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The Beer Belly of America

2010-02-01T06:00:00Z

At FloatingSheep, we're willing to search for and analyze almost anything that falls within the realm of human experience. Sometimes this is mundane (pizza) and sometimes it is contentious (abortion) but most of the time it falls somewhere in between. Such as, where can I get a drink?

Total Number of Bars

We were quite surprised, however, when we did a simple comparison between grocery stores and bars to discover a remarkable geographically phenomenon. We had expected that grocery stores would outnumber bars and for most parts of North America that is the case. But we could also clearly see the "beer belly of America" peeking out through the "t-shirt of data".

Starting in Illinois, the beer belly expands up into Wisconsin and first spreads westward through Iowa/Minnesota and then engulfs Nebraska, and the Dakotas before petering out (like a pair of love handles) in Wyoming and Montana.

The clustering was so apparent that we wanted to check how it compared to the "official" data on this activity. So we gathered 2007 Census Country Business Pattern on the number of establishments listed in NACIS code 722410 (Drinking places (alcoholic beverages)) and divided by Census estimates for state population totals for 2009 and found remarkable correspondence with our data.

On average there are 1.52 bars for every 10,000 people in the U.S. but the states that make up the beer belly of America are highly skewed from this average.


Rank	State	Bars per 10,000 Population

1	North Dakota	6.54

2	Montana	6.34

3	Wisconsin	5.88

4	South Dakota	4.73

5	Iowa	3.73

6	Nebraska	3.68

7	Wyoming	3.4

Another slice of the Google data which shows the relative number of bars in a location further confirms this concentration. So looks like Wisconsin is your best bet.

Specialization in Bars

CMAP #2: How Books Are Made

2010-02-25T12:58:33Z

It is a common misconception — to paraphrase a commenter in the previous post on common misconceptions about publishing, that "the only two people that matter are the author and the reader (one puts creativity in, the other money: the rest add cost)".

This is a bit like saying that in commercial air travel, "the only two people that matter are the pilot and the passenger (the rest add cost)". To which I would say: what about the air traffic controllers (who stop the plane flying into other aircraft)? What about the maintenance engineers who keep it airworthy? The cabin crew, whose job is to evacuate the plane and save the passengers in event of an emergency (and keep them fed and irrigated in flight)? The airline's back-office technical support staff who're available by radio 24x7 to troubleshoot problems the pilots can't diagnose? The meteorology folks who provide weather forecasts and advise flight planners where to route their flights? The fuel tanker drivers who are responsible for making sure that the airliner has the right amount of the right type of fuel to reach its destination, and that it's clean and uncontaminated? The designers and engineers at Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, or the other manufacturers who build the bloody things in the first place ...?

I hope you can see the point I'm trying to make. To be direct: a manuscript is not a book. The author's job is to write the manuscript. The publisher's job is to turn a series of manuscripts originating from different suppliers into consistently produced books, mass-produce them, and sell them into distribution channels.

Note the phrase "series of manuscripts". Small outfits like Golden Gryphon Press (who published the first two of my Laundry novels in hardcover) work on a handful of individual titles (in GG's case, 1-3) in any given year; each book gets special attention and is handled as a separate job. Larger publishers — be they recently-graduated-from-small-press outfits like Subterranean Press or operations like Tor operate on a production line basis. Tor publish 250-300 books a year. Each incoming manuscript goes through a series of production stages, and if there's a hold-up they lose their slot in the publication queue (unless the book is very, very special, for major-bestseller values of special).

What is the production workflow for a book by a professional author working under contract with a publisher?

The author writes a manuscript. Note: a manuscript is not a book. It's a bundle of pages of written text (or a text file on a computer: most big publishers these days insist, for no sane reason, on receiving a Microsoft Word 2003 .doc file — probably because it's the commonest format people use with support for italics, underlining, boldface, and headings). The author may suggest a title (the publisher doesn't have to accept their suggestion). The manuscript has been worked over and polished by the author to the best of their ability, but will inevitably contain typos, grammatical infelicities, continuity errors, factual errors, internal inconsistencies, and muddy bits where the author was typing on autopilot. (And these are the good, publishable manuscripts from authors with a track record. For some insight into how bad the bad stuff can get, read this and weep.)
The author or their agent send the commissioned manuscript to their editor. (I'll write about agents and acquisitions in a future entry.) Note: outsiders often have some strange ideas about what editors do. These days, an editor is a middle manager. Their job is, in conjunction with a marketing manager, to determine what titles to acquire for their list; to negotiate deliverables and deadlines with authors: to provide high-level guidance and feedback to authors: and to ride herd on the production pipeline so that Sales and Marketing receive each quarterly or triannual batch of new titles on schedule. Editors not infrequently enjoy editing, but there's a lot more to the job than that. Here's one editor's perspective on how you wind up in the job.)
The editor reads the MS. If it's in need of more work, they tell the author what they want doing. ("It needs a purple singing dinosaur and a surprise ending. Oh, and get rid of the DEATH guy, he's a downer.") But more often than not, they accept the manuscript. This notifies Accounting to pay the author (or their agent) the second tranche of the book advance (I'll talk about royalties, advances, and how authors make money in a future posting), the Delivery and Acquisition money. They then work out where to slot the MS into their production queue.
Marketing. In general, the marketing spend on a book is around 5% of the dollar value of the books the publisher expects to ship. It may be more if the publisher is trying to build this particular author's sales. An editor talks about marketing, including where the money goes. Note: this activity starts when the book is delivered, before it is published — but the budget is based on expected revenue which won't be known until the orders are in. So to some extent the degree of marketing push depends on the editor's (or marketing director's) best guess as to how well the book will do.
Scheduling. This is hammered out in the rough before the contract commissioning the book is even signed. Generally, large publishers like authors to deliver one MS per twelve months, like clockwork, because their production line is geared to turn manuscripts into published books in twelve months. However, the clock only begins ticking when the MS is accepted by the editor: so the editor looks at the calendar about 12 months ahead, works out where there's room to slot the book in — ideally in a month preceding the summer or pre-Christmas sales peak (if the book's likely to sell well) — then works backward to sort out when the various steps in the process must take place. Note that it doesn't take 12 months to produce every book — but 12 months is ample time to process the slowest book in the queue, by the recluse who doesn't use email, writes with a quill pen, and is always late reviewing the page proofs.
Copy editing. The MS is sent to an external copy editor (usually a freelance editor specializing in the genre in question). The copy editor's job is to keep the author from embarrassing themselves in public. To this end they need to regularize spelling and typography and nomenclature, spot inconsistencies and obvious errors, fix spelling mistakes, and telepathically read the author's mind to ensure that the manuscript reflects the author's pure and original intent rather than looking as if a barrelful of monkeys had a fight for ownership of the keyboard. Traditionally, copy editors work on a paper MS using red pencils to indicate their changes; larger publishers are now switching to all-electronic workflow, hence Word change tracking and notes. The result, a Copy-Edited Manuscript or CEM, is returned to the editor within 2-4 weeks.
The author reviews the CEM. (For some reason my publishers' editorial assistants seem to love to send me CEMs for review the week before Christmas, with a due-back deadline of January 4th. It's especially fun when two publishers pull this stunt simultaneously. Perhaps they think nobody loves me and I welcome the distraction ...?) Alas, copy editors are not, in fact, telepathic. Sometimes they get stuff wrong — rarely, they get lots of stuff wrong. So when the editor receives the CEM they bounce it to the author for review. The author can override the copy editor's changes and, if necessary, add corrections of their own. There are usually multiple changes per page — ranging from trivial stuff (serial comma policy at $PUBLISHER differs from author's usual style) to "you've referred to your hero as Joe sixteen times and Jim fourteen times in the MS — which is right?" The author typically has up to four weeks to review the CEM and return it to editorial. If it's on paper, the author must use a different colour of crayon from the copy editor, otherwise whackiness ensues. Electronic workflow involves change tracking and lots more irate marginalia, followed by hoping that Word or OpenOffice don't corrupt the file.
Advance Reading Copies. If the book is going to be promoted heavily, the editor arranges a production run of ARCs. These are trade-paperback-sized print-outs of the manuscript, sometimes with rudimentary typesetting, and a non-glossy cardboard cover. They go to reviewers (the lead time for a book review in Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus, or another news outlet is several months), other authors (if a cover quote is being solicited), and sometimes to bookstore buyers to promote a title that's expected to sell well. Note that despite its crude appearance, an ARC costs a lot more to produce than a finished hardback — it's laser-printed and hand-bound, in small numbers, so not all books get ARCs. Someone — typically the office intern or editorial assistant — has to mail the ARCs out.
Book design, cover design, front and back flap copy, and cover artwork. The editor pulls together a description of the book and/or the original manuscript. These are used to brief the art director, who if necessary commissions an artist to produce a painting. (Cover paintings may not be necessary if the fashion is currently for abstract/design-driven covers in marketing.) The art director also works out a suitable cover design for the book. A marketing/blurb writing person/editor also writes the flap copy (the text on the back of the book that makes you want to read it). The goal of book design is to motivate shoppers unfamiliar with the author to pick the book up. Nothing more and nothing less. (Retail psychology tells us that shoppers who handle a product are more likely to buy it. Existing loyal fans will buy it anyway. So the book design is aimed at appealing to new readers.)
CEM delivered to Typesetting. Publishers these days own neither internal typesetting departments nor printing presses. What happens at this point is that the copy edited manuscript is sent to an external typesetting bureau, where a typesetter with a workstation running either Quark Publishing System or (increasingly, these days) Adobe InDesign sets up a Book project, imports the styles specified by the publisher's standard book design, and imports and reflows the CEM — making sure that all the changes are incorporated into the DTP file. If the book is still being produced with paper-on-pencil workflow, at this point the poor bloody typesetter has to go through it page by page entering manual corrections (and undoubtedly injecting new and creative errors of their own).
Marketing copy. The editor develops a pitch for the book that will motivate their marketing and sales force. At a company like Tor, internal meetings are held between editorial and sales several times a year, at which the editors present their new and forthcoming titles and explain their selling points, target audience, and special angles. The sales team then go forth and push the book at store buyers (who choose which titles to stock in retail store chains) and wholesale buyers (ditto for wholesale channels). The picture at other publishers may be different; for example Ace (part of Berkley publishing group, part of Penguin, turtles, recursion, etc.) have a smaller number of higher level marketers who liaise directly with the buyers for the big chains (Barnes and Noble, Borders). This stage is critically important, because the retail and wholesale buyers place their orders before the size of the print run is finalized.
Review page proofs. The typeset file is used to generate a PDF image of the book, as it will appear on paper. This is sent to editorial, who send a copy to the author and, hopefully, one or more proofreaders. At this point, the job of the author (and the proofreaders) is to correct errors introduced during the typesetting process, and possibly typos they didn't spot earlier — but not to make substantive changes. Again, around one month is allowed for reviewing page proofs and returning the marked-up chunk of dead trees (or an annotated PDF file, or a list of page/line number/error tuples) to editorial, who pass it back to the typesetters for fixing. (Parenthetical note: there is no such thing as a clean page proof. Authors are blind to their own persistent spelling idiosyncracies, typesetters get stuff wrong, and so on. But in general, the more eyeballs — and more proofreading passes — a set of proofs receive, the fewer errors will be left in the finished book.)
Collate advance orders and order the print run. The sales folks have spoken to the big chain buyers and wholesalers, who guess at how many books they can sell and place orders. If these are trade books they are sold typically on 90- or 120-days net credit, sale or return. (That is: if the bookseller orders a carton of 24 books, they must either return unsold stock or pay up the agreed wholesale price when invoiced after 90 or 120 days. So they're running on credit from the publisher.) If they are mass market books they are sold on net credit, but instead of being returned for credit, the wholesaler/retailer returns the stripped covers and pulps the book block. (Which means that MMPBs unsold after 90 or 120 days are treated like spoiled grocery stock. The mass market pipeline is absolutely insane, but it mirrors how magazines are sold; it was brought in during the 1930s/1940s to sell cheap paperbacks and arguably kept the publishing industry from collapsing, but today ... let's just say I haven't met anybody who's in favour of it. Note that although mass market paperbacks are all C-format in size, not all C-format paperbacks are "mass market" books; in the UK, the sale-or-strip channel died in the late 80s/early 90s, and today — as far as I know — all British C-format paperbacks are sold on sale-or-return terms.) On the basis of these advance orders, and experience which tells them how many extra copies to print for late orders/specialist stores, the publisher orders a print run from a print shop.
The print run: this is the moment of truth. (If the editor has coughed up a $100,000 advance against a 10% royalty on cover price, they need to ship $1M of books (cover price); if the advance orders add up to 2500 hardbacks, senior management are going to start asking difficult questions.) Some rough figures: a typical first SF/fantasy novel in hardback from a major US publisher will ship 3500-5000 copies. Anything over 10,000 is nudging towards the bestseller list; a fiction book that shifts 25,000 in its first month in hardcover is going to be in the New York Times top 20. Mass market paperback runs are much larger — 15,000-30,000 — but 25-50% will be pulped and the profit margin on them is vanishingly narrow compared to those juicy hardbacks. Oh, and the long tail applies: the top 3 on the New York Times bestseller list easily outsell the next 30 combined, and #4 to #30 combined probably outsell the next three million.
The printing process may include multiple stages: ordering of paper (different grades of paper have different properties and costs), then printing of book blocks (containing the pages of the books), trimming, printing of colour cover flats, folding and binding, or printing of signatures, stitching and trimming, binding, printing of dust jackets, and folding (depending on whether paperback or hardback, with variations depending on whether the hardbacks are saddle-stitched — as is still common in the US market — or perfect (glue) bound — as is the case for most British hardbacks). At least the old process of cutting photographic plates is obsolete; most commercial printers these days have machines that take in a properly imposed postscript or PDF image and act (from the user's point of view) like a gigantic Postscript printer (fed by barrels of ink and giant rolls of paper). It takes 2-4 weeks from ordering the print run to the shipping pallet of finished books to appear on the publisher's warehouse loading bay, depending on how busy the print shop and how complex the manufacturing process are.
Shipping. Someone in a warehouse has to ship out several hundred or thousand cartons of books to stores, and a smaller number of larger palletloads to wholesalers.
Invoicing and accounting. I'm going to tip-toe past this particular pit of festering insanity. Let's just say that if you're shipping to dozens of wholesalers, a handful of large bookstore chains, and literally hundreds of small bookshops, it gets hairy fast. (Multiply by 300 titles a year with an average in-print life of 5 years if you're someone like Tor.) Note also that the contracts the publisher signs with their authors dictate that the authors will be paid a royalty (percentage share of the proceeds) based on the number of books sold and the sales channel through which they are sold. The authors almost certainly have a contractual right to order a third-party audit if they think you're screwing with their figures. And if the figures are out, you (the publisher) pay for their audit, in addition to the money you owe then.

After I hand in an MS, I expect to do another 3-6 weeks' solid work on the book before it is published — mostly in the CEM-checking and page proof-checking stages. After I hand in the MS, I expect my publisher to put in ... well, Tor produce 300 books a year with 60 staff, so it's about ten person-weeks per book in house, but this doesn't include the external copy editor, proofreader, typesetter, printer, and other outsourced tasks, which probably double it again. Overall, the process of turning a manuscript into a book is estimated to cost $7000-$20,000 — an amount comparable to the author's likely earnings from the book. In fact, the actual division of labour on a book is split roughly 50/50 between the author and the publisher.

In summary, while it's true that the author is the one with the creative input, they only do about half the work. And the other half of the job is not optional. The reason publishers exist is to provide for division of labour; if I did the other 50% to bring my rough manuscripts up to published-book-quality, I'd only be able to write half as many novels.

Bueda API Turns Tags into RDF URIs

2010-02-26T19:54:58Z

A large percentage of content that users deal with on a daily basis is created by other users. Every minute more than 90,000 videos and images are uploaded to YouTube, Flickr and other social media websites, yet this represents a relatively small revenue percentage when compared with traditional media. We believe that one reason for this is the publisher's lack of ability to understand high density content that lacks the adequate description. With mobile platforms providing users with easy methods for rich media upload, this problem will rapidly increase.

Tags are an attempt to mitigate this problem. They allow users an easy way to label content with the labels that make sense to them. Its strengths rely in the simplicity for the user and the ability of the user to use anything as tag, enabling an accurate description of content from the user's perspective. Yet, the strength of tags is also a weakness when it comes to the publisher's ability to understand that content. A tag is, realistically speaking, any sequence of characters. It could be a well formed word, a company name, a person name, an ISBN number, a concatenated version of dates and words, etc. The problem of coverage and disambiguation makes a hard problem to solve.

Bueda addresses this problem by presenting a new solution in the form of an API that can be used by developers to get clean information from noisy tags. It provides a low friction way of tapping into the latest in semantic analysis for tags in a scalable platform.

Bueda provides actionable information that enables targeted advertising, content recommendation, search engine optimization and semantic search, amongst other things. Even though the biggest impact might be in high-density content, such as rich media and pictures, the platform is open to any application and use case.

Bueda is a CMU spin-off and uses proprietary technology for Semantic Resource integration, enabling the integration of heterogeneous data sources that enable open domain coverage in a distributed and scalable framework. Bueda is also an Alphalab alum and currently funded by Innovation Works.

Bueda is currently in private beta. However, Semantic Focus readers have access to some exclusive API keys.

Got something to say? Leave a comment!

New Android App Can Recognize Faces | TheTechJournal.com -:- Technological News Portal

2010-02-25T14:56:24Z

Swedish software technology and design company TAT just announced that it has developed an augmented-reality app for the Android platform that can recognize a

Man-in-the-Middle Attack Against Chip and PIN

2010-02-11T22:18:03Z

Nice attack against the EMV -- Eurocard Mastercard Visa -- the "chip and PIN" credit card payment system. The attack allows a criminal to use a stolen card without knowing the PIN.

The flaw is that when you put a card into a terminal, a negotiation takes place about how the cardholder should be authenticated: using a PIN, using a signature or not at all. This particular subprotocol is not authenticated, so you can trick the card into thinking it's doing a chip-and-signature transaction while the terminal thinks it's chip-and-PIN. The upshot is that you can buy stuff using a stolen card and a PIN of 0000 (or anything you want). We did so, on camera, using various journalists' cards. The transactions went through fine and the receipts say "Verified by PIN".
[...]

So what went wrong? In essence, there is a gaping hole in the specifications which together create the "Chip and PIN" system. These specs consist of the EMV protocol framework, the card scheme individual rules (Visa, MasterCard standards), the national payment association rules (UK Payments Association aka APACS, in the UK), and documents produced by each individual issuer describing their own customisations of the scheme. Each spec defines security criteria, tweaks options and sets rules -- but none take responsibility for listing what back-end checks are needed. As a result, hundreds of issuers independently get it wrong, and gain false assurance that all bases are covered from the common specifications. The EMV specification stack is broken, and needs fixing.

Read Ross Anderson's entire blog post for both details and context. Here's the paper, the press release, and a FAQ. And one news article.

This is big. There are about a gazillion of these in circulation.

EDITED TO ADD (2/12): BBC video of the attack in action.

Smaller Than Life #1

2009-10-12T13:15:00Z

Metric Map: Which Countries Don’t Belong With The Others?

2010-02-05T15:05:15Z

Map : author

What sets the U.S apart from the rest of the world?

The U.S. is one of only three nations in the world (the other two being Liberia and Burma) which clings to its outmoded system of measurement, failing to get on board with the rest of the world and use the metric system.

We don’t even use the British Imperial system (that the British don’t even use anymore) – we use some bastard child of the Imperial system called “the United States customary system.” Ask any American how many ounces are in a gallon or feet are in a mile and you’re almost sure not to get a correct answer.

What does this mean for you as an American? It means that when you travel you look like an idiot. When someone asks you for directions, you are suddenly at a loss, unable to estimate distance in kilometers. If one of your South American friends asks you how cold it is, you have no idea what to say. Is 30 degrees hot? Is it cold?

There are more communist countries than there are countries not using the metric system. Everyone else has come to the conclusion that it just makes for sense to use the system everyone else in the world is using in which all units are divisible by ten.

Just try to pass the right wrench to someone and you’ll see how stupid this system is. “I need the five sixteenths hex wrench. No! I said the five sixteenths!” Of course you did.

OK. Maybe it wouldn’t be cost effective to tear down all those mile markers, but just imagine the jobs it would create to start adding kilometer markers to every highway in the U.S. of A.

Ontario Get's Stone(d): Worthy?

2010-02-08T21:43:00Z

So the story goes: a bunch of arrogant bastards walk into a particular Bar Volo on a sunny Superbowl Sunday afternoon and they get Stoned.

The regulars, total strangers, passers by, and most being beer geeks from far and wide stopped by to pay respect to a brewery that deserves it. This brewery is Stone Brewing Co. If you have followed any brewing news you can see that they are making waves, or flying straight over them. A craft brewery doing everything in its power to be seen, heard, and tasted.

Is Ontario worthy of such products? From the turn out of happy drinkers sharing bottles, thoughts, and company, it's obvious that we are truly worthy. Simply by the empties left on the table at the end of the night should give an example of how far beer fans will go for a good bottle of beer. This isn't to say that Canada doesn't have good breweries, in fact we have many that are top notch and can compete with the best of the best. Though, when you taste any of the Stone brews you know the quality that goes into it. It isn't a gamble to try the beer and wonder if you'll like it. It simply demands your respect.

On top of that I've never noticed any other bottle with so much text resembling short essays. Maybe it was just the sun shining through the window, the many people admiring one brewery, and one brewery only, the cases of stone, the dead solider (empty bottles) making their way to a table, but something felt right. Even as the sun began to set it was still a great atmosphere.

I could go on and describe every beer, but I'd love to just note the Vertical Epic 060606. For a four year old bottle, this was lively, aggressive, contemplative, complex, bold, brash, and of all things, Epic. Epic, indeed.

Once again, a huge thanks to Volo for putting this off. If we are not worthy, who really is?

Needless to say none of the Stone appreciators are worried about our bone density or mineral content today. As all the news today has been over the silicon content beer provides for strong and healthy bones.

I say more barley and hops please! Who would have thought a nice barley wine or doubleIPA could keep the doctor away.

On topic, I see these beer events and the supporters giving hope for the growing market for a much wider palate. It's not just marketing anymore, but individuals hunting down quality and specific tastes. 2010 is looking good. Well, it may be an epic year for beer in Canada.

I do indeed feel worthy.

Cheers.

Pollution in 1/8

2010-02-03T10:51:00Z

The recent allocation of the 1.0.0.0/8 and 27.0.0.0/8 not only triggered a lot of media attention due to IPv4 exhaustion exceding the 90% mark, it also sparked the curiosity of many technical folks. Specifically the NANOG mailing list triggered quite a lively discussion about the allocation of 1.0.0.0/8 (http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2010-January/017402.html).

History

1.0.0.0/8 (1/8) was reserved by IANA since 1981. Since then is has been used unofficially as example addresses, default configuration parameters or pseudo-private address space.

February 27th, 1832 | Pretty Things beer and ale project

2010-02-03T17:13:43Z

Shared by ashok
Wish I was down in MA for this...

Save DAB! Send FM radios to Africa

2010-02-02T14:40:45Z

Or bury them in a hole in the ground. We don't care

Dumping tech is in the news again. Last week MIT's Nicholas Negroponte appealed for broken OLPC laptops to be sent to Haiti, but this will be dwarfed if the UK radio industry gets its way. Trade body Digital Radio UK wants Britons to send perfectly good working FM radios to Africa, in the hope it will accelerate our migration to DAB.…

The power of collaboration within unified communications

Wrasse Punish Cheaters

2010-01-20T19:26:59Z

Interesting:

The bluestreak cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) operates an underwater health spa for larger fish. It advertises its services with bright colours and distinctive dances. When customers arrive, the cleaner eats parasites and dead tissue lurking in any hard-to-reach places. Males and females will sometimes operate a joint business, working together to clean their clients. The clients, in return, dutifully pay the cleaners by not eating them.
That's the basic idea, but cleaners sometimes violate their contracts. Rather than picking off parasites, they'll take a bite of the mucus that lines their clients' skin. That's an offensive act -- it's like a masseuse having an inappropriate grope between strokes. The affronted client will often leave. That's particularly bad news if the cleaners are working as a pair because the other fish, who didn't do anything wrong, still loses out on future parasite meals.

Males don't take this sort of behaviour lightly. Nichola Raihani from the Zoological Society of London has found that males will punish their female partners by chasing them aggressively, if their mucus-snatching antics cause a client to storm out.

[...]

At first glance, the male cleaner wrasse behaves oddly for an animal, in punishing an offender on behalf of a third party, even though he hasn't been wronged himself. That's common practice in human societies but much rarer in the animal world. But Raihani's experiments clearly show that the males are actually doing themselves a favour by punishing females on behalf of a third party. Their act of apparent altruism means they get more food in the long run.

TV Presenters Anna Williamson And Jamie Rickers Held By Police Under Under Anti-Terror Powers | UK News | Sky News

2010-01-28T03:14:53Z

Two children's TV presenters have revealed they were held by police under anti-terrorism powers after being stopped while running around with hairdryers in London.

The Da Vinci Highway Code

2010-01-22T12:15:00Z

Dan Brown gets the book sales charts completely sewn up...

(Also available on b3ta.)

Booty Call

2010-01-27T16:31:00Z

Digital Book World is a two day digital publishing conference recently held in NY. One hot topic at the event was ebook piracy. The conclusions drawn were:

1. People are stealing a lot of ebooks. (surprise surprise!)

2. Publishers need to fight this with lawsuits, better DRM, takedown pressure, anti-piracy legislation, targeting upload sites, and ultimately fighting the pirates themselves.

Apparently, publishing has paid close attention to the music and film industries, who have been successful at stopping pirates with the above tactics.

Oh, wait a second... The RIAA and MPAA have NOT been successful at stopping piracy. In fact, they've done nothing but irritate paying consumers.

It's good to know that the smart folks in publishing are ready to spend millions of dollars to make the same mistakes, no doubt with a similar outcome.

Of course, no one invited me to speak at the conference, which is a shame, because perhaps I could have saved the publishing industry the heartache and financial trouble they're about to embrace with one simple sentence.

The Only Way To Fight Piracy Is With Cost And Convenience.

How do I know this?

Because I've done extensive experiments with ebooks. The cheaper the ebook, the more you sell. And if the ebook is free, the downloads are off the charts.

I also know how pirates think, because I'm a pirate. Yes, I admit to being one of the billion people on the planet who download copyrighted material.

In fact, I've downloaded all of my own ebooks and audiobooks for free from various bit torrent and file locker sites. I'm able to do this because I too am being pirated. A lot.

Google konrath torrent and you get over 14,000 hits. These are all sites where my work is being stolen.

Does it bother me that people are sharing my books online?

No, it doesn't. Because piracy hasn't hurt me financially.

Why is that? Especially since I can account for thousands of illegal downloads of my own material?

Because I'm still making money. I don't think piracy has hurt my sales. In fact, I think it helps my sales by giving me a wider distribution network and greater brand recognition.

My self-pubbed Kindle titles are $1.99 or less. Since last April, I've sold over 20,000 books on Amazon.

Want to hear the funny thing? These same ebooks are available for free on my website. For FREE.

Does free hurt sales? Apparently not.

I've already blogged that if I had the rights to my in-print books, I could make a bigger profit selling them for $1.99 on Kindle than I'm making with the prices my publishers have set.

Cheap sells. Free sells even more. And if you make it easy for people to get your product (like pressing a button on a Kindle or an iPhone) they won't bother going to Pirate Bay or Rapidshare or Limewire or Megaupload or Isohunt.

File sharing is a pain. It can take a long time to download a file. The files can get corrupted. Sometimes they're tough to search. Often you can't find what you want. There are viruses. Seeding files takes up bandwith and harddrive space, and there's always a fear that The Man will send you a letter saying they'll sue you.

How much easier would it be if the large publishers, instead of adding extra copyright protection and hiring a team of lawyers and tech guys and lobbyists to fight piracy, just made their downloads cheaper?

Malls are dying. Main streets are dying. What's taking their place? Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart has shown that if you offer customers inexpensive one-stop shopping, they'll spend money.

iTunes has shown the same thing.

Amazon hasn't been able to do that yet, because publishers insist on DRM (which consumers hate) and high prices for ebooks. $9.99 for a bunch of ones and zeros is overpriced. But if it were up to the publishers, they'd charge $14.99 and more for their ebooks.

Amazon is fighting back, though. In June, they'll begin paying ebook authors a 70% royalty rate.

Let's play the numbers game. Let's say a midlist author, like, oh, JA Konrath, uploads a new Jack Daniels book on Amazon and sells it at $2.99. A coffee at Starbucks costs more than that.

Let's assume JA Konrath can sell 10,000 copies per year of an Amazon title--something he's proven he can do. The 70% royalty rate will mean he earns 20k. PER YEAR. For just the erights.

This is more than most fiction writers earn on a single book for all rights: hard, soft, audio, ebook, movie, and foreign.

Shouldn't publishers try to follow Amazon's example, rather than continuing to charge hardcover prices for ebooks, which have no shipping or production cost?

That's what I'd do. But no one is asking me. No one invited me to speak at Digital Book World.

It's impossible to stop piracy. The whole reason the internet was invented was so people could share and trade information and media.

But it is possible to co-exist with pirates, and make a good living doing so, by making sure ebooks are easily and cheaply available.

Instead, it looks like we're going to see the publishing industry make the same mistakes the music and movie industries have made.

Copyright cannot be successfully defended in a digital world. Period.

Human beings are genetically wired to share information. And the internet has made it easy.

Publishers should be taking advantage of both human nature and the internet. Instead, they're gearing up for a fight they can't win.

Oh, and since I anticipate the comments saying, "If books are free, how can we make money?" I want to restate that authors will be able to make money on free downloads someday.

Let's say a well-known author releases a free ebook. But there's a catch. In the ebook, there are fifteen print ads, like you'd see in a magazine. Each ad costs the advertiser 2 cents per impression, which is comparable to other internet advertising.

That means each free download will earn the author 30 cents.

More than 100,000 people have downloaded my free ebook, SERIAL.

If I'd sold ad space for 2 cents an impression, I'd have earned 30k in less than a year. Even more money than I'd earn selling 10,000 ebooks for $2.99 each.

Of course, I've been saying this for a few years now. And I'll keep saying it until someone finally listens.

I just hope, by the time this is over, there will still be some publishers around to listen.

Slime design mimics Tokyo's rail system

2010-01-22T13:53:47Z

What could human engineers possibly learn from the lowly slime mold? Reliable, cost-efficient network construction, apparently: a recent experiment suggests that Physarum polycephalum, a gelatinous fungus-like mold, might actually lead the way to improved technological systems, such as more robust computer and mobile communication networks.

gritting, salting and blizzards

2010-01-18T00:17:00Z

[I started this back when it was snowing...then the term started. Eek. Thanks to my new Twitter-followers for their recollections on grit and sand.]

A couple of Americans have remarked to me about BrE speakers' use of grit as a verb in snowy contexts like these (from a single article in the local newspaper):

Hospitals across Sussex were inundated with patients over the weekend who had broken limbs after falling on ungritted pavements. [Ed. note: the weekend broke limbs?]

Dozens of people contacted The Argus to condemn the lack of gritting which has left many elderly people trapped in their homes. [Ed. note: did they also condemn the lack of a comma on a non-restrictive relative clause?]

A Brighton and Hove City Council spokesman said all the authority's refuse and recycling staff were being diverted to gritting roads and pavements today.

Now, I don't believe that this use of grit is solely BrE, but in the snowy Northeastern US, one talks about salting the roads--which may include some sand--or less frequently of sanding the roads--which usually includes some salt or other de-icing agent. In addition to sand, ash and cinders are (or at least have been) commonly used. The "sand" that's used may be more coarse material, like the grit used in the UK. And while gritters are used in the UK to spread grit, salters and sanders are used in northern north America for the same thing.

I come from a place where we get to talk about lake-effect snow and (orig. AmE) blizzards a lot.
And when we use the term blizzard back home, we don't mean a piddly 6 cm (2.4 inches) of snow like my local UK paper does. It turns out that the word may be common to AmE and BrE now, but the meaning is not. From Wikipedia:

In the United States, the National Weather Service defines a blizzard as sustained winds or frequent gusts reaching or exceeding 35 mph (56 km/h) which lead to blowing snow and cause visibilities of ¼ mile (or 400 m) or less, lasting for at least 3 hours. Temperature is not taken into consideration when issuing a blizzard warning, but the nature of these storms is such that cold air is often present when the other criteria are met.^[1] Temperatures are generally below 0 °C (32 °F).

According to Environment Canada, a winter storm must have winds of 40 km/h (25 mph) or more, have snow or blowing snow, visibility less than 500 feet (150 m), a wind chill of less than −25 °C (−15 °F), and all of these conditions must last for 3 hours or more before the storm can be properly called a blizzard.

Many European countries, such as the UK, have a lower threshold: the Met Office defines a blizzard as "moderate or heavy snow" combined with a mean wind speed of 30 mph (48 km/h) and visibility below 650 feet (200 m).

Of course, even a little snow in a place like southern England (or the southern US, for that matter) grinds the place to a halt. I've had three 'snow days' from work so far this year, and we've never had accumulation of more than a few inches. But not only are snow (AmE) plows/(BrE) ploughs rarer than hen's teeth here, but no one has a (possibly AmE) snow shovel, few have appropriate footwear (attention: (BrE) wellies [AmE: rubber boots] are not snow boots!) and almost no one knows how to drive on icy roads. So, we can't really blame the victims of these snows for their inability to deal with them--though that didn't stop me from less-than-sympathetically exclaiming in response to the laceration on my friend's face and talk of the bruise on another's (BrE) bum: "You people don't know how to walk on snow!" I have since spent every outdoor moment convinced that this comment is going to come and almost-literally bite me on the (AmE) ass/(BrE) arse, landing me with a broken coccyx or worse.

Final reflection: I can't believe that I just had to invent a 'weather' tag for the blog in response to this post. I'm in England! I'm supposed to be talking about the weather at least 74% of the time. I hope they don't find out and revoke my citizenship.

The Power Law of Terrorism

2010-01-12T19:46:18Z

Research result #1: "A Generalized Fission-Fusion Model for the Frequency of Severe Terrorist Attacks," by Aaron Clauset and Frederik W. Wiegel.

Plot the number of people killed in terrorists attacks around the world since 1968 against the frequency with which such attacks occur and you’ll get a power law distribution, that’s a fancy way of saying a straight line when both axis have logarithmic scales.
The question, of course, is why? Why not a normal distribution, in which there would be many orders of magnitude fewer extreme events?

Aaron Clauset and Frederik Wiegel have built a model that might explain why. The model makes five simple assumptions about the way terrorist groups grow and fall apart and how often they carry out major attacks. And here’s the strange thing: this model almost exactly reproduces the distribution of terrorists attacks we see in the real world.

These assumptions are things like: terrorist groups grow by accretion (absorbing other groups) and fall apart by disintegrating into individuals. They must also be able to recruit from a more or less unlimited supply of willing terrorists within the population.

Research Result #2: "Universal Patterns Underlying Ongoing Wars and Terrorism," by Neil F. Johnson, Mike Spagat, Jorge A. Restrepo, Oscar Becerra, Juan Camilo Bohorquez, Nicolas Suarez, Elvira Maria Restrepo, and Roberto Zarama.

In the case of the Iraq war, we might ask how many conflicts causing ten casualties are expected to occur over a one-year period. According to the data, the answer is the average number of events per year times 10^-2.3, or 0.005. If we instead ask how many events will cause twenty casualties, the answer is proportional to 20^-2.3. Taking into account the entire history of any given war, one finds that the frequency of events on all scales can be predicted by exactly the same exponent.
Professor Neil Johnson of Oxford University has come up with a remarkable result regarding these power laws: for several different wars, the exponent has about the same value. Johnson studied the long-standing conflict in Colombia, the war in Iraq, the global rate of terrorist attacks in non-G7 countries, and the war in Afghanistan. In each case, the power law exponent that predicted the distribution of conflicts was close to the value 2.5.

This doesn't surprise me; power laws are common in naturally random phenomena.

UK Independent editor claims it may steal any image posted to Flickr

2010-01-17T01:20:44Z

The Independent used a photograph by Peter Zabulis without asking his permission. The photo in question is marked "All Rights Reserved," meaning that the photographer didn't offer any license to use it--a wee fact that The Indy missed. Normally when this sort of thing happens, emails are sent, accommodations are made and the situation is resolved. (In this case, the teaching moment is that the Flickr API feeds you content, but not a license to use it). But when Zabulis contacted The Indy--a major newspaper in the UK--the respondent instead claimed that by posting the picture to Flickr, he had abandoned his rights, even if Flickr's terms of service (not to mention the law) say otherwise.

We took a stream from Flickr which is, as you know, a photo-sharing website. The legal assumption, therefore, is that you were not asserting your copyright in that arena. We did not take the photo from Flickr, nor present it as anything other than as it is shown there. I do no consider, therefore, that any copyright has been breached or any payment due.

Freely sharing one's work is a popular choice, but it's not the choice that Zabulis made here. Moreover, the Independent didn't attribute the work, responded disrespectfully to his inquiry, and offers no fair use defense or even a transgressive rationale for what it did: just "tough shit, old boy," safe in the knowledge that legal recourse is an option only to those who can afford it. Pete's flickr set [via Valleywag]

New Labour bring old Nuremberg Laws to Britain • The Register

2010-01-16T15:46:43Z