Competition in the Digital Age
News coverage of automation and machine learning tends to focus on extraordinary events, such as computers winning at Jeopardy and Go, and robotic arms flipping burgers in short-order restaurants. Additional headlines foster a sense of nightmares, conjuring pictures of autonomous cars killing pedestrians and newly automated establishments laying off their workforce. The combination of headlines …
It is time for the annual review of the past year in digital economics. As in prior years, this review will resemble an awards ceremony. And there are so many events deserving of recognition -- hackers at Equifax, Russian ads at Facebook, #metoo on Twitter, an implosion at Uber, and a bubble at Bitcoin, to …
Mainstream writers do not discuss online sex and porn for fear of touching unseen landmines that offend readers. It is part of a phenomenon that I call the hush-hush norm. There are permeable boundaries between rebellious and mainstream hackers, and between porn and mainstream content providers. Yet, the mainstream press discusses all of it as …
Prairie Home Companion begins with a mischievous maxim that all children in Lake Wobegon are above average. The equivalent adage in Silicon Valley goes like this: Every insider acts like an outsider. This adage reflects mythology as well as savvy public relations. The largest technology firms possess names recognized in most households, and they perceive …
Did the rise of free information technology improve GDP? It is commonly assumed that it did. After all, the Internet has changed the way we work, play, and shop. Smartphones and free apps are ubiquitous. Many forms of advertising moved online quite a while ago and support gazillions of “free” services. Free apps changed leisure long ago—just ask any teenager or any parent …
Technology policy has been a low priority for most voters in presidential elections in the post-war era. The most recent contest was no exception. Arguments about technology policy never made it into campaign commercials, to say the least, nor even a minute of the televised presidential debates. So it goes. Many denizens of the high-tech …
Continue reading "Technology Policy and the Trump Administration"
It has long been recognized that networked services contain weak-link vulnerabilities. That is, the performance of any frontier device depends on the performance of every contributing component and service. This column focuses on one such phenomenon, which goes by the label “congestion.” No, this is not a new type of allergy, but, as with a …
Hello good readers! It is time once again for a retrospective look at the top ten digital events of 2016. And what a year it was – elections, political intrigue, hacking, and more! Some very impressive people and action deserve their just rewards, i.e., fifteen seconds of snarky comments. The award is called a Sally. …
Delivered on Nov. 12, on the occasion of Eli's Bar-Mitzvah. My dear son, awesome Eli. This may be the last time in the next few years I can get your attention for an uninterrupted five minutes. Sorry to do this in public. Try to smile. A Bar-Mitzvah traditionally marks the time for passing into adulthood. …
Rob Gebelhoff of the Washington Post wrote an awesome piece about the latest Wikipedia research to come from Feng Zhu, Yuan (Grace) Gu, and yours truly. The piece by Gebelhoff is called "Science Shows Wikipedia is the Best Part of the Internet." It refers to our research, Ideological Segregation Among Online Collaborators: Evidence from Wikipedia. A …
Continue reading "Wikipedia and Political Discourse: The New Hope?"
