs did not seem capable of those any longer. But there still was a good chance to get a personal best. The legs began to move at a quickened pace.

I paid for that in short order.

I stopped for water just before the 24 mile sign. Only 2.2 miles to go. I can do this.  I finished the water, and picked up the pace for the last stretch. It was time to give whatever was left. The end was close.

Not much more than a tenth of a mile past the 24 mile sign I felt a wave of nausea overtake my body. It happened so quickly there was nothing I could do but run to the side of the street. Fortunately, there were no bystanders there. Don’t ask me why, but at that moment I remembered the scene from the Matrix, when Neo gets nauseous when he first learns about the Matrix. One of the crew members shouts, “Look out, he’s gonna’ to pop!” Then Neo loses his lunch.

I popped. That is how goal #3 and #6 both became unobtainable.

As it turned out, goal #5 also fell not long thereafter. Stopping for this purpose stopped all running. Maybe professional runners can keep going, but I could not. Standing there for an extended period, the endorphins stopped, and tightness seized my lower body – knees, ankles, thighs, calves, toes, and plenty of anatomy of the legs that only medical students memorize. I swore to myself. This hurt.

This had happened in practices, most recently three weeks earlier. Usually it took a few minutes for equilibrium to return. It had become such a source of jokes around the house that the kids treated it as routine. Last year, when it happened very frequently (before I discovered electrolyte pills) my youngest child, who was eight at the time, was once quoted as saying, “Daddy will come home from his run, throw up, and then he will be fine in five minutes.” It had become a routine joke. Once one of these episodes visited itself upon me long after a sixteen mile run. My oldest daughter still likes to point out the spot on Sheridan Road where we had to pull over.

Well, now what? I thought to myself, as I stood there wiping my mouth with my sleeve (what else would you do?). There is no point in holding on to dignity after throwing up at a marathon. I might as well walk.

I must have looked pathetic. A minute later I came to a corner, turned right to follow the course, and somebody with a kind face – one of the race volunteers? – came up to me, put his arm around me and asked me if I was ok, as if he was preparing to escort me to a medical tent. I looked at him, smiled, and said, “I’m ok. Thanks.” I broke from his gentle arms, waved at him, and kept walking.

Don’t get me wrong. I actually was not ok at that moment, but from prior experience I expected that equilibrium eventually would return.  I just kept walking. Still, that incident entered a little mental balance sheet. If I actually do feel something else uncomfortable, I thought to myself, I better check myself into the medical tent.

After I got home I consulted my sports watch, which has a GPS tracker on it. I walked for approximately three quarters of a mile. But distance was not the relevant metric at that moment. I was just paying attention to whether my stomach and head felt settled. After a while it did. (My youngest son was optimistic. I had walked for more than five minutes.)

Look, call me crazy, but I thought about goal #5, not to walk. I was sorry to have not realized that goal. In the Chicago Marathon I never stopped and walked, despite running out of gas. I was proud of that. Call it silly pride, but I thought, The next best thing was to cross the finish line while running. Can I jog my way to the finish line? Will the tightness go away if I start running again? Goal #4 faded from view as I made the first few steps, and settled into a slow pace – something close to the pace for cooling down at the end of a workout. At a leisurely pace I ran with Bruce Springsteen’s serenade between the signs for mile 25 and mile 26.

“…The highways jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive
Everybodys out on the run tonight but there’s no place left to hide…”

And, finally, the finish line. After the race I picked up some water and a banana and began to walk off the tightness. My obsession already began to surface again. I have signed up for the Chicago Marathon this fall.

If only I can figure out how to get through mile 25 without popping…

My official time was 3:43:36. It really is not too shabby. It is just not what I had aspired to do. That’s the thing about aspiring to reach something audacious; sometimes it will stay out of reach.

Let’s not get sloppy with the use of modern lingo. The release of the video might have been risky and calculated, and it even might have been crucial, but let’s not get carried away.

Crowd-sourcing had little to do with what happened. Collective intelligence comes in many different sizes and flavors, but let’s not give it credit when it does not deserve it.

Crowd-hunting is a more appropriate term. This will take a minute to explain.

Look, this is partly a reaction to a lovely article in the Sunday New York Times, which contained a wonderful recounting of this decision (written by Michael S Schmidt and Erik Schmitt). “Manhunt’s Turning Point Came in the Decision to Release Suspect’s Images” said the headline.

Paragraph six contains one sentence. Here is a partial quote…”The decision….was one the most crucial turning points in a remarkable crowd-sourcing manhunt for the plotters of a bombing that killed three people and wounded more than 170.”

Remarkable? Yes. Crowd-sourcing? No.

According to the online version of Merriam and Webster’s Dictionary, Crowd Sourcing is “the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.”

In practice it is also a cooperative activity. Usually a person or firm poses the problem, solicits and manages the help provided by the crowd, and takes care of the other details, such as making the contest rules, if any. Sometimes there are explicit awards and sometimes not.

Such as it was, the crowd was cooperative in Boston, to be sure. Everyone wanted to help if they could. Many sent in their videos of the finish line and tried to help the investigation.

But there were crucial differences between what happened after the Boston Marathon Bombing and crowd-sourcing.

• Most crucially, the cooperation only went so far. The suspects did not want to be found. The definition for crowd sourcing includes nothing about the “solution” putting up active resistance.

• Here is another difference. There also was (sort of) a leader soliciting ideas and managing the contributions, but it was hardly well  organized. To be sure, the feds and the state of Massachusetts and the city of Boston cooperated in some news conferences, and in the strategies to release video and photos. Every participant described this as chaotic. Not because anybody wanted it that way; that is just how things are in a major event.

• Also, more trivially, only a small part of this employed online methods and communications. The news media had a huge role, not just one web site releasing details and collecting suggestions. And it was not just CNN prattling away on every little detail. Some of the media was perfectly happy to amplify any little thing, even false rumors. For example, the New York Post ran a headline “Bag Men” with a circle around the picture of some poor guy who had nothing to do with the bombing. The competitive dynamic between the various news outlets played a key role in blowing many facts out of proportion, and setting the crowd off in the right and wrong direction.

• There is also this little problem: the actual facts don’t fit the label of successful crowd-sourcing. After all, the big break came when the brothers hijacked a car, and released the owner after driving with him for a while. Not killing the car-owner showed that the brothers still had some measure of humanity in them, but releasing him also shows they were not thinking clearly. They had talked about the bombing in front of the car-owner. Once he was released he called 911, and police put out an all-points-bulletin. The owner gave lots of details about his own car. The police spotted it a few minutes later, and that directly led to the death of the older brother.

• Facts get in the way again on the second big break. After the shooting on Thursday and the chase, the governor asked everyone to stay inside on Friday. This was supposed to help the police locate the second brother. This draconian measure was lifted after an entire day because law-enforcement concluded it failed. They had no clue emerged as to the second-brother’s whereabouts. Ten minutes later the owner of a boat in Watertown went outside to get a breather and found the injured brother in the boat in his backyard. In other words, this success was a byproduct of giving up on lock-down, not a strategic or deliberate use of crowds at all. The police were no longer using sourcing. Sourcing had not been allowed to work all day on Friday, since everyone stayed had been asked to stay inside, which is quite the opposite.

The most we can say is that there was an attempt to use sourcing to gather information in order to identify the suspects. The release of the photo did yield many useful clues, and set events in motion. It also probably played a role in the events at MIT, which led to the tragic death of a police officer. In other words, crowd-sourcing acted as a catalyst, but it did not play much of a role beyond that.

Crowd-hunting is a more appropriate term to describe what transpired in Boston. A working definition might be the following: “The practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content related to an unsolved crime by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, often involving one or more government actors, typically using a variety of media to communicate needs and relay updated information to the public.”

Free services without any apparent catches are rare, but it seems to happen with “honesty boxes.” It has always been so with street musicians. A listener can walk away or give any amount into an open hat—from nothing to any denomination of bill. Public campsites have relied on honesty boxes for years, letting campers fill out their permits, paying on their
honor. Office coffee pools frequently use honesty boxes as well.

What about the online world? There have been experiments with online honesty boxes. The lessons are quirky, but too interesting to ignore. Today’s column describes two—one from Radiohead, and another from Cards Against Humanity.

Radiohead

Thom Yorke, a member of the band, Radiohead, claims the experiment with honesty boxes arose in 2007 from a simple motive. In an interview with Wired he said, “Every record for the last four—including my solo record—has been leaked. So the idea was like, we’ll leak it, then.” (See D. Byrne, “David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music,” Wired, no. 16.01.)

Some background may help. Radiohead, a British band, makes music in the genre typically labeled “alternative.” The genre tends to stress themes such as alienation, not puppy love, if you catch my drift. Radiohead’s best songs are moody, thoughtful, layered, and complex. Formed in 1985, Radiohead took many years to reach commercial success. After it signed a record deal with EMI, it produced its first album, Pablo Honey, in 1993.

A decade later, Radiohead found itself in a situation that most musical acts rarely experience. Most bands get one or two major hits, if they are lucky, and little else, so their labels are happy to drop them before their contract expires. Radiohead, in contrast, had made all six albums promised to EMI. The band still had a large following, and still had the potential to produce more music.

The band members decided to make and distribute their next release without EMI. Such an independent turn would have marked an experiment by itself. The band did not stop there, however. The band announced their pricing plan for their next album, In Rainbows, on 2 October 2007. They said that on 10 October, they would make In Rainbows available for download, while the CD would come later. The music would be available exclusively on the band’s website for a month. While this method would yield songs of lower fidelity than what a CD would deliver, it was good enough for many listeners. The band also made available a special box set.

Users could preorder the special CD or wait for the digital album to go up. In either case, the band’s website asked for two things—an email address and payment. The payment for the download, however, was an online honesty box. The user could pay any value, including zero. The website said, “It is up to you. It’s really is up to you.” On the surface, this looked like suicidal business from a bunch of artists gone mad.

There was more here than meets the eye. The band’s manager confessed at a 2011 appearance on The Colbert Report that the giveaway helped boost CD sales and make money. How could that be?

Consider the band’s take from a CD. Compare it with their take from online downloads.

The band members, who often take on the role of composer and performer, have a right—under copyright law—to a piece of the revenue from selling music. To be sure, they are one of many with such a right. Retailers and record labels also get a cut. While the details behind Radiohead’s deal with EMI are not known, if it looked like a typical deal, then the music writers would have gotten approximately 5 percent of revenues, and the performer 15 percent . Hence, the band’s typical cut from a $15 album would be around $3.

Put another way, Radiohead didn’t have to get nearly as much money from a free online giveaway. They just had to beat 20 percent of a typical album price by a little bit, enough to cover the costs of doing the download on the website.

All the evidence suggests they met this benchmark. ComScore estimated the returns from those it followed. It estimated that 60 percent of US users put in nothing, while the average contributor gave $8.05. In other words, on average, Radiohead collected more than $3.23 per download in the US. The numbers were a little lower worldwide. The benefits did not end there. Radiohead collected over 1.2 million (worldwide) e-mail addresses in 29 days, and from some of its most passionate listeners.

The band also did not hurt its reputation. The honesty box came across as fan-friendly. Nontrivially, the music on the album also was quite good (to its many fans, albeit that is a matter of taste). In Rainbows included the hits “Jigsaw Falling into Place,” “House of Cards,” and “Bodysnatchers.” That translated to CD sales in December, and to concert ticket sales later.

A skeptic might say that the band would have gotten as much concert and retail revenue with a conventional approach. That alternative is untestable, since we can’t rerun history. At most, it appears that the honesty box didn’t hurt Radiohead’s bottom line.

The experiment lives on

The Radiohead experiment received considerable publicity from the music world. Numerous additional experiments followed. Nine Inch Nails ran a series of download programs. Prince gave away an album in a newspaper. Efforts to raise money for Haiti also used honesty boxes. In perhaps the most “half-baked” twist, Panera Bread ran a few stores with honesty boxes, donating some proceeds to charity.

That was where it stood until December 2012, when Cards Against Humanity added a new chapter.

You may have heard of this game. It’s not designed to be played in grandma’s presence—unless she happens to like salacious, blunt, and scatological language. It parodies a kid’s card game called Apples to Apples. Instead of innocent cards and questions, however, its cards contain sarcastic, droll, and offbeat humor—sentences and questions that appeal to the sensibility of nerdy adolescent men.

The creators of Cards Against Humanity love to flaunt their unconventional approaches. First developed through Kickstarter, it spread by word of mouth, and became publicized on Reddit. Today it has many loyal followers (in spite of, or due to, the irony of its countercultural appeal).

The game’s creators had experimented with users’ honesty before their latest experiment. Any user can download the entire set of cards for free under a Creative Commons license. The creators are not total business dopes, however—a packaged set is also available. The $25 expense apparently does not bother many people, and, accordingly, the founders can pay their rent.

The game’s website also flaunts the game’s evolution over time. It solicits user suggestions for new cards. It also makes new cards available from time to time to keep the game fresh and original for its most frequent players.

In early December, the site made available a new set of cards for the holidays, and announced it would donate the profits to a charity (in this case, Wikipedia). The website then set up an honesty box that defaulted to $5, but let the user name any price, including zero.
What happened? The website sold 85,000 packs, which was all that were available. More than half of the users paid $5, and 19.8 percent paid nothing, averaging $3.89 per pack. Then the company donated $70,000 to Wikipedia, showing the revenue and costs breakdown on its website (http://www.cardsagainsthumanity.com/holidaystats).

What was the point of all the effort? First, the publicity reinforced the website’s countercultural street-cred. Second, the stunt attracted attention, and site traffic soared. I would bet the new traffic led to more sales of the core product.

Third, the gamers raised money for charity, an accomplishment in and of itself. The site founders claim to be grateful to Wikipedia. I will take them at their word.

As before, a skeptic might say a conventional approach would have worked as well. In this case, that seems unlikely, since this is a niche product that faces challenges getting any publicity. At worst, the site gave up $70,000 for additional sales and goodwill—not a bad deal for a small enterprise.

Using an honesty box contains many hidden angles. It might produce some revenue directly, but often its primary effect is to reinforce some other revenue source. It can be particularly valuable for building goodwill among loyal users.

Many questions remain. How would an observer measure the spillover to other revenue streams? And is monetary reward the only way to measure success, especially with artists? Can this work only when a website has a loyal set of users? This style of pricing should still be considered an experiment.

Copyright held by IEEE. To view original, click here.

Check it out.

Armen Alchian died yesterday. He was 98.

Many economists of my generation did not know Armen personally.  However, signs of his work are pervasive in the field.  There are many good examples of this in the research and teaching of many faculty at Kellogg, particularly in the Management and Strategy department. 

Armen’s work on learning curves in aircraft production (from the late 1940s, though not published until 1963 because it relied on classified data) is credited as the first empirical investigation of learning curves – an important feature of many industries.  We sometimes take for granted the implications of learning curves on firms’ strategies and economic outcomes – for example, the strategy implications were popularized nearly forty years ago by Bruce Henderson and others at the Boston Consulting Group — but much of the large body of research on these issues builds from Armen’s work.  Economists and strategy professors implicitly appeal to Armen’s work on industry evolution – where he emphasizes that competitive outcomes need not depend on the assumption that firms can precisely profit-maximize – when students ask them whether the frameworks we teach depend on such strict assumptions.  And modern economic thinking on the productive efficiencies of vertical integration, and professors teach their students about such efficiencies, draws directly from Armen’s famous paper with Ben Klein and Robert Crawford (as well as from Oliver Williamson’s work which was done in parallel around the same time) in the late-1970s.

Armen’s most-cited paper is his work with Harold Demsetz, published in the American Economic Review in 1972.  This paper may be the most influential paper in the economics of organization, catalyzing the development of the field as we know it.  It is the most-cited paper published in the AER in the past 40 years.  (If one takes away finance and econometrics methods papers, it is the most-cited “economics” paper, period.)  It is truly a spectacular piece.  It is a theory not only of firms’ boundaries, but also the firm’s hierarchical and financial structure.  And it is a theory – like all of Armen’s work – that is grounded in real-world phenomena.  The back half of the paper is devoted toward explaining how the theory explains why various forms of organizations – from corporations to partnerships to employee ownership – are used in different circumstances.  Seminal work in the economics of organization by other great economists such as Bengt Holmstrom, Oliver Hart, Paul Milgrom and others can easily be traced to this paper.

Armen’s most-read work, however, is almost certainly his undergraduate textbook University Economics, first published in the early 1960s.  Ironically, most economists trained during the past thirty years have probably never seen it.  But it is a tour de force, and unquestionably the most entertaining economics textbook ever written.  It teaches economics by way of a series of illustrations of how economic thinking plays out in the real world.  It taught millions of students how to think like an economist.  It also provides a fairly accurate depiction of Armen as a person – an economist to the core, deeply engaged in the real world, and someone with more important concerns than political correctness.

I was lucky to know Armen reasonably well.  When I arrived at the UCLA economics department in 1995 as a rookie assistant professor, Armen was 80.  He was no longer teaching classes, but came into the office every morning (usually after hitting a bucket of golf balls at the local driving range).  Although he did not generally attend seminars, he generally did read the seminar speaker’s paper.  If you were lucky, which I sometimes was, Armen would stop by your office to discuss it.  Even at an advanced age, his economic insights were unique, on point, and valuable.  I found him tough on ideas, but a very generous and gracious man in general.

I regret that I am too young to have known him in his prime, but there are many admiring stories that you can hear from those who had him as a student.  Kevin Murphy – indeed, both Kevin Murphys – Bob Topel, and David Levine are among the many ex-students that are sources for such stories.  His Ph.D. microeconomics class was legendary at UCLA for teaching students how to think like an economist and apply these insights to explaining the real world.  It was also legendary for its toughness.

Armen Alchian never won the Nobel Prize.  However, his influence on the field was at least as large as many economists who are laureates – and this influence can be seen not only in the direct influence of his best-known papers, but also in how we ourselves think like economists and teach others how to do so.  He had a profound effect on the field, and will be greatly missed by those who he and his work have touched.

Methinks that all the talk of restructuring is exaggerated. The names have changed, but the same factors still matter for market leadership. The old structure had a number of economic determinants that haven’t gone away. For example, ongoing product development by independent firms continues apace, and all parties must manage the unknowable. Today, as in the past, independent firms cooperate with established publishers when it suits both parties.

If you ask me, we’re transitioning to the same structure with (at most) a new set of players. That’s because two factors used to matter most in gaming—uncertainty and market frictions—and they still do.

A classic question

Let’s start with uncertainty. Situate the discussion in the pre-smartphone era, when Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo dominated console sales. In those days, all participants expected an upgrade to consoles every few years. Recall how much changed with the introduction of the Wii. Every new Xbox console also brought about new changes.
Each of these events opened opportunities to take advantage of new capabilities. Were those opportunities valuable? That depended on whether new users showed up or picky users bought a few more games at a faster rate.

To be sure, things have improved since Pong, Donkey Kong, and Space Invaders, but there was only so much one could do with a single-/multishooter game, racing game, sports game, or adventure fantasy game. As it turned out, some advances were almost routine (such as racing a car with more graphic detail), while others were too new to forecast (such as playing Wii bowling). Similarly, the value to firms could be predicted some of the time (for example, the Mario brothers acted frenetically) but was unknowable beyond that (recall the first and second versions of Halo).

That didn’t eliminate uncertainty. Plenty of experiments pushed the boundaries of good taste (including violence or adult themes), pushed technical boundaries (involving large numbers of players), or pushed business model boundaries (tempting users to buy software upgrades or virtual real estate). Some of these experiments made no sense to me, but apparently other gamers had different opinions. As an analyst (and parent) I kept track of them. (Let’s see a show of hands for all those who refused to pay for a little extra magic that merely led the wizard to kill one more virtual troll. Yep, most buyers did not go for that offer.)

That leads to the deeper point: Despite all the predictability, some fundamentally unknowable facets of the setting remained. Even the experts differed on how successful the boundary-pushing experiments could or would become.

Two others facets of these markets limited the profitability of the unknowable. Most new games had rather short shelf lives, getting most of their sales early in life (and typically around the December holidays). Moreover, each genre supported only a small number of big winners. In short, there was only so much money to go around. That led to many hungry independent developers, as well as frustrated marketing executives at major publishers.

Market frictions

Market frictions also played a role in this market, shaping the boundaries between firms. More specifically, the gaming market has always supported two distinctly different types of organizations, the independent developer and the branded developer, whose work played a role in a branded portfolio of games. The former came in many shapes and sizes, but tended to be small. The latter also took on many sizes, and at its largest, such as Electronic Arts, was quite profitable.

That division begs a question: why don’t all games come from one or the other? If one were superior to the other, then one type of organization should dominate.
The explanation has two parts. First, some aspects of value resist reduction of risk. Out-of-the-gate games for a new console, such as the Wii (when it first came out), contained plenty of market risk. The earliest games for smartphones also used a different sensibility than games for existing platforms. On second and third release, however, there is much less risk. Developers understood their user-communities and knew a lot about what appealed to them.

Illustrations are easy to find. Not going out on a limb here, it sure seems as if Electronic Arts knew plenty about making an appealing sports fantasy game for Xbox and PlayStation. Every new release was as good as the prior one. Ah, but smartphones didn’t require predictable sequels. Again, not going out on a limb, Electronic Arts has not dominated there. There has been room for plenty of games other than Tetris. Independent developers have been able to experiment widely, and some have blossomed.

What frictions kept both types of organizations in existence? The stories today don’t sound much different than stories in the past.

• Developers “like their independence and guard it,” meaning they just won’t work at a big firm. A related explanation stresses the geographic dispersion of talent far beyond the traditional locations in the US and Japan (for example, in Russia and China). These programmers and designers won’t move to a few US cities and concentrate in a few firms.

• Even for developers in big US cities, it’s a challenge to get the right job, because the big firms haven’t figured out how to judge talent. Developers take all the risk by developing something. A good review leads to an interview with a big employer.

• A related explanation stresses the inevitable disagreements over potential “pivots in strategy,” which are inevitable with a new format. Independent developers handle that better than a manager at a big firm. (The open question, then and now, is whether smart pivots matter as much on the second or third release.)

• Publishers are both potential partners and competitors to independent developers. That sets up a distrustful conversation between them. Only after there is an asset to trade (such as a real game with actual buyers and users) do deals become possible.

• The value of a new game’s “fit” to an established firm is unknowable without market experience. With such experience, the value of marketing and distribution at the branded firm become predictable enough to support negotiations over a merger or acquisition.

So, publishers get later control of an established format for later releases, and independents tend to break new ground more often. Even though established publishers seemed to get better shelf locations, and higher prices and sales, nothing ever seemed to deter independent developers from trying new things. There was just enough success to foster dreams and illusions among the independents—albeit, not too much.

New market structure

Back to the main topic: The last few years have seen an enormous plethora of new app firms from independent developers. Is that really new?

First of all, compared to what alternative universe? The structure of the new market might have changed anyway with the introduction of the Kinect, the rise of social networks, the new vintage of the Wii, and Sony’s latest upgrade to PlayStation. Also, global supply chains would have improved whether or not the smartphone appeared.

Don’t get me wrong. Facebook is a new platform, as are the iPhone and Android platforms. They are moving targets, technically speaking, but Apple has made it easy for many developers to work with the iPhone, as have Google with Android, and Facebook with Facebook. That fostered new opportunities, which attract old brand names as well as new firms.

Sure, a few new firms have done well due to the new opportunities. My point is simple: some of that would have happened anyway.

Take a firm like Halfbrick Studios, who markets the popular game, Fruit Ninja. The company hails out of Australia, which makes them an interesting example of a newcomer. As best as I can tell, the firm has tried many things in the past, and recently found a good niche in smartphones. Now they’re expanding to every platform. Chock one up for the dexterity of a small firm.

How about Doodle Jump, another popular new game? This game comes from a two-brother team based in New York and Croatia. They eschewed final drafts and biyearly releases. Instead, they seduced and excited users with frequent upgrades, operating more like a media website. They too are expanding into more platforms. Once again, attribute that success to smart pivots.

What’s new in comparison to a few years ago? If anything, the scale of unknown possibilities is greater. Sure, the supply is more global, but not much more so.

What’s fundamentally different? I’m not sure that much is. We should still expect to see many independent developers as innovators, taking on risks. We still should expect to see the established firms imitating the independents or buying them at some point if those deals are mutually beneficial.

Here is the essence of the open question: are we in transition to the same old structure with a new set of firms, or are we merely moving market share around? In the past, established publishers had valuable brands, better assets for further development, or superior marketing. Is that still so? If so, then less market share will go to independents. If not, those assets lose their value, and independents retain market share.

Give it time. This game is fun to watch.

Copyright held by IEEE. To view original, click here.

Position Description

The Department of Communication Studies (in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts) and the School of Information are jointly offering a postdoctoral fellow position in the multidisciplinary area of “infrastructure studies.”

The addition of information technology is transforming the way society provides important infrastructures, including those that support media, telecommunications, power, and transport, but also those that support  knowledge, culture, and scientific data. Thanks to new capabilities in computing and control, every year our infrastructures claim to be “smarter,” with new capacities for distributed processing, analysis, sensing, adapting, and autonomous self-improvement. This radical transformation is well underway, but the assessment of its consequences is still in its infancy. For example, infrastructure unevenly distributes benefits and capabilities, with complex and sometimes unforeseen implications for politics, economics, knowledge, and social justice (to name just a few domains). This position will fund a researcher who will have the opportunity to work alongside senior collaborators to define and shape this new area of scholarship.

Salary: $50-60,000 per year (depending on negotiated duties), plus a competitive benefits package, $5,000 in discretionary funding, and the opportunity to appoint and supervise one or more paid undergraduate research assistants to work on projects of your choice.

This position is made possible by an MCubed grant.

Review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled.

Download the complete position description, requirements, and application process here.

More to the point, it is too soon to throw a harsh judgment at Google. This settlement might work just fine, and if it does, then society is better off than it would have been had some grandstanding prosecutor decided to go to trial.

Why? First, public confrontation is often a BIG expense for society. Second, as an organization Google is young and it occupies a market that also is young. The first big antitrust case for such a company in such a situation should substitute education for severe judgment.

Ah, this will take an explanation.

Public confrontations are expensive

The FTC investigation contained two distinct components, one involving patents and one involving antitrust. Today’s comment will focus on antitrust.

My comments will not focus on the specifics – what Google promised to do to other providers of information, like Yelp, and what rights it will give advertisers who want to operate campaigns on multiple platforms. Look, others have focused on details, and that is part of the problem. The details interfere with understanding the big picture.

Step back from the moment and, instead, focus on a broad & historical perspective. What did Microsoft’s, Intel’s, IBM’s, AT&T’s antitrust cases have in common, and what does that commonality tell us about the Google settlement? Two common lessons emerge from history, and these inform the present.

First, big public trials are expensive. Part of that is obvious. Big court cases are very expensive for those involved. That just starts the expenses to everyone, however. Raising uncertainty raises expenses in many quarters. The industry hangs on to every detail. Investors, competitors, sometimes even customers, wait to see how it goes. These cases introduce enormous uncertainty into everyone’s calculations, and many firms put off some long term investments. Settling can be much MUCH cheaper to EVERYONE if it can come much sooner.

To be sure, going to court can change the outcome, so interpret this first observation the right way. If it were possible to get close to the same outcome using either a lengthy public confrontation or a quicker negotiated one, then historical experience illustrates that negotiation is far better. Indeed, that allows for a little fudging, namely, as long as the outcomes are “close”, then negotiations are still better.

Don’t get me wrong. I can read antitrust history and I have opinions about how to interpret prior events. I think the AT&T and Microsoft court cases did a world of good, in part because they did change the outcome. Those cases made those firms accept points that the executives at those firms refused to acknowledge and implement (for a variety of stubborn reasons). That does not contradict the observation: If that stubbornness could have been achieved through negotiating a compromise then that would have been a far better way to go. (And, yes, I am saying that with tons of retrospective bias. So be it.)

Which leads to my second point about education. As with prior major antitrust investigations, the Google case was really about educating the CEO. In this case that person is Larry Page, and those around him, such as Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt.

Commentators steeped in the Washington lingua franca of policy discussion seem to have completely missed this second observation. The typical technology CEO and strategy team usually do not care about antitrust. Most executives in technology firms have never taken a university course in “Business and society,” and certainly not a law school course in antitrust. The executives usually slept through civics classes in high school, because they were much more interested in math or electrical engineering or chess club.

In other words, antitrust is far from the first priority or interest of most CEOs in technology firms. Most CEOs treat antitrust violations like a kid who does not clean up his room. It is a careless mistake — a little thing that just does not matter to them.

Even worse, sometimes CEOs come to the topic with deeply flawed conceptualizations. What did Bill Gates know about antitrust before his uncomfortable encounter with it? He is a very smart man, but his confrontations with antitrust partly showed that he had enormous misunderstandings about how antitrust applied to his firms (and others). It was widely reported that he brought those misunderstandings to negotiations, and questioned everything he encountered. I share the view that Bill seems to have believed that he was protecting his firm by questioning antitrust but he persisted in such behavior for FAR too long. He actually ended up doing his firm an enormous disservice. (Yes, retrospective bias again, but this view is widely held too. So be it.)

Or smart CEOs just play dumb and get lucky. As another example, what did Andy Grove at Intel know about antitrust before his firm got investigated by government prosecutors? He had a PhD in chemistry, but that did not make him expert on antitrust. He always said publicly that he did not fully care what the issue was, but he had no taste for a confrontation with government. That was it, nothing grand. As a result, while CEO, he always avoided a big public case, which seems to have been wise.

I do not know Larry Page or Sergey Brin well, and only know them from public appearances. They appear to be a very smart men, as one might expect of someone who got close to finishing a PhD in computer science at Stanford, and stopped writing a dissertation merely to start a firm. Eric Schmidt has a similar background (and he did finish his PhD in computer science at Berkeley), and quite a few more years of executive experience, so he comes across as smart too, not to mention well-spoken and well-coached.

Yet, I bet they had (and may still have) the same general blind spot as others who have been in similar situations. To be sure, it is widely reported that the shadow of Microsoft’s experiences and prior behavior shaped (and continues to shape) the outlook of Google’s team, and that has translated into a strategy to have more friends in political and industrial circles than Bill Gates had at a similar point in the life cycle of his firm. That is smart approach to market leadership, but — hey, stepping back from the detail — that still is NOT the same as understanding the nuances of antitrust law, or the obligations that come with it. I bet that until two years ago none of them really thought much about whether their firm resembled Standard Oil, AT&T, or IBM, or whether their critics had valid points about how the laws of antitrust applied to Google.

Actually, I would go further. I have read quite a few of the official statements coming from Google over the last few years.  I would say there was considerable evidence two years ago that Google’s executives did not understand how antitrust applied to them.  Like many others, when the FTC opened this investigation I thought Google’s executives were showing many signs of being naive, and I inferred that it reflected lack of proper schooling in antitrust. It has been very interesting to watch Google step up its game in the last two years and wrestle with some of the key issues — at least in its public statements.

Do those changes reflect mere public relations or deep-seated changed in the attitudes in Mountain View? That questions explains why education matters so much. Oversimplifying somewhat, if an executive walks away from their first experience with government prosecutors with a sense of entitlement or a sense of disdain for the government prosecutors, then they will not implement processes inside their own firm to protect against a future antitrust violation. Usually that means they will be back in court in a few years. If they walk away with a chastened attitude and a general understanding of what they need to do, then they will make compliance a priority. It starts to show up in subtle ways, in mistakes avoided, and in a multitude of minor actions that reflect a grown-up approach to business practices. That usually prevents a revisit.

In other words, sometimes this first experience with the government leaves a good impression on the CEO and sometimes not. Some CEOs learn to stop treating the topic like a low priority, and sometimes not. Some learn to pay attention to their obligations to society, and some not. Some learn to grow up and act like a sophisticated American firm who protects the competitive process, and some not.

Back to the topic at hand, that leaves me with an open question: Did the government educate the executives at Google in a way that will not lead to any further investigations? Did the attorneys at Google get all wrapped up in the specifics of their case or communicate the general lessons to their CEO and those around him?

Nobody knows. Attorney-client privilege protects the conversations. What did Larry learn about the place of his firm in society? What did other key decision makers learn, such as Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt? We will find out the answer in a few years, when we see whether Google gets hauled back into an investigation again.

In the meantime, settling with Google seems like a good approach after the first encounter. It involved a lengthy conversation, and possibly some education. There was some movement in public, and now the industry watchers will look for subtle movements in less overt parts of Google’s behavior. If the education worked, then society avoided on an enormous expense.

And if not, well, then I would make this prediction: if the executive team did not listen and if they do not plan to adjust their behavior, then there will be an aggressive and ambitious prosecutor in Google’s future. So be it.

There are no fixed categories of awards. Some categories are recycled from last year’s awards, but some are new. Just like last year’s awards, there are three criteria. The winner had to do something in 2012. The action had to involve information and communications technology. It had to be notable.

The awards come with plenty of sarcasm and it does not come with a statue. The prize is a virtual badge called a “Sally,” affectionately named for Sally Field, famous for her flying nun and her cry at the Oscars, “You like me, you really like me!”

If you do not like this year’s awards, please use the commentary section to make additional suggestions.

Also, one last note: None of this should be taken seriously. Most of these awards are given with tongue firmly in cheek. The exceptions come near the end, in awards 11 and 12, which contain a preachy tone. Sorry, but not all of life is fun.

Let’s get started:

1. Lost in Space award. The first Sally goes to Apple for the mess it made for itself by releasing an inaccurate map and making it the default. There is nothing wrong with experimenting with new software utilities, as long as the company calls it beta. Apple did not use that label. It just released this software and let users find all the mistakes. To make matters worse, Apple did not arrange for alternatives from other map makers (Google, in particular), even though those alternatives could have been available had the others been given enough notice. This came across as an arrogant and selfish and incompetent attempt to crowd-source corrections from the army of loyal iPhone users. Tim Cook deserves every ounce of criticism for presiding over such a mess, and he deserves lots of credit for reversing course quickly. His actions became a study in listening to his users, taking responsibility for the mistake by firing the executive who managed this release, and for openly apologizing to users.
2. Best foreign film. The winner of the Sally goes to the Gangnam video on YouTube. It has acquired a place in the history of popular culture as the first video to achieve one billion views. This award also comes with some disappointment and a measure of resignation. It is no surprise that somebody would reach one billion views. For many years there have been predictions that the global diffusion of information technology would lead to the organic emergence of a global culture, a blending of images from many lands and a shared experience cutting across borders. Call me an idealist, but somehow I always had imagined this moment differently. I had imagined a video that would combine the best of world cultures. It would begin with someone like Susan Boyle singing soft sweet Irish melody, then Kabuki actors would join her and sing a Mozart opera aria. That would segue into a rhythmic Balinese rendition of the Ramayana, and finally end with a soulful saxophone from John Coltrane. As it turns out, however, the first video to gain a billion views does none of that. Instead, it draws from the lowest common denominator. It is a ridiculous K-pop video laced with garish wardrobe choices, herky-jerky dancing, and attention-deficit issues. *sigh*
3. Amateur video with the most punch. The Sally this year has to go to the film recording of Mitt Romney making his remark about the “47 percent” of America. More than most amateur online videos, this one was an excellent study in how to use the Internet’s buzz to maximal destructive effect. That was, after all, the intent of Mother Jones, the left-wing organization who released it. No, really, it does not take a paranoid right-wing conspiracy theorist to see a conspiracy behind these events. The video had been taken when Romney made the remarks in the spring, but did not get circulated until September. Deliberate timing? Of course. Surely somebody sat on it for a while in order to find a moment to maximize the impact. They released it just a few weeks after the political conventions were done, but far enough in front of the election to make an impression. Boy, did it ever make an impression.
4. Best new reality show online. Speaking of manipulated events online, the Sally goes to Reddit for sponsoring the interchange between Barack Obama and a bunch of questioners in August. Don’t get me wrong. It was breathtaking to behold. It started this way: “Hi, I’m Barack Obama, President of the United States. Ask me anything. I’ll be taking your questions for half an hour starting at about 4:30 ET.” Then the site offered proof it was Obama by linking to his twitter feed… Can we all just pause for a moment and recognize this milestone? A sitting president answered questions in real time on an online site. Wow, what an interactive experiment in mass democracy! Having said that, let’s also take a moment to criticize the Obama campaign staff for treating the masses like a bunch of dolts. They released a photo of Obama sitting at a computer, which makes it appear as if he is some regular Joe (in a white shirt and tie, sleeves partially rolled up), doing his own typing, thinking his own thoughts. Ya, right. And we are supposed to believe this is not staged? As if he is all alone? Please. How many dozens of advisers stood just a little off-camera, providing suggestions on how to answer questions, checking off the key talking points?
5. Speaking of the presidential campaign, the next award is for “experience triumphing over hope.” This year Nate Silver receives the Sally for recognizing the biases in many overnight presidential polls. It seems that many polls kept showing that the race would be neck-and-neck until the end and genuinely did not forecast what actually happened, that it did not turn out to be close. Silver repeatedly forecast these problems. To his credit, he did not let hope interfere with hard-nosed analyses. He looked at the biases in several previous elections and examined the methods that produced those biases. He said many standard polls oversampled certain demographics, who tended to vote Republican, and undersampled certain demographics, who tended to vote Democrat. What does this have to do with IT, you may ask? It has everything to do with IT! For one, it is already challenging to get an accurate reading of who will vote and who they will vote for, but, it has gotten harder in recent times. A large and ever-growing fraction of young and mobile Americans lack landline phones, and, therefore, cannot be easily polled using traditional methods. In other words, if a poll-designer takes the easy-way-out and only uses listed phone numbers to make an overnight poll, then they will not get a representative sample. Getting a representative sample has become hard and expensive, and no single strategy works. It requires finding, for example, the mobile over-educated work force, and the English-as-a-second-language work force, and adults in several other demographic categories as well, all of whom rely on their cell phones exclusively. This mistake seems to have affected several national polling organizations, including Gallup and others. Hmmm, makes one wonder about many commonly cited polls, no?
6. That observation leads to our next Sally, which is award for letting “hope triumph over experience.” The award goes to Karl Rove, who had staked his reputation on the aforementioned biased polls. It led to one of the most remarkable events of election night. Live, on the air, he openly disagreed with the Fox News Desk, who had called the election. All viewers got to see a confrontation between the most prominent strategist in Republican circles and the statisticians of Fox News, strategist versus statistician. This type of debate normally takes place behind the scenes. Wow. More to the point, like other organizations, Fox had polled voters who had just left the voting booth, and that was definitely more accurate. Yet, bowing to Rove’s reputation and outburst, for a few minutes Fox’s anchors questioned the call of the presidential election – which, it should be noted, put them at odds with all the other major news outlets in the country, so the pressure was on them to either declare or recant. As it turned out, that confrontation did NOT reach “Dewey Defeats Truman” for major screw-ups in national news, because (as we now know) the professionals at the Fox News Desk stuck to their guns, and told Rove to bug off. They were certain their data was accurate. So, instead, this confrontation goes down in history merely as an extraordinary moment on national television, not an iconic mistake. Oh, what a relief.
7. Best supporting actor in an online protest.  The Sally goes to Wikipedia for joining seven thousand web sites shutting down for a day in order to protest the SOPA/PIPA legislation. The protest led to something rather extraordinary for US politics: Normally Hollywood gets whatever it wants in copyright legislation. Instead, in a few days the whole process supporting SOPA/PIPA stopped, and then evaporated. It was amazing to watch all the scared representatives just walk away from the bills, even some of those who had put their names on the bills as sponsors (Talk about friends who will not stick around when the going gets tough). Anyway, the fallout is rather amazing. Acquaintances of mine in legal circles received emails and letters from shell-shocked lobbyists for movie studios, who have tried to make nice, as part of strategy to open a dialogue with those who opposed them. Such a dialogue would be in everyone’s interest, but would have been unthinkable a year ago. Let’s hope it happens. Copyright holders have legitimate commercial concerns, but they have never been in the habit of making room for the legitimate commercial concerns of others. Making copyright policy so it considers all such concerns would be a new change in US policy making. (Moreover, SOPA/PIPA were just badly written). Here is what I suggest: How about a meeting in neutral territory between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, like in the middle of the California? Perhaps, somebody should hold a meet-and-greet on Pismo Beach next to a beach bar-b-que, roasting marsh-mellows (Can you smell the smores?). Not the right style? Alright, then follow it up with a catered reception at Hearst’s Castle (Can you say, “Rosebud”?). What do you say, guys? Can you work out your differences ahead of time, so the Internet’s popular sites will not go down for a day ever again?
8. The empire strikes back. This year the Sally for empire striking goes to the International Telecommunications Union, which met in Dubai, and tried to adopt passages in a treaty that would take the first steps towards letting old-fashioned international organizations intervene in aspects of the Internet’s governance. The US resisted this effort, and so did many western countries, as well as a few allies from around the world. Underscoring how important this is, many governments around the world were willing to see a treaty fall apart over this seemingly simple detail. Does any friend of today’s Internet really think a slow slide into international bureaucratic supervision will be good for the Internet and world freedom? If the Internet ever gets to that place, please beam me up Scotty.
9. Most audacious actions by private enterprise. Each year there are always many nominees, but this year the Sally goes to Space-X for successfully putting rockets into space for commercial flights. Look, this has nothing to do with IT, and the business model is all about careful engineering designed to bring down operational costs on a hugely expensive activity. So why give Space-X the award? Because it is just real cool.
10. The most amazing statistic. The Sally this year goes to the statistic about the source of the highest fraction of traffic. For most of the last decade that peer-to-peer traffic has dominated backbone statistics. It mostly involves traffic for pirated movies in a bit-torrent format. But this year Netflix traffic overtook it, according to Sandvine, and accounts for a third of all downloading traffic at peak times (Bit-Torrent still dominates uploading traffic). In the wireless world, by the way, the related and analogous distinctions go to YouTube (downloading) and Facebook (uploading). Those statistics points to a very different future, as the Internet changes from one set of dominant applications to another.
11. Crass behavior award. This Sally goes to the photographer who climbed a tall utility tower and used high-powered cameras to take long-distance photos of Kate Middleton sunbathing topless. Leaving no doubt about the crassness of his actions, he then sold those photos to the French tabloid, which then put those photos on the cover of its publication. If that was not bad enough, many guys then pasted those pictures on the Internet for everyone outside of France to see. Didn’t you just want to yell at these people? “Dude, leave her alone!”
12. 12. Speaking of lack of privacy, this next Sally is for “What was he thinking?” It goes to the FBI agent who investigated Paula Broadwell. Why does he get an award? Because the official explanations for his actions have never held up to scrutiny. According to official news accounts, Jill Kelly went to an FBI agent, who was a friend, because she received some harassing emails. He was taken off the case, and others investigated the emails for evidence of cyber-stalking. Not to minimize Jill Kelly’s concerns, but cases of cyber-stalking can involve hundreds of emails coming from a deranged person who threatens family members, and in bad cases it can happen repeatedly over many months. It is just awful. By comparison, Kelly received a couple of weird emails, accusing her of doing inappropriate things with Petraeus. Eventually (and not widely noted) no charges were filed, underlying something that most Internet legal experts recognize, namely, from the outset this investigation was based on mild legal grounds. Pretext in hand, however, the investigation then became very invasive. Broadwell went to some lengths to hide her identity in a Gmail account. Undeterred, the FBI agent got a warrant, linked Broadwell to the emails by affiliating the IP address with the Gmail account.That led the agents to “discover” that Broadwell was receiving email from another anonymous person, who “appeared” to be acting like the director of the CIA. According to the official account, this anonymous person also had a Gmail account hiding his identity. The FBI agent worked around the IP address, just as before, and unmasked Petraeus’ identity. According to official accounts, with all those dots connected, evidence in hand, the FBI then followed standard procedures for making it public, albeit, they gave everyone advanced warning, so Petraeus could first go to Obama and resign in advance of the inevitable publicity. You all know the rest.…. Doesn’t something seem wrong with this official account? Stepping back from that sequence, it does not take any paranoia to find it plausible that from the beginning the FBI agent who started the investigation had a pretty good suspicion about what and who he was going to find, and said so to others. He likely got that tip from Kelly, who probably had suspicions herself, because, after all, she was in the same social circles as Petraeus and Broadwell. That is why the FBI went to so much trouble. . In short, from the outset this was not about cyber stalking, or that was merely a pretext; rather, it was about bringing down a CIA director, who was having an affair. Finally, an additional observation seems to have escaped notice and deserves attention. Consider what the FBI would have done in the past with that information about Petraeus’ private life. In J. Edgar Hoover’s time, the information would never have gone public; Hoover would have kept it to himself and blackmailed the director of the CIA. But not the modern FBI, thank you. They cannot keep a secret and abuse it. That counts as progress. Oh, the irony.
13. Award for best casting. Let’s end on a lighter note. This Sally goes to whoever cast Sally Field as that feisty Mrs. Lincoln in the movie Lincoln. To be sure, Daniel Day Lewis put on an amazing performance, but so what? Please, please, please, members of the academy, give her an award. We all want to hear her reach the stage and say “You like me again, you really like me again.” Wouldn’t that be so sweet?