Jeff :: News

Predatory Producing

09 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

A company offers a product so cheaply that their competitors go out of business, at which point they raise prices. Anticompetitive predatory pricing?

A company offers a product so good that their competitors go out of business, at which point they make their product worse. Anticompetitive predatory producing?

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Caller control of phone ringer

08 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

I want this as my voicemail message:

This phone is set to vibrate. If this is really important [1] dial '73' to make the phone ring. Otherwise, please leave a message.

I leave my phone set on vibrate and often ignore it: just because I have a box in my pocket doesn't mean that people elsewhere should take priority over people in the same room. In person, if B comes up while I'm talking to A they will politely wait until A is done. If it's urgent, they can say "excuse me, but this is really important", and seize priority. Phones should have this too. It wouldn't have to go into full ringing: a brief sound following a vibrating ring that I had ignored would tell me that someone had claimed urgency.

(Would people claim urgency excessively? I don't think so, but if they did in practice I could make this available only to people I trusted not to abuse it.)

This is part of my general retrogrouch outlook.

[1] And possibly: "... and you're willing to pay $1 if I disagree ..."

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Merge Timing

07 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

Driving down the highway you see a sign saying that your lane is closed for construction a mile ahead. Do you merge over now, or do you stay in your lane until the last minute? In the US at least, the normal thing to do is to merge promptly, and then get angry at the jerks who cut in at the last minute after zooming past the patiently waiting people who have already merged.

We think of this as a defect/cooperate situation: you can cooperate for common gains in which you share, or you can defect and increase your gains at the expense of others. Cast this way you should cooperate, but what messes this up is that it's actually better to merge late. What looks like polite cooperative behavior is actually worse for the group.

I think the solution here is the same as for buses: you should do the thing that has the best outcomes overall (take advantage of the emptied lane and merge late; squeeze through to the empty space at the back of the bus) and think of the misguidedly polite people as the rude ones.

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Copying

06 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

A friend who runs a startup was complaining to me about others ripping off their ideas and designs. After figuring out just the right thing to say on a signup box, he would notice the same wording appear on competing sites. How much copying is ok?

At an extreme it's clearly not ok: don't use another site's html as a starting point. But if you notice a competitor is putting 'Sign Up' instead of 'Submit Info' on a form submit button, is it ok to copy that? [1]

In some fields we accept pretty much complete copying. The Apple IIe and IBM PC were clean-roomed by competitors. GNU and Linux are basically copies of Unix: the code that runs when you run a command, for example /bin/true, is different between AT&T Unix, BusyBox, and GNU, but the goal in creating them was to have the same effect. After Firefox added tabbed browsing and popup blocking Internet Explorer did too. (And I wish Chrome would copy side tabs.) Not only were these copies legal, but they were generally seen as a good thing.

Other times copying is illegal or at least looked down on. When a tea company didn't want to pay to use a cover image they recreated the picture:

A British court ruled that they had violated the copyright of the original artist because:

I have not found this to be an easy question but I have decided that the defendants' work does reproduce a substantial part of the claimant's artistic work. In the end the issue turns on a qualitative assessment of the reproduced elements. The elements which have been reproduced are a substantial part of the claimant's work because, despite the absence of some important compositional elements, they still include the key combination of what I have called the visual contrast features with the basic composition of the scene itself. It is that combination which makes Mr Fielder's image visually interesting. It is not just another photograph of cliched London icons.
...
I sympathise with Mr Houghton in his wish to use an image of London landmarks. He is free to do so. There are entirely independent images of the same landmarks available to be used which predate publication of Mr Fielder's picture. But the defendants do not want to use those, no doubt for their own good reasons. Perhaps they did not look as attractive as the claimant's image? The defendants went to rather elaborate lengths to produce their image when it seems to me that it did not need to be so complicated. Mr Houghton could have simply instructed an independent photographer to go to Westminster and take a picture which includes at least a London bus, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Whatever image was produced could then have been used on the tins of tea. Such an image would not infringe. It may or may not have the same appealing qualities as the claimant's image. Even if it did they would be the result of independent skill and labour employed by the independent photographer. Again however that is not what happened.

The American tech reaction, at least, was widely negative, though a lot of people hadn't read the judgement and were interpreting the ruling as being broader and less thoughtful than it actually was.

Zynga [2], on the other hand, is probably on the right side of the law, but is widely regarded as a copycat. The way they work is to find other Facebook games and copy the mechanics and gameplay, but with their own art and text.

This is legal, but people don't like it. It doesn't help that they aren't really making games people play because they are fun as much as because they create as sense of obligation.

I have a hard time seeing the difference between Compaq making a clone [3] of the IBM PC and Zynga making a clone of Slashkey's Farmtown. And I don't know if my friend is right to be indignant that people would look at his site to see what is working for him.

[1] You would definitely want to test that it actually does better on your site.

[2] They make FarmVille, Mafia Wars, CityVille, etc.

[3] While their first cloned product was a fully compatible portable computer, they relased their first desktop, very similar to IBM's, a little over a year later.

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The Perfect Crime?

05 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

The constitution requires that crimes [1] be tried a jury of the state and district where the crime was committed. [2] Normally this is not a problem: districts are big things, and they rarely cross state lines. But what if there was a case where some land were in a combination of state and district that had no population? Then if a felony were committed there it would require a jury drawn from a pool of people that don't exist.

A recent paper by Brian Kalt argues that this is a real possiblity: the Idaho portion of Yellowstone is in the Wyoming district, but has no one living in it. This might make prosecution of jury-requiring crimes impossible there.

[1] This is normally interpreted as not including 'petty' crimes, which don't need juries.

[2] Article III, Section 2: "The Trial of all Crimes . . . shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed." Amendment 6: "of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law."

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Phones as Makeup Mirrors

04 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

Sometimes I'll see people put on makeup on the bus. Much of they time they'll use a smartphone instead of a mirror. A mirror is very simple technology, giving a very high resolution display with no latency. It's light, small, and cheap. But because the smartphone does the job well enough why carry an additional thing?

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Wrapping Bass: Implementation

03 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

After thinking yesterday about octaveless notes I decided to write something to generate the tones I had in mind. Here they are as two-second mp3s:

Bb B C Db
A D
Ab Eb
G Gb F E

The code is on github. It uses portaudio so it should work cross platform if you want to compile it. The important parts of the code are:

#define sine(i,F) ((float) sin( (((double)(i)*(double)(F))/SAMPLE_RATE) * M_PI * 2. ))

float freq(float note)
{
  return 440*(pow(2, (note-69.0)/12));
}

float intensity(float note, int octave)
{
  float bass_n = fmod(note, 12);

  switch(octave) {
  case 0:
    return 0.00 + 0.01*bass_n;
  case 1:
    return 0.12 + 0.01*bass_n;
  case 2:
    return 0.24 + 0.01*bass_n;
  case 3:
    return 0.32 - 0.01*bass_n;
  case 4:
    return 0.22 - 0.01*bass_n;
  case 5:
    return 0.10 - 0.01*bass_n;
  }
  return 0; // never reached
}

float synth(float phase, float note) {
  return pow(2,(sine(phase, note)));
}

# A440 = 69, as in midi
# phase is constantly increasing, once per sample
#
float sample_val(float note, unsigned int phase)
{
  note = fmod(note, 12);

  return log2(synth(phase, freq(note + 12*0)) * intensity(note, 0) +
              synth(phase, freq(note + 12*1)) * intensity(note, 1) +
              synth(phase, freq(note + 12*2)) * intensity(note, 2) +
              synth(phase, freq(note + 12*3)) * intensity(note, 3) +
              synth(phase, freq(note + 12*4)) * intensity(note, 4) +
              synth(phase, freq(note + 12*5)) * intensity(note, 5));
}

# call sample_val as:
# for (int i = 0 ; i < 1000000 ; i++)
#   send_to_speaker(sample_val(69, i));

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Wrapping Bass

02 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

Sometimes on the piano I would like to be able to do a long series of bass notes in the same direction, and then get frustrated when I end up way too high or low. I'd also like to have a pedalboard for bass notes while playing mandolin, and if I could get away with just twelve notes that would be a lot cheaper. So what if we construct twelve sounds in a circle so that wherever you are each note sounds a half step above it's left neighbor and a half step below it's right?

There's an effect where you have a continually rising tone. It works like an escalator: the steps are going up, but you're always adding new ones at the bottom and having old ones fall off the top. If you slowly bring up the volume of the low frequencies and bring down the volume of the high ones, I think you could make bass notes that didn't really have an octave structure.

If you were impossibly capable on the piano you could get this effect playing octaves with the left hand and varying the pressure of the low and high notes so the weighted average of the two fundamentals didn't vary as you changed notes.

Update 2012-02-02: In response to a question by email I wrote:

To a first aproximation, I'm proposing synthesizing twelve sounds. Only twelve, one for each note. For example, just guessing, looking only at the C scale:
  C: .03*C0 + .27*C1 + .46*C2 + .24*C3
  D: .06*D0 + .30*D1 + .43*D2 + .21*D3
  E: .09*E0 + .33*E1 + .40*E2 + .18*E3
  F: .12*F0 + .36*F1 + .37*F2 + .12*F3
  G: .18*G0 + .39*G1 + .34*G2 + .09*G3
  A: .21*A0 + .42*A1 + .31*A2 + .06*A3
  B: .24*B0 + .45*B1 + .28*B2 + .03*B3
The important thing is that B, C, D sounds like it's smoothly rising while D, C, B sounds like it's smoothly falling.

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Hall Managing at BIDA

01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

The BIDA dance is a relatively high effort contra dance. We have signs, lights, windows that need ladders to open, we bring our own sound system. Starting February 18th we're having twice as many dances (1st and 3rd Sundays) which means the people who normally do this work might not be able to do it every time. So: more documentation, more knowlege transfer.

The roles at one of our dances:

Caller: tell people what to do (paid: $75 + profit sharing)
Band (3-4x): play awesome music (paid: $75 + profit sharing)
Sound: bring and run sound for the dance (paid: $75)
Hall managing (1-2x): run set up, deal with stuff, run clean up
Set up volunteer: put out chairs, posters, lights from 6:15-7:15
Door volunteer: greet people and collect money (6:30-8, 8-9, 9-10)
Money: figure out what people get; pay them (sometimes in with hall managing)

Most of these we have plenty of people for: the main limiting factor is hall managing. Not all board members have done it, and we're also thinking of doing something where we have "super volunteers" who do this too. A checklist version, and then full details:

Setup
- Fans (ceiling, windows)
- Chairs
- Posters
- Christmas Lights
- Water coolers, cups
- Get door volunteer set up
During
- Door volunteer shift changes
Cleanup
- Announce time limits; request help
- Everything from "setup" in reverse
- Look over the hall, make sure we've not left Fred a mess

Details:

Setup
- Get to the hall about 6:00
- Turn the lights on from the breaker panel (breakers are labeled)
  - you want the side sconses up (dimmer and switch to the right of the panel)
  - the right level of brightness is around three of the main lights
  - stage lights need to be on
- Make sure the heat is off or low (if not, talk to Fred)
- Use the remotes to turn on the ceiling fans ("stage R" means "by the stage, on your right" not "stage right" )
- Carry the BIDA stuff from the closet out to a table
- If there are no popsicles in the freezer, consider asking someone to go get some from the Shaws across the street
- Move the small table over by the door to collect money
- Move the big table outside the door to where the small table lives for flyers and nametags
- Pull the cart with the chairs out from the closet in the far corner
- When the setup volunteer arrives have them, in this order:
  - set up chairs along the far wall
  - put up posters (you have to use the blue tape; yes, it doesn't stick)
  - lay out the lost and found
  - put up lights
- When the first door volunteer arrives, explain to them what to do
  - $5-$10 sliding scale, "pay what you can"
  - take money, put in cashbox
  - mark attendance by half-hour block (6:30-7:00 ; 7:00-7:30 ; ...)
  - mark people who get in free (board members, volunteers, newcomers)
  - people only get in free for the beginner's workshop if they arrive before it starts (7:05ish)
  - tell them who is replacing them and when
- Take a ladder and open the windows appropriately.
  - The ladders are sometimes on stage, sometimes in the hall next to the kitchen
  - Put fans in them. Make sure the fans won't fall out. They do better on their sides. Fans live on stage.
- Put the green fan and any other fans not in windows where they can blow on the dancers. There's a shiny metal fan for the musicians if they want it.
- Fill water coolers and have someone help you carry them out to the ledge in the hall.
  - put bowls from the kitchen under where they drip
  - put out cups
  - put out a "please label your cup" sign, making on if needed
- Push chair rack back into the closet
During the dance
- Make sure the door volunteers remember shift changes
- Deal with stuff as it comes up
- Dance and have fun
- At the break get someone to help you carry out the potluck table
  - put popsicles on it if we bought some
  - put "popsicle fund" on a popsicle box and wave it about for donations
- At some point you can dim the lights and turn on the disco ball
  - this is nice to sync with the top of the tune, ideally with a tune change
  - keep the sconses on the sides on
  - turn the ball motor on in advance
  - flip together: turn off the main lights; turn on the ball lights
  - this is tricky; you want to be sure you have the right switches
  - if the band looks agitated make sure the stage lights are on
Cleanup
- Announce that we have to be entirely out of the hall by 11, so please either help clean up or move along out of the hall quickly
- Tell people who want to help clean up what to do:
  - if they can coil cables, or they come often and want to learn, send them to the stage to coil cables
  - put chairs on the rack (it was pushed back into the closet)
  - take down posters, lights
  - throw out cups
- Empty water pitchers
- Put stuff back in crates; pack back in closet. Make sure the pitchers can air out and dry fully
- Put tables back where they go
- Collect lost and found items, put in closet
- Make sure the hall is back how it was when we came

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Jotting Down Notes

30 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Since getting my phone, one of the big things I like is that I can quickly take down notes. If I spent $8 on contra dance admission, I used to have to remember until I got home and could add it to the expenses spreadsheet. If I got a good idea walking to work, I would hope it was still in my head when I got there. I considered at times carrying around a notepad for this, but it never seemed worth it.

A smartphone is many devices in one, each of which (notepad, phone, camera, gps, flashlight, pager, ...) I wasn't interested in enough on its own to bother with carrying around.

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Group Coordination

29 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Contra dancing, flash mobs, group singing, and facebook birthdays. Doing the same thing as lots of others around you feels good it's own way, differently from most things we do. Watching a comedy in company where laughs compound. Gathering at a funeral to be together in grief. Feeling the words of a charismatic demagogue play the emotions of the crowd. While our thoughts don't actually merge with the group's [1] we move part of the way to being a single entity.

[1] The Tines in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and Children of the Sky do this. I enjoyed both books a lot.

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Self Redirection

28 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Trying to append a file to another, I was surprised when the terminal just sat there, taking seconds for something that should have been instant. When I canceled the operation I found that the file I was trying to append to hadn't changed and the original file had ballooned to several megabytes. Looking back, I had redirected a file to itself:

  $ cat file1 >> file1 # should have been file2

You can try this yourself, but be prepared to hit Ctrl+C if it isn't instant:

   $ echo "abc" > tmp.txt
   $ cat tmp.txt >> tmp.txt

With BSD cat, as I have on my mac, this just sits there, filling up the disk at around 2MB/s. With GNU cat, on the server where I read email, I get:

   cat: tmp.txt: input file is output file

It's even smart enough to detect hardlinks:

   $ echo "abc" > tmp.txt
   $ ln tmp.txt tmp2.txt
   $ cat tmp.txt >> tmp2.txt
   cat: tmp.txt: input file is output file

The code for this in GNU cat, unchanged except for whitespace since at least 1992-11-08 when it was first put under source control, is:

   /* Input file can be output file for non-regular files.
      fstat on pipes returns S_IFSOCK on some systems, S_IFIFO
      on others, so the checking should not be done for those types,
      and to allow things like cat < /dev/tty > /dev/tty, checking
      is not done for device files either. */

   if (S_ISREG (stat_buf.st_mode))
     {
       out_dev = stat_buf.st_dev;
       out_ino = stat_buf.st_ino;
     }
   else
     check_redirection = 0;

   ...

   /* Compare the device and i-node numbers of this input file with
      the corresponding values of the (output file associated with)
      stdout, and skip this input file if they coincide.  Input
      files cannot be redirected to themselves.  */

   if (check_redirection
       && stat_buf.st_dev == out_dev && stat_buf.st_ino == out_ino)
     {
       error (0, 0, "%s: input file is output file", infile);
       exit_stat = 1;
       goto contin;
     }

The reason hardlinks don't fool cat is that it checks the device and inode values, which all hardlinks to a file will have the same:

   $ echo "abc" > tmp.txt
   $ ln tmp.txt tmp2.txt
   $ stat tmp.txt | grep Inode
   Device: 803h/2051dInode: 18645001    Links: 2
   $ $ stat tmp2.txt | grep Inode
   Device: 803h/2051dInode: 18645001    Links: 2

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Android Sound Synthesis and Latency

27 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Playing with people's iPhones I really enjoy music apps. Even though there's no real tactile feedback they're still really fun to play. When I got a computer with a responsive and accurate multitouch trackpad I wrote one for it. Now that I have a smartphone I wanted to write something similar: map regions of the screen into notes.

I started with libpd for Android, which is a port of libpd to Android, which is a library version of the audio engine from Pure Data. Learning enough Android programming to get this loading on my phone was a little annoying, as was figuring out how to modify the CircleOfFifths example app to play single notes, but I got something working. Unfortunately, the latency is terrible. I put down my finger, and there is a significant delay before sound comes out of the device. This isn't just my experience; round trip generate-speaker-mic-record latency with libpd on Android tends to be around half a second. Measuring mine with their tester I got 558ms.

While this is way high, I thought at first the problem might be with libpd and that by using the lowest level API directly I might get good performance. Unfortunately, it sounds like this is not the case: the best you can do on the best devices is about 50ms, which is still too slow. If you read the Android Audio mailing list, this is nearly all they talk about back to the third message on the list. There's a bug registered, and it's in the top 10.

It looks like the main problem is that most devices are not designed for it. To get 5ms latency at 44KHz you need to be able to get the buffer down to 256 [1] samples and keep it from emptying. Most Android devices have a minimum buffer size over ten times that. I don't think Google's going to be fixing this soon. This is sad. I want to make music live with my phone.

[1] Really 220 samples, but we like powers of two.

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Fourth Saturday Contra Dance in Cambridge

26 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Back in September I got really excited about starting a new weekly contra dance in the city. [1] I can report some progress on this: the 4th Saturday dance is moving to Cambridge, and their first dance in the new hall is this weekend:

Saturday January 28th
5 Cadbury Road, Cambridge
Cambridge Friends School Meeting Hall
8-11pm; $8 ($6 for students under 21)

Calling by Daniel Friedman
Music by Julie Metcalf, Debby Knight, and Walter Lenk
(facebook event, website)

It's a 10-15 minute walk from the Porter Square red line stop, and also walkable from Alewife, Harvard, and Davis. There is also parking.

I'm looking forward to dancing with you all!

[1] I'm still talking to BIDA about having our dance more often. We're penciled in for first Sundays at the Masonic Hall starting in the Spring, and at our next meeting I'm going to try to convince people that we should commit. One big reason people don't want to go weekly is then it's harder to do special events like Spark in the Dark or English/Contra without being the same weekend as our regular dance.

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Bus Bunching Factor

25 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

After a long wait for a bus, two arrive in quick succession: the buses are bunched. [1] Running in a group they act like they are running less frequently than they really are. I want a way to calculate 'bunchedness' from the buses reported GPS positions, both as a way to see how bad the problem is and as a potential way for a bus service to determine if a fix is working.

I think what we're trying to minimize is wait time. If a bus route has scheduled service every 10min then with perfectly spaced buses you get an average wait time of 5min, half the scheduled time between buses. If the buses are bunched in pairs but otherwise evenly spaced, this goes up to 10min. Let's define the bunching factor B at a stop in terms of the ratio between the mean wait time W and the scheduled service interval S:

    B = 2W/S - 1

A perfect route (W=5min, S=10min) would have bunching factor of 0 while as the route got closer to pairwise bunching we'd get up towards 1. We can average this to compare routes or bus systems. [2]

Measurement

You can pull vehicle locations as xml from NextBus's API. Let's say we pull and log once a minute. [3] Consider each route (dirTag in the feed) separately. To get stop arrivals we can pull the list of stops for that route and look only at sequential pairs of points where a bus went from being on one side of a stop to another. Make a giant list of (route, stop, time) triples.

If we were to run the calculation over the whole time period of logging we would see that the buses were all running during the day and especially at rush hour. We shouldn't be counting it as bad that the transit agency decides to run fewer buses at 1am than 5pm. Let's assume they're correctly determining the service frequency at each time of day. Using the historical data for each route we can figure out when they make shifts in frequency. Cluster the data into windows by service frequency: early morning, morning rush, midday, etc. For each time window of length T, if the number of buses arriving at a stop is N> then:

    S = T / N

Calculating W is trickier. We want to know how long you would have to wait for a bus if you showed up at this stop at each point during the window. Break the window down by bus arrivals into N segments. During each segment of length L_i you expect to wait for L_i/2 and we weight the segments as L_i/T [4], so we have:

    W = sum((L_i/2)*(L_i/T) for i in 1 to N)

Which gives us:

    B = N*sum((L_i/T)^2 for i in 1 to N) - 1

Does this sound right? Is there a better way to do it? The windowing makes me uncomfortable; I fee like there should be a continuous version.

[1] I'm not entirely sure why this happens. I think it might be that evenly spaced buses are an unstable equilibrium. If a bus gets behind schedule it picks up some people who might have been for the following bus, slowing it down and speeding up the following bus.

[2] If S=1hr and the buses are all running exactly 20min late, we'll still see W=30min and B=0, but that's not what we're trying to measure. Bus systems already track an "on time percentage" metric, which deals with this.

[3] You can't compute an instantaneous bunching factor from a single pull because you don't know if there are naturally slow (bad intersections) or fast (highways) parts of the routes.

[4] This adds to 1 because sum(L_i for i in 1 to N) = T.

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Clogging

24 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Listen at a contra dance and you'll hear people clogging, making noise with their feet. It's now mostly limited to balances and long lines, but you'll see people do it when they're 'inactive' during an older dance like Chorus Jig. Back when most dances had 'actives' and 'inactives' there was a lot more of that. Most clogging now is teams that do southern clogging or modern competition clogging with synchronized stepping routines. This does make it better to watch, but I like it as a component of social dance, not performance. If you go to a lot of contra dances on good wooden floors wearing shoes that make noise, you'll pick it up the old way as part of the dancing. [1]

[1] This is how I learned it. If you're curious you can see me clogging some while calling at Northboro or by myself. I also did some while dancing with the the Points of Etiquette longsword side, enough to learn that I don't enjoy routines.

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The Advantage of Logging: Browser History

23 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Often when I suggest that we should log everything people don't see the value. What would you do with a giant audio or video recording of your life? You're not going to sit down and watch the whole thing. Recording all your conversations is inconvenient without a specialized box; perhaps the initial costs have kept us from finding out the benefits. But what if recording and transcription were free? This is kind of like what we have on the computer, so we should look there.

Your browser logs every page you visit in a giant list of URLs stored with the time you visited them. For years this was mostly just used to let the browser know when to turn links purple. Occasionally people would look back through the browser history to find something, but that was annoying. Then FireFox integrated history search with the URL bar and suddenly I could easily find places I wanted to go back to:

This was actually a pretty small change (they just moved the location of the history search bar) but it made it enough more valuable to me that I went from being ambivalent to actively glad that my browser was keeping track of where I'd been.

(I get similar value from logging the commands I run but people who spend less time on the command line would appreciate this less.)

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Singing Squares: Just Because

22 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

About a week ago I went looking for recordings of the singing square 'Just Because'. I ended up finding several different versions. It's hard to compare them in audio form, so I decided to transcribe them. Seeing them written out I noticed several big differences:

The older versions are really repetitive. While Tod Whittemore and Walter Lenk have everyone do something different each time through (ladies chain, right and left through, stars, promenade the inside (Lenk only), sashay), Frank Fortune and Glenn Pease have the dancers chain each time through.
While I think of the break (with the "make it twice") as an integral part of the dance, only the two current ones have it. I wonder when that was added?
In a contra dance or unsung square, the caller generally tells you what to do right before the end of one phrase so you can start at the beginning of the next. The calls in a singing square, however, go along with the music and the dancers are used to starting each move on the phrase, which means you're being told what to do at the same time as you're supposed to be doing it. Below you can see the two modern callers occasionally calling out "look for the corner" or "sides your turn" at the end of a phrase so that when they start singing the next call the dancers have a head start. The older recordings don't have that, which makes me think people didn't care so much about being on the phrase. Or maybe no one thought to combine ahead-of-the-phrase calling with the singing.

Update 2012-01-31: on Saturday I talked to Walter Lenk. He says he learned this square from Tod Whittemore who learned it from Duke Miller. Rewriting the words to not be directed only at the gents ("the one that you just left" in place of "the lady on the left") was quite intentional, though he said he doubts many people notice. He also added the "promenade round the inside" of the set, because he wanted the sashay figure to be with your partner.

Transcriptions, in chronological order

Frank Fortune, 1952 Studio Recording (mp3)

all dosido on your corner
now dosido with your own
now aleman left on your corner
go back and swing your own
now aleman left on your corner
go on with the right and left grand
when you meet your maid you all promenade
because, just because

head two ladies chain right on over
head two ladies chain right back again
side two ladies chain right on over
side two ladies chain right back again
all dosido on your corner
everybody swing your corners all
take that corner maid and you all promenade
because, just because

head two ladies chain right on over
head two ladies chain right back again
side two ladies chain right on over
side two ladies chain right back again
all dosido on your corner
everybody swing your corners all
take that corner maid and you all promenade
because, just because

head two ladies chain right on over
head two ladies chain right back again
side two ladies chain right on over
side two ladies chain right back again
all dosido on your corner
everybody swing your corners all
take that corner maid and you all promenade
because, just because

head two ladies chain right on over
head two ladies chain right back again
side two ladies chain right on over
side two ladies chain right back again
all dosido on your corner
everybody swing your corners all
take that corner maid and you all promenade
because, just because

all dosido on your corner
now dosido with your own
now aleman left on your corner
go back and swing your own
now aleman left on your corner
go on with the right and left grand
when you meet your maid you all promenade
because, just because

head two ladies chain right on over
head two ladies chain right back again
side two ladies chain right on over
side two ladies chain right back again
all dosido on your corner
everybody swing your corners all
take that corner maid and you all promenade
because, just because

head two ladies chain right on over
head two ladies chain right back again
side two ladies chain right on over
side two ladies chain right back again
all dosido on your corner
everybody swing your corners all
take that corner maid and you all promenade
because, just because

head two ladies chain right on over
head two ladies chain right back again
side two ladies chain right on over
side two ladies chain right back again
all dosido on your corner
everybody swing your corners all
take that corner maid and you all promenade
because, just because

head two ladies chain right on over
head two ladies chain right back again
side two ladies chain right on over
side two ladies chain right back again
all dosido on your corner
everybody swing your corners all
take that corner maid and you all promenade
because, just because

all dosido on your corner
now dosido with your own
aleman left on your corner
go back and swing your own
aleman left on your corner
go on with the right and left grand
when you meet your maid you all promenade
because, just because

Frank Fortune, 1955 Live Recording (mp3)

all dosido with your corner
dosido with your own
aleman left with your corner
go back and swing your own
now aleman left with your corner
move on with the right and left grand
when you meet your maid you all promenade
because, just because

head two ladies chain right on over
head two ladies chain right back again
side two ladies chain right on over
side two ladies chain right back again
all dosido with your corner
everybody swing your corners all
take that corner maid and you all promenade
because, just because

head two ladies chain right on over
head two ladies chain right back again
side two ladies chain right on over
side two ladies chain right back again
all dosido with your corner
everybody swing your corners all
take that corner maid and you all promenade
because, just because

head two ladies chain right on over
head two ladies chain right back again
side two ladies chain right on over
side two ladies chain right back again
all dosido with your corner
everybody swing your corners all
take that corner maid and you all promenade
because, just because

head two ladies chain right on over
head two ladies chain right back again
side two ladies chain right on over
side two ladies chain right back again
all dosido with your corner
everybody swing your corners all
take that corner maid and you all promenade
because, just because

all dosido with your corner
dosido with your own
aleman left with your corner
go back and swing your own
now aleman left with your corner
move on with the right and left grand
when you meet your maid you all promenade
because, just because

Glenn Pease, 1973 Live Recording (mp3)

everybody bow to your partner
bow to your corner and then
aleman left and you grand right and left
half way round you go now
come back when you meet your partner
and you right and left back the other way
when you are home you all swing at home
because, just because

oh head two ladies chain over
and you chain em back home once more
the two side gents with a ladies chain
chain em across the floor
and you aleman left on your corner
and you swing your partner just once around
and you take the corner maid and you all promenade
"because, just because"

oh head two ladies chain over
and you chain em back home once more
the two side gents with a ladies chain
chain em across the floor
and you aleman left on your corner
and you swing your partner just once around
and you take the corner maid and you all promenade
"because, just because"

and you dosido on your corner
and you dosido with your own
and you aleman left with the one on the left
aleman right your own
then you aleman left and you grand right and left
half way around to that maid
take that maid and you all promenade
"because, just because"

oh head two ladies chain over
and you chain em back home once more
the two side gents with a ladies chain
chain em across the floor
and you aleman left on your corner
and you swing your partner just once around
and you take the corner maid and you all promenade
"because, just because"

oh head two ladies chain over
and you chain em back home once more
the two side gents with a ladies chain
chain em across the floor
and you aleman left on your corner
and you swing your partner just once around
and you take the corner maid and you all promenade
"because, just because"

and you dosido on your corner
and you dosido your own
and you aleman left with the one on the left
aleman right your own
then you aleman left and you grand right and left
half way around to that maid
take that maid and you all promenade
"because, just because"

Tod Whittemore, 2011 Live Recording (mp3) (youtube)

bow to your partner
bow to that corner girl as well
aleman left with your corner and balance to your own
grand right and left you will roll
well you walk right by your partner you keep on going home
when you get back home you all swing
you swing with your own and everybody sing (why?)
"because, just because"

head ladies chain, right down the center
you chain those ladies right back home, and then
side ladies chain, right down the center
and you chain those ladies right back home again
aleman left your corner lady aleman right your partner too
and you swing that corner lady round and round
and you promenade the ring and everybody sing (why?)
"because, just because" (face your corner)

all dosido round your corner
it's right hands, go twice around your own "make it twice"
you aleman left with your corner
and you dosido with your own
aleman left the corner lady and you balance to your own
grand right and left you will roll
when you meet with this one, promenade and have some fun (why)
"because, just because" (head couples right and left through)

right, on ovah
right and left right back home and then
side couples right and left through on ovah
right and left right back home again
aleman left your corner lady aleman right your pahtnah too
and you swing that corner lady round and round
you promenade the ring till you head right back and sing (why?)
"because, just because" (look to your corner)

you all dosido round your corner
it's right hands, go twice around your own "make it twice"
you aleman left with that lady on the left
and you dosido with your own
aleman left your corner lady and you balance to your own
grand right and left you will roll
when you meet with this one, promenade and have some fun (why?)
"because, just because"

head couples star by the right hand in the center
star by the left until you get back home
side couples star by the left hand in the center
star by the right until you're home
aleman left your corner aleman right your own
swing that corner lady round and round
you promenade the ring and everybody sing
"because, just because"

you all dosido round your corner
it's right hands, go twice around your own "make it twice"
you aleman left with that lady on the left
and you dosido your own
aleman left your corner lady and you balance to your own
grand right and left you will rrroll
when you meet with this one, promenade and have some fun (why?)
"because, just because" (head couples sashay, go!)

whooho
heads sashay back
side couples sashay, (come on dickie, you got to get back here before you do the rest of it)
sashay back
aleman left your corner lady aleman right your partner too
and swing that corner, who is that?
you promenade the ring, and everybody back and swing
"because, just because"

you all dosido round your corner
it's right hands, go twice around your own "make it twice"
you aleman left with that lady on the left
and you dosido your own
aleman left your corner lady and you balance to your own
grand right and left you will roll
when you meet with this one, promenade and have some fun (why?)
"because, just because" (bow to your partner right there)

Walter Lenk, 2011 Live Recording (mp3)

well it's everybody bow to your partner
you bow to your corner just as well (with your corner)
aleman left your corner, you balance to your own
it's grand right and left you will roll
well it's reverse when you meet your partner
grand ol right and left the other way back and then
oh when you're home swing your own, everybody swing at home
"because, just because" (head ladies chain)

head ladies chain right on over
you chain those ladies right back home, and then (sides, your turn)
side ladies chain right over, and then
you chain them right back home again (look for the corner)
aleman left your corner, aleman right your own
swing that corner round and round and round
well then you promenade the ring, and everybody sing
because, just because (with your corner)

you all dosido with that new corner
turn right hand, go twice around your own "make it twice"
aleman left the one that you just left
you dosido back home (back to the corner)
now aleman left your corner and balance partners all
grand old right and left go round the hall
now when you meet that [? ?] meet that maid then everybody promenade
"because, just because" (heads right and left through)

head couples right and left right over
you right and left right back and then (sides, your turn)
you right and left, right over, and then
you right and left back home again (look for the corner)
aleman left your corner aleman right your own
swing that corner round and round and round
well then you promenade the ring, and everybody sing
"because, just because" (with your corner)

you all dosido around that corner
turn right hands, go twice around your own "make it twice / fried rice"
aleman left the one that you just left
you dosido back home (back to the corner)
now aleman left your corner and balance partners all
grand old right and left go round the hall
now when you meet with that one promenade it's just for fun
"because, just because" (heads star by the right)

head couples star by the right hand in the center
you star by the left until you're home (sides left hand star)
left hands around in the center of the set
you star by the right until you're home (heads ?)
aleman left your corner aleman right your own
swing that corner round and round and round
well then you promenade the ring, and everybody sing
"because, just because" (with your corner now)

you all dosido with that new corner
turn right hand, go twice around your own "make it twice / ain't that nice"
aleman left the one that you just left
you dosido back home (back to the corner)
now aleman left your corner and balance to your own
grand right and left you will roll
now when half way round you meet, you promenade your sweet
"because, just because" (heads promenade round the

inside) say hi, as you go by
and you promenade back home and then (sides, your turn)
you promenade, go round the inside of the set
you promenade right home (look for the corner)
aleman left your corner aleman right your own
swing that corner round and round and round TIMBER!
well then you promenade the ring, and everybody sing
"because, just because" (with your corner)

you all dosido go round that new corner
turn right hand, go twice around your own "make it twice / your very own"
aleman left the one that you just left
you dosido back home (back to the corner)
now aleman left your corner and balance partners all
grand old right and left go round the hall
now when you meet with your own promenade and head for home
"because, just because" (heads sashay now)

it's gents go back to back across the center (look)
and the ladies go back to back until you're home (sides, your turn)
...
... (look for the corner)
aleman left the corner and balance partners all
swing your partner round and round and round
well then you promenade the ring, and everybody sing
"because, just because"

well everybody bow to your partner
you bow to the corner just as well
aleman left the one that you just left
you dosido back home (back to the corner)
now aleman left your corner and balance partners all
grand old right and left go round the hall
now when you meet with your own promenade and head for home
"because, just because" (swing your partner)
"because, just because" (now keep on swinging)
"because, just because"

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MBTA Service Cuts: Actions?

20 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

The MBTA is proposing massive service cuts. I think this is foolish, and instead we should get them more money [1]. What can I do to help? There are meetings, but what does complaining to the MBTA accomplish when the solution isn't within their control? [2] I decided to call my reps. (You can look up yours from your address). At Toomey's office I left a message. At Jehlen's I spoke to someone. They wanted to know how the cuts would personally affect me (80, 90, 95, 96 eliminated), where I lived, and they explained to me that Jehlen is currently advocating for (1) a gas tax increase and (2) a switch to a graduated state income tax, both of which would raise money that could go to the MBTA.

What else should I do?

Update 2012-01-25: I just got a call from a staffer at Toomey's office. He says that they want to avoid cuts and that they see the only real solution being increasing the T's revenues, possibly by fare increases but ideally by increasing the sales tax or something similar.

[1] Moving irrelevant big-dig debt away from the MBTA would help the most. Fare increases are also fine, but making up the whole shortfall this way would be too much. If you're curious about current subsidy (revenue, expenses, trips) by mode I found a 2011 presentation on 2009 data (p14) that compares the MBTA with "peer transit agencies". Raising money with increased property, sales, or other taxes could also work.

[2] Showing up would probably mean being counted, by the MBTA and maybe newspapers, but does that help much?

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Belief Listing Project: War and Pacifism

19 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Growing up Quaker I was pacifist by default. As a small child I didn't have 'war toys', especially guns, and I learned that fighting was wrong for both individuals and nations. Later I learned more about the peace testimony and how nonviolent resistance worked in practice. My pacifism was of the form "killing is wrong, war is horrible, and there is always a better way."

In high school I became less certain. I remember a schoolmate asking me how absolute my commitment to non-violence was: what if my family was at risk? I rejected the question, calling it unfair. I'm embarrassed by this response now: there was nothing unfair about the question, and by objecting to it I was protecting an inner contradiction from scrutiny.

My eighteenth birthday was ten months into the Iraq War, and I had to decide what to do about registering for the draft. Registration was mandatory, and though it hadn't been enforced since before I was born, I would be ineligible for college financial aid if I didn't register. This was the first time I really had to think about what I would do if I were drafted. After lots of thought I decided to register, and further, if I were drafted I would not try to claim CO status. My view was that the government was going to draft the same number of people either way, and so if I didn't go someone else would have to. It wouldn't be fair of me to avoid the danger and hardship of war just because I had happened to be raised Quaker. I still thought war was wrong, but if I wouldn't be preventing people from being killed wouldn't I just be looking out for myself?

Most of a decade later I no longer think that it's always wrong. War is incredibly harmful, damaging, expensive, and tragic. Peaceful resistance and nonviolent conflict resolution are dramatically underused. Politicians and most of society is much too optimistic about war, especially when we haven't had one for a while. But I think there could be and probably have been some wars that were positive on balance.

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Libraries and Technology

18 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

The modern library is a product of cheap printed books. It's much more efficient to buy a book once and keep it somewhere public than for each interested person to buy their own copy. Back when the technology was hand copying, libraries operated differently. Books were move valuable, often chained down, and when a library did lend out a book they were glad for it to be copied.

Today's library is the internet. Storage, transfer, and duplication costs are so much lower for digital works that we're able to have a huge amount of information available to all. You can't get everything online yet, but this continues to get better and the internet is already well past the best physical libraries. Payment is tricky, with a huge gap between free/ad-supported and paid, but I don't think this is permanent.

So where does this put public libraries? Their main advantage, centralization, is gone. They still lend books [1] but we're getting more and more online and e-readers are getting better and cheaper. They seem to have taken on two new functions: (1) providing computers and an internet connection and (2) paying for their members to get access to ebooks, journals, and databases. When we decide that storing all those paper books redundantly in buildings across the country is too expensive, will libraries continue just in these two new functions?

[1] Which the internet improves: I can request books online and get an email when they're ready to be picked up at the branch library I walk past on my way home from work.

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Why does the BIDA open band work well?

17 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Open bands have a reputation for being less enjoyable to dance to. I've heard dancers say they avoid open band nights, or that while they understand the role of the open band in fostering musicians they wish they weren't needed. Now that I'm helping organize them with BIDA, however, I'm not seeing this. In fact our attendance is higher, people have a great time, and I don't hear complaints. Afterwards a dancer wrote that they had "never seen that much positive engagement between the band and the dancers."

(on youtube)

I see two explanations: (1) open bands are not actually unpopular and I was just listening to the small number of people who don't like them or (2) BIDA is doing something right. I don't know which it is, but I figured I would describe what BIDA has been doing in case it's (2).

(BIDA has had four open band nights. I've only been involved with the most recent three, so what I have below is about these three.)

In scheduling the open band we first find a band leader. We've had Peter Barnes twice and Debby Knight once, both have been great. They both primarily played piano, but also can play other instruments if someone else wants to take a turn on piano. This is the only paid role; everyone else playing pays admission on a $0-$10 sliding scale.

We have two rows, sorting people by experience. We mic everyone in the front row and most of the people in the back, though there are often some who don't want to be mic'd or who need to take turns with limited mics. It's helpful that we have a large stage. Everyone plays at once. At our most recent dance we had: (front row) caller, piano, 6x fiddle (back row) double bass, whistle, recorder, fiddle, octave mandolin.

Reading through this, nothing sounds very different from other open bands I've been to. Which makes me think it's not actually about how we run the band and instead about the musicians who decide to come. Maybe what's going on is that we're drawing from a different group? I wonder if there's an effect where when an open band has been around longer many of the best musicians move on and you have mostly people who aren't interested in or aren't able to get booked for other dances? If this were happening I would expect that in general open bands that were newer would be better; are they?

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MBTA Service Cuts

16 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

The MBTA has a major funding problem. Most of their money doesn't come from fares, it comes from the sales tax and from fees it charges to the towns it serves. As they have brought up new services and and grown their ridership, only the money they get from fares has increased. Making things worse, the sales tax has grown much less than it was expected to when the state decided to make this their main source of funding. And the MBTA has a huge debt, much of it from things unrelated to them.

With a massive budget shortfall coming up, they're trying to raise revenue or cut expenses. They're put out a proposal with two scenarios. The first one raises fares 43% and cuts:

The second raises fares 35% and cuts:

Do you see all those buses? That's absolutely huge:

The bold red routes are eliminated, the blue ones are kept. This would make living without a car much less practical. I've heard some people say that the MBTA is bluffing by offering extreme service cuts that they will negotiate down from. I hope they're not, because when Chicago's CTA tried this negotiations failed and they ended up going ahead with the major cuts.

Really, the problem is not too much service or too low fares but too much debt and too little funding. In 2007 the Transportation Finance Committee (TFC) recommended:

The MBTA has over $5.2 billion in outstanding principal debt and paid $351 million or 27 percent of its operating budget on debt service in FY 2006 more than the total of all fare revenue collected. About 35 percent of the principal amount of the outstanding debt ($1.8 billion) is directly attributable to carrying out Central Artery/Tunnel commitments. That debt is rightly the responsibility of the Commonwealth, not the MBTA. Level-funded over a 20-year period, this would shift about $117 million in debt payments from the MBTA to the Commonwealth. It should be emphasized that this debt must still be paid. The substance of this recommendation would transfer this obligation from the MBTA to the state budget.

The $117M/year in debt payments that the TFC thought should shift to the state budget is twice the size of the cuts we're talking about.

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Singing Squares

14 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

There's a saxophone and a drummer with a full kit, and the caller is singing the calls. Some new contra syncretism? Or just a typical night in 1955?

The singing square, "Just Because," from live recordings over the years:

1952 Frank Fortune (studio)
1955 Frank Fortune
1973 Glenn Pease
2008 David Millstone (youtube)
2011 Tod Whittemore (youtube)
2011 Walter Lenk

(If you compare a dance program from 1955 or 1965 to one now, the biggest thing you notice is half the dances were singing squares, and the ones that weren't were mostly couple dances.)

Update 2012-01-22: I later transcribed the 'Just Because' recordings.

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GiveWell and Money Moved

13 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Without thinking about it much, I had assumed GiveWell tracked 'money moved' primarily so they could tell how they were doing. The more money their top charities receive that is directly attributable to GiveWell, the more of an effect they're having. While it does fill this role, after talking to Holden [1] my understanding is that's it's actually more useful than this.

Most reviews don't require substantial cooperation from the organization being reviewed. A restaurant reviewer shows up, ideally appearing just as any other customer, orders various things, and reports back on the experience. Consumer Reports buys a bunch of blenders, tests them against each other, and publishes a story on the best blenders. But charities are different: you need them to work with you to get the data you need to evaluate them. If you can say "in 2010 we moved over $1M to our top rated charity," they're going to be much more willing to do this work than if all you can say is "we're reviewing charities so people can see where they do best to donate." This is especially true when you intend to publish reviews that talk honestly about failings: charities are very cautious about admitting imperfection.

This is also why they push so much for people to give through their website: it lets them track how much money they're moving. I know many people aren't so excited about tracking, but this is a case where I think it's really helpful.

[1] After Julia posted on picking a cause, he wrote to her and asked if she would like to talk. The three of us talked for about 45min last night, and he mostly convinced me that giving to AMF or SCI was better than to Oxfam, IPA, or J-PAL.

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Belief Listing Project: Death Penalty

12 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

I don't think the death penalty should be legal, in our society as it currently stands. It's generally applied to the wrong cases, often because the public found the crime particularly shocking for reasons unrelated to the law. It's too unpredictable to function well as a deterrent. It doesn't even save money, compared to life in prison.

I don't, however, oppose the death penalty in the abstract. I think you could have a healthy society where the standard punishment for some crimes was death.

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Googlebot Running Javascript

11 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

If you search Google for site:www.jefftk.com [1], the sixth result is currently:

The text it's showing for the description is from a comment. This is strange, because the comments from my posts are pulled in from from Facebook and Google Plus via javascript. So in the indexing process Google is running this script on another server, computing the change to the page that the "document.write" makes, and saving the text as the post-javascript page.

I can see how in the modern javascript-everywhere web this helps people get better search results, but this feels erie. It's a violation of how I expect bots to work. Next we'll see Google having indexed pages that require form submissions to get to.

Update 2012-01-11: The example above of javascript is from a Google+ comment, and while I think it's unlikely that Google is using G+ comments on link shares to pull up results, to test this I checked whether it also could pull things out of Facebook comments. It can:

[1] Why was I doing this? I recently added a <meta name="description" content="[first 400 characters of post]" /> to my blog entries because Google was putting the header ("Jeff Kaufman :: Blog Posts :: RSS Feed ...") into the search results and I wanted to tell it where the real text started:

The change seems to have fixed some results but not all of them. They previously all looked like the image above, but now some are the beginning of the text, as 'description' should hint:

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Housing

10 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Julia and I are starting to think about housing again. We've tried four different arangements since leaving college:

An 8x10 cabin while working at a dance and music camp. No plumbing, heating, or internet, but it was summer and there were nearby standalone bathrooms and socializing space. Communal food, with people paid to cook (Julia) and clean up (me). No other housemates, but ~20 crewmates and ~140 rotating campermates.
A room in my parents' house in West Medford. Communal food (usually Rick or Julia cooking) with communal dinner most nights. Two to five other people over the course of the year.
A 23x16 studio apartment near Porter Square with just the two of us.
The third floor of a Somerville triple decker, with another couple and their baby. Communal food, communal dinner about half the time.

Our lease is up here at the end of February, at which point we're planning to live chaotically for a few months and then, perhaps September 1st, move into something more stable. Probably another situation kind of like our current one, but maybe closer to the red line and with a saner landlord. So we're looking for housemates. Julia put together a list of things you should know about us and what we're looking for:

We assume September 1st is a good moving date, but we can be flexible.
We would like to be near the north end of the Red Line or at least on bus routes to there. [Julia's] graduating in the spring and won't know where [her] job will be until spring or summer. Jeff works near Kendall.
We're currently paying $900 a month for utilities, one bedroom, and use of the apartment's common spaces. We would like to keep our cost in this range, going up to maybe $1050.
We're aiming for two to five other housemates.
We don't have a car, so location is quite important to us.
This year we lived with two other adults and their baby. This went pretty well, and we would be open to living with kids again.
We like the idea of living with preexisting friends, but this year we met our housemates through an email list and that worked fine also.
[Julia] like[s] to cook and eat. [Julia] would like to live with people who also enjoy these things.
We currently rotate cooking duties with our housemates. We usually all eat dinner together. This is working well for us.
We eat some meat but not a lot. We would be willing to have communal meals be vegetarian, but not vegan.
We'd like to have mostly communally bought groceries, as we find this is cheaper and easier. People can certainly keep their own stashes if they want.
In food we tend to optimize for low cost rather than ethics, but if we lived with people who really wanted more local/organic/etc. we could compromise.
This past year we had four adults and a baby sharing one bathroom. It worked fine. Any more than four adults to one bathroom might be dicey, though.
Jeff plays folk music. Music sessions sometimes happen at our house at reasonable hours. If you can't tolerate accordions, we are not your ideal housemates.
We like to have groups of people over for dinner around once a month.
Maybe twice a year we have larger parties with (folk) dancing and music.
We like games, particularly German board games. If you do too, we could play.
We're not dog people. Cats are fine with us, though they do make it a bit harder to find an apartment.
We don't currently have a dishwasher or laundry in our building, and we would be okay doing without these again (though strongly prefer laundry in the building).
We're both used to living with other people - Julia lived in a co-op in college, we lived with Jeff's parents and assorted other people for a year and a half, and we're finishing a year with three housemates in an apartment.
If you'd like to speak with our current housemates, we're happy to provide their contact information.
We would probably live in this arrangement for between one and three years.

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Dead Child Currency

09 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

A proposal to measure money in dead children:

According to Population Services International, a respected charity research group, it costs between $650 and $1000 [1] to save one child's life through charity. You've probably heard lower numbers like twenty cents somewhere. The lower numbers are wrong. Yes, maybe an anti-measles vaccine for a kid in Africa only costs twenty cents, and measles can be fatal. But there's a lot of overhead, and you have to immunize a lot of people before you get the one kid otherwise destined to die of measles. I find the $650-$1000 figure much more believable. Let's round it off to $800.
So one dead child = eight hundred dollars. If you spend eight hundred dollars on a laptop, that's one African kid who died because you didn't give it to charity. Distasteful but true. Now that we know that, we can get down to the details of designing the currency itself. It should be a big gold coin, with a picture of a smiling Burmese child on the front, and a tombstone on the back. The abbreviation can be DC.

This makes sense to me, to a limited extent. You can spend money for your own benefit or to help others elsewhere, and there really are people who wouldn't have to die if you would forgo some luxuries. Making this tradeoff more explicit ("we're looking for an apartment costing no more than six dead children annually") might lead some people to greater generosity. It's a way of abstracting compassion.

Two things worry me, though. The first is that there's a big focus on spending here [2], but increasing earnings deserves more focus: getting a raise or a new job that added $10K to my salary would let me keep more children from dying than would reducing my spending on myself to zero. [3] The second is that thinking of all your purchases in terms of dead children is likely to make you miserable. Not just that, but miserable to little gain: you still probably spend almost as much money on yourself, you just feel more guilty about it. Much better, I think, is to pick a rule for how much to give and then apply it to money as it comes in. That way each purchase has no effect on the number of deaths you're averting.

[1] The current number is probably closer to $2K.

[2] Maybe this is because it sounds weird to talk about salary in terms of dead children? ("I wonder what job earns me the most dead children?") Perhaps for earning the unit should be the "undead child"?

[3] In 2011 Julia and I lived on $18K for the two of us, not including taxes or health insurance.

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Nextgen Voting Sites

07 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Current voting news sites don't care about who is doing the voting. Provided you stay clear of fraud detection systems, you voting on a link has the same effect as me voting on it: the quality estimate goes up, more people see it. In the comments of my post earlier this week on predicting what people will want to have read, we started talking about a much more powerful idea: your vote affects what I see in as much as our past voting has been similar.

When you vote on one of these sites, currently, it only has a direct effect on what other people see. It's a very community minded act, which makes it not so surprising that very few people vote [1]. If most of the time a reader responds to seeing something by voting it neither up or down, you're getting much less information than you could be. So perhaps apathetic voters would make this fail? If your votes directly affected what you would see in the future, however, you would probably vote more. Perhaps a lot more.

The main thing you give up with a system like this is that the site looks different to different users in a nonobvious way. Everyone who goes to Hacker News sees the same thing. Everyone who goes to Reddit sees the same thing except for the filtering of what subreddits they've subscribed to. This would be much more like Facebook in that I would need to expect my front page to look nothing like yours (unless we had similar interests).

I've found myself enjoying Reddit less over time: perhaps that's because when I started I had a lot in common with other users and their votes were a good predictor of my interests, in a way that's increasingly less true?

[1] The typical top story on Reddit has ~1500 upvotes (you can't get the total number of votes because the numbers they give are fake) and Reddit has somewhere around 2.5M monthly visitors. Assuming *everyone* visits every day, that's 83K people a day, of which only ~2.4% voted for the top story. The 'everyone visits daily' assumption is terrible, so the voting percentage is even lower, between 2.4% (everyone daily) and 0.08% (everyone monthly).

Update 2012-01-07: A friend points me to their 2008-2009 startup Newsbrane that tried to do exactly this:

Using an interface similar to that of Reddit, users vote up or down on stories. But instead of having those votes affect a global score, the site uses the votes to build an understanding of each person's tastes, and scores other stories for that user based on those tastes.

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