(E)book pricing (still) broken
There are many examples of hardback, paperpack, ebook pricing chaos. Today, I ran across one of the more absurd examples I have seen in a while. I was looking up Johnathan Letham’s Chronic City in ebook format and got this weirdness. At amazon.com,
Chronic prices on amazon.com. Notice they don't offer the ebook.
While at Barnes and Noble they have the ebook, but at a silly price:
The ebook price is a few cents above the hardback price at Barnes and Noble. The ebook price is about double the paperback price at B&N and more than double the used hardback price at Amazon.
What is the strategy here? To make customers angry? This isn’t building a lot of confidence that publishers know what they are doing or that they are trying to give readers what they want to buy.
I have said here before that piracy is about access–this is one of the handful reasons publishers keep giving people to look for alternatives and to root for their demise. I would rather buy books in a reasonably error-free format I can read on multiple devices and pay a sensible price. Still missing on just about everything guys!
Getting started with Hadoop with Amazon Web Services
Last night, I gave a presentation at the Boulder/Denver Hadoop Meetup on getting started using Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce. Amazon’s EMR is Apache Hadoop, cloud resources and Web services that implement a scalable, on-demand MapReduce solution for analyzing very large data sets.
The presentation contains step-by-step instructions for getting your first simple project running on EMR and a short overview of the map-reduce way of thinking about data problems. The slides also contain many links to tools, papers, and examples.
Download EMR-HadoopMeetup slides and example code and slides (including latex/beamer file).
Semantic robot control and biomimicry
Recently, there have been a couple of amazing examples of robots attaining some amazing low-level movement and navigation autonomy. Here are a couple of examples. First, a quad-copter that can perform some startling complex high speed navigation stunts:
Second, a beetle-like walker that can easily navigate rough survaces:
Progress on robots has been pretty steady for years, so what is interesting about these particular examples?
The ability to direct a robot’s higher level movements with reliable outcomes.
That is, a shift from directing robots with syntax (manipulating control surfaces, motor speeds, servo positions) to directing with semantics (go to the living room). Robots like those shown above will soon be able to take commands at a high level and carry them out reliably and safely.
Broad access to robot servants
We have reached a point in sophistication and cost where small, autonomous robots can be controlled with higher level commands. To learn to fly a quad-copter via remote control of throttle and pitch in a way that can navigate a window with 3 inches of clearance takes hours of practice and crashed copters. As shown above, now we can merely command that it be done. The cost of these devices has reached a few hundred dollars each and will continue to fall quickly.
Swarms of robots (“many hands make light work”)
These developments mean that small robots can be directed to “got into the living room” or “fly across the park without hitting anything and find little Bobby.”
The possibility of cheap, small autonomous robots performing tasks such as searching for hurricane survivors, mapping oil spills, collecting anti-personnel mines, carrying out surveillance, assisting you in the garage or mowing your lawn is now very real.
With the ability to direct them at a high level, the opportunity to carry out large tasks with many small specialized robots is in reach. With our current knowledge of collective behaviors, swarms of robots could be called on to perform large scale work requiring collaboration and coordination.
Bio-mimicry and fear
There is something unsettling about both of these videos. They both demonstrate movements that are life-like, and often associated with animals we’d rather not have too big or too close. Both robots execute robust recovery and control actions much like beetles or house flies. I postulate that this bio-like attribute is core to the technical success demonstrated here. But it is also clear that this attribute may be more a than a little distasteful to people.
Will we adapt to the creepiness and have a swarm of crawlers clean the house? Or is this technology DOA because it violates some survival instinct?
Another concern is the new, cheap capabilities to do harm that come with any technological advance. Will ethics and countermeasures evolve fast enough to head off a major mis-appropriation of robot swarms?
Transparency and legitimacy
Global Guerrillas laments the behavior of the US Government/BP around the unfolding tragedy of the oil spill in the Gulf as an,
example of an approach, reinforced by ongoing global financial disasters, that uses media manipulation and confidence boosting as a substitute for real solutions. It fails to punish bad behavior due to the need for collusion between the government and the offending corporations to construct the information campaign. It fails to construct real solutions since the facts are not known and the number of people able to address the problem is extremely limited. Also, since these people are the same people that caused the crisis, real solutions are avoided to prevent adverse publicity. Most importantly, it is yet another body blow to the nation-state and the global market system as legitimate organizational constructs.
In organizational leadership, there is an inverse relationship between transparency and legitimacy. As secrecy and obfuscation go up, societies collective support of the legitimate powers and roles of the organization go down.
This happens because (1) people don’t trust their leaders and the organizational systems serve their interests. Trust can break down to a point where people undermine the parts of the system that are beneficial (e.g vaccinations are hurting you more than polio or smallpox) and (2) there are fewer better solutions people lack information or open creative dialog about problems and possible responses.
This has always been the case, but the cause-effect time delay is getting shorter partly because the systems encompass many layers of social, financial and political systems and are more richly connected.
Stewart, Taleb, Mandlebrot…
N. N. Taleb and many other mathematicians (e.g. Mandelbrot) have been trying to explain how market variations are not adequately characterized by symmetric, thin-tailed Gaussian distributions, that a World seen through these models will have many (unexpected!) “black swans” or “perfect storms.”
John Stewart illustrates the same point by lining up quotes from the talking heads in the segment A Nightmare on Wall Street. (Sorry for the link out, embedding Comedy Central Flash video in WordPress stumped me.)
Fun dynamic optical illusion
Over at Scientific Clearing House, Carson posted a pretty proof of the how dollar cost averaging is an optimal investment strategy. Unfortunately, I think the conditions for this optimization aren’t practical because they are far too optimistic about one’s ability to choose to invest in appreciating assets.
In a long winded comment, I take delight in making the following perverse equivalence between an honest work-ethic idiom and foolish gambling practice,
Under these optimistic assumptions, DCA [dollar cost averaging] is equivalent to the idiom: make hay while the sun shines. Downward price fluctuations are viewed as opportunities to use the same resources to make even more of a good investment. Under less certainty, this is what gamblers call doubling down–when you are loosing, bet more so when you win, you make up your previous losses.
I have advocated DCA as a reasonable investment strategy to friends of mine, but I am increasingly skeptical about the assumptions. It is starting to seem more like doubling down and less like making hay.
Weight training experiment – Week 20
In January of 2010, I was 10 weeks into a workout experiment. In the last ten weeks, strength gain in smaller muscle groups has clearly leveled off and the rapid increase in strength for the larger muscle groups has started to slow as well. Here are the charts updated with data up through today’s workout.
Week 20 - Strength as fraction of first workout (%).
A couple of features jump out:
- Progress with a pull downs flattened quickly. I backed off and tried to concentrate on negatives, but progress was slow. This exercise uses biceps, triceps and abs. The strategy going forward is to isolate the weakest area(s).
- Bench press progress appears to be tapering off to about 80% increase from mid-November. Leg press is nearly 90% and there is still week-to-week progress. The lat row progress, while only 45% from November, continues to progress a few pounds form week to week. I did not expect these results and am very pleasantly surprised!
- This represents 18 workouts averaging 23 min each, for a total workout time of about 7 hours of workout time. Time under load averages about 40% of the workout or about 2.8 hours of actually pushing the weights. I am satisfied that this workout method is very efficient!
- (The dip in leg press trend around February 20 is due to changing machines–I surpassed the capacity of the normal leg press machine and had to move a machine that holds free weights. This machine is at an incline so it took a couple of weeks to recalibrate. I added a conversion factor based on the angle of the inclined machine to adjust the last 6 points on the leg press line.)
- I gained a few pounds during this time period. Since I did not measure body fat ratios, I don’t know the details of weight redistribution. But the changes are in the right direction.
In terms of absolute weight, I am still a fairly weak desk jockey…
Week 20 - Weight trend for 18 workouts.
The results seem really great based on the 2 hours and 45 minutes I spent in the gym pushing weights. Recommended.
eBook readers want portability
Dear Author Reader Survey results I posted earlier indicates ebook readers want ebooks and devices characteristics that allow them to read conveniently on more than one device. Many solutions provide this functionality with some limits (both Barnes and Noble and Amazon offer dedicated devices [nook and Kindle], desk top applications and iPhone eReader options; Amazon uses proprietary book and DRM formats). And readers are using them.
Over half of the responses of those indicating they read ebooks indicate ebooks are read on more than one device.
The top multi-device combinations for 2 and 3 devices are shown below. Desktop plus iPhone is an important combination for publishers, ebook sellers and device makers to consider in their product plans.
Top three device combinations for users of 2 and 3 devices.
When readers expressed their preferences for using multiple devices and keeping them in sync, they responded consistently with the results above.
Readers value multi-device support.
Readers value synchronization between their devices.
Free eBook promotions drive sales
Dear Author Reader Survey results I posted earlier contain a couple of questions about free eBook promotions. The survey asks if readers have downloaded a free promotional eBook and whether the promotion prompted them to make purchase. The results for this audience are clear: they respond to the promotions and they make purchases based on downloads.
EBook promotions and resulting purchases.
EBook promotions and resulting purchases data.
