Creating jobs?

I’ve said before how much I like the radio show This American Life. This week’s episode, How To Create a Job, was an interesting one. I was especially interested near the end.

Throughout the show, they look at the difficulty of actually creating jobs — new jobs, where jobs didn’t exist before. In Act Three, we see that in many cases, it’s really just a matter of shifting the jobs around. They were always there, but we’re looking at a different there, moving jobs to Phoenix or Houston, from, say, California. That might make things look better in Phoenix or Houston, but overall, the U.S. economy hasn’t been improved by creating more jobs.

But then it was the intro to Act Four: Be Cool, Stay In School that really make me sit up. Here’s Ira Glass:

OK, here’s something I didn’t know before we started working on this week’s radio show. I knew that 9% of Americans are unemployed. But college graduates: their unemployment rate is half that, 4.5%. People with PhDs, it’s even better, 2% unemployment. High school grads are right near the national average, 9.7% unemployment. And people who did not graduate high school: their unemployment rate is almost 15%.

Which means, the unemployment problem in this country is mostly a problem for the uneducated, the unskilled.

And what’s strange is that those economic development people that Adam and Julie just talked to, they are mostly focused on attracting jobs for the highly educated, for people with at least college degrees.

To finish Act Four, Adam Davidson tells us this, after saying that America is still manufacturing a lot of stuff, in a lot of factories:

But pretty much everyone in those factories needs to have some basic math proficiency. They need to be trusted with expensive, precision equipment. You’re probably not getting a factory job if you don’t have at least a high school degree and some advanced technical training. The experts call it high school plus. If you don’t have a high school degree, plus some more training, some more specialized skill, you are, increasingly, locked out of the middle class.

And that’s a lot of people: 80 million Americans over 25. That’s 40% of the adult population, are in that group.

Having some training or education after high school used to be a great way, one of the most reliable ways, to make it into the middle class. But over the next few years, more and more, it’ll be the only way.

Now, most of my readers have lots of post-high-school training. Most of you have college degrees; some have PhDs. And I know that some of you have lost jobs and have had trouble finding work in this economy. We probably already have a sense that more education correlates with lower unemployment, though that’s little consolation when you, personally, fall into the bottom of the statistics.

It’s an interesting episode; give it a listen.

---

[And, by the way: Act Four talks about a program called Pathways Out Of Poverty. I don’t know about you, but I — probably though my training at IBM — make acronyms out of everything. And, well, sometimes people might want to think about that a bit before they name their organizations.]

Internet wiretapping

A story about impending U.S. legislation has hit the news in the last few days: Senator Patrick Leahy, along with ten co-sponsors that include Dianne Feinstein and my own senator, Chuck Schumer), has introduced S. 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (link to PDF).

There’s a log of blog outcry about it, of course, and rightly so. I’m less worried about it than many, but I do think it’s a bad idea. Here’s why:

First, we’re meant to be a democracy, different from the totalitarian states we group together with terms such as Axis of Evil and whatnot. That means that, in general, we fit our surveillance and law enforcement into the technology, rather than limiting the technology and building it specifically to enable surveillance and law enforcement. Those who say that this is only paralleling what’s in the telephone system already are missing that the telephone system grew up from a much lower-tech starting point. Wiretaps used to be literally that: wires clipped into wired systems. And it didn’t used to be easy at all.

There’s a lot about surveillance and intelligence gathering that’s hard, and it stands to reason that those tasked with doing it should want to make it easier. Keeping it hard is actually a useful check on nascent authoritarian tendencies, and the temptation for abuse. We’ve recently had court decisions, for example, declaring it a fourth-amendment violation to use GPS tracking without a warrant. These sorts of checks are important.

There’s no saying that the sort of surveillance that S. 3804 proposes will be warrantless — and the bill does specify that a court has to approve it — but we have to remember the warrantless electronic surveillance of the Bush administration, where they bypassed no only the regular courts but also the FISA court, specifically set up to deal with monitoring terrorist action. Official abuse is a real danger.

Further, this bill doesn’t even address terrorism, nor even racketeering or other such crimes. It’s aimed at copyright infringement. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s a ridiculous focus for such a broad and risky remedy. There are better ways to address the problem of illegal distribution of copyrighted material, and this is an attempt to shortcut things with a blunt instrument. At least, though, it’s not as bad as the insane French HADOPI law.

Apart from official abuse, though, there’s the issue of abuse by the Bad Guys themselves, who can fool with such a system in two ways:

1. They can take advantage of the holes themselves. Any system that allows authorized intrusion implicitly allows unauthorized intrusion as well, and we should not be so naïve as to think that won’t happen. People are corruptible, security systems are compromised all the time, and if we set it up so that any Internet communication is tappable, malefactors will make their way in and tap it.
2. They can skirt it entirely. It will only be the normal communication channels that will have their encryption compromised, allowing officials to get the unencrypted version. If what gets put on those wires is itself encrypted beforehand — if the unencrypted version is separately encrypted — we’ve gained nothing. Once requiring specialized, high-tech, expensive machines, encryption is now easy, and any ten-year-old with a copy of PGP can do it. And anyone can create a self-signed TLS certificate to secure communication with their web site. There’s nothing the service providers can do to tap into any of that.

The result will be, as often happens with these sorts of things, that private citizens and companies that are trying to abide by the law will have their privacy and liberty compromised, while the real criminals will be able to hide as easily as they do today. If passed, this law will have some effect in the area it’s intended to... but that effect will be limited, and probably short-term.

Finally, there’s the law itself: it actually seems pretty good in its inclusion of safeguards and court involvement. There are two issues I have with it:

1. Sec. 2324(a)(2)(B) is too vague:

   [For purposes of this section, an Internet site is dedicated to infringing activities if such site is] engaged in the activities described in subparagraph (A), and when taken together, such activities are central to the activity of the Internet site or sites accessed through a specific domain name.

   Subparagraph (A) specifies that the site must be specifically designed for these activities, be marketed for these activities, or have no significant purpose other than these activities. That provides a reasonable limitation on the Internet sites that may be targeted here. But then subparagraph (B) opens it back up in a vague way, by saying that any other site might qualify if when taken together such activities are central to the site. Subparagraph (A) clearly does not include such sites as YouTube and Facebook, but subparagraph (B) arguably could. The threat of bringing such an argument to court could exert a severely chilling effect on web sites devoted to social activities and legitimate media sharing.
2. Sec. 2324(j) provides for a public list of sites that are alleged, without any real evidence or court involvement.

   (1) IN GENERAL- The Attorney General shall maintain a public listing of domain names that, upon information and reasonable belief, the Department of Justice determines are dedicated to infringing activities but for which the Attorney General has not filed an action under this section.

   There are mechanisms to ask to be removed from the list, and for judicial review of the case only after the Justice Department refuses the petition for removal. This amounts to an unregulated blacklist of Internet sites, and strikes me as ill advised, and possibly dangerous. There will clearly be such a list held at the Justice Department; the list should not be public. Any public list must be vetted by a court, as a necessary check on law enforcement.

I plan to write to Senator Schumer with a brief version of this post, and a pointer to the full one.

OED3: printed, or not?

’Tis sad news, indeed: the Oxford English Dictionary will probably cease printed versions and will make the upcoming 3rd edition online only.

The print dictionary market is just disappearing, it is falling away by tens of per cent a year, Nigel Portwood, the chief executive of OUP, told the Sunday Times. Asked if he thought the third edition would be printed, he said: I don’t think so.

Almost one third of a million entries were contained in the second version of the OED, published in 1989 across 20 volumes.

The next full edition is still estimated to be more than a decade away from completion; only 28 per cent has been finished to date.

It’s sad, in that the world will miss a beautifully bound piece of work. No more will we be able to heft a volume and see several pages of definitions and references for just a single word. The OED is the most researched word reference there is.

But it’s not just a large tome: it’s a large set of large tomes. It takes up a great deal of shelf space, it’s very expensive (Amazon sells it for $1300, but they’re out of stock as I write this), and it takes them more than 30 years to put out a new edition, once they decide to get started. It’s sad that it probably won’t be printed, but it’s not surprising.

With an online version, users can access entries quickly and easily from their computers — and these days, that means iPads, iPhones, BlackBerry devices, and others of that sort — untethered from the couple-of-dozen weighty volumes, however nicely bound they be. Updates can go in incrementally, so every time you access what’s there, you get the latest version, with whatever updates they’ve put in. And cross-references are right there, simple and quick. When puggle sends you to echidna, which sends you to monotreme, you can flip from one to another with a click — you don’t have to run to the shelf to pick up a different volume.

Of course, even the online version is expensive. £240 is about $370, and that’s the annual fee — four years of that, and you’ve paid more than what Amazon wants for the printed second edition. Of course, you’re also paying for the convenience of having it online, as I note above. But ten or twenty years of twenty-pound-a-month subscription fees really add up.

The official word of Oxford University Press is that another printed version is still possible. I’m sure they want to keep their options open as they test the waters with this announcement. And they’ll still print the other, smaller editions, which abound: the Compact OED, the Concise OED, the Shorter OED, the collegiate version, the pocket version, and so on.

It really is a sign of the times.

You got a coupon?

The New York Times “Bits” blog carried an item a few weeks ago about electronic coupons, sent to your mobile device at appropriate times:

How many times have you heard the prediction that one day, businesses like coffee shops will send us coupons on our mobile phones when we walk by?

That has long been the dream of mobile marketers. Still, only 9 percent of people have received a coupon or discount code on their phones based on where they were standing, according to new data from Compete, a Web analytics firm.

This could be the year that changes. People are increasingly interested in receiving coupons on their phones, especially at the grocery store, Compete found. On Wednesday, Target announced that it would start sending mobile coupons.

When I worked at IBM Research, several of my co-workers did a project involving a retail establishment and customers’ mobile devices. They dealt with electronic coupons, as well as other uses of the mobile technology, and they wrote a paper about the project. The abstract:

Toward a Mobile Digital Wallet

Mobile phones have now made their way into a large fraction of pockets and handbags worldwide. An intriguing question is whether such phones will eventually replace the physical wallets we carry. We believe the answer is in the affirmative, though plenty of challenges abound in overcoming entrenched personal and business practices and processes. In this paper, we explore the changes that need to ripple through the ecosystem to build a vibrant set of digital wallet services that potentially interact with each other to provide users both with increased convenience and a level of functionality hitherto unrealized. We describe our initial mobile wallet prototypes on web-enabled smart phones, designed to explore some of the challenges in creating the architecture and infrastructure necessary to make this vision a reality. Feedback from users and experts across a range of industries such as retail, banking, telecommunications, and healthcare indicate that we have just scratched the surface and a substantial wave of innovation is necessary to make the digital wallet a full-fledged reality.

Would consumers want to receive coupons and other offers on their phones, or would the interruptions just annoy them, seeming to be spam? My colleagues found that customers in the pilot program liked getting the coupons, and used them. In their paper, they note these results:

1. The frequency of in-store visits was greater than the visit rate of the baseline loyalty program.
2. The electronic coupon redemption rate was several times higher than traditional paper coupon redemption rates.

Indeed, going back to the Bits blog in the Times:

Thirty-six percent of consumers said they would like to receive mobile grocery coupons, 29 percent said they want cellphone apps that scan product barcodes for an offer or discount, and 26 percent want coupons from movie theaters.

Are electronic coupons the wave of the future? What about the general concept of an electronic wallet? If we could solve the privacy and security problems, would people like using their mobile devices at points of sale, in lieu of money or credit/debit cards?

I think I would.

Girl Scout at the door

A girl came to the door on Tuesday, selling Girl Scout cookies. Oh, what the heck: I bought a few boxes, if for no other reason than that she trod up my 300-foot driveway to ask.

She was only taking orders at this point, and she’ll come back to deliver them. I had to pick the kinds and the amounts, and fill out the order form, and, while the weather was very nice on Tuesday, it’s still on the chilly side. “Come in out of the cold,” said I, “while I decide what I want and fill this out.”

“Um, actually, I’m supposed to stay outside,” the girl replied. Yes, of course she is, and I said as much and went about choosing and writing, with the door open and the young entrepreneuse on the stoop making suggestions.

But it makes me sad about what we’ve made of the world. Our perception of things is very different from how it was when I was Scout girl’s age.

This despite that we were probably too permissive with this sort of thing in the past: it was probably never the best idea for a child to disappear into the house of someone the parents didn’t already know, with whom they didn’t already have an appropriately trusting relationship.

We have long ago left the safe environment of the village. Sigh.